Brooklyn

I have been in Brooklyn for several days now. Manhattan is something distant that you can only go to at night.

Instead I have been a Gowanus Flaneur.

People live in Brooklyn but I keep them out of my photos as they disrupt my composition.

DC

The Mall

Trains.

Ruby slippers.

Dupont Circle

Dupont Circle, 6 pm.

Dupont Circle, 11 pm.

Welcome to Virginia

Dinosaur park, Berryville, VA.

Baltimore

Baltimore is a mix of tony Georgian flats and fat white trash John Waters' set extras. The downtrodden hoods of Fells Point and Hampden are now bursting with cookie shops and antique stores. I spent a lot of money at Atomic Books which is awesome. I had an omelet made with fresh crab meat at Cafe Hon.

Inside-the-Beltway thinking

Safeway, Greenbelt, MD.

Bros before hos!

A new essay of mine is up on the PopMatters website today...

"Bros Before Hos" looks at internet erotics centered around the frat boy and collegiate sexuality--motifs of violence, misogyny, and homosexuality--in the wake of the Duke Lacrosse team. Here's an excerpt:

Depending on your local and state laws, some of the scenarios depicted could be very illegal and many are unambiguously wrong. In one episode, the College Fuck Fest crew is hanging out at a party in Las Vegas when out of nowhere a stranger approaches, whispering conspiringly, "Hey dudes, there's a chick passed out in one of the rooms upstairs." Inside the room, they find a woman lying on a cot. The boys try to stifle their laughter, but they can't contain themselves. One bends down and runs his tongue down her neck, pulling on her halter top. "Dude, what if she wakes up?" She does stir a little, and then, fulfilling a classic male fantasy, the drunk girl starts kissing him back. She turns from side to side. "I can't see," she moans. The man begins to have sex with the woman, and she acts like she's into it. "Hey Travis, you didn't even get her name," the cameraman says. The men laugh.

Whether or not such nonconsensual sex really occurs at fraternities, these videos still reveal a great deal about the fantasies of masculinity -- and the links these fantasies draw between sex and power -- that drive pledges and ingénues both. Why else would a bunch of college guys choose to live in cramped, often squalid quarters with other young men but to be around this kind of privileged masculinity?

When it comes to embodying cultural ideals of masculinity, there's strength in numbers; fraternity requires a set of rules and aesthetics, brotherhood implies a shared set of genes. This masculine ideal can be performed by a troupe of young men who would never measure up on their own. A frat house is a support group.

Blog about it.

Blog about me.

I give props to Rob Horning, my editor over at PopMatters...he's a damn good smart careful editor and he has a great blog of his own on the site...Marginal Utility. Check it out.

When in Minnesota and you got a drinking quota....

Thanks to MNspeak, I've been reminiscing about NOFX, who provided the soundtrack to many of my tragic junior high skateboarding poseur-fests in downtown Duluth. I "rode" a Maple board which basically meant that I just sat on curbs smoking cigarettes and watching the other cute sk8ters. We would also drive around town, destroy public property, and listen to NOFX among other bands.

NOFX's new video for the song "Seeing Double at the Triple Rock" was shot at the bar, which so often unfairly languishes in the penumbra of First Avenue.

Okay these screen grabs from the .wmv video suck but check out the video anyway.

the suspense is killing me...i hope it will last | new york times magazine article on the future of the book | graphic drawings of gay animal/man hybrids having x-rated gay sex

Lemsip and manhattans

Whenever I visit Britain I stuff my bags with Lemsip on the return trip home. A lemony powder cut with a strong vein of Paracetamol, mixed with hot water it makes a lovely narcotizing tea that puts me to sleep immediately.

The New York Times yesterday contained an article on allergies. My allergies have been mildly debilitating for weeks. Red eyes. People have been coming up to me at work and asking me in a confidential whisper if I have been crying.

The allergies have turned into a cold, maybe strep throat. Strep can affect other parts of the body beyond the throat. I once dated a man who (before I met him) had gotten strep in his urethra from some nasty oral sex. And I once had coffee with a seminary student in Atltanta who was convalescing from a nasty bout of strep in his ass. I may or may not have strep, but I am determined to cure whatever I have before my trip to the East Coast later this week.

