Stories We Tell Ourselves

Detox Post-Mortem

2010-07-10T16:28:00.001-04:00

It's been one week since the end of my detox and the results are in: I feel great! Part of me wants to continue the detox in some form. I may even restart it again later this summer. It impacted my life in several positive ways. First, it made me appreciate my time with my friends much more because I was actually experiencing them without the haze of alcohol. Second, I was more selective about what events and outings I attended, basing my decisions on my own preferences rather than the likelihood of free booze. Lastly, and this has been the most gratifying result, my own detox inspired a lot of other people. I'm not gonna call anyone out, but it's sufficient to say that at least a 15 different friends and colleagues either embarked upon or restarted their own detox/healthy living regimens in the last three weeks or so.

Steering clear of caffeine and only having sugary treats on a holiday? Sounds reasonable. Limiting myself to drinking once a week or only having two drinks when I'm out. Quite possible. Last night, I only had three drinks but this morning I was not feeling so wonderful. Whatever form this new lifestyle takes, I'm in a much better place physically and mentally.

A week ago today, I met with Josh Borden, one of the fitness specialists at Pure Austin, to test my metabolism and see what my body was looking like from a scientific perspective. Numbers aside (1750 resting metabolic rate, 140 pounds, 10 percent body fat), it was eye-opening. I need to eat more and really increase my protein intake if I want to build some muscle. He also said that no matter how many workouts you do, your physical well-being and muscle tone is ultimately shaped by what you put into your body. Period. In other words (and I knew this, but it was still nice to hear), it's not a zero sum game. You can't down three 500-calorie margaritas and then just run your ass off on the treadmill for an hour to make up for it. Being healthy is a lifestyle choice—I've been working toward a healthier lifestyle for several years now—and it's one that I'm happy to fully embrace much more now that I'm living in Austin. Surrounded by people who workout, run Town Lake, do various boot camps, shop eco-consciously for groceries, etc—I couldn't ask for more inspiration. Thanks to everyone who encouraged me along the way!

Maybe next time the transformation will merit before and after pics. Until then...

Having My Steak & Eating It, Too

2010-06-25T00:11:00.005-04:00

At the end of day 13 of my detox, I'm feeling good. Throwing back vitamins instead of Grey Goose L'Orange and Tonics. Hitting the gym instead of nursing a hangover. Despite the occasional craving for sugar, my body hasn't reacted negatively to this phase of deprivation. Needless to say, I've replaced some of the usual bad stuff with some good stuff. More fruit and whole grains, etc. Even so, when I was invited to attend a dinner for local media people at Fleming's on 2nd Street, I was a little worried. Despite my reservations, there were only three items on the menu I could not enjoy: the ravioli, a delicious-looking processed carbohydrate topped with plenty of cheese; the restaurant's new Svedka Vodka-based cocktail, the 99-calorie Bikinitini, and the desserts—which looked divine and included a flour-less chocolate cake—were off limits. There's always next time. I did enjoy the dinner (I ate most of what's on the plate in the picture, above), all in all: good food and great company. I'll leave you with this fun fact I recently learned: the average 12-ounce margarita contains 540 calories.

At Some Point, You'll Have an Emotional Breakdown.

2010-06-18T22:29:00.003-04:00

That's what someone said to me recently when we were discussing my detox. Usually when you deprive your body of something it's used to getting (in my case, sugar, booze, caffeine, etc.), different emotions can spring to the surface. Of course, someone else said that I might coast through it without a big emotional blowout. I guess we'll see. Thus far, seven days into my customized detox, I'm feeling good.

My energy level is high, my skin's clearing up and I'm sleeping more soundly than I was before. For me, it's less about depriving myself and more about substituting good things for the not-so-good. Instead of cookies I'm reaching for an apple. Instead of a cheese-topped quesadilla I'm going with a sashimi salad.

I've been hitting the gym pretty regularly and I can see the combined results of exercising and detoxing. I'm pleased. I've been headache-free so far, too. The encouragement from people has been awesome. Even though it's been a very busy week (L Style G Style's July August issue went to the printer today! The party is July 3rd), I never once broke down and ordered tacos from Sazon or a coffee from La Boite or poured myself some wine from the unopened bottle sitting in the kitchen. Ultimately, 21 days isn't a very long time. My friend Amanda told me today that she gave up alcohol and meat for six months last year.

But 21 days is still long enough to form better habits. Good habits are the best ones to form. By the end of this, I'd like to evaluate where I am and see what sort of longer-lasting changes I can make to live a healthier life.

When Brunch Is a Verb

2010-06-14T12:19:00.006-04:00

Brunching with a group of gay men, which I did twice on Sunday (at Z'Tejas and Berryhill), is not quite the same without alcohol. That's not to say I didn't myself. It was great seeing old and new friends and making connections. I listened, with amusement, to stories of Saturday-night shenanigans. Delightful.

It was different, however, because I was the one taking really accurate notes and seeing all the little things that tend to get lost in the booze-induced haze of the weekend. Every time I ordered another water with a lemon it became a little bit easier. The words of support and encouragement I've been receiving from people--Alisa, Marques, Todd, Jonathon, Douglas, Rich, and my mother, to name just a few--have been super sweet. And very appreciated.

In the end, I'm not doing this to make anyone else feel bad. I'm not giving these things up forever (only for 21 days). I'm just giving my body and mind a much-needed break. My liver, too. I got nine hours of blissful sleep last night and this morning my eyes were clear (and bag-free).

I'm ready to close out the July/August issue and move ahead with upcoming issues/projects. Tonight it'll be time for running and the gym.

Detoxic

2010-06-12T15:11:00.004-04:00

When I started telling friends about wanting to do a cleanse the most common response, other than words of encouragement, was, "Why?"

I'm someone who believes that moderation is the key with pretty much everything and I don't have an addictive personality. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life. Having said that, I know what my vices are and what's actually good for my body. So rather than doing some sort of extreme master cleanse, I've crafted a 21-day detox plan for myself.

Giving up: sugar, booze, caffeine and cheese. Increasing: veggies, fruits, whole grains, vitamins, etc. I'm not banning meat, by any means, but I gravitate toward the grass-fed variety anyway. Chicken and fish, perfect.

Consumed thus far today: blueberry/banana smoothie with coconut water and unsweetened soy milk from Whole Foods Market, sandwich roast beef and sliced avocado on seeduction bread and a lot of water.

Throughout this process, I'll be running around Town Lake and working out at Pure. Will I end up with tighter abs (6-pack, anyone?) or bigger pecs? Maybe. But I know for sure that I'll feel good. Clear-headed. Eyes wide open. Here goes something!

Have You Seen the Lights?

2009-11-12T11:41:00.004-05:00

I'm excited about my first piece for The Faster Times. I reviewed Hank Stuever's new book, Tinsel. You can read it by clicking here.

The Masked Man

2009-10-24T16:10:00.009-04:00

Every moment in life is a learning experience. Or what good is it, right? --Paul, in Six Degrees of Separation

Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence. --Virginia Woolf

Have you ever met a masked man? We've all met him or spent time with him, at one point or another. He glides easily from high-end cocktail parties to cowboy hoe-downs, from benefits and fashion shows to dinner parties and movie nights. His personality is bland enough that he can seamlessly weasel his way into your life---taking on the characteristics of you or your friends or your heart's desires. He has all the trappings of material success---and he wants you to know that he's just like you. He possesses a desperate need for society's approval. He talks a really good game, it's true. In fact, the masked man can't stop talking. With him it's an endless flow of word vomit, always trying to---what?---cover up his feelings? Fill the emptiness in his heart? Convince you that he actually believes in something other than his own ego? Usually it's all of these things. His verbosity is the very definition of meaninglessness.

One thing is for sure: Pretentiousness comes in every shape and color. The masked man, of course, is hiding something. Or several somethings. Beneath all the bonhomie and supposedly-deep conversations, apart from the professions of feeling (can such a person truly feel anything?) and the tokens of his appreciation, lies a very sad man. To go through one's life wrapped in a mask of false happiness and pretension, covering up one's feelings by over-intellectualizing everything and behaving as though this is normal and okay---it's too bad.

If you only talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk---well, you shouldn't be playing. That's all.

Message In a Bottle

2009-08-15T14:19:00.003-04:00

"I like a good martini. One or two at the most. After one, I'm under the table. After two, I'm under the host." --Dorothy Parker

"There but for the grace of God go I." --Proverb

Have you ever felt that life was banging you over the head with a sledgehammer? Lately certain events that have happened to someone I know have reminded me of my own past. This recollection has made me realize just how far I've come since my early days as a curious twenty-something in New York City. The glory days of all-nighter benders and friends left behind at the bar and party favors. It turns out that my crazy antics have had a good shelf life, as fodder for laughter-inducing stories. This pleases me. But as with all stories, people change.

Sometimes I think of life as being like those game shows where you have to choose what's behind door number one, two or three. If you choose door number one, you end up being a happy, tax-paying, property-owning and successful member of society. Door number two might win you that shiny Bosch fridge you've been coveting. But door number three could lead you off a cliff. The thing about downward spirals--we've all seen homeless people on street corners or in subway stations holding cardboard signs saying that they ended up in jail and lost everything dear to them--is that they start with small, seemingly insignificant decisions. Whether or not to attend that particular party. Whether or not to keep hanging out with a crowd that's pulling you down or offering up constant temptations. Whether or not to trust your instincts or succumb to peer pressure.

I've been at the edge of that cliff. I've looked down, too. The view is not cute or pretty. I feel like throwing on a red t-shirt I own that bears the old Virginia Slims slogan: "You've come a long way, baby."

Flying the Joke-Free Skies

2009-07-05T16:23:00.005-04:00

"Any joke or offensive comment about security could result in your arrest," said the pleasantly robotic female voice that was being piped over the sound system in George Bush Intercontinental Airport as I made my way from one maze-like terminal to another en route to my connecting flight to Boston. This information was relayed after she told me that the current terrorist threat alert, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security, is yellow. Guess this wouldn't be the time to drop any jokes about pat-downs and airport racial profiling.

Zipping through security in Austin was a breeze. I didn't even have to remove my clear, regulation-size toiletries-filled plastic zip-up bag. Shoes off and bomb free, I walk through the metal detector. Lugging my carry-on past countless Wifi hotspots, tourist-trap tchotchke shops, localized or themed newsstands (couldn't resist picking up People's Michael Jackson tribute issue), charger kiosks for cell phones and myriad food choices--from white linen napkin spots to fast food chains--I made my way to seat 10F. I was sitting smack dab in the middle of a dozen 10-year-old digital-camera-toting girls. Over the next four hours, these girls (they were seated in my row and directly in front of me and behind me) proceeded to snap pictures of each other, talk loudly, get up in their seats, ring the bell for the stewards a few times, get scolded by the ever-patient crew and generally wreak havoc.

Just as there are unspoken rules--don't bring very young, prone-to-crying fits babies to fancier restaurants like Uchi and Parkside--I believe there should be a no flash camera photography policy on airplanes. It's distracting and unnecessary. The 12-year-old boy sitting next to me, after devouring an extra meal he'd purchased in the airport, but before our mini-meals were brought out, was snapping pictures of himself with his hat pulled over his face or his head down on the pull-out tray...you get the idea. Besides, the inside of most airplanes still transports us back a decade or so. What exactly is so intriguing that you have to photograph it on the plane? Unlike, say, cars--airplanes haven't upgraded their designs in a while and air travel is no longer treated with the same respect (people used to only wear their finest finery while flying) as it was in the past.

I turned on my iPod shuffle and listened to some wonderful new mixes, content with keeping my own 9/11-related jokes to myself. I believe in all types of humor. Just remember: nothing is as sacred as the Washington punditocracy says.

Flying is a modern, though at times seemingly antiquated, mode of travel. Right now, I'm relying on it more than I used to. One can hope (and dream) that Obama, along with states like California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, will usher in an era of high-speed rail to truly propel the American transportation system into the new century while creating thousands of new jobs.

Back to Basics

2009-06-20T18:55:00.011-04:00

I like to remind my friends, and myself, that Facebook is the biggest time suck since--well, since the invention of television. In reality, of course, it's much worse. The act of watching TV is still very passive; unless you're the type of person who yells at the TV whenever you disagree with a talking head or with a call made during the game, you're probably not intellectually engaged with what's happening onscreen. Whereas Facebook is actively engaging you, sucking you into its vast cyber-maw with status updates, myriad links and photos and video post, plus hundreds of inane "Which cast member of 90210 are you?" quizzes.

Facebook markets itself as the opposite of passiveness: it "helps you connect and share with the people in your life." Sounds innocuous, sure. I guess we all weren't connecting and sharing enough before the fall of 2006 (when Facebook became available to anyone with a valid email address)?

Recently, with everything that's been pouring out of Iran via Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, I've had to rethink my own sometimes-disdainful take on social networking. I admit that sites like Twitter and Facebook can, and do, impact world events in a positive way when they provide millions of us with a boots-on-the-ground view of the gradual disintegration of a repressive, totalitarian regime. You see, although I post on Facebook and update my status often enough--usually on a daily basis--I was late to the party (if Facebook decides to start charging for membership, said party will rapidly morph into a funeral). I joined MySpace about 4 years ago, long after it had gone from hip to ubiquitous to passe. Now, it's primarily a space for bands, music lovers and teenagers. I leapt onto Facebook when I moved to Austin, hoping that it would in fact further my connections to friends far and wide. In some ways, it's worked out. I am able to stay in touch with friends on the East Coast, and still feel like I'm in their loop just enough, so that when we do finally talk over the phone the blanks can be filled in, the stories can be shared and laughs can be had.

Facebook has also provided a new forum--broadened my readership, if you will--for my blog. This has given me a newfound sense of freedom, in one respect, but it's also forced me to choose my words very carefully, knowing all these eyeballs are watching. The site also promotes and facilitates the kind of voyeuristic behavior, cattiness and general cynicism that can all-too-often lead to negative feelings, resentment or more. Of course, this happens more often to some than others. If your predisposition is glass half empty, well then...you see where that road leads.

I can count on one hand the number of friends here in Austin who haven't taken the plunge and joined the cult of Facebook. And I hereby applaud them, heartily. Their social calendars aren't any less booked. Their professional lives are percolating along nicely. And they don't suffer from any social networking disconnectedness withdrawal symptoms--as far as I know.

As this first decade of this new century rushes to a close, I'm hoping that against all odds there will be a renaissance for the basics and a renewed appreciation for old-fashioned pleasures: face-to-face contact, sitting and reading the Sunday New York Times (the version composed of dead trees and ink), watching movies as opposed to webisodes, curling up with a good book (again, those pesky dead trees) and detaching yourself, for whatever length of time seems appropriate, from the far-reaching tentacles of Facebook.

