Sarah Palin, Fill Out the Map!

Please comment on the Huffington Post. It's good for my profile there.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-olmsted/sarah-palin-fill-out-this_b_365820.html

The Sundays at the End of the World

The Rockwell part of this is called "Sunday Morning" and in the original the Dad is hiding from his wife taking the kids to church. (In the original Dali that forms the other part of the Hy-Art, a man's body morphs into the mast of a ship.)

My Dad used to stay in the car reading the Sunday paper while we were in St. Mary's. His church was the New York Times. I was too young to read it, but had I been able to understand its contents, they would probably have traumatized me more than Sunday services, where the only danger was death from boredom.

My parents must have felt that the world was in no better shape than I feel it is now. The threat of nuclear war and complete annihilation hung in the air. Hundreds of America boys were dying weekly in Vietnam. The sexual revolution was upending social assumptions. No one even imagined something like AIDS.

Thank God we don't know the future--we couldn't function if we did. This is why "2012" is such an interesting phenomenon. It represents a desire to be certain about the future, even if it's a terrible one. My theory is that people need to invest in the fantasy of an apocalypse in order to experience the huge sigh of relief that will occur when it doesn't actually come true.

Even with our audacious President, hope is in such short supply, we need to artificially create it.

MCO 2012

Scary Sarah

[Note: the above collage has nothing to do with this blog entry. I just put it together spontaneously]

Sarah Palin, in and of herself, is not the problem. The problem is the stream of anti-intellectualism that she represents. I was listening to some of the interviews of the individuals lining up to buy her book. The recurring theme was consistent. "She shows what an average woman can do if she puts her mind to it." "She won't let the media dismiss her." "She's a regular person, like me." It seemed to bother no one that she could write a book (with a ghostwriter) but never seems to read one. Her lack of education, ignorance of policy, disinterest in governing---none of this bugged the bookbuyers. What they wanted was to be reassured that someone has ignorant as they were could become famous. They too could be lipsticked hockey moms who might run the world with a little common sense and willingness to kick liberal ass.

The celebration of faith-based mediocrity is chilling. Even the disastrous results of 8 years of this sort of dunderhead "gut-based" leadership has taught them nothing. The fact that Obama is smart is a negative to them, because it makes them feel stupid. They grasp at anything to attack him. Universal, affordable healthcare? A socialist plot to kill Grandma. A cautious weighing of what to do about Afghanistan? "Dithering" (Would Bush have "dithered" instead of jumping into a $3 trillion dollar war in Iraq.) Their "solutions?" Less taxes and less regulation--exactly what just got us into this mess.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here. I thought Obama's win would make me less depressed about the political situation, but the insane virulence and just-say-no obstructionism of the right is driving me to despair. Hitler only had the support of about 20% of the population when he maneuvered himself into power, and I don't trust these wingnuts at all. An assassination, a coup, martial law, black-shirted white militiamen arresting progressives and atheists--I can see at all happening. It's enough to make you wonder whether or not to arm yourself just like they have.

What marked the philosophy of Hitler and his henchman was the simplicity of their message. Jews were the problem, Nationalism was the solution. The reason I know the Democrats are not potential Fascists is that we debate things to death. No one proclaims there's a magic solution to anything. Climate change, the economy, Afghanistan, healthcare reform---these are incredibly complex issues without easy answers.

Beck, O'Reilly, Palin, Limbaugh are reductionist sloganeers. Love America and cut taxes. Free enterprise and a strong military (somehow not "big government" and not a cause of deficits) will cure everything. It's the scariest kind of proto-fascism because it's cloaked in the propaganda of "liberty." Of course, the only liberty they're really interested in is the ability to make money.

Which bring us back to Sarah. She's doesn't care about governing, or she wouldn't have resigned as Governor. She's interested in celebrity, and the $ that comes with it. She's getting exactly what she wants.

MCO 2009

Do We Want to Be Right or Have Rights?