Being sick is another excuse to drink for me. On Saturday I drank a lot of Manhattans, which does temporarily cure the throat and disinfect the sinuses.

As I am typing this the Tylenol PMs are slowly breaking down my fine motor skills.

Oh!

Oh! I just realized it's been about a year since fiveoclockbot returned to the scene in its present incarnation.

Some readers have gone and some new ones have entered the discussions-I-mean-bitch-sessions. The incoming links are about the same as they've always been. I get between 500 and 700 unique visits a day.

Here are the archives for the year.

So far my filter has blocked 42,689 spams.

I love all of you.

Winning a round against my landlord

I won a round against my previous evil slumlord of a landlord, Jim Gray of Irving Properties. Earlier this week, Jim Gray allowed me to truss him up like a pig. He submitted. Licked my shitkickers clean.

I moved out of my hellhole of an apartment in South Minneapolis at the end of March. Though I only moved four blocks, it was the longest move of my life. After Irving Properties sprung a surprise condo conversion on the tenants in the building (starting construction without giving proper notice of condo conversion) I had found a new apartment but my move-in time at the new place was a day AFTER I had to be out of my present shithole. Irving Properties refused to budge on my move-out day, so I was forced to out A DAY EARLY, moving all my life into a rental truck that sat out on the mean, wet streets of South Minneapolis for two nights while I slept with the cats on Jessica's couch.

When Irving Properties finally sent me back my deposit, the fuckers subtracted $250 my deposit, claiming I had overstayed my welcome by five hours. Which comes out to $50 an hour.

Well, I promptly wrote them a nice fuck-you letter, demanding the return of my deposit or I would take them to court. Within ten days, Jim Gray submitted. Lick those boots clean, bitch.

I was almost disappointed. I had a good case against the fucker, with witnesses and affidavits to prove my timeline. I was working on a sexy Matlock swagger. If I had taken him to court I could have recouped damages against his blatant slumlord tactics. But in the end all I ended up with after months of fighting is what was rightfully mine from the start.

The Rise of the Retrosexual

"First they came for the gays"

First they came for the gays
and I did not speak out
because I was not gay.
Then they came for the leatherfolk
and I did not speak out
because leather chaffs me.
Then they came for the unmarried swingers
and I did not speak out
because I was not a swinger.
Then I tried to buy the morning after pill
and I was refused
because God hates sluts.

What is a retrosexual? I didn't come up with the term but I wish I did...whenever it rolls off my tongue I can't help but picture my friend Mike wearing a chastity belt under his Banana chinos. Hot.

A retrosexual is the authority figure who told you masturbation makes your knuckles hairy. A retrosexual protests outside the abortion clinic. Michelle Bachman is a retrosexual. So is Rick Santorum. So are the organizations Concerned Women for America and Family Research Council. A retrosexual is anyone who spreads lies in order to suppress sexual expression, anyone who foists their moldy morals on the rest of us. Anyone who wants the government to legislate private sexual pleasures.

This DailyKos diary is worth reading as it brings to light what the gays have been saying for quite some time. Do you really think these homegrown American Taliban (fundamentalist) organizations such as Concerned Women for American will stop once they've banned gay marriage? That's just the start, folks...gay marriage is just the kind of knee-jerk issue that gets your foot in the door.

If you take a step back you'll see its part of a broader vendetta against sex in general...sex aids, sex education, representations of sex, and sex itself...both gay and straight sex. Trust me, they're not going to stop with banning gay marriage. Their main target is any form of sexual expression outside of a married, heterosexual procreative unit.

Consider the following...

• This New York Times article on how the anti-abortion movement has evolved into a broader movement against contraception...
• The proposal this spring to ban sex toys in South Carolina
• The ways in which anti-gay marriage bans in Ohio and Missouri are being used to discriminate against unmarried heterosexual couples...
• "'Culture-of-life' assfucks" (to use Dan Savage's term) who are against a vaccine that would prevent the HPV virus (genital warts) and save many women from dieing of cervical cancer because an HPV vaccine would encourage sex...
• Legislation currently introduce in Minnesota that would force pharmacies to allow individual pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception...

Despite these developments, the DailyKos diarist thinks that these extreme, anachronistic views actually hurt their overall cause:

Basically, Concerned Women for America and similar organizations seek to codify into law (and in some cases, restore) some pretty extreme sexual teachings. Let's recap: They believe that sex acts that do not include the possibility of procreation are sinful. They want to outlaw all abortion, outlaw all contraception, and enforce sodomy laws even for sex between married couples. They believe in the familial subservience of females--first to the authority of their fathers and then to the authority of their husbands. These are not mainstream positions in the US anymore. CWA and their allies would say that's the trouble with America--and that the change in attitude is liberalism's fault rather than liberalism's accomplishment. Either way they are giving us the credit for the prevailing social view and making themselves look dangerously radical by comparison.

Bottom line: it probably helps us to have the more extreme positions of their agenda exposed since I suspect that ultimately these are winning wedge issues for our side rather than for their side. Just watch and see how these retrosexual organizations, and more important, Repubilcan candidates, run away from and minimize (and hide) these positions during the 2006 elections. It's almost to our advantage to keep publicizing their true agenda, since the majority of the electorate is almost certainly with us.

I disagree. They're playing a shell game, shuffling shame around and stacking it on this group, and then that one, dividing and reconfiguring identifications. And I think that as long as gay sex is weighed and afforded a different value than, say, heterosexual oral sex or anal sex or extramarital sex, the debates will allow to take advantage of people's natural tendencies to sit back and not give a shit while another group's private, consensual pleasures are criminalized (again).

I think what we need to do is rescue broader terms like 'sodomy' from its contemporary meaning as something that the gays do and resuscitate its historical, puritanical roots to our advantage...something to celebrate...sexual acts of defiance that both straights and gays, married couples and unmarried couples, old folks and teenagers can take part in. Couldn't it be a term of solidarity between reasonable adults who believe that sexual freedom belongs to everyone?

the war on peons fucking | what the rest of moussaoui's life will be like | sturtle.com | bush & nixon...a race to the finish | as the sea levels rise, will you end up underwater? | real life internet horror story | cure your asthma by giving yourself hookworms and give yourself hookworms by walking around in human shit in cameroon

Flight of the Navigator

Last night I watched Flight of the Navigator, a made-for-t.v. Disney movie from 1986. It was my favorite movie as a 10-12 year old. I probably saw it one Friday evening in summer, because Disney would show these movies each Friday and we always taped them. I know that I wore that tape out in a couple of years.

It's a story about a 12 year old boy named David who is mysteriously transported eight years into the future in an instant, without aging.

The movie starts in 1978, where David is finding he's reached a difficult age.

He is realizing that he likes girls but doesn't know how to talk to them. His dad offers some well-meaning advice but it's clear he's on his own. No one really understands him. His little brother Jeff is a four-eyed terror. He's caught between childhood and the next stage.

I remember I identified strongly with him as a fellow eleven and twelve year old. I was the oldest, and my younger siblings were terrors. No one quite understood what I was going through. Like David, the only people close to me who could offer advice were my parents, they came across as well-meaning but utterly inept. David fixes his telescope on to the harbor (they're in Fort Lauderdale) and spies on a cute girl. He's watching the world from afar while prettier, more able people have all the fun.

Later that evening, David's mom tells him to walk through the woods and meet his little brother, whose coming from a neighbor's house. In the woods, he's a little frightened, his dog Bruiser isn't much of a guard dog. Jeff frightens him and he becomes disoriented and falls into a ravine. Seemingly moments later, he wakes up and climbs out of the ravine.

But upon returning home, he finds an old couple living in his house! The wallpaper is uglier, and instead of fireworks and telescopes in his bedroom, an old man in a red velvet smoking jacket is reading the newspaper and drinking whiskey on the rocks!

He's eventually reunited with his parents, who have aged considerably. Especially his mother--you can see it in her eyes. It's been eight years since David went missing. They've given him up for dead. David is still twelve, but everyone around him is eight years older. Jeff is now eighteen years old.

"You're like my big little brother."

As a little kid, I was incredibly jealous of David's predicament. Ignoring the trauma he's going through, the tears and confusion...he's reunited with his parents, but they aren't really his parents and he shies away from their touch...but he is suddenly special, and people are noticing him. Something has happened that hasn't happened to anyone else. He's different. Jeff feels horrible for scaring him like that--he spent every Saturday for years after his disappearance putting up fliers around town.

