Magic Beans

Carlos gently "admonishes" me every time I buy more magic beans - one of the latest being a framed movie poster from the movie Donnie Darko.

I think I'm in the clear for awhile. He told me a few days ago that he spent $53.00 on a Wimbledon beach towel, including the extra $5.00 to have it monogrammed.

Stairway To Foo

Every kid who picks up a guitar first wants to play Stairway to Heaven. Or Smoke On The Water.

It’s such a cliché that back in college while joining my manic-guitar-playing friend Jeff into a musical instrument store, I have personally seen “No Stairway” posted.


Led Zeppelin is, after U2, my All Time Favorite Band. Yet, I haven’t listened to Stairway all the way through in about 10 years.

Dave Grohl, the leader of the Foo Fighters and Nirvana’s former drummer, has always been a Zeppelin fan.

I really admire him:

1) He is established enough in his career that he can play live with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. In June, the Foo Fighters played a show at Wembley Stadium, joined by Page and Jones for the Zeppelin tunes Rock and Roll and Ramble On. According to this and other articles, Grohl says, “"Welcome to the greatest day of my whole entire life."

2) He is respected enough that he can play Stairway to Heaven live on Craig Kilborn, making fun of his presentation just enough that the audience knows that it’s cheezy, but playing it seriously enough to agree with the audience that the song should be granted reverence, no matter how overplayed it is.

Here are Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins covering Stairway To Heaven. Enjoy.

Labels

I finally got around to adding Labels to the end of my posts.

Two Recent Emails

I have had two interesting emails exchanges recently that I wanted to share.

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#1 -

Bobby (an online acquaintance of mine):

I need your opinion on something. I've been talking to this guy and he sent me the following pics of himself. I told him that they look like a model and professionally done. His response was that he has a friend that take modeling pictures and took these for him. I want to believe him but I've been burned so many times that I don't trust easily anymore. Can you take a look at these pictures and let me know what you think? Have you seen these on the net anywhere?

Here are the pictures he sent with his email, with the files named RANDY1 through RANDY4.








My response:

You're being burned again!

That's definitely a professional model. His name is Kerry Degman. Do a google search and you'll see. Sorry, Bobby.

Why are some people so deceptive!

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#2 -

John is a friend of mine from here in New Orleans. He moved out of town in 2005, but we still keep in touch. I came out to him about 4 years after we met.


John:

I've personally tasked myself with wondering about the people I consider myself to have connections with and asking them what I've always wanted to ask - honestly, sincerely, and without censorship. So, here's your question.

I've always felt like I betrayed you upon my discovering that you were gay. Chalk it up to being young, unexposed, or whatever. I'm not here to make excuses for that or anything so bravado. I just want to know if you felt the same way? Apologies likely to follow.


My response:

Betrayed? I never thought that.

I could, however, tell you were definitely "unexposed" to The Gays (as my mom calls them), but your reaction - both your initial one and your ongoing one - was fine. From my point of view, you said, "Eh. So what?", treating it like a non issue and moving on. That's the reaction I was hoping for.

By the way, I came out to my parents in June 2008 - and now my entire family knows. They have all met Carlos and really like him.

I think he was either drinking when he wrote the email (because he gets "deep" when drinking) or he's stopped drinking and working his way through the 12 Steps of AA. I haven't heard back from him yet.

Crunchy Frog

This is the band I would have been in at 10 years old...

Feel Good Videos

I watch videos on YouTube all the time, but two recent ones really made me smile.

I heard about the first one on tonight’s NBC Nightly News and Entertainment Weekly’s website. Here is the description from www.ew.com:

By now, you've probably seen this weekend's viral video sensation, 47-year-old ("and that's just one siiiiide of me!") Susan Boyle's audition for Britain's Got Talent. The never-been-kissed Scot blew away the initially sneer-mongering judges with her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables, causing Simon Cowell to sort of shift in his seat a little bit while allowing one the most sheepish documented grins to date spread over his "O" face.

Here’s a link to the clip on YouTube (embedding has been disabled).

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The second video was sent to me by J A S O N.

I'm not even a huge Sound of Music fan and I loved the video.



I hope you enjoy them both.

