Boo

A little holiday music, for All Saints.

To get there, click on the “furthur.”

The creature to the right there is me.

In costume, in disguise.

The Light The Heat

Dueling Bardos

After death comes nothing hoped for or imagined.

—Heraclitus

With life tough enough to figure, you’d think people would leave off trying to suss out what happens after it, too. But they don’t. Some science types claim that’s actually what differentiates humans from other animals, brooding on the afterlife, but they’re probably wrong about that, as ravens attend funerals, and elephants weep for their dead.

In a certain sense it’s understandable, this obsession with events after the expiration of breath, since life is so short, and death is so long. Matt Groening, in a Love Is Hell strip, once put things in perspective for one of his rabbits, who was considering adultery, confronting him with a line across the entire page that represented time. The line was labeled “time you are dead.” Near the very beginning of the line lay a tiny dot: “time you are alive.”

Powell Coming Out

People are permitted to grow wiser as they grow older, and when they do, we should try not to give them a hard time.

While campaigning for president, Bill Clinton promised to lift the military’s ban on gay service personnel. Once in office, his plans encountered stiff opposition from senior members of the military, conservative Congressmembers, and various assorted bluenoses from across the fruited plain. Even as Senator Sam Nunn presided over a carnival of a congressional hearing, during which assorted beribboned potentates and scholastic hacks soberly intoned that the Republic would Faint Dead Away if openly gay people were permitted to take up arms, Colin Powell, then serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly assembled support for a “compromise,” in which gay people might serve, so long as they did not openly declare themselves, or engage in sexual relations. In return, the military would cease its punitive “homosexual hunts.” Clinton, eager to put the issue behind him, so that he could get on to bungling health care, caved. And so Powell’s policy, soon dubbed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” sailed through Congress, to be anchored into federal law as 10 USC 654.

While maintaining that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy “was correct for the time,” in an appearance this past Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Powell signaled that it is now time for that policy to go.

La Musica: Wicked Game (Friday Mix)

I am more sympathetic to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his lover, Argentine businesswoman María Belén Chapur, than is apparently allowed by the judgemental fulminators of either the left or the right. To the former, Sanford is a laughable hypocrite; to the latter, a repugnant sinner. To both, Chapur is a “slut” and a “homewrecker.” To me, they’re just human beings, skewered by love. No blame, no balm.

At some point I plan to inscribe a long and no doubt musty essay about the recent confluence in the news of Sanford, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, all of whom were occupied by loves unconfined by the rigid de rigueur American cage of one man one woman, happy together happy forever, till death do us part.

But that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy. So instead I’ll play some music, here on this Friday, the day traditionally ruled by Venus, she who oversees love, in all its many variations.

In The Name Of The Father

A 25-year-old Egyptian man whose father for more than two years repeatedly refused him permission to marry the woman of his choice retreated to his room Sunday and sliced off his penis with a hot knife.

Doctors were unable to reattach the severed member.

The young man was identified by AP as a member of a prominent Egyptian family in the southern province of Qena. He had sought to marry a woman of a lower class.

According to Sarah El Deeb of AP:

Traditionally, marriages in these conservative parts of southern Egypt are between similar social classes and often within the same extended families—and are rarely for love.

An AFP report indicates that the man had been ordered by his parents to marry another woman.

“He was in love with a woman but his parents rejected her and told him to marry another woman he didn’t want. He took a knife and cut off his penis in his room.”

Eros In Gaza

Islam, like the other major religion to crib its god from Judaism, Christianity, has been shaped by its potentates to require of believers an unnatural and unhealthy sexuality. To remain true to the tenets of the faith, Muslims, like Christians, must continuously repress or redirect sexual impulses.

A piece in Sunday’s New York Times suggests that in Hamas-controlled Gaza, people are becoming increasingly resistant to Islamic sexual authoritarianism. They devour Noor, a Turkish TV soap opera steamy with premarital sex, despite the fact that Gazan clerics have pronounced fatwas against those who would view it. In music shops, audiotapes praising the virtue and piety of Hamas gather dust, spurned by purchasers who scurry home instead with CDs and DVDs featuring a pouty, beckoning Jennifer Lopez. Alongside the Koran, booksellers hawk sex-instruction manuals and Arabic translations of Harlequin romances.

A skinny boy with bad teeth, manning the book tables the other morning, grinned when a woman came by and thumbed through What to Do if You Have Weaknesses in Sex.

Pointing to the religious books, she asked “do many people buy those?”

“Sure,” the boy said.

“These, too?” she asked, gesturing toward a stack of flimsy softcovers with a picture of the young Cheryl Tiegs on the front.

“Oh yes!” he said.

Hamas officials are not particularly pleased with these developments. But they are losing. As the Times reporter interviews a Hamas leader in a restaurant, songs by Steely Dan waft over the patio—”Steely Dan” an American rock band that derived its name from a dildo.