allaboutgeorge

The great thing about Brazil is that so many people there understand the life-changing potential of music, and art in general. The cynicism in Britain, the idea that music will never change anything, is based on a very narrow view of what constitutes change. The Brazilian trip reaffirms our reasons for getting involved with music in the first place. It is the ultimate form of communication.

I think Singleton wanted to make some salient points about life for a segment of Black society. Unfortunately, I think he further perpetuates stereotypes and disturbing behavioral patterns that exist within the community. If folks see the movie they should use the film as a springboard to conversation about relationships and family dynamics.

Two years later, when the giant Zooropa tour arrived at Wembley Stadium, Bono called to ask if I'd like to come out on stage. U2 wanted to make a gesture of solidarity, and this was the biggest one they could think of. When I told my then-14-year-old son about the plan, he said, "Just don't sing, Dad. If you sing, I'll have to kill myself."

- 1 for "brothers"

- 1 for "children" (I have none. Zip. Zero. Nada.)

- 1 for "keith clinkscales" (Over here)

- 1 for "linda"

- 1 for "mom" (maybe this)

Jako (01:22 PM): got a sec?
george (01:29 PM): I think so.
Jako (01:30 PM): just wondering if you blogged anything about that SF Gate article Ernie and Anil linked
george (01:31 PM): I didn't. I read it after coming back from Pride. Saw the paper on a BART train, and flipped through it right before napping on the couch.
Jako (01:31 PM): really cool article - was hoping to get your take
george (01:34 PM): Well, GSSMs are what Anil and Peterme had on their minds a couple of years ago.
george (01:34 PM): At least, that's how Anil explained it to me.
george (01:35 PM): In a way, I felt that straight people appropriating elements and markers of gay culture was sort of bogus.
george (01:35 PM): I mean, support the culture, sure
george (01:35 PM): but it didn't seem too far removed from white people feeling Tupac Shakur's pain, as the article mentioned.
george (01:35 PM): Then my wife told me to pull my head out of my ass
Jako (01:36 PM): true, but some straight folks (on both sides of the gender fence) just act GAY as a matter of course...
george (01:36 PM): and said that straight people who fcuk with borders and boundaries and expectations are cool
george (01:37 PM): and I shouldn't hate on them because it's not always about stealing someone else's cool
george (01:37 PM): and since the more confused people are about gender boundaries, the less likely it is that they'll just come out (ahem) and say stupid stuff and act stupidly.
Jako (01:38 PM): your wife's got it right
george (01:38 PM): So I asked her when was the last time she had her gaydar checked.
george (01:38 PM): She stuck her tongue out at me.
Jako (01:38 PM): ha!
george (01:38 PM): And we went out to the bookstore, came back home and watched this documentary on FTM trannies on PBS.

- 1 for "dkny thong" (I don't wear them. Try over here next time.)

- 1 for "iverson" (mentioned him way back, re: a Me'Shell N'Degeocello quote I found and liked)

- 1 for "jean michel basquiat" and - 1 for "jean michel basquiat photo" (I don't look -- or speak anything like Jeffrey Wright in that movie. Maybe I should just take it as a compliment. Unless whoever tried it wants to share?)

"We tried to combine science fiction with the ancient culture of Egypt, and then wrote a story around it. A lot of it has to do with representing ancient Africans in a positive manner that's not stereotypical. The heroine's conflict is fulfilling her obligations as a priestess and a warrior having to destroy, yet heal. It causes a fundamental rift in her on many levels, internally and spiritually. It's an important struggle, because it's still common to what many of us go through today."

"If you get a great model who has a great attitude, that's terrific, but it is up to the cover lines to do the other 90 percent of the work ... In order to get that $4 from the reader, you have to think of it as a newsstand mugging."

"Different groups, or perhaps different segments within groups, have different reasons for clustering ... For some, it's a survival mechanism based on necessity and the fact that they're offered limited options. But for others, it is a cultural preference, and it's really what they want to achieve when they've made it in America."

"I remember when we had 9 percent unemployment in Appalachia in the late 60's -- it was 50 percent higher than the national average -- and it generated outrage and all kinds of roads and development programs ... In Tulare, unemployment is six times the national average and nobody is saying anything. There's a high degree of ineptitude that makes it difficult to change the status quo."

I seldom listen to pop music because it's too monotonous rhythmically and too coarse harmonically to interest me for long; it depresses me and fails to connect me to a better, nobler society. When I write, I want to feel I could belong, at least in my dreams, to a world in which art must be puzzled out, a realm that believes that beauty is difficult. Of course this limitation on my part is doubtless a function of the generation I belong to.

This population of expectant fathers had lower testosterone and cortisol levels and a higher proportion of samples with detectable estradiol concentrations than control subjects. The physiologic importance of such hormone changes is not known, but these hormones are known to influence maternal behavior.

Teen pop star Jessica Simpson, no longer the innocent she appeared to be at this event last year, performed dressed in the skimpiest of hot pants, shaking her rear to a sample of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back.''

"It's like coming into a Buddhist temple with a shirt that says 'Jesus Saves.'"

Invincible is the tentative title for the record, sources said, though an Epic Records spokesperson could not confirm any details about the project. ... Until a few weeks ago, Jackson was putting the finishing touches on the album with producer Teddy Riley at Miami's Hit Factory, according to sources at the studio, who said Jackson had been there for three months. The first single is a collaboration with Method Man, those sources said.

Method Man told reporters, "I don't know whether it's in the job application for flight attendants to be rude to certain people. I didn't win my ticket on a game show."

Vanity Fair, July 2001, p.42, "Postcard from Sao Paulo," p. 42: "The beauty of Sao Paulo is its urban energy," says Camargo Vilaca's Marcia Fortes. "People move fast here. It's where things can happen."

A nice profile of Jan Willis, professor of religion at Wesleyan University, the first African-American scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and author of "Dreaming Me," in Dharma Life magazine (but sadly, not on the site).

A searing piece on white male fetishization of Asian female beauty in Monolid magazine, where they apparently don't play that.

The pulp hero, though he may be a renegade, is a guy who doesn't feel. Anything. Ever. And for the adolescent male -- pummeled by emotions left and right, whether arising from sexuality or resulting from his necessary encounters with authority -- this hero is a blessing, a relief and a release. The world he lives in, where feelings are totally under control, looks to the adolescent boy like heaven! This hero's lack of feeling -- like Star Trek's Spock -- is what allows him to be a genius, or allows him to shoot the bad guys and/or aliens, without a quiver to his lip.

But what starts as a relief and a release, you eventually recognize as a distortion: it doesn't reflect the real world. Precisely what gave you a certain pleasure is also a restraint. Thomas Mann said that every philosophical position exists to correct the abuses of the previous one, often to the other extreme. You could make a reasonable argument that it is the alien Spock who carves out the space of desire that is eventually filled with sf's explicitly erotic characters -- everyone from my own Kidd in Dhalgren to Maureen F. McHue's gay character, Zhang, in her extraordinary China Mountain Zhang, not to mention all the Kirk-slash-Spock fiction.

That's the first time I remember reading anything in sf that talked about the terror of sex. It foreshadowed the terror of rejection, something that writing about sex must talk about, or it becomes mere wish fulfillment. That terror is such a large part of people's sexual lives. It is why we don't go up to perfect strangers and say, "Hey, you're gorgeous, let's go to bed." To put that part of you out there makes you very vulnerable.

"Sometimes you shoot a story backward to tell the story forwards."

Maybe they should change the name from Sony to phony.

Just a week after the studio grudgingly admitted its advertising executives faked a film critic in print ads for several of its movies, Sony's facing another in-house case of fakery.

Daily Variety reports the studio passed off two of its employees as faux fans in commercials hyping last year's "The Patriot."

The fraud was perpetrated in nationally televised spots for the Sony/Columbia Pictures' Revolutionary War epic starring Mel Gibson, according to the trade paper. Apparently, some marketing executive thought it'd be cute to interview two of the studio's workers and have them pretend to be moviegoers who had just seen the film.

And their response? It's the "perfect date movie!" gushed Sony employee Tamaya Petteway in the spots, which aired on NBC and CBS. Petteway works in Columbia's marketing department as assistant to the executive vice president of creative advertising, Dana Precious. Her "date" in the ads was poser number two--Anthony Jefferson, who works in the studio's finance department.

The duo's testimonials aired as part of so-called "reaction spots"--a montage of interviews outside theaters that show fans who've purportedly just seen the movie and give the kind of over-exaggerated praise that studio marketeers just die for. ...

The spots are also coming under scrutiny for a practice known within the industry as "affirmatives"--where affirmative action plays a role in deciding which testimonials are included in a commercial.

"The Patriot" had come under fire from Spike Lee and other prominent African Americans for ignoring the issue of slavery in colonial times. Petteway and Jefferson are black, as was one of the other interviewees in the ad, which featured 32 moviegoers in all.

"We've been in business for 30 years. I don't know of any dot-com that could even begin to match that."

'I'm not doing it for any man. I'm doing it for myself.''