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As long as we're talking about "Feel Good" videos, here's the video for the song Feel Good Inc by Gorillaz.

Adam Lambert Gay? Who Cares?

Although it's a little long, this article from today's New York Times is worth reading.

Note that the pictures are from my collection, NOT from the New York Times web site.

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April 12, 2009
American Idol's Big Tease
By GUY TREBAY

LET'S say you are an "American Idol" contestant with a criminal history. Let's say you claimed to have had an affair with Paula Abdul. Let's imagine that you are found to have posed for topless photos or been charged with identity theft.

These are not hypothetical scandals. Each has occurred during the eight-season run of the top-rated show. And each has duly been processed out of consciousness at a speed accorded most show business scandals — forgotten in the nanosecond it takes us to move on from the latest reality TV distraction and back to our ordinary lives.

Let's imagine, then, that among the assorted warblers and strummers and leather-lunged divas that have made up the renewable cast of hopefuls on the country's No. 1 television show, you appear not as some talented hopeful with a shady backstory but as a theatrical creation with a message to sell beyond the usual will to prevail. You are swivel hipped and pillow lipped. You have an outsize talent and a fondness for Cher. You have blond hair dyed black and styled in an asymmetrical shag. At some long-ago moment, you gave in to your inner Maybelline girl.

You are Adam Lambert, the contestant widely tipped as a favorite to be the next winner of "American Idol." And the only thing standing between you and riches and the chance to play arenas may be a question currently burning up the Internet: Can a gay contestant win?

Leave aside for a moment the answer to such a question, or even whether Mr. Lambert is gay. He may be. He may not. Fox, which owns "Idol," is not saying; neither is the contestant himself.

What is notable is the intensity of the insinuations caroming around the Internet and in certain corners of the mainstream press — that and the fact that even asking whether a gay contestant can win a broadly popular reality show, whose survivors are selected by public acclaim, seems increasingly anachronistic in light of decisions in Iowa and Vermont to extend marriage rights to gay men and lesbians.

Still, ask they do. Pointing to "embarrassing pictures of Mr. Lambert circulating on the Internet," photographs that show someone who looks uncannily like the contestant tongue-wrestling another man, the conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly inquired last week on his Fox News show, "These pictures that hint that he is gay, will they have an effect on this program, which is a cultural phenomenon in America?"



Cultural critics with a broader frame of reference than Mr. O'Reilly's can easily contextualize Mr. Lambert in a long line of performers who tantalize the public with their talent and equally with their gender ambiguities. Think of Liberace. Think of Prince or Bowie or Elton John or K. D. Lang or Pete Wentz. "We have always had that person" on the pop landscape, said Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine. "The difference now is that previously the conversation about sexuality has not been as public. When Liberace was around, there was no real way to talk about this stuff."

Now, of course, there is no way and no reason to stifle conversation about the signals Mr. Lambert appears to send in the form of song choices pilfered from the hope chests of anthemic divas (Cher's "I Believe"); his bio (he was a child who enjoyed dressing up a lot but sports "not so much," said his father in an on-air interview); and a theatrical style at times so arch that his country-night version of "Ring of Fire" evoked for Sarah Chinn, the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, "Joey Arias channeling Billie Holiday channeling Johnny Cash."

According to a Gawker post last week, the "applause-o-meter" had Mr. Lambert pulling way ahead. "Might we actually get a Kris/Adam finale?" read the item, referring to Kris Allen, a generic teen idol type with a waxed cowlick and a lopsided smile. "Might, also, we get a Kris/Adam somethin' else?' Hah, doubtful. No one sees Adam without his skinsuit on, except maybe that fetching, fey little blond character they keep cutting to and describing as Adam's `friend.' "

Predictable as the snarky innuendo is, it also struck a discordant Roy Cohn note, coming in the week when Vermont's Legislature voted to override a veto by the governor and recognize gay marriage, adding the Green Mountain State to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa in a list of states actively advancing the cause of civil rights for gay people. "The entire system is changing so rapidly it is not to be believed," said David Ehrenstein, a Los Angeles based film critic and scholar who writes the hilarious Fablog.

America's heartland, he said, turns out to be politically contiguous to its notoriously liberal coasts. "Iowa is apparently infested with San Francisco values," he said.

