A long blog today. That's what you get for letting me listen to NPR on a Saturday.
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Postcards of Rubble

The Pottery Barn Theory of Regime Shopping~~~~

Tom Friedman of the New York Times was on NPR this morning talking about his Pottery Barn Theory regarding the plans the US always has about taking down a government and rebuilding something they like better. You break it, you bought it. Do we really want to be responsible for rebuilding the infrastructure and government of another country, and setting up the first secular, oil-rich, democratically-elected, free/fair-market-friendly, Arab/US-backed government in the Middle East? That region has no model for that kind of state. Our ally states- whose leaderships were in no way elected in free/fair elections- will not be liking the new US outpost in their midst. Turkey- a serious military power and important US training ground- will have none of us as long as we're trying to make alliances with their arch-enemy, the Kurdish insurgent groups. The US and UK are poised to start ripping down this hopelessly complex and ancient set of structures in the middle of the Middle East, in Iraq. I'm not going to say anything about the atrocities of Hussein's regime (and how they've been exaggerated in the US press- see a blog by Tom Tomorrow addressing the infamous false baby-incubator-theft story), in any case I don't think this tyrant is something we can afford to break. And plus, according to international law, acts of unprovoked aggression by one state against the other are criminal.



Tom Friedman also pointed to the mess in Afghanistan, where the current leader survived an assassination attempt this past week. He collects postcards for his wife, and he bought her a pile of them in a hotel in Kabul. One postcard depicted "The Ruins of the Afghan Museum." It's like a joke. You know you've been at war too long when you are selling postcards of rubble. These governments we want to break have normalized a culture of constant warfare. Who are we to think we can end those cultures in a grand renaissance of freedom, democracy, and abundant human rights for all? This might sell to the mainstream press and public, but what genius really thinks we can actually do this in Iraq? Selling such a gameplan is like trying to sell office space in that pile of rubble north of Battery Park. Are we selling postcards of that yet?



What a silly question. I guess it's a consolation that some things still make me cringe. Oh goody, here's one that looks like one of those souvenir cartoon maps, like the one of Amsterdam showing hookers mooning the stoned locals, only this time it's cartoon buildings burning. Yeah, a "day of infamy"- where tragically HUNDREDS of cartoonists and graphic designers simultaneously had brain farts.

I found another blogger against the new war, and a slacker-in-arms, concerned that we have forgotten our original impulse in invading Afghanistan: read the comments by the Slacktivist.

As pointed to by my friend and another blogger against the new war, Interesting Monstah, read an anti-war activist information resource list from the Nation.

The Arm of Laocoon ~~~~


or, the Debut of the Slacker Stalker's Fractured Fine Art History (Pun Intended)

It turns out that if you can stick out the collective committee-driven creative process, you can lose a whole right arm and get it back again. Maybe not for 1,956 years, but eventually, you can get that first, best arm back. In the first century "before our era" (B.O.E.) (as the academic secularists in Russia still say instead of "B.C.") a committee of three Greeks, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, created a monument to the suffering of a Department of Psychic Works employee for the City of Troy who warned the devastated remnants of leadership to Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts (Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes!). He and his sons were killed in an accident while they were tidepooling (by serpents sent by the angry goddess underwriting the Greek effort), and the Trojans thought that was proof of malfeasance of that particular DPW employee, Mr. Laocoon, and proceded to solicit gifts from their enemy Greeks, who obliged. Troy was destroyed by the Greeks about 1184 B.O.E. Look at the face of Laocoon's monument and know the suffering of the passionate public servant hung out to dry by management. Meanwhile, the story of the monument. The statue was unearthed in 1506 O.E. when Michelangelo was on the gallery circuit, trying out his new "bag of rocks" muscle-bound floppy-wristed rentboy look in the medium of marble, and he got a look at the 1st century B.O.E. sculpture, which had lost its right arm. He came up with a theory of how the arm should look- bent backwards over the head- with a nice limp wrist. The owners of the galleries (failed artists) told him to stick to his girly pietas. Their non-union and probably heterosexual stooge, Mr. Montorsoli, glued a macho John Travolta disco-pointing arm on the figure in 1532 O.E. In 1905, B.C.E. (Before the Communist Era, when bourgeois sculptures were reconstructed by committee, ushering in the artistic school of Futurism), an archeologist was in a marble-cutter/ antique shop and discovered a nice limp-wristed arm, and he, a Mr. Ludwig Pollack, was a secret partisan of the Michelangelo School of Laocoon Armism - the MSLA (a turn-of-the-century kind of gay social club), so he knew that this was the original lost arm of that bereaved public servant, and so it was.