The Huffington Post says they'll try to approve posts within 24 hours of their submission, but each of my posts seem to go up later and later after I submit it. They have had this one for 8 days, and my inquiries have garnered automatic emails responses. I suspect--but do not know--that they are understaffed and inundated with requests to blog for them. Or it could be that when they disagree with the content, they simply don't post it. Whatever the reason, it makes it hard to write something that doesn't get stale for the news cycle, so I am going to go ahead and post this here before the latest election has receded too far in memory.
I have written about this before and I know the sentiments of many of you. Sheria, I know you think this is a question of civil liberties. I agree with you. However I disagree with the insistence on obtaining this equality through the pursuit of the institution of marriage to the detriment of different approaches.

Which is why this is entitled:

DO WE WANT TO BE RIGHT OR HAVE RIGHTS?

I’m a gay man who supports the right of consenting adults to enter into whatever relationship they’d like, including marriage. I have several married friends who took advantage of the pre-Prop 8 window. I love these men and respect their relationships. I volunteered in the campaign against Prop 8 and was disappointed by the results in Maine. But just because I believe gays should be able to marry doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea.

One advantage of same-sex love is that we are relatively unshackled by the expectations most heterosexuals are hard put to avoid. This doesn’t necessarily mean we have better or longer relationships, just ones more likely to color outside the lines of societal expectations. The end result is that we have a lot to show the world in this department—including (horrors!) arrangements that don’t necessarily hew to models of monogamy, particularly among gay men. (We’re not supposed to talk about it anymore, of course, but the nature of male sexuality does not change when you sign a marriage certificate. If you were a one-partner-man before you got hitched, you still are. If you weren’t, you still aren’t. But suddenly, following the very same agreement after getting married feels like adultery.)

But what have gay people done with this singular, “outside-the-box” legacy? Have we trail-blazed new legal frameworks recognizing non-traditional families and relationships? Have we led instead of followed? In a prodigious failure of imagination, we have instead decided to pursue for ourselves an institution with a success rate of a mere 50%. (And I use “success” advisedly. I bet you can count the couples married more than a decade that you think of as “happy” on a few fingers, if that.)

Despite this lousy track record, the state of being married is still held up as the ideal, and society confers status on those who conform to it. It’s as if getting married is some kind of accomplishment, like getting a degree after years of school. No one even questions the premise that married people should have more rights or status than unmarried people in the first place. And they do. Ask any single mother or divorcee, particularly over 40. Within the gay community I’m noticing the same subtle fissure growing between the wed and unwed, as the words “my husband” are stamped with a legitimacy absent from “my boyfriend.”

The divide will grow deeper when we get full marriage rights. This, by the way, is inevitable without the expenditure of millions of more dollars. It is simply a matter of demographic patience, as the young entering the voting pool replace the old leaving it.

Since time will win the marriage war, we don’t have to keep losing the battles on the way. Our money and energy should be expended in the fights we can presently win, like the one we just did in Washington State. Our campaign there wasn’t savvier than in Maine or California, but it didn’t involve the word “marriage,” except preceded by “Everything but.” The haters and the ignorant spread the same nonsense on the airwaves, but the arguments seem to lack traction for that crucial 10% swing vote when the “M-word” is unattached from the idea of equal rights.

Every time I embark on this dissent I get accusing of defending the principle of “separate but equal.” This was the legal theory advanced to justify segregation; and the reason it was preposterous was that the economic resources accorded to blacks were so egregiously inferior to those accorded whites that separate could never be anything but unequal. If “separate” was inherently “unequal” for civil unions, wouldn’t we have seen gays in France and England up in arms over their supposed second class citizenship? By all accounts they seem perfectly content with their legal status. (Full Disclosure: my mother is French, and has always been slightly appalled by American weddings. “In France, we walk down to city hall and then go to a nice restaurant.”)