Perhaps de-friending is the new black?

Notes on Friendship & Fauxcializing

2009-06-14T23:22:00.006-04:00

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

Not sure where the above quote is from, but I like it. It dovetails with a lot of my thinking lately as it relates to self-improvement and learning about the Kabbalah and just being a better person.

Years ago, I cared a lot about what people thought. More precisely, I cared about what everyone thought. Now, schooled by time, I only care about what a few specific people think, and they're the ones I value the most. The rest of the chattering class can say what they want. Or naysay, if they so desire. They don't even have to like me. I used to really want everyone to like me--and I couldn't understand for the life of me why anyone would dislike me. I took it personally. It stuck in my craw when I found out that someone had an issue with me or someone (who I'd met before) ignored me out at the bars. I no longer feel this way and I certainly no longer think this way.

If you don't like me, that's cool. I don't need to be Mr. Popular. If you choose to be petty or catty or gossipy or immature when you're around me, so be it. That says way more about your character than mine. I don't need to have 1,000 Facebook friends (I've been methodically deleting people who are only tangentially connected to me or who, for lack of a better word, are troublemakers.

I realize it's a cop out to close with another quote, but at least I'm admitting it.

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.” --Tennessee Williams

Would You Like Some Brie With Your Certitude?

2009-06-14T15:20:00.018-04:00

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. --Joan Didion

There are times in your life when you think that loneliness is simply going to envelop you in its suffocating embrace. This can occur despite all evidence to the contrary--convivial nights out with colleagues and friends, fabulous invitations stacked on the bedside table, forever tempting with offers of cheap booze and promises of new faces. New faces? Sometimes I prefer the old ones. Feeling lonely is a state of mind that may or may not be connected to one's actual station in life. I was reminded of this recently, after watching Mike Nichols' devastating film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--starring Elizabeth Taylor (she won an Oscar for this fierce performance) and Richard Burton as the married couple Martha and George (plot summary here). Caustic and true, the film's dialogue is superb; they don't make movies like this very much anymore. On the surface, a relationship might appear to be going swimmingly well. To outside observers, who would remark on how Mr. and Mrs. (or Mr. and Mr. or Mrs. and Mrs.) So-and-So are still enamored of each other after X years together, all is well. Friends who see their public displays of affection, or lack thereof, may not have a clue. Lingering there, hidden beneath the veneer of normality and happiness, lies an issue--festering. It may be that an arrangement is no longer suitable, that a previously-hidden agenda has been revealed or simply that all the passion has vanished. Whatever the particulars, you cannot judge a relationship solely by its surface clues, just as you can't learn everything there is to know about a person from their Facebook profile.

If it were possible to go back in time and set things right (a life-reversal)--to ask the question that's been gnawing at your conscience since a friend's sudden death, to confront a partner over a stale relationship, to choose a better man for marriage, to stop your born-again Christian sister from stirring up trouble--would anyone do it? Does it even truly matter? These trials, and all the negative energy associated with them, are tests, at least according to one school of thought. Not the pass/fail kind, certainly not the multiple choice kind that some of us dreaded in high school--but personal strength tests. "Well darkness has a hunger that's insatiable/And lightness has a call that's hard to hear." I couldn't have said it more succinctly. Not to get too Kabbalah on everyone (though I'll admit I've been reading up on the Jewish mysticism that Madge popularized), but the white light and the positive vibes that we all want to surround ourselves with aren't always the most easily-attained emotional state. Positivity turns out to be tough, at times.

Nevertheless, I feel newly empowered and enlightened by recent events in my life. Positive energy begets positive energy, right? One thing I know for sure: if you want something enough, it can become a reality. If you spend time focusing on the positive and ignoring the negativity and gossip, you'll be on track for success. Before I veer too far into prosthelytizing, or perhaps preaching to the converted, I'm circling back to the original sentiment at the top of this post, as expressed by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

I saw the beginning of things with my most recent ex, but completely lost sight of the end. It morphed into a series of false starts, mishaps and misbehavior. These days, the beginning is crystal clear, while the end--well, at the very least I can make a highly educated guess. And right now, for me, that's perfect.

L Style G Style's Family Issue

2009-05-25T13:39:00.001-04:00

You can check out some of my latest work in the May/June issue of L Style G Style. It's a free publication available at various locations throughout Austin--and it's online. Click here to flip through it.

Notes from an Optimist**

2009-05-24T18:24:00.010-04:00

We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going—North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying—elbows stretching—fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless—eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning—sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming—air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

This is a story about love, fearlessness and serendipity in the sun-saturated land where time seems to have stopped at 1865, and, simultaneously, hurtled ahead to 2016 or beyond. It's a tale, like many tales, which would hitherto only be told in whispered asides or during martini-fueled escapades. Far away from the toxic marshlands of Jersey and the concrete, steel and glass homogeny of Manhattan, a solitary young man once heeded a call for change. Welling up inside of him, this call manifested itself in a certain restlessness of the mind and heart, a yearning for new social and intellectual stimulation--the uniquely American promise, handed down since the founding of this young nation, of progress through movement. If you cease to move, what happens? If you cease to learn, what happens? The young man never entertained that possibility.

Creative fulfillment and the trappings of continued professional development came quickly and easily. Motivation based on money was never this young man's truth. The accolades came, the party invitations flowed in, the pats on the back and expressions of wonderment, the friendships that blossomed and grew, in some cases flowering into permanence and in other cases wilting in the heat of misunderstanding and gossip. Still, the young man felt that something was missing. It wasn't gnawing at his insides or invading his dreams, though it did occasionally come up as a topic amongst his friends. How does he not have a...? When will I discover that one, true...? He's been single for how long? Generally, none of these things were said with malicious intent or hatefulness. The issue also surfaced in his recently-neglected journal. Sensitive and forward-thinking as he was, adamantly independent in his own daily life, he wondered at times whether he was doomed to repeat the mistakes of others. Or his own mistakes. Friends of his who seemed unable to locate the kind of love they frequently proclaimed they were looking for over late-night cocktails; his own father, who saw fit to slash, burn and lie his way out of a long marriage, wreaking much domestic havoc along the way. Still, the young man maintained his optimism, knowing (hoping) that when the time was right, he too would find his love. His truth.

Truth comes in unexpected, yet lovely, packages. Oftentimes, it is not wrapped in a shiny colorful bow with a sign saying 'Open me. I'm perfect. This situation is perfect.' The details of how and when it happened are meaningless for the reader at this stage. The fact remains, it happened. Relationships are complicated, that's what they always say. Complexity keeps it interesting, yes, but it also makes one yearn for a dash of simplicity. In the young man's situation, truth arrived in the form of an exquisitely handsome intellectual equal. There was, of course, the matter of logistical technicalities--they were easily overcome--which had more to do with the inconvenience of circumstance than any inconvenient truth. The young man dove headfirst into this new phase of his life, never wavering or second-guessing. He was learning, exploring and growing in unexpected ways. He deftly deflected the slings and arrows of onlookers as being motivated by the twin evils of jealousy and envy.

Safely ensconced in his new love, growing more sure of its permanence everyday and relishing the bumps in the road up to that point, the young man breathed a deep sigh of relief. Surveying the chattering masses, their well-worn one-liners ever at the ready, he smiled. His confidence, clear to most, stemmed from his belief in the power of what is meant to be. The power of something becoming what it will be. What it was, indeed, meant to be. 'Yes,' he thought, 'I have found real love. And real love has finally found me.'

**This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Some Like It Hot

2009-04-08T22:33:00.004-04:00

Music makes the people come together. It must be true--I heard it in a Madonna song. Music is my boyfriend, that's a line from another song my colleague repeated at work today. Music is the great uniter. Music is literature set to a tune, said another close friend this evening.

Music may or may not bridge every gap (where's a catchy pro-gay marriage song when you need one?) or heal every wound (can Madonna help mend our ties to the Muslim world?), but it can definitely express a feeling. Or make an emotion, previously hidden from view, burst out like tulips in freshly rained-on spring dirt.

I'm writing this with one eye half-shut, feeling lethargy creeping in after two glasses of white wine and my share of carbohydrates for the day. This I know for sure (like Oprah): the only people to create music for me (mixed CDs) have been those whose hearts are (or were) true and whose feelings are (or were) deep. I send out wishes of musical connectivity, danceable remixes, jazzy standards, Broadway show tune show-stoppers, meandering melodies and all the happy memories that said music evokes.

Flip Through It

2009-04-03T09:48:00.005-04:00

If by chance you haven't picked up a copy of March/April's issue of L Style G Style (it's available at a range of locations, including Whole Foods Market and various 2nd Street District shops), you can flip through it by clicking here. I wrote about tennis player Paul Bradshaw; artist, teacher and owner of El Sol Y La Luna, Anna Salinas; Red Carpet Suicide, Perez Hilton's book; The September Issue, RJ Cutler's forthcoming documentary about the making of Vogue's biggest issue ever.

Notes on Serendipity

2009-03-31T23:47:00.011-04:00

"This is what I vow: He shall have my heart to keep;
Sweetly will we stir and sleep,
All the years, as now,
Swift the measured sands may run;
Love like this is never done;
He and I are welded one:
This is what I vow."

It's been far too long, I know. I have neglected my blogging duties--due to a few glitches in the system (I was allowing the Matrix to keep me down)--but I'm stepping back up to the plate (just in time for baseball season; go Yankees!) for April. I cherry-picked the above quote from my Dorothy Parker reader, which was collecting too much dust on my shelf. I've been thinking about love and fate and serendipitous connections. As I get older, I'm more convinced than ever that you meet people for a reason. Even if the initial timing of a connection may seem off, most things tend to work out. I'm glass half full, regardless of whether I'm in Austin or NYC. I can't help it. Maybe that's the yoga (which I haven't done in a while) talking. Speaking of yoga, I had the good fortune to interview a well known Austin yogi this past week at his soon-to-open new downtown studio--and our chat will be in the next issue of L Style G Style. That, along with a few other pieces, should make for a great May/June issue of the magazine.

Besides that, my work life has featured the usual upheavals and changes that come when people choose to move in different directions. As for me, I take it all in stride. Of course, it's easier to accept big changes when they come with friendly dinners and new experiences. New discoveries abound in Austin, and I'm thrilled to take them all in with open arms. Each day I appreciate this city in new and unexpected ways. This is partly due to living in the present and also because of the company I keep. I've got big plans for the rest of this year, so watch out, Austin. Here I come!

Some readers will be displeased by the rambling, somewhat vague nature of this post, but given the injuries I've recently sustained and the long day I have ahead of me tomorrow--I hope that everyone will understand.

Reinventing Myself

2009-02-28T12:58:00.006-05:00

Reinvention. It is a distinctly American idea. The sense that, no matter the odds or particular tragic circumstances of one's life, one can always start anew. It's the pioneer spirit. I come to Austin as a pioneer! Bringing my NYC sensibility, my offbeat politically incorrect sense of humor--my ability to revel in the absurdness and darkness of life.

In no particular order, some things I've done lately (in the last year or so) to reinvent myself:

Relocated to Austin
Recharging my journalism career (Tribeza, L Style G Style, Austin American-Statesman)
Bringing long-term projects (novel, stories) to the front burner
Drinking less
Taking a long (extended) break from gay bars
Changing my diet
No more Whataburger!
Less sugar
More vitamins
No more coffee
Organic everything
Working out at Pure Austin
Getting back into yoga
Less spending
More saving
Traveling
Learning to write in Arabic

I admit that this is a lame, teaser blog post. But I plan to write a bit more often in the coming months. Did I mention I'm growing my hair out? The above picture was taken with my G1. I finally took the plunge, eight years later, and bought an iPod shuffle with a Macy's gift card I received for Christmas. I got an eye zone treatment from Jesus -- can you tell? :-)

What else? I'm typing this on my shiny (new) black MacBook, which Jarred sold to me at a discount. I'll be hitting SXSW for the first time -- covering the film festival for L Style G Style. Otherwise, I'm just working and thrilled to still have a steady income. Austin does seem to be an oasis from the Depression-style mood sweeping the country. Maybe it's cause the sun is almost always shining here. Or because Austin's downtown, unlike Miami's, is not overbuilt. People are still moving here all the time.

I'll close this meandering post with a Joan Didion quote that seems appropriate:

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image."

72 Hours in Provincetown

2008-10-28T21:50:00.004-04:00

You can read the piece I wrote about Provincetown in the October issue of Tribeza here:

72 Hours in Provincetown

“Provincetown is by nature a destination. It is the land’s end; it is not en route to anywhere else. One of its charms is the fact that those who go there have made some effort to do so,” writes Michael Cunningham in his homage to Provincetown, Land’s End. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours fell in love with this old fishing town’s haunting beauty many years ago, and he, along with artists like the director John Waters, the playwright Tennessee Williams, former U.S. poet laureate Stanley Kunitz, and the writer Norman Mailer, has kept a home here.

Provincetown, perched at the end of a curved, sandy sliver of land between the vast Atlantic Ocean and picturesque Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts, is a place where history lingers in the air (the town was incorporated in 1727), where acceptance of diversity and eccentricity is de rigueur (you’re as likely to receive a postcard for an act featuring men in drag at the Paramount nightclub, or to see two men pushing a baby stroller down the street, as you are likely to see a big family waiting for a table at the Lobster Pot, a down-home seafood joint), where the cuisine rivals that of New York City, and where longtime residents are possessed with immense pride of place. A onetime Portuguese fishing village turned artists’ mecca, P-town, as it’s known by regular visitors, truly has something for everyone.

I boarded a smooth flight to Boston and then cruised from there to Provincetown on the fast ferry (the 90-minute trip allows time for a nap and a quick snack). Eager to score some beach time that afternoon, I was glad that the friendly folks at the Brass Key Inn, a 20-year-old recently renovated guesthouse on Bradford Street, made the check-in process simple. The inn’s quaint and sophisticated Victorian feel is complemented by the modern amenities of its central courtyard, which features an infinity pool and an in-ground spa.

The town’s size (about three miles long and slightly more than two blocks wide) makes it extremely bikeable, so I rented a two-wheeler at Gale Force Bikes, which offers free locks, helmets, and maps. From there, it’s a breezy 15-minute ride to Herring Cove Beach, where the water is clean and crisp.

Cafe Heaven, which offers scrumptious salads and sandwiches—the avocado and goat cheese on a French baguette is divine—was a great start. After lunch I walked from one of end Commercial Street—the town’s main drag—to the other. The many art galleries, such as the Cove Gallery or the Lyman-Eyer Gallery, the bookstores, and the town’s newly restored library made for an afternoon of pleasant wandering.

