Ten Years of the Tin Man

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Ten years ago today, I started this blog.

A year later, I wrote a first-anniversary post in which I went into detail about how and why I started blogging, how my blog got its name, how blogging had changed me, and a list of my favorite entries from that first year. If you’re interested in any of that, it’s all there.

Blogging has changed a lot in ten years. At the beginning of 2001, blogging was still pretty new — except to some people — and most blogs were either linkblogs, personal journals, or a combination of the two, like this one. Then 9/11 happened, and blogging went mainstream — but it came to be epitomized in the public mind by warbloggers and political bloggers.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One, the news media started to care about blogs only when blogs started to cover their territory — the news — so that’s how most of the general public was introduced to blogging. Two, the news media didn’t really care about other types of blogs; how do you explain to the masses such blogs as those by Jason Kottke or Matt Haughey or Anil Dash?

Then blogging became monetized, and most new blogs were launched with a focus on just one topic: politics, or home design, or being a mom, or making one’s way through Julia Child’s cookbook. Many of the personal blogs like mine started to fade away.

And then Facebook and Twitter appeared, and now nobody blogs anymore.

I miss the days when lots of gay guys blogged. We had our own homo blog community that spanned the nation and even the world. I made some good friends that way, and I even found my partner. There were lots of bloggers I never even met, and I miss them: bloggers like Closet Boy (what ever happened to him? I hope he’s out of the closet and living a happy life) and the Daily Dean (who, according to the photo on his faculty page, is as hunky as ever).

I really don’t understand why so many people stopped blogging. People claim to be too busy or too lazy or to have run out of things to say. That’s too bad, because I can learn so much more about people through a couple of paragraphs they’ve written than through their 140-character tweets. Reading a blog entry is like catching up with a friend; reading Twitter is like speed dating. When I post a new blog entry, I feel like I’m inviting you into my home, even if you’re reading this through an RSS reader. But when I tweet, I feel like I’m just throwing it out there into the agora where there’s nothing to distinguish it from anyone else’s tweets. It’s just noise — a stream of pithy data coming at you.

But I must confess: I myself once quit blogging. I had let my blog take over my life, and I needed to stop. A year later, I came back, after realizing that I could blog without baring my entire soul, that I could make my blog whatever I wanted it to be instead of letting it or its readers control me. Ever since then, my blog and I have had an understanding: I’m the boss.

You know what, though? I recently went back and skimmed through those highlights from my first year of blogging, and there were several incredibly soul-baring posts in there. There were times when I really lay myself out on a table for everyone to see. In some ways I feel I was a better writer back then, or at least a more interesting one.

Such is the price of stability, I guess.

Oh, one last thing: after I got to the end of writing this, I was curious to know what the traditional tenth anniversary gift is.

You know what it is?

Tin.

I think that’s funny.

Or aluminum, I guess, but “The Aluminum Man” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Happy tenth anniversary, blog.

real tin man
(Explanation of photo here.)

“A Platform of Political Discussion”

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Arizona Republican Congressman Trent Franks says, regarding whether 30-round ammo clips should be banned after the Tucson shootings:

At this point, I have criticized others for making a political nexus or a platform of political discussion out of this tragedy, and so I am going to avoid doing that myself.

Do you realize that this is not about politics? Do you realize that after a shooting incident in which the killer was stopped only after he paused to reload, it is not a “political discussion” to want to ban those types of ammo clips? Do you realize that the only way to ban these clips is through the political process?

Do you realize that not everyone is trying to take political advantage of this situation? Do you realize that this is something we actually care about? Do you realize that many of us are scared that ordinary citizens are able to buy ammo clips that let them fire 30 rounds without needing to reload? Do you realize that if these clips had been banned, then Jared Loughner would have fired many fewer bullets and that some of the human beings that were killed might not have been killed?

I swear, it’s exasperating.

Tucson

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Some thoughts on the Tucson shootings:

My original impulse on Saturday was to blame the shootings on a right-wing lunatic influenced by all the violent political rhetoric we’ve heard in the last few years. To ascribe such blame is not, despite what David Brooks might think, “political opportunism.” It’s a natural human reaction based on deductive reasoning: a Democratic congresswoman gets shot in the head — a congresswoman whose office windows were smashed in 2010, a congresswoman who held a constituent event in 2009 to which one of the constituents brought a gun — and it takes place in a political environment in which Sharron Angle talks about resorting to “Second Amendment remedies” and the need to “take Harry Reid out,” in which a certain Alaskan celebrity says, “Don’t retreat… reload!” and puts out a map with targets on certain congressional districts, in which a new Republican congressman’s chief of staff says, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and in which a guy flies an airplane into an IRS building. What else are we supposed to think but that this was done by a right-wing lunatic?

And yet — we were wrong. Loughner isn’t a right-winger but a truly mentally ill human being. While my instinct is to feel hatred for him, I also find myself wondering abut the nature of mental illness. How much is someone’s mental illness a part of one’s self? Do we blame Jared Loughner for these crimes, or do we blame Jared Loughner’s mental illness? Centuries ago, mental illness was seen as a form of possession by some evil or alien entity. If we could somehow remove the illness from his brain, would Loughner take the stand, or would his mental illness take the stand? It’s probably beside the point, because no matter what, Loughner belongs in confinement. Whether that confinement is conceived as punishment or as a way to prevent him from causing anyone else harm is a secondary question.

