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Don Cornelius

February 2nd, 2012

I’m grieving over Don Cornelius. I loved soul train, and although it went toe to toe in the same late Saturday morning time slot as American Bandstand, Soul Train always won out. I’d watch the show and try to keep up with the gorgeous kids on the dance floor, wishing I could be one of them instead of myself, desperately wanting out of my body into one of theirs, cursing my awkwardness and humbled by their grace.

Don was ever handsome and velvet voiced. He stood still as everyone moved. He was tall and stately, which seemed to anchor the music and secure the beat, lending calm and gentility to the rhythm that is felt so deeply in your heart, that shakes your body up from the bottom to the top. Don was cool about it. Don was the best.

I guess I took the political importance of Soul Train for granted when I was a kid. I didn’t know or understand what it took for a program like that to be on the air. It was a big deal in terms of race and visibility for people of color. It was by itself its own civil rights movement and one I danced to religiously, yet then it was all down to the music and not about any idealistic vision. For that we have Don Cornelius to thank. He was a true visionary. He was a pioneer. He gave us to ourselves, us who love R&B and soul and pop and slow jams and funk and hip hop. I even cry when I think about watching The Commodores or Marvin Gaye or The Jackson Five or JANET JACKSON (MY FAVORITE) and the feeling I had that this was for me or about me and by me. I don’t know why I felt that, I just did.

Everyone I know is broken up about this loss, about what happened. It’s unexpected and too terrible to comprehend. My friend asked, “Don, I wish you had told us what you needed.” I wish people would tell us what they need, before it’s too late. I promise to tell you what I need if you promise me the same. Let’s be here for each other so that we won’t have to feel this again, this helplessness. The blankness of death. It’s bitter. It’s bleak. I don’t want to feel this. The emptiness overwhelms me and consumes me and swallows me whole.

What I want to remember is the tremendous achievements of Don Cornelius, what he brought to me, what he will forever be remembered for, all he did. The soul train camera would split and weave through the crowd and they moved with it and you could feel the exhilaration when the lens would rest on one then another. It was the power of the collective gaze finally brought to those so used to being invisible that being suddenly visible made us high. How much is visibility worth? It’s everything. It is proof of your existence. When you see me, I am here. When you see me dancing, I invade the moment and surround the moment and transcend the moment. When I dance, I am this fine moment and the world is my witness and there is nothing better.

Soul Train wasn’t just a kids music show, it was a grand entrance, an essential, empowering, addictive and ever important mirror and a proud and courageous wish for our future that we would grow out of this, become more from this, and because of this, we have.

Tags: Don Cornelius, RIP
Posted in BLOG | 8 Comments »

Canyon

February 1st, 2012

I had always felt creepy around Bronson Canyon, having lived for years just underneath the Hollywood sign. I walked Ralph up that trail, past the batman tunnel, up by where the horseshoe prints would end. it was too quiet up there, too silent and calm to be safe. The wooded areas of my past forever bring forth tragedy and chaos. You can’t believe what folks are capable of sometimes, what they do in the dark cold night of the soul.

Even with the biggest dog on the end of a leash I still felt alone and unsure, and though I rarely saw another person up there, it was as if you were being constantly watched, as if the hills themselves had eyes. I read too many crime novels and watch too much forensics on tv to ever feel like I can let my guard down. it always happens when you think the coast is clear. It always happens when you don’t think it will. People always feel safe until they are suddenly not.

I hadn’t heard of bodies being dumped in the canyon before, but just down the street near the Mayfair market was where the hillside strangler had struck in the 70s, when I first started to equate los angeles with murder, and the earliest thought that I remember having about not being able to trust adults, that adults could harm you and hurt you and even kill you. This was the scariest realization, and a rude awakening in every way – that moment when you come to know the world as dangerous.

That trail felt bad every time I hiked there, and I only went a few times even though I lived right at the mouth of it. the danger may not have happened yet but it was present. The deeds had not been done but it would only be a matter of time. There were dead snakes lying stick straight like cast off dousing rods or fallen tree branches, rotting in the thin cover of dry grass, skin then organs then bones revealed in slow decay. Stagnating pools of ancient rainwater lay poisonously still and refused to evaporate in the sun. Ralph pulled me bodily to drink from them and I fought him and dug my heels into the dirt and kicked up dunes of dust in my efforts. He almost dragged me right into one of the pools and as I looked closely at the water I had almost fallen into I could see deep black clouds made up of thousands and thousands of tadpoles, swimming tails crowded together in a mass exodus to nowhere.

Tags: Los Angeles
Posted in BLOG | 6 Comments »

There Will Be Bloodstains

January 30th, 2012

I do love a nice leather jean. It’s not the most practical item to buy, but they are beautiful. I have had a few pairs in my lifetime, and when I find ones I really love, it’s the most exciting thing. I remember all the best ones. My favorite were these weird stiff unlined and low waist ones from Fred Segal that cost a fortune – like $600 or something, which was everything I had at the time, but I didn’t care because they were a strange French peanut color, like that candy that went uneaten at the bottom of your plastic jack-o-lantern on Halloween. I loved the pants so much I wanted to eat them and I can’t find them at all now. Perhaps I did eat them because they were the kind of pants you don’t give away or throw away or lose and yet I search my memory and my closets and drawers and those pants are history, but a figment of my leather pant imagination.

There are white leather pants I wear when I ride motorcycles, 60s style – outrageous – that glow with a toothpaste blue undertone so I can be seen by all on the roads I ramble down. These were specially made for me years ago, and the fly is all snaps and I can undo them with a hard exhale. They have a slight bootcut to accommodate the fearsome Harley Davidson motorcycle boots that are essentially also my brakes, and they are thick enough to protect me from ass gas and grass for now.

I have chaps, which I guess are leather pants too, but they are somehow less complete. Perhaps because they are more like boots with a belt attached. I have to be in the mood for chaps, like a Judas Priest mood – which I am in often (breaking the law breaking the law). I love Rob Halford – what a hot leather daddy! That is who I feel like when I wear chaps! It’s very Folsom St. Fair.

My newest leather pants were the finest ones I had ever seen in my life. The J Brand red lambskin leather skinny jeans were way out of my price range, as they were nearly $900!! This is too much money for any one thing – I mean, it’s fucking pants! But I stalked those pants online, looking at them every day, looking at them on different websites, looking at them in different currencies, wondering what they would be like to have on. I would think about the pants off and on during the day like wondering what they were doing, who was wearing them, who tried them on, who bought them, who didn’t. I was spending too much time thinking about these pants and so I just broke down and bought them.

They came in the mail and I tore the package open with my bare hands making that weird dusty filler that seems like what collects on the lint screen in the dryer explode into the air and fill my lungs. I put them on and they were perfect, just perfect. I loved the feel of the lambskin on my skin and the zippers at the bottom were sleek and kind of punk fading into new wave. I felt like Chrissy Hynde and I felt like Lou Reed and I felt like I had stepped out of CBGBs in the late 70s to smoke a cigarette in the street even though I could smoke inside, I wanted to just be alone, with the pants.

I tried not to wear the pants too much because they were so beautiful I wanted to somehow save up that beauty, not spend it all in one place. They also stretched out a lot in the knee area, so that the hips and butt and ankles would remain tight to my figure, but then these weird bags would appear around my kneecaps, but it didn’t matter because I loved those pants. I folded them as opposed to balling them up like everything else I had. I packed them carefully into my luggage for my big winter trip to New York. I wanted those pants to see the Big Apple. I was taking the pants on vacation.

When I was wearing the pants, feeling on top of the world, in a Barbour jacket and Vanson Skeleton bag, sitting alone in a café in Williamsburg, I looked down between my legs, just to admire the inseam of my beloved J Brand lambskin leather, and I noticed an odd stain. It was like a period stain, but it didn’t make any sense because I had never worn these pants during my lady time. I would never have worn them during my lady time. I was sitting there in the middle of a crowd of bored and hungover looking hipsters with ironic government issue black framed eyeglasses and unflattering/flattering topknot hairdos and pleated skirts and colored tights and expensive but pilled long sweaters and I was staring down at my crotch with my legs spread wide open and I just screamed and everyone looked at me and then everyone looked away very quickly. I actually screamed. I was batting at the stain, trying to see if it was wet or dry, and trying to ascertain whether the stain came from without or within.

I realized I looked crazy, and I left the café and went to the place I was staying and I ran into the door and tore off the beloved pants. The stain was not from the inside. There was nothing inside the pants. If I had shit my pants or gotten my period in my pants or both I would not have been as upset. I own my hole. If something comes out, its on me. But this was different. The stain was from the outside. I must have sat on something – but that didn’t make sense because if I had then the stain would be on the butt area. I must have straddled something – but I really don’t remember doing that, and I think I would remember.

The only answer is that the stain was some kind of a stigmata, a miraculous occurrence on the pants, because they are such nice pants and I love them so much, they must be holy. I thought I could make out the face of Christ in the stain. I don’t know what to do now. I put the pants away and thought about the matter. I guess since it is not an authentic period stain, I can still wear them, but they resemble a period stain so much, that people will just assume that it is a period stain. it’s like a period stain catch-22. There’s also the fact of my age, which should mean automatic immunity to all period stains, but I do look younger than I am, so I guess I am fucked here. I took the pants to my Korean dry cleaner who looked at the pants outside the crotch and said “this blood?” and she looked at the pants inside the crotch and she exclaimed “this not blood!” then she said “$30 – but I don’t know. Maybe.” So now I am just waiting for the pants now to come out of the pants hospital. Oh god. I hope they are ok.

J Brand - L8001 Leather Super Skinny (from www.jbrandjeans.com)

Tags: Fashion, Periods
Posted in BLOG | 10 Comments »

Brows

January 26th, 2012

I want to pluck my eyebrows badly right now and I can’t. It’s too dark anyway, and I don’t have tweezers, but even though I can’t see all those stray hairs clearly, I know they are there. I spotted them on the last hopeful but unproductive bathroom visit before the long drive to LAX, and I wanted to get my tweezers out of my luggage and pluck them then and there but there wasn’t time. I thought about the stray hairs on the drive to the airport and now I am on the plane and I am still thinking about them.

These are the times I know I am OCD but there’s nothing I can do but acknowledge this frailty and just suffer. Could I go into the tiny airplane toilet now and try to pull the offending hairs out by the root with my bare hands? Probably not. I don’t even have fingernails, cut to the quick earlier this week in anticipation of holiday jam sessions, loosely planned easy days where my guitarist friends come over and marvel at my tremendous collection of 6 and 12 strings.

I don’t think I can grab at the hairs with my fingers, especially with the newly re-formed calluses from all the feverish playing between Christmas and New Years. My hands are not tight enough and the hairs are too fine, after being plucked diligently for more than two decades. My shiny Asian hair is slippery and defies the grip of even the most needlenosed of my Shu Uemuras.

The girl who showed me how to pluck my eyebrows was the girlfriend of a guy I know well. They had a tumultuous relationship that tortured him and cost him many friends who hated watching him wither under her gaze. It is strange and something that afflicts the young more than the old, groups of friends that shatter under the weight of a new relationship, opinions about him or her becoming the concern of the whole rather than the individual. There is the splitting and the taking of sides and possibly attempts to reconcile, which never quite works, the initial break too traumatic to recover from, the cracks irreparable underneath the facades of certain kinds of friendships. When we age this happens less, friends being harder to come by. The machinations of life kicking us all into higher gears, it is a pleasure to downshift with those you know you love and can go slow with.

Fashions have changed and browstyles have come and gone but I still use her technique, plucking all the hairs in the direction of their growth. Her initial pattern remains the one I adhere to. I haven’t plucked them more or less from the shape she first created, in the exact image of hers, looking each like adam’s rib, delineating the space between my eyes and my forehead. It’s like she did it yesterday, or actually the day before yesterday because now they are growing in and driving me crazy.

She was slightly older than me and I remember she held herself in a great importance, which was one of the reasons why my friend loved her so, and also why she infuriated his friends. She was always frustrated and sighing over some insult. Every day brought forth a new calamity. She made an art of her dissatisfaction because she wholeheartedly believed she deserved better, whatever better meant. She sighed at my eyebrows and she sighed as she plucked them. She didn’t ask permission to do so but I didn’t need her to. I desperately wanted her attention because it seemed incredibly valuable and much more than I could afford. She worked on my brows and her steady exhale into my face made me shake visibly but of course I hid this as best I could.

When she was done I was shocked at how different I looked and also how glamorous and pampered I felt. She made a gift of her $20 tweezers and my heart leapt out of my chest. She gave me a tight smile that showed both her indifference and her kindness. “They look good. Pluck them every day.” and I did. And I have.

It took many years for my friend to finally break up with her but she and I never hung out again. He brought her up in conversation recently and I could feel the love he still felt for her freeze the air around us for a moment until it was warmed over by a joyous interruption from his young son.

I tried to keep my eyebrows the same way, and probably will until they turn grey and are framed by wrinkles. All these years have not changed them. They are a symbol of my youth but also my coming of age. They remind me of the moment I knew that I was queer and loved women as easily as I loved men if not more.

Tags: Beauty
Posted in BLOG | 12 Comments »

Present

January 25th, 2012

On the rented bike, a magnificent and majestic Harley-Davidson Sportster Low, with only three miles on it so far and the brand new shiny chrome catching the sunlight and beaming it back into the world in hard, blindingly brilliant rays, my emotions and opinions about motorcycling vary wildly from second to second.

When I am up in third gear, flying down an industrial street with few cars or pedestrians, just two other riders, one, the adept and skillfully sensitive teacher Luis, the other, the avid and keenly aware student Ryan, I scan my field of vision and I think 3 things -

1) What is happening in the street 12 to 1 seconds in front of me?

2) This is the best thing I have ever done.

3) I love the heads in the helmets in front and behind my gaze.

Whenever I have to stop, downshift and clutch and brake and put my boots, left then right on the ground and wait at the intersection, holding the heavy bike between my skinny legs, I think -

1) My hands and feet are inadequate.

2) This is the worst thing I have ever done.

3) I still love these hot bikers I am riding with and their straight backs and faces held high and looking where they are going – their bodies and bikes as one perfect and very fast being – and I love all motorcyclists I have seen and met thus far, and rejoice saying hi to them as we pass in the street and will gladly talk to any one person in possession of 2 or 3 wheels and an engine for hours about nothing else – yes I love all y’all, but I am never doing this again.

It gets even more extreme in the hills, cornering and leaning into the black diamond turns and curves that make up Griffith park, which reminds me ever of James Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood in “Rebel Without a Cause”. They shot that film up there, can you believe it? Right up on the top at the observatory. Yeah I know. Amazing. I think about how incredible they all are and also how dead they all are even though they should be alive right now and getting lifetime achievement awards and Kennedy Center honors and presenting at the Oscars, maybe even doing one arm pushups, being the face of what to look forward to with age and legend that lives on. Sadly they are not any of these. They each disappeared way too early in a hot flare of mystery and tragedy. But the bike didn’t claim them. It was respectively – car, knife and water. I’m gonna try to stay away from those three. I am gonna stay up, on this bike. No, I am not. At the next horse crossing, I am going to park this hog and hijack an old circus mare and clop home.

When I ride, I am in my body, which is rare. I am never in my body, having been chased out at an early age, but here, as part of this glorious mechanism and gyroscopic wonder, I am the proverbial ghost in the machine, and if I don’t stay in my body I will be separated from it, seriously. so I stay. I have to stay. I have to lean into this turn. I have to pull my not inconsiderable weight over to the side like a real racer, like steve mcqueen – who rode the best, who is also dead, however again, not by the bike, but from cancer.

I have to apply all the knowledge that I have in me and trust that its real and good and lives in my brain and my hands and feet and I don’t even need to think about it, I will just do it. The wisdom is there to catch me as sure as the wind is on my back. I am part of this thing, a big part, and I daresay I am not sure if I have ever been a part of anything this urgent, this important. I am this ride, and I have to be this ride only. No going nowhere. I am used to giving up, but here I can’t give up the ghost because if I do then I will be a ghost literally, so I stay here. I am here. I think this is the solution to a lifetime of ignoring the moment and what is in front of me. I think this is what I will do forever. Then I think there is no such thing as forever. There is only right now. I am riding right now. And now. And now. It’s always now on the bike. It has to be. Or else, you will become a then. How zen. It even rhymes.

What I noticed most about riding in the street is how many people who are driving cars actually aren’t there.

I look into their darkly tinted windows and I can see them texting, or possibly sexting, as they seem super involved in the tiny type of their conversation. If they aren’t texting/sexting, they are looking for deeply buried songs that aren’t in any particular playlist on their ipods or googling the name of a movie/medicine/shoe/diet that someone said was good.

They stare unbelieving at their GPS and look for addresses that seemingly don’t exist and not looking at you, who is existing leathery, loud and glinting in front of them.

There are weary moms turning around from the steering wheels of their fearsome SUVs and I see the backs of their heads yelling at children and they are holding the steering wheel with an elbow while the other hand goes in back presumably to break up a fight between siblings or to give a crying child something to really cry about.

There are people talking on the phone, laughing and negotiating and sharing good news and bad news and they are with their friend on the other end of the line probably in another car somewhere and neither are nowhere near where you are right now, in their path of travel. There are people applying makeup (even mascara!!) and emptying big coffee cups into their mouths and eating fast food, balancing fries and burgers on dashboards.

I have seen motherfuckers flossing. Their fucking back teeth. Molars and shit.

There are drivers doing infinite combinations of these activities and might be engaged in all of them at once, I have no idea. People are limitless in their ability to multitask and I can only give them each a fraction of a second because my eyes have to continue their search for dangers assessing everyone out here with me and I can’t dwell on just one.

Even if they are guilty of none of these crimes against automotive awareness, there are many just kind of dully and blankly staring forward with no life in their eyes. They are looking right at me as I am trying to assess whether they will turn left suddenly without signaling or not fully stop at the stop sign and they don’t see me at all. I am used to being invisible, which I have always fought, and so I am used to making myself seen and heard, sometimes forcing it, and this is essential when you are on the road on two wheels trying to navigate amongst four wheel vehicles which are exponentially larger than you and no one is paying attention.

I get scared because I feel like on the bike I am present and no one else is. I feel alone and without my tiny motorcycle club here with me I would actually be alone. Thank goodness for them.

All my gratitude to the Rider’s Edge and Harley-Davidson and Luis ‘tico’ Chacon, my fantastic teacher. you save lives. Mine and everyone else’s. Also great thanks to my fellow student and rider Ryan Kwanten. You look right handsome on that bike. Be careful everyone. Stay up.

Tags: Motorcycles
Posted in BLOG | 21 Comments »

Write To Me

January 24th, 2012

Please comment on my posts. I read them all, so be nice to me, as I am all kinds of sensitive, and really a bad word here will ruin my day and even week or month. Years have been wrecked by criticism and insults. I got the memory of an elephant but not the thick hide. I take it all real personal, and deep inside, so know that before you say what you are going to say. I’d like to know why you want to read my writing and what it makes you feel like and if you have anything to add. I may not answer every question or comment, but I truly will take it all into consideration.

If you feel like it, let other people know that this blog is worth reading, as I think it is, just as I enjoy writing it. I am trying to realize my writerly potential. It’s happening, or something is happening.

Tags: Writing
Posted in BLOG | 81 Comments »

SOA

January 20th, 2012

I absolutely love the “Sons of Anarchy”! I received the first three seasons on DVD for my birthday and so I swallow 3-4 episodes at a time as I cannot stop once I start. It’s thrilling and my lower back aches from all the backstabbing and I am fascinated by the tight plot twists and boot-cut drama. It lives in the magical universe of “The Shield”, another one of my all time favorite television shows, and since I never got to be on The Shield, I hope one day to get to do the Sons of Anarchy. Maybe I could even ride!

The Sons of Anarchy reminds me of the northern California gangs of my youth, but they didn’t have impressive custom bikes, they just rode the trains, although a few among them had shiny, roaringly loud El Caminos and Mustangs. These belonged to the older boys, men really, and the muscle cars usually didn’t last long as they were quickly impounded or sold to pay for bail bonds and lawyers as the owners were carted off to jail and then inevitably to prison.

They called themselves the WPODs, and the primitive rock-painting-like graffiti of these letters on walls all over the city would later be covered over with the sophisticated, swirling spray can murals taggers eventually learned to create, discovering that they too had a right to art. I didn’t know then that the letters came from a song by the tubes, and they stood for white punks on dope, and this was mostly true, although they weren’t technically punk, as they didn’t have Mohawks or piercings made with safety pins and they never went to see bands at the Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco’s premier punk venue. They preferred laser light shows at the planetarium and the classic rock of Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and of course Black Sabbath.

They were always white, and mostly of irish descent, but not recent immigrants, as they didn’t regularly frequent the real irish bars of the Sunset and Richmond districts filled with authentic brogues and bitter beer and held no opinion or allegiance to Protestants or Catholics or Sinn Fein or the IRA or anything and they were too young to be in those establishments anyway. The dope of their moniker and choice was usually crank or what is now known as crystal meth, but then it was a heavily stepped-on early edition of the drug, so cut up with baby laxatives that everyone would fart up a storm at the mere appearance of a cloudy, stingy bag.

The Sunset District where I grew up was made up of these 4^th and 5^th generation Irish and 1^st generation Chinese /Korean /Vietnamese /Japanese /Filipino families. It was a faintly depressing and conservative neighborhood that was defensively lower middle class. The streets were mean but they were clean. The trains were on time but filled with hard looking kids, who weren’t bad really, just high, and bored, which was me, and is still me sometimes.

The WPODs were like sentinels or soldiers, as they had a uniform, and you would see them strutting around, keeping watch, proud as roosters, in their derby jackets – deep blacks and blues and sometimes steely grey and even an odd khaki brown in there for the wild card crazy one who liked to set off fireworks and could make pipe bombs with the collection of pyrotechnics squirreled away under his bed.

There was a distinctive double seam going across the back of the jacket, shoulder to shoulder, which I took to represent the horizon that marked the farthest border of the Sunset District, the painfully cold and windy Ocean Beach, whose dangerous undertow made going swimming absolutely suicidal. You needed to get your affairs in order and write a note to your loved ones before taking a dip in there. Everyone I knew who went in that water died. That is not an exaggeration.

To go with the jacket there were loosely slung Ben Davis slacks, the wide leg giving way to steel toe boots, laced hard and tight up the shaft, holding their skinny boy calves in a confining leather hook and eye embrace. They walked with confidence and dirty hair that framed beautiful but haunted cold weather faces, and in their glittering blue and green eyes I could tell they were still little boys who got scared and cried when they were alone.

We weren’t supposed to hang around with them but it happened. The WPODs were encouraged to stay with their ‘own kind’, but they never did, being unable to resist the gorgeous asian girls growing up next to them, with our shiny black hair and plump lush Dr Pepper Bonne Bell mouths. They’d wait outside your house smoking Marlboros and trying not to act or look like they were waiting outside your house, dreaming of a whiff of your Love’s Baby Soft or Jean Nate After Bath Splash. Their hopelessly ardent crushes betrayed their hoodlum exteriors.

I was well liked for my humor and resemblance to the 26 year old woman whose purse had been stolen on the N Judah, and at 12 I could convincingly buy kegs of beer with that swiped ID and my ageless poker face and grown woman body. The WPODs would leave odd trails of saliva on my Izod shirts as they didn’t know how to kiss but tried to seem like they knew everything about sex and so they’d suck on odd areas around my shoulders and chest like lampreys sticking to the side of a fishtank.

I got older and these boys got into worse and worse trouble and without warning became men who couldn’t do anything else but be in trouble. I left my neighborhood for comedy and showbusiness and better and brighter things and sometimes I would hear of the incarceration of one and the death of another and I’d think about the clean hopeful Ivory soap smell of their necks and how the derby jackets they wore held the cigarette smoke inside them so they always smelled like they were smoking even if they were not. Whenever anyone lights a Marlboro red around me I remember so much and so hard and so quickly and so vividly I feel like crying.