January 18

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October 3

   

Coffee and Politics

Something a little different today. I’ve become aware that my “Coffee” posts are a popular feature of my blog. Readers comment more on the coffee stuff than anything else I post. And I get personal questions about my coffee habits. So here’s my coffee confessional.

At home I use the Chemex method to brew coffee. I prefer the natural (brown) square cut filters. For coffee, I brew a custom combo – half Starbucks Sumatra and half 7-11 regular exclusive blend. I know. But it’s my preference. Three scoops per 12-ounce cup/mug. Multiple times per day. I can drink a mug of coffee right before bedtime, and it doesn’t keep me awake. Total coffee addict.

When ordering out, I go for an Americano with a splash of half-and-half and half a packet of Whole Earth Nature Sweet (Stevia/monk fruit blend). It took me awhile to get used to the taste of Stevia, but I can’t argue with the fact that it’s a non caloric natural product instead of a packet of chemicals. Past noon (or so) I drop the cream. Go ahead – judge me.

It seems inappropriate to post pictures of prurient interest at a time of national tragedy, so I’m taking the day off from that. Today, political frustration seems more important than soft porn. 

At the time of the Las Vegas mass shooting Sunday night, the curtain had already come down on Paul Rudnick’s (above) one act play, “Big Night”, playing at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles. Yesterday the theatre was dark, but it will be a tough performance tonight, since the show includes a mass shooting as a sub plot – a gunman enters the Los Angeles LGBTQ Youth Center and shoots 50 kids. On Oscar night.

This poorly-reviewed show is not one of the best from openly gay playwright and screenwriter Rudnick (b. 1957), who has given us such classics as “Jeffrey”, “In and Out” and “Sister Act.” Right now he is writing the screenplay and lyrics for a stage musical version of “The Devil Wears Prada”, a project for which Elton John is composing the score.

A short while ago I copied and pasted a political commentary by Rudnick in which he vented his anger toward Trump voters. Somehow today seems the right time to share an excerpt from it.

(Rudnick)...The anger is caused by a single basic fact. If I agree, or at least entertain the idea, that Trump voters had genuine grievances and hardscrabble lives, there’s still something I can’t forgive. They saw who Trump was, they knew exactly what he stood for, and they chose him.

When I’ve talked to Trump voters, they often explain that they were rolling the dice, that they were sick of politics as usual, and that Trump felt like something new. If Trump was a truly fresh face, someone who arrived from nowhere, as a genuine populist hero, I could understand this hope, this betting on change.

But Trump? Every American knew he was a blowhard, whose businesses constantly went bankrupt; they knew that he abused women and never thought of anyone but himself. They knew that his rallies were ignited by the worst lynch mob mentality, and that he celebrated not America, but hatred. And they excused these facts or ignored them or claimed they were manufactured, but they knew. They had a choice, and they chose Trump.

Even if you hated Hillary or didn’t trust her or thought she was a political hack, she wasn’t Trump. She wasn’t worse. She wasn’t a proven, inept embarrassment. If nothing else, her service to America was indisputable. Trump has never done anything for anyone: this was who you favored, to represent our country?That choice is what can’t be forgiven, because every day, that choice erodes our nation’s stability and dignity. None of Trump’s actions have been even the slightest surprise: not the fact that he champions white supremacists, or busily provokes a possible nuclear war, or mocks people suffering from a hurricane’s devastation.

Trump’s supporters are too cowardly to admit their mistake, so they blame fake news, or the Democrats, or, as one guy told me, “So what? It’s business as usual. Hillary would have been just as bad.”

Which isn’t true. No one would have been as bad. America isn’t being torn apart by policy disputes over taxes or healthcare, or an impasse between political parties; we’re suffering from the most sickening shame, and that can’t be healed by “understanding” or “reaching out” or “listening to the other side.” With Trump, there is no other side.

And from Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT):

“This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.”

The real strength of Murphy’s statement isn’t its use of light profanity, but its implied acknowledgment of the twin challenges facing the gun control movement. Nothing will change without policy, and policy is near-impossible to pass due to politics. Not to mention the sobering reality that, in terms of campaign contributions, the NRA sends its money almost exclusively to Republicans, who control both houses of Congress.

We’re screwed.

September 20

Shorts story:

Just because:

How to retire in style!

Pier Paolo Pasolini 

Italian film director, poet, writer, actor and painter Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a highly controversial figure who was at the center of postwar European intellectual life. He was involved in 33 trials relating to scandals, censure and assorted controversies. He was also a defiant homosexual, visionary artist, a Catholic who was tried for insulting the Church, and a non-aligned Leftist.

