This. That. No Other.

Your Host in 1973
Lately I’ve been digging through my old Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention CDs, ripping them to my iPod — while it’s still not a crime in Canada — and rediscovering the musical brilliance and cheeky, peurile polemics of this towering figure of American 20th century music. He was a fierce, [...]

So, let’s say you’re walking down the street and you hear Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” blaring from a huge house. And let’s say you’re at a university. Say… the University of Chicago. And let’s say the big house is a frat house. And let’s say that as you walked by this big frat house [...]

Academy Award-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black makes a promise to the lesbian and gay kids of America, while the crustier queers among the millions watching wipe away a tear:

Oh my God. This was, um. This was not an easy film to make. First off, I have to thank Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg and [...]

(from MIKERO.COM)

Cripes, what a busy week it’s been, and my bad for the limited posting here. So, by way of apology…
I’ve spoken before about Cabaret Voltaire and the brilliant minds behind it — Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder — and here’s an opportunity to sample Kirk’s work under one of his many pseudonyms, Al Jabr.
Some [...]

I have seen the future of me:

(Audio NSFW)
Tears, streaming down my face. I’ve watched this video eleventy times and each time it gets even awesomer. Royce an Marilyn are… beyond. More about them here.
(Thanks to timber for the tip).

Yeah, I’m twelve, too.

Your Host as Homo erectus, from “Devolve Me”, Courtesy Open University
Happy 200th, Mr. Darwin.

Some of the scratch-pads still work. Or maybe it’s just scents-memory.
I miss Divine. I miss Edith Massey. It must be hard for John Waters — another of My Dream Dinner Party attendees — to watch his landmark movies now. They’re almost all gone, those iconic Dreamlanders.

While most of my Toronto contemporaries were making the trek to NYC and getting completely fucked-up for this party or that party, I was intoxicated by a different kind of celebration: ACT-UP, Outweek and Queer Nation.
We sat behind Martin Balsam and his wife at Millennium Approaches. He cried as much as I did, if [...]

Never let it be said I’m not a follower.
On the heels of similar blogbuddy posts — here and here — I paid a visit to The Hero Factory and crafted my own, superpersonalized  superhero. Some parts of him are off and some dead-on. I’ll leave it for you to decide which are which.

I acknowledge in [...]

Hey! Look at the happy baby!
This is me with my grandmother and grandfather:

I was, what, five or six months old? The photos were taken in my parents’ flat in the Silver Heights Apartments in Winnipeg, Manitoba. That chair my grandfather is sitting in? Is seven feet from me right now, in my living room. It [...]

“…all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”
– President Barack Obama, 20 January 2009
The man gives good speech, that’s for damn sure.
History.
Hope.
And without giving us even an hour to grow cynical and jaded, within moments of President Obama’s swearing-in, WhiteHouse.gov posted this commitment to support [...]

Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009)
Sometimes celebrity deaths hit you in ways you’d never have anticipated. John Lennon was one, from long ago, as was — more recently — Paul Newman, both of whose work I admired greatly but in neither of whom I was overly invested. And, after yesterday, add Patrick McGoohan to that list.
I remember him [...]

I mean, apart from bigoted motherfuckers like Ken Starr and the bigoted motherfuckers who supported Prop 8 who, not satisfied with merely preventing gay and lesbian couples to celebrate the institution of marriage enjoyed by every other American, want to actually make null and void the completely legal marriages of over 18,000 Californians?
And bigoted motherfuckers [...]

Cocteau Twins have been in heavy rotation on my iPod lately, and I couldn’t quite figure out why that is. Of course, the obvious reason is that their albums are lush, sweeping, gorgeous documents of a certain time and place, not just for me but, well… everyone who’s a fan seems to possess a similar, [...]