Golly

So, deep, deep in Mencken this past fortnight, I can only say, "What he said!"  The only thing I think I might just a tiny bit differ with is Mencken's underestimation of the potential for simple-minded toxic Nazification in the philosophy of Nietzsche.  To be fair, nobody could have foreseen, before the end of World War I, the cowardly, vicious, gratuitous victimization of the innocent German people--the blockade of the northern ports--by the insufferably "victorious" Allies:  Which, when you look at it down the long wrong end of the telescope, does lead directly to a sour Nietzschism gone horribly, insanely literal, without a shred left in it of playful, Gallic hyperbole...and to the Death Camps.  But that aside, there is not a particle of difference between my beliefs and opinions and those of H.L. Mencken.  We are unanimous in our bad opinion of (monstrous evil tyrant) Woodrow Wilson, Prohibition, Puritanism, the Evangelical South, American participation in World War I, and modern classical music; and united in our love (I think we must call it love) of San Francisco (for the same cultural, esthetic and geographical reasons) and of real classical music, from Bach to Brahms.

And there is this, which I might have written, and did our lives not overlap, I might actually suppose to have written in a previous incarnation:

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up. 

Why they killed Muammar Gaddafi (New World Order)

Gaddafi's son: Libya like McDonald's for NATO - fast war as fast food

The Shame!  The fucking utter gratuitous infamy of the NATO rape of Libya!

au Cinéma: Nicky's Children

Enormously touching story about the rescue of 669 children (mostly, but I think not entirely Jewish) from Prague in the nine months before September 1st, 1939, delivered to foster care in England.  The work of one man, Nicholas Winton, who just happened to be in Prague on holiday, and saw what desperately needed to be done and did as much as he could.  Thank Netflix at least for this.

Reading...

So, seized by I know not what Higher Impulse at the beautiful and gracious downtown Honolulu library day before yesterday, I summoned out of the stacks (where, these days, such things are kept) a double handful of the writings of H.L. Mencken--whom, for his deep appreciation of San Francisco (Urbs et Mens) I have long loved--and in among them I have found many and many a precious gem, including, particularly, Mencken's prose poem, idyll or ode, to the Democratic convention of 1920, "holden" (as Mencken Chaucerizes the past participle of hold) in the then new (built in 1915) Municipal Auditorium of San Francisco, and lubricated with a railroad carload of exquisite, delicious, and even healthful bourbon whiskey, gratis, courtesy of 'Sunny Jim' Rolph, San Francisco's longest serving, most popular, and most corrupt mayor, and purveyed to the delegates by His Honor's prettiest, politest, and best dressed hookers.  I had to go online to get the whole story, which even Mencken only gives glimpses of.  'Sunny Jim'--who went on, by the way, to become Governor--as I learn, was everything one could possibly desire in a Mayor of San Francisco:  With a few of his cronies, he organized the Panama Pacific Exposition (World's Fair) of 1915, built the fabulous civic center,  oversaw the building of the Oakland Bay bridge, engineered the Hetch Hetchy power and water supply, and constructed the West Side Trolley system; all the while declaring that he would enforce Prohibition "as little as possible," and, with tightly policed (so as not to scare off the tourists) gambling hells and whorehouses, turning San Francisco into about as Wide Open a city as it was ever possible for an American city to be--greatly to the approbation and the satisfaction of the inhabitants thereof.  "A not surprising alliance of populism and debauchery," is how one of the online chronicles of those times puts it.   And of course it does all lead on to the increase in the number of gay people who settled in San Francisco, because of the general climate of sinful tolerance, and who eventually created the Gay Liberation Sexual Revolution which I myself witnessed and participated in in the 1960's.  Yes.  And no thanks whatsoever to contemporary events on the East Coast or the riots at the Stonewall Inn.  Or to trannies or Lesbians.

The key, or crux, the single thing which made Gay Liberation  possible and inevitable, was the California Supreme Court's decision, Stoumen v. Reilly, 1951, which restored the Black Cat Café's liquor license, and incidentally affirmed that homosexuals were indeed human beings, and that the public assembly of homosexuals was not in itself illegal.  

Castalia II

'Tis my favorite Utopian Fantasy that the castles and palaces bequeathed us by our feudal history be used as orphanages and boarding schools.  Linderhof, for example--not to mention Neuschwanstein and Schloss Herrenchiemsee--would be a fine place for Bavarian kids to take swimming and riding lessons, study French and Italian, play soccer, listen to concerts of Old Music, receive delegations of foreign students, learn to dance the gavotte, and, yes, if they want, play video games and look up smut on the Internet.

Normal, bourgeois citizens of Bavaria, and tourists from elsewhere, might visit and hang out just as they always have done, even in the days when a real, live König was in residence, with valets in livery, and with pathways marked off with velvet ropes, to shush them and guide them around so that they don't obtrude or interfere or get in the way, and yet they might get a true sense of the idyllic life in the castle, such as you can only really experience when the castle is occupied by someone who has a divine right to live there. 

And why was Sandra Bland murdered in the Waller County Jail by Cops?

Because it was fun for the cops to beat her (rape her?), then stage her "suicide"--but also because it provides the Powers that Are (the FBI is overseeing the investigation into her death) a useful object-lesson for the perhaps insufficiently cowed citizens of Texas and the United States: That cops, being by definition above the law, can and will murder whomever they want, whenever they want, without let or hindrance.  The bottom line being that in a country without habeas corpus or the rule of law, where torture, confiscation of property by unaccountable authority, arbitrary detention, and murder by the whim of the chief executive are the law of the land, it does not matter whether the people respect authority or not, so long as they fear it.

The interesting thing about this mugshot of Miss Bland obtained from the Waller County Jail is that she was apparently already dead when it was taken--You can see, if you look closely (particularly from the fly-away positioning of her dreadlocks), that it is a picture taken of a corpse lying on the floor, not a photograph of a woman standing with her back to a wall.  

Hillary Clinton on Gaddafi: We came, we saw, he died

Hillary's girlish, smart-alecky, utter indecency is worthy of, say, an Ilse Koch.  I am deeply ashamed for my country.

Today is the 711th Anniversary of Petrarch's Birth

A day I always like solemnly to remember, in a particularly lovely time of year, this transition from Hierophantic Cancer to Regal Leo--the Glorious Summer of the Sweet New Style.  

Yet another ceasefire violation in Donetsk: 1 dead, many more injured

I propose that, for every "ceasefire violation" by the fascist régime in Kiev, one of Poroshenko's hirelings be hauled into the street and shot in the back of the head at close range.  And specifically, for the next murder, by Kiev, of yet another blameless citizen of the Donbas, let the bloody-handed swine Mikheil Saakashvili be slain in recompense.

But Rape or, in some cases perhaps, merely Seduction...

Sorry, Ladies, I know how terribly important it is not to do anything to you that you aren't in total conscious agreement with--and how doing anything to you that you don't whole-heartedly concur with is, by definition, violence.  And if it's your sacred Thingy, or poopy-hole, or your almost-as-sacred buttocks or bazooms which are violated, of course, you have every right to feel outraged, humiliated and defiled.  And I hope you do.  But there are worse things:  Violence in the perpetration of which physical pain and injury are inflicted, and even death--mayhem and murder--for example, and these really are very much worse. Notice that I do not count psychological pain as nothing, only as considerably less than physical pain; and that I do, contrarily, count the infliction of physical pain and injury as so enormous a crime that I would in some cases, such as physical child abuse, maintain that it can only be atoned for, or condignly punished with, amputation of the offender's hand(s), or his (or her, or their) hanging or decapitation.

I should think, however, that a fine and a reprimand--and not any period of incarceration--would be adequate punishment for the crime of rape (were it never so outrageous, humiliating or defiling), provided that no physical pain or injury had been inflicted.

Kindly refer to my previous blogs, which touch on this subject, of the 7th of this month, and of 4/6/2015 (2:26 a.m.), and 7/15/2014.

Madamina, il catalogo è questo (Leporello, Ferruccio Furlanetto). Don Gi...

Call it rape, call it seduction--It's been around a long, long time.  Only in the 18th century they hadn't invented Quaaludes.  

Murdering Marines

If there were any excuse that I could think of for being a Marine, now that there is no military draft--and that there has not been a military draft, to speak of,  for more than three decades; and that, even in the thirty years before 1975 (and after the Good War) when there was a military draft, there was, even so, no excuse for being a Marine but the still-culpable, absolutely inexcusable stupidity of believing what the government and other egregiously fraudulent moral authorities propounded as reasons for being a Marine--then I might deplore and condemn the murder of Marines.  But since there is no such excuse, and given the intrinsically evil (mercenary soldier, killer for hire) nature of being a United States Marine, and given the great number of horrendously evil things that United States Marines have done in the last sixty years, and continue to do in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, I neither deplore nor condemn shooting and killing them.  As an American citizen, however, much as I do approve of and wish to encourage the slaying of the mercenary soldiers who serve the iniquitous powers which have usurped the governance of my country, I had much rather that my fellow would-be restorers of Constitutional Government begin with the slaughter of the militarized police, prison guards and paramilitary (so-called "security") agencies who have in actuality turned my country, once the "Land of the Free," into a fascist prison-state.

That of course is the difference between me and the "perpetrator" (if you will) of the late massacre of Marines in Chatanooga:  He was thinking of Sabra and Shatila; I am still thinking of the FBI siege at Ruby Ridge and of the twenty-six children they deliberately burned alive in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas.  But hey, I won't quibble.

The Exception

As can be seen from Our previous blog, somewhere between Our eighth and ninth years We lost all of Our interest in American popular music--Pat Boone and Elvis Presley poisoned the well, so to speak--and, with one exception, We never regained it.  That exception was Bobby Darin, whom I once, when I was fifteen or so, saw/heard sing, on television, his version of 'Mack the Knife'--and it knocked my socks off.  I became therewith a huge Bobby Darin [and, though I didn't know it, Kurt Weil] fan, delighting even in 'Splish Splash, I Was Takin' a Bath.' As with any popular music 'singer,' you have to ask yourself, "Is it his musicality that captivates me? or his winning character? or the profound sensibility and mordant wit that lies behind everything he says and does?" Whatever, it is an exception that does us both (Bobby Darin and me) credit, I think.

I admit that the criteria for my negative judgement of most popular American music have been, at least in part, extra-musical:  The perfect tastelessness of ('April Love') Pat Boone, for example, is, to me, indistinguishable from his smug troglodytic political conservatism; while the poor-white-trash nastiness cum necrophilia of Elvis Presley, and the stink and swagger of the Mafioso that hung in the very air around Frank Sinatra have made it impossible for me to hear either of them simply as 'singers.'

Ultimately, a large part of my admiration of Bobby Darin himself is not so much for his music as for his having divorced (the utterly negligible) Sandra Dee, and for his support of, and participation in, Robert Kennedy's political campaign.

It is interesting, I think, that Dick Clark--whom I detested, and whose 'American Bandstand' I fervently loathed--advised the then young and up-coming Bobby Darin not to sing 'Mack the Knife,' on the grounds  that it was "too operatic."  Ha!

When in the fullness of time I became accompanist to a cabaret singer (an intelligent and difficult young woman), our best and most satisfying work, generally speaking, was the songs of Kurt Weil--We knocked 'em dead with 'La Complainte de la Seine.'   But our all-time foot-stompin' stupendous success (with our audience) was our dynamic version of 'Le Jour où la Pluie Viendra.'  

The Isolated Far Western American Transcendentalist: Imbibing Truth and Strength from his Own Inner Source of Wisdom

First and always there was music.  I remember being enthralled with music when I was three and four years old, listening to player pianos and high school band concerts; and my mother recalled to me my pulling myself up, while I was yet a toddler, to the old console radio and dancing, with every evidence of delight, to the music of the Big Bands.  By the time I was five or six, I knew by heart and could sing all the popular songs of the day.  At eight years of age I was picking out tunes (like the "Tennessee Waltz") on the piano; at nine, after my mother had started with her own version of the Suzuki method, playing pieces to me out of a (for real) antebellum album (which had come West from pre-war Virginia, some ninety years before, in Great-Grandfather Moses Moore's Syracusia of a wagon-train) of Waltzes for the Pianoforte, which I would play back to her note-perfect--and after I had begun to make up little pieces of my own--I began formal piano lessons with Mrs. Osborne, the Methodist church organist, widow of a former Methodist Minister recently deceased, a sometime pupil of Darius Milhaud, and a graduate with honors from Mills College, who started me right in on little minuets of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Haydn, which I adored.  At ten, I discovered on the radio Haydn symphonies, Mozart concertos, and the chamber music of C.P.E. Bach which so ravished me that I was sometimes not able to sleep at nights.  By eleven, I saw and listened to Die Zauberflöte on television, which induced a state of raptus that lasted for a couple of days; and, about the same time, I was walked through a performance of Pagliacci on television (by a well-meaning Italian uncle), with a live translation--which nasty little opera lirica totally outraged me, horrified me and sickened me with the mindless squalor of the sordid lives of its dramatis personae, and with its hysterically vulgar, realistically (verismo indeed) and appallingly ugly kind of singing. At twelve, thanks to the good offices of Mrs. Osborne, I saw two live operas on two consecutive nights in the old (then new) Spokane Coliseum, The Barber of Seville and Tosca--the former of which, as sung in 50's barbarous verismo (not bel canto) style (bel canto being a style then still unknown), I had the good taste or sensible acumen to detest; the latter of which being verismo to begin with, I put aside the blinding severity of censure to enjoy on its own sloppy/lush terms, reveling in its voluptuous post-Wagnerian harmonies.   In my early teens I discovered Schubert and Vivaldi and Albinoni and--speaking of beauty which drove me nearly mad for days or weeks on end--Mozart's Divertimento in E Flat for string trio, Köchel #563.  What music (real music) meant to me I could not have said exactly, but I knew that it meant more to me than to anyone else I knew; that I could not live without it, and that worshiping it as I did made my relation to the normal, comfortable world of family and school chums impossible.  It wasn't till I read the novels of Hermann Hesse a decade later that I discovered that there were others who "understood" music as I did, and for whom that "understanding" was, as it was for me, an integral core of their identity.  The sum of all this is to say that I have for most of my conscious life felt detached and isolated from my peers and coevals--and yes, ineffably, though painfully, superior to them.  And, in all honesty, I don't see how I could have done otherwise.

Some very intelligent dogs, and children, are terrified of thunder...

They believe in reason, and nothing that anyone can say can convince them that such unnecessarily loud and violent noise is not madness.

Well, Jeez...

Just when I had put my worries on hold, and snuckered down and prepared to wait another thirty-one or sixty-two episodes if necessary, to find out if Miguel could overcome his possessive jealousy, or if Alice really had poisoned Fernando--all of a sudden, by the thirty-fourth episode--Paulo and Miguel got married and it was all over.  Bam.  Well, but honestly, it was getting a little nerve-wracking watching these two fine young straight actors having to kiss each other and act like they were making out.  

Paulo y Miguel -- O Beijo do Escorpiaõ

I've been binge-watching this terrifically sincere (they do their homework on social issues), fabulously absurd gay Portuguese soap-opera on YouTube the past couple of nights, arriving at the 31st episode this morning just as the cock crew.  It's about these two cute guys who live in Lisbon, and who are gay (one very much; the other not so much), sure enough, and their web-like, or perhaps labyrinthine, circles of family, friends and odd acquaintances.  Many of these are wise, prescient and benign; others are benighted, foolish and malign; but I still haven't figured out who the scorpion is whose kiss (?!) we ought probably to avoid--though indications are that it's Alice (pronounced ah-LEE-shay).

And the Bottom-Line, No-Bullshit Fact About the Significance of Sexual Dimorphism in Humans Is:

that being 30% bigger and stronger than women gives men evolutionary license to rape them, and/or, if it comes to that, gangbang them.  Not that I ever would, or that I think it's a good idea; but that is what sexual dimorphism means for other animals--Why should we be different?  And not only that (now that we've got the ladies at a fever pitch, and just to bring 'em to a boil):

Sexual dimorphism (difference in size and suppleness) is probably what makes the sexual connection between full-grown men and half-grown boys so common, and delightful, a normative factor in human society throughout the history of our species.   And it also explains why both the earliest forms of heterosexual marriage and homosexual paedophilia  (such as that practiced in ancient Crete--and of course epitomized in the myth of Zeus and Ganymede) always contain a large element of more or less ritualized Abduction, which seems to serve the dual purpose of making the new relationship both official and juicy hot. 

Now Rape

The statistic thrown at us (by what authority I know not, because ordinarily no authority is cited; but which I complacently accept for purposes of argument because it sounds about right) is that one in thirty-three--say, 3%--of men have experienced "attempted or completed [?] forcible rape." Which means that another man has, without the victim's consent, and/or contrary to his will, attempted, or successfully attempted, to put his (the rapist's) erect penis into the victims's rectum--and, if really successful, the rapist has ejaculated, depositing his sperm; while, if doubly or really-really successful, the victim also has ejaculated, either messing the front of his pants or, like Onan, scattering his seed on the ground. No doubt, considering the difficulty of the endeavor, there are a great many more attempted, than successfully completed, forcible rapes of men; but even by that most restrictive definition, I myself can, and do, claim the status of Official Rape Victim (as per this blog of July 15th, last year, in which the particulars of my being raped are spelled out),  with all the rights and perquisites pertaining thereto of talking about Rape, expatiating upon it, and drawing conclusions, both general and particular, about it.

The first thing that strikes me about Rape is that--despite its present universal and hysterical disfavor with the Sex--it is, or can be, many different things, not all of them criminal, nor even unseemly or unpleasant things, depending on the circumstance, the judgement of the victim, the nature of the actual physical act of rape, and the intent of the rapist--as, for example in the classical instances of the rape of Proserpine by Hades, or of the rape of the Sabine women by the men of Rome. In my own experience, although my consent was decidedly not solicited, and while I was very much surprised by being raped (by a man whom I believe to have been Portuguese, a couple of years older than I was at age twenty)--notwithstanding--I was thrilled, delighted, pleased and pleasured by it; certainly not humiliated, displeased or hurt by it.  In fact, given his superior strength, and the extraordinary size and beauty of his uncircumcised, erect penis (what little I saw of it)--plus the fact that, having robbed me at knifepoint of all the money I had in my wallet before he raped me, when he had  done raping me, he graciously gave me back half of the money he had taken from me--I was touched, gratified and honored by his raping me.

Later, when I would masturbate to the memory of being raped, I would think of my rapist's flashing Latin eyes, his ferocious inarticulate growling, his large shapely hands sliding over my body beneath my clothes, and how he nearly crushed me in his embrace when he ejaculated. And I, belatedly realizing that he had found me as beautiful and desirable as I had found him, with a melting heart,  would attain ma Jouissance solitaire.

Visiting my Aunt (pronounced Ant) Margie (Marjorie), the Youngest of my Father's Sisters (all of whom, in their various ways, were delightful, and nice) about sixteen years ago--She died a half dozen years ago at the age of eighty-five--

She vividly recalled our first meeting sixty-eight years ago, when I was but four years old and she was just four and twenty:  Suddenly and atypically bashful, I hung back, and pulled my mother down to talk to me, and asked her in a stage whisper, "Mommy, who is that Beautiful Lady?"  How I recognized her as such is still not clear to me.  She was dressed for a hot summer afternoon in jeans shorts, with a tie-over blouse, bedroom slippers (We didn't have flip-flops in those days), and had her hair done up in a bandana.  With a shout of laughter she dropped to her knees and enveloped me in one of the Nozière Sisters' signature peculiar Auntly Hugs, in which painful boniness strove with blissful warmth, leaving one paralyzed.  And then she proceeded to teach me how to make "Googly Eyes," so that I could talk to any Beautiful Ladies I might meet, all on my own, without having to ask my mother.  Did I say my Aunt Margie was nice?  And funny.

LGBTQ? No thanks. Not even GLBTQ. Just G, please.

I don't like LBTQ, and I don't want to get "married"--I'm not a Lesbian.  And if you think because I'm G you can call me Q, I'll slap your goddamned face off.

Yet again,

Reading but a little further into David Sedaris's Diabetes with Owls, I am captivated by his suave, limpid, wickedly funny prose--and wonder what kind of Philistine humorless jerk I must be to've judged ill of it.