But the fact that Loughner is mentally ill does not excuse political exhortations to violence. Such exhortations are, in and of themselves, despicable and unacceptable. We don’t live in the nineteenth century, when Preston Brooks attacked Charles Sumner and some members of Congress carried guns. This is 2011. We long ago learned to settle our political debates without violence. We, as human beings, are supposed to know better today. Or so I had thought.

And as long as I live, I will never understand our nation’s gun culture. I can sort of understand why some people want to carry around pistols for personal protection from robbery or rape, regardless of whether I think it’s a good idea. But can’t we all agree that nobody should be able to buy a 30-round clip at a Sportsman’s Warehouse? When it comes to guns, our country is insane.

Sometimes I just find myself throwing my hands up in the air.

Defending the Tea-Partiers

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As much as I think the tea-partiers are a joke, I do want to defend them a little bit.

Okay, not quite defend them. But I do want to quibble with one criticism about them: that they are apparently hypocritical in defending certain parts of the Constitution while opposing other parts of it. The argument goes like this: if the tea-partiers claim to revere the Constitution, why do some of them want to get rid of parts of it like the Sixteenth Amendment (allowing an income tax) or the Seventeenth Amendment (instituting direct election of U.S. Senators)? And how can they revere a document that legitimized slavery through the three-fifths clause?

As an example, the New York Times yesterday said in an editorial that the Republicans’ desire to read the Constitution aloud on the House floor “is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation. Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.”

As another example, Talking Points Memo, a site I read almost every day, is making fun of the Republicans for reading an “amended, slavery-free” version of the Constitution today. The argument again is: look at their hypocrisy! If they love the Constitution so much, why don’t they read the whole thing?

Here’s where I part ways with the Times and TPM.

The thing is, it’s possible to revere the Constitution without thinking that it’s a perfect document. Why? Because it is not really about revering the Constitution; it is about revering constitutional process.

Nobody is saying that the original Constitution was flawless. What they are saying is: look, the Constitution itself includes a mechanism for changing it: Article V, which shows you how to amend it.

Much of legal argument in this country is not about substantive issues, but about procedural ones. In fact, “respecting the process” is itself a substantive value. Look at all the back-and-forth in the Prop 8 case about standing: it’s a procedural issue, but procedural issues are important in our society, because we are not an anarchy or even a pure democracy; we are a constitutional democracy. We respect rules and laws. There’s nothing wrong with changing things, as long as you do it in the right way. You can even change the right way to change things, as long as you do it the right way.

So what the tea-partiers are saying — or at least what they could say — is this: it’s perfectly fine to change the Constitution, as long as you do it the way you’re supposed to. Of course the three-fifths clause was unconscionable — and look, we got rid of it in a way prescribed by the Constitution itself: the Thirteenth Amendment! And nobody is saying to just flat-out ignore the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments; they’re saying, let’s repeal them, in the way the Constitution allows, just as the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) was repealed by the Twenty-second Amendment. (I happen to think the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments are great ideas and that it would be harmful and/or stupid to repeal them.)

What I do think is silly and a bit insulting is for the Republicans and tea-partiers to say that they’re the only ones who respect the Constitution. The Constitution contains lots of vague clauses that can be interpreted in many different ways. There are entire semester-long courses taught about the different ways to interpret the Constitution.

I still think the tea-partiers are a joke, and I don’t know how many of them think about the Constitution this way. But the Times and TPM are being a bit silly here.

Quote About Blogs

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A quote about blogs and bloggers:

It’s amazing that blogs even exist any more. Facebook and Twitter are the Fast Food Nation of thought. Who wouldn’t rather take 15 seconds to spout something off instead of the hours it takes to write a decent blog entry? Bloggers are the resistance, and before they get taken into custody in the name of Vapid Über Alles they need props while they’re still with us.

[via matt haughey]

New Year’s 1958

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With 1959’s North by Northwest on TV last night and a Twilight Zone marathon on Syfy all weekend, and this editorial about how the idea of the year 1971 once seemed futuristic, I’m feeling a little wistful this morning about the passage of time. So here’s some TV footage from New Year’s Eve 1957-58, featuring the ball drop in Times Square, along with Guy Lombardo, “direct from the famous Grill Room of the Roosevelt Hotel,” sponsored by Clairol.

Twenty-Ten

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Another year is over: twenty-ten, which looks more like a sports score than a year.

What did I do this year? In no particular order, moved with Matt into an apartment on the Barnard campus; painted a room for the first time — my home office; paid off my student loan; improved my finances; bought a Mac, an iPhone 4, and a Kindle; went to Disney World; sang in several concerts with my chorus, including one in New Haven; went on business trips to Houston and to Banff, Alberta; got a new boss; visited Matt’s family outside Chattanooga for Thanksgiving; learned more about being an uncle; reconnected with my 95-year-old great aunt; saw a heck of a lot of theater and a few movies; got more into Twitter; said goodbye to Lost; started watching Modern Family; decided to emotionally separate myself from politics.

