I’m off to Germany for two weeks. Miss me please!
Archive for June, 2006
I’m sorry to cut and paste a block of someone else’s writing, but in the Seattle Weekly this week, there’s an excellent piece by Roger Downey discussing his separation from the events and celebrations of Seattle’s Gay Pride weekend, which is about to take place in Seattle. Having just seen Brokeback Mountain - yes, rather late - he sees the film from a different perspective from many people who criticised it and who loved it. He thought it was largely about poverty and class, and how being poor in rural America massively reduces your chances at sexual liberation. Long before the time of the events pictured in the film men and women of sexual minority groups were finding companionship with one another in major cities like San Francisco and Miami. By urbanising and grouping together they were strong. But it was and still is those gays and lesbians who are caught in the rural states, in areas detached from support mechanisms, that need help and still need our help. Downey says Pride is now more about celebrating how great we are and what we’ve got rather than what we have achieved. It was those that came before us that made today’s ‘tolerance’ if not acceptance possible. Now we have to do something to be proud of, help those minority groups and racial minorities who aren’t educated in the language of sexual politics to liberate those members of their communities who are still hiding.
I’ve been feeling more and more remote from the events of Gay Pride for years, but seeing Brokeback Mountain, even if I saw it differently than most, got me thinking hard again about what it’s for, about just what it is that’s being celebrated. Pride? Proud of what? Proud of our “difference”? Proud of our struggle to overcome fear, intimidation, and opposition? Twenty years ago, even 10, I could go along with that. But when I look at the Pride marchers today, if I see anything more than a sort of multicolored St. Patrick’s Day celebration, I see people celebrating being, on average, the most privileged people on planet Earth, free to do exactly as they please, absolved even of the implied injunction on heterosexuals to reproduce, to foster their offspring, to devote the best years of their lives and much of their income to providing for the next generation. I’m not saying that’s not cause for celebration. I enjoy the same privileges as they. What I don’t understand is why we call it “Pride,” and why the hets are willing to let us disrupt traffic with our boasting.
Anthropomorphizing the icons of today’s ‘popular’ web browsers (Netscape?!), the viral video pokes fun at Firefox’s competitors without actually showing how it’s better than the rest. It’s an ad for those who already love it: Firefox is all about the browser just working, not much else…
via TUAW.com
Scott Adams is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. He’s a guy who managed to hold down a steady job in the corporate world for six years whilst drawing his comic every day before work, and perhaps part of that whacky nature of not giving up has spilled into his blog which you can get to from dilbert.com, but is really found at dilbertblog.typepad.com. He posted some information about true events that have happened to him, being held at gunpoint four times and being mugged in other ways as well: it doesn’t give San Francisco in the 80’s a very good sell.
Anyway. The stories from readers are hilarious, starting with the knockout first one, from ‘Sheilah’:
I once pushed an ENTIRE HUMAN BEING out of my vagina.
He’s bigger now.
They just don’t seem to get it! A lot of people don’t like the idea of killing, for ’scientific purposes’, the largest mammals on Earth: whales. The only scientific study I could imagine would be to see how many they can kill before they don’t recover.
David Attenborough has previous said:
…If whales could scream the industry would stop, for nobody would be able to stand it.
Then they give money to poor Caribbean nations for ‘fishing aid’. What is this, so that these countries create over-developed fishing industries that will be just outraged by the impact of whales eating their fish? It’s so false and underhand and just disgusts me. Can’t we show repeats of The Blue Planet on Japanese television continually until they beg us to stop and repent their horrible crimes. Japan and Norway’s tolls: 2,500 whales killed in the last twelve months. It’s disgusting.
WaPo: Pro-Whaling Nations Lose Early Vote
Guardian: Japan hits out at ‘polarised’ whaling council
Stepping out, everyone can see my face
All the things I can’t erase from my life
Everybody knows
Standing out so you won’t forget my name
That’s the way we play this game of life
Everybody knows-Dixie Chicks: Everybody Knows
Thanks to the internet, I think for the first time young people are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders. It’s such a powerful thing that we can create our own history, see the news unfold in real-time and contribute our own information and thoughts to unfolding stories before they are stymied by those that would like a more agreeable daily roundup.
from SFPride.org:
Unlike other Grand Marshal positions, the Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal is not necessarily an annual award and is bestowed only when the appropriate occasion arises. This award is given to a person who has dedicated years of service and activism toward the LGBT community throughout the course of their lifetime. This year, Pride is recognizing a person who has given much of his time and activism to supporting the Transgender community, especially in the wake of the riots at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966, but whose support for the LGBT community reaches back into the early sixties.
On a related note, the ads on the SFPride website are just too funny. The catchlines are just too tongue in cheek:
- LOGO (tv network): ‘Say you want it’
- Delta (Airlines): go anywhere. anything goes.
- San Francisco Chronicle: We Come Out Every Day
- Comcast (ISP): Hook Up. Fast.
You can accuse that movie of almost every sin and it’s going to be true. But what’s sweet about it is that despite, in many ways, being really rubbish, it’s really good! Of course half of that’s probably just because it’s got a stunning soundtrack, but it also has a lot of style, fun, spirit and personality. I know that’s really just four words describing the same concept, but I don’t care. It’s all of them nonetheless.
Anyway, I watched Flashdance last night, for what must have been the second time because, even though I thought I’d not seen it. I love the 80’s style of cinematography with the bad colour rendition, the noise on the picture, the haze of sunlight in the camera. It’s like they’d never thought that blacks should be black, and the whites should be white! This sounds like laundry detergent copywriting, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just a bit fuzzy. Thank god for Panavision!
Anyway, after watching the film I wanted to find out a little bit more about it, and in finding out facts like the fact that the star Jennifer Beals is now cast in the television show ‘The L Word’, I also came across a hilarious fictional analysis of the film from a book, published online at out.com for the 20th anniversary of the film, in 2003.
