Pink Floyd founder Richard Wright died today at his home in England. He was 65.
A spokesman for the band confirmed that Wright had been battling cancer, the AP reports.
…
Wright wrote and sang some of the band’s most memorable songs, such as "The Great Gig in the Sky," and "Us and Them" on the 1973 album "The Dark Side of the Moon."
Dark Side of the Moon was pretty much the sound track to my college years. I was a young gay man, just off his first serious heartbreak, headed toward an even bigger, much more disasterous one, still trying to make sense of the world, still believing I could find my creative place in it, find my soulmate, and unleash all the creative potential inside of me. I still believed that everything was possible to me creatively. But…it wasn’t… Not without that once missing piece in my heart…
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
Leave, but don’t leave me
Look around
Choose your own ground
Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be
And especially…
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
I swore when I first heard those lyrics that I’d never let that happen to me. And somehow…I did…
Part of the reason I took the long weekend, besides it’s my birthday and I wanted the time free, was I wanted to try and get re-acquainted with my drawing table. But all weekend long so far I haven’t even been able to look at it.
I can’t draw. But it wouldn’t be correct to say that I’m blocked. My head is full of ideas for cartoons and other artwork. I just don’t want to sit down to the drafting table and pull it out of me. I don’t want to go there. Inside. Where the drawing comes from.
I ran away from it for almost fifteen years, from the mid-1980s to 2001, when I started posting my political cartoons here for the first time. What I found when I picked up pencil and pen again after so long was I’d lost a lot of it. It was a struggle to get it back. But then I got better. Better then I’d ever been. I’m starting to be afraid now that I’m headed for another dry period. And it’s not dry in the sense that I have nothing to put down on paper. I have lots to put down on paper. Tons. But…I don’t want to any more. It just seems so pointless now…
I remember back in the 1980s…which were a terrible period of time in my life…first the interest in drawing and painting went away, then my interest in photography. Eventually all my creative interests just…stopped. That was the period I took up computer programming, which eventually led to a whole new career and lots more money then I’d ever dreamed of making. So you could argue that it was a net gain. But it wasn’t. It was deathly cold and horrible. That’s where I’m headed. Again. It looks like.
…but not entirely, thanks to a few kind people. I got some messages from a few online pals, and my brother called and one other guy who I haven’t spoken to much since November 2004. A few rays of light in an otherwise crappy day. The weather was dreary, rainy, and just ugly over all. Gray overcast sky and rain that either drizzled or poured. And the combination temperature and humidity were almost perfectly ugly. It was right at the point where it was almost too hot, and almost too humid…but not quite. The moment I stepped out onto my front porch the air was just wrapping me in a suffocating blanket, but not so much that I had to run right back in. It was perfectly balanced on the precise point between miserable and insufferable. So the weather was in tune with my inner state at least.
I figured I’d go get myself a birthday cake. I had it in mind to treat myself to a German chocolate cake, so I took a drive to a nearby German bakery to buy one (there are actually several here in Baltimore). From the sound of it I figured it would be a decadent treat. Well for those friends of mine who think I’m getting a bit too wrapped up in all things German (because of a certain someone), don’t worry. I found out that German chocolate cake has coconut in it. Okay…I hate coconut. With a passion. It’s like little plastic shavings in my mouth. I’d as soon eat chocolate covered sawdust. But the same bakery had a really nice looking Hazelnut Torte so a small one of those went home with me. And a brat and kraut because I hadn’t eaten all day.
I’ll say this…you eat some real German sausage and American hot dogs start looking a lot less appetizing. And that’s true with a lot of European food we try to mass produce over here. For example…I love cheddar cheese…absolutely love it. The sharper the better. And never more since I’ve been able to get some real English cheddar at Whole Foods. Now I can’t even look at the domestic product anymore. They add food coloring to it for god’s sake. And…stiffeners…to make it behave like it’s been aged. And American cheese…the stuff I used to eat all the time in grade school…I found out it isn’t even cheese, really.