What makes civil unions at present unequal is not their separateness, but the host of federal benefits conferred by marriage that even the best state domestic partnerships can’t accord. So let’s change that by calling Barack Obama’s bluff on his stated support of civil unions. Let’s also call the bluff of our electoral foes who proclaim they are not anti-gay, just pro-marriage. Deprive them of their most potent electoral argument.

Let them have their word and their failing institution. We can do much better.

MCO 2009

Sam Harris

So last night I went to see my friend Sam Harris do his cabaret show at a place called the Catalina Jazz Club. As you may know I have produced cabaret shows, writing patter for both Lannie Garret and Cheri Spriggs, and directed Cheri, all through the 80s. I know this genre. I know how many singers depend on their voice and don't mix it up with stories or humor to really make it a piece of theater. I always felt that an essential element, so I tend to be critical of this form of entertainment, because so few singers grasp that.

Not Sam. Sam "gets" it--all of it. He is the best performer I have ever seen. His voice is world-renowned, of course, that's no suprise. But his patter is priceless, and feels like he's making it up on the spot--no mean feat. His song choices, and his placement of the songs to create moments that either have you grabbing the napkin to dry your eyes or stuffing it in your mouth to stop laughing--that's genius. And he frequently adds or changes lyrics to make the songs his own, not to mention makes "couplings" of two different songs--and you know how I love hybrids!
(His rendition of "Bust the windows out yer car" is priceless.)

There was one ballad that I have to share here. The lyrics are simply some of the best I've ever seen, by Kevin Fisher. http://www.samharris.com/free/i-love-you-more.htm Sam's rendition on stage was incredibly moving. I don't know how he gets through rehearsal.

I recommend you buy his albums. Have a great Sunday everyone.

MCO 2009

Past, Present, Future

The woman on the left is from the artist Gerome, she was painted in 1882. The woman on the right is from a 1580 El Greco. They look like sisters, don't they? For some reason, this comforts me. With things so dire these days (random example: The California State Prison system just cut their drug treatment programs--that'll help!) I need to take some historical perspective. In 1580, in Spain, the Inquisition was still in full bloom. Thousands of innocent people were tortured and killed, and the norm for those who weren't was back-breaking poverty--not life at Court that history mostly remembers. In 1882 you might be one of the rich New Yorkers from The Age of Innocence, posing for a painting dressed in Oriental garb (all the rage at the time), but more likely you lived in one of the endless rows of dark, overcrowed and disease-filled tenements that constituted the vast majority of Manhattan.

So are things any worse, really? It is a modern idea that life is dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, even more recent is the idea that we entitled to that result. For those confronting the reality that life remains the emotional slog it always has been, What's wrong with me? seem to be the question that haunts. Maybe because I'm getting older (as my friends are) I seem to hear it from more and more from people around me. The perception is that everyone else is happy and successful--in L.A. all you have to do is look up into the Hollywood Hills that ring the city to feed that impression. How could someone who lives in one of those houses not be leading a charmed life? As if depression, debt and drug addiction does not visit the well-housed with equal fervor. Along with huge dollops of guilt because they themselves think they should be happy.

Plus ca change... (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) Just to see how virtually identical these women are, 3 centuries apart, helps me take the long view. At least I think it's long. At this rate, the new move "2012" is starting to look like it might be a documentary.

MCO 2009

Gun Crazy

I don't think Basquiat would mind much if I appropriated his art to make a statement on gun violence. As reports come out of the Fort Hood shooting, a few things are fairly clear. This man was unstable, his superiors knew it, and he had no business buying a gun. But the FBI is prohibited from getting information about gun buyers who haven't committed a felony. This is what our crazy gun uncontrol laws have wrought. These wingnuts are so afraid "the government" is going to sweep and and take all their guns that they deny themselves protection from the people who intend to use these guns to do harm.