Although P-town largely eschews national chains, a Marc Jacobs boutique recently opened (Robert Duffy, president of Marc Jacobs, Inc., has a house in town and is a longtime supporter of local charities). Dinner at the Mews, which offers a succulent lobster dumplings appetizer and entrée choices like pappardelle with pan-roasted scallops, wild mushrooms, and garlic and filet mignon served with chipotle-flavored sweet potato au gratin was a filling and fitting conclusion to a delightful day (reservations are necessary here).

A late-night stroll on the beach with a special someone is the perfect nightcap, enhanced by the breeze on your skin, the smell of the salty air, and the play of moonlight on the water.

Michelle Obama: "I love this country"

2008-08-26T01:10:00.001-04:00

Great speech. Check it out here:

Don't know much about...

2008-08-25T12:39:00.001-04:00

Yes, Barack, more of these:

Dark Knight Lives Up To All the Hype

2008-08-09T22:09:00.007-04:00

Marques and I saw Dark Knight at the IMAX theater today and it was, in a word, amazing. Besides the great acting, the mind-blowing special effects and the score that helps to keep you on the edge of your seat--the main thing that I enjoyed was the film's deep philosophical undertone. Beneath all the violence and explosions lies a very dark film that asks viewers to ponder the nature of fate, humanity's evolution (or lack thereof) and whether human beings are ultimately motivated by good. Dark Knight lives up to all the hype and critical acclaim it's received (including the Oscar whispers for Heath Ledger's creepily cringe-inducing portrayal of the psychotic Joker. The movie has already made $626,811,000 worldwide.

(Photo: Warner Brothers)

It's nice to be missed...

2008-08-08T14:06:00.009-04:00

Several folks have asked why I'm not posting on here more regularly--and the short answer is: I've been super busy! Also a bit lazy. I've discovered that Austin's perpetual 100-degree heat (next record set to be broken, of 69 triple-digit days in a summer, was set in 1925) only serves to increase one's general laziness and lethargic mood. I have big news to share, but I'm saving that for another post. Suffice to say, it's a major positive step and the beginning of a new phase of my life.

The picture above was taken during my early-July trip to Provincetown, MA. I stayed with my uncle and his partner, who have a fantastic condo up in the old Portuguese fishing village turned gay mecca. Sunshine, friendly people and the beach. What more could a guy ask for? As usual, I met some awesome guys during my visit. The trip's first leg, to visit my mom and sister in New Jersey and my friends in NYC, was also delightful. Home cooked meals from mom, brunch and dinner in the West Village, Soho shopping excursions, my friend's new furniture store in my old 'hood, Williamsburg...it made me realize how much I miss my beloved NYC and all that it offers. And it also makes me appreciate the friendships I've built, over time, up that way. Meanwhile, I passed the six month mark of living in Austin; time flies by quickly here, it's said, because the weather really stays the same for most of the year.

Future posts will detail our friends' recent visit, my writing and other tidbits. Marques and I showed Athena and Elaine some of what Austin has to offer--including trips to Uchi, Hamilton Pool, the Domain, SoCo, Second Street and Lamberts. I'll also reveal the exciting news that's had me grinning ear to ear for the past day or so.

Chain Drive

2008-07-01T11:03:00.001-04:00

My piece on Chain Drive, an Austin gay bar that may be forced to close down next year, is here:

LANDMARKS

Chain Drive isn't moving any time soon
Gay bar's owner laughs off speculation that his downtown establishment will close soon.

By Christopher Carbone
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Tuesday, July 01, 2008

"We're still getting calls," says Donald Jatho, owner of Chain Drive, laughing off the speculation about the imminent death of the longtime Austin gay bar. "They say: 'I've heard this is your last weekend. Are y'all still open?' "

For the record, Chain Drive is open for business, and its management has no plan to close the beloved institution. The 21c Museum Hotel and Residences complex is slated for groundbreaking next year at the southwest corner of Cesar Chavez and Red River streets, the same block as Chain Drive, which fronts Willow Street. But Jatho's laid-back attitude regarding the watering hole's uncertain future is fitting for a guy who opened this friendly outpost on a lark with buddies on April 24, 1986.

Chain Drive — known alternately as a Levi's-and-leather bar, a come-as-you-are neighborhood spot where the drinks are cheap, and as a dive bar with live music — was originally near the corner of East Seventh and Red River streets, near a cluster of other gay bars, all since closed or moved.

Jatho, 49, takes the latest possible change in stride.

"I've gotten no official word that I have to leave right now," he says of his contract with landowner and developer Perry Lorenz. "When Perry is ready for me to move, he'll let me know."

The businessmen have left Chain Drive's lease on a month-to-month basis, but Lorenz hopes Jatho sticks around for the next year.

"Donald and the Chain Drive have been the perfect tenant," Lorenz says, "honorable folks who always lived up to their end of the deal. I wish them all the luck and good fortune in the world. I would love for them to stick around a bit longer."

Moved to its current location on the edge of Waller Creek in April 1989, Chain Drive sometimes intimidates newcomers, with its darkly lit, concrete-clad décor. Yet the staff is known as friendly and welcoming, and patrons are fiercely loyal.

Ken Earnest and Rusty Salazar, partners for 13 years, persuaded a friend to perform their civil ceremony on the bar's back patio, long before the gay marriage debate began in earnest.

"This will forever be my little spot," Earnest says on a recent Saturday night. "It's a dive, but it's our little piece of history."

Plans for big developments have been scuttled in the past, too. During the tech boom of the late 1990s, Vignette Corp. planned an office complex for the site. The 21c project — yoking together a 16-story hotel and a 44-story condominium tower — itself has been rescheduled and moved a few blocks east.

Yet, to Chain Drive fans, the pace of gentrification seems unstoppable.

"I'd love to squat out here and drink forever, but sooner or later someone's going to come and develop it," Earnest says.

As for possibly moving the Chain Drive, Jatho says that getting the proper zoning is oftentimes the rub. "There are lots of good locations. You have to have (specific) zoning for a night club."

Buddy Allen, a patron for almost 20 years, says he would be sad to see it close altogether. "Austin has a need for this type of establishment," Allen says. "Everyone's friendly. Once you're inside these walls, you're safe."

The backyard, with its ivy-covered walls, donated plants and landscaped pond, well-worn wooden tables and benches and numerous trees framing a skyline view, is dedicated in memory of John Araujo, a former bar manager who died in 1993 of AIDS-related illnesses.

David McGill, 30, has tended bar at Chain Drive for four years, met his boyfriend there, and clearly enjoys serving the bar's customers. "I've only seen one fight here — and it was girls."

Chain Drive's bad-boy reputation — it's the closest thing to a true leather bar in Austin and formerly housed a shop for sex toys — is also what draws some. Several organizations, including the Boys of Leather, Heart of Texas Bears and the Capital City Riders — a gay motorcycling group formed at the bar — hold monthly cookouts and parties at the bar.

"I think if Donald doesn't move it, somebody will," says Steve Ryerson, a longtime patron. "It's a bunch of people who have to be serviced."

"We're keeping the options open," says Jatho, who has lived in Austin all his life. "If I can find a great location, I just might move."

Barack Loves America

2008-06-19T18:02:00.002-04:00

This is the first general election ad from Barack Obama, set to air in 18 states:

He Said It First

2008-06-18T13:20:00.005-04:00

Here's a satire of a true event that you won't hear about in the mainstream media. John McCain referred to his wife, Cindy, as a "cunt." Why aren't we seeing this repeated over and over again, a la Rev. Wright's sermons? Hmmmm...double standard, anyone?

Wedding Bells Ring in California

2008-06-17T13:32:00.004-04:00

Same-sex couples like lesbian rights activists Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 84, tied the knot in San Francisco yesterday. At some point in my lifetime, this will become commonplace--the law of the land, if you will. Hooray for California!

In the Mix: It's really, really hot....

2008-06-16T11:15:00.007-04:00

Crazy thing is, all this 100-degree weather is only the beginning--as folks keep reminding me. I can only imagine what July and August will be like. Yikes! My review (see post below) ran as the lead item in Sunday's Life & Arts section in the Austin American-Statesman. It's fair to say I'm very pleased.

After dinner at Lamberts, where I had the glorious Frito Pie (a Texas delicacy that's a mishmash of beef, cheese and, yes, Frito Lays chips) Marques and I checked out Austin's pride festival and parade on Saturday, which featured the usual assortment of floats, music and guys with their shirts off. Thousands (how many is anyone's guess) of revelers packed 4th Street, which is sorta like Christopher Street during NYC's pride, clapping and whooping it up for each float or organization. Thanks to my friend Frankie, I was able to bypass the long lines (and cover charge, in one case) at OCH and Rain. After that, we swung up to Charlie's to mix and mingle before ending the night at Chain Drive.

Other big news? Not much. I'm learning lessons at work and figuring things out. I can't believe I've been here almost five months! I bought tickets to fly to NYC (to see my family and friends) next month and also I'm going up to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to see my uncle and his partner. Can't wait! I renewed, or I guess re-started, my subscription to The New York Review of Books--my longtime favorite publication, and I'm writing another feature for Tribeza for August.

Thankfully, dear Lauren returns from her European jaunt this week. Can't wait! Dinner at Uchi may be in the cards.

A Book Is Not a Blog

2008-06-15T15:28:00.003-04:00

You can read my review of Arianna Huffington's new book, Right Is Wrong, here:

BOOK REVIEW

Arianna Huffington's predictable 'Right is Wrong'

Relying on her usual mix of sarcasm and name-calling, the famous internet pundit hasn't figured out that a blog is not a book

By Christopher Carbone
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, June 15, 2008

Arianna Huffington, née Stassinopoulos, is a master of reinvention of the sort that made Madonna famous. In Arianna's case, however, the myriad incarnations haven't always been thoughtfully planned. Picasso biographer, right-wing activist, sitcom actress, political wife, gubernatorial candidate, born-again liberal — Huffington has, at times, given the appearance not of building a career so much as desperately grasping at one.

A few years ago, she finally found one that fit. As proprietor of the liberal-leaning huffingtonpost.com, Huffington has earned enough renown to qualify for a spot-on impersonation by Tracey Ullman. Huffingtonpost, one of the most successful news and opinion sites out there, showcases plenty of offbeat links and a range of bloggers — celebrities, journalists, politicians, activists and regular folks — sounding off on the issues of the day.

Unfortunately, what works on the Web doesn't necessarily translate into print. Huffington's latest book, "Right Is Wrong," might leave readers thinking she should stick with blogging and leave the heavy lifting to the professionals.

The tome's subtitle is almost as much of a mouthful as the name she was born with: "How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness)." It's also disingenuous, because although the book is chock full of thoroughly researched criticism of the GOP's policies, it offers up few concrete solutions.

Instead, Huffington resorts to sarcasm and name-calling — great in a blog, but not so great in a book that aims for serious political analysis. In this free-wheeling liberal critique of the Bush years, oil industry executives are "petro-vampires," the mainstream media's lack of interest in serious reportage is chronicled as "Bombs vs. Bombshells," David Petraeus is the "Surgin' General" and Bush's pro-war cohorts are dubbed "nea-cons" (Neanderthal conservatives). Even when she's trying to make a point with humor, the effect, outside of the tight confines of the blogosphere, is exhausting.

It doesn't help that Huffington rehashes topics that have dominated the left-wing blogosphere over the past few years: the Republican war on science and the environment, the GOP's immigration "reform" shenanigans and the silliness of a political discourse more concerned with Janet Jackson's exposed nipple than, say, the 40 million Americans without health insurance. One-third of "Right is Wrong" focuses on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we've heard it all before: the White House's sketchy attempt to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, contractor cronyism, torture and rendition, a resurgent Taliban and rejuvenated al-Qaeda, our continued inability to capture Osama bin Laden, the heated ratcheting up of rhetoric against Iran.

None of this is groundbreaking, but none of it's wrong, either. If this gathering of familiar factoids was in the service of building a specific political case, it might be worth it. But arming liberals with what they need to know to "end the madness" is where Huffington falls glaringly short. A final three-page section, which reads like an afterthought, contains her "personal plea." Does she suggest a new mobilization of voters or citizen-journalists via the Internet? Stronger campaign-finance reform? Nope. Instead, readers are offered a non-specific call to "take up the gauntlet and stand up for the truth," without an explanation of how they might do that.

Huffington lauds Paul Wellstone, the late senator from Minnesota who earned the fervent adoration of anti-war liberals for being one of only 11 senators from the Democratic Party to vote against the 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. How could America actually encourage the kind of leadership that Wellstone provided? She never says. Perhaps the necessary changes are too radical for an insider like Huffington.

Despite her criticism of people like Bob Woodward, Tim Russert and Judith Miller for living too far inside the Washington bubble, Huffington is pretty well-connected herself, just to a different power structure. (One is reminded of the recent New York Times story in which the reporter noted, in complete deadpan, that Huffington made an important editorial decision "by cell phone aboard David Geffen's yacht in Tahiti.")

Perhaps because she spends so much time amongst the rich and famous, Huffington seems to have little interest in the financial pressures bearing down on so many Americans. A meager 25 pages are devoted to America's economic malaise, a stunning omission given the burgeoning housing and credit crisis, the pessimistic consumer mood, gas prices pushing past $4 per gallon and the likelihood that America is in a recession. Though exit polls show money problems are the voters' top priority, Huffington, like many of her fellow liberal bloggers, is fixated on the Iraq war. Given the blood shed and money spent over there since 2003, it's an understandable fixation. But in America in 2008, a winning electoral coalition will have to be built on a lot more than that.

Many progressives — and more than a few Republicans — are suffering from Bush fatigue. But after countless anti-Bush books, what else is left to say? When it comes to political strategy and policy solutions, plenty. But "Right Is Wrong" skimps on the information we need and ladles on the complaints we've heard a thousand times before. It provokes a brand-new and hopefully short-lived phenomenon: anti-Bush Fatigue.

Hillary Endorses Barack Obama

2008-06-08T02:24:00.002-04:00

Best speech ever. Period. Full of intelligence, grace and class. A true leader and a champion for all Americans. That's my Hillary.

Check it out:

Sexism Sells -- But We're Not Buying It

2008-06-06T18:31:00.003-04:00

Congrats to Barack Obama! He is the Democratic nominee for president. Now he must get to work winning over all those voters (18 million of them) who pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton. Will he choose Hillary as his VP? I suspect he's not smart enough to make that choice.