So…anyway…I took Thursday and Friday off to have a long birthday weekend, and then basically just vegetated around the house. Mostly because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money traveling. The price of gasoline is still high, and I’m worried about the economy and my future at Space Telescope if NASA suffers major budget cuts. But I am also getting tired, very tired of traveling by myself. It isn’t fun anymore. When I got the job at Space Telescope, and had real paid vacation time for the first time in my life, and lots of it, traveling was fun. It isn’t fun anymore. 55 and single really sucks. In another five years I’ll be grandpa material. That’s not exactly boyfriend material.
I think I’ve finally pinned down this feeling I’ve had for years…finally found the words to express it better. It’s not so much loneliness. It’s not so much uselessness. What I feel like, is a leftover part. Something in the bag of nuts and bolts that’s still there after the thing has been assembled. It goes in the drawer and maybe you find something to do with it someday but usually it just sits in there forever. That’s how I feel at age 55.
The Day The Music Died. And The Day After That. And The Day After That…
My favorite form of vacation is to just throw my maps and my cameras and my luggage in the car and just drive. I love taking long cross-country road trips. When satellite radio came along, I figured it would be ideal for that. How wonderful, thinks I, to be able to dive from one coast to the next and hear your favorite radio station the entire trip. If I wanted to taste the local fare, I figured I could always switch back to broadcast radio.
I had actually stopped listening to broadcast radio long before satellite radio came along. Too many commercials and too little content worth listening to. And then the hate jockeys of talk radio came along, to drive the final nail in. I grew to loath radio. It was driving across the so-called heartland of America one trip, and hearing nothing but hate, hate, hate on the local broadcasts, that finally convinced me to get satellite. That was when I owned the little green Geo Prism. By the next year’s road trip I had the Honda Accord, which initially came with XM.
But I wanted Sirius. I’m a gay man, and what appealed to me about Sirius was it had a gay channel. XM didn’t. An additional plus was that I like big band/swing music and Sirius had a channel specifically for that and all XM had was a general 1940’s music format. But you have to appreciate that having a channel dedicated to a gay audience really appealed to me. When it comes to mainstream broadcasting, you feel less like a part of the audience and more like a topic for discussion. Particularly during sweeps months. So when I bought the Honda Accord back in 2005 I actually had the factory radio ripped out because it was XM only, and had a conversion kit installed that allowed me to install an off the shelf Sirius car radio.
For about half a year after I installed it, I enjoyed listening to Sirius immensely. Then they changed the channel lineups.
OutQ was still there. But Swing Street was gone. Just…gone. I was actually listening to Swing Street more then OutQ for reasons I’ll go into in a moment. So when they dropped it I was really pissed. At first they made the channel into a general all purpose "American Standards" channel. It eventually became the All Frank Sinatra All The Time channel. I complained over and over again on their customer support email address, which I take it gets routed straight to /dev/null. Of course nothing came of it.
But that wasn’t all. Air America hopped over to XM. Then the trance channel, Area 53 moved to channel 33 and was renamed Area 33 and the format changed slightly. Now they only play trance at night. I found when I got Sirius that I kinda like listening to trance while driving. Something about the relentless beat combined with the asphalt zooming past just clicked with me. Now I could only listen to trance at night. And Spa 73 went from New Age to International music and became completely unlistenable. I’m not a big New Age fan, but it’s nice to listen to while driving, or doing household chores sometimes.
Okay…there were still the classic rock stations. But the more I listened to them, the more I found them playing the same songs over and over. After a while I just stopped listening.
Out of over a hundred channels I’d have thought there was room there for the formats I liked to listen to. And they Were there for a while. But then they just…went away. And what replaced them was crap. Hadn’t I been there before with broadcast radio?
And what of OutQ? It’s too raunchy most of the time. Particularly Derick and Romaine. I don’t mind there is room for adult format radio on satellite. I think that’s great actually. But for the same reason I really don’t like my DVD catalogs stuffed with tons of pornography simply because I’m a gay man, I really resent the implication that because I’m gay, all I want out of a channel that targets gay folk is raunchy sex talk. I was hoping for more like the Signorile show and Sunset Cruse, which is a really sweet love song call-in dedication show that runs late on Sundays. I loved Sunset Cruse. Absolutely loved it. I used to listen to it constantly while I drew my political cartoons on Sunday nights. All the heartfelt love that came through on that show really kept my spirits up while I was drawing cartoons about the latest spew of anti-gay bigotry in that week’s newspapers. It was sweet, it was heartfelt, and it raised my spirits to face the coming week. If it wasn’t for those two things, Signorile and Sunset Cruse, I wouldn’t bother with OutQ at all.
Oh…wait… They recently replaced Sunset Cruse with…Derick and Romaine. Well we all know that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
So. The gay channel didn’t turn out to be as great as I’d hoped, and like everything else on Sirius I enjoyed when I first signed up, it’s gone into the trashcan. My swing channel is gone…I can put my iPod’s classic rock playlist on shuffle and hear more variety then I get on the classic rock stations on Sirius…the symphony hall channel is too hard core for me and the pops channel too lite…they only play trance for half a day now on the trance channel…and Spa 73 is almost unlistenable now.
I was actually contemplating putting the factory radio back into the Accord before I traded it in. The only thing that kept me from doing it was Signorile and Sunset Cruse. When I got the Mercedes last October, it came with a Sirius radio. Now Sunset Cruse is gone…replaced by Derick and Romaine’s crappy piss bar raunch. I still listen to Signorile. I pop it on occasionally for the trance channel when I’m driving at night. But I find myself now scanning the channels for something…anything…worth listening to and I can’t find it. Luckily the Mercedes sound system is iPod enabled. I recently upgraded the pre-amp coming off the AUX input on the Mercedes sound system…the sound levels for attached iPods were too low and people were complaining and Daimler listened. Now the iPod sounds as good as any CD, and it holds tons of music. I have a swing playlist on it that I can play in shuffle mode and imagine I’m listening to Swing Street again. I wish I’d captured the station ID when it was still on the air.
New music? For now I’m getting it on Pandora. At least until the RIAA kills internet radio. If I could get internet radio in my car I would be happy again. Especially Pandora. Seriously, the music industry should be paying Pandora, not the other way around. I’ve bought more new music listening to Pandora in the last year then in the previous ten. In the meantime, when my current Sirius subscription runs out, I’m not renewing.
The music industry is going to kill Pandora, and Internet radio. They want to kill satellite radio too, but it looks like its killing itself just fine. I guess they figure they have to so we can all be pushed into listening to mass produced lowest common denominator crap. But I won’t be pushed. I’ll just stop listening. And…buying.
The center of Hanna has actually settled over the city, according to the latest weather radar. No rain. Just the occasional wind gust. I’m going to take a wee stroll…
I just looked at NOAA radar for the area. If you do a base reflection loop you can see clearly the center of the storm is strolling right up the bay.
It’s calm outside now, drizzling that fine rain you always get from tropical rain bands. You can see on the radar that the south side of Baltimore is near the edge of Hanna’s center of rotation. The center actually looks like it’s hugging the bay’s western shore. Its between Washington and Baltimore as of 1:21 according to the radar images. Good thing it wasn’t a hurricane.
I’m looking at the NOAA radar look for this area and it looks like Hanna’s center is passing a lot closer to Washington and Baltimore then they were saying last night. Good thing it wasn’t a hurricane.
Looks like all the little seaside towns along the coast from the Delmarva north are going to get their beaches clobbered. I doubt this thing’s going to do much damage beyond beach erosion though. Which is bad enough for those places.
