Shut the Fuck Up, Popovich. Seriously.

Dear Pop: Please shut up. Your views about "the LGBT movement" and "women's suffrage" (! What, is this 1920?) are ignorant and ridiculous. As is your awkward use of the term "organic." As are your apologies for those of us who are "born white" and thus, according to you, have "systemic advantages." Myself? Poor white background. Not a single "advantage." I got to attend college via student loans only. (Thanks to the government. Government student loans are also available to smart poor black people.)

On the streets, as a bus-rider, I've been physically attacked by black guys and black women. In the business world, I've had one job taken away from me because I wasn't Hispanic (the boss was Hispanic, and had a history of only hiring other Hispanics --- when I was a temp for her, she held the job open so another Hispanic woman could apply.) When I lived in New York City and worked the midnight shift as a proofreader, half of the supervisors were black, and half of the workers were black. How did that happen? Black people make up 13% of the population, not 50%.

I came from a poor white rural background, and I was given no advantages at all. Who the fuck are you, Popovich, to claim any sort of knowledge about poor white people or gay people (which I am) or of "women's suffrage" (a particularly stupid claim). Or of black people. You know nothing of anything. Please shut up.

Kanye West: School Spirit (2004)

If I could go through all that and still be breathing
Bitch bend over, I'm here for a reason
 ......

 Back to school and I hate it there, I hate it there...


 

[Intro]
School spirit motherfuckers

[Chorus]
Alpha, step. Omega, step
Kappa, step. Sigma, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw
AKA, step. Delta, step
S G Rho, step. Zeta, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw

[Verse 1]
I'ma get on this TV, momma
I'ma, I'ma break shit down
I'ma make sure these light skinned niggaz
Never ever never come back in style
Told 'em I finished school, and I started my own business
They say, 'Oh you graduated?'
No, I decided I was finished
Chasin' y'all dreams and what you've got planned
Now I spit it so hot you got tanned
Back to school and I hate it there, I hate it there
Everything I want I gotta wait a year, I wait a year
This nigga graduated at the top of my class..
I went to Cheesecake, he was a motherfucking waiter there

[Chorus]

[Verse 2]
I got a Jones like Norah for your sorror'
Bring more of them girls I've seen in the Aurora
Tammy, Becky, and Laura, or'a Shirley
I'm tryin' to hit it early, like I'm in a hurry
See, that's how dude became the young pootie tang tippy tow
Rocafella chain, yeah that's my rapper style
Rosary piece, yeah that's my Catholic style
Red and white One's, yeah that's my Kappa style
And I ain't even pledge
Crack my head on the steering wheel and I ain't even dead
If I could go through all that and still be breathing
Bitch bend over, I'm here for a reason

[Outro]
I feel a woo coming on, cuz. I feel a woo coming on, cuz
WOO
There it was
I feel some woos coming on, cuz. A couple woos coming on, cuz
WOO, WOO

1932. Joan Crawford w' writer Vina Delmar ("Grand Hotel" set)

Jimi Hendrix - The Star-Spangled Banner ('69, Woodstock)

Reclaiming the song for our country's freaks (myself included). So interesting and intelligent, the inclusion of Taps and dive-bombers.

1932. Joan Crawford in "Grand Hotel" (and 1954 in "Johnny G")

Sia: I'm gonna swing from the chandelier

I've not given up yet.

Colin Kaepernick's Pussy-Whipped Bullshit

Why Colin Kaepernick's taking a knee during the National Anthem is bullshit:

(1) From Wikipedia: "Kaepernick was born in 1987 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Heidi Russo, a 19-year-old white woman of Irish and Bohemian [dubious – discuss] descent who was single at the time.[4] His birth father, an African American man, left Russo before Colin was born.[5][6] Russo placed Colin for adoption with Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, a white couple..."

If your poor-white mother gives you up for adoption and your black father has left you, then you're adopted by a nice white middle-class couple who offers you a nice life -- far nicer than your deadbeat dad wanted to provide for you... Then be fucking grateful for your opportunities.

(2) If America is so terribly evil and racist... then how was someone like you able to make it to the top of his profession and given an NFL contract worth millions of dollars?
Same goes for all of the other NFL sheep kneeling for our country's National Anthem just because Kaepernick or LeBron James (via Twitter) suggested that you do so. And you sheep even have 8-year-olds kneeling before their Pee-Wee football league games, without understanding what they're kneeling for.

(3) Got a political beef? Go march on your own free time. Donate money to your favorite causes. Just don't subject the rest of us to your bullshit during NFL games. (And don't cry wolf. The biggest murderers of black men? Other black men. See Chicago crime stats, for instance. I'm not going to pay any attention to your "cry racist" bullshit until you first look in the mirror.)

(4) Perhaps most importantly: Don't let your new Muslim girlfriend sway your views. Kaepernick started dating Nessa Diab, a Muslim activist raised in Saudi Arabia and educated at Berkeley, in 2016. Which is right when the kneeling started. Coincidence? The guy is obviously a confused pussy. Confused about his race, confused about his origins, confused about what/who to be loyal to. Given his neuroses, why is anyone following his lead?

My Bad-Ass President (Alabama 9/22/17)

"Rocket Man should have been handled a long time ago...I'm gonna handle it because we have to handle it."

Give 'em hell, Trump.

Poor Alan Dugan on Anne Sexton

I was randomly browsing some poetry sites today and came across this, "Drunken Memories of Anne Sexton," by Alan Dugan. (I remembered his name and, vaguely, some of his plainspoken work from my classroom poetry anthology in the 1980s.)

The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you know," as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? And just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
"Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green"
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others' beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.

At first, I was annoyed by the poem's style -- I usually hate a prose paragraph broken into lines, attempting to be "poetry," not to mention the gratuitous anti-war rhetoric so common at the time. Next, I was fascinatedly grasping at any bit of personal info about Sexton (what a dick that professor was, and what a defiant thing for her to say to the innocent Dugan). And, finally, I found myself identifying completely with Dugan, the awkward, odd man out as the two "beauties" gazed at each other after Kinnell had said exactly the right thing. I actually felt pangs for Dugan's loss! And, get this... I think the below might be the exact meeting Dugan was writing about!:

NYC, 92nd Street Poetry Center. Galway Kinnell and Anne Sexton.

Poor Alan Dugan looked like the below around the same time. Heart full of love but, alas, looking like a judgmental church deacon!

And here's a color photo of Sexton, for eye-gazing, from the UT HRC website:

Phew!

Just got out of an afternoon showing of Darren Aronofsky's "Mother!" Only about 10 people in the entire audience (but then it's rather overbooked in Austin, showing at at least a dozen theaters).

Aronofsky has said the film is about the environmental rape of Mother Earth. All the critics are also saying it's a Rorschach test of the viewer. OK, so here's what I saw in it: (1) Jesus dying for the sins of humanity, and (2) the inside of Sylvia Plath's head (I kept thinking of the story of her getting overly upset when Ted Hughes asked their Ouija board whether or not he'd be famous---she saw it as an extremely bad omen that the world would take him away from her...as it did).

Yes, I feel like I've been through the wringer after watching (as with "Pi," "Requiem for a Dream," "The Wrestler," and "Black Swan"), mainly emotionally but also intellectually. You certainly know what you're getting with him.

Maud Allan

Maud Allan passport photo.

As a teen, I used to amuse myself while trying to get to sleep by trying to track the source of the latest thought that had popped into my head. I dunno, I could go 12 or so steps back. It was interesting.

I mention this because right now I can't remember why in the world "Maud Allan" ever came into my consciousness today. I suppose I was searching for "Joan Crawford" on eBay, and a "Maud Allan" photo turned up in a sidebar... I dunno.

At any rate, from eBay, I clicked upon "Maud Allan" on Wikipedia, and then to her brother Theodore Durrant, who sexually murdered two women in San Francisco in 1895 and was hanged in 1898: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Durrant

Post-murder, his sister changed her name and moved to Europe.

