August 28, 1963

The End is Near

Besides the second Bush administration, the second 90210, or the Miss Puerto Rico reality TV show, other signs that the End is near include the odd monster sightings in the past few months, including the Chuapacabra-like being that washed up on the shore in Long Island, we also have quite a few apparitions of the Almighty in everyday objects or living things (including tree trunks, cheetos, Mexican tortillas and the like).


The Cheejus, as it was baptized by the Missouri woman who found it in her Cheetos bag. I am waiting for the Nativity Scene Funnyon.


The latest is Jesus' face on the wings of a moth. Usually regarded as an ugly nuisance, the moth has now been elevated to sublime and sacred. I am hoping that the next sighting will take place on a lady's long acrylic nail...If anyone else finds a case of miraculous apparitions, send them in and I will post them!

We Lost A Hero Today

Del Martin (right) who fought for lesbian human rights, worked to overturn the definition of lesbianism as a psychiatric disorder and for many other righteous causes. She was only married to her partner of over 50 years for two months.


Del Martin, Lesbian Activist, Dies at 87

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: August 27, 2008
Del Martin, who married her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon, on June 16 in the first legal gay union in California and who helped found the pioneering lesbian-rights group the Daughters of Bilitis, died Wednesday in San Francisco. She was 87.

The cause was a broken arm that exacerbated her existing health problems, Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told The Associated Press.

The June wedding was not the couple’s first effort at legalizing their union. In February 2004, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco challenged California’s marriage laws by announcing that the city would issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples who requested them. Of the more than 4,000 couples who married before the California Supreme Court intervened a month later, Ms. Martin and Ms. Lyon may have been the oldest, and were certainly first and the most celebrated.

That summer, though, the California Supreme Court invalidated all licenses for same-sex marriages, arguing that the mayor had exceeded his legal authority. Ms. Martin and Ms. Lyon were among the original plaintiffs in a series of lawsuits that led to the court’s declaring same-sex marriages legal this year.

Mr. Newsom invited the couple to be the first couple to marry under the new ruling. This they did, in San Francisco’s City Hall, after living together as a couple for more than half a century.

On Wednesday, Ms. Lyon, 83, said in a statement, “I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed.”

Ms. Martin was born Dorothy L. Taliaferro on May 5, 1921, in San Francisco. She studied journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State College. At 19 she married James Martin, but the marriage ended in divorce four years later. Their daughter, Kendra Mon, survives, as do two grandchildren and Ms. Lyon.

While working for a construction trade journal in Seattle, Ms. Martin met Ms. Lyon, an employee at the same firm, and the two became romantically involved and entered into a permanent relationship in 1953. In 1955, having moved to San Francisco, they joined with six other women to found the Daughters of Bilitis, the first social and political organization for lesbians in the United States, which soon established branches around the country. The name was taken from “Songs of Bilitis,” a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louys.

Ms. Martin was the organization’s first president, and from 1960 to 1962 she edited its newsletter, The Ladder, which Ms. Lyon had edited from its inception in 1956. The organization disbanded in 1970 as more radical lesbian groups came to the fore.

In 1964 Ms. Martin helped found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which lobbied city government to end police harassment of gay men and lesbians and change discriminatory laws.

Ms. Martin is believed to have been the first openly gay woman to be elected to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women, where she agitated to put lesbian issues on the table. She was also an active member of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, which was founded in 1972 to support gay candidates in San Francisco.

In her later years, she was a member of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. In 1987 she earned a degree from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

She wrote a book, “Battered Wives” (1976), and two others with Ms. Lyon, “Lesbian/Woman” (1972) and “Lesbian Love and Liberation” (1973).

Source - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/28martin.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

La Leti's nosejob part 2

Andy Warhol Before and After

The spread below is from HOLA! magazine's web site. Now they have really taken this to a whole new level. Not only does the Casa Real let EVERYONE know that Princess Letizia had a nose job, but now HOLA! it's virtual mouthpiece, the doyenne of Spanish gossip magazines, the Pravda of royalty news world-wide, actually promotes an on-line vote on the before and after shots! And this is fabulous for many reasons. First, unlike the times of Velazquez and Goya, when the royal family's physiognomy (hideous as it may have been) was the standard of beauty, as they were destined by God to rule, now we commoners can have an opinion! And that is partly because la Leti is a commoner, just like we are. Second, by asking us which of the two looks better, they slyly imply that the "official" explanation of a medical motive as untrue! So insubordinate.

If HOLA! doesn't toe the line, this means someone in the royal family is out for blood - la Leti's blood. This is as good as the libels against Marie Antoinette. And you know what happened to her. I am just saying. But they got what they asked for, he refused to marry an insipid royal relation, he went for the outspoken former TV anchorwoman, with a mother who is a union organizer, a suicidal sister, a taxi driver grandfather, divorced parents, the divorcee with a past and an apparent eating disorder. And she doesn't give him a male heir to boot! 

None of this should be a problem except for the fact that their whole institution is based on medieval notions of absolutism, religion, a sense of divine entitlement, inevitability, racist superiority, and right to plunder. So even though now they are allegedly a democratic institution, someone like la Leti must really rub them the wrong way.

Start the countdown to the Third Spanish Republic. I will be there waving the tricolor!

