Good, Truthful Propaganda, called "August Eighth" in English

I wept, and I cheered, and I tried even to contact my friends to tell them what a must-see this movie is--but my personal settings would not permit it.

Just saw, for the first time, Vito Russo's (and I think Lily Tomlin's) The Celluloid Closet,

now just, since 1995, twenty years old--and a lot has happened in the past two decades which makes the movie (in a good sense) somewhat dated.  I had forgot a lot of the homophobic savagery (that at the time I mostly just ignored) of Silence of the Lambs, Mr. Goodbar, and JFK (I knew there was a reason I've never seen that movie).  Living, as I mostly did, in San Francisco through the mid-sixties to the early eighties, without contracting HIV, while yet partaking, whenever I wanted to, of the ultra-Babylonian male homosexual profligacy which characterized that City in those Times, and which was there, openly laid out, for the enjoyment-of and the indulging-in, to men as young, comely and fit as I then was; besides my being, as a wide reader of history, well aware of what, in historical terms, a precarious anomaly such Good Times always turn out to be, I was, and was always consciously, a Monk devoted to Truth and to the Pursuit of Wisdom, not to put too fine a point on it.  I spent a lot of time reading, and--without quite realizing that's what I was doing--meditating.  I virtually memorized Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, as well as the Lotus and the Lankavatara Sutras, and I maintained my discipleship with 'my' Zen Master of Hermetic Philosophy, from whom, in fact, in due course, I received the Direct Transmission of the Dharma. And always I listened to (and 'meditated' on) the best, most uplifting classical music, and whenever I got a chance, practiced it--Mozart, Haydn, Scarlatti, Purcell, Couperin and, always and always, Bach.  And always, I disdained to listen to, or think about, anything else. My regimen, or rule, combined with my hygienic practices, suited just me--and the men and youths (and yes, a few times, young women) with whom, from time to time, I had hot, uninhibited, and perfectly vanilla sex.  So, as I have said elsewhere, I imagine that the fact that I have never contracted HIV has something to do with the fact that I have also never left skid marks in my shorts, nor ever encountered shit, nor the least odor of it, in my, perhaps paradoxical, yet not unenthusiastic enjoyment of anal sex.

And it were well to note, I think, that the only time I ever encountered a fart when fucking was in doing with a female lady-person (which, yes, several times I did do), who did indeed, in a most unlady-like fashion, in the midst of our embraces, cut the cheese, long and loudly--but fortunately not (that I could tell) stinkily--causing both of us to giggle inordinately; but which did not prevent or much delay our eventual earth-shattering simultaneous orgasm.  And I swear that I am not making this up.

Google is just another bloated corporation and is not our Benevolent Liberal/Humanist/Enlightened Friend, per se:

Is the message of the latest dust-up between Google and Bloggers (which Bloggers have, temporarily, won) in re: labelling ourselves "adult," or getting summarily "disappeared" for our "adult" content--as fucking IF the tiny-minded censors appointed by its saurian corporate consensual "intelligence," were competent to judge of such things--The indescribable flustered horror they must feel, for example, at our blog for the 13th of June, 2008 ("It's not about you"), with its exemplary photograph of the Brazlian Speazze triplets, presumably prevents their seeing, or understanding, any educative or heuristic purpose in it; as must, presumably, the text and illustrative photographs of our blog for the 8th of August, 2011 (Souvenirs for the Prurient Swine who Drink our Blood and Eat our Flesh--The Real Purpose of the War in Afghanistan).  After all, who do they work for?

Disabling Spellcheck (globally) turned out to be a piece of cake....

Actually I feel a little let down:  I was prepared to fight to preserve those soft melting bastard Latinisms and half-conscious Briticisms--but all I had to do was uncheck a little box that I didn't know was checked (in System Preferences/keyboard), et Voilà!  all the colours, honours, favours I could wish.  Maybe even more.

Reading on my Magic Information Machine

Starting by clicking on Corriere della Sera in Bookmarks, reading a featured article by one Simona Machetti on the relationship (for such it really was) between Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive entitled intriguingly 'Il Corrodoio esclusivo,' containing the interesting summary statement, "In fondo,  fra genii--lui e Jobs--non poteva che esserci un legame esclusivo."  [What a fucking bitch it is getting Italian past Spellcheck!--I have to write everything three times.  There must be a way to disable Spellcheck!]  Then I went on to read the recent article about Jony Ive in the New Yorker.  I think I'll drop next month's welfare pittance on an Apple phone.

Reading, reading...

(Books sent me by Richard) Zen poetry, and lives of the poets, of Han Shan, Basho and Ryokan, especially the last.  Zen poetry translated from another tongue seems doomed to lack both Zen and poetry, but Ryokan,  for all his appalling diarrhea and the crudity of his behavior during the Tea Ceremony, was a conscientious monk with a firm grasp of the non-arising and a marvelous way with kids.  From the library, I'm reading one James Geach's Galaxy, a perfectly delicious book by a real astronomer about the present state of the universe, for which I vote our author the Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle Prize for rendering a sometimes abstruse subject charmingly lucid--even, I imagine, to members of the Sex.

But there is more to say.  Firstly regarding Confucius and Confucianism.  I am, I dare say, one of the few Westerners (Round Eyes, Long Ears, Butter Stinks) who is actually fitted by nature to understand Confucius and appreciate where he's coming from, even while, on the whole, I rather abhor the doctrinaire ethico/esthetic moral code that has been erected around the few (and basically, I believe, wrong) tenets of his personal philosophy.  I do believe, for example, that the parent/child relationship is primary; but I think that Master 'Kung Fu-tzu stood things on their head by saying that it is the parents who ought to be venerated, when, in my view, it is the child quo magna reverentia debetur.  Most significantly, however, I fully get why music and ritual are (or should be) important in our lives and in our politics--only in place of the music of Shao, which Confucius found utterly perfect, "beautiful and good," I would put the music of Western Europe from approximately 1400 C.E. to December 22, 1894 (when Claude Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un Faune was first performed, and which was, arguably, the last occasion on which the first performance of a piece of Occidental Music was beautiful).  I don't agree with my alter ego that music (even Wagner) can be both beautiful and bad:  If it's beautiful it's good. At any rate, I understand from reading several biographies of Ryokan-san, that Confucianism, for all its inevitable god-awful inherent cruelty to women and children, is an academic subject which is studied, and for which institutions of higher learning issue degrees of certified competence--and I am as astonished and perplexed by this as I am to have learned that Marxism and Dialectical Materialism has a similar academic status--and that the lovely and intelligent Raïsa Gorbachev, to name but one, was actually a professor of Marxism.  How can things which basically aren't be academic disciplines?

Well then, secondly, I am deeply perturbed by Dr. Geach's enlightening exposition of the subject of Dark Matter, based as it inexorably is on the speed of rotation of the galactic disk--and either you believe Kepler's Third Law or you don't, and I as a rational person have no choice but to do so.  And there are even pictures of halos of Dark Matter, which I find utterly persuasive.  So.  But "The Physics has just not caught up with the fact of Dark Matter," makes me want to shout "Epicycles!"

It's hate-Putin Day in the West,

Because a new, independent poll has just announced that Putin's favorable rating with his own people  in his own country stands at 85%.  You'd think congratulations would be in order, but the Anglo-American press is, instead, consumed with a bitter, transparently envious despite (to use the word in its former nominative sense of corrosive, nearly hysterical malice); not that they can say that the poll is fraudulent and its results erroneous, but their wish to say so is palpable, and it seems to hurt them that they can't. 

Valentine's Day 2015 Animadversion

Why I fucking hate heterosexuals.  There is this quote of late--especially today--much attributed to Marilyn Monroe, which goes:  "I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure.  I make mistakes, I am out

of control and hard to handle.  But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."  Of course, in all fairness to Marilyn, there is no credible record of her having said any such thing, nor any record of her having on any other occasion called herself "selfish."  The important thing is that a lot of people think she did say--or might have said--something like this, and they're taking advantage of it to excuse their being assholes.  Assholes are people (mostly women, but also women's apologists) who don't realize that being selfish is not a minor, but a fucking huge major character flaw, far different and far worse, and infinitely less forgivable, than being impatient and insecure and out of control.  Or actually I think they do realize it, and just sneak it in along with what are, if anything, foibles, not defects, so that they can get a free pass for being what is--short of cruel and indifferent to the suffering of others--the ugliest and evilest thing a human being, even a woman, can be.

The best

It was one of those thrilling, happenstantial, stall-to-stall encounters in the old Greyhound Bus Station's  big, upstairs men's room in Spokane, late one afternoon in the late winter of 1973/74. The peepholes in the partition between our respective toilet stalls were too small really to give us a good view of one another, and I wasn't sure if he understood me when I said "Meet me downstairs, outside, okay?" so I   repeated it a couple of times, till he fairly shouted "Yes!" and I stood up, flushed the toilet (for appearances' sake), pulled my clothes up and headed out without looking back.  I was surprised, a few paces down from the outside entrance, and needless to say gratified, when a toothsome youth some fourteen or fifteen years old strode up beside me, gracile of form, with eyes like molten copper and hair like burnished gold.  At thirty-one, having spent the summer and autumn before doing hard manual labor, I myself was probably as good-looking as I ever was in my life.  Evidently, we pleased one another, and he, who called himself Marvin, and said he was nearly fifteen, followed me home, where for the next several hours we fucked like bunnies. One thing: Boyishly, he wouldn't suck cock.  But he did everything else I wanted him to--including a certain knack or trick of massaging my dick with his rectum, like a milking-machine kind-of, that was unlike anything I've ever experienced elsewhere, ever in my life.

A half dozen times over the next couple of months Marvin visited me.  Always pre-douched, always ready, always with the insanely orgasmic internal dick massage.  For a month or so I didn't hear from him, then I got a kind of valentine/birthday card (It must have been about his birthday--I had figured out that he was a Taurus), saying,

 "Good-bye forever.  If you can help it, don't forget me.  Love, Marvin."

That's when I realized that it had in fact been love.

The Louvre is full

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Louvre's 18th French painting mezzanine.  Only Quentin de la Tour's portrait of Mme. de Pompadour seems appropriately and sensitively mounted in her own little room; smallish perhaps, but not just jammed in higgledy-piggledy like, alas, most of the Watteaus and Nattiers and Fragonards are.  The worst, most crowded-seeming is Hyacinthe Rigaud's splendid state portrait of Louis XIV, which needs, at the least, to be hung in the king's bedroom at Versailles--even in the Salon de la Guerre or the Salon de la Paix--just not where it's now, actually hung in the Louvre, where it seems like it's waiting in some attic for a knock-down clearance sale.   There's something sadistic and disrespectful about its present placement. And yet there is a certain cruel justice in having Perronneau's exquisite portrait of Mme. de Sorquainville ("la Joconde du 18ième") over in one corner of the room just out of sight of le Roi Soleil, with all her merciless, dagger-sharp wit and elegance: She was 58 years old when this portrait was painted. And it gives one goose bumps to think what she might say (or must have said) about the strutting, swaggering be-ermined pomposity of her former sovereign.  Does me anyway.  

Now, do you think that over at Salon Magazine, where they're so concerned with the equal representation of women in television and movies, that they have any notion how of infinitely superior Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. de Sorquainville were to Louis XIV?  Or how perfectly equal they were to one another?

The boring, irrelevant, ridiculously inconsequential Sex

I have just found out, from reading Salon Magazine, that there is such a thing as a Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University--shades of all those studies which have been done to see how much attention is paid by teachers to girls who raise their hands in class compared to boys who raise their hands in class.  And, not at all surprisingly, the San Diego State University Center for the Study of Women (compared to Men) in Television and Films publishes a yearly review of the relative percentages of female protagonists in movies (in 2014, 12%), speaking characters (30%), and secondary roles (29% of major characters).  And behind the scenes, things are even "worse":  Women make up only 17% of directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors and cinematographers.  Really.  As if it mattered.

"I read the news today oh boy"--

Really I didn't, I haven't read the news, but that song from Sgt. Pepper is just how I feel.  I wonder if having read history all day yesterday (and a little bit of porn and news) is what's done it to me. Somehow what's flashing on my inner monitor is John Kerry's concerned, crafty, infinitely mendacious and utterly dishonest face--poor eastern Ukrainians!  It's somehow reassuring to know, from reading the Great Game, that unwarranted, irrational Russophobia has been around for at least a couple of centuries now.

I learned a new word today, rising early and for some reason reading, first thing, on my Magic Information Machine, about the 17th century in Russia: "Smuta."

It's a Russian word that means "Troubles."  What the 17th century was a time of for Russians, and which the 16th and 18th centuries, relatively speaking, were not.  Ha ha.

Then, throughout the rest of the day, when I wasn't looking at smut (not smuta) on the Internet, I was reading Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, leaving off this evening with the account of the the massacre of the 14 or 15 thousand Turkmeni civilians, mostly women and children at the siege of Geok-Tepe in 1881--this being some five years after the Turkish bashi-bazouks slew 12,000 Christian men women and children in Bulgaria.  Which reminds me:  Our fascist friends in Kiev are now said to have under-reported by a factor of about ten the number of civilians they have murdered in the Donbas--i.e., not 5,000, but something more like 50,000 innocent fucking civilians.

It is NOT dishonest or untruthful Revisionism to say that the Civil War was about what the people who insisted on fighting it SAID it was about:

Unionism Vs. Confederacy (or the right to secede from the Union), and NOT really at all, except peripherally and somewhat incidentally, about Slavery.  (Item)  The Union Generals who swept like a refining fire through rural Georgia, destroying houses, barns, granaries and crops, said, for example, that that in itself was their purpose; NOT the freeing of slaves.  (Item)  The Union soldiers, who invaded the homeland and destroyed the property of their fellow citizens in the Southern States, called (those whom they thus made) their enemies "Seshes" ("Secessionists"), NOT "Slavers."  (Item) The fascist lunatic without whose obsessive determination to prosecute the war there would have BEEN no Civil War (no wonder he was depressed), Abraham Lincoln himself said it was about "preserving the Union" (whatever the hell that means), and NOT especially about slavery.  But of course Postmodernists never take anybody at their word.

I gather (though of course this is not what you hear in the corporate media) that what's happened in eastern Ukraine is that, in the last few days of January, and first days of February,

The patriot, separatist "pro-russian" militias have pushed far past the liberation of the Sergei Prokofiev Airport in Donetsk, and have encircled some 5,000 regular (conscript, demoralized, ready to give up) troups of the illegitimate, NATO/CIA-backed, fascist Ukrainian government, which, to quote the poet, is "just in the jaws of ruin and Codille." 

Enter the Maüschen Merkel and the utterly Ineffectual Hollande with a face-saving Peace Proposal. Ha ha.  Will anybody notice that NATO--while still of course killing pas mal de vieilles femmes et mioches innocents with its murderous ongoing bombardments of hospitals and apartment buildings--has just  totally lost its own little World War III?

Outgoing!

Richard,

      I am quoting from (page 88 of) The Triadic Heart of Shiva, which you have so kindly just sent me:

"O lady with beautiful hips!  The Heart is the subtle vibration of the triangle which consists of the incessant expansion and contraction of the three powers, and it is the place of repose, the place of supreme bliss.  This very Heart is the Self of Bhairava, of that which is the essence of Bhairava, and of the blessed supreme Goddess who is inseparable and non-different from him."


For sweet Jesus' sake,
Give me a fucking break.