This has been one of the most financially stable years of my life, and I wish I could say it’s because of my own actions, but it’s not; it’s because I have a partner whose job provides us an apartment as part of his compensation. I have a pleasant job that doesn’t pay nearly as much as I would if I were a practicing attorney, but that’s okay. As wonderful as these things are — and I know I am very lucky to have them — my life is not perfect; there are some big ongoing issues that I don’t write about here. I don’t have any disease or illness or anything like that; it’s just “life” stuff. Still, I’m in a seven-year relationship with someone who loves me and whom I love, and that’s saying a lot.

It’s hard to believe we greeted the new millennium 11 years ago. It’s hard for me to believe I’m 37 years old. I don’t like it. But there’s nothing I can do about it; one of the continuing themes for me these last few months has been to try to accentuate the positive, to appreciate the little good moments each day, to realize that my life is not going to be grand, that I will not be famous, that I probably won’t ever write a book, and that none of this really matters, because I’m not a more important human being than anyone else: I’m just one of the billions of people on this planet who will be forgotten a few decades after I’m gone.

All you can really do is live.

Here’s to more living in 2011.

Books Read in 2010

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Here are the books I read in 2010, in chronological order. As always, I followed my interests wherever they led me. They reflect some of the things I did this year: got a Mac, went to Walt Disney World. In the winter and early spring, I got back into the history of broadcasting, one of my recurrent interests. I read two novels this year; everything else was non-fiction. Oddly, there were a few books that I read for a second time this year. Here we go:

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Robert Caro

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, Robert Caro

Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, Erik Barnouw (half)

Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, Christopher H. Sterling & John Michael Kittross (first few chapters)

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, Charles Petzold (2nd time)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter (3rd time started, 1st time finished!)

Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, Richard H. John

Think Python: An Introduction to Software Design: How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, Allen Downey

Upgrading and Repairing PCs (19th Edition), Scott Mueller (first few chapters)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Snow Leopard Edition, David Pogue

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, Steven Levy (2nd time)

The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011, Bob Sehlinger, Menasha Ridge, and Len Testa

Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980, Laura Kalman

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein

Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik (first few chapters; would love to get back to this)

Walt Disney: An American Original, Bob Thomas

Realityland: True-Life Adventures at Walt Disney World, David Koenig

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Daniel Walker Howe

The Imperfectionists: A Novel, Tom Rachman

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (started for the second time)

Holiday Week

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I look forward to this week every year, and it almost always disappoints me. But I’ve been taking a different attitude toward it this time, and I’ve been a little happier because of it.

The last week of the year is pretty special for several reasons. One, it’s bookended by Christmas and New Year’s Eve; even though I’m not a Christian, I do get caught up in all the holiday spirit. Two, my birthday falls in the middle of the week, which gives the week special meaning for me, as well as a special rhythm and texture. Three, it’s the week when most of the Oscar-bait films come out, so it’s a great time to go to the movies. Four, I almost always take this week off from work.

I usually imagine filling my time by going to the movies, going to museums, having a nice lunch somewhere, enjoying the holiday spirit of the city. But I usually set up so many expectations for this week that I wind up disappointed.

I never do as much as I plan to do, and many things that sound interesting in theory wind up not being so in practice. Matt doesn’t like artsy-fartsy movies, so usually I either have to see them by myself — which makes me feel lonely — or not at all. And many museums wind up not being as interesting as I anticipated. For my birthday, I send out an invite to almost everyone I know in the city inviting them to a cozy bar, and only a small handful of people show up because most people are out of town. And then I feel so much pressure to have a great New Year’s Eve — to at least go to a party — but Matt is content to watch the ball drop on TV (and he doesn’t even care all that much about it) and then go to bed. And we don’t have a very big social life; there are actually no couples in the city — gay or straight — that we socialize with. So I tend to passively wait for invitations, and they don’t come. (I know that one needs to extend invitations to get them, etc., and I know that most people assume that when you’re a couple, you’re content to spend time alone together.) And then the week is over, and so is the whole holiday season, and it’s January and back to work.

So the week sometimes winds up a downer.

Last year was actually lots of fun, because we spent most of the week in Tennessee visiting Matt’s family, and we did something fun or interesting almost every day, and even when we were just sitting around the house, there were other people around. But the year before that, we were at home, and I flipped out a couple of times because we were living in a cramped apartment, and I was bored out of my mind and Matt and I could barely agree on anything fun to do.

So I decided that this year would be different. I decided to have zero expectations and just go with the flow.

And it’s been really nice.

Since I haven’t expected much, I haven’t been disappointed. Matt has had to go to his office almost every day, so I’ve had to find stuff to do, but it hasn’t been so bad.

On Christmas Eve, we went out for Chinese. It wasn’t great, but whatever. On Christmas Day, we opened some presents from Matt’s family, and in the afternoon we went out for Japanese.

On the day after Christmas, Matt and I went to see Tangled, a movie we both wanted to see, and it was cute. It snowed all day and into the night, and I love snowstorms, so it made the day nice and cozy. For dinner, I made chili, while everything outside turned to white.

