A couple of weeks ago: close encounters with facets of healing.
Continue reading “Sexual Healing”Sexual Healing
The Red Roots of Modern Gay Liberation
It’s 1953. Founders of the first viable gay civil rights group the Mattachine resign due to their Communist pasts. Meet the players whom the FBI know are gay and Red. Uncover the parallels between activism in the 1950s and 2020s.
Continue reading “The Red Roots of Modern Gay Liberation”Obscure Exposures
Reminiscences regarding reissues by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.
Continue reading “Obscure Exposures”Meeting the Master, Rudy Perez 1929–2023
As of six months ago, “Meeting the Master” might evoke the histrionic single by Michigander rock band Greta Van Fleet. It’s not unlike Medium Medium’s “Guru Maharaj Ji” from four decades before, which I’ve described as “either a snide putdown, or a pedestrian description, of the teacher-student dynamic.” I added: New York Times’ Robert Palmer writes that the song “manages to be understanding and wryly humorous.” (The epitome of this polarity might be The Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie,” written by John Lennon about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.)
Last month I wrote to my filmmaker friend Albert Gasser about
all the gurus I’ve “followed,” secular and non-, among them César Chávez (UFW), Arthur Janov (Primal Therapy), Rudy Perez (dance performance), Charles Cameron [literary and spiritual mentor], Tarkovsky (you introduced me to him), Roman Catholicism, Robert Adams (Advaita Vedanta), Lowell May (IWW), Guy McPherson (abrupt climate change).
To that list I would add my wife Andrea Carney, whose writings salt-and-pepper this blog. And from the New World and Old World respectively, Ricardo Reyes (art and culture) and Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (compassion on a tightrope). And my spiritual mentors Milania Henley and Rev. Bruce MacKenzie. And to that original list I added, to Albert, “If I spouted the party line, I hope usually it was for a brief while. But oh, what I learned.”
Rudy Perez died yesterday morning after a severe asthma attack that took him to the ICU. A year ago I had my first such attack, mild by comparison, but scary enough for an ER session, and as the doctor told me, “You can deal with a lot of things, but not being able to breathe…?”
Continue reading “Meeting the Master, Rudy Perez 1929–2023”Jim Morphesis: Conversations in Isolation
The sun will never disappear
But the world may not have many years
— John Lennon, “Isolation”
In the summer of 2020 I contacted visual artist Jim Morphesis to ask his permission to reprint his private reply to Rudy Perez in response to Part 2 of my Portrait of Rudy Perez series. Jim had reminded Rudy of how the two had met on July 24, 1981, when Rudy appeared on Rona Barrett’s television show.
Continue reading “Jim Morphesis: Conversations in Isolation”In the Can
My introduction to the public restroom would have been in kindergarten, 1960–61. There were issues.
Continue reading “In the Can”Picx Picx: Greñudo’s Favorite Hot Sauce
I’ve been distracted lately by food videos sent my way by YouTube. A week ago America’s Test Kitchen posted Our Top Rated Hot Sauce.1 At about the same time I was reintroduced to the first hot sauce I ever used on a regular basis.
Reopening the Rosenbergs
Note: This is the second in a series of my recollections about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953. See Part 1 and Part 3. My husband David Hughes contributed much research and text to what follows.
Continue reading “Reopening the Rosenbergs”The Stranger Alongside Me
In 1974, a few months after I started working in the same doctor’s office that I wrote about in Little Women, I triaged a woman with a severe and painful case of shingles. As we talked she told me something as if she were desperate to unload a terrible secret. She had witnessed the aftermath of a murder and then been chased by a pickup truck, and was tailgated so closely she couldn’t see its license plate. I ushered the woman into an exam room so “Bernie,” the doctor I supported, could see her. Afterwards, he and I didn’t discuss the woman’s diagnosis, but I did tell him how I’d been pursued by a pickup just before coming to work with him.
Continue reading “The Stranger Alongside Me”Gang of Four Part 1: Natural’s Not In It
Last month I saw Gang of Four for the third time.
1980
The first was at a small club, probably their show at the Starwood in West Hollywood, capacity 400–800, May of 1980. Earlier that same year, the band had opened for the Buzzcocks and later, Iggy Pop, both at the much larger Santa Monica Civic. But those garnered lousy reviews by the Los Angeles Times, the first due to bad sound, the second to fatigue. The Civic could put a lot of distance between the stage and the floor. And it ostensibly seated 3,000, but when I saw the Clash there, the seats were replaced by metal plates; when we bounced, so did they—and there were a lot more than 3,000 bouncing.
Obviously that Starwood show in 1980 featured the band’s original lineup: Hugo Burnham on drums, Dave Allen bass, Andy Gill guitar, and Jon King vocals. It was riveting. The stage was small enough to bridge the Civic’s divide, but broad enough to allow Jon King his signature sprints between microphones. If King was a gazelle, Gill was a beast of prey, exactly as described by poet Ted Hughes in his “Second Glance at Jaguar”: “He coils, he flourishes/ The blackjack tail as if looking for a target.”