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Quotations: Blasts From the Past

By Chris Hall
March 28, 2004
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A few words of wisdom from those who made this country great:

  • “You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red, that man is a communist!’ You never hear a real American talk like that.”
    –Mayor Frank Hague, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1938
  • “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

    –John Wayne

  • “Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”

    –General William Westmoreland

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Filed Under: Quotables

Are You Embarassed by Your President?

By Chris Hall
March 27, 2004
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Add outraged and fearful and sickened and appalled, and you have my feelings about George W. Bush in a nutshell. It goes beyond simply disagreeing with the man; the only way that he knows how to express himself is through cheap, arrogant bullying that represents the worst in the American character. He seems to be guided by a sense of entitlement and autocracy that belongs nowhere in a constitutional democracy. Listening to his speeches and watching his implementation of policy, the first thing that comes to mind is Cornelius Vanderbilt’s famous exclamation: “Law? What do I care about the law. Hain’t I got the power?”

Some people with my same feelings and more wit have taken the initiative to declare April 1, 2004 National “I’m Embarrassed By My President” Day. To commemorate the day, they’re asking everyone to wear a brown ribbon or armband to signify their distaste for the loads of hot, steaming bullshit that have been flooding out of the Bush White House. This is a fucking great idea, in my book. Show your outrage and your embarrassment at the same time — wear that brown!

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Filed Under: Humor, Politics

93 Years After the Triangle Fire

By Chris Hall
March 25, 2004
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Today I attended the 93rd Annual Commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, just east of Washington Square Park.

Although the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire isn’t commonly known today except by historians and labor activists, we live with the results everyday. In 18 minutes on March 25, 1911, a fire rushing through the Triangle Shirtwaist factory killed 146 workers, nearly all of them women and girls as young as 14. The majority of them died not from the smoke and fire, but because, facing the choice between dying from the fire and dying from a nine-story jump, they chose the jump. The doors inside the factory were locked (to prevent petty theft and labor organizing) and the fire escape was so flimsy that it collapsed under the first rush. Girls plunged to the sidewalk, one after the other, until the water from the firehoses in the gutter turned red from the blood. There had been discussion about the necessity for fire safety laws before, both from city officials and from labor organizers; only a year before, there had been a similar fire in Hackensack, New Jersey in which 25 workers jumped to their deaths. New York Fire Chief Edward Kroker said very explicitly and prophetically that conditions in New York were ideal for a similar tragedy.

The horror of the Triangle fire galvanized organizers and the public, especially after Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the owners of Triangle, were found not guilty of any wrongdoing. The spectacle of street gutters filling with women’s blood was too much for the public to forget, and for the first time, real workplace safety laws started to be passed, not only in New York, but across the United States.

The building is still there, at the corner of Washington Square and Greene, and is now owned by New York University. I have been living with the Triangle Fire for over a year now, because my girlfriend, who is the co-founder of a theater company (Flying Fig Theater) has co-produced and acted in several productions of a play about the fire, starting with last year’s Fringe Festival. I’ve done my humble best to provide what little emotional and material support I can. As you can imagine, it’s been the subject of constant discussion, and often finds itself woven into more indirect discussions.

Today was the 93rd anniversary of the fire, and we attended the commemoration ceremony with Heather, the director/co-producer, and Ellen, the writer, and some other people involved in the production. The core of the ceremony consists of a fire truck raising its ladder to the seventh floor, as far as the ladders would go in 1911; then a fire bell is rung one time for each of the victims while the names are recited and one white carnation is placed on the sidewalk for each one. We each placed a carnation. Mine was for Bertha Manders, a 22-year-old who died of multiple burns and injuries in the hospital.

Mickey placed a flower for Max Lehrer, 22 years old, dead of multiple injuries.

Heather’s flower was placed for Celia Weintraub, 17 and also dead of multiple injuries.

One of the great things about the ceremony is the way that it ties the past with the present. Many such things only serve to confirm how dead and irrelevant the past is. I have a hunch that it won’t be long before the WTC memorial feels like that. But the Triangle ceremony does an excellent job of giving those lives and deaths meaning, and somehow you could see them reflected in the modern-day union workers and leaders there to pay their respects on a dank, rainy day almost a century later.

Three workers from UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees each hold a carnation representing a worker who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Three workers from UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees each hold a carnation representing a worker who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
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Filed Under: Etc.

The Lesser of Two Evils?

By Chris Hall
March 22, 2004
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Cthulhu arises from his home at R'yleh.Okay, I’ve just about had it with the dilemma of making voting choices between stances like Kerry’s carefully rationalized cowardice and Bush’s incompetent fascism. This year, I’m going whole hog. Cthulhu for President! When you’re tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.