While openly gay from the very start of his career, Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies. A major exception was “Salò” (1975), made the last year of his life. Subtitled “The 120 Days of Sodom,” the film depicted the Marquis de Sade’s compendium of sexual horrors. His personal life, however, was jump started when at age forty he met the great love of his life, fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli in 1962. Pasolini cast him in his 1966 film “Uccellacci e uccellini” (The Hawks and the Sparrows). Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion, also appearing in six more of Pasolini’s films.

But all of this brilliance, sordidness and controversy was extinguished when Pasolini was just 53 years old. In 1975, in an act of gruesome cruelty, Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car on the beach at Ostia (the port of Rome). Seventeen-year-old hustler Giuseppi Pelosi, who was later spotted driving Pasolini’s car, was arrested and confessed to the murder. Pasolini’s body was marked by broken bones, crushed testicles and gasoline burns. Twenty-nine years later Pelosi retracted his confession, claiming that three people who denounced Pasolini as a “dirty communist” had committed the murder. New evidence indicated that Pasolini had been murdered by an extortionist, that several spools of the film Salò had been stolen (the film had not yet been released at the time of the murder), and that an eyewitness had seen a group of men pull Pasolini from his car, but the judges responsible for the investigation found that the new evidence did not justify a continued inquiry – this was Italy, after all! The crime has never been fully resolved.

Because so many of Pasolini’s films depicted a sexual and moral reality that did not reflect what society sanctioned, controversy was aroused at every turn. In addition to written works, a list of his films (1961-1975) can be found on Pasolini’s Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Paolo_Pasolini

From San Francisco film critic Michael Guillen:

"Pasolini's cinema takes its inspiration from many sources: Renaissance painting, Romanticism, Freudian psychology, Italian neo-realism, ethnographic film-making, and music – his films share an affinity to musical structures and form. His aesthetic often rebuked traditional film grammar, opting instead for a spirit of experimentation. More often than not, he drew upon non-professional actors, casting peasants and urban youths who brought an authenticity and edginess to his narrative films. Behind the camera, Pasolini collaborated with top-notch film-makers, including cinematographers Tonino Delli Colli and Giuseppe Ruzzolini, costume designer Danilo Donati, and composer Ennio Morricone, often working with the crew on location, be it Syria, Yemen, or the impoverished outskirts of Rome. As a poet/film-maker, he spoke of his 'tendency always to see something sacred and mythic and epic in everything – even the most humdrum, simple and banal objects and events.' "

August 14

Shower time:

With a side of swimwear:

Arthur C. Clarke

 

Famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was a visionary whose works, which blended scientific expertise and imagination, led to tantalizing ideas and possibilities about outer space and our relation to it. When he died in Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956, he was an out gay man, having posted particulars on his own web site (arthurclarke.org) in 2004.

He and film director Stanley Kubrick gave us the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey; they were jointly credited with the screenplay. Astronomer Carl Sagan, cosmonauts and media producers alike credited Clarke with influencing the public’s attitudes toward space exploration. Gene Roddenberry acknowledged Clarke’s influence for the courage it took to pursue his “Star Trek” project in the face of ridicule from television executives. Clarke is almost universally proclaimed the preeminent science fiction writer of the 20th century. He delighted in confronting his fictional characters with obstacles they could not overcome without help from forces beyond their comprehension.

“I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books,” he admitted. Yet he did not acknowledged his sexual orientation until 2004, even though he was known to host orgies with young Sri Lankan men for nearly fifty years. Many commented that he thus did a disservice to gay writers throughout the world who admired his work. However, it should be noted that the main character of Imperial Earth was bisexual and lived in a futuristic society in which exclusive heterosexuality and homosexuality were not practiced. Also, the main character of his novel Firstborn was gay.

Among his output of nearly 100 books are some, such as Childhood’s End, that have been in print continuously. His works have been translated into 40 languages. In 1962 he suffered an attack of poliomyelitis, which returned in 1984 as post-polio syndrome, a progressive condition characterized by muscle weakness and fatigue, forcing him to spend the last years of his life in a wheelchair. Still, he kept writing, and accolades continued unabated. English born, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998.

In an effort to keep his homosexual proclivities private, he married an American diving enthusiast named Marilyn Mayfield in 1953. They separated after a few months. An important relationship was with male diver Leslie Ekanayake, who lived with him in Sri Lanka; in fact, the two are buried next to each other. As well, many of Clarke’s young male partners were installed as servants in his Sri Lankan household. Although Clarke was likely spooked by the traumatic false accusations of pedophilia by an English tabloid, his efforts to remain closeted were so successful that few acknowledgments of his homosexuality are extant, even after his 2004 self-outing and subsequent death in 2008. Kubrick biographer John Baxter cites Clarke's homosexuality as a reason why he left England, due to more tolerant laws with regard to homosexuality in Sri Lanka. Fellow science fiction writer Michael Moorcock commented, “Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I'd go out drinking with his boyfriend” (Clarke himself was a teetotaler).

Just because: