I don’t know if anyone else has said it, but I thought Juan Epstein was hot. Either way, the actor Robert Hegyes, who played him, died at the age of 60. So here’s a clip of Kotter’s first day back at Buchanan High.
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:
Dear Mr. Kotter,
Epstein was not able to turn in his history assignment on account of he’s dead.
Sincerely,
Epstein’s mother
Which is nearly horrible yet somehow perfect.
The couple who chose to keep their child’s sex a secret so that s/he might be raised free of gendered expectations and stereotypes, have now revealed their child Sasha was declared male at birth.
The reason, of course, is that Sasha is starting school.
Miss Laxton, a web designer from Sawston, Cambridgeshire, admitted that keeping her child’s gender under wraps for so long had not been easy. At her mother and baby group, she said she was regarded as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl’. ‘I could never persuade anyone in the group to come round for coffee,’ she said. ‘They just thought I was mental.’
At school, Sasha sometimes wears a ruched-sleeved and scalloped-collared shirt from the girl’s uniform list. But he has yet to encounter any teasing or bullying. ‘Nobody’s ever mentioned it and I would hope that if they actually said something to Sasha, he’d be confident enough to make a good response,’ his mother said.
I think they sound entirely sane and reasonable, and I applaud their efforts to raise their child without the restrictions gender places on all of us.
Rachel calls it my clink-bang-whizz-brr music. (Tom Waits, amongst others, is in the same category.)
It still makes me happy, and they were amazingly cool live. They were the only band I ever played that my mother asked me to turn off, and I vaguely remember her calling it something like “Nazi death music.” I love this description at Trouser Press:
Part deadly earnest post-musical composers, part boys- with-toys goofballs whipping up a ruckus for the pure joy of making noise, Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) have built a distinctive, challenging and extremely imaginative sonic career out of implements generally intended for other utilitarian purposes: power drills, humming power lines, water towers, air-conditioning ducts, plate steel, glass, boulders and various large metal objects beaten with sledgehammers, pipes, wrenches and axes. Even traditional tools receive similarly brutal mistreatment — Blixa Bargeld’s pained vocals and guitar are often blurred to the point of abstraction. While Einstürzende Neubauten occasionally veers into song form with intriguing, even attractive, results, the group’s output more typically resembles a bunch of highly amplified (or, in some cases, barely audible) industrial sound-effects records being played at each other with little concern for anything but the raising of blood pressure and artistic hackles. Good shit.
Ah, Blixa: check out the creepiest version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” ever recorded. (He was one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds too, by the way.)
or there’s always this option.
As someone who goes to see a great deal of music these days – go figure, but it turns out I love chamber music – I tend to leave my phone somewhere in the entrance / antechamber to the actual performance hall. It would make sense if people could check their phones before walking into an event.
… is 39 years old today, & still, thankfully, the law of the land. It is not, of course, guaranteed, and the pro life forces are quite aware that the next presidential choice of a Supreme Court justice is incredibly important, and they’re feeling pretty cocky after the 2010 elections.
So for those of you who are “fiscal conservatives” – I put that in quotes because I don’t think you can separate fiscal issues from social ones, since how we make and spend money, is, ultimately, a moral issue – who are thinking of voting against Obama, but who are feminists, think twice.
Being Pro Choice is not being Pro Abortion. I have yet to meet anyone – feminist or not – who is pro abortion. What we are, rather, is feminist, and think a woman’s life – which is actual, apparent, and breathing – should have at least some influence on the potential life – which is debatable, uncertain, and not breathing – she is carrying.
Sugar and Slugs put together a list of 100 trans-related blogs; not all of them are primarily dedicated to trans issues, but still, this is pretty amazing.
I think there were three when I started, & I’m not sure any of those are still online/active.
I expect some of our Appleton peeps will read this & we will make a lot more sense. Maybe. Anyway, it’s great.
Bagel.
It’s been seven months since he left us, & we both still miss him everyday.
Here he is with his star pendant. Because, you know, he was one.
“Power without love is reckless & abusive,
& love without power is sentimental & anemic.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice
& justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
- Dr. King
Or, as my friend Dylan posted on Facebook:
Spend this day in reflection.
Put no words in Dr. King’s mouth and make no assumptions that he would be on your side if he was alive this day; dead men can neither dispute words nor defend deeds. Create no saints where there was only a brave, fragile human who spoke for justice at his peril and ultimately to his demise.
Above all, remember the work that must be done tomorrow, for while Dr. King gave us momentum there is still so much left to do, so many challenges yet to come. May we share his strength and bravery as we act justly in the face of injustice, and in doing so honor his legacy more than any statue or holiday could attempt.
Indeed. That last bit would make a lovely start to any meeting, or any day.
If you haven’t yet heard, a Girl Scout troop allowed a young trans girl to join and in response, people are boycotting the sale of Girl Scout cookies.
Which, to my mind, means: more for us! These will be the most guilt-free cookies ever.
The Girl Scouts, by the way, have continued to support an inclusive membership policy despite the boycott.
I know everyone is sick of these already, but I find this one charming:
More interesting is the same guy’s musings on being “trans enough”.
ABC Cancels “Work It” After Two Episodes
Los Angeles, CA, January 14, 2012 – Today ABC announced that the series “Work It” has been cancelled after two episodes. GLAAD and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) advocacy organizations including the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) had spoken out against the series for its potential to cause harm to transgender people. The series debuted on January 3, 2012 to low ratings, and, according to Entertainment Weekly, dropped another 20 percent this week.
“While many of ABC’s positive and groundbreaking portrayals of LGBT people have been critical and popular successes, the public had little interest in this outdated show,” said Herndon Graddick, Senior Director of Programs and Communications at GLAAD. “As a result of this campaign, an important dialogue has been started in Hollywood and mainstream media about the real discrimination faced by transgender people today.”
I love this. A “Plus Size” model – in scare quotes because I find the phrase idiotic – did a photo shoot with your average (skinny) model, exactly to show the difference.
What’s striking to me is how much she looks like an adult woman to the other model’s more child-like appearance. And honestly, that kind of freaks me out.
Anyway, I think she’s gorgeous.
Wow. Margaret Cho rightfully lost her shit & in so doing wrote us all a manifesta:
I grew up hard and am still hard and I don’t care. I did not choose this face or this body and I have learned to live with it and love it and celebrate it and adorn it with tremendous drawings from the greatest artists in the world and I feel good and powerful like a nation that has never been free and now after many hard won victories is finally fucking free. I am beautiful and I am finally fucking free.
I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were “different” and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.
Read the whole thing at Jezebel or on Cho’s blog.
I am beautiful and I am finally fucking free.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you’re not pretty enough, that you curse too much, that you don’t like the right things, that you are “‘different’ and therefore unlovable”. They are only keeping you from your freedom.
It’s profoundly moving to see that someone like Margaret Cho – famous, funny, rude Margaret Cho – still needs to punch back so hard against someone who is telling her to be something other than what she is. Makes me feel an ounce better about having felt the need to do the same thing when I was told what I needed to do to fit in here. Sometimes I wonder if those of us who “grew up hard and am still hard” get read as a lot tougher than we are, & so people feel free to critique when they might not if a person were obviously vulnerable. Hrm.
On this day in 1928 police seized 800 copies of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. It would be put on trial as obscenity later in 1928 under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857; Virginia Woolf came to the trial but wasn’t allowed to provide testimony — nobody was.
Interestingly, 1928 was the same year women got the right to vote in the UK.
Coincidence?
(h/t to The Progressive’s “Hidden History” calendar, via FW)
You knew it was coming:
“You transgenders are so inspiring” is probably my fave.
That said: we have had plenty, PLENTY of trans women ask us if my partner has had “the surgery”, how we have sex exactly, and whether she is gay, was gay, and whether or not I was/am/have become a lesbian.