Mr. Laocoon was finally made whole again in 1957 O.E., after the fall of the Communist Facists (and their long-lived but unproductive Komitet for Creative Reproletarianization of Antirevolutionary Art by Propertarianists-- CRAPKOM) ...and after other partisans of the MSLA found the rest of the pieces that comprised the supporting fragments of the arm. It took them a long time because of the early-century invention of absinthe, popular among the Armists. OK, I made that last part up. Nobody knows why it took so long, except that every stage of this sculpture's life involved committees, and no doubt then committee meetings. Eventually the suffering Laocoon was made whole. Don't he & his son look happy about it?



I wonder why I can't find an on-line postcard of Laocoon. I guess that facial expression just doesn't say "have a nice day." Here is a PDF of a lecture on the real history of "Laokoon" (the metric spelling). Read a linked-up version of the story from the Tufts 'Perseus' network of Classics databases here.

Last Call~~~~


My girlfriend was hijacked by breast cancer, her body destroyed by disease, her mind by terror. After her diagnosis of involvement of bone cancer in her neck vertebrae on 9/11/01, we went shoe shopping. She responded to the terror of her diagnosis and the global paroxysms of terror after that date by trying to make "normal" happen as often as it could. She cleaned the house. She bought me small gifts. She made breakfast while I watched CNN. She kept me as close as she could, which meant not as close as before in some ways, closer in others. She stopped smoking her medicinal marijuana and she started to dream again. We stayed up late in eachother's arms talking about dreams. She called me the Sunday before she ended her life and left a message: "Hi baby. I'm just calling to tell you I love you, I really do. I'm ok. I hope you're ok. I'll talk to you soon."



Today NPR is playing excerpts from the Sonic Memorial to the Trade Center. The recordings of the last phone calls sound like that last message my paramour left me. Nonurgent, heartfelt, normal. These sound remnants are the aural postcards of rubble.



I kept that last message until Sprint PCS suddenly deleted it. It's too gruesome to lose the last recorded sound of a silenced voice, but like a postcard- you can only re-examine it so many times. It's hard to admit that I am more than the sum of my loss, and that this lost sound postcard is really not more than a postcard. Someday I'll let go of my anger at losing that last message, and their subsequent shittiness in their treatment of me in my distress, but for now I stoke a little fire in my heart and wish nothing but humiliation and disaster for a stupid cell phone company.



P.S. If you also hate Sprint PCS, you can post your complaints to SprintDidABadThing. I'm sorry that I can no longer find IHateSprint.com - which looked like the corporate site, except for the animation of a guy pooping on their logo.

In my search for more bad Leonard Nimoy poetry...

I have found a kindred blogger who also appreciates the danger of "crossing the beams" of Star Trek and Tolkein elements with that dancing and singing Hobbit video by our friend Spock -- that I blogged about 2 weeks ago. Sorry about adding a Ghostbusters reference to that volatile mix.

This apt observer of culture has a blog that is classified by Google as "Recreation > Humor > Bizarre > Farts" -- another obvious reason you should check out the spiffiness that is Mr. Pants.

I have so far failed to buy a copy of or find online anything worth mocking from Come Be With Me, but I have found another Nimoy video clip, of him performing his song "Highly Illogical." I also present to you The Leonard Nimoy Estrogen Brigade (LNEB). I am disappointed the page doesn't include seem to include photographs of its "18 and over" female members.

