The Fox TV show Glee recently featured a male/male duet of the great 'winter' song, "Baby It's Cold Outside". Its amazing sometimes how the world rolls forward. If only it could always be like this, 'cute', gently, one song at a time.
My all-time favorite version appears on the Ray Charles and Betty Carter album, which is not available on line (WELL worth getting, if you don't have it already. Their Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye never ceases to give me the shakes). Here, however are some other versions on YouTube, showing a bit of the evolution of the song.
First some 'definitive' versions:
Betty Garret and Red Skelton (from the song's debut in the film Neptune's Daughter). This is already a bit of a variation as the song had previously been sung in the film by Ricardo Montalban to Esther Williams.
Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan
Ringing the changes:
Louis Armstrong, fooling around with Velma Middleton (the poster mistakenly thought it was Ella Fitzgerald, hence the images)
The next best thing to Ray and Betty: Ray Charles and Dionne Warwick (it's the way Ray sings 'Roar' that gets me every time:)
Rod Stewart and Dolly Parton
Willie Nelson and Norah Jones
From the UK: Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews (from Jools Hollands amazing show, Later, of course!)
Still cold in the 21st Century: Chris Colfer and Darren Criss
My folks used to joke that Baltimore was an 'over grown small town,' and there is something to be said for it's familial feel. On the other hand, you can hardly get away with anything or go anywhere without running into someone you know:)
Last time I was back in town, I saw another writer on the street, and someone who I know by sight from 'out' (bars and clubs) in Home Depot. This time ('no place like Home for the Holidays') I've run into two former co-workers at Pratt, one in the grocery store, the other at the liquor store (those librarians, always eating well and drinking well!:)
I can't say I've not run into people I knew unexpectedly in New York, because I have, but the number of 'sightings' here in Charm City is pretty amazing. Either we're a small town, or my friends and I travel the city in a repeating circle, going to the same places over and over again!
One of the differences I've noticed already between New York and Baltimore is that people don't 'speak' up here.
Not that they are silent -- not at all -- but rather that whole thing of total strangers or neighbors passing you on the street and saying Good Morning doesn't happen very much in New York. Even the "Black Male Head Nod" ™ (with optional opening or closing "Yo!" and/or 'Zup? )as guys pass each other on the street isn't very prevalent here....curious...
But then this is a city with over 8 million people in it, where the streets, subways, and other forms of transportation are seldom if ever empty - you'd be exhausted trying to say something to even every other person within a matter of a block or two. And, once you engage them, New Yorkers are actually helpful and for the most part friendly (although they don't want people to know that - something about that Rough New Yorker Stereotype is appealing, and gets people to leave you alone). Still, I have to say, there's something about the casual camaraderie of quick acknowledgment I miss.
But, of course, a couple of days ago, as I was thinking about writing this, a guy passing by me in Brooklyn nodded and said, 'Zup? So there! Exceptions always prove the rule I guess...
Passing along Split This Rock's 'Poem of the Week', "mourns the gay and lesbian young people who committed suicide in the past weeks: Justin Aaberg, Asher Brown, Raymond Chase, Tyler Clementi, Aiyisha Hassan, Billy Lucas, and Seth Walsh."
Charlie Howard's Descent
Between the bridge and the river he falls through a huge portion of night; it is not as if falling
is something new. Over and over he slipped into the gulf between what he knew and how he was known. What others wanted
opened like an abyss: the laughing stock-clerks at the grocery, women at the luncheonette amused by his gestures. What could he do, live
with one hand tied behind his back? So he began to fall into the star-faced section of night between the trestle
and the water because he could not meet a little town's demands, and his earrings shone and his wrists were as limp as they were.
I imagine he took the insults in and made of them a place to live; we learn to use the names because they are there,
familiar furniture: faggot was the bed he slept in, hard and white, but simple somehow, queer something sharp
but finally useful, a tool, all the jokes a chair, stiff-backed to keep the spine straight, a table, a lamp. And because
he's fallen for twenty-three years, despite whatever awkwardness his flailing arms and legs assume he is beautiful
and like any good diver has only an edge of fear he transforms into grace. Or else he is not afraid,
and in this way climbs back up the ladder of his fall, out of the river into the arms of the three teenage boys
who hurled him from the edge - really boys now, afraid, their fathers' cars shivering behind them, headlights on - and tells them
it's all right, that he knows they didn't believe him when he said he couldn't swim, and blesses his killers
in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive.