The media postmortems regarding the role of sexism and misogyny in the campaign continue. Katha Pollit in The Nation:

"Clinton's run has put to rest the myth that we are living in a postfeminist wonderland in which all that stands in women's path is women themselves. Like a magnet--was it the pantsuit?--Clinton drew out the nation's misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it...Vats of sexist nastiness splattered across the Comments section of hundreds of blogs and websites...As for the...pundits, thank you, Hillary, for showing us the snickering belittling of women that passes for media commentary..."

In the Times, Judith Warner writes:

"It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month, characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.” A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park” episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice, largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry, watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)"

She also links to this incredible, makes-you-wanna-cry montage. Check it out:

Madonna's Sticky and Sweet Tour

2008-05-29T01:56:00.005-04:00

Marques and I will be watching the Queen of Pop from the sixth row of Minute Maid Park (where the Astros play) in Houston on November 16th. More info on her upcoming Sticky and Sweet tour is here. OMG HOTNESS!!!!

In the Mix: Breaking Records

2008-05-28T15:04:00.003-04:00

Temperatures have been in the mid- to high-90s for the past week or so here. While it started out fairly dry, the humidity has been creeping up. How to beat the heat? Hanging out by the pool at the Hyatt at Lost Pines is one way. That how I spent Memorial Day with a bunch of my Uchi coworkers. Lots of sunshine, food and drinks, and overall good times. Although I can't party like a 22-year-old anymore, I still had a blast.

I had my debut in the Life & Arts section in last Sunday's Austin American-Statesman. You can read my write-up of the 3 Redneck Tenors here. I finally checked out Progress Coffee and it's my new favorite daytime spot. I also sampled a pork taco from El Chile (loved it!) and tried a cocktail or two at the Peacock.

Why Do Misogynists Get a Free Pass?

2008-05-20T16:54:00.005-04:00

I wonder how bloggers and reporters would react if stores were carrying "Obama the monkey" dolls or if there were derogatory comments being bandied about regarding his private parts? The outcry would be swift and severe. But alas, in 2008 America, sexism is just fine with the chattering class.

What about the depth of the sexist vitriol that Hillary Clinton has endured? (The Hillary "nutcracker" dolls; men screaming "iron my shirt!" at a rally; Obama disdainfully saying Hillary is "likable enough." The media's silence has been deafening. It's a defining narrative of the 2008 nominating process. Now that her campaign has been declared "dead" by the know-nothing pundit class (despite the fact that she leads in the popular vote), sexism as a driving force is being explored. Here are Hillary's comments on what her supporters and surrogates have noticed for many, many months. The treatment she's received has been, in a word, disgusting:

"It's been deeply offensive to millions of women," Clinton said. "I believe this campaign has been a groundbreaker in a lot of ways. But it certainly has been challenging given some of the attitudes in the press, and I regret that, because I think it's been really not worthy of the seriousness of the campaign and the historical nature of the two candidacies we have here."

Later, when asked if she thinks this campaign has been racist, she says she does not. And she circles back to the sexism. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted, and . . . there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head," she said. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists."

Writing Galore

2008-05-08T13:46:00.004-04:00

I penned a review of the book American Artisanal for Tribeza. You can read it here.

Are Americans Better Off?

2008-04-25T13:44:00.001-04:00

The Dems are finally airing their first nationwide ad against McCain. Good times.

Superdelegates: Obama Is Not Electable

2008-04-24T02:24:00.005-04:00

If the Democratic party's superdelegates are foolish enough to get behind Barack Obama in August, we can look forward to endlessly replayed YouTube clips of Obama's hateful pastor of 20 years, Rev. Wright, yelling "God damn America." We can look forward to one of the most racially divisive, nasty campaigns in American history, we can look forward to--in short--President McCain. Many white working-class voters, Catholic voters, Jewish voters and perhaps women and Hispanics (all of whom Hillary has done extremely well with), will abandon the Democrats and vote for McCain. Here's an electoral map for Hillary Clinton (you need 270 electoral votes to win) and here's the map for Obama.

Here's a Canadian dude's take on it:

Barack Obama--known by the company he keeps
Theo Caldwell, National Post Published: Monday, April 21, 2008

If he becomes the Democratic Party's nominee for President, Sen. Barack Obama will lose the general election for this reason: When the smiles and platitudes are set aside, Obama's campaign and the philosophy of his cadre amount to one big put-down of America.

Anomalous among Western leaders, the president of the United States serves as head of both state and government. Moreover, he is elected directly by the voters, unlike in a parliamentary system whereby a leader attains power through the success of his party. As such, the president represents something very personal to Americans. He is, for four or more years, the personification of their country, embodying the aspirations and goodness of the land that they love. A president may disappoint after assuming office, but America is not in the habit of electing candidates who hold their country in contempt.

Not only have the comments of Obama's wife, Michelle (who has referred to America as "downright mean" and stated that she was not proud of her country until her husband started winning primaries) and his minister, Jeremiah Wright (whose hateful, anti-white, anti-American diatribes are available for sale in Obama's church, or for free on YouTube) revealed the tired, leftist scorn for America that Obama represents -- the Senator's own remarks have exposed this ugly, unelectable side.

Speaking to a fundraiser in San Francisco, Obama attempted to explain his persistent deficit in Pennsylvania primary polls by describing small-town Americans as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This is hard stuff, and patronizing, besides. Add to this Obama's characterizations of the "typical white person" (in the context of describing his grandmother, whom he had originally tossed under the campaign bus in order to create a false equivalence with Wright's racism), and one finds something far more damaging than a simple series of gaffes --it is a window into how the Senator sees his countrymen.

Obama's associations, even beyond Wright, speak to this unappealing point of view. William Ayers, a domestic terrorist of Weathermen infamy, enjoys a friendly relationship with the Obamas. As general-election voters will learn, Ayers bombed the Pentagon on May 19, 1972, and fondly recalls, "The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them." Ayers and his accomplices also bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, as well as banks, police stations and courthouses.

In one's associations, as in other aspects of life, mistakes are made. But a hallmark of a leader is the willingness to make them right. For this, Obama has shown little talent or enthusiasm.

Obama has defended Wright by insisting that he merely represents the convention of "Black Liberation Theology," as though this were just some quaint offshoot of traditional Christianity. One need not pore over the tenets of Black Liberation Theology or its founder, James Hal Cone -- although a Google search of either would provide a world of clarity to the undecided voter -- to recognize that a would-be President who cannot utterly disassociate himself from such racist, anti-American rubbish lacks sufficient character and affinity for his country's ideals to be its leader.

The bumper-sticker slogan "dissent is patriotic" has for decades been employed to legitimize any insult to America, no matter how hateful or moronic. But Americans understand that their president's instinct ought to be to defend the nation against unfair invective, not embrace those who purvey it -- or, in the case of Ayers, seek to blow it up altogether.

With his demonstrable view of America, and considering his cohorts, Obama would be wise to make himself very comfortable in the Senate.

theojpcaldwell@yahoo.com - Theo Caldwell, president of Caldwell Asset Management, Inc., is an investment advisor in the United States and Canada.

Don't Give Up, Hillary!

2008-04-23T20:38:00.003-04:00

Interviewed on MSNBC's Morning Joe today, Hillary made some great points after her Pennsylvania victory. She won despite the fact that she was outspent 3-to-1 by Obama. Although he blanketed television and radio with thousands of ads, Obama can't seal the deal with women, white working-class folks and union households. Keep on fighting, Hillary. This thing is far from over. Elections are all about choices. Hillary's on track to raise $10 million since the race in PA was called for her. I donated a little today, and I would urge everyone else to dig deep and do so as well. Click here to donate.

Madonna coming to Austin?

2008-04-23T18:25:00.004-04:00

This rumor seems too good to be true. I mean, why the heck would Madonna come to Austin? But oh my gosh, if it's true, how HOT! In other Madge news, "4 Minutes to Save the World" has moved an astonishing number of digital copies in its first two weeks (over 846,000). It'll break the one million mark soon.

The Obamanots Won't Like This...

2008-04-18T13:55:00.001-04:00

Oh well.

Don't Nominate Barack John Kerry Dukakis Obama...

2008-04-16T13:15:00.005-04:00

Maureen Dowd picks apart Barack Obama's inability to reach out to Pennsylvania's "bitter" working-class voters:

His mother got her Ph.D. in anthropology, studying the culture of Indonesia. And as Obama has courted white, blue-collar voters in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country, he has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals, resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey, examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.

He hasn’t pulled a John Kerry and asked for a Philly cheese steak with Swiss yet, but he has maintained a regal “What do the simple folk do to help them escape when they’re blue?” bearing, unable to even feign Main Street cred. But Hillary did when she belted down a shot of Crown Royal whiskey with gusto at Bronko’s in Crown Point, Ind.

Dowd even has some (gasp!) kind words for Hillary.

Sunny Days

2008-04-10T12:15:00.006-04:00

A few tidbits to report: I actually shopped for the first time at the 80,000-square-foot Whole Foods Market (it's the largest in the country) yesterday, buying some ground beef, apples and bananas, and some granola. My previous experiences there were confined to quick trips with Marques for a bite to eat and the like. Although the prices are too high for buying everything on my list, I absolutely love the shopping experience at Whole Foods Market. I popped into American Apparel and scored two pairs of running shorts, which will come in handy for Town Lake jaunts and when I volunteer later this month at the Hill Country Ride for AIDS. I had a great chat with one of my editors at the Statesman over lunch at Jo's on South Congress. We discussed feature ideas and having me do some nightlife write-ups for the paper. I ended up covering someone else's shift at Uchi last night; as usual, working with Gina was great. Today I'm interviewing another photographer for this feature on outdoor/sports photography that I'm writing for Tribeza. I also have a bunch of other writing-related things to accomplish and an errand or two to run.

4 Minutes to Save the World

2008-04-08T13:08:00.002-04:00

Check out the video for Madonna's new jam, "4 Minutes to Save the World," featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. It's hot!

Googling My Austin Address...

2008-04-08T13:05:00.003-04:00

produces a link to where I live. Kinda creepy? Perhaps. But still cool.

My debut in Tribeza!

2008-04-05T13:13:00.004-04:00

My piece about Austin architect Burton Baldridge's modernist house on Mohle Drive is in the April issue of Tribeza. You can read it here and check out the pictures here. My review of the Gil Elvgren book is here.

Tyson on Iron Chef America

2008-04-04T18:17:00.003-04:00

Here's a piece from the Statesman about the Uchi team's appearance on Iron Chef America. I was lucky enough to be hosting that night, so I watched the action on one of the plasma-screen TVs that were set up in the restaurant.

In the Mix: Spring Update

2008-04-04T17:20:00.007-04:00

"You've only got 4 minutes to save the world!" Those lines are from "4 Minutes to Save the World," the first single off of Madonna's new album. This post is going to be as all-over-the-place as the lyrics to the song. The album, Hard Candy, is set to burn up the charts later this month, she's appearing everywhere these days--including the cover of Elle and Vanity Fair--and I'm finally settling into a good routine in Austin.

Two friends from NYC (Michael and Lloyd) came for a lovely visit last week, both ostensibly in town on business but also to see yours truly. We were treated like kings at Uchi--even their seen-it-all Gotham exteriors melted in the face of Uchi's gastronomical feats of wonder--and we checked out some bars later that night. I ate way too much at Truluck's, a pretty well-known steak and seafood spot downtown; I finally went to Chain Drive, which is a cool dive bar with a backyard offering a bird's eye view of Austin's ever-changing skyline.

We stopped in at By George, where Marques was pulling outfits for his Sex and the City-themed Glossy photo shoot, and my friend chatted with the manager. A quick note on politics: I'm thrilled that the race for the Democratic nomination is still percolating along: despite all the naysayers, I still think Hillary will be on top in terms of the popular vote come June. Go Hillary!

I'm volunteering for the Hill Country Ride for AIDS, one of the area's biggest AIDS-related charity events, later this month. I may also help out at the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival. A colleague asked me why I'm not writing columns, a la Carrie Bradshaw, about my adventures in Austin. I guess the question is: where could they be published? Unlike NYC, Austin doesn't have a gay newspaper or even a version of HX or Next.

Marques, Lauren, Nina and I gorged ourselves on soul food (chicken friend steak, buttered carrots, ribs, buttermilk pie, mashed potatoes, candied yams and the like) at Hoover's the other night. Now the weekend is here and besides working two nights at Uchi, I'm interviewing folks for a Tribeza feature and reading some books for review in the Statesman and the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.

It's not okay to hate...

2008-03-10T21:11:00.003-04:00

Janet Jackson, Andre 3000, T.R. Knight and others want you to watch this. Pass it on:

I'm miss Linda Greenhouse

2008-03-10T18:16:00.007-04:00

This type of development upsets me. It's the sad state of affairs at big media companies. Talented writers and reporters are bought out or laid off in order to improve the almighty bottom line. Who will ever forget her astute reporting on this travesty? From the New York Observer:

Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer-winning diviner of the inner workings of the Supreme Court and one of the great New York Times institutions, has asked to leave the paper under a voluntary buyout program.

"For 30 years, my internal clock has been set to the Supreme Court's calendar, but the buyout got my attention and it's a really good deal," she said in an interview with Media Mob last night.

The Times announced on Valentine's Day that 100 newsroom staffers would lose their job, and they'd begin the painful process by offering buyouts...

The buyout should be a good one—it's a two-year-salary plus a bonus since she's been at the Times for more than 35 years (she started there in 1968).

All in all, she said it would be about a $300,000 payoff (she makes $140,000 a year).

(Left: Greenhouse accepts her Pulitzer Prize)

Thank you for calling Uchi. Fierce!

2008-03-10T15:35:00.011-04:00

"It's slim pickings out there. You can't swing a Fendi purse without knocking over five losers." Lately the truism uttered by Samantha on Sex and the City has been on my mind. I've always been a glass half full guy--and that definitely hasn't changed. But there are some things I'm not loving: folks who don't call or follow up and other such sketchy behavior. Things I am loving: the majority of friends who've been supportive and awesome as usual, "4 Minutes to Save the World," the first single off Madonna's forthcoming album (her last with Warner Brothers), Hard Candy, is hot. Timbaland worked with Madonna to produce the amazing beats and Justin Timberlake sings on it too. It will be the soundtrack of the summer. Breaking news: I'm the new host at Uchi, one of Austin's hottest restaurants. Uchi is a five-year-old establishment on South Lamar that serves up avant-garde Japanese cuisine seven nights per week. It's the brainchild of executive chef and founder Tyson Cole, named by Food & Wine as one of America's ten top chefs in 2005. You can also check out this video about Uchi by clicking here. My training starts tomorrow afternoon.

Hillary and the Invisible Women

2008-03-09T11:41:00.002-04:00

I'm not always a fan of Tina Brown's writing, but this piece she penned for Newsweek rings true.

Hillary and the Invisible Women
Tina Brown
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 12:57 PM ET Mar 8, 2008

Hillary Clinton's run-up to the Texas and Ohio primaries was the political equivalent of Hell Week for a Navy SEAL. At least it felt that way for the reporters who'd been participating in this killing Democratic marathon since the Iowa caucuses in January and now, dosed up on Airborne and bad coffee, were covering what was being billed as Hillary's last stand.

As a campaign virgin who joined the press bus on Saturday morning in Ft. Worth, Texas, I was staggered by how isolated accompanying reporters actually are most of the time. It's like being trapped in a moving bathysphere. You can't buy newspapers or watch TV in real time. Occasionally, as you fall into your seat on a plane hop from Dallas to Columbus, Ohio, wanly clutching a boxed panini, you catch a glimpse of a familiar large, frosted head in the first-class section that's rumored to belong to the candidate. She doesn't come back much to visit the press, except for the odd bright-eyed moment of managed conviviality. One senses a moment of trepidation on the flight from Cleveland to Toledo: "I intend to do as well as I can on Tuesday and we will see what happens after that."

The Hillary coterie up front in the plane always includes the stylish brunette Huma Abedin, a.k.a. the "body person" who maintains the senator's power wardrobe and unfailingly fresh appearance. Sometimes the candidate is joined by friends and endorsers. Ted Danson and his wife, Mary Steenburgen, show up for some Ohio gigs and are surprisingly effective, especially Steenburgen: "I looked at my friend Bill 30 years ago and I thought, If there is anything inherently healthy in the universe, you should be president one day. And I looked at Hillary and thought, 'Wow, do I dare to dream?' " Chelsea, Hillary's no-longer-secret weapon, joins the flight on the eve of Election Day, visibly lifting her mother's mood. The warmth and complicity between them is evident as they crack open a bottle of wine and squeeze hands together in the first-class cabin. Chelsea, 28, is all soft power to her mother's pre-emptive strike. There is steel beneath Chelsea's girlish charm.

The grueling, brutal pace Hillary maintains (14 cities in four days) even sets a pace for the younger Senator Obama. Perhaps she deserves to prevail simply because she's tougher—tougher than the media following ashen-faced in her wake, and clearly tougher than the other Democratic and Republican candidates who've already gone down in flames. Let no one dispute the grit of a woman willing to get up at 4 a.m. on a Monday in time to deliver doughnuts to workers on a shift change at the Chrysler plant in Toledo. Refreshed by the excursion, she then summons the bleary-eyed reporters and camera crews down to an impromptu "press avail" in the hotel lobby, where she coolly defenestrates Obama on his economic adviser's "wink wink" double- speak about NAFTA. Back on the plane a photographer pins up a sign over his seat: DON'T CALL ME AT 3 A.M.

The press will always feel Hillary's fierce, historic mistrust—and who can blame her? ABC's Kate Snow tells me that members of the public often bear down on her when they see her TV mike, cursing her out as a stand-in for Tim Russert, even though he is at NBC. "They feel we're the people taking her down," she said.

Perhaps this explains the Clinton advance team's puzzling decision, discovered when we arrived in Austin, Texas, on Monday afternoon, to have the press file from a men's locker room. Laptops were set up cheek by jowl with a wall of urinals, prompting raucous cries of: "Now we really know this campaign is in the toilet!" Reporters were supposed to view Hillary's electronic town hall with 800 Texas voters on an overhead TV monitor via Fox Sports Southwest—a curious choice of outlet based, apparently, on the cheapness of the media buy. (Or maybe it was a cunning strategy to alienate male voters expecting a Houston Astros spring-training game.)

As we awaited the town hall, we could look up at the overhead TV with the sound off. CNN's Wolf Blitzer was standing in front of a map, informing Americans of something—what? Then came images of an exhortatory Barack Obama. There was a rumor flying around out there that thousands of people were attending his rallies. How could this be when we on the Solutions for America campaign knew Hillary Clinton was going to win?

Here's the good part about the meta-madness of living in the campaign bubble. Sitting on the press bus learning nothing makes you especially receptive, when you get off at a pit stop, to learning everything—to feeling with heightened keenness the raw charge of churning humanity, unfiltered through polls and belligerent media noise. It allows you, finally, to see the candidate through the voters' eyes, and to realize how resolutely effective, how inspiringly pedestrian Hillary Clinton is.

Campaigning in places like Cleveland, Akron, Dayton and Toledo—communities that have some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country—Hillary manages to fuse her own political survival with her audience's own struggles to get by. NAFTA-gate works wonders for her in places where so many jobs have disappeared.

On Sunday morning there's a "canvas kickoff" in a high-school gym in the predominantly white, small suburban town of Westerville, Ohio, which has FOR SALE signs on every block. She stands with her hardy brown ankle boots planted firmly center stage—the indomitable image of a seasoned, capable 60-year-old woman, handsomely groomed as always in her imperturbable (blue, this time) pantsuit, belting out bread-and-butter positions on health care, No Child Left Behind and college loans. "Yes!" she crescendos. "I've been around for a while, doing this work for 35 years, and I know it's important to have a president in the White House who gets up every single day and worries about your fears, your needs! … We need a fighter, a doer and a champion in the White House!"

If you dialed into the campaign conference call later that day, a platoon of generals told you why they were ready to salute her as commander in chief—so many of them that by the time she walked out on the stage of a school auditorium in Akron, you half expected her to be wearing a Kevlar top. Still, her best role will always be Hillary, the indefatigable student-body president, demanding, insisting that voters grade her for the specifics of her campaign promises: "I want to be in the White House and have you say, 'Well, we heard you in Akron but when are you going to produce those jobs you talked about?' " The scary part is that she means it. At a campaign stop at Herrera's Mexican Restaurant in Dallas on Election Day morning, Dawn Martin, the executive director of a small oceanic conservation society called SeaWeb, buttonholed me: "Hillary understands more about fisheries, climate change and the overall ecosystem in the maritime environment than anyone I know."

Much has been written about how boomer women have rallied to Hillary's cause (she won an impressive 67 percent of the white women voting in Ohio; they were 44 percent of the total). It's fashionable to write off this core element of her base as rabid paleo-feminists fighting the tired old gender wars of the past. But Hillary's appeal to the boomer gals is wider and deeper than that. Cynthia Ruccia, a grass-roots political organizer in Columbus, told me that in these last beleaguered weeks, women started showing up in waves at Clinton headquarters—women who told her they had never volunteered in a campaign before. "There was just an outpouring about the way she was being treated by the media," Ruccia said. "It was something we hadn't seen in a long time. We all felt, as women, we had made a lot of progress, and we saw this as an attack of misogyny that was trying to beat her down."

It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman." All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don't want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they'd prefer a "fresh (cheaper) face."

Even Oprah abandoned them when she opted for Obama. Am I alone in suspecting that TV's most powerful 54-year-old woman just might have endorsed him so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration? Certainly, no TV diva in her 50s who values her ratings wants to be defined by the hot-flash cohort.

What saddens boomer women who love Hillary is that their twentysomething daughters don't share their view of her heroic role. Instead they've been swept up by that new Barack magic. It's not their fault, and not Hillary's, either. The very scar tissue that older women see as proof of her determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to come with girl power in the White House.

She might have a chance of winning them over yet, if she set about dividing the Obama girls from the Obama boys. Maybe start with some mother and daughter rallies in Pennsylvania, summoning an audience that would mirror the winning image of Chelsea onstage at her side on Tuesday night in Ohio.

It's worth a try—because there is still romance to the idea of a woman in the White House, spattered and compromised though Hillary's candidacy might be.

It was hard not to be caught up in the euphoria at the Columbus Athenaeum when her primary results started to come in. I found myself jammed between two exultant Columbus ladies, a high-fiving yoga-studio owner in her 50s and a human resources director of a software company roughly the same age. They were raising the roof along with the band to the old 1965 McCoys hit "Hang on Sloopy."

For all the invisible women, it's the only anthem they've got. And for their sake alone, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton should not give up the fight.

Hillary in South Austin

2008-03-04T01:45:00.006-05:00

I saw my lady, Hillary Clinton, tonight at a rally here in Austin. It was a packed, enthusiastic and motivated crowd of dedicated Hillary supporters. I found the experience to be encouraging and fun. Chelsea was there, too. I even bought some Hillary pins, which I will wear proudly tomorrow. Three new polls show Hillary ahead in Ohio. It seems that the media is finally asking Obama a few tough questions.

I just love this cover....

2008-02-28T23:16:00.004-05:00

The new issue of Adbusters

My first Austin byline!

2008-02-28T10:13:00.009-05:00

I've been in Austin for a month and the big news is that I scored my first byline. That's pretty hot, right? I wrote a preview of TexARTS' upcoming show Damn Yankees. You can read my piece here. I'll be checking out the show Saturday night at the Paramount. Things I didn't expect: sitting in the back of a large pickup truck zooming up Guadalupe Street on a windy night and gazing up at Austin's bright, fast-changing skyline; drinking a $1 margarita outside on the patio of The Belmont wearing a sleeveless shirt (it was a warm and lovely night); learning from a new friend that it's never too late to come out, even if you're 40. I've been truly fortunate to eat at some amazing restaurants. I loved the lasagna--which really looked almost too pretty to eat--at Starlite and the ribeye at Lamberts was mouth-watering and tender. Tonight Marques and I are headed to Neiman Marcus (I only found out recently that it's a Dallas-based company) for a Tribeza event. I'll have two pieces, a book review and a home feature, in Tribeza's April issue. Stay tuned...

Obama Plays the Race Card

2008-02-27T13:02:00.005-05:00

This piece is so great I decided to reprint the entire thing below.

Race Man
How Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton.
Sean Wilentz, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, February 27, 2008

After several weeks of swooning, news reports are finally being filed about the gap between Senator Barack Obama's promises of a pure, soul-cleansing "new" politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as the manipulative illusion that it is.

Most of the recent correctives have concerned outrageously deceptive advertisements approved and released by Obama's campaign. First, in Iowa, the Obama camp aired radio ads patterned on the notorious "Harry and Louise" Republican propaganda from 1993, charging falsely that Senator Hillary Clinton's health care proposal would "force those who cannot afford health insurance to buy it, punishing those who won't fall in line." In subsequent primary and caucus campaigns, the Obama campaign sent out millions of mailers, also featuring the "Harry and Louise" motif, falsely claiming that Clinton favored "punishing families who can't afford health care in the first place." A few bloggers and columnists, notably Paul Krugman in The New York Times, described the ads as distorting, but the national press corps mainly ignored them--until Clinton herself, seeing the fraudulent mailers reappear in Ohio over the past weekend, publicly denounced them.

The Obama mass mailings also attempt to appeal to Ohio's labor vote by claiming that Clinton believed that the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was a "'boon' to our economy." More falsehood: In fact, Clinton had not said that; Newsday originally applied the word "boon" and has now noted the Obama campaign's distortion. In this campaign, Clinton has called for a moratorium on all trade agreements until they are made consistent with labor and environmental standards--and account for the effect on jobs in the United States. Obama makes a big deal about how Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. But he fails to mention that, within the councils of her husband's administration, Hillary Clinton was a skeptic of free trade agreements, and as a senator and candidate she has said that NAFTA contained flaws that need to be rectified. Ignoring all that, the Obama flyer features an alarming photograph of closed plant gates, having no connection to any action of Senator Clinton's, as well as the dubious quotation about her from Newsday in 2006. Newsday has criticized "Obama's use of the quotation" as "misleading ... an example of the kind of slim reeds campaigns use to try and win an office." Obama, without retracting the mailing (and while playing to protectionist sentiment in the party) said only that he would have his staff look into the matter--long after the ad has done its dirty work.

Misleading propaganda is hardly new in American politics --although the adoption of techniques reminiscent of past Republican and special-interest hit jobs, right down to a retread of the fictional couple, seems strangely at odds with a campaign that proclaims it will redeem the country from precisely these sorts of divisive and manipulative tactics. As insidious as these tactics are, though, the Obama campaign's most effective gambits have been far more egregious and dangerous than the hypocritical deployment of deceptive and disingenuous attack ads. To a large degree, the campaign's strategists turned the primary and caucus race to their advantage when they deliberately, falsely, and successfully portrayed Clinton and her campaign as unscrupulous race-baiters--a campaign-within-the-campaign in which the worked-up flap over the Somali costume photograph is but the latest episode. While promoting Obama as a "post-racial" figure, his campaign has purposefully polluted the contest with a new strain of what historically has been the most toxic poison in American politics.

More than any other maneuver, this one has brought Clinton into disrepute with important portions of the Democratic Party. A review of what actually happened shows that the charges that the Clintons played the "race card" were not simply false; they were deliberately manufactured by the Obama camp and trumpeted by a credulous and/or compliant press corps in order to strip away her once formidable majority among black voters and to outrage affluent, college-educated white liberals as well as college students. The Clinton campaign, in fact, has not racialized the campaign, and never had any reason to do so. Rather the Obama campaign and its supporters, well-prepared to play the "race-baiter card" before the primaries began, launched it with a vengeance when Obama ran into dire straits after his losses in New Hampshire and Nevada--and thereby created a campaign myth that has turned into an incontrovertible truth among political pundits, reporters, and various Obama supporters. This development is the latest sad commentary on the malign power of the press, hyping its own favorites and tearing down those it dislikes, to create pseudo-scandals of the sort that hounded Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. It is also a commentary on how race can make American politics go haywire. Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama's supposedly uplifting campaign.

II.

Readers of Philip Roth's award-winning novel, The Human Stain, will be familiar with the race-baiter card and its uses, but so will anyone who has been exposed to the everyday tensions that can arise from the volatile mixture of race and politics. In Roth's novel, a college professor loses his job and his reputation after he asks one of his classes whether two African American students who have regularly been absent are "spooks." The context of the professor's remarks make it clear that he used the term to mean "ghosts" or "specters" and intended no racial disparagement--but that makes not the slightest difference, as his enemies on the faculty fan the argument that he is a blatant and incorrigible race-baiter who can no longer be trusted to teach young minds. An innocent remark becomes a hateful one when pulled through the prism of ideology, ill will, and emotional exploitation. One day, Roth's professor (who, ironically, turns out to be a black man passing as white) is a respected, even revered member of the faculty; then the race baiter card gets played, and his career is suddenly destroyed.