Now, to close, I'm going to join Joan Houlihan, a poetry snob, in quoting some bad U.S. American poetry from a book by Ellen Bass, a book lauded by the popular U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

"They pulled you from me like a cork

and all the love flowed out. I adored you

with the squandering passion of spring

that shoots green from every pore. "

Human parasite extractions! Popping noises! Green lasers shooting out of every pore! It's a Sci-Fi thriller stanza! "But if this be pleasure, in what does torture lie?" moans Ms. Houlihan. The article (and poem) in its entirety is linked at The Arts & Letters Daily but can also be read in its original context in her column "The Boston Comment" at Del Sol - "locus of the new literary art."

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"Removing All Sorrow"


I'm a 29 year old kind-of-widow whose lesbian partner died last October, and as my dear-departed's 51st birthday approaches- and the 1st anniversary of the shitty event that happened on the day after her birthday, 9/11 - I've been noticing a word turning up in lyrics of the sad songs I listen to that seems to beg to be examined: Nepenthe. I'm not a lyrics-listener usually (I'm still sometimes shocked to find out what Led Zeppelin's songs are talking about even after playing the tapes ragged for years), but sometimes a word gets stuck in my mind like a catchy tune. Don't ask me what kind of music I listen to that uses words like Nepenthe. I can't remember what albums I'm listening to-- I'm a widow: I have griefheimers.

From Webster's as found on Bibliomania...


"Nepenthe: (Ne*pen"the) n. [Fr. Gr. removing all sorrow; hence, an epithet of an Egyptian drug which lulled sorrow for the day; not + sorrow, grief.] A drug used by the ancients to give relief from pain and sorrow; — by some supposed to have been opium or hasheesh. Hence, anything soothing and comforting. Quaff, O quaff this kind nepenthe. -- Poe ."

Poe's quote is part of the wish for forgetfulness from the narrator of "The Raven" who couldn't bear to live with the memory of a lover who had died.



The herb the ancients called Nepenthe was probably actually borage, a weed often found in garbage heaps and at the edge of gardens. Borage may be descended from a word meaning a couragous man in a Celtic tongue- "barrach." It may also come from a corrupted version of the Latin "cor" (heart) plus "ago" (I bring)- or courage, "I bring heart." Roman soldiers were given borage-steeped wine before battle. It makes you absolutely forget sadness and fear, and dwell only in the moment. Borage oil, something you can buy in any health food store, is sold as a source of healthy fatty acids, for heart trouble.

What my widow friends call griefheimers, absentmindedness due to grief, is the opposite of Nepenthe's state of mind-- it is dwelling so completely in the past that you forget the moment absolutely. It makes you lock your car keys in the car while it's running. It is a constant state of un-heartedness, humiliation-- spoiled food, stained clothes. Nepenthe is mental bleach.

Some mental bleach, as recommended by a widow friend:

equal measure boiling water and whiskey

a spoonful of honey

a squirt of lemon juice.

(a traditional English hot toddy)

"Stay calm and work with simple ideas." -- Nanna Candelaria

I love my bellydance teacher Nanna's pearls of wisdom. Tuesdays are the nights I harvest my pearls. Tonight she talked about creating a routine in bite-sized chunks, staying calm and working with simple ideas. She also said (I'm paraphrasing) "find the places in your body that are calm and stay with them."

Some other Nanna pearls, talking about moving your hands into position consciously: "How you got there is part of why you're there." Another one, talking about visualizing planes of horizontal movement: "If you hold these things in your mind, they will happen in your hands." And another: "Look for opportunities to open your chest." She was talking about keeping an open posture in your upper body. Talking about holding different volumes of movement in mind: "move in your full dimension." So much about dance is also about projecting yourself into physical space with control and precision, and Nanna's advice comes back to me in stressful work situations all the time.

Read another professional dancer's rave review of Nanna as a dancer and teacher. This link has a link to Amira, where Nanna performs. Read a short article Nanna wrote about taking her troupe Tabu to an international dance festival in Beijing. This link also has a nice picture Nanna uses for promotion. Sign up for her Wednesday beginning (levels 1 & 2) bellydance classes at the Berkeley YW. Upstairs there at my links list of "Some Obsessions" also has a link to a nice photo of Nanna with her troupe in action.

Sometimes she thought about packing it all up and moving into town.

This was the caption on a favorite old t-shirt of mine, under a picture of a pretty young cowgirl kneeling on the ground and looking up at the moon. Then I packed it all up and moved into town, leaving my horse and saddle behind.

Today I'm homesick, even after a day (yesterday) of homie-hop at the hip-hop stage at gay pride Oakland, organized by Juba from the Deep Dickollective (D/DC). A whole ten-minute freestyle with a stage full of queer rappers, mostly butch men and women, mostly but not all African-American, was the phenomenal climax of the show. It may have been the first ever city gay pride hip hop freestyle, at least maybe the first publically-sanctioned one of that magnitude. And most of the rappers in that freestyle were young- some barely drinking age. As D/DC sings (and thank the gods for this fact): "Why keep on trippin'-trippin'-trippin...? We are your future."

So why am I homesick? If I wanted more laid-back music there was the womyn's (wymyn's?) stage where someone I know saw a nice lady playing solo acoustic guitar and singing a song about yoga. Oh it wasn't (all) that bad. That stage also featured Kindness, and they do rock, they do, with Dawn Richardson of 4-Non-Blondes at the drums and bassist Catherine Chase and Shelley Doty (a guitar superforce). So, what don't I have here that I had back in the sticks?

See a web cam where I'm from.

OK it's not exactly where I'm from, it's about 2 hours east of where I'm from. And this is 43 hours west of where I live now. If I pointed my Toyota at Northern New York and started driving today, just three days' drive.

Now, to pull out my fiddle and polish up some tunes for a hoe-down this afternoon for some other expat citified hicks who grew up with live music as something you do for eachother as a way to pass the time, with whom I went to an empty San Francisco bar last night and saw The Trout Band, which may or may not have included some of these people. (This picture speaks a thousand twangy words.) The commonplaceness of live music is something the rural US has in common with urban Russia-- another part of the mysterious conglomerations of reasons why I ended up there at age 20, I guess.

Another Reason to Abandon Identity-Based Politics: the Curse of the G/L Consonant Cluster

I work in the US for the queer non-profit IGLHRC. I make fun of the acronym of the US queer organization NOGLSTP. A respected queer foundation is about to fund GLO-P (in South Africa- I see they have just changed their name to OUT) and GAG-L in Paraguay. I don't believe we are a minority if you include all permutations of queerness, but for acronymic consonant cluster reasons alone, I vote for "sexual minorities" to replace "gay and lesbian." Think of it. SM. OrgaSM, SMile, SMash, AweSM. Of course, I always tell people we should rename our organization Up With Sodomy, and have the Up With Sodomy Singers on a perpetual world tour. But they don't let me into the branding and fundraising meetings since I kept suggesting a human rights slave auction.

I have been living both in an identity-based and in a post-identity world now for at least a decade of queer activism, and the acronymicization of "GL" is just gonna kill me some day soon now. Yes, even with all the pretty GLOEs and GLAADs and GLSTNs.

There's only one peach with a hole in the middle. Maybe.

Mmmm. Peaches. Maybe she hadn't seen Tiny's Organic Donut Peaches yet when Peaches wrote that song.

Well, I thought a cure for my gloomy mood might be to go to Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck) and buy myself a package of those bizarre new donut peaches they are selling for $6/half-dozen. The price of a matinee movie, a luxurious novelty, they are organic- nothing but bug footprints on them. They are small, sweet, easy to eat, very sexy. Then, talking to a friend on the phone, I was musing that today is the 1/2 year mark for the birthday of my 103 year old adopted great-great grandmother, Valentina Mikhailovna, AKA my babushka. We have blogs and e-mail as a daily part of our lives, while she is still getting used to women walking out on the street wearing pants, and now we've entered a whole new state of whacky- we have donut-shaped peaches. Then, I looked them up. They are much older than Valentina Mikhailovna. The Saucer Peach, Chinese Peach, Saturn Peach, Flat Peach. The third day of the third month of the Chinese Lunar Calendar is the Festival of the Flat Peach. The other peach with a hole in the middle. As I've written this I've nibbled down four.