On my birthday, instead of having sent out an invite to lots of people and having barely anybody show up, I had a really nice dinner out with Matt. Afterwards, we met up with three friends who had already expressed interest in getting together or I knew would be able to come. (A fourth wound up snowed in and unable to come out.) Our little group had a nice night drinking together.

The next day, the 28th, I went to Macy’s in Herald Square to exchange some Hanukkah gifts. Even though Macy’s was packed, I felt like I got out of the house and did something and interacted with people. At night, Matt and I had leftover chili for dinner, and then we watched the Kennedy Center Honors, which is one of my new holiday week traditions.

Yesterday, I went to the movies with an old friend who’s in town this week. We saw The King’s Speech, which is the only Oscar-bait movie that has called out to me. (True Grit and The Fighter don’t seem like they’d interest me, but I might see the former anyway.) I loved the movie. Afterwards, we trudged through the slushy streets and had a couple of drinks together, and it was great to socialize and catch up more with my friend. At night, Matt and I ordered in some dinner and watched TV.

So it’s been a nice week so far. Tonight we’re seeing what is supposed to be a spectacularly bad production of Dracula. On New Year’s Day we’re seeing Three Pianos. On January 2nd, I’m seeing a show with my mom and then getting together with the rest of my family for a belated birthday dinner.

If you try not to expect everything to be all perfect and exciting, you can wind up having a really nice time.

Thirty-Seven

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Thirty-seven years ago today I was born in a hospital in Manhattan — the same hospital where Stephen Sondheim was born, I just learned this year.

As I lay in bed last night, I was feeling a little dejected about this birthday. It’s not like it’s a milestone birthday like 30 or 40, but I feel like I’ve officially transitioned from my mid-30s into my late 30s, and I’m not happy about it. How did I get to my late 30s? When I turned 30 *SEVEN YEARS AGO* (jeez), I remember someone telling me, “Your 30s are great! You stop worrying about turning 30 and all the drama of your 20s starts to go away and your life becomes more stable.” I guess that’s generally true. On the other hand, the years since I’ve turned 30 seem to have just sped by. I don’t know what I’ve done with myself. My 30s have been… boring.

And yet when I look at the individual days, I know I’ve had some specific moments and experiences that have been lots of fun and enjoyable.

But it strikes me: the way my life is right now is probably the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life. This… might be it.

In some ways, that’s good and fine. Because you can’t really think about your life on a macro level like that, or else you’ll just get depressed. You have to think about it on a micro level. You have to appreciate all the little good things that happen in a day. You have to be attuned to *small* things: the smell and taste of a meal, the sound of blowing wind on a snowy day, relaxing on the couch with your honey watching TV, a nice drink with friends. I have given up most of the big ambitions I once had for myself, and I seem to be happier on a day-to-day level. It’s only when I look at the big picture that I start to get a little uneasy. So I try not to look at the big picture.

So anyway: I’m frickin’ 37 years old. Jesus.

Angels in America

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One of my biggest regrets in all my years of theatergoing is that I never saw the Broadway production of Angels in America. I could have; although I was in school in Virginia when both parts played in repertory in 1993-94, I made several trips home to visit my family, and I could have seen it during any of those visits. But I never did. I was very uncomfortable with my sexuality at that point, and in fact I barely saw any theater at all during that time. (A perusal of my Playbill collection informs me that the only Broadway shows I saw in 1993-94 were Kiss of the Spider Woman and She Loves Me.)

I was glad when HBO did a TV version a few years ago, because I finally had a chance to experience the show. But watching it on TV wasn’t the same as seeing it on stage. So I was thrilled last year when the Signature Theater announced a new stage production of the show. We snapped up tickets the day they went on sale, and this week we finally saw it: Part 1 on Tuesday night, and Part 2 last night.

It’s a terrific production, with superb acting all around. It’s just a 160-seat theater — much more intimate than the 975-seat Walter Kerr, where the Broadway production played — so I was thrilled to be able to see one of my major crushes up close: Zachary Quinto as Louis Ironson. Quinto has a decidedly different take on the role than Ben Shenkman did in the HBO production: more intense, more anguished, even a little threatening. I saw hints of Sylar at times. Robin Bartlett, as Hannah Pitt and Ethel Rosenberg, was every bit as good as Meryl Streep; having learned a few weeks ago that my great aunt knew Ethel Rosenberg, it made those scenes even more poignant. Billy Porter, as Belize and Mr. Lies, brought sass, wit and comedy. Bill Heck conveyed a masculine vulnerability as Joe Pitt; his voice sounds like that of a masked superhero carrying the world’s weight. Zoe Kazan as Harper Pitt seemed to be channeling Mary Louise Parker from the HBO production, and she’s a lot shorter than Bill Heck, which took some getting used to, but she was excellent. Robin Weigert as the Angel and the nurse was loopy and compassionate, respectively. Frank Wood as Roy Cohn was appropriately mean and evil.

But the standout was the actor in the role of Prior Walter. Christian Borle is supposed to play the role, but he was absent on both nights, so instead we saw his understudy, Eric Bryant. And it turned out to be his first time in the part. He did a great job: scared, funny, strong, thoughtful. I didn’t realize until I picked up our tickets for Part 2 that it was his debut in the role, but during the bows at the end of Part 1, the other actors had given him pats on the back, which made more sense when I found this out.

