Killing Time

I am having to stop home in the evenings to look after my terminally ill cat, which means I can no longer travel directly from downtown DC to Greenbelt to hang out with my gf. So I now travel from DC to Silver Spring to Greenbelt at least twice a week via mass transit because I don't want to drive my Ford Festiva on the Beltway. So here is my commute in a nutshell:

1) leave office at 5 pm, travel on metro from Dupont Circle, arrive at Silver Spring around 5:40

2) Walk ALL AROUND Silver Spring metro because of a "transit center to nowhere" project that will take eons to complete. Arrive at my apartment around 6:00 pm

3) Clean my cat's dishes, put out more food, clean up whatever poop and/or puke there might be

4) Catch 6:20 bus to Langley Takoma Crossroads, the neighboring barrio where yuppies who have a disdain for immigration law pick up cheap undocumented labor to do their home improvements

5) Around 6:40 pm cross University Blvd, then New Hampshire Ave. to catch the C2 bus to Greenbelt Plaza, arriving anytime between 7:35 and 7:45 pm.

Once I have a seat on the C2 I have 45 minutes of free time to read a book or engage in my latest vice: watching LGBT TV shows on my new Creative Zen Player. Nothing makes you more deviantly hip than being the token white chick on the bus watching same-sex romance on a portable media device. Fortunately Amazon Unbox sell shows from LOGO and Here! TV so I have enough material for quite a few commutes. Here is what I have been watching:


Gimme Sugar

This is an MTV/LOGO produced reality show in which a group of young LA lesbians decides to organize a women's club night. The women are attractive but fit the formula of Real World contestants: they are self-absorbed, superficial, and whiny drama queens. There are only two sympathetic women in the cast.

*SPOILER ALERT*

The women's night flops and is taken over by straight men the women lure to the bar just to meet the drink guarantee. Somehow it is comforting to see that even young, hip lesbians have trouble getting people to come to their events! Not that I know anyone personally that has that problem.

Exes & Ohs

This is a more mature lesbian series that succeeds as a cringe-inducing comedy. The lead character, Jennifer, is still friends with her ex, Sam, an attractive lothario, though their friendship is often challenged by unprocessed past relationship issues. The series opens with Jennifer witnessing her partner Sienna cheating on her with the couple's relationship therapist. Ensuing episodes show Jen's awkward entrance into the dating world, and Sienna's unrepentant invasion back into Jen's life. The other ancillary characters, such as Crutch, the talentless lesbian folk singer, play more to type. I would give this series a C+ which automatically gets upped to a B because of the dearth of lesbian programming. And who is going to be selective about entertainment while traveling on a bus to Greenbelt?

Dante's Cove

This series features witches, gorgeous scantilly clad gay men and lesbians, and weather that turns violent on cue. It is bloody awful yet I can't stop watching it. The series centers around the unshaven and chiseled Toby, who works in the mornings serving cocktails at the beach bar of a haunted hotel. His beefcake boyfriend Kevin moves in with him to flee a homophobic stepfather. Meanwhile, a 19th century witch's spouse, Ambrosius, escapes eternal damnation after Kevin wanders into his basement prison on a beer run and ends up in his clutches. Ambrosius plots to win Kevin and get rid of his scorned wife, whom he had cheated on with his butler. The whole witch coven angle is uncovered by Toby's hot lesbian friend and housemate Van during a trip to the local historical center. This show make the Love Boat seem like Shakespeare, but at the risk of seeming superficial, you really can't beat the visuals.

Today's Impulse Purchase

I managed to avoid the "no candy no tabloids no fun" line today at the supermarket and ended up with OK! in my cart. It was their pink issue, and pink it is. Not only does it feature Lindsay and Sam on the cover, but Ellen is on there as well. Oddly enough, Lohan's relationship is couched in glowing, non-salacious terms, but the breeder pairing of Scarlet and Ryan is characterized as "secret."

Flat Earth Society 2.0

I just finished Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat, which is a breezy read despite its 600 pages. Friedman's presents a series of vignettes gathered during his travels to such far flung places as Silicone Valley, Bangalore, and China, to illustrate the 10 technological, economic, and political factors that have converged within the last two decades to create an unprecedented period of global collaboration.

Friedman argues that this new era of globalization has not resulted in corporate homogenization nor U.S. domination as WTO protesters would have you believe. Because of "flatteners" a new middle class has emerged from poverty in China and India that no longer has to emigrate to the United States to achieve the American dream. However the U.S. stands to be shut out of the opportunities it has helped launch by cutting its investment in education at the same time China and India have generated millions of engineers and scientists.

Instead of restricting free trade to protect American jobs, Friedman argues, we should be engaging in an effort on the same scale as the space race to better educate future generations so that they can compete on the new level playing field. Globalization is here to stay, so it is up to us to shepherd the process so that workers rights do not succumb to the pressure for lower wages, and the carbon footprints created by new cars in China do not destroy the planet.

No Better Reason to Vote for Obama

Sarah Palin is only pro-life when it comes to humans. As the graphic video shows below, she supports the aerial hunting of wolves and bears.

Leni: The Life and Works of Leni Riefenstahl

This past spring you may recall that a dumb-ass attending a pro-Tibet rally held a sign asking "Would We Have Allowed Nazi Germany to Host the Olympics"? Apparently this person did not see "Olympia," Leni Riefenstahl's legendary documentary on the 1936 Olympics. I recently had a chance to read a thought-provoking biography on Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach. Although Refenstahl insisted after the war she was an apolotical artist unaware of Nazi atrocities, Bach demonstrates her complicity through exhaustive research. For instance, her name appears on contracts that call for the use of unpaid Gypsy extras from detention camps for her Reich-funded film Tielfland, and she was photographed at the scene of a Nazi massacre in Poland.

After the war Riefenstahl felt unfairly judged when shunned by the movie industry. However her artistic drive and narcissism enabled her to forge a career that lasted almost until her death at 101 years of age. The extent to which she put her artistic vision above human morality is deplorable, but even Bach, who barely contains contempt for his biography subject, marvels at her defiance of old age. The same insatiable sex drive that compelled her to sleep with practically every man on set carried through to her later years, when she engaged in a long-term relationship with a man 40 years her junior. While in her eighties she lied about her age to obtain a scuba license to film a series of underwater films.

There is no denying that Reifenstahl was one of the great filmakers of all time, and the fact that she achieved this in a male-dominated industry makes her feat all the more remarkable. Nevertheless, Bach's book inspires debate on the extent to which we can separate the artist from their art. Though Back acknowledges Reifenstahl's genius, he is not deluded by her false protestations of innocence and self-serving persecution complex.

I'm Mad As Hell and I'm Not Going to Take it Anymore!

Last night I had friends over for movie night. No one had any good DVD offerings so we ended up watching the 1976 film "Network" instantly on Netflix. Network easily makes my list of top ten films. I even sampled some of its dialog for my 1998 CD Slice.

Howard Beale is a newsman whose mental breakdown is inadvertently televised. The network initially fire him but then give him his own TV show once it is evident that his psychotic rantings and ravings generate high ratings. Faye Dunaway plays Diana, an uptight, ruthless programming vice president whose pet project is developing a TV series to broadcast the terrorist activities of a black militant group. She also monitors the success of Beale's sermons, and is thrilled when Americans across the country open their windows and scream "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!!!" at the urging of a frenzied Beale.

Howard Beale eventually gets in trouble with the network when he rails against the multinational corporation that is attempting to assume ownership. The resulting reprimand from the head honcho, Arthur Jensen, is one of the most chilling and portentious monologues in cinema:

There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There is no third world. There is no west. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast interwoven, interacting, multivariate multinational dominion of dollars. Petrodollars, electrodollars, reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today. It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things. You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and Democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT &T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

Even though its portrayal of the dire consequences of corporate media ownership has been eclipsed by reality, Network still holds up well 32 years later.

Parlez vous francais?

Like many gay Americans I have been patiently waiting for season 3B of South of Nowhere. I had pre-ordered season 3's 16 episodes on iTunes last year, but the show went on hiatus after the first 8 episodes aired last fall. In February of this year it was announced that season 3 will be the series' last, despite fan protests. Viacom's The N has been a tease about when it will be airing the final episodes. They showed promos in March promising an April return, but have now postponed 3B until September. Meanwhile, the episodes are airing in France!!! It is kind of hot seeing Spashley dubbed in French though.