Even the White House made a point of inviting lesbian and gay families to join in an annual Easter Egg Roll.

Thus it seems plausible that a person with more than a toe peeking out of the closet might actually win the most hotly contested singing show on the planet. True, it took six years of public insinuation before Clay Aiken, the popular also-ran from Season 2, made the choice in 2008 to come out. When he did so, however, the anticipated career-stall never happened. The news was greeted with a collective yawn.

"I see us as living in the post-Neil Patrick Harris era," said Mr. Ehrenstein, referring to the actor who in 2006 trumped online efforts to expose his sexuality by publicly declaring himself gay to People magazine. "He crossed the Rubicon. He did the `sudden death' play. Supposedly you come out and your career is over. He came out and his career is in better shape than it ever was."

It is worth remembering how radical a shift this is in the public consciousness and that a half century ago, in the 1950s when the film producer Marina Cicogna first found herself in Los Angeles, as she recently told W magazine, studios forced Rock Hudson into bogus relationships with women and obliged gay actors "to lie from morning to night."

In 1959 Liberace, the camp artifact best known, as one critic wrote, "for beating Romantic music to death on a piano decorated with a candelabra," sued an English newspaper for libel for implying in print that he was gay. Given his taste for lacquered pompadours, rhinestone jumpsuits, white mink coats and pneumatic male personal assistants, it is hard now to imagine Liberace believing his public was deceived. But then it is still hard to square shifting public opinion with that of an industry that forces its gay talents to hide in plain sight.

When asked on the witness stand whether he was homosexual, Liberace emphatically told a judge: "No, sir! I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society." He won the suit and damages and then, much later, was named in a $113 million palimony suit by his partner Scott Thorson.

"For a long time, gay men were very sensitive to being associated with effeminacy," said Mr. Hicklin of Out. "It was highly objectionable, an example of stereotyping and caricature."

Being photographed in drag or, as Mr. Lambert apparently was at the Burning Man Festival, wearing makeup and a thigh-high halter dress revealing enough to bring a blush to the cheeks of J. Lo, is far from a career-killer these days. "There was a common set of signifiers in theater and TV and popular culture that implied gay," Mr. Hicklin said. "Gay men came to embrace all that because it came to feel far less threatening to be labeled in that way."


Also, somewhat unexpectedly, heterosexuals took up the playfulness of gender ambiguity. "The gay thing got derailed by the way many straight guys started playing with image," Mr. Hicklin said. Metrosexuals followed homosexuals out of the closet. Pete Wentz posed for the cover of Out. "Pete Wentz wears makeup and clearly is confident enough not to be threatened by any assumptions his fans or nonfans might come to," Mr. Hicklin said.

Like Mr. Lambert — whose more steadily assertive gender games are likely to reach an apotheosis this week when the "American Idol" contestants are asked to perform their favorite movie song — performers are now free to treat real or putative gayness as another show business tool, a peekaboo game, a ploy. So-called low forms of sex relationship that entertainment industry codes once kept from being depicted on movie screens are now so routine a feature of pop culture that when "Saturday Night Live" recently parodied the proliferating pop references to sexual experimentation in a sketch titled "The Fast and the Bi-Curious," the Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker slapped the show down for using jargon that "feels old and overused."

Unlike other reality shows, said Joe Jervis — a gay activist blogger whose recent mention of Adam Lambert on his site Joe My God generated 50,000 hits from people searching the term "Is Adam Lambert Gay?" — the contestants on "American Idol" aren't voted off their little show business island by one another. Love them or hate them, it is up to America to choose.

"The show is squarely in the hands of the viewers," Mr. Jervis said. It is just that vox populi aspect of "American Idol," he said, that demonstrates radical changes "in the popular view of openly gay people." That may be. But it is certainly also worth noting that a Revlon habit is no surefire tip-off to gayness, latent or otherwise. Ask Marilyn Manson. Ask Devendra Banhart or Brandon Flowers or any of the other members of groups sometimes called "eyeliner bands." For that matter, why not ask Kiss?

Stories From My Youth

I have been compiling some Classic Stories from my youth. I thought I’d pass a few of them on.