Interestingly, sitting in the audience on both nights was Michael Urie — best known as Mark on Ugly Betty, but he also won a Lortel Award last spring for playing Rudi Gernreich in The Temperamentals Off Broadway. He’ll be taking over the role of Prior Walter at the beginning of February. He was sitting a few rows in front of us each night, so it was interesting to occasionally look over and watch him watching the show. I wondered what was going through his mind.

So… last night, during the second intermission, I went over and said hello to him. He was sitting by himself and everyone around him had gotten up to stretch their legs, so I impulsively got up and walked a few rows down to his seat. “Excuse me,” I said. He looked up. “Sorry to bother you… you’re going into this in February, right?” He said he was. I chatted with him for a couple of minutes. I asked how he felt about going into the role, and he said it’s a pretty intense role, and in addition to the performances, he’d watched the understudy in rehearsal earlier that day. I told him I’d enjoyed him in The Temperamentals. I wished him luck in his new role and then walked the few rows back to my seat. I think Matt was mortified. I was a little embarrassed myself; when I talk to actors I’ve seen perform, I feel like a babbling little fanboy.

Anyway, it’s a great production, and I’m so glad I finally got to see it on stage. I have more thoughts on Angels in America, but I’ll leave that to another post.

DADT Repeal

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In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that anti-sodomy laws were permissible under the U.S. Constitution. Seventeen years later, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled that travesty of justice.

In 1993, the “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy was instituted. Seventeen years later, Congress is about to repeal another injustice against gay Americans.

I can’t believe this is actually going to happen. Just over a week ago, DADT repeal seemed dead. The Republicans had blocked it not once, but twice. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman could have given up, but instead of just giving repeal their pro forma support and saying, “Sorry, we tried,” they actually worked to make it happen. A standalone bill seemed like a Hail Mary pass — there might not be enough time, and both the House and the Senate would have to pass it.

But it’s happening. At 3:00 p.m. today, the Senate will vote on the actual repeal bill, after 63 senators — including six Republicans — voted this morning to allow a simple majority up-or-down vote on repeal.

I don’t know if it’s significant that each of these mistakes — Bowers v. Hardwick and don’t ask/don’t tell — took the same amount of time, seventeen years, to reverse. Seventeen years is not quite a full generation, although it’s close: a gay person born in 1993 will be able to join the military as an openly gay American when he or she becomes a legal adult next year. Perhaps the seventeen-year time frame is just a coincidence.

What we do know is this: each step toward justice builds on the steps that came before. Before Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, being gay itself was practically a crime. In the 1990s, in a child custody case in Virginia, a judge ruled that a lesbian had no right to custody of her own child because Virginia’s anti-sodomy law made her a felon.

After Lawrence, such a ruling was no longer possible. Opponents of marriage equality can no longer use anti-sodomy laws to show that gay people are unfit to marry or raise children. A weapon in their arsenal was taken away.

And now the ban on gays in the military is about to be repealed. In and of itself, this is a wonderful thing and long overdue. But it will also give more ammunition to the fight for marriage equality. After all, how can you argue convincingly that someone who has served his or her country as a member of the U.S. military should not allowed to marry the person he or she loves, or is unfit to be a parent? We’ll see example after example of openly gay soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen and airwomen; we may not see tons of them right away, but we’ll begin to see more and more of them. Anti-gay bigots will start to see a mismatch between their own stereotyped preconceptions of gay people and the reality out there. A does not compute message will begin to form itself in their heads, and either they will change their minds or their heads will explode.

No victory stands alone. Each one is helped by previous victories and helps to create future victories. Our president likes to quote Dr. King: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Each step nudges the trajectory a little bit more in the right direction.

Ripping My Music

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I’ve been in the process of ripping my CD collection to iTunes. I have a few hundred CDs, so this is taking a long time. But it’s also making me aware of how many CDs I have that I haven’t listened to in ages, or listened to only once, or never even listened to at all. (Dvorak’s Stabat Mater? When did I buy that?)

I used to have all my CDs sitting in their original jewel cases in a big CD rack, but a few years ago I bought a few hundred Case Logic sleeves and transferred my whole collection into them. I then put the sleeved discs into boxes. My collection takes up a lot less space, but since I no longer have the CDs in a rack with all the spines facing outward, I no longer know what I have in my collection.

I’ve got a ton of classical CDs. During my second year of college, I became interested in classical music. I bought a classical music guide recommending recordings for famous pieces, and I used to pore through it all the time. In Charlottesville I’d go to Plan 9 Records and flip through their offerings and sometimes even buy stuff; I’d do the same thing at Tower Records when I’d come back home to New Jersey and New York.

I became addicted to buying classical music CDs. It continued from college through law school, still in Charlottesville. What I loved most of all were complete collections: all of Mozart’s string quartets in one box, or all of Shostakovich’s quartets, or all of Brahms’s chamber music. They always came in such beautiful cardboard cases; how could I resist? I would stand there in the store, holding it in my hand, looking at the price tag, thinking, oh my god I want to buy this so badly, but I shouldn’t be spending 60 bucks or 80 bucks on CDs, and who knows if I’ll ever listen to some of these pieces? But I wanted them. It wasn’t just about listening to them; it was about having them. I would be paralyzed, standing there in the middle of the store. Reason might win over and I’d put it away and go home. But the next time — or maybe the time after that — the addiction would win. Trembling, excited, I’d go up to the counter and pay for the box of CDs, feeling guilty and ashamed but really wanting it anyway.

I should point out that I was completely in the closet at this point in my life and had no sexual outlet. Make of that what you will.

I was also really picky about which recordings of a piece I’d buy. If the store had a copy of the Penguin Guide or the Gramophone Guide, I’d study the entry intently for the piece I was looking to buy. If the store didn’t carry any of the recordings that were recommended by the guides, I wouldn’t buy them.

Anyway, I’ve been importing my CDs into iTunes one by one, and I’m already benefiting: it’s great to do a search and see everything I have that’s conducted by Leonard Bernstein or Robert Shaw (shaw shaw shaw) (sorry, inside joke), or everything by Mozart, or whatever. I have lots more CDs to import, though. I may need to buy a bigger external hard drive to store it all.

Nate Silver on Tokyo

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Nate Silver is apparently on vacation in Tokyo. I love how he describes the city:

Tokyo is a bit intimidating so far — roughly speaking, it’s as expansive as Los Angeles but as dense as New York; it doesn’t quite feel foreign in the way a European city might to an American, but instead, almost like some sort of parallel universe.

That description is dead-on to me.

Obama the Rationalizer

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You could see Obama furiously spinning the tax cut deal in his press conference yesterday: it’s a necessary compromise! This country is built on compromise!

I’m getting tired of Obama always telling us he deserves points for compromise, as if compromise were the only option. Of course compromise is the only option if you never fight for anything in the first place. It’s one thing to compromise after you’ve been negotiating with someone for a long time; it’s another thing to signal before you even begin negotiating that you’re willing to compromise with an opposition who is not willing to do the same.

What did the country get out of this? What did Republicans give up? The Republicans gave in on unemployment benefits, which they would eventually have conceded anyway. It was just a bargaining position. They know how to negotiate; the Obama White House does not.

I am so tired of this.

Obama thinks he’s such a masterful leader. But he’s not. True leaders think creatively. They look at the chessboard and say, how can I rearrange all these pieces to achieve my goals? If they don’t like the chessboard, they create a new one. They make up new rules and get other people to agree to them. Obama should be on prime-time TV every night, telling the American people why the Republicans are wrong and he is right. The Republicans want to block unemployment benefits? Fine — Obama should go on TV and say, Look at what the Republicans are doing, and all because they refuse to make rich people pay the same tax rates they paid during the Clinton era. They claim they’re concerned about the deficit and yet they have no way to pay the $900 billion cost of these continued tax cuts.

Obama doesn’t do any of that. He’s completely passive. He never even tries to fight. Over and over again, the Democrats let Republicans frame the debate, even on issues where the Democrats have the more popular position. And over and over again, the White House negotiates against itself.

This White House is pathologically afraid of political combat. It’s so afraid of poisoning the political well, when actually, nobody cares about the damn political well. People don’t care about political discourse; they just want results. You can turn off the TV or close the newspaper, but you can’t turn off your economic situation.

Obama just cares about things that most people don’t really care about. He needs to come back down here to Earth where the rest of us are.

Family Commie Hanukkah Party

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Yesterday we had our annual family Hanukkah party. This used to be a tradition when I was growing up: the families of my paternal grandmother and her two sisters would get together on Saturday or Sunday evening during Hanukkah at someone’s house or apartment (we were spread from northern New Jersey to the Bronx and Queens, so the location was different ever year) and have latkes and other food, and all us kids — the second cousins — would get presents. By the end of evening, piles of wrapping paper would be everywhere.

The tradition was dormant for many years until being revived last year, but Matt and I couldn’t go last year because we had a chorus concert. Fortunately we were able to go this year, and although there weren’t as many people due to deaths and distance and conflicting commitments, it was still a wonderful time.

The best part of it was that I got to see my 95-year-old great aunt, my grandmother’s sister, who I hadn’t seen since my grandmother’s funeral four years ago. I consider my great aunt to be my last link to my grandma. (The third sister passed away many years ago.) At 95 she’s still sharp as a tack, with a droll sense of humor; although she uses a walker, she can walk a little bit without it. She lives in an assisted living community in Queens; someone comes in a couple of times a day to look after her, but other than that she can manage on her own. God bless her. I cherish her deeply.

I learned a couple of things about my relatives yesterday. One, my dad’s cousin (my great aunt’s son) went to junior high school with Lee Harvey Oswald. Two, my great aunt knew Ethel Rosenberg. I had no idea.

I was also reminded that most of my relatives of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generation were Bundists, which means they were basically socialists and/or communists. This was pretty typical of New York City Ashkenazi Jews in the 1920s and 1930s who emigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe. They all read the Forverts or the Freiheit. Of course, the Cold War came along and made these beliefs dangerous, so they had to tame it down and dropped out of politically questionable organizations. But I think it’s great. I love my radical commie ancestors.

Thanks, Chris Christie

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New Jersey Transit had delays this morning. Just like one evening last week. I got to work late because of it.

Until train 6610 could be moved, all NJ TRANSIT and Amtrak trains in both directions were forced to share a single track for service to and from New York, resulting in delays that ranged from 30 to 60 minutes.

But yeah, we don’t need another train tunnel under the Hudson.

Fuck you, Governor Christie.

Crazy Audience Member!

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Last night’s production of Spider-Man was terrible enough, but it was made worse by the most bizarre experience I have ever had with an audience member at the theater.

Our tickets were in the second-to-last row of the balcony. We took our seats at about 7:50. A few minutes after we sat down, a family came and sat down next to Matt: a man, a woman, and two boys. The woman took the seat next to Matt. Dark hair, probably in her late 30s.

The show still hadn’t started, so the woman began chatting with us. That was fine, although we were both fiddling with our phones and trying to check into the theater on Foursquare. After a little small talk, we both turned back to our phones. But she kept chatting.

“Happy Hanukkah!” she said to us. “You guys are Jewish, right?”

I said that I was but that Matt that wasn’t. It was a little awkward; you shouldn’t really try to guess what religion someone is.

And then she said, “Is there an extra night of Hanukkah this year?”

Um, what?

“No, it always has eight nights,” I said.

“There’s no extra night because it’s not a leap year,” Matt said jokingly.

“Oh, my son told me that sometimes it has an extra night. I guess he was tricking me!”

Then she pointed out some of the lighting equipment toward the sides of the theater and said how neat it looked.

It was then that I noticed she had a beverage with her. It was a smoothie in a plastic cup, or at least it looked like a smoothie. I realized that this woman was either drunk out of her mind or just bonkers.

Then one of the producers walked out onto the stage and welcomed us to the show. He told the audience to remember that it was a preview, and also not to take photos, recordings, all that usual stuff, and to enjoy the show. He left the stage and the lights went down and the show started.

But the woman wouldn’t be quiet. She kept oohing and aahing and pointing at the stage and saying, “Wowwwwww!” and “Look at that!” and throwing up her hands and swaying like she was at a rock concert. It was annoying and a little distracting, but I decided to ignore her because the show wasn’t very good anyway and it was mostly loud enough to drown her out.

But a group of college girls sitting in front of us started turning around and looking at her, and I heard the people behind us start to talk about her too.

At one point the woman took out her cell phone and took a picture, which had been specifically prohibited, of course.

And then… she started singing along with the music.

That was it. I leaned across Matt and said to the woman, sternly, “Excuse me, would you please be quiet?” She looked at me. I said, “Seriously. Please be quiet.” I think I embarrassed Matt a little bit. It was hard to return my focus to the stage because I don’t like having to confront people and I was feeling a little uncomfortable now.

The show continued, and so did the woman’s antics. Finally, near the end of the first act, she pulled out her camera again. And this time she stood up to try to take pictures, and she was unsteady on her feet. She was totally blocking the view of the people sitting behind her. That was the last straw. Matt and I both yelled at her, actually yelled, and told her to sit down. The music was blasting, so only the people immediately nearby heard our confrontation.

I said to her, “You’re ruining the show! You’ve been talking the entire time!”

“What are you talking about? I’ve barely said ten words!”

“Are you kidding me? You’ve been making noise during the whole show!” And then I said angrily, “Sober up!”

“I’m not even drinking, you weirdo,” she said. And then again, “You’re a weirdo!”

Five minutes later the first act ended, and Matt and I immediately got out of our seats and went to find some ushers. We told them there was a crazy woman sitting next to us in seat G106 who was drunk and making noise and standing up and taking photos.

“Yeah, I saw a flash, but I wasn’t sure who it was,” one of the ushers said.

“Well, she’s totally ruining the show,” I said. “Not that it’s a very good show anyway, but still –”

“Well I don’t have anything to say about that,” the usher said awkwardly, “but we’ll see what’s going on and we’ll eject her if we need to.”

When we went back to our seats, the whole family was… gone. Their coats were gone, too. Dad and the kids must have realized they needed to get her out of there.

We started commiserating with the people around us. The college girls in front of us said that the woman’s kids had kept telling her to be quiet. That made me feel better — at least it wasn’t just me and Matt. But I felt bad for her family.

Then the people behind us said to us, “Was that woman with you?”

“No,” I said. “She just sat down before the show and started talking with us!”

Thankfully, they didn’t return, so we got to watch the second act without disruption, atrocious as it was.

Between the terrible show and the crazy lady, it was just a bizarre fucking night at the theater.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

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We saw Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark last night. Before I continue, I should point out that the show is still in early previews (last night was the fourth such preview) and it doesn’t officially open until January. So in theory, there’s time to fix any problems.

But, oh my god. This thing is absolutely terrible.

Most of the publicity has been about the show’s technical snafus and injured actors. But there were no technical problems last night, no glitches that stopped the show.

The real problems are the book, the music, and the lyrics. And I don’t see how any of these get fixed.

The story is totally incoherent. The songs (except one) are tuneless and uninteresting. The lyrics are pointless. The spoken dialogue is boring. The characters are uninvolving. There is no wit or humor. There is nothing to make you laugh or tear up or care about what is happening.

I’m sorry. This is not a Broadway show. This is a $65 million, three-hour piece of crap. Some people have said it’s basically a Cirque de Soleil production, but that’s not true. Cirque de Soleil performers at least contort themselves into interesting shapes and create art with their bodies. Here, it’s just people on wires. So you can’t even give it that.

I go to the theater to be changed. I want to walk out of a show thinking about something in a new way, or having laughed or cried, or heard some good songs, or watched some interesting performances. I’m not impressed by people flying above the audience in costumes or enormous pieces of moving scenery or giant video screens.

This thing has no reason to exist.

The story makes no sense. There are a few random villains but they rarely appear and they rarely interact with Spider-Man. They don’t even seem to have any diabolical plans or motivation. They attack Spider-Man a couple of times but we don’t know why. They’re just kind of there. In addition to the Green Goblin and some villains called the Sinister Six, the Greek mythological figure Arachne appears in the show. Arachne, as the Playbill helpfully reminds us, was turned into a spider by Athena after she beat Athena in a weaving contest. While it might be an interesting idea to have a story about Arachne and Spider-Man, there is no story here. She just shows up every so often. She has no reason for being in the show.

As for the music: I like rock musicals. I loved Spring Awakening, and American Idiot has its moments. Both of those shows use music and lyrics to tell a story. But Bono and The Edge appear to know nothing about how to do this. And they won’t even deign to come to New York to watch the previews of their own damn show, so how can they fix anything?

Oh, I forgot to mention the four annoying, recurring geek characters who talk in rhyming couplets and bring the action to a complete stop whenever they appear and whose only apparent purpose is to stall for time during set changes behind the curtain.

And also, there’s a song where Arachne and an eight-legged spider chorus sing a song about shoes. Yeah, shoes. It’s not even campy bad. It’s just boring bad.

The one good moment in the show is a ballad sung late in the second act by Peter Parker’s girlfriend, Mary Jane, played by Jennifer Damiano. I feel sorry that she has to be in such an awful show after her role in the terrific Next to Normal.

I tried to go in with an open mind but I hated this thing from start to finish.

Even the name of the show is terrible.

Oh, and I haven’t even talked about the CRAZY AUDIENCE MEMBER sitting next to us! But that deserves its own post. (Update: here it is.)

Exceptional

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When I was 14 years old, my dad’s company offered him a position in Tokyo, so we picked up and moved halfway across the world. I’ve always considered myself very lucky that I got to live outside the United States for three years and be a third-culture kid.

For those three years we were essentially cut off from anything happening back home. This was before the Web or e-mail, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. The two available English-language newspapers covered some American politics and foreign policy, but they were mostly internationally focused. I could go to the American Club every week to read a week-old Sunday New York Times, and during our last year and a half we had CNN, but that was about it. I basically have an American pop-culture void from 1988 to 1991. We landed at JFK in the summer of 1989 for a visit, and everyone was wearing Batman t-shirts. The following summer it was Bart Simpson t-shirts. It was overwhelmingly strange.

Living overseas gave me a perspective on this country that most Americans will never get to have: the perspective of an outsider. The perspective of a foreigner. Although I’ve been back here for almost 20 years, I have always carried some of that perspective with me. I’m forever thankful for it.

Yesterday I read this piece [via Matt Haughey], and it’s been resonating with me ever since.

It begins:

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world—by a wide margin.

It’s a pretty entertaining piece of writing, although some it is over the top. That said, it makes an excellent point near the beginning: most of what the American people accept as normal is not really normal. The frame through which Americans see things is distorted. There is so much that we accept in this country that people in the rest of developed world would never stand for.

First and foremost, our sub-par health care system.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin.

Our system is an outrage. And yet everyone thinks it’s normal.

We were living in Japan when Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, died. At the time, I imagined a Kansas farmwife back in the U.S. saying to her husband, “I saw on the teevee that the king a’ China died!” Now, I’m sure most middle-aged Americans in 1989 remembered World War II and knew who Hirohito was. But the point is, most Americans don’t care or know about anything that happens outside the United States unless it involves someone attacking us.

Even though other countries have problems, ours are worse. Things here are just fucked up. Life here is seriously out of whack.

Our health care system sucks. Our taxes are too low. Our infrastructure is a shambles. I ride NJ Transit twice a week and those train cars are straight out of the 1970s, and they’re never on time, and a heavy rainstorm can shut things down. In most other developed countries, this would be unacceptable, but here we all accept it as normal. None of this is normal. Thomas Friedman and Nick Kristof are dead on.

It’s the Southernification of the United States. Before the Civil War, the north was innovating, building its infrastructure. The south wanted to remain a stratified, backwoods society. We should have let the South go like they wanted, because the Old South mentality controls the whole country today. It’s ridiculous.

It’s the Overton Window again. Our frame is completely distorted.

People need to stop feeling guilty for wanting health care and higher taxes and a good infrastructure. It is normal to want these things!

And in the rest of the developed world, it is normal to have them.

Americans need to wake the hell up.