Stardate 11082002
These columns chain together in ways that even I, who live this shit, find hard to believe. In the last episode, I wrote about the hipster laundromat and featured a photo of a studious young guy hunched over his book. While I was at the laundromat, I also ran into my old roommate who let me on the big secret DEVO free show that everyone knew about. It was sponsored by Nissan (which, if you didn’t know, is a very conservative company – not that all corporations aren’t, by their nature, conservative, but why let your ethics get in the way of a killer promotional opportunity?) So Nissan stuck Devo in San Francisco on the eve of a giant Peace Rally, priming us, if you will, with their rousing songs and a little bit of leftist, anti-Bush rhetoric. And Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer of DEVO, didn’t once make a pitch for their cars. So you wouldn’t even know you were watching a big car commercial.
That’s the trick. Just smile and nod and the hold the knife behind your back. Not a real knife … it’s a metaphor.
My first reaction was “DEVO!! NO WAY!!” which, it turns out, was everybody’s first reaction and at the actual concert, in the Civic Center Plaza (where the Peace Rally ended up), the crowd was in a state of shock for the first couple of songs. As in, “I’m dreaming. That’s really DEVO. I’m at a DEVO concert.”
When everyone realized that no, this was not an illusion, a music video or a cover band, they just…freaked…out.
They played for about 45 minutes for a heavily black-cladden crowd and then told everyone to get back to their cubicle. DEVO’s absurd lyrics reflect a deep dissatisfaction with the whole order of our society and it struck me that they are just as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.
Afterwards, I found my posse and we had vegan food at the Ananda Fuara restaurant run by devotees of Sri Chinmoy. I’m all for people teaching peace, but Gurus just aren’t my bag, especially the ones who cultivate fanatical devotion. At least the staff isn’t trying to convert the patrons. The food is excellent – organic, generous portions, prepared with love. They have a great tea called “Chi Tea,” heavy on the ginger and ginseng, that is a much better mid-afternoon pick-me-up than coffee. Macho, hot-headed types with short tempers should stay away from Red (Korean) ginseng and stick with the Siberian Ginseng. While not a true ginseng, the Siberian variety has a balancing effect on your system. Red ginseng is often sold as an aphrodisiac to the kind of men who shouldn’t be ingesting it at all.
The kind of men who would go to a street fair in a largely gay neighborhood for the sole purpose of gay-bashing and ruining an otherwise festive street party. More on that in a moment.
Janeane Garofalo, who I can’t stop writing about and it’s starting to worry me how often I mention her, performed that night. I went to see her again because I wanted to get as riled up as possible before I marched the next day and I was sure she would help galvanize my left sensibilities. Not that I needed any help … okay, I just am compelled to pay attention to her. I bought a ticket off a scalper for 30 bucks, which seems like a lot, except that full-price, the ticket would cost $45.00. That’s a $17 service charge. 17 dollars! Ticketmaster must burn. If possible, buy your tickets directly from theatre box offices and help stop the evil that is Ticketmaster. Even shows at tiny venues are creeping towards the $20 mark. I mean, come on. Everyone is broke. But if you are going to spend nearly $50 on a night of entertainment and it’s not ballet or opera or any of the other forms of “high” culture that is priced to keep the rabble-rousers out, then might I suggest Janeane Garofalo.
I think punk rock and opera have a lot to teach each other.
Okay, I am NEVER writing about her again.
Saturday, October 26th, there were giant peace rallies in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, with smaller rallies in a handful of other cities and countries, showing solidarity against the current effort to transform our society into a war machine , turning public space into a militarized zone and organizing our cultural identity around hatred of an enemy – which was Bin Laden but curiously has become Saddam Hussein. It used to be the U.S.S.R.
I have to keep reminding people that I didn’t choose to be born into a world of conflict but now that I’m here, don’t expect me to buy into the bullshit and carry on business as usual. I don’t feel constrained by the stories of the past, so I can live a different present and create a new future.
Here is a startling fact: estimated time to severe water shortages – 20 years. That is, if fresh water sources haven’t been poisoned with agricultural run-off. You think I’m just being alarmist, and that as long as FRIENDS still comes on and there are Doritos at the Safeway that nothing could possibly be wrong. But there is an ugly backside to our collective way of life that is curling its head around and when it finally bites us in the ass, we aren’t going to survive the venom.
I was at a supermarket the other day and I wondered, “Where’s the food?” There was no real food. My friend’s grandmother once said, “Organic? What’s organic food? When I was growing up, everything was organic.” I guess she conveniently forgot the period after WW2 when DDT was thought to be safe enough to spray on children. And they did!
The chemical companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the sickness industry are the ones you have to watch out for. They have it in for us. I feel like I’m stuck in a giant con game.
Sports make better media than investigative reporting or deep analysis. In the United States, war coverage is just like sports coverage, which is curiously, just like business news. Which are seen as the domains of men. There’s a connection there people, reach for it.
