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(Answer to yesterday’s riddle: The $25,000 Pyramid.)
(Note: As was the case during my earlier flirtation with morning headlines circa 2007, these won’t necessarily appear every day.)
He says well-meaning things about whites stealing rock and roll from blacks — no mention of hip-hop though. Or what Clarence might have thought about playing to arenas and stadiums filled with next-to-zero black people. (Springsteen’s audience is pretty much exclusively white.) Or, for that matter, how Timothy felt standing in a room full of white people congratulating himself on America’s ability to successfully and peacefully integrate itself, due solely to the fact that there was a black guy in the band playing saxophone.
The national gay news mag The Advocate has declared Seattle to be the tenth “Gayest City in America.” Number one: Atlanta.
…got to pout n’ protest against California’s supreme court when it upheld that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.
As I wrote here last fall, it’s always fun to snipe about the state that thinks it’s so superior to the rest of us.
(Of course, longtime readers know that when I snipe at Calif., I also snipe at people here whose only idea how to improve Wash. is to blindly copy everything that’s been done there.
As if everything done there would always work here.
As if everything done there even worked there.)
But, as speakers at Tuesday’s Westlake Park rally asked, why don’t all these local protesters do more to get legal gay marriage in this state?
Well, some are.
We’ve now got the great compromise that is “civil unions.”
(And as one Daily Kos diarist put it, Tuesday’s Calif. ruling seems to pave the way for a similar compromise there.)
But plenty of activists insist that “the legal equivalent of marriage under another name” just ain’t the same thing as marriage.
And they’re right.
…one Sam Schulman argues what just might be “The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage,” as described in a New Republic snark post. Schulman goes beyond the normally accepted bounds of reactionarydom, to posit that marriage is necessary to keep straight men in proper society and to keep women from “concubinage.”
By the way, this is the Sam Schulman who used to own the short-lived magazine Wigwag—not the (now late) Sam Schulman who used to own the Sonics.
…of complainin’ and protestin’ all the time about that dumbheaded Prop 8 down in Californ-i-yay, you all could do something to support improved domestic-partner rights in our very own state. Like right here.
Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.
“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.
I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.
Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.
Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.
Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.
The nonexistent (outside Africa) hetero AIDS scare that was supposed to hit us any year now has cost governments and health groups about a billion bucks. Bucks that could’ve been spent on treatments and possible preventions for those who really did have it, or who really were at risk.
Another TV season has come and gone. Ratings across the channel spectrum continued to plummet, even on shows/channels that weren’t hit by the writers’ strike.
And with the explosion in programming across broadcast and cable channels, telecasters are constantly on the lookout for entertainment forms that haven’t yet been adapted to the screen.
Saturday Night Live, as you’ll recall, was born from trends in stage sketch comedy that hadn’t yet been brought to TV on a regular basis.
Later years brought us televised karaoke, poker, ballroom dancing, shows based on video blogs and webcams, travelogue shows at pubilc-drunkenness events, and even prime-time bingo.
So: What else is out there, to feed programmers’ ravenous appetites for stealable concepts?
Here are a few ideas. (If any readers successfully package a series based on one of these, you may pay me a modest royalty.)
Please feel free to suggest your own.
…we don’t have to do everything the way it’s been done in California? Well, here’s one exception.
(My apologies if that word-wraps weirdly in your browser.) As we await the potential end of at least one party race, knowing we’ve got our own state caucuses this Saturday, here’s some other nooze:
…discover the shocking fact that skiers like snow in the mountains. In other nooze:
…And in the nooze:
