Urvashi Vaid

Has a new book out, Irresistible Revolution.  It's top of my to get list.  I've been listening to interviews on podcasts like OUT FM in NYC and watching speeches and interviews on the web and remembering how cogent and incisive Virtual Equality, her earlier book, was.  And remembering what an inspiring activist "Urv" and others like Sue Hyde, Jerry Greenberg, Linda (I'm blanking on her name, but she was fierce), young folks working for NGLTF and moonlighting in OUT! like Scott and Mary, and old hands like Frank Kameny were when I was a teenager in 80s DC with homohatred and denial strong in the local and national culture and AIDS raging.  I was constantly impressed with her and their fearlessness and willingness to speak out despite all the shaming and silencing that was still the hallmark of the time, so many years post-Stonewall.

Besides having a hot, funny GF (Kate Clinton, yes, *that* Kate Clinton), Urvashi's wicked smaht.  And lived the movement history she's writing about.

Her site has a link to a study of lesbian participation in the first two "marches on Washington of the LG flavor-  labels changed for each one and 1993...   Some interesting observations. 

It brings me back... Queer DC at the time, like Boston and other cities was split between men and women, each divided by racial groupings, with a radical lesbian underground hosting women's music, collectives, a feminist bookstore, magazines like off our backs, and the like.  And some of us straddled that scene and hung with the radical guys in scenes like Gay Community News, ACT UP!, and OUT!  It was a bit of a mind- bender, ideologically and socially speaking.  Sexism, hostile defensive disinterest, and invisibility from one side and some whack ideological social policing and infighting/trashing like only women can do on the other...  For a teenage wannabe activist, there was a lot to learn and digest, all at once from all directions.  Urvashi had a way of cutting through the b.s. effectively, from understanding where everybody was coming from but calling them out too.  The way I remember it, anyway...

North Brother Island

I have a little sideline obsession with abandoned ruined buildings, particularly mental institutions, sanitariums, and prisons.  It started with Alcatraz and the abandoned farmhouses that list on rural properties in Virginia and North Carolina, and over time places like under-church grottoes in France, the Castell in St. Augustine, the Presidio in Tucson downtown, the Sutro Bath ruins at the edge of San Francisco have re-stoked it.

Plus Melody Gilbert's urban explorer film "Into the Dark" and youtube videos of urban exploration.  An old veterinary hospital in Wales, the catacombs under Paris, old train tunnels and graveyards, and all the old asylums can be explored from your couch or bus seat.  Without fumes, falling plaster or beams, and crawling through raw sewage... or law breaking and some such technicalities.

I'm particularly obsessed with North Brother Island, a small island in the New York Harbor that is near Ryker's Island.  It hosted a typhoid quarantine residence that held Typhoid Mary, a sanitarium, a juvenile drug rehab center, and more.  There's something about the mishmash.of architecture and history that fascinates me.  I keep trying to use it in a story but it is wily and elusive...

Cleaning out my bookmarks, I found this slideshow from North Brother Island.  Some really nice shots by Ian Ference, such as the one above, plus an overview of the island's past incarnations.  Enjoy.

Fellowship

In honor of the President giving us the day off and the need for some hands-free entertainment while baking, I'm listening to an audio production of "The Fellowship of the Ring." 

A tip o' the hat to Cle for inspiring me to pick this up at Magers and Quinn, our awesome general used book store (Uncle Hugo's rules used and new SFF). 

I have trouble reading fantasy, and especially epic/high fantasy, but it turns out audiobooks cut through the attention deficit quite nicely.  So far, it's very enjoyable.  I thought background music would be annoying, but it works well.

We went to see "The Hobbit" on opening weekend.  The others in the group were not as taken, but I found it funny and tense, in the correct parts.  I guess I'm a sucker for dwarves.  One looked suspiciously like Young Hercules.  I might actually have to see it again...

I also really enjoyed "Night Train to Munich," which is now almost 75 years old.  It soft-pedaled WWII and the Nazis a bit, with lilting British accents, but it was made in 1940.  Despite this, it actually managed to imply that much more horrible things lay beneath the surface of the Reich, and made it clear collaboration was inexcusable. 

And somehow it moved very fast and remained intensely suspenseful.  Very.unusual for such an old, mannered film.

Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood, directed by Carol Reed (a dude), and lots of double-crossing spy drama.  James Bond lifted the ending scene 35 years later, with Jaws on the ski trams.

Coldheart Canyon

I am feeling impatient for my potato water to cool so I can mix the sponge for Rusleipa, Finnish sour potato rye bread.  Experimenting with sourdough starter is starting to pay off, but I haven't mastered reading the recipes ahead of time to be able to plan for 12-20 hour sponges.

So instead, it gives me time to discuss Clive Barker's novel, Coldheart Canyon.  I was hoping to read something I'd heard

of by him, but this was the one available at the library, so I gave it a try.

Coldheart Canyon turned out to be very readable, though a real mishmash of a Hollywood satire, a horror novel, and erotica.  The different genres weren't blended so much as arranged like a collage, one, then another, then back to that, then that. 

The characters were pretty strong, even the villains, which made this work.  It also worked against falling into genre cliches.  The cheesy erotica parts were a little too horrific, and the horror a little to funny, or sexy, and the bits of satire added a nice edge.

It's ostensibly a ghost story- fading Hollywood it boy hides out in an old mansion and gets drawn into congress with the undead.  But ghosts, the Devil, his goat-boy son, and monstrous animal-human hybrids, plus some magic spells, make for a grabbag of horror tropes.  Hard to say more without giving too much away...

The ending kind of dragged on, much like Salem's Lot, but this paid off a little.better in the Barker novel.  I will definitely have to check out some of his other titles, while I'm on a horror kick.

Oh yeah

I have a summary of all the books I blabbed about here, basically, up at Aqueduct Press's annual year-end extravaganza.  Mine is  here.  I've got to go peruse the other lists for 2013's to-read list...

More desert

Brrrr

I got spoiled by several days in Tucson, Arizona.  And came back to calf-deep brown snow.  ; (.

We went so the lady who sprained her ankle could try running a marathon down Mt. Lemmon.  Turned out she could, in a decent time despite doctor's orders to walk intermittently.

We made the rounds to Native Seeds to get dried chilis and gifts, to the Desert Museum, to Mission San Xavier (whose local name "san'aveer" drove the Mi'waukan crazy for some reason).  We went through the 4th Ave street fair, trying to get to La Indita, a native-Mexican restaurant that's very veg-friendly.  They had junk you'd see at any big street fair, including a screaming homophobic preacher guy.

At the Desert Museum, the javelinas, black bear, bighorn sheep, coatimundis, beaver, otter, hummingbirds, and mountain lions were in top form, but the coyote was sleeping and the ocelot was hiding in his lair.

So we ate all kinds of good food, walked around the desert, ran a little in the crazy resort the marathon got us a deal with, and lounged in their pool.  It's tough being a sherpa...

I wasn't the best sherpa though.  I made her hike up to Romero's Pools, a steep rocky trail, two days before the marathon.  My excuse is that I didn't really remember what the hike was like, but mostly it's my favorite trail.  The pools were mostly dry, it being winter.  But the sun was not quite so bad.

For the first time I saw Taliesin West, up in Scottsdale.  It's funky, and the tour is interesting.  Check out how well it blends into the landscape (up top).

I was reminded of a couple bad novels I read this year that tried to get all precious about