Guess what I voted? ________________________________

VOTACIÓN: ¿LE GUSTA MÁS LA NUEVA IMAGEN DE LA PRINCESA DE ASTURIAS?
Doña Letizia se ha sometido a una septorrinoplastia para corregir una desviación del tabique nasal






Gracias por su voto.
Sí
6778 votos
No
5710 votos


La Princesa de Asturias se sometió hace dos semanas a una operación, por recomendación del servicio médico de la Casa del Rey, para corregir una desviación en el tabique nasal y mejorar así sus problemas respiratorios. Aunque aún es pronto para evaluar el resultado final -todavía tiene la nariz hinchada y habrá que esperar seis u ocho meses para que todo vuelva a su ser-, lo cierto es que doña Letizia luce una nariz más armónica que le ha dulcificado el rostro.

En hola.com queremos saber su opinión, mostrándoles un antes y un después de la intervención quirúrgica para que pueda apreciar el cambio. ¿Le gusta más la nueva imagen de la Princesa de Asturias?

Noticias relacionadas
La princesa Letizia se opera la nariz por recomendación médica
_____________________________________________________________

from hola.com

Massiel Wins Eurovision

It doesn't get better than this: my obsessions with pageantry, nationalism, propaganda and camp all rolled into one.

This is a clip from Franco's NO DO propaganda newsreels commemorating Massiel's victory for Spain in the Eurovision song contest. I believe I have written about this contest before here. It's closely followed by Europeans and has been a landmark in my own upbringing. Massiel was an opportunistic singer who took over for Joan Manuel Serrat when he was not allowed to sing his own song in Catalan. Franco refused to allow Spain to be represented by the "subversive" region's language. 

Massiel is now a bloated alcoholic who makes a fool of herself in gossip chat shows. One of my favorite anecdotes is when she allegedly fell reaching for a book in her home, and then posed full of bruises and bandages in hospital. 

The NO DO shows how Massiel was the spokesmodel for the Spanish FIAT knock-off, the SEAT (we had one when I was a kid, those cars were the bomb) so she was promoting Franco's resurgent industrial production, and then you will see her on the government TV station TVE singing the song with a tuna accompaniment. The latter another tourist kitsch cliche - the tuna singers are strolling musicians associated with universities but they became a staple in restaurants aimed at tourists near the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, and other sites. 

Finally, the narrator proudly announces that the song was a backdrop in the Miss Germany Pageant. The best is when the announcer notes that an innovation that year was the requirement that the winner be "smart" as well as beautiful. Awesome. 

Watch for the cameo appearance by famous Spanish film and TV director Pilar Miro, as an Eurovision judge. This is particularly ironic since it's one of many cases where the NO DO or print media reveal that politically progressive icons from the Transition to Democracy and more recent years collaborated with the regime in one form or another. 

Riita Immonen - Marimekko designer

  Photo: Marimekko

New York Times

ARTS / ART & DESIGN
Riitta Immonen, a Founder of the Marimekko Textile Company, Dies at 90
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: August 27, 2008
Ms. Immonen was a designer of uniforms and ready to wear with a couture touch.
For the full obituary, cut and paste this to your browser:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/arts/design/27immonen.html?ex=1377489600&en=4bc92f9814c3ba82&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pant Suits

This is a first for me, I actually found myself really being convinced by a Hillary Rodham Clinton speech. She finally graciously accepted that Obama was selected by the majority of us, and she finally graciously and convincingly asked Democrats to vote for our candidate. Yes, she did go into a long discussion of her platform but then she explained that it is OUR platform, and that the option is to vote for McCain which equals more of the Bush policies. I have no idea if her most enthusiastic supporters will be swayed, but if that speech doesn't do it, nothing will. So with relief I think that we can win, because that speech was good enough to persuade most of the most ardent HRC backers to vote for Obama. 

It was a contrast to last night's speech by Michelle Obama. As my friend noted, Obama had to domesticate herself. And it's true, she framed herself as daughter, sister, mother, wife, never as just herself. Ironically, in my opinion, tonight was Hillary R. Clinton's most overtly feminist speech (and she even had a shout out to us queers). I liked the ways she made reference to the ways in which gender and race intersect in the struggle for social justice. But we all remember the times when HRC had to talk about baking cookies, or stand by her philandering husband, and shed some tears when she was tanking in the primaries. So did another very smart, strong and accomplished woman have to present herself as "non-threatening." 

A commentator on MSNBC used the telling term "rehabilitate" as in Michelle Obama needed to somehow defend herself and clear her record. Rehabilitate herself for what? She is not a criminal, is she? What exactly is her transgression? That she is a woman, her husband's senior when they started dating, strong and accomplished? Or is it that she is all of those things and also African American? Why is it a problem that she lives in a nice house but no one asks about the McCain or Bush family fortune? Because she is black? All of the sexist and racist stereotypes are implicitly deployed against her: the angry Black woman, uppity, shrill, domineering. Another friend commented on the Jackie Kennedy hair and the sleek dress (which was a bit Oleg Cassini-ish now that I think of it). And she even had the softer Jackie tone of voice and the bed time story refrain "See......" 

Yet another friend wondered why she did not use the repeated refrain rhetorical modality in the speech. I told her because that form is too strongly marked as "African American" and religious. So instead she used the self-effacing, halting and conspiratorial intimate story-telling style "You see....." Like Jackie giving the White House Tour on television. Anecdotal. And she herself, anecdotal to the primary story being told. Probably because of this strategic self-effacement, if they are sent to the White House, she might be better liked as First Lady than HRC. I have no doubt that like HRC, she is just as smart and capable as her husband, if not more so, and could just as easily have been running for political office herself. 

I found it fascinating given last night's Kennedy tribute, that it seemed like another political dynasty was being presented - the Clintons. Even if HRC didn't make it to the White House as President, the subtext seemed to read, Chelsea would run in the future.