Sheesh! Try to get back into the swing of blogging, and immediately fall behind! I was away from computers for much of Friday, and so missed out on participating in this year's Blog Action Day (October 15th). The topic this year is/was "Water".
Almost a billion people around the world don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. And in the industrialized nations, water is tied to technology (an iPhone requires half a liter of water to charge, cotton t-shirts take 1,514 liters of water to produce, jeans an extra 6,813 liters), mass produced food (24 liters of water to produce one hamburger) and our love affair with bottled water. People in the US drink an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year, requiring over 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture, 86 percent of which will never be recycled. More info on these facts here
(I'm guilty too, but the bottled water thing still seems a little odd because much of it tastes just like tap water to me - and that's before I reuse/refill the bottles city water!)
Please visit the links and take action -- or at the very least THINK before you slap down that $1 for a bottle of H2O or let your faucets run and run and run..
After having recently participated in a flurry of e-mails about the Yale Younger Prize (congratulations to new judge Carl Philips), I have mixed emotions about them. Sometimes the best book is nominated, and even wins, sometimes not. Sometimes the winner is memorable, at other times one barely remembers the winner a week after the announcement. And don't get me started on issues of race and gender and the Prizes! Ultimately, however I have to agree with Tayari Jones (as usual!) and her take on the whole Awards Biz (in a post titled "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You, NBAs":
I know it's foolhardy, but my relationship with these book prizes is like my relationship with a bad boyfriend that I just can't quit. I know he's trifling, but sometimes he's nice, and I keep telling myself that his heart is good, and that he will change. Silly as it is, I keep holding out for happily ever after.
I know what you mean, Tayari, even though those kinds of guys break your heart everytime, baby....
Finally, unqualified congratulations to Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, currently imprisioned in China for his non-violent human rights work. Since he also writes poetry, I guess a poet DID win a Nobel this year! Here's one of his poems, from the PEN American Center website.
Daybreak
for Xia
over the tall ashen wall, between the sound of vegetables being chopped daybreak’s bound, severed, dissipated by a paralysis of spirit
what is the difference between the light and the darkness that seems to surface through my eyes’ apertures, from my seat of rust I can’t tell if it’s the glint of chains in the cell, or the god of nature behind the wall daily dissidence makes the arrogant sun stunned to no end
daybreak a vast emptiness you in a far place with nights of love stored away
Any translators out there, PLEASE take a look at their work and help bring it into English, they're both terrific!
Here is a translation of one of the poems that Ms Gorga read for us that I particularly enjoyed, with a video of her reading it in in Catalan.
Stones
If the voice could come out in photographs in the way shadow or tenderness does -- even while being more vulnerable realities -- I would hear once again my father telling me that, before picking up a stone, you should roll it over with your foot or a branch to scare away the scorpions hiding underneath like dry thorns. I never worried about that. Being six years old was simple, simple as dying. In both cases, there was no secret other than the air: breathing it or not breathing it, as if the soul were full of tiny alveoli that open and close. The first scorpion I saw was in the natural science book, trapped forever in the severe pincers of time. On occasion, though, books don't tell the whole truth, as if they didn't know it or had forgotten it on the way from the printer's. Arachnid with body divided into abdomen and cephalothorax. It said nothing of the burning sun in the tongue, of fear, of the spike pierced into the neck. I didn't know then what words were immense icebergs hiding beneath their icy waters much more than they show. Like the word scorpion. And now, as the phone insistently rings -- a sharp daybreak cry -- as I get up, turn on the light, move my hand to its white body of plastic that shines like a stone in the sun, as I pick it up and say yes? and someone tells me you're dead, I only think of scorpions, of what you wanted to tell me when you repeated roll the stones over, please, roll the stones over.
(from El desordre de les mans, 2003, Translated by Julie Wark)
Okay so I've been TERRIBLE about updating this, but (as if this is an excuse) a number of major changes have been happening with me.