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Every school morning when I was in high school, I used to walk 10 blocks to meet up with a friend of mine, then he and I would take public transit (“the big green limousine”) to school. About three blocks before his house, I would stop in this one garage that was always open, to smoke a cigarette. I was 15 and my parents didn’t yet know that I smoked.

One day I noticed that there were hundreds of books in this garage. Upon further investigation I discovered that these books were all porn novels. (“He slipped his hand over her milky white breasts, caressing the…” and so on.) I took one to school to read. After reading it, I showed it around to all my friends. One of my friends offered to buy it. Supply and demand, I said $10.00. He readily agreed. My other friends asked if I could get any more.

By the end of the semester, I had stolen almost all of the Garage Man’s porn books and sold them to my classmates at school. Once I ran out of books, I stopped and moved on.

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When I was a kid, I loved to play in water. During the summer, my parents would drop me off at the local country club at 7 am for swim team practice and come back for me at 9 pm when the pool was about to close.

I remember begging them to let me stay.

Every summer I would have green hair because I would spend so much time in the pool that the chlorine in the pool would react with my white-blond hair and turn it a nice shade of green.

During the school year, when the pool was closed, I devised a game to keep me in water. We lived in a house that had about 25 wide concrete steps leading from the sidewalk up to our front porch.

I would take one of our trashcans up to the porch, fill it to the top with water, get in the trashcan, and dump myself over. The water and I would go cascading down all the steps, onto the sidewalk.

I did this over and over, taking a 20-minute break between rides while the water refilled in the trashcan. At the end of the game, I would usually have brush burns on my chest from slamming into the concrete steps as I was shooting down them.

I was telling Carlos this story:
Carlos: “Where were your parents when you were barreling down the steps on a small plane of water, almost killing yourself?”
Me: “Oh, they were around somewhere. Their theory was that as long as I wasn’t bothering them, I was okay, whatever I was doing. My parents weren’t neglecting me; they just trusted me.”

I played this between 12 and 14. My sister Claudia often played with me. She’s 8 years younger than I am.

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My mom had me when she was 23 and Christine (my sister) came 13 months later.

(Christine and I were both accidents. My informal family nickname is “Went On The Honeymoon” since my mom was three months pregnant for me when my parents got married. Christine’s informal family nickname is “Can’t Get Pregnant While You’re Breastfeeding” because my Aunt Barbara – my mom’s supposedly-all-knowing younger sister - told my mom that. And Christine was conceived while my mom was breastfeeding me.)

I don’t think my mom was prepared for us. And she definitely wasn’t ready for two kids under 3 (and we were really wild kids) before she was 26.

Since she’s the oldest child in her family (thus had no one to ask about parenting) and since my dad was always at work during this time, she had to improvise a lot.

All of my family had a habit of reading while we ate. Not during family meals – We always ate those together while I was growing up. Even my dad was home in time. But when we were sitting down at the kitchen table alone, we would naturally would go to the bookshelf in the kitchen, pick out a book, get our food, read and eat.

My mom dealt with the dreaded Sex Talk by putting books on sex on that bookshelf. From the time I was 8 years old or so, my sister and I were perusing such titles as “Talking To Your 5-8 Year Old About Sex”, “Talking To Your 9-12 Year Old About Sex”, “Dealing With Sexually Transmitted Diseases”, “Your First Period”, “The Pill and Its Alternatives”, and my favorite because it had some graphic illustrations, “Where Do Babies Come From?”.

My parents never mentioned any of this to us. One day these books just appeared on the kitchen bookshelf, and Christine and I read them all. She and I were some of the most knowledgeable kids in our peer group.

Guilty Pleasure II: Year 3000

I gotta admit: The Jonas Brothers have some infectious songs.

Here is my favorite of the lot:

Guilty Pleasure I: Nights on Broadway

The first in a series: Guilty Pleasures.

I have always liked the Bee Gees, and their song Nights on Broadway has always been my favorite of theirs. I think because Robin Gibb is my favorite in the group, and this is one of the few songs that he gets to sing lead vocals. (He's the one in the middle. Barry, on the right, is the main lead singer. Maurice was the backup support. He died in 2003, resulting in the remaining brothers saying that they'd never "perform as the Bee Gees again".)

Here is the best (and earliest) version of the song that I have found: