Boom

color

Today I have a new favorite (living) artist, and her name is Xenobia Bailey. 

the king

While I have mixed feelings about nonviolence as a movement, it's been a solid part of every successful modern revolution (and a few pre-modern ones, which I will ignore today). Dr. King had teachers, and a long list of men and women who fought (Or, more accurately, sat. And marched. Not fought. Stupid nonviolence.) alongside him. I'm mostly linking to Wikipedia below; it's as good a place as any to go read snips of these heroic lives.

A few of my personal favorites:
-Ida B. Wells, who sued (and won, which was overturned) a railroad for making her give up her seat some 70 years before Rosa Parks refused to move on the bus. She went on to publish and agitate on the topic of lynching, and successfully encouraged black folk to leave the southern apartheid states. She tore it up with more than a few women in the temperance movement over white feminists refusal to deal head on with racial issues.

-A. Phillp  Randolph, an atheist socialist who unionized the Pullman car workers and agitated to end military segregation. I don't think you can understand American civil rights history without understanding the Pullman car workers.

-Bayard Rustin, a openly gay black Quaker (born just up the road from my hometown!) who coaxed and counseled the then-armed Dr. King to the message of nonviolent resistance and started the Freedom Rides. Please note that homosexuality was illegal in most of his lifetime, yet he was uncloseted. A hero in every way.

-Fanny Lou Hamer, a righteously loud Christian organizer who was certain she had god on her side. When we sing We Shall Overcome, we do her honor. Of course, Billy Graham was equally sure that god was on his side, but whatever. Fanny Lou's personal history and charisma, along with her belief that civil rights needed to be a multiracial movement, makes me love her.

-Shirley Chisolm, who survived three assassination attempts when she ran for president in 1972. She's as much as a feminist hero as a civil rights hero, which earns her at least triple importance. She worked hard for kids, women and the urban poor...and Nixon, of course, vetoed her most important bill.

-Melvin Tolson, a poet and professor who's probably best known for his work with the Wiley Forensic Society (subject of The Great Debaters movie with Whitaker and Washington and produced by Oprah). I think it's more interesting that he was the poet laureate of Liberia and wrote a book-length epic poem called Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. (I hoped to link to the text online, for those of you interested in reading a book-length poem in your few minutes of blog perusal time, but couldn't find it. But it's available for purchase here and there, if you are so inclined.)

-This last one is more an exercise in frustation for me. A few months back, I stumbled across an interesting fellow; a white guy (Jewish? Quaker? I don't recall.) who's been teaching nonviolent resistance in this country for decades. He was, at least as of about eight months ago, still alive, and a professor emeritus somewhere. In case it's not obvious already, I didn't write his name down, or at least write it down in a place I can now find. The school he's affiliated with isn't a coastal state, but that just means "somewhere in the Louisiana Purchase" which is more unhelpful vagueness. I found him interesting because I'd never heard of him before, and he's about a zillion years old and still active, and it struck me that he's pretty damn important in any civil rights narrative and dammit, we should all know who he is. I am both annoyed and ashamed that Mr. Who The Hell Knows will continue to live in relative oblivion, thanks to my lazy/disorganized discovery.

excellent advice

Having never been a teenage boy (except for my sense of humor), I can only say that Dan Savage's advice strikes me as some of the best advice ever given to a large group of people.

Funny, now that I think about it: I'm pretty sure I never actually dated at 15-year-old boy. 12-14 years old, yes (when I was 12-13, you creep), and then when I hit 14 there was kind of a jump to the 17+ age group (and yes, that plus sign implies there was some law breaking/creepiness going on, I roll my eyes at you now just like I did then if you dare mention it).

With that in mind, I would add this bit of advice to 15-year-old boys: do whatever you need to do to toughen up and build some defenses against the withering scorn of girls in the 14-18 bracket. We are/were a scornful, scornful bunch.

Peaceful Acres /

There is a particular sort of spreading green lawn, frequently located near state highways around this country, where the purpose of said lawn is not easy to identify. Specifically, is that a golf course--or a cemetery? If you can actually spot the name (usually noted on a sign so tasteful as to be nearly invisible), you can use nouns like "club" or "lawn" to help figure it out.

In the assorted small towns I've lived in, it was easy to tell the difference. Old graveyards in eastern Pennsylvania and the swamps of Virginia have tall, mossy, crumbly gravestones (in PA, the really old ones are made of slate, which decays in a very pleasing manner). In VA, the town I lived in had one of the major roads go through the cemetery, and there were big, graceful trees and a few marble angels and it was generally southern-gothic in a way I deeply approved of at 14.

But I also don't think about funerals very often. I find public, formal ceremonies of all varieties mildly distasteful, particularly when they have a religious slant (and yes, this actually includes my own wedding, which took place in the back of a limo). In the case of funerals of those I love, I'd rather cry at home by myself and not have to worry about people judging the quality of my grief and (frequently the same) people saying offensive things about the cause of death (if he hadn't been so fat...). In the case of funerals where there is an obligation but I barely knew the person--or actively disliked him--it's even more preposterous. A show of respect, for that jerk? No thanks.

In my immediate family, the approval of assisted suicide is so supported, it's actually become a joke over the years--and the preference for "disposal of the remains" is being donated to science, which I guess means being cut up by med school students. This collection of death-as-vaudeville opinions doesn't really relate to personal grief, but it has been known to disturb those who prefer a little pomp with their circumstance.

I woke up early this morning, and didn't want to start work right away, so I poked around for things to read. The only item worth noting is Brendan Kiley's lovely, funny, sweetie-pie story from last week's Stranger, called The Art of Dying. Art, business, funerals he's attended, visits to gravestone factories, crying with a stranger, ridiculous background music...it's grand.

Pillowy

Since I started trying not to sleep while twisted around like some elaborate pastry, I have found that it's actually pretty hard to sleep in a relatively straight line (even after Ambien) but, unsurprisingly, it helps me wake up feeling less crunchy. Except my fluffy and beloved down pillows caused other problems, now that I was no longer all twisty, and I started waking up with headaches and neck spasms. I finally got a new pillow over the weekend.

Pillow shopping, like most shopping, has gotten ridiculous. I saw pillows designed to combat everything from snoring to hot flashes to skin problems to asthma. My pillow claims to be manufactured with "better sleeping technology" and the fabric cover is made by Nanotex, which should really involve tiny robots but seems to just involve high thread count cotton.

Somewhere, somebody has a job developing new pillow technology.

Beware of Sorcerors

No, really, baby...it was here just a minute ago.

I would wonder how on earth one becomes a "suspected penis snatcher" (yes, geeks, you dated her), but as usual, the actual answer is that people are stupid, violent and prone to poor behavior when in groups.

Which reminds me of how great the Democratic National Convention is likely to be this summer.

Which tells me it's time to go have a cookie.

Saddle Up

Who's up for a road trip? The Creation Museum claims to be within a day's drive of almost two-thirds of the US population. Pretty much every detail of the website horrifies--I mean, educates. The dinosaurs playing with children on the banks of Eden's river, the "global culture impacting ministry", and a series of things to see and do that I just have to quote: "Walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the Fall of man. Sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo through the room. Finally, see the sacrificial Lamb on the cross, and the hope of redemption."

I'm pretty clear that creationists disagree with evolutionary science, but I didn't know they had such a problem with grammar. Maybe since here "lamb" is standing in for Jesus, it's supposed to be capitalized, like when someone named Lewis is nicknamed Scooter.

And if Adam and Eve aren't naked in the room with the serpent, I am demanding my admission price back. Eve and Adam putting clothes on ought to be part of the sin-ravaged world, not the happy dino-kid frolicking place. It also says that each seat in the planetarium is a rocket launching pad. Could it be that much of the evolutionary disagreement is simply from confusion about metaphors and similes?

The more of the website you can tolerate reading, the greater the rewards (the wood for Noah's ark is spelled phonetically, and it's imported from Brazil; their exhibit halls are "gilded with truth", and apparently 6,000 plants have been placed within the lake...I must stop now).
Conversational snippet:
Me: The museum store is called Dragon Hall, "rich in dragon lore and legends".
Sweetie: Wha? Like dragon-dragons? I didn't know they were in the bible.
Me: Yeah, and you also think the earth is millions of years old. [Scoffing noises]

Art and Science

Bush administration pressured scientists on climate change. Oh, and a former White House Counsel on Environmental Quality now works for ExxonMobil. And the White House isn't supplying documents necessary for the current investigation! This ain't nothing but par for the course (can I say "ain't" and make a golf reference in the same sentence?) but it still pisses me off. I greatly appreciate the Union of Concerned Scientists, and love their FEED newsletter. I'm also looking forward to my copy of their Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, which apparently points out things like how it doesn't matter what kind of diapers you might use on your kids if you drive all over the place and use older, inefficient appliances at home.

Here are quilt photos.

Right side of the bed:

Left side of the bed:

Close-up of one of my favorite flowers:

Close-up of a web:

and a slightly blurred close-up of the lace my great-grandmother made to go with the quilt:

Nasty Hobbitses

"In many ways, the hobbit brain is unique". And apparently, the Shire is one of the 13,000 islands that comprise Indonesia.

In other news, I learned at PT today that I breathe in a lopsided manner. It's more common than one might think.

Macho Cheese

This entry is the result of an odd mix of events: I've been reading a sweet memoir about birding, the printed blog of Mimi Smartypants, a centuries-old Italian advice book called The Book of the Courtier and a lot of online stuff about Latin American culture. I also just spent four days sharing an apartment with two other hetero couples (they didn't overlap, so it was actually two days with each couple). The night before we left on our Seafair Avoidance Weekend, I had a houseful of geek boys, drinking beer and playing Dungeons and Dragons, which morphed into drinking beer and talking about The Future.

The result of all this has mainly been thinking about the boys I know, and trying to put them in some kind of historical context. Before the industrial revolution, men were pretty femmy; the upperclasses were fully expected to write poetry, sing insanely tragic romantic songs to their beloved, dress in bright colors, wear perfume and behave under tight societal restrictions when it came to basic manners and daily habits. Poor men, while expected to perform the lowerclass/manly stuff like gutting fish and trapping bunnies and ploughing land, were fussy about the wine they drank, hugged frequently, sang and danced with each other on all social occasions and put tremendous amounts of effort into beautifying public spaces. Then everything got all industrialized and personal value was tied to net income, which led to unpleasant sexism and a multigenerational trend for men to be really boring and repressed.

Now, the guys I know have become post-industrial. I can have conversations with them about fashion and literature that are awfully similar to the ones I have with girls. They care about style, and they hug and sing, and dear lord, might even write poetry although I hope the vast majority never share it with me. Most of them are reasonably happy with their jobs, but net income is by no means their primary method for determining happiness. Granted, most of them would sell out to the highest bidder in a heartbeat, but they're quite aware that selling out is exactly what they'd be doing and don't feel the need to gloss it over. Sweetie does seem to be the only one who genuinely knows his way around a tool box, but since I fix everything with just a hammer and a roll of duct tape, maybe in my own ignorance I underestimate the skills of the non-Sweeties.

I'm not talking about the word "metrosexual", because that word is basically the modern term for "dandy" or--even better--"macaroni" (yes, as in "stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni"). Metrosexual is, from what I've read, about fashion sense. Fancy shoes and styley shirts aside, I think what I see is more a result of this slow, painful shift to a post-industrial world. I think it's neat that the fellows I know are so vastly different from the men I read about as literary characters from the 20s to the 80s. They seem to have changed less on the way from boyhood to manhood than the two previous generations, without being immature jerks (even if I have seen one use pretend anti-girl-germ spray recently). Maybe the boring suit-n-tie-short-back-and-sides guy was really the result of Henry Ford's assembly line, and now that those lines are gone (at least in the US), that guy will fade away, too.

I kind of expect a lot of comments on this that include fart jokes and sugartits remarks. Maybe instead of that you should go buy a pair of shoes and sip a mocha frappacino. If you write a poem, keep it to yourself.