"It was like I had a sixth finger. I didn't think I was sick or perverted, just that nature had made a mistake with my body,''

"Our data indicate that urban girls, both those who have had sexual intercourse and those who have not, both view their sexual behavior as being based on personal (although infrequently religious) values."

Thank you. ("In the developed world, a substantial number of people who could very easily go online have decided not to ... They see no compelling reason to be on the Web. The hype and the promise of the Internet clearly hasn't impressed them -- not yet at least.")

Are you a boy or a girl? (The New York City-based research firm said that women over the age of 18 now comprise 40.9 percent of all online users, up from 40.3 percent in May 2000 and 39.3 percent in May 1999. In contrast, men age 18-and-over comprise 39.8 percent of all online users, down from 40.1 percent in May 2000 and 45.7 percent in May 1999.)

And, of course, do you know how fabulous you are? (Overall, the study found that Internet users are more accepting of social and political diversity than nonusers. They were significantly more likely to support or tolerate civil rights, homosexuality and nontraditional roles for women, and to oppose censorship of groups advocating those issues. They also said children should be taught not only obedience, but also how to think for themselves. ... Internet users were also more optimistic about life and described themselves as healthier and happier than nonusers did. They described their lives as more exciting and they were more trusting of their fellow citizens.)

"Nepal is not out of the woods yet."

"If instability continues and there is a law and order problem in Nepal, it will certainly cause concern in India ... "India and Nepal are so closely related that the border is almost open. Then the crisis situation will also have an impact on India. So far the Indian government has acted in a very correct diplomatic manner -- ultimately it is an internal matter of Nepal. But some wrong move or statement may create misunderstandings."

"The confusion about the murders is causing great anxiety to the Indian government. This is the kind of thing that can lead to a variety of rumours."

1 for "deano and deaga" (wtf?)

1 for "drums n space" (wtf?)

- 1 for "google" (psst! -- over this way!)

- 1 for "keep your eye on the sparrow" and - 1 for "keep your eye on the sparrow mp3" (yo! -- here's the words; here's the music)

- 1 for "malcolm x" (shrugs, shakes head from side to side)

- 1 for "preston" (he's over here, yo!)

- 1 for "table" (quizzical look on face)

- 1 for "u t o p i a" and - 1 for "mr ms u t o p i a" (a reference, perhaps, to pictures I took at a beauty pageant last month -- start here and keep changing the numbers after the word "pageant" from "01" up to "44")

- 1 for "ankita" (can't help you there; she's mine!)

- 1 for "dj onyx" (that's here)

- 1 for "keroac" (probably "kerouac" -- start here and tack on a "1" thorugh "7" after the word)

- 1 for "lyrics" (scratches head)

Writing with my eyes closed, sounds come to the forefront. The motor of my antique PowerBook. My pulse causing my ears to scrape against pillow. Clatter of typing. Writing lying down I feel like Colette except I have a few advantages over her. I can write really lying down, not just propped up in bed among an orgy of pillows. I can write with my eyes closed without worrying about writing off the page onto the sheets. And yet somehow I can't bring myself to feel superior to Colette. Will keep trying. ...

"I was sick ... The psychiatrist was useless. And then I found a doctor who straightened my diet. I don't eat no dairy, no sugar, no yeast, nothing out of cans."

"It's definitely the most ear-friendly of all my albums ... I feel like I've been sitting around for a couple of years complaining about what's on MTV and the radio. You can only do that for so long. If you want to hear good music on the radio, you need to make an album."

RandomWalks

Tomalak's Realm

.e.v.e.r.c.l.e.a.r.

Preston Davis

The Museum of Black Superheroes

comics research bibliography

Web Nouveau Tableless Sites

Hivelogic (courtesy Cecily)

little.yellow.different

SF Dyke March 2000

The European Ethnohistory Database

Patina

The Daily Dean

Caterina.net

Back to Mine: Everything But The Girl

All Back to Mine | BBC World Service

Danny Tenaglia : Back to Mine

Air : 10,000 Hz Legend

US ISSN Center Home Page

Gay in America: 1996 (Trinity Ordona)

A RealAudio stream of "Amnesiac"

An Esquire interview with Lil' Bow Wow (in the Michael Stipe tradition)

An argument for including MTFs in the lesbian community

Marie Claire, the American edition of which Ms. Bailey has edited since it was founded in 1997, has always incorporated fashion, but never made it the centerpiece. Instead, it favored horoscopes, personal-interest stories, articles about women's political issues (like the July feature "Babies in Prison") and the occasional whimsical piece about, for example, what happens when women hit the bars to pick up men while wearing T-shirts that read "Wanted: a Rich Man" or "I Look Better Naked." (The woman wearing the latter reported, "It intimidated some men, but over all it sure was a great icebreaker.") Ms. Bailey has proved to be adept at having her magazines picked up off of newsstands.

