Are you, too, a Consenting Adult? Do you welcome frank talk, critical views and a belly laugh now and again? Welcome to my blog. I'm a long-time journalist, activist, ballroom dancer, lover and not so long ago I single-handedly brought down the McCain/Palin ticket through my book Thanks But No Thanks: The Voter's Guide to Sarah Palin.
On Facebook? Friend me at Facebook.com/sue.katz.
I’m a prose woman. Some poets move me – Verandah Porche, Charles Coe, Suheir Hammed – but usually I know them well enough to understand what they are writing. I didn’t have to know June Jordan (1936-2002) personally, though, to be knocked over by her integrity and the power of her work. It is the anniversary of June Jordan’s birth in 1936, as I was reminded by Campbell Ex, a valuable Facebook friend.
Unflinching in her approach to sexuality, race and justice, Jordan will always be remembered with honor by those involved in the struggle for Palestinian rights for her poem “Moving Towards Home.” It was written in the wake of the 1982 attack on Palestinians in Lebanon and it just happens that I am working on a novel about that same period. Here’s the last stanza: I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home.
She came from the Caribbean with her parents, telling us in one article, "I am the daughter of peasants who begged and borrowed their way to these United States. They wanted an escape from no-shoes-no-drinkable-water poverty." She also wrote novels, plays and journalism. Wikipedia says that she “is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.”
I have seen her perform live and it was an amazing, energizing evening. She had a way of putting things – here are a few knockout comments:
“Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.”
“Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?
“If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.”
And one of my favorites….
“The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment: these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.”
This video about reproductive health – there’s a maternal death every minute – has been launched by the White Ribbon Alliance on the occasion of the G8 meetings in Italy. Lucinda Marshall, Director of the Feminist Peace Network, is spot-on when she calls it “an elegant presentation.” I found this riveting and beautifully done.
Here's the link to the page with the recording (not sure how to link directly to an mp3) of my appearance today on Sonali Kolhatkar's great show, Uprising Radio: Subverting The Airways on KPFK (90.7 f.m. in L.A.).
Sonali Kolhatkar is one host who really does her homework and always surprises me with the level of her knowledge about current issues that progressives care about. No wonder she is syndicated on a range of stations. Her studio is in L.A. and if you're out of range, a visit to her website is always worth it.
Go to this link and then click on "Listen to this Segment" to hear our 15 minute discussion.
The bottom line for Sarah Palin is, well, the bottom line.
Among the many entertaining puzzles in the Palin resignation speech that Shannyn Moore of Huffington Post called “a word salad”, one point is getting insufficient attention from the pundits.
“Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight.”
Sarah Palin is poised to use her appeal to the wacko-right and fundamentalist GOP base to get rich. It’s not just the book with its enormous advance and huge sales potential. As a speaker, Palin is likely to generate a gusher of shekels. She would be following the leadership of George W. Bush who “crassly told journalist Robert Draper that his chief post-presidential intention is to ‘give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers.’" The figure of $150,000 is widely cited for Bush’s domestic speeches and quite a bit more for overseas gigs. Now Palin is going to present some daunting competition. Let’s face it, when it comes to delivering from a stage, Palin provides a more colorful act than Bush.
Higher Calling
Before the religious right convinced McCain that he had to accept Palin onto the ticket if he wanted any support from their troops – the only reliable Republican bloc – Palin was busy climbing the Alaskan political ladder. She was being closely tended by national Christian right figures, even from the days of her mayoral campaign in Wasilla.
Once she stood at the national podium to waves of adulation, it was hard to go back to the day-to-day responsibilities of running a state. Despite humiliating herself in excruciating public displays of flappy-mouth – from botched TV interviews to inappropriate winks to gleefully accusing the most popular man in America of hanging out with “domestic terrorists” – Palin found no fault with herself. That is because she has a “higher calling.” She’s never said otherwise. She is doing god’s work, so whatever she does, it must be just perfect.
It's more fun to make money.
Having acquired a taste for adoring, salivating, autograph-seeking attentions, Palin doesn’t want to give up the silks for her Alaskan fleece. It’s the stage she wants, more than the power. She doesn’t want to monitor budgets, set policies or negotiate anything more complicated than a TV talk-show contract or a role as Republican money-machine.
If she manages to become the top headliner at fundraisers for 2010 Republican campaigns, it would make her a happy bunny. She would be preaching to a receptive choir – who else would be at a GOP funder? – and they would be relieved that it wasn’t Romney or some other suit droning at them over their lobster.
She knows she’s right in everything – but the criticisms, ridicule and law suits get her down. She used to be a very popular politician in Alaska; now instead of friends she feels surrounded by obstacles. She feels a bit betrayed because she’s the same object of god’s ambitions that she has always been.
“Some say things changed for me on August 29th last year - the day John McCain tapped me to be his running-mate - I say others changed.”
The Mistress of Incomprehensibility
Palin continues to be the mistress of incomprehensibility, and she longs for an audience who appreciates that skill. Apparently the Alaskan legislature doesn’t. She insists that she is explaining with clarity why she is walking away in the middle of her term. Here are four of those transparent reasons:
1. She grows sappy about her visit overseas to the wounded troops, who are “bold, they don't give up.” They inspired her to resign.
2. She refuses to take the “quitter's way out,” so she quits.
3. In her basketball analogy, she reminds us that “a good point guard knows exactly when to pass the ball,” (Oh how the ‘Barracuda’ must miss those uncomplicated days of sports glory featured in the photo!), without recognizing that the guard does not then leave the court and go home to her sunbed.
4. And because she worries that “a problem in our country today is apathy,” she’s walking out of the job to which voters elected her.
She also is very conscientious about providing challenges for future students of language when they try to deconstruct her inscrutable homilies, such as “Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’”
Finally, reaching to more revered texts for guidance in the midst of chronic inarticulacy, she recites for us the hallowed words on her parents’ fridge door:
"Don't explain: your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe you anyway."
It’s a whole new configuration of Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell.
Hey California: I’ll be on Uprising Radio tomorrow (Tuesday) talking once again with Sonali Kolhatkar about Sarah Palin.
Tune in from 8:40 a.m. - 8:55 a.m. PST to 90.7 fm, Tuesday July, 7th. The station's based in LA.
The programs are often podcasted a bit later at http://uprisingradio.org/home/.
A blogger has requested, via Freedom of Info, email correspondence between Palin and Anchorage radio jock Eddie Burke, in the midst of various rumors of scandal, according to a source Susie Bright quoted.
As I reported in my book Thanks But No Thanks: The Voter's Guide to Sarah Palin, Eddie Burke called the organizers of the Alaskan Women Reject Sarah Palin Protest "a bunch of socialist, baby-killing maggots" on the air. He also published the private contact info of the organizers so that they became the brunt of terrifying right-wing threats.
I continue the story in my book: "Burke brought along his right-wing cronies to crash the event, but they numbered less than 100." More than 1,500 demonstrators turned up - making it the largest protest in the history of Alaska. It had started as the idea of a few women having coffee together, frustrated that Palin was representing herself as the voice of Alaskan women. Within a couple of days people had heard about it through word-of-mouth and email blasts.
It would be ironic indeed if Eddie Burke has something to do with Palin's swift departure from the Governor's office. Her inarticulate press conference was bizarre - she put her political future to a vote among her children, yeah right - and filled with conspiratorial intimations. So it's hard to know from her what she's up to. Socialist, baby-killing maggots everywhere await the next chapter.
I want to ask a friendly New Yorker a favor, but first here’s the back-story. My friend Charles Coe, poet and mensch extraordinaire, called today to ask if I knew that something I had written was featured at the Stonewall anniversary exhibition at the New York Public Library. He said he heard that the piece was under glass, accompanied by a plaque with my name. I actually knew a bit about it because my Google self-alert had picked up a mention of me on a rather cool gay blog called Band of Thebes.
The writer was describing the exhibition called 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation. He said:
Other artifacts on display include issues of The Ladder, copies of the newspaper Gay (featuring a movie review called "The Bores in the Band"), and Sue Katz's mimeographed essay "Smash Phallic Tyranny."
In fact, the published piece was ultimately titled “Smash Phallic Imperialism” and was illustrated by a drawing I had done of a stars-and-stripes dick, upside down in a trash can. Ahh, those were the days. It first appeared (1970?) in a queer newspaper that was the collaboration of two Boston groups: our Stick It In The Wall MotherFucker Collective of revolutionary, working-class feminist lesbians, and a collective of radical faeries, some lovely gender-bending guys who mixed mustaches with tutus and ball gowns with beards. If you held the newspaper in one direction, it was a dyke front page; if you flipped it over and turned it around, it was a gay boy front page.
We named our rag “Lavender Vision” after Betty Friedan’s homo-terrified assertion, on the eve of International Women’s Day, that, “We will not be cowed by the lavender menace.” She had heard the (accurate) rumor that for the first time lesbians were going to be “out” at the march in NY, Boston and LA. Perhaps in other places that I can’t recall. Our newspaper lasted all of two issues, I believe. (Disclaimer: All of the above are shards of memory I’m dredging up and I cannot personally swear by any of it.)
I’m not sure how a mimeograph ended up in this prestigious exhibition, but I suspect that the venerable Allen Young – who included me in the early (first?) queer anthology, Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, which he edited with Karla Jay – is behind it. I’m sure Allen will weigh in when he reads this.
In any event, the exhibition ends on June 30th and I’d be ever so grateful to any New York friend who can make it over to the library and take a couple of photos of me under glass.
If you're around my age, then you grew up with Johnny Carson in the background, if not the foreground. In fact, have I mentioned that when we used to sit around in the 60s fantasizing about what our roles would be after the Revolution, while others wanted to be Minister of Peace or Secretary of Education, I planned to replace Johnny Carson. I'd have my cousin Sandy as my sidekick, just as Carson had Ed McMahon, who died today. A Facebook friend posted this clip and I think it shows the essence of their relationship.
Over 50 families established a Catskills summer community in 1979 with two basic shared realities: they were all Holocaust survivors and they all agreed with Fran Lask, 82, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, that, "This is our revenge on Hitler. To live this long, this well, is a victory." Some knew each other from their original Russian or Polish villages, some from the concentration camps and some from their beloved Four Seasons Lodge.
This remarkable documentary follows their reduced numbers in 2006 – the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Lodge. Most of them are now in their 80s and 90s. The aged president and the vice-president are tired of all the work involved in maintaining the camp and the residents must make a decision about its future.
Central to this exceptional and emotional film are the wonderful ways in which these people – some of them the sole survivors out of hundreds of extended family members – have become family for each other. They dance, they sing and they love with a passion that slaps the Final Solution upside the head.
And oh, what romantic stories! Victor and Regina Lewis have remained together since their youth in Krakow, Poland over 65 years ago, straight through separate camps and on to America. Olga and Genya are two women who have been close for the same amount of time and, in this film, come out about their special relationship.
The bittersweet intimacy of the Lodge’s residents is based on a common tragedy and built out of a shared hunger for life. On the assumption that no one would really be interested in their story, the producer told us during the Q&A after showing the film, they continued their squabbles, their revelations (one man finally tells his friends that he was experimented on by Mengele) and their tears without self-consciousness in front of the camera. We feel we are getting the real deal – a peek into the world of the last surviving survivors and we come away with the sense that this film is simply not to be missed.
My advice? Find a film festival that is showing Four Seasons Lodge, take a hankie and a friend and join their party.
For a taste, here’s the trailer.
This documentary follows Johnny Weir, the brilliant ice skater, through his achievements, his under-achievements and his bubble baths.
There is a long tradition of male dancers putting on their tutus and toe shoes and dancing as swans in gender-bending Swan Lake ballets. Johnny Weir is famous for having put the male swan into ice-skating.
Weir has been hovering at the edges of men's ice-skating superstardom for some time. Despite big achievements in USA competitions, including three successive gold medals in the Nationals, he just hasn't been able to nail down world titles, not the least the Olympics.
The documentary Pop Star On Ice, filmed between 2006 and 2008, has been featured at a number of gay film festivals, despite the fact that the very camp Johnny Weir quite explicitly refuses to discuss his sexuality. He struts fashion show runways, does photo shoots in stilettos and is filmed taking a bubble bath with his best boy-pal Paris Childers. This is enough to provoke open horror from the skating officialdom, the executives of which like their men butch and their women sweet. While any gay person can spot Weir as a friend of Dorothy's from a mile away, he clearly feels his behavior alone, without coming out in words, gets him in enough trouble.
He misbehaves in other ways, too. There are his erratic press conferences where, instead of giving the canned comments expected of sports stars, he mixes rebellion with inappropriate comparisons that puzzle or offend. He is not a simple lad: he can be a petulant spoiled brat one moment and a generous, gracious star to his fans, known as Johnny's Angels, the next.
The two central relationships in the documentary are between Johnny and Paris - he says they're so close they're like a married couple without the sex, and between Johnny and his coach from age 12, Priscilla Hill. From his late start in skating at age 12, Hill spent many years cajoling him to train with discipline, but when he loses his Nationals title to his very "masculine" rival Evan Lysacek, he leaves Hill for Galina Zmievskaya, the Russian who worked with Oksana Baiul, Weir's first skate idol.
For a film that opens with caressing close-ups of his naked legs, his nipple, his back and his pelvis, there is a vacuum where Johnny Weir's candid discussion of his sexuality and its impact on his career could be. He is a complex mix of diva and athlete, of costume designer and technician, but in Pop Star On Ice we never learn from him what makes his heart do a triple axel.
This piece first appeared on Edge Publications portals.
Cambridge, MA?
If so, I'm going to be on the Michael Koran show on CCTV, live, at 7:00pm Sunday, June 14. Just talking. Later it may be shown on MichaelKoran.Blip.TV, apparently.
Suggestions about what to wear - welcome.
More bad news from Gaza. With this spate of murderous hate crimes by the far right in America, important elections around the world and a global economy that is masking a radical shift of wealth to the ruling classes from the rest of us, it’s important not to forget what is going on in Gaza.
The UK daily The Guardian gives us an important seven minutes of film that looks at what is happening to those who are ill. The medical infrastructure has been decimated and medical supplies are prevented from getting to Gaza. For many their only hope is treatment in Israel. Besides the usual wretched barriers Gazans face when trying to move from one place or another, not the least the ubiquitous checkpoints (at left), The Guardian finds evidence that patients are being forced between becoming informers and their own survival.
I can’t figure out how to insert this clip, so please click here to watch it.
What a week. A man of principle assassinated. Obama in Cairo and Buchenwald. The British Labour Party in the poo-poo. Unemployment figures ascending. Any personal impact from this elusive Stimulus Package missing in inaction.
What a day. Dr Tiller is being buried. Obama is speaking at D-Day Ceremonies. And a friend (you know who you are, SW) has complained that my blog is too often a bummer. So to lighten things up, here is one of my all-time favorite auditions from last year's So You Think You Can Dance. (The judges' comments aren't that interesting and the camera-work sucks - gotta show the whole body all the time.) Thank you Robert Muraine.
Obama is an eloquent and effective speaker. His long-awaited speech in Cairo today was no exception. I’m restricting my observations to just one of his seven main points, for as someone who formerly lived and worked in the Middle East for 14 years, and who continues to support the fight for justice there, I was moved by what he had to say about The Conflict.
Obama addressed “the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world” with a level of understanding far exceeding his unfortunate comments during the presidential campaign. Today he began by countering Holocaust deniers (he means you, Ahmadinejad) and contextualizing anti-Semitism in history, stressing the “unbreakable” bond between the States and Israel. This is not a new message from American leaders, but it was well-put.
And then: “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” He talked about “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation,” calling the situation “intolerable.” Yes!! It is so important that this occupation be called an occupation, especially in our country where international political understanding is so minimal that at least one professor of media found that the majority of his students believed that the Palestinians were brutally occupying poor Israel. Obama also called on Hamas to “recognize Israel's right to exist”– a concept I have yet to comprehend, despite it being a daily mantra of those who like Israeli military policy. Would Obama expect this to be a mutual recognition?
“Palestinians must abandon violence,” Obama said, without mentioning the unspeakable levels of violence Palestinians have been the victims of. But then Obama did something I suspect no American president has ever done: he compared the struggle of the Palestinians to that of African-Americans and others who have fought for righteous freedom:
“For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.”
Settlements (at left) have been on Obama’s mind, especially since the present Israeli Prime Minister provocatively refused to stop further building on occupied land. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” Obama said – leaving me wondering if he is taking the bold, necessary step of acknowledging the illegitimacy of all settlements in occupied territories
He touched on the nature of the relationships America has with Arab countries and Israel. “We will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs.” This would be another profound change in American conduct, which has long been winking conspiratorially to the Israelis behind the backs of the Palestinians.
The reception in Arab countries has been mixed, says Al Jazeera. This piece lists a variety of reactions, from excitement to complaints that it was non-committal.
Israeli reaction, too, has been mixed. Akiva Eldar, writing in the daily paper Haaretz, noted in a piece titled “Obama put Arabs and Israel on an equal footing” that
“U.S. President Barack Obama declared before the entire world, upon an Arab-Muslim stage, that the time has come to end the era of Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories.”
Behind all of Obama’s statements stands the assumption that peace and security for Palestine and Israel will only be achieved through a two-state solution. Many scholars and activists in the region now think that this occupation – the longest running forced occupation on earth – has so changed the reality on the ground that establishing two states side-by-side is unfortunately no longer a viable option. They see no way around a single, democratic secular state. That, however, is a discussion for another day.
Today we can say Obama has made rhetorical history and we can hope that it is backed up by some concrete progress. Like allowing the import of such forbidden items (thanks to Amira Hass for the list) into devastated Gaza as “car parts, fabrics, threads, needles, light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses and animals.” Being able to repair one’s bombed-out home and put shoes on one’s child seems like a legitimate pre-condition to conducting serious negotiations.
Britain’s Got Talent was won by a dance crew named Diversity, not by Susan Boyle, the Scottish woman whose lovely singing voice was successfully fetishized by the Simon Cowell publicity machine. There have been plenty of commentaries on how Susan Boyle, by singing quite nicely, confounded the assumptions (“spinster,” “dowdy,” asexual “virgin,” “simple”) that accompanied her first appearance on the competition show. More astute observers have pointed to the sexism, ageism and classism inherent in those assumptions.
Anyway, I always thought Boyle’s performances were quite “pitchy” – as Randy Jackson, a judge on competitor American Idol says when some notes don’t quite get where they are going. But her voice has never been the issue. Building on hundreds of millions (!) of YouTube views of Boyle’s debut, the show’s producers have kept her well in the spotlight, happily increasing their audience.
I didn’t want her loss to go unremarked, although the whole saga has ultimately been just another p.r. exercise based on distasteful condescension. Boyle has been very useful –Britain’s Got Talent has received huge international attention since the video of her first appearance went viral – but her job (and the season) is done.
British tabloids did their share by questioning her mental health. “The singer's increasingly strange behaviour has sparked fears that she may suffer a breakdown - or be axed from tomorrow's final,” the sleazy Sun wrote the day before the final. Even the quality papers couldn’t resist a post-performance judgment: “Oozing confidence and betraying none of the nerves that had reportedly seen her throw public tantrums in the days leading up to the final, Boyle nevertheless appeared more subdued than on previous appearances.” (You can see her final performance here, if you’d like.)
What was the nature of Boyle’s freak-out and temper tantrums? First, she apparently swore at police officers and then was reported to have “screamed "f*** off" and flicked a V-sign at the TV in the hotel bar as she watched judge Piers Morgan tell Shaheen Jafargholi, 12, he had given the ‘best singing performance so far.’”
If swearing at the cops and giving your television the finger are signs of madness, then reserve me a padded room immediately.
Piers Morgan (at left), one of the three judges, meanwhile, nicely fanned the fires on his blog. “Susan is finding it very difficult to cope, and to stay calm. She has been in tears many times during the last few days, and even felt like quitting altogether and fleeing all the attention."
Duh. The woman is ridiculed and then awarded for not living down to the most mortifyingly low expectations, based on all the dumbest of stereotypes about who best deserves to be onstage and onscreen. What's to be upset about?
[NOTE: Strangely enough, as I’m writing this blog, there’s a “breaking news” story on cable news that Susan Boyle has been admitted to the hospital with an “emotional breakdown,” complete with the continuing condescension of Piers Morgan who expressed his relief that Boyle came in second, saying “a victory would have ‘just carried on the mayhem’ for the unworldly Scottish spinster.” Sigh.]
But what about the winners? Diversity is a 10-guy dance crew comprised of three sets of brothers and their friends. Cowell liked them as soon as he learned that the older members were in college or working as IT engineers. Their energetic, creative routines were a lot of fun and their obvious affection for each other heart-warming. For anyone who follows America's Best Dance Crew, produced by Randy Jackson, has seen many astounding examples of this kind of street dance, combining hip-hop, gymnastics and synchronization. Here’s the winning performance.
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