    • Mighty Cthulhu’s platform for Evil.
  • The tentacled one’s biography.

 

 

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Filed Under: Humor, Politics

A new kink in the marriage debate…

By Chris Hall
March 20, 2004
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Sandy Clarissa Gast, a 48-year-old transsexual, has been busted by the authorities of Leavenworth County, Kansas, for the horrific crime of filing for a marriage license. The official charges are described as “providing false information on an official document” — i.e., describing her gender as “female,” because despite the fact that she’s legally changed her name and that her driver’s license says “female,” the State of Kansas is firm on the matter of gender: once you’re born, you’re that gender for life, no matter your own feelings about it, no matter what your other legal documents say, and no matter how much surgery you go through.

While there are legitimate philosophical ambiguities about gender, the overreaction of the County officials is just bizarre on a Kafka-esque level. Where they could have just shrugged and handed the application back to her, they decided instead to come down HARD on her ass, releasing her only after she posted a $2,500 bond and now faces a $500 fine.

Strangely, this kind of hysteria only encourages my optimism, rather than diminishing it. When the ‘phobes are this crazed with fear and panic, it can only mean that they know how badly they’re losing.

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Filed Under: Queer Politics

Ask Mullah

By Chris Hall
March 19, 2004
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The April, 2004 issue of Harper’s has an item titled “Mullah, May I?” which reprints several questions submitted to a South African site which gives advice to Muslims the world over about the propriety of issues that include money, politics, sex, prayer, and marriage. The questions excerpted by Harper’s are specifically drawn from the Marriage section, and at first seem to confirm our standard image of the Muslim world’s misogyny, authoritarianism, and sexual ignorance. They include:

  • Is it permissible for a man to look at his wife’s private parts including below the navel and vice versa, during intimacy? I’ve heard one can become blind. (Answer)
  • If a wife please her husband by masturbation & their private parts do not touch, is bath compulsory for her? (Answer)
  • Can we squeeze our wives breast? can we lick them and suck their nipples and have fun with their breasts? (Answer)
  • Can Muslim wife and husband kiss/suck each other body parts stronlgy? I mean whole body (breast, lips, tounge, penis, vagina) (Answer)

The list, as presented in Harper’s at first seems to invite a condescending feeling of superiority by showing the amusingly alien nature of Islamic puritanism and superstitiousness. If you keep in mind America’s own historical attitudes towards sex, health and morality, though, it makes Islam seem that much more familiar. Many of these questions have been phrased by American men and women to doctors, clergy, and writers since the days of the Pilgrims in varying forms. A lot of our contemporary debate has to do with the fact that each new generation asks them.

Browsing the website itself gives a much more nuanced, less coy vision of Islamic attitudes. In many ways, the vision is not a positive one, and does in fact comply with the puritanical, anti-sex image that we have. One of the more disturbing posts, for example, comes from a writer in the UK who asks, “Is there such a thing as rape in marriage between husband and wife ? and what evidence does a wife need to prove if so …” To this, Mufti Ebrahim Desai replies:

In Islam, there is no such thing as rape between the husband and wife. However, both spouses should be considerate to one another in their conjugal relationship. If the wife or the husband does not wish to have a relationship due to circumstances, for example, being tired, ill, etc. then that should be considered.

There are many other examples which make me really uncomfortable, and fit not at all into my ideals of egalitarianism or eroticism. But it’s also interesting to delve past the caricature and see how complicated Islamic codes on sex and the rights or responsibilities of men and women are to each other. If nothing else, both the questions and the Mufti’s answers implicitly acknowledge the importance of pleasure. And the fact that the questions are even being asked shows a much greater degree of ambiguity in Islamic attitudes towards sexuality than we see in our sound-bite media.

Reading Ask Imam doesn’t really reduce my fears or my skepticism about the mix of religion and sexuality; like mixing religion and government, it’s usually a really bad idea. In many ways, it confirms my concerns about Islam. In other words, it may not make Islam seem more benign, but it does make it seem more human. That’s something that’s been studiously buried under all the panic and hysteria of the past two years.

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Filed Under: Religion, Sex and Gender

Kissing and Pissing

By Chris Hall
March 18, 2004
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Okay, now I have to admit that this is weird and screwed-up even to my sensibilities:

According to Yahoo, the men’s room in the Virgin Airways clubhouse at JFK Airport now boasts urinals in the shape displayed above: a woman’s open lips, decorated with bright-red, fuck-me lipstick. The urinals were designed by the Netherlands company Bathroom Mania, which has a talent for making unique accessories for people to vacate their bladders and/or bowels.

The concept of wanting to pee in someone’s mouth doesn’t offend me in and of itself, actually; I’ve known people who were into piss play of one kind or another, and while not my thing, they had honest, forthright attitudes toward it that respected themselves, the act, and their partner. The word “play” in this case is key; it is an implict recognition of the difference between fantasy and reality, and the different rules that apply for each.

Virgin’s toilets are just another example of the hypocrital way that sex is expressed in the mainstream; despite getting hit by loads of sexy images every day, the effect of most of them is not to dismiss shame, or to expand our visions of sexuality. Instead, they manipulate that shame. The advertising industry hits us with millions of image that increase our desire for sex while holding it even higher out of our reach. This is what you should want to have, they tell us, but you can’t have it, because you’re too old, too ugly, too poor, too clumsy, your tits are too small, your dick won’t stay hard long enough, and whatever you do will just be a shallow imitation of what our ultra-beautiful, ultra-skinny, ultra-rich, ultra-Botoxed, ultra-Viagraed models do with each other. But it’s all right if you try; here, buy our stuff.

And similarly, I really doubt that any of Virgin’s representatives would be willing to endorse consenting adults peeing on or into each other for a little bit of fun. Their fancy toilets are just a nasty, mean-spirited joke that lets guys with too much money and attitude go through the motions while still calling other people perverts. It quite neatly combines misogyny, class privilege, and fear of sex into one great big red package.

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Filed Under: Crappy Smut, Etc., Sex and Gender

A New Definition of "Death Wish."

By Chris Hall
March 15, 2004
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As if the Southern Baptists hadn’t laid enough devastation on their own country, and the Middle East didn’t have enough fundamentalist fanatics of their own, Iraq’s post-Saddam legacy now includes this:

The first Baptist church ever established in Iraq was dedicated with more than 700 people in attendance. Leaders say the church, called the National Evangelical Baptist Church in Baghdad, is the cornerstone upon which future Baptist work in Iraq will be built.

In addition, teams of Baptist volunteers have worked in various regions of Iraq, distributing food and Bibles and sowing seeds of interest in what God wants to do in the nation.

In a sense, the Baptists should feel much more comfortable in Iraq, since the agenda of Christian fundamentalists — traditional gender roles, strict hierarchies of power, compulsory heterosexuality, and theologically based government — is much more compatible with radical Islam than with a secular constitutional democracy. Their influence on the government in the past 20 years has culminated in America becoming a truly frightening place to live in. It has also become a truly frightening place to live with, as both the Middle East and Europe can attest to since the 9/11 bombings. Still, we’ve done an admirable job of resisting the full force of the Religious Right’s attempts to build a theocratic kingdom over the bones of every feminist, queer, or Jew in the union. Watching the flood of gay marriages is just one way that we can see how we’ve kept them from the omnipotence over our lives, loves, and laws that they want so much.

So, Iraq seems like a natural playground for fundamentalist Christians, except for the fact that they’ll probably get blown up by people who want just the same things they do but with different names. It’s hard to see a Baptist church lasting much more than a month when Islamists have done such a good job of blowing up trained, well-equipped soldiers on a regular basis. And in their deaths, these Baptists will probably be as like their Islamic counterparts as they were in life: martyrdom, after all, is their key to the kingdom.

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Filed Under: Politics, Religion, Religious Right

Non-Crappy Porn

By Chris Hall
November 7, 2003
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I promised that I’d provide some good sources for non-crappy porn, so here are some of my favorites:

Electra Summers: One of my big gripes with mainstream porn is the fact that it makes everyone look the same, which by definition is not sexy. For me, eroticism lies in difference and individuality of form. Electra’s been showing off a plump, zaftig form for years, and doing it with great joy and humor.

Retroraunch: One of my favorite ways to escape the monotony of the crappy porn that’s produced is to look at porn from the past. Retroraunch is a great source for smut from the past, especially the fifties and sixties.

Jane’s Guide: When all else fails, go to Jane’s Guide. Jane Duvall and her cohorts have been reviewing internet porn sites for years, separating the crap from the non-crap so that you don’t have to.

Bettie Page Shrine: Bettie Page, Queen of the Pinups. And lots of her.

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Filed Under: Non-Crappy Smut, Sex and Gender

Protection From (Crappy) Porn

By Chris Hall
November 4, 2003
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President Bush declared last week (October 26 – November 1) to be “Protection From Pornography Week,” yet another attempt to appear to be doing something about something that doesn’t need doing while not doing anything. According to Bush,

The effects of pornography are particularly pernicious with respect to children. The recent enactment of the PROTECT Act of 2003 strengthens child pornography laws, establishes the Federal Government’s role in the AMBER Alert System, increases punishment for Federal crimes against children, and authorizes judges to require extended supervision of sex offenders who are released from prison. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Sex and Gender, Smut Tagged With: Hanne Blank, porn, Protection From Pornography Week, sex-positive

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