"I look better naked" (worn to an Italian restaurant, a sports bar, a local dive, a hip hotel bar, to run errands and to a supermarket by an Asian woman ID'd as "Maggie, 26, musician" with a last name of Kim) drew approaches from 9 men (average quality? C+).

Quotes: "I like yours very much. Maybe we switch?" "She's cute? I might talk to her because of the shirt, but I wouldn't date her." "I was compelled to talk to you before I saw it; now I want to know if it's the truth."

"Wanted: A rich man" (worn to a restaurant, a "gentleman's club," a Starbucks and a local diner by a blond ID'd as "Amber, 29, entrepreneur" with a last name of Bishop) drew approaches from 30 men -- including 15 phone numbers (average quality? B-).

Quotes: "So what do you have to offer a rich man in exchange for a good life?" (asked by a woman) "I think she's doing just fine on her own. Lighten up. I like it. It's gutsy." (stated by said woman's boyfriend) "I've got what you're looking for." (the most commonly used line)

"I have sex on the first date" (worn to an organic food store, an outdoor flea market, a swanky boutique, a sultry bar and a lounge hosting a party for young, successful professionals by a brunet ID'd as "Karen, 29, writer" with a last name of Robinovitz) drew approaches from 16 men (average quality? D+).

Quotes: "You don't do that, do you?" "I must buy that for a friend. It's so her!" "I'm JoJo, and that is an 'int-uh-resting' T-shirt. First-date sex is fabulous. That better not be false advertising, though, or I could sue you."

It's important to communicate. It's important to have a lingua franca. But it's also important to think differently. The most fertile, thriving cultures have a balance of order and chaos, with constant ferment. But today's computer media are flat and Anglocentric. Things are a bit too stuck, a bit too ordered. Both within the machines and across the network, we could enjoy a little more linguistic turmoil.

Le freak, c'est chic.

"We're gonna do the first part like Caetano did it, then pttt" -- spitting out an imaginary watermelon seed -- "we'll quick switch it over."

Laurie Anderson. *recalls that Wong Kar-Wai film -- "Speak my language!"*

Bjork. *I've seen it all -- and I can't wait for "Vespertine"*

Cibo Matto. *One word: "Moonchild." Well, maybe 17: you can't avoid the lint of love, but you've got to know how to take it away.

Cat Power. *I like her cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" better than the one James turned me onto, the one by P.J. Harvey and Bjork done live somewhere. Get thee to Gnutella (via your -- I mean, via my client of choice -- and compare/contrast) ...

Jill Scott: After the debut, she's rollin' with Sting. Every breath she takes, she can put the blunt down, leave that nasty lung infection she had behind and live up to that "next Ella Fitzgerald" praise he lavished on her.

DJ Gilles Peterson: love his show, love his CD, love my co-worker for loaning me said CD.

Saturn-Neptune Contacts: For my brothers and sisters born between 1970-2--and who are currently going through their Saturn Returns--this essay is dedicated to you. Many of you will have a Saturn-Neptune opposition in your birthchart. When the Saturn-Neptune complex is activated, very little is worse. This is the configuration of depression, existential despair, and the belief that life is completely futile and hopeless. Since Neptune is the planet of imagination -- of image -- Saturn can create an incredibly bleak and dark imagination in which the world looks like a big, black hole. One's self image can be remarkably pessimistic and unsuitable. Fear can rule one's world. This aspect can also enervate the ego, weaken the body, and create tremendous self-denial and religious guilt. This really is one of the tougher Saturn Returns to navigate. But, if successfully navigated, one can have a sense of inner meaning, purpose, and beauty that few others can reach.

Thoughts to consider and suggestions: Food is good. Make St. John's Wort your friend. Don't overindulge the urge to isolate one's self. Remain active. Avoid Ingmar Bergman flicks at this time. Ask yourself: "Does my self-image match who I really am? Do I deny myself daily pleasure? Do I feel guilty about my life choices. Is my imagination destroying my foundations?"

A cross-section of Collins' densely rhythmic melodies has been reworked into hip-hop odes on the tribute album, Urban Renewal Featuring the Songs of Phil Collins, released on WEA Germany, according to Sonicnet.com. Included on the album is ODB's rendition of "Sussudio," Brandy's cover of "Another Day in Paradise" and Lil' Kim's interpretation of "In the Air Tonight." The concept for the album was inspired by years of requests from R&B and hip-hop artists to sample Collins' music.