Maud Allan was initially best known for her 1906 "Vision of Salome" erotic dance that she performed to great scandal and acclaim, appearing in 1908 in London for over 250 performances. Then in 1918, she was involved in yet another Oscar Wilde morality trial:

In 1918 the British MP Noel Pemberton Billing, in his own journal, Vigilante, published an article, "The Cult of the Clitoris" which implied that Allan, then appearing in her Vision of Salome, was a lesbian associate of German wartime conspirators.

Allan sued Billing for libel, based on the following counts:

• The act of publishing a defamatory article about Maud Allan and J. T. Grein, her impresario.
• The act, a separate offence, of including obscenities within the article.

This led to a sensational court case, at which Billing represented himself. Lord Alfred Douglas also testified in Billing's favour. Allan lost the case. The trial became entangled in obscenity charges brought forth by the state against the performance given by Allan in her dance. She was accused of practising many of the sexually charged acts depicted (or implied) in Wilde's writings herself, including necrophilia.

At this time, the Lord Chamberlain's ban on public performances of Wilde's play was still in place in England, and thus the Salomé dance was at risk. Her brother's crimes were also dredged up to suggest there was a background of sexual insanity in her family.

 

 

 

 

1916 by Edward Weston.

And about the brother, Theodore, who inspired a female following during his lurid, nationally publicized murder trial:

http://www.historicalcrimedetective.com/killer-theodore-durrant/
http://www.murderbygaslight.com/2009/11/theodore-durrant-demon-of-belfry.html
http://www.annalsofcrime.com/04-05.htm

Oh, shit...

What do you do when you find out that the person you thought was the love of your life also happens to be the love of someone else's life?

And the other person has the better claim (Ginny dumped me for her, and she was with Ginny when she died---- and I just contacted her on Facebook, and, though she's in another relationship now, she said that Ginny was also the love of her life... I think she gets first dibs.)

Shit. I'm alone now, but I had somehow fantasized that I'd have a mate in the Afterlife.... Damn. I'm really on my own, for now and evermore.

Post-script 9/15/17: Ginny's "other" just gave me her phone number via Facebook.. What can I say to her? I saw Ginny's diary with its "I write/you act" that had nothing to do with me? How desolate I felt? She's expressed to me that she was very jealous of me at the time; I expressed the same to her. What have we to say to each other now, 34 years later? (Interestingly, I told her that Ginny and I had never been lovers, never even kissed... she said that she assumed that we had been lovers, but that Ginny just hadn't admitted it to her... We were all just around 18 years old.)

Target makes you a Star

Sometimes when you're just shopping at Target for a birthday card or a new microwave or something... They suddenly offer a star-studded version of your initial for only $14.99. I completely bought into it (and bought it).

I feel sorry, though, for those whose initials aren't "S," "J," "K," or "M," the only letters offered. Oh yeah, and an ampersand. The display offered "S & M."

Joan Crawford, 1926

Why write or draw or paint or try to represent anything else? This is what I, at least, was always envisioning.

Bay City Rollers - Give a Little Love (1975)

Great Britain Bucket List

(1) England (history)

(2) Liverpool and Beatles

(3) Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (London and Devon)

(4) Scotland and the Bay City Rollers: Les McKeown is still playing gigs around Scotland to this day --- I would love to see any original member of the Bay City Rollers. (I did see short-term member Ian Mitchell play at a small club in New Jersey in 2007, right after I'd moved to NYC. With my junior-high friend Debbie, who then lived in Brooklyn and drove us out there.)

Bay City Rollers Renaissance

My first favorite band. The first 2 albums that I ever owned ("Dedication" and then "Bay City Rollers," in 1976). The first concert I almost went to (at the Tarrant County Convention Center in Fort Worth, Texas --- cancelled for lack of ticket sales).

The 1st picture below is what I've been reading over the past 2 weeks.

The 2nd picture below is me in summer 1977 (age 12) in Germany (in my German cousin Susie's bedroom), right after their "It's a Game" album was released. (My mom pasted the photo into the front of the book at the upper right, 2016, that I asked for for my birthday a month ago.)

Bay City Rollers -- It's A Game (1977)

Bay City Rollers - Midnight Special 1976

When I was 12. I stayed up all night to watch this.
After the Beatles, the Bay City Rollers are STILL my favorite band.