Not that a gun can do anything but harm. No one will ever convince me that the joy of target-shooting justifies all the grief caused by accidental shootings; or that the crimes "prevented" by gun ownership aren't 90% in the mind of the gun owners. This is a violent, militaristic society with the highest rate of incarceration in the industrialized world. We spend millions turning men into killing machines, then send them in to "nation-build." When they come back suffering from P.T.S.D and traumatic brain injury, an asshole like Senator Tom Coburn holds up a bill to help their caregivers because he wants it "paid for" ahead of time. Funny, he made no such objection when he paid for all those appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. Men like him love the shock and awe part, the rest, not so much. They do not associate war with unpleasant consequences. They deny the existence of anything that makes them uncomfortable, like climate change, domestic violence, injured veterans. They turn the other cheek, but to look away.

Straight, white men on the right in this country love violence. War gives then a woody. They've never seen a prison they didn't want to build. They love to see birds drop from the sky when they shoot them and deers fall in the forest. They are convinced of American exceptionalism, that we are the "greatest country in the world." They personalize patriotism because it makes them feel better about themselves. Underneath, they are scared little men, intellectual peanuts. When I see them ranting irrationally at a Michele Bachmann rally, I wish they would all rise to rapture, and leave us behind.

MCO 2009

Dali/Rockwell

The original Rockwell is called "At the Vet." So the surrealistic Dali elephants fit right in.

MCO 2009

Precious Beauty

After 4 1/2 hears of sobriety, I finally signed on to a website that allows me to flirt with men all over the world. I thought this picture particarly sexy, n'est-ce pas? I can't say it's the best use of my time, but like everyone who has a relationship with the internet, we all seem to find our time-eaters. Blogwriting, blogreading, Facebook, (all the apps on Facebook,) My Space (all the music on My Space,) Match.com, and on and on and on. If you're a news junkie, you're lost; a porn junkie, you're going to need a 12-step program by morning. My latest addiction is good one--teaching myself sign language. Though this I could actually spend a lot more time doing.

On Saturday night, David had free tickets to see improv and asked me to go with him. These troups (Bennesssee and TGIF) were very good, but made feel old. I used to think that quickly. I sure don't anymore. Now, I know that Improv troupes rehearse and rehearse--developing memes and characters they tend to use and reuse. Still, the lightning fast adjustments are really impressive. I felt a little left in the dust.

Yesterday, I saw Precious. The performances were absolutely remarkable, particularly Gabourey Sidebey, who plays the title role. Mo'nique is also oscar-worthy, although I wish the script had not made her an unadulterated monster. The whole movie would have been far more powerful with some more ambiguity, a mother who would have made some sincere attempts to act like one. But to make a movie about an obese, dark, poor, 16-year old black girl--that alone was such a courageous act of filmmaking that my hat is off to Les Daniels, even if I thought the volume could have to be turned way down and been twice as effective. Restraint is a word you will not see applied to the direction of this film.

Why Hollywood will not make me into a script doctor, I'll never know. I could have fixed most of these problems at the screenplay level.

MCO 2009

P.S. Sheree Shepherd and Mariah Carey --- two thumbs up for them as well.

I.S.E.M.

I'm going through my Irregularly Scheduled Existential Maintenance.

What does it all mean? What does anything mean? Is it important to do things for a living? What livings make more sense than others? Why? Does it matter if I ever publish a book? What's wrong with being a blogger? What if I publish and no one reads it? Aren't we all just dust in the wind? Do fame and fortune mean anything? Does obscurity? Is there a God? Why are we here?

The answers I've come up with are few and random. I think being a farmer is an important job, but I don't want to be a farmer. Being a nurse, being a mother, being a doctor, being a teacher--these have intrinsic meaning. Being a prison builder, a speculator, a Republican senator--not so much. Picking up trash? Who the fuck knows.

What about being an artist? Suppose no one sees what you do? Does the act of creating have its own meaning? Does it matter how many people read your book? Buy your art? What if you write enough words to fill 6 books, but never publish one?

Well, in a case like this, I could use some inspiration. Look what this guy did to make Precious.

MCO 2009