Q. Where's this road going?

A. I've been living here all my life and it ain't budged yet.

This is a story translated by Paul Reps in his collection Zen Flesh Zen Bones.

The Buddhist nun Ryonen was born in 1797. Before she was a nun, she was so beautiful the monks refused to let her into the monasteries, so she burned her own face in order to be allowed to become a disciple. On her deathbed she wrote:

Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing

scene of autumn

I have said enough about moonlight,

Ask no more.

Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no

wind stirs.

The zen koan in its entirety is: Ryonen's Clear Realization.

Someone please bring me the head of Leonard Nimoy.

Now eez ze time on schprockets ven vee danse. Won't someone please think of the children?

For more of the dubious genius of Leonard Nimoy, stay tuned. I will share some of his gems when I get my copy of his 1978 collection of poetry "don'ts" that is Come Be With Me , as elegant and subtle as a bag of ball-peen hammers.

It should be here in a few days. However, right now you can enjoy these e-greetings with his poetry and this page dedicated to his artistic works.

Please also take the time to add your name to the petition to get Leonard Nimoy to eat more salsa . This is the English language section of the site, but it is an international movement. Apparently.

The Law of Talion

Tonight I cracked open some old journals, which is like visiting an old friend for most people, but for me (and other people who have a lot of death in their life) it's like cracking open a gate something akin to the scene from Ghostbusters where the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster got together and the Sta-Puft guy showed up. I opened my old journal from December up to a list of words I picked from a dictionary at random. The first word: "talion."


I have a talent for fortunetelling and usually use tarot cards, rarely runes, almost never less reputable tools like pendulums or stichomancy . However, in grief I abandoned tarot, and was reduced to stichomancy. The first time I opened a dictionary seeking a message from my love, who died recently, I opened and dropped my finger to "talion" - from Latin talio - retaliation - "punishment that exacts a penalty corresponding in kind to the crime."


Before my partner died we had conversations about whether or not "even a murderer" would have mercy in the hereafter. I believe she was talking about herself. She ended her own life two days later. Of course, breast and bone cancer was a great (and the official) motivation, but I have been intrigued to think that she would actually carry out an informal, vigilante death penalty on herself, in penance for a vigilante killing of a rapist-- the crime I have reason to believe she committed, based on all the facts of her life. Here is a little more on talion from a 'cool word' mailing list .

"If the punishment for an offense is exactly the same as the offense, then it is a talion, and it is talionic punishment. Example: 'For the crime of murder, the talion is death.'


"The ancient root was tele-, which had meanings related to lifting, supporting, and weighing, with derivatives relating to measuring and money. From the same ancient root:


"toll: fee paid for passage or service; extent of loss or damage;

"tolerate: to allow; to endure

"talent: marked innate ability, specific weight of gold or silver

"tola: the weight of one silver Indian rupee

"extoll: to praise highly ('lift up')"

Read this examination of the Law of Talion , posted to the site of the Austrian group The Center for Encounter and Active Non-Violence right after 9/11/01. It hints at the need for support of the International Criminal Court, which is opposed by the US Congress as though it was another terrorist attack on our homeland.


I have no answers- only wishes for the blessing of moderation.

Welcome to the Language of No Future
This is the beginning of a blog documenting the life of my flypaper mind. I am a language person, and one of my latest obsessions is Latin. So I will begin with a thought passed on to me two days ago by my Latin tutor. The Romans, it is said, did not use the phrase "face the future." Their turns of phrase indicate that for them you face the past, because that is all that is ever known. We are all walking backward into present memory. Beyond that, there is only present expectations. The future, the unknown, doesn't really exist, and so can never be faced. On another note-- don't forget that "carpe" in "carpe diem" is using an agricultural term: "harvest the day" is closer than the usual translation "seize." Cultivation blessings.