At the same time that everyone is paying attention to David, another plot line is developing that will soon converge with David's. A beautiful silver spacecraft has crashed into some powerlines, and NASA is currently trying to figure out what to do with it. After some tests on David's brain activity reveal some startling answers as to where he's been for eight years, NASA catches wind, and offers to run some tests on David for 48 hours to determine where he's been for eight years.

This is my favorite part of the movie. When hooked up to NASA's computers, David's brain begins communicating directly with the computer systems, downloading star charts and answering questions as to where he's been--on a distant planet being studied by aliens! That's why everyone's aged while David has stayed the same--traveling at the speed of light, time slowed down for him! I wish I had the clip to show you because it's beautiful. Dark organ chords rumble while David's brain appears to overload the computer monitors with a dazzling confusion of star charts, eventually showing the scientists where he's been...the planet Phaelon!

I wanted to feel special as a little kid. I wanted to be a genius. I wanted to be so smart so effortlessly that people would have to take notice. I was in love with this part of the film as a kid because I relished the fantasy of having a brain so powerful that it would overwhelm computers. I wanted to be kidnapped by aliens and taken to a far-away planet, to be changed by them and to come back part human, part alien. I dreamed of an untapped potential in my brain. The house I grew up in was surrounded by acres and acres of forest, untouched, miles to the next house. In these woods I would play...often pretending I was Luke Skywalker. Luke Skywalker and David both appealed to me because I wanted to be special. I dreamed that there was a destiny in store for me, greatness. That I would have to do is be at the ready for when it chose to overwhelm me. These fantasies included leaving the planet. Like Luke Skywalker left his desert planet. Like David left earth.

On the NASA base, the spaceship begins speaking to David, calling him. And with the help of an intern named Carolyn, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, David escapes his locked room and enters the spaceship.

The spaceship is a drone ship powered by a computer (the voice is that of Paul Reubens) who had its star charts erased when it crashed into the powerlines. After escaping the hangar, the spaceship zooms off, taking David with it. Eventually he becomes friends with the computer, who he names Max, and they fly around the world, freaking out unassuming humans, listening to the Beach Boys, and running circles around the NASA scientists, who can't quite keep up with them.

Eventually, David decides its time to return to his family. But when they arrive in Fort Lauderdale and David steps outside the spaceship, he's faced with a confusing scene. The government officials, guns drawn, will obviously take him away from his family but even if he was left with them, they are strangers to him.

In another key scene of the film for me, David addresses his family and tells them that he's sorry but he doesn't belong here anymore and so he's leaving. The looks on the faces of his family were priceless for me as a child.

But instead of spending the rest of his life in intergalactic exploration, as I would have done, David makes a different decision--despite the risks involved, he asks Max to take him back in time, back to 1978 to the moment he left, even though the trip might vaporize him.

he wakes up where he fell, behind his house. A train is rumbling past. He returns to his family, who are back to being the boring 70s era people he left. Still clueless. Despite loving the film as a child, these last scenes always disappointed me. Nothing is as boring as the 70s...his family is so not sexy.

When I was a kid, my bedroom had those glow in the dark stars plastered across the ceiling--very cool. Fantasizing about leaving the woods of Northern Minnesota and my family, who didn't understand me and who I viewed from a critical distance, as though through a telescope, I would pray to my concept of the god at the time to take me away. Or, if it should be the case that I was being protected from alien abductions, to please lift the protective veil. I dreamed to be woken up, to be taken, to leave the atmosphere. Unlike David, I never would have returned.

viagraholics | daily kos: minnesota congressional update | condi loves the trannies! | what can elephants hear? | pornzilla | the return of a jedi: christian themes in anakin skywalker's redemption | perinatal imagery in the star wars trilogy | cool workspaces

Where I am

If more than a few days pass between postings, I'm either having a really good time or a really bad time, because blogs thrive within a space of mediocrity.

More Xanga

Makes me glad I don't live in nyc. Someone buy me a fucking camera. My friend Ben is so much better. Every time I think about him I end up thinking about the concept of 'marrow' and how I enjoyed, as a little kid, eating the burnt-up marrow out of the bones leftover from our Kentucky Fried Chicken family-sized bucket.

As I work at a poultry farm, funny things happen from time to time to leaven the day. Like today, at five pm and I went to my boss and said, "I can't wait to go home and take my Viagra...I mean, my Allegra." I have bad allergies these days.

Also, I said to a female colleague, "I wanna smoke a fag right now."

And she said, "Do you mean you want to smoke a cigarette in the British sense or do you mean you want to have sex with a gay?"

Both, I replied.

Someone needs to write this book: Pigs at Play: The Reification of Gay Culture. Thank you.

enter dennis cooper's online motion picture festival | play-doh scented cologne | city living in the burbs | get your photo taken with the ass | christian bumper stickers | diy coasters | from kate silver: download this bad ride | funny scenes from drawn together

If this were a Xanga blog...

If this were a Xanga blog, I might write something like:

Do you ever talk to yourself in the mirror? Sometimes I do. Usually when I know I need to go work out and I'm too tired/lazy to muster up the gumption. Today I got home from work at 5:45. Putzed around a bit. Finally looked at myself in the mirror and said very sternly and out loud, "Go for a run, you daddy fucker." Did the trick.

Makeout City

GIRLS WHO ARE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS TO BE GIRLS WHO DO BOYS LIKE THEY'RE GIRLS WHO DO GIRLS LIKE THEY'RE BOYS ALWAYS SHOULD BE SOMEONE YOU REALLY LOVE

Makeout City at Brian, Tom, and Emily's party on Saturday night thanks to the bisexual editorial board of the campus newspaper--the boys made out with me and each other and girls, and the girls made out with boys who had girlfriends and gay boys, and there were kittens and blowjobs in the sun room, and deep crushes were revealed and love triangles formed. Even when one of the boys kept swigging from a bottle of peppermint schnapps and puking up in his mouth the making out continued. All thanks to Emily's dance mix, which was the sound of hormones.

I made it home at four am and showered, only to be visited by five am by the highschool boy, who was ending his prom night. Tight like prom night, so Brian says. He showed up in a tuxedo and left early in the a.m. to go to work at the tanning salon. I would have dismissed it all as a dream if I hadn't awoken like a washed up Chippendale's dancer, wearing his bowtie...

firefox plugin: download youtube, google videos | ignoring colbert | the academic left is nowhere today | the best of colbert

Patagium

Last night while standing outside my building I saw a flying squirrel. It is only the second time in my life I have seen one. I noticed an object alight in the high branches of an elm. It climbed to a height of about forty feet and huddled in the crook of the tree.

Silently it leapt, crossing a distance of about thirty feet, to another tree.

The thin flesh it extends while gliding is called the patagium.

plagiarism and punishment | last ninja speaks: be able to kill your students | please put your sexual pictures in your weblog

Things that make me barf today

* Stepping outside my office to get some lunch (cravings for potato salad), I passed a woman in a thin peach sweater talking on a giant headphone-thingy attached to her cellphone. She was holding the cell phone in her hand and saying, "I am heading south now..."

* Not more than ten seconds later, I was almost run over by a middle-aged man in smart business casual attire pushing himself up the sidewalk on a scooter.

* This video: Baby Got Book

What made you barf today?

Someone finally gets it!

Today I wore my 'PORKCHOP SANDWICHES' shirt to work today, not because I like porkchop sandwiches but because I believe in the right of slacker/hipster media artists to create video art through mashups of cartoons I grew up with that I can watch while at work.

Standing in line in the Dunn Bros. waiting for my coffee and muffin, the woman behind the counter looked at my shirt and said, "Is that shirt from those GI Joe cartoon collages that were on the Internet a while ago?"

Score. First time ever someone has got it. The videos were produced by Fensler Film, which appears to delight in ironic imagery but also makes real things for legitimate clients. Their PSA series takes those short clips that would appear at the end of GI Joe cartoons, in which G.I. Joe, Doctor Mindbender, Clutch, and Cobra Commander walk amongst us, teaching kids not to play with fire, pet growling dogs, play around live, snapping electrical wires, or try to use the stove when mom's not around.

Watch them and then buy your own shirt.

the incredible d.o.g. the bounty hunter | jean cocteau art | moistworks | paris hilton and the american cannibal | best cheap thrill: meth of course