The main one being this: After nearly 20 years at the Pratt Library, and even more than that in Baltimore, I am now in New York City, and working at Poets House. An amazing shift, but one that I think is just perfect for me right now.
I will NOT however, betray my (woebegotten) Orioles by becoming a Yankees fan (I've always had a soft spot for the equally hard pressed Mets) or abandon the Ravens. One has to be True to Their Team no matter where they live after all!
**** Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and sadly, this has been a terrible season for LGBTQ people - especially young people, with six suicides in the past five weeks (Aiyisha Hassan, 19; Raymond Chase, 19; Tyler Clementi, 18; Seth Walsh, 13; Asher Brown, 13; Billy (William) Lucas, 15) and one young man, Tyler Wilson (aged 11), whose arm was broken by bullies in school because he joined the cheerleading team.
I honestly don't know what to say about the intra-gang violence, other than sadness to see that these alternate (and homosocial) families that young people have created are resorting to such violent policing of heterosexuality amongst their ranks.
As someone who suffered from depression for many years, and contemplated suicide more than once, however, I think I recognize a bit of what's going on with the recent rash of self-destructions.
I think many in the mental health field can report that there's an element of 'contagion' in suicide. Those who have contemplated it can, in a sense think, 'Well if they did it, I can do it too' when they hear news of others killing themselves. Hearing about someone else doing it makes it seem more of a valid option. And one thing those who may not have considered this must realize is that the person thinking those thoughts is in a great deal of pain, actual physical and emotional pain, and wants to end their lives to make the pain stop -- or to end the pain they think their existence is causing someone else.
"I was that man, I suffered, I was there...."
Dan Savage created the "It Gets Better" video project, where gays speak to the younger versions of themselves, urging them to 'hang in there' through their teens because Life Gets Better.
Personally, I think that some things in life DO get better -- and others just change. "Bittersweet" seems the best word I can come up with to answer the question "What Is Grown-Up Life Like?"
And also you have to MAKE things better, following the suggestions created by the young people on their website, and not just (to take a phrase from an old Springsteen song that I used to repeatedly play for myself when I was in my teens) "Waste your summers praying in vain for a Savior to rise from these streets." As much as you can, take control of your own life.
It is also imperative that we as adults step in and stop bullying and harassment of young people (and other adults) for being 'different.' And be seen by younger people doing so as well.
And I also want to echo the words of someone who I've grown to admire a great deal, former basketball player John Amaechi, who in his Coming Out Day message said, in part
...I believe you should know that in this climate, there is poison all around. People and institutions who would marginalize and abuse you for being who you are and as such, I would encourage you to come out judiciously. Know that coming out doesn't mean the whole world needs to be told at once - or ever - some people will never earn the right to know the whole you.
People do have to *earn* the right to get to know you and be your friends. Try to limit your time around negativity and negative people. Do what you can to retain and hold onto a positive outlook, but don't be blindly optimistic either -- can we say "Trust but Verify" perhaps?
Know that there are people out there that can help you, or that will be happy to just listen to you vent if you like. And there is a community of people out there(gay, straight, both and neither) who will be glad to welcome you.
For me however, the people of the moment are Steven Monjenza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga of Malawi, who are now under arrest and facing the possibility of 14 years in jail at hard labor for having a traditional marriage ceremony in their country. It is men, women and trangendered people living through situations like these that are almost beyond our imagining as we live in comfort that we need to remember on this day. And all throughout the year as well.
"If people or the world cannot give me the chance and freedom to continue living with him as my lover, then I am better off to die here in prison. Freedom without him is useless and meaningless." -- Tiwonge Chimbalanga
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.
Never once in my life did my parents say, 'What you're doing is a waste of time.' ... I know there are kids out there that don't have that support system so if you're out there and you're listening, listen to me: You want to be creative? Get out there and do it, it's not a waste of time. — Michael Giacchino, after winning the Academy Award for best original score for 'Up'.
Congratulations to all of this years Academy Award Winners, to First Female Best Director Winner Kathryn Bigelow, and most especially of course to Baltimore's own Mo'nique for her ferocious performance in Precious. I wish her very much success in her stated desire to play Hattie McDaniel in a bio-pic in the near future
Congratulations also to professor and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher for his win for Best Adapted Screenplay for his adaptation of Sapphire's novel Push. He's the first African-American to win a writing Oscar, and gives all of us scribblers of colour some hope!
This was the first time I'd watched the Oscars all the way through in a VERY long time (I'm not a fan of awards shows), and all in all I thought it was a very enjoyable evening. Most of the films and stars I suspected would win did in fact get their awards, and for me the only surprise was the selection of “The Secret in Their Eyes” (“El Secreto de Sus Ojos”) from Argentina over "The White Ribbon" or "A Prophet".
Do we have sex outside of the marriage? Let me say this. I have not had sex outside of my marriage with Sidney. Could I have sex outside of my marriage with Sidney? Yes. Could Sid have sex outside of his marriage with me? Yes. That’s not a deal breaker. That’s not something that we would say, ‘Oh my God because you were attracted to another person and because you happened to have sex let’s end the marriage.’”
Considering the reaction of some people to this 'revelation' (which was old news to New York Times Readers) one would think Mon'ique had confessed that she and her husband spent their spare time as serial killers.
Secondly, the closeness of the stars of the Best Picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, provoked this bit of strangeness from NBC Today show co-host Meridith Viera:
Both these instances point out ways in which conformity particularly in issues relating to sex and sexuality continually rears its ugly head. Some people feel the need to police other people's relationships, and or their expressions of warmth, affection, and love. Dominant forms of 'acceptable heterosexuality' must be enforced at all times! And as the author of the "Good as You" blog points out, this kind of reaction is particularly disturbing for gay and lesbian people when it comes from one of our so-called liberal allies, as Viera has been in the past:
'"Because we have so many of our supposedly liberal friends who will be so nice to our lives and our loves when confronted directly with them, yet will so often go for these cheap and, frankly, stupid jokes that traffic solely in anti-gay "worry." In doing so, they foster the idea that same-sex affections are icky, a fear fomentation that's not negated by their niceties when dealing with actual gay people. Regardless of how much the purveyors of this mindset may disconnect these abstract denunciations from actual LGBT human beings or contribute to our cause, the reality is that they're cultivating in the minds of the American public the exact kind of casual heterosexism that keeps people voting against us and then justifying it by saying "some of my best friends are gay," keeps civil unions on the table as acceptable alternative to full marriage equality, and keeps many would-be allies apathetic to the pro-equality fight because they see gays as this odd "other." '
Personally, as someone who has played on sports teams, been in the military, and been through very stressful and sometimes traumatic events with other guys, I didn't see anything particularly 'gay' about the way these actors reacted or were all hugged up on each other. In filming Hurt Locker they experienced a small part of what soldiers on the front lines are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one that can create an incredible bond. To make that seem somehow 'wrong' or a 'reason to worry' is in itself a reason to worry about the person who feels that way. So...what's up Meredith?
Although the following poem is old, and written for another occasion, I offer it in honor of all the winners, and urge everyone to express their affection for others however they damn well please.
THE VICTORS Men's 100 meters Goodwill Games: New York City, 21 July 1998
Our only enemies are Time, the unending fall of each hundredth of a second, and the Air which holds us back, keeps us from transforming to pure flight not those others talking trash.
We do not need words, have caged Speed itself within the bunched muscles of our thighs, feel it purr beneath our feet coiled tight, ready to spring out with the sharp crackling of a shot.
We train as one, live as one, push each one on with shared determination, pull each fiercely over every finish line.
Awash in applause and screams beneath a flag too small to contain all that we are, this final lap of victory is shared: mine, my brothers. When I win he wins, we all win – all swim arm in arm in glory.
Shirtless in the flashbulbed night, our bodies gleam with muscles, sweat and speed, hammered bronze turned gold in the liquid light of our tripled love.
My all-time favorite version appears on the Ray Charles and Betty Carter album, which is not available on line (WELL worth getting, if you don't have it already. Their Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye never ceases to give me the shakes). Here, however are some other versions on YouTube, showing a bit of the evolution of the song.