Even before the first caucus met in Iowa, the Obama campaign was ready to play a similar game. In mid-December 2007, one of the Clinton campaign's co-chairs in New Hampshire, Bill Shaheen, remarked entirely on his own on how the Republicans might make mischievous and damaging political use of Obama's admitted use of marijuana and cocaine during his youth. The observation was not especially astute: Since George W. Bush, both the electorate and the press have seemed to be forgiving of a candidate's youthful substance abuse, so long as says he has reformed himself. Nor had the Clinton campaign prompted Shaheen to make his comment. But it was not a harebrained remark, given how the Republicans had once tried to exploit the cocaine addiction of Bill Clinton's brother, Roger, and even manufactured lurid falsehoods about Clinton himself as the member of a cocaine smuggling ring during his years as governor in Arkansas. And it was not in the least a racist comment, as cocaine abuse has afflicted Americans of all colors as well as classes. Indeed, there have been persistent rumors that Bush abused cocaine as well as alcohol during his younger days--charges he addressed in the 2000 campaign by saying that when "he was young and foolish" he had done "foolish" things.

None of the reports at the time about Shaheen's miscue (and the Clinton campaign's decision to relieve him of his ceremonial duties) mentioned anything about racial overtones. Yet the Obama campaign kept stirring things up. After being questioned for ten minutes about the drug allegation on cable television--and repeatedly denying that the national campaign had anything to do with it--Clinton campaign pollster Mark Penn mentioned the word "cocaine" (which was difficult to avoid in the context of the repeated questioning about drugs). "I think we've made clear that the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising, and I think that's been made clear," he said. Obama's campaign aides (as well as John Edwards's) immediately leapt on Penn and chastised him as an inflammatory demagogue for using the word that Obama himself referred to in his memoir as "blow." Since then, Obama's strategists and supporters in the press have whipped the story into a full racialist subtext, as if Shaheen and Penn were the executors of a well-plotted Clinton master plan to turn Obama into a stereotypical black street hoodlum--or, in the words of the fervently pro-Obama and anti-Clinton columnist Frank Rich of the New York Times, "ghettoized as a cocaine user."

The racial innuendo seemed to fade when Obama won his remarkable victory in the Iowa caucuses. With the polling data on the upcoming New Hampshire primary auguring a large Obama triumph, it looked as if the candidate's own appeal might sweep away everything before it. But at the last minute (as sometimes happens in statewide primaries), there was a sudden movement among the voters, this time toward Clinton. Many ascribed it to an appearance by Clinton in a Portsmouth coffee shop on the eve of the vote, where, with emotion, she spoke from the heart about why she is running for president. Others said that misogyny directed at Clinton on the campaign trail as well as on cable television and the Internet turned off women voters. The uprising was certainly sudden: As late as 6 p.m. on primary day, Clinton staff members with whom I spoke were saying that they would consider a loss by ten percentage points or less as a kind of moral victory. But instead, Clinton won outright, amazing her own delighted supporters and galling the Obama campaign.

That evening, the Democratic campaign became truly tangled up in racial politics--directly and forcefully introduced by the pro-Obama forces. In order to explain away the shocking loss, Obama backers vigorously spread the claim that the so-called Bradley Effect had kicked in. First used to account for the surprising defeat of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley in the California gubernatorial race in 1982, the Bradley Effect supposedly takes hold when white voters tell opinion pollsters that they plan to vote for a black candidate but instead, driven by racial fears, pull the lever for a white candidate. Senior Clinton campaign officials later told me that reporters contacted them saying that the Obama camp was pushing them very hard to spin Clinton's victory as the latest Bradley Effect result. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a cheerleading advocate for Obama, went on television to suggest the Bradley Effect explained the New Hampshire outcome, then backed off--only then to write a column, "Echoes of Tom Bradley," in which he claimed he could not be sure but that, nevertheless, "embarrassed pollsters and pundits had better be vigilant for signs that the Bradley effect, unseen in recent years, has crept back."

In fact, the Bradley Effect claims were utterly bogus, as anyone with an elementary command of voting results could tell. If the "effect" has actually occurred, Obama's final voting figures would have been substantially lower than his figures in the pre-election polls, as racially motivated voters turned away. Later, Bill Schneider, the respected analyst on CNN, several times went through the data on air to demonstrate conclusively that there was no such Bradley Effect in New Hampshire. But even on primary night, it was clear that Obama's total--36.4%--was virtually identical to what the polls over the previous three weeks had predicted he would receive. Clinton won because late-deciding voters--and especially college-educated women in their twenties--broke for her by a huge majority. Yet the echoes of charges about the Bradley Effect--which blamed Obama's loss on white racism and mendacity--lingered among Obama's supporters.

The very next morning, Obama's national co-chair, Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., a congressional supporter from Chicago, played the race card more directly by appearing on MSNBC to claim in a well-prepared statement that Clinton's emotional moment on the campaign trail was actually a measure of her deeply ingrained racism and callousness about the suffering poor. "But those tears also have to be analyzed," Jackson said, "they have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina where 45 percent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... we saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not Hurricane Katrina, not other issues." And so the Obama campaign headed south with race and racism very much on its mind--and on its lips.

III.

By the time Clinton and Obama (along with Edwards) debated in South Carolina, it was clear that nerves had been rubbed raw. Obama's supporters, including New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, had been making much of a lame, off-color but obviously preposterous joke that Martin Luther King's close friend and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young had made back in December about Bill Clinton having slept with more black women than Obama. Supposedly, Young's tasteless quip--"I'm just clowning," he said, sounding embarrassed--was as part of some sort of concerted Clinton campaign. Likewise, also in December, former Senator Bob Kerrey's misinformed defense of Obama, in an interview on CNN, for having attended a secular madrassa in Indonesia (he did not) became twisted by the pro-Obama camp, including Herbert once again, into some sort of sneak attack orchestrated by cynical, race-baiting Clintonites. Kerrey is a Clinton supporter, but is notoriously unscripted. Once again, the Clinton campaign had to apologize. But the Obama campaign began ratcheting up the racial politics in earnest during the run-up to the South Carolina contest.

It has never been satisfactorily explained why the pro-Clinton camp would want to racialize the primary and caucus campaign. The argument has been made that Hillary Clinton wanted to attract whites and Hispanics in the primaries and make the case that a black candidate would be unelectable in the general election. But given the actual history of the campaign, that argument makes no sense. Until late in 2007, Hillary Clinton enjoyed the backing of a substantial majority of black voters--as much as 24 percentage points over Obama according to one poll in October--as well as strong support from Hispanics and traditional working-class white Democrats. It appeared, for a time, as if she might well be able to recreate, both in the primaries and the general election, the cross-class and cross-racial alliances that had eluded Democrats for much of the previous forty years. Playing the race card against Obama could only cost her black votes, as well as offend liberal whites who normally turn out in disproportionally large numbers for Democratic caucuses and primaries. Indeed, indulging in racial politics would be a sure-fire way for the Clinton campaign to shatter its own coalition. On the other hand, especially in South Carolina where black voters made up nearly half of the Democratic turnout, and especially following the shocking disappointment in New Hampshire, playing the race card--or, more precisely, the race-baiting card--made eminent sense for the Obama campaign. Doing so would help Obama secure huge black majorities (in states such as Missouri and Virginia as well as in South Carolina and the deep South) and enlarge his activist white base in the university communities and among affluent liberals. And that is precisely what happened.

First came the Martin Luther King-Lyndon B. Johnson controversy. Responding to early questions that he was only offering vague words of hope instead of policy substance, Obama had given a speech in New Hampshire referring to Martin Luther King, Jr. "standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial" during his "I have a dream" speech. (This rhetorical formulation was reminiscent of a campaign speech delivered in 2006 by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, another client of David Axelrod, Obama's message and media guru; in a later speech, Obama would repeat Patrick's rhetoric word for word.) When asked about it, Clinton replied that while, indeed, King had courageously inspired and led the civil rights movement, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," she said, adding that "it took a president to get it done." The statement was, historically, non-controversial; the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others, later said that Clinton "was absolutely right." The political implication was plainly that Clinton was claiming to have more of the experience and skills required of a president than Obama did--not that King should be denigrated. But the Obama campaign and its supporters chose to pounce on the remark as the latest example of the Clinton campaign's race baiting. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black congressman--neutral in the race, but pressured by the Obama campaign arousing his constituency--felt compelled to repeat the charge that Clinton had disparaged King, and told the New York Times that "we have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics." Several of the Times's op-ed columnists, including Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd as well as Rich, rushed to amplify how Hillary was playing dirty, as did the newspaper's editorial page, which disgracefully twisted her remarks into an implication that "a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change."

Clinton complained that her opponent's backers were deliberately distorting her remarks; and Obama smoothly tried to appear above the fray, as if he knew that the race-baiting charge was untrue and didn't want to level it directly, but didn't exactly want to discourage the idea either. "Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn't make the statement," Obama said in a conference call with reporters. "I haven't remarked on it. And she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King's role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that. But the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous."

Meanwhile, below the radar, the Obama campaign pushed the race-baiting angle hard, rehearsing and sometimes inventing instances of alleged Clintonian racial insensitivity. A memo prepared by the South Carolina campaign and circulated to supporters rehashed the King-Johnson matter, while it also spliced together statements of Bill Clinton's to make it seem as if he had given a speech that "implied Hillary Clinton is stronger than Nelson Mandela." (The case, with its snippets and ellipses, was absurd on its face.) The memo also claimed, in a charge soon widely repeated, that he had demeaned Obama as "a kid" because he had called Obama's account of his opposition to the war in Iraq a fanciful "fairy tale."And a few reporters, while pushing the Obama campaign's line that black voters had credible concerns about the Clintons' remarks, had begun to notice that the Obama campaign was doing its utmost to fuel the racial flames. "There's no question that there's politics here at work too," said Jonathan Martin of Politico. "It helps [Obama's] campaign to... push these issues into the fore in a place like South Carolina."

When asked about the race-baiting charges, Obama campaign spokeswoman Candice Tolliver roiled the waters: "Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this really an isolated situation or is there something bigger behind all of this?" Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., the Obama co-chair, as before, was more direct and inflammatory, claiming that the "cynics" of the Clinton campaign had "resorted to distasteful and condescending language that appeals to our fears rather than our hopes. I sincerely hope that they'll turn away from such reactionary, disparaging rhetoric." The race-baiting card was now fully in play.

Among those dismayed by Obama's tactics and his supporters' was Bill Moyers. In a special segment on his weekly PBS broadcast in mid-January, Moyers, who as a young man had been an aide to President Johnson, demolished the charge that Clinton had warped history in order to race-bait Obama. "There was nothing in [Clinton's] quote about race," he observed. "It was an historical fact, an affirmation of the obvious." Moyers rehashed what every reputable historian knows about how King and Johnson effectively divided the labor, between King the agitator and Johnson the president, in order to secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Moyers said was happy to see that, by the time he went on the air, the furor appeared to be dying down and that everyone seemed to be returning to their senses and apologizing--"except," he pointedly noted, "the New York Times." But this upbeat part of his assessment proved overly optimistic.

IV.

By the time the Obama campaign backed off from agitating the King-Johnson pseudo-scandal, it had already trained its sights on Bill Clinton--by far the most popular U.S. president among African Americans over the past quarter-century. Not only were Bill and Hillary supposedly ganging up on Obama in South Carolina--"I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes," Obama complained during the South Carolina debate--the former president was supposedly off on a race-baiting tear of his own. Yet, once again, the charges were either distortions or outright inventions.

The Obama campaign's "fairy tale" gambit was particularly transparent. Commenting on Obama's explanation of why he is more against the war in Iraq than Hillary Clinton, and disturbed by the news media's failure to report Obama's actual voting record on Iraq in the Senate, the former president referred to what had become the conventional wisdom as a "fairy tale" concocted by Obama and his supporters. Time to play the race-baiter card! One of Obama's most prominent backers, the mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, stretched Clinton's remarks and implied that he had called Obama's entire candidacy a fairy tale. (The mayor later coyly told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she had not intended to criticize Clinton: "Surely you don't mean he's the only one who can use the phrase 'fairy tale,'" Franklin said, in a tone that the reporter described as "mock indignation.") Appearing on CNN, one of its pundits, Donna Brazile, hurled the wild charge that Clinton had likened Obama to a child. "And I will tell you," she concluded, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing." With those kinds of remarks--"as an African American"--the race card and the race-baiter card both came back into play. Although Brazile is formally not part of Obama's campaign, her comments made their way to the South Carolina memo, offered as evidence that Clinton's comment was racially insensitive.

On January 26, Obama won a major victory in South Carolina by gaining the overwhelming majority of the black vote and a much smaller percentage of the white vote, for a grand total of 55 percent. Although the turnout, of course, was much larger for the 2008 primaries than for any previous primary or caucus, Obama had assembled a victorious coalition analogous to that built by Jesse Jackson in the 1984 and 1988 South Carolina caucuses. (Bill Clinton won the 1992 state primary with 69 percent of the vote, far outstripping either Jackson's or Obama's percentages.)

When asked by a reporter on primary day why it would take two Clintons to beat Obama, the former president, in good humor, laughed and said that he would not take the bait:

Jesse Jackson won in South Carolina twice in '84 and '88 and he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama's run a good campaign. He's run a good campaign everywhere. He's a good candidate with a good organization.

According to Obama and his supporters, here was yet another example of subtle race-baiting. Clinton had made no mention of race. But by likening Jackson's victories and Obama's impending victory and by praising Obama as a good candidate not simply in South Carolina but everywhere, Clinton was trying to turn Obama into the "black" candidate and racialize the campaign. Or so the pro-Obama camp charged.

Clinton's sly trick, supposedly, was to mention Jackson and no other Democrat who had previously prevailed in South Carolina--thereby demeaning Obama's almost certain victory as a "black" thing. But the fact remains that Clinton, who watches internal polls closely and is an astute observer, knew whereof he spoke: when the returns were counted, Obama's and Jackson's percentages of the overall vote and the key to their victories--a heavy majority among blacks--truly were comparable. The only other Democrats Clinton could have mentioned would have been himself (who won more than two-thirds of the vote in 1992, far more than either Jackson or Obama) and John Edwards (who won only 45 percent in 2004, far less than either Jackson or Obama). Given the differences, given that by mentioning himself, Clinton could have easily been criticized for being self-congratulatory, and given that Edwards had not yet dropped out of the 2008 race, the omissions were not at all surprising. By mentioning Jackson alone, the former president was being accurate--and, perhaps, both modest and polite. But Obama's supporters willfully hammered him as a cagey race-baiter.

Not everyone agreed with the race-baiting charge--including Jesse Jackson himself. Jackson noted proudly to Essence magazine that he had, indeed, won in 1984 and 1988, and, even though he had endorsed Obama, criticized the Obama campaign, saying, "again, I think it's some more gotcha politics."