Over 40,000 people filled Market Street on Saturday, October 26th. Every kind of person, age, persuasion and platform showed up to express their discontent with the Bush Agenda. I didn’t stay to hear any of the speakers because an otherwise cohesive march was about to break down into factional arguing while every leftist organization tried to rally support for their particular plan to transform the United States into some kind of egalitarian utopia where everyone has health care, food and housing and the leisure time to develop a life of the mind and participate in social and civic activities, not as an afterthought or after a long day at work, but as the main attraction. I was only there to help deliver one clear, consistent message.
No War In Iraq
If I were to elaborate, I would say raise wages, decrease military spending and invest in social programs. I would also say Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Which is why I’m a little disappointed when Green party candidates focus on labor issues and corporate ethics and forget to bring environmental issues to the forefront.
CNN reported that Susan Sarandon marched in the D.C. rally. David Arquette recently pledged his support for the pro-peace effort. “I’ll do anything to help stop this war,” Arquette said. Sean Penn, on October 18th, paid $56,000 to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post to publish an open letter to George Bush Jr., exhorting him to think about the actions he wants to take against Iraq.
The issue, you know, isn’t just about Iraq. Good guys versus bad guys. Right against wrong. It’s about a perpetuation of a way of being that continually creates the conditions of war. Us vs. Them. Me against you. Jesus versus Mohammed versus Yahweh, who are all versus Buddha and Shiva. Even Southeast-Asian Hindus are at war with Southeast-Asian Moslems (the Punjab region betwixt Pakistan and India is a hotbed of that conflict and one where the threat of nuclear retaliation on the part of India comes up once in a while.) It’s so hard to figure out where nationalism, religious bigotry and ethnic identity begin and end in just about every war on earth right now.
This peace march was also a way of saying, “there are millions of us who are seeking out alternatives to the continual waste and pollution and conflict that characterizes our society.” The ideology of the left is ultimately about healthy living, leveling the playing field, accountability, self-responsibility and the pursuit of truth and freedom. The right seems to be about slash and burn, dominate and destroy, me first, win at any cost, lie, cheat, steal and enslave.
War is not the path to peace. The path to peace is the journey into your own compassion. I have to say this because some people with a lot of power are projecting their paranoid death script on the rest of the planet and it really pisses me off.
No wonder some people are desperate for a Sri Chinmoy to give them a way out of the ruling consciousness of Western culture to find a way of life that is not based on the conflict between absolutist dogmas or warring “truths.”
Subverting the dominant paradigm isn’t just for hippies anymore. Sean Penn signed his letter, “Sean Penn, San Francisco, California.”
He doesn’t live very far from me. I should go personally thank him.
THE CUTTERS recorded their new album in San Francisco this past weekend. Currently untitled. I made a few suggestions but I think they fell on deaf ears. After all, what do I know about Rock and Roll? I went to go see them at Talk of the Town in Oakland but the only thing anyone was saying was, “Where’s the band?”
Talk of the Town didn’t pay the rent and THE CUTTERS arrived to be told to go home. I was bummed because I really wanted to see them. It was like a birthday party without the cake. I got word they were playing a show at the Hotel Utah the next night but that information was not on their website. I asked, “What gives?” and Mike, the guitarist, said, “Tell the people who maintain our website. They don’t think anyone checks the performance schedule.”
How else does anyone find out about anything if its not on the Internet?
That was the night of thousand parties where the annual Day of the Dead celebration in the largely Hispanic Mission district was taking place while a motorcycle driver was being thrown from his horse. The police officer at the scene told me the driver was “not so good.”
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I didn’t see any blood on the pavement, just gasoline. But it was very eerie to have so many reminders of my own mortality hit me at once. [ouch.jpg] The Day of the Dead (or Dia De Los Muertes) is a Mexican celebration honoring the deceased and is traditionally celebrated by building altars with food, drink, skulls made of sugar, pictures of the deceased and marigolds. Sprinkling marigolds inside your doorway is thought to invite the spirits of the ancestors back for the night.
The “official” San Francisco Halloween Street Party, normally held in the Civic Center plaza (popular with the homeless set when not being used for some kind of party) was cancelled this year due to lack of sponsorship. Those in the know call the Civic Center party the “asshole” party because that is where all assholes go, leaving the REAL party in the Castro unhindered by those backward attitudes that claim the lives, jobs, reputations and homes of thousands of gays, lesbians and everyone else who doesn’t fit the heterosexist norm that everyone is supposed to conform to.
Normally, the Castro, the largely gay neighborhood and spiritual center of the global gay community, attracts about 150,000 revelers. Always “without incident” as the crime-fighting community like to say, always raucous and always totally fun. I normally go but this year I opted out and went to a house party where a guy named Blue played the Didgeridoo. I’m glad I stayed away.
150,000 extra non-cool people (see, “Asshole”) with no place else to go, took their bad attitudes and baseball bats into the Castro. “My boss got punched.” “I saw a girl get a bottle smashed against her head.” “I saw this guy get punched.” “Two guys were being beat up by a five others, bloody and screaming for help.” “Four people were stabbed.”
The violence was attributed to gang-on-gang violence and gay-bashing. It was estimated that nearly 60% of the crowd came from out of town.
An angry observerspoke out the following day on the message board at San Francisco Craigslist. “This is our life. This is our neighborhood. We have fought hard and long to keep it safe, secure and free from outside torment and attack. Obviously, after watching with horror the events of Halloween, it is clear that we are not done fighting.”
Now San Francisco City Hall is saying, “Maybe we should shut down the Castro party.”
I say, “Maybe we should be more aggressive with a public tolerance campaign and reflect tolerance and diversity in our laws, hiring practices and civic literature.”
Yes, let’s just turn a blind eye to hate violence and blame the victims. “If she didn’t wear such a short dress.” “If he didn’t ACT gay.” “If she wasn’t so dykey.” Etcetera, etcetera.
We talk a lot of shit about terrorism abroad when there is plenty of domestic terrorism that the Bush administration could focus on, if our “President” wasn’t a right-wing, anti-gay, anti-woman, war mongering dumbshit.
The same night that homophobia sank its bloody teeth into Halloween, I got into a conversation with a straight guy (I am not straight), who said, “Gay people have it so easy. They don’t have to deal with the divide between the sexes. It seems to me like a cop-out. Maybe that’s why you decided to be gay.”
It was like 1958 all over again. Homosexuals are really just failed heterosexuals. Please beat me up, kill me, medicate me or institutionalize me for my own good and the safety of your children. Please continue to show me what a normal sexual relationship is in your magazine ads, your television shows, your movies, your churches, your schools, your locker rooms. Remind me every day that I’m wrong. That what I want is wrong. Reject me and disown me.
Yes, we have it so easy. I was pretty lucky. My sexuality, owing to my enlightened parentage, was a non-issue and I was able to be open about my relationships and my sexuality while a teen-ager – a luxury unheard of in most parts of the U.S. Gay teens need to be able to explore same-sex relationships in the open just like their straight peers because its NORMAL and NATURAL to have feelings for the same sex and just because some religions forbid it and some cultures fear it, doesn’t make that any less true.
You may as well forbid a tree to grow.
So it was refreshing to go to a party where self-acceptance was literally graffitied on the wall. I also met the mysterious Abe who tells me he travels from city to city, doing his art and surviving however he can. At some point he lived in Brooklyn. He was very knowledgeable about the local art scene, which greatly impressed me.
And in other news, San Francisco Bay Area residents Robin Williams and Dana Carvey performed at the 12th annual “Cool Comedy - Hot Cuisine” held on November 4th in Beverly Hills to benefit the Scleroderma Research Fund. Lily Tomlin also performed. Ellen Degeneres was on the bill but left a reportedly humorous phone message which Bob Saget played for the audience. Scleroderma is anything but funny. About 300,000 people a year contract the disease which causes tissue to harden and is most dangerous when it affects the internal organs.
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I finished the week at DeathGuild, a gothic-industrial club. DeathGuild also runs the DeathGuild camp at Burning Man which constructs a life-size Thunderdome from the Mad Max film of the same name. Like the battles in the movie which are staged with props and nobody actually gets hurt, the battles in the desert are fought for fun with foam batons. The DeathGuild Camp Thunderdome was featured prominently in the background when Wild On E! covered the event in 1999, the year the Burning Man committee allowed the mainstream media in to film the festival which claims to have no spectators, only participants.
Ramadan began on Wednesday, my sister informs me. “May the blessings of Allah shower upon you during the ROZA. Ramadan Mubarak!” Roza is Ramadan and I think Ramadan Mubarak translates as “Happy Ramadan.” My sis converted to Islam (much to the horror of her liberal family who was certain she’d have her vagina sewn shut and thrown into a dungeon while her male in-laws beat her senseless night after night) when she married. Her husband’s family was forced out of India by Hindu nationalists during a war against Muslims. Many fled north and created Pakistan. Some fled to the South Pacific to islands like Fiji. I always thought that was an interesting confluence of cultures. Islamic religion, Fijian culture, Indian ethnicity. I don’t hang out with my sister’s in-laws because I’m gay, and they think I’m evil incarnate and hide the children if I come visit, but my sister is thankfully still open minded about such things.
Sex is already a taboo subject in India, imagine what it’s like when you are Indian AND Muslim! I feel sorry for Middle-Eastern gays more than I do Midwestern gays or Latino or Chinese gays. So much cultural oppression. It drives me crazy. When will it end? I think pro sports is the final holdout. When more athletes come out of the closet, more straight men will have to examine their assumptions and stop rallying around hatred of homosexuals and dominance over women as the core component of their masculinity. And that’s just here in the United States.
There is a whole world of hatred and intolerance that needs to be transformed. The hardest thing in the world is having compassion for someone who wants to kill you because they feel so threatened that murder is the only answer. I don’t think humans have a natural taste for blood, but I do think we are controlled by fear and in turn, control others through fear. Fear of punishment, fear of losing your home, fear of not having enough food to eat, fear of not being understood, fear of being rejected, fear of being left behind, fear of gaining too much weight, fear of smelling bad … you name it, we are afraid of it.
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