Wow…as I was typing this my Japanese maple just took a wind blast and got a real good shake. This thing may bring some trees down around here after all…
Hanna’s bopping along though Virgina now, heading to the Chesapeake Bay. But it looks like it’ll cut across the Delmarva peninsula and head out to sea, instead of running right up the bay like Isabel in 2003 and Agnes in 1972.
We’re getting some wind now, but it isn’t bad. Just some brief gusts that shake the tops of the trees a little. A fine, driving rain is coming down in alternating bands of heavy and light, which is typical for the outer bands of tropical storms. So far it doesn’t look like anything to worry about. A couple weeks ago I was worried about a friend down in Orlando. Now I’m getting a taste of it here in Baltimore. But Hanna’s moving pretty quickly. We have flash flood warnings and high wind warnings up, but they say tomorrow will be sun-shiny and blue skied.
Right now the wind is shaking my Japanese maple just outside my front bedroom window. It does that for a little while and then stops. The rain is pretty constant now though, alternating between pouring heavy and fine. Just a day to stay indoors. I’m going to try and get some cartooning done.
It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing.
On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America,” an essay she’d entered in the “Wave the Stars & Stripes” essay contest and won. The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.
There’s the Continental Congress…A real WWII vet…Photos of workers at Ground Zero. A close-up of a folded flag presented to a grieving widow at a military funeral… profiles of soldiers swelling with pride in slo-motion.
But CBS News found that the footage of the ‘funeral’ and soldiers is what is called ‘stock’ footage. The soldiers were actors and the funeral scene was from a one-day film shoot, produced in June. No real soldiers were used during production.
The footage, sold by stock-film house Getty Images was produced by a commercial filmmaker in Chicago. Both Getty and the production company, Mr. Big Films, confirmed that the footage was shot on spec and sold to the Republican National Committee.
One of the actors, Perry Denton of Chicago, Ill. also confirmed that he was hired on a day-rate as an actor for the shoot and told CBS News he was surprised to learn the footage was shown at the convention.
One argument would be that using real soldiers in a political campaign video would amount to manipulating the U.S. military for domestic political purposes. As if they don’t already do that anyway…
But they could have easily found usable news footage of an actual military funeral if they wanted to. I don’t think that thought ever crossed their minds. Our armed forces have been nothing more to them then a prop they can use to gain and keep political power. So the difference between a stock actor and a soldier doesn’t come immediately to mind and that’s why nobody questioned the use of actors in that video. We’re all props on their stage as far as the republicans are concerned, every one of us. And in any case, reality is what they say it is.
“I just wanted to take a second to come by and pay my respect and the campaign’s respect to your organization and to your group,” said Schmidt, who many view as the new architect of the Republican Party. “Your organization is an important one in the fabric of our party.”
In his brief remarks, Schmidt weaved in a personal anecdote about his lesbian sister and her relationship to him, his wife, and his children. “On a personal level, my sister and her partner are an important part of my life and our children’s life,” he said. “I admire your group and your organization and I encourage you to keep fighting for what you believe in because the day is going to come.”
The Log Cabin members there in attendance immediately began questioning him on McCain’s record on gay equality, pressing him repeatedly on his stance on same sex marriage. Finally concluding that they’d come there looking to see a leader and they didn’t.
Hahahahaha…. No. Actually, that was a high school student in Concord New Hampshire, speaking directly to McCain himself…
William Sleaster, a student at Concord High School rose to ask McCain a question about gay rights and, ultimately dissatisfied by the answer he received from McCain, told the Republican presidential contender that he’d come looking to see a leader and didn’t.
McCain first answered the high school student by talking about his support for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the military’s policy regarding gays, and about his belief in the sanctity of marriage.
“Discrimination in any form is unacceptable in America today,” McCain said.
“I understand the controversy that continues to swirl around this issue,” McCain said. “That debate needs to be continued.”
Sleaster pressed on. “Do you support civil unions or gay marriage?”
“I do not,” McCain answered. “I think that they impinge on the status and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”
“So you believe in taking away someone’s rights because you believe it’s wrong?”
“I wouldn’t put that interpretation on my position, but I understand yours,” McCain said diplomatically.
Sleaster went on to ask another question about how to help the working class in America, which McCain fielded by talking about the country’s need to figure out education and health care, and to secure the environment.
Sleaster indicated that he wanted to follow up again.
“You have one more? Go ahead you’re doing good,” McCain encouraged.
“I came here looking to see a leader,” Sleaster said. “I don’t.”
The assembled students murmured, and a teacher started to step in.
“I understand,” McCain said. “I thank you. That’s what America is all about.”
…and Homeland security immediately began tapping his family’s phones and intercepting their emails. I sure hope that poor kid doesn’t need any student loans to get himself through college. Anyway…here’s what the Log Cabin members actually did. They…uhm…cheered as Schmidt rose to the defense of Sarah Palin…
“You saw one of the great speeches in the history of political conventions last night by an accomplished governor of a state who has just announced herself as a major force in the Republican Party in her own right, and I think the other side this morning, when you consider the backlash that is likely to occur after all the vile filth that’s been thrown at her, they ought to be sitting on the other side saying, Oh – My – God,” Schmidt said to the cheers of some 50 attendees.
Vile filth…??? You mean…like this…?
Like…this…?
This…maybe…?
That kind of vile filth? Meanwhile the Log Cabin cheered for the lady who tried to eliminate domestic partner benefits in her state by referendum when she couldn’t get it via the courts, and told the Eagle Forum in a 2006 questionnaire that her No. 2 priority as governor would be "preserving the definition of ‘marriage’ as defined in our constitution." They cheered.
If sixteen year old William Sleaster had been there to see it, he might not have bothered challenging McCain on his gay rights positions. If we don’t stand up for ourselves, no one will stand with us.
The Log Cabin Republicans: Breathing new life every election year into Truman Capote’s saying, that a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
A SENIOR clergyman has threatened to quit rather than work alongside the man who could become the UK’s first openly gay bishop because he says homosexual acts are “sinful and wrong”.
Canon Peter Jones said he would consider his position should the Dean of St Albans, Dr Jeffrey John, become the new Bishop of Bangor.
And just so you know he isn’t motivated by anything as sordid as mere hate…
Mr Jones, who is married to health visitor Susan and has two grown up children, added: “I’m not against homosexuals as people, but people who engage in homosexual acts or people who teach that such acts may be acceptable.
We don’t hate the person, only the act… But if if an "act" is all you can see in the sexual intimacy between same sex couples, then you are beyond hating the person. You don’t even see the person. Hate has already done its work on you. It has turned homosexual people into nothing. It has taken loving same sex couples and turned them into strange two-legged beasts who merely copulate. It has turned their love for each other into an act. And now the enemy can no longer be just the act, but the meaning that underscores it.
Dr John, 55, and his long-term partner the Rev Grant Holmes became civil partners in August 2006, but he claims to be celibate.
Celibate or not, they are a couple, and your enemy isn’t lust, it isn’t sex, it isn’t moral relativism. The enemy now is love. Which is why it has to be an act. "…people who engage in homosexual acts or people who teach that such acts may be acceptable." Acts. Acts. Acts. Homosexual sex isn’t what offends you. Homosexual sex isn’t what you are striking out at there. You are not denying that sex is moral between same sex couples, but that love plays any role in their intimacy. That’s why it has to be an act. By calling it such, you are throwing a dagger at the hearts of loving same sex couples and hoping for blood. You are trashing their garden. You are spitting on their hearts, because the heart, not the sex, is what offends you.
Hate has done its work on you. You are beyond hating the person. You are beyond hating homosexuals. You have taken that one critical step past the edge of the Pit and you have fallen in. The enemy isn’t sex. The enemy now is Love.
There probably isn’t any going back from this place. You’re done. By all means, return the stole to someone who is fit to wear it.
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