Hillary Clinton's unexpected popular victory in Nevada and her crushing Super Tuesday wins in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and California seemed, according to media reports, to have been offset by Obama's more numerous victories in much smaller states that Democrats are highly unlikely to win in a general election. His string of victories in caucuses and primaries over the next four weeks gave the Obama campaign undeniable momentum. But Obama and his strategists kept the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck--and the news media continued to report on the contest (or decline to report Obama's role as instigator) as if they had fallen in line.

The New York Times, for example, opened its front page on February 15th to report an utterly inaccurate and possibly wishful story that Representative John Lewis of Georgia--a genuine hero of the civil rights movement, a courageous voice for integration, and a stalwart Clinton supporter--had announced that he had decided that, in his role as superdelegate, he would vote for Obama. Lewis quickly called the story false, although he added that he was wrestling with his conscience over whether to switch. Meanwhile, the press generally ignored a report, confirmed by all involved, that Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., had warned one of Clinton's unshakable black supporters, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, that he'd better line up behind Obama. Jackson, once again playing the role of the Obama campaign's "race man" enforcer, posed a leading question: "Do you want to go down in history as the one to prevent a black from winning the White House?" Black congressmen were threatened to fall or line or face primary challenges. "So you wake up without the carpet under your feet. You might find some young primary challenger placing you in a difficult position," Jackson said. Yet for the Obama-inspired press corps, it was the Clintons who were playing the race card. "The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up," wrote Frank Rich, Obama's vehement advocate in the New York Times.

The Obama campaign has yet to reach bottom in its race-baiter accusations. On February 25, Hillary Clinton planned to deliver a major foreign policy address, an area in which Obama's broad expertise is relatively weak. Clinton was also riding high in the Ohio polls, despite the Obama campaign's false charges about her health plan and support for NAFTA. That same day, the notoriously right-wing, scandal-mongering Drudge Report website ran a photograph of Obama dressed in the traditional clothing of a Somali elder during a tour of Africa, attached to an assertion, without evidence, that the Clinton campaign was "circulating" the picture. The story was silly on its face--there are plenty of photographs of Hillary Clinton and virtually every other major American elected official dressed in the traditional garb of other countries, and Obama's was no different. The alleged "circulation" amounted, on close reading, to what Drudge's dispatch said was an e-mail from one unnamed Clinton "staffer" to another idly wondering what the coverage might have been if the picture had been of Clinton. Possible e-mail chatter about an inoffensive picture as spun by the Drudge Report would not normally be deemed newsworthy, even in these degraded times.

Except by Obama and his campaign, who jumped on the insinuating circumstances as a kind of vindication. The Drudge posting included reaction from the pinnacle of Obama's campaign team. "It's exactly the kind of divisive politics that turns away Americans of all parties and diminishes respect for America in the world," said Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe, who also described the non-story as "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election" and "part of a disturbing pattern." Although he never explicitly spelled out the contours of this pattern, he was clearly alluding to race baiting. Later in the day, Obama himself jumped in, repeating the nasty, slippery charge that the Clinton campaign "was trying to circulate this [picture] as a negative" and calling it a political trick of the sort "you start seeing at the end of campaigns."

Although finally skewered, for the first time, on "Saturday Night Live" over the past weekend for its pro-Obama tilt, the press corps once again fell for this latest throw of the race-baiter card, turning the Drudge rumor into its number one story, obscuring Clinton's major national security address. In doing so, the media has confirmed what has been the true pattern in the race for the Democratic nomination--the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states' rights.

It may strike some as ironic that the racializing should be coming from a black candidate's campaign and its supporters. But this is an American presidential campaign--and there is a long history of candidates who are willing to inflame the most deadly passions in our national life in order to get elected. Sadly, it is what Barack Obama and his campaign gurus have been doing for months--with the aid of their media helpers on the news and op-ed pages and on cable television, mocked by "SNL" as in the tank for Obama. They promise to continue until they win the nomination, by any means necessary.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).

Hillary Speaks For Me

2008-02-24T23:05:00.000-05:00

The Daily Texan Endorses Hillary

2008-02-22T11:27:00.002-05:00

The paper representing UT's 50,000 students recently endorsed Hillary for president:

Endorsement: Time to clean house
Posted: 2/22/08

As voters, we're often torn between our hearts and our minds when making crucial decisions concerning the welfare of the country. This endorsement is no different.

In the past year, we have been entranced by the powerful timbre of Barack Obama's voice. We have felt our hearts soar with each progressive idea he has put forth, especially his call for youth action and enrollment in public service programs. But we do not think he is the wisest choice for president. George W. Bush has made a mess of America, and we believe Hillary Clinton is the best person to clean it up. She is prepared and willing to be a leader who is "a lot less hat and a lot more cattle," as she stated during Thursday night's debate.

Clinton is a seasoned politician, and some argue that works against her. But Bush has been wildly successful in destroying every positive function of the machine that is Washington, D.C., and Clinton has the political tools and knowledge to fix it.

We have admired the consistent integrity of Obama's campaign. He is everything a politician shouldn't be, meaning that we think he is a good human being. To truly be a leader we can look up to, Clinton should learn from her refined opponent's style.

But during Thursday's debate, Obama made a major gaffe in incorrectly stating that he had received endorsements from every major newspaper in Texas. We may not be considered a "major" paper to many, but we represent a crucial constituency of close to 50,000 young and enthusiastic voters, and we've been scrutinizing every move of the candidates leading up to today's endorsement. Sure, Obama took many under his spell when he graced our city with his presence early in his campaign, but we think he prematurely considered his work in Austin done.

We've taken into account our communication with each campaign as an indication of how each candidate's government would function. Upon finding out the debate would not be open to students, Obama's campaign told us there was nothing they could do to get more students into the debate, whereas the Clinton camp was sympathetic in offering assistance. This makes us wonder how far Obama would go for us as president.

The youth vote, especially here in Texas, is extremely important to both candidates. As Texas, Austin and UT have all entered the limelight as major players in the nomination process, we have been confused by Obama's relative absence from the home of such an important, excited and loyal constituency.

Clinton, while not as dazzling as her opponent, has asserted her presence to us. She has pledged to restore government support to college students by increasing the availability of Stafford Loans and Pell Grants. Her outline for a universal health care system is thorough and sound, while Obama unfairly exploits the resounding term "universal" in terms of his plan, which is voluntary and wouldn't actually serve America in its entirety (like Social Security, policy can only be universal if it is mandatory). Furthermore, Clinton's plans for Iraq ensure a gradual transition to stability for the Middle East.

Clinton's abrasiveness, while somewhat off-putting, is essential in scrubbing our country clean of the grime the current administration has let build up. And by promising that the clean-up will begin in full effect on day one of her presidency, she's proved to us over and over again that she's ready, even excited, to get her hands dirty. Meanwhile, Obama's curent focus is geared toward winning the nomination, and we need more than hope and rhetoric to be reassured that the critical transition to come with the next presidency will be handled safely.

We live each day in anticipation of Democratic leadership for this country. But considering the current state of America, now is not the time for radical change.

We'd like to see Obama and Clinton work together in achieving the many goals they share. Obama has our confident vote in four (or eight) years' time. But for now, we can't risk trusting the judgment of our hearts. Logically, Hillary Clinton should be the next president of the United States. Under her leadership, we can return to being the great country we once were. © Copyright 2008 The Daily Texan

Hillary: Professional, Polished and Presidential

2008-02-21T22:52:00.006-05:00

Despite what the chattering class is saying, I think she scored a win tonight--pointing out subtle but important policy differences and handling every question with style and grace. The best part was her answer to the last question, which was to describe the moment in her life when she'd been tested the most. Have a look:

Busy Is the New Black

2008-02-21T01:10:00.004-05:00

So it's been a fun, busy week here in Austin. I've been applying to work at all sorts of different places, from BookPeople to this modern Asian restaurant Imperia to the infamous Hotel San Jose. After blanketing my resume all over Austin, I enjoyed a free dinner with Chloe Dao (of Project Runway fame) and her seven lovely sisters. Kudos to Marques for the invite! She was honored at the Hilton by the Texas Asian-American Chamber of Commerce for her work. In other news, the Austin Museum of Art unveiled the design for its new building (right); I made two new friends, Nina and Sissel, who had me over for Thai food in their cute South Austin apartment on Sunday (Nina's tight with my friend Hillary in Brooklyn); two friends of mine from NYC, Michael and Lloyd, are visiting me in late March (good times!) and I'm up far too late on a school night. Besides that, nothing exciting to report: I've been sticking to my regimen of working out at the gym and eating healthier foods and consuming less alcohol. And that, as Martha might say, is a good thing.

What accomplishments?

2008-02-20T14:09:00.005-05:00

Chris Matthews asked one of Barack Obama's supporters to name some of Obama's accomplishments as a legislator. The guy had nothing to say. This will be a huge problem for the Democrats if Obama becomes the nominee. Watch for yourself:

Talk Is Cheap

2008-02-19T01:16:00.004-05:00

Barack Obama lifted some lines from his friend Deval Patrick's speech (who was running for governor of Massachusetts at the time). He never gave the guy credit. Is the media making too much out of it? Not when Obama's been campaigning as a different kind of candidate who's going to revolutionize DC. You can watch the side-by-side clip here:

In the comments section of a piece about this controversy, I found this bit written by some dude. I think it succinctly gets at the difference between Barack and Hillary:

audacity of hope

vs.

miracle of competency

Obama is just another politician with a good line. How are his promises any different than Bush's "I'm a uniter, not a divider." I'm tired of government by the well intentioned. We need someone who knows how to get things done. We already know what those things are.

Making History...

2008-02-18T15:18:00.002-05:00

Just 'cause I don't live there anymore...

2008-02-16T02:22:00.001-05:00

doesn't mean I can't appreciate New York.

LOVE THIS!!!!

Hillary Kicks Off Her Texas Campaign With Boisterous Rally in El Paso

2008-02-13T16:14:00.009-05:00

A few choice excerpts from a memo just released by Hillary's campaign:

"Change Begins March 4th. Hillary leads in the three largest, delegate rich states remaining: Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These three states have 492 delegates - 64 percent of the remaining delegates Hillary Clinton needs to win the nomination...

The reason Hillary is so strong in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania is that her message of delivering solutions resonates strongly with voters in those states. Hillary is the only candidate who can deliver the economic change voters want - the only candidate with a real plan and a record of fighting for health care, housing, job creation and protecting Social Security..."

Hillary has raised over $14 million this month on the strength of 143,000 new donors. The campaign also notes that losing a bunch of states does not always spell disaster:

"In 1992, Bill Clinton lost a string of primaries before clinching the nomination. He ceded Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland, Arizona, Washington, Utah, Colorado, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Vermont and South Dakota...in 1976, Jimmy Carter lost twenty-three states before winning the nomination, including: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Illinois, Mississippi, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah."

Pundits are spouting nonsense about her campaign being dead in the water; I guess someone forgot to tell folks in El Paso, Texas, where 12,000 very excited people were on their feet screaming and cheering for Hillary at her Texas kick-off rally the other night. She received a rock star welcome. You can watch it here:

Sign #1 That I'm an Austinite: I Met Leslie!

2008-02-12T17:26:00.000-05:00

The other night I was having a great chat with a new friend at Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse, a cute South Austin spot he recommended. Spanning politics (he's part of the Obamanon, but I won't hold it against him), Austin's ongoing transformation and other topics, our conversation came around to one of the quirky misfits who validate the 'keep Austin weird' movement--Leslie. Literally within a few minutes of discussing him, guess who should wander over to us and offer to clear our plates?! Leslie in the flesh, wearing a short skirt and some type of mink or chinchilla jacket and sporting a fanny pack and a beard. Pictured at right, Leslie is a homeless cross-dressing man who ran for mayor a few years back, has a refrigerator magnet of his likeness sold in various shops and is beloved by Austinites. I shook his hand--he's a nice guy.

Explained: Hillary's 2002 Iraq War Resolution Vote

2008-02-12T16:50:00.000-05:00

The Obamabots and the other anti-Hillary activists who continue to vilify her (for voting in favor of the resolution to use force in Iraq) should actually listen to the 20-minute speech she gave on the floor of the Senate in October of 2002 [the top video is the first part & it continues below that]. Making these decisions isn't easy, and she clearly agonized over it...folks will argue for years whether her vote (and those of her 76 colleagues who also supported the resolution) was indeed the right choice.

Madam President

2008-02-11T01:12:00.000-05:00

This piece, taken from a politics blog I like, gets at the issue of sexism and how it's impacted the campaign:

Is Misogyny the Last Taboo?
By Ruth Rosen - February 9, 2008, 1:07PM

The good news in this campaign is that most Americans, including pundits and political analysts, seem to feel it is socially unacceptable to use overtly racist stereotypes or innuendo against Barack Obama. Though I still believe that racism is pandemic in American society, people appear to keep their beliefs and feelings about the color of Barack Obama's skin to themselves. At least, so far.

Restraint against making sexist comments, by contrast, is not yet apparent. Fortunately, the outcry from both men and women has been loud enough to force Chris Mathews to apologize for implying that Clinton would never be a candidate if her husband hadn't messed around in the White House. I'm also delighted that MSNBC's David Shuster has both apologized and been suspended for asking a guest if Chelsea Clinton was "being pimped out in some weird sort of way" by the Clinton campaign?

These are only two of a long list of sexist comments noted by Media Matters, feminist scholars and activists across the country. This list would bore you.

But the one moment that sill sticks in my throat happened quite a while ago. On November 12, 2007, a McCain supporter asked, "How do we beat the bitch?" Laughter erupted among the crowd and McCain joined in. After a few moments, he replied, "That is an excellent question." Then, he went on to say that he respected Senator Clinton.

Oh really?

If so, McCain should have been shocked and admonished his supporter by replying, "That's not the way we speak about women, and certainly it's wrong to use such language when discussing a distinguished Senator campaigning for the presidency. " But that wasn't his response.

Imagine, for a moment, if he had been asked, "How do we beat the N word?" referring to Senator Obama. Everyone would have gasped, including the Senator himself. He wouldn't have laughed and he would not have said it was an "excellent question."

The point is, McCain gave his supporters permission to view Clinton as a "bitch,"
even though he then went on to say he respected her. Well, Senator, you can't respect any woman and allow her to be vilified in such a sexist manner.

I am among those feminists who supported Obama in the primaries. But I'm also outraged by the way Hillary Clinton has been treated by the media, the pundits, even the candidates. Discussions of her poor taste in clothes, her thick ankles, distorted descriptions of her eyes welling up as "crying," and attacks on her "cackling laughter" have made many women feel they want to support her, if only to get even with everyone who has tried to diminish and sabotage her. I share their anger. Many of us know that we are viewed as a "bitch" when we're strong and as an incompetent when we reveal emotion.

Now that Sen. John McCain appears to be the Republican candidate, it's time for him to apologize to Hillary Clinton--and all America women--for allowing any woman to be called a "bitch." It doesn't matter that a woman was the supporter who yelled out the question. It's up to McCain to prove that history has not passed him by and that he respects half of the population he seeks to govern.

Enough is enough. Men, get a grip. We're here to stay and one of us is actually running for the presidency forty-odd years after the modern women's women began. Get used to it; we're not going away.

Betty Butterfield: Election 2008 Edition

2008-02-09T12:26:00.000-05:00

This is hilarious.

Hillary: I was overwhelmed by the wave of new contributors

2008-02-08T21:06:00.000-05:00

Hillary's campaign has raised $8 million online since Super Tuesday and a total of $10 million so far this month--in the process gaining over 75,000 new donors. Go Hillary! You can donate by clicking here. Watch a fun clip here.

Lesson to MSNBC: Don't Mess With Hillary

2008-02-08T20:31:00.000-05:00

Last night MSNBC anchor David Shuster wondered aloud whether Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out" by her mother by virtue of the fact that she's been calling superdelegates urging them to support her mother. Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson rightly called the comment disgusting and "beneath contempt," while also suggesting that Hillary might not participate in any future MSNBC-sponsored debates. Watch the original clip, along with his initial non-apology apology from this morning, below:

Several hours later, MSNBC sent over the following response to the Clinton campaign:

On Thursday's "Tucker" on MSNBC, David Shuster, who was serving as guest-host of the program, made a comment about Chelsea Clinton and the Clinton campaign that was irresponsible and inappropriate. Shuster, who apologized this morning on MSNBC and will again this evening, has been suspended from appearing on all NBC News broadcasts, other than to make his apology. He has also extended an apology to the Clinton family. NBC News takes these matters seriously, and offers our sincere regrets to the Clintons for the remarks.

Here's the strange thing, and it's not the pattern of sexism at MSNBC (Hardball host Chris Matthews has described Hillary Clinton with these words: "She Devil" "Witchy" "Anti-male" "Look at those eyes. Look at the cold eyes that she's giving him. Look at that cold look." "[L]ike a strip-teaser saying she's flattered by the all the attention"), but really the strange pattern whereby members of the media take anything that is a perfectly normal part of politics, such as having your family solicit votes (um, the Bush twins, Mary Cheney, Michelle Obama), and turn it into something sleazy, unseemly or corrupt whenever it involves the Clintons. It's totally ridiculous.

The Britney Economy Is Recession-Proof

2008-02-07T22:59:00.000-05:00

Conde Nast Portfolio put together a story (I recommend watching the slide show by clicking here) detailing how much money the handlers, promoters, concert/record executives and media types are making off of her, even with her recent bipolar diagnosis.

I actually feel sorry for this young woman, regardless of what you may think about her music or the choices she's made--dealing with bipolar disorder (if she truly is) sucks.

Hillary Loves the Gays

2008-02-07T22:27:00.000-05:00

My dear friend Michael sent this. It's a letter from Hillary Clinton to the gay community (in stark contrast to Barack Obama, who has surrounded himself with anti-gay bigots and so-called "ex-gays," which you can read about here). Meanwhile, Hillary's letter is below, and it's awesome.

As I have traveled around the country these past twelve months, what I sensed in my heart has been confirmed--America is embracing its LGBT sons and daughters with an acceptance and understanding as never before. On the campaign trail, a father of a gay son will ask about ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. A woman will ask why she can be discriminated against just because of who she is. Sometimes they wait furtively for the crowd to thin and then whisper their confidences in a soft voice and sometimes they stand up proudly at town meetings and want me to share my views on how I will help lead the change to assure that this country fulfills its promise to everyone.
Let me tell you what I have been telling voters across America. I am fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of LGBT Americans. For seven long years, the Bush Administration has tried to divide us --only seeing people who matter to them. It's been a government of the few, by the few, and for the few. And no community has been more invisible to this administration than the LGBT community.
I will change that. The best evidence of what I will do as President is what I have already done.
* I am proud of my record as First Lady, as a U.S. Senator and as a candidate for President in working toward the fair and equal treatment of LGBT Americans.
* I am proud that as Chair of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee in 2006, I worked closely with LBGT community to develop a smart strategy that defeated the Federal Marriage Amendment. I am proud of fighting the FMA as divisive wedge politics at its worst.
* I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligation Act which would grant the same benefits (including health insurance) to domestic partners of federal employees that are currently offered to employees’ legal spouses.
* I am proud to have authored the Early Treatment for HIV Act, which expands access to vital treatment options for low-income individuals living with HIV, and fought to fully fund the Ryan White CARE Act.
* I am proud that I hired a National Director of LGBT Outreach within a month of announcing my candidacy for President and to have openly gay and lesbian staffers serving at all levels of my campaign.
* I am proud to have a National LGBT Steering Committee of over 130 that includes openly LGBT elected officials, Board members and opinion leaders on issues ranging from transgender rights, to HIV/AIDS, to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”.
* I am proud to have marched in Gay Pride parades as both First Lady and as Senator and to have spoken in front of so many LGBT audiences ranging from the Human Rights Campaign, Empire State Pride Agenda, the Hetrick Martin Institute, PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
* I am proud to have fought Republican efforts to demonize and marginalize the LGBT community, and I will continue to do that as President.
We have so much work to do. When I am President, we will work together to make sure that all Americans in committed relationships have equal benefits and that nothing stands in the way of loving couples who want to adopt children in need. We're going to expand our federal hate crimes legislation and pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and assure that they are both fully inclusive of all people. And finally, we will put an end to the failed policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Courage, honor, patriotism and sacrifice – the traits that define our men and women in uniform – have nothing to do with sexual orientation.
My father was a conservative Republican, who held very traditional views for much of his life. Yet in his last years, it was a gay couple who lived next door who provided much of the compassion and comfort he and my mother needed as he grew ill. And it was that same neighbor who held his hand as he died. If my father can move, America can move.
To each and every LGBT American, I say this. You have done so much to help this country understand your lives by simply being open and honest about who you are and living your lives with dignity. Thank you for your courage. It is time that we recognize your hard work. I know that this country is ready for changes in the law that reflect the evolution in our hearts.
America deserves a President who appeals to the best in each of us, not the worst; a President who values and respects all Americans and treats all Americans equally no matter who they are or who they love. I want to be that President. I want to be your President.

"Honest-To-Goodness Good Cooking!"

2008-02-07T19:54:00.000-05:00

That's the commitment from Hoover Alexander, owner of Hoover's, this amazing little Southern comfort food spot in East Austin. Half a BBQ chicken, rubbed in punchy spices that called to mind the Southwest and kicked things up a notch, along with a heaping side of candied sweet potatoes and green beans flavored with fat-back (or some such meat product), plus some warm cornbread--all for only $9.99! You can't beat that price. It was a ton of food, and I managed to scarf it all down pretty easily (much to Marques' amazement).

Besides that, I swung by the farmer's market here at the Triangle. It runs every Wednesday afternoon year-round, and I scored some tasty granola (from a guy who used to live--you guessed it!--a few blocks from my old digs in Williamsburg, and relocated to Austin from NYC many years ago), fresh local tomatoes, broccoli, sweet potatoes and herbs. All for a very low price.

The other news is that I met with Jeff Solomon, books editor of the Austin American-Statesman. He's a former New Yorker who started out at the Village Voice. I have my first assignment, too. I'll be reviewing Arianna Huffington's forthcoming Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, And Made Us All Less Safe; plus, she's apparently doing a reading at Book People here in Austin.

Rhetoric About "Hope" Will Not Get Real Results in Washington, DC

2008-02-06T14:52:00.000-05:00

Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott does a great job summarizing why it makes sense to support Hillary over Barack Obama. I agree with his sentiments. Did you vote? I hope so. Hillary got my vote in NY via absentee ballot. From Wolcott's blog (below that, check out Hillary's gracious remarks after winning a majority of popular votes in the Super Tuesday primaries):

So spurn me, I voted for Hillary.

I have many faults and quirks, but one thing I'm not is a narcissist. My vote isn't about Me. Who I am, how I conceive myself, how my vote positions me in the pulse of the moment. The tab I flip in the voting booth isn't intended as a dramatic gesture to pin in my lapel like a carnation and sniff during intermission, like some Clifton Webb character. I don't accept being lectured or morally browbeaten into voting for one candidate over another in order to prove my virtuous intent and appease Kurt Andersen's peculiar, posturing racial anxieties. Perhaps it's my atheism at work but I found myself increasingly wary of and resistant to the salvational fervor of the Obama campaign, the idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria. I can picture President Hillary in the White House dealing with a recalcitrant Republican faction; I can't picture President Obama in the same role because his summons to history and call to hope seems to transcend legislative maneuvers and horse-trading; his charisma is on a more ethereal plane, and I don't look to politics for transcendence and self-certification. I agree with NYCweboy: "Win or lose, Barack Obama has changed the landscape of American culture and politics - bringing the perspective of mixed race to the table, and finding validity in both white communities and communities of colors. That's huge. It's just not, in itself, a reason to make him President. Voting for Obama, for me would be about picking an idea, not a person, or a set of specific plans... I need more than that. And Hillary Clinton is the person, with the specifics, who offers more." Though I didn't read NYCweboy's post until after voting today (I must have mistimed my visit to the polling station because I missed running into Katrina van den Heuvel, one of the anticipated highlights of election day), that's pretty much the direction my thoughts and sentiments took.

And I may have been spurred somewhat by the sexist pile-on of the last few days on Hillary, such as the Chris Matthews panel that kicked off with a discussion of how genuine Hillary's near-tears were , with Margaret Carlson manufacturing smarm with her own half-baked mix of snide faux-sympathy and bogus mind-reading.

The Beauty Myth

2008-02-02T19:54:00.000-05:00

Marques and I went to a panel discussion at UT featuring Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth) that was sponsored in part by Dove. It was a great event that touched on self-esteem, politics, the media and all the hows/whys of womens' distorted perceptions of their own beauty.

At the beginning, they showed a video that Dove produced. The video depicts the transformation of a normal woman in a billboard supermodel. I think it's really powerful. See for yourself:

"We need to find oil daddies!"

2008-01-31T16:57:00.000-05:00

That was the refrain en route to Epoch, this adorable independently-owned coffeeshop on North Loop in Austin. We were heading there for a warm after-dinner beverage. Leather daddies are so passe. We're not into chaps; it's all about bank accounts. Why an oil daddy, you ask? Because oil daddies can offer wheels and wings! Wheels like these and wings like these. Anyhow, after getting past a few bumps in the road, I finally arrived in Austin Tuesday evening. The weather has been great so far (a bit chilly, according to Marques), but mainly it's been sunny with highs in the 50s or 60s. I'm loving it!

People have been bending over backward to be friendly, kind and helpful. This applies to everyone from total strangers living in The Triangle (the apartment complex where I'm living until we relocate to the townhouse Marques bought in South Austin) to editors I've met to employees at T-Mobile and various restaurants.

My two main full-time job possibilities are percolating along (no news to report just yet) and I'll be doing some freelance writing as well. The last boxes of my stuff from NYC should arrive today. I really like BookPeople, one of Austin's offerings. My friends Michael and Lloyd are probably going to visit in the coming months. Tonight I'm off to The Domain so Marques can finish scouting clothes for his job. Otherwise, to borrow a phrase from Cyndi Lauper, I've been seeing everyone's true colors over the past few weeks...in a few instances, it's been unpleasant. But the vast majority of folks have been truly awesome in their support, kind words and encouragement.

Avenue Q Rocks My World

2008-01-23T11:12:00.000-05:00

What can I say? I finally saw Avenue Q last night with my friend Soren. It was awesome! Totally politically incorrect. Amazingly talented singers and tons of laughs. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

She's Just Getting Warmed Up...

2008-01-23T11:08:00.001-05:00

I missed the South Carolina debate, but thanks to YouTube I was able to see this choice exchange. All I can say is, Wow.

In the words of the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

2008-01-21T13:28:00.001-05:00

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so I have reprinted below a choice excerpt from his beautiful "I Have a Dream" speech. It's too bad that none of our current presidential contenders speak as fiercly and eloquently he did back then.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."²

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

(King: medaloffreedom.com)

Oh Happy Monday

2008-01-21T13:10:00.000-05:00

I'm typing this from the ninth floor of the News Corp building in Midtown. Why? Because I'm doing a one-day stint at Page Six Magazine.

I realize that the pictures from my birthday are so low-res that they make my hair look grey in the front. I promise: It's a trick of the lighting and the low-res image. While I have a few grey hairs, I think, I certainly don't have some sort of raccoon-like streak.

Besides that, I'm selling furniture and getting ready for the big relocation. There are at least two separate full-time job possibilities for me in Austin, which rocks. This weekend, I saw a friend or two, chatted with my family and shipped another box to the Lone Star state. Some exciting news: I'm going to start reviewing books for Bookslut. Good times! Also: I've recently become aware of a group called Shimmerplanet. Their lead singer, Soren Anders, is a sweet and talented fellow. Check out their music here.

(News Corp Building: viewimages.com)

Good times in the big city...

2008-01-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

one more with Marques

You get the idea

2008-01-17T15:57:00.002-05:00

with Marques, once again

And more...

2008-01-17T15:57:00.001-05:00

Hamming it up with Marques

More birthday fun...

2008-01-17T15:54:00.001-05:00

With my old boss Lisa Kearns, her man Don and my friend Robert.

30th Birthday Pics!

2008-01-17T15:50:00.000-05:00

I know, I know...it's been ages since my last post. There's a sad story about a now-recycled (dead) G4 iBook behind that. At any rate, here are some low-res pictures from my 30th birthday celebrations in November. And I promise to write more often once I'm settled in Austin. ABOVE: on the phone; with my friend Elijah

Boring!

2007-12-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

This song called "Boring" kills me. It's by the Pierces. I'm loving it lately! Kudos to Giovanni for showing me the way...

In the Mix: Plenty of Everything

2007-12-07T14:47:00.000-05:00

As his poll numbers continue to drop, it was revealed that Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress Judith Nathan received taxpayer-funded rides around NYC in 2000--far earlier than his campaign had previously admitted. Conde Nast closed down the 90-year-old House & Garden after years of losing money, Martha Stewart folded Blueprint with executives saying they had "misjudged the market" and the New York Times promoted Book Review editor (and apparent neo-conservative) Sam Tanenhaus to editor of--you guessed it!--Week in Review. The Barack and Oprah juggernaut [favorite headline was the Post's Omentum] joyfully plowed through Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire, attracting tens of thousands of screaming supporters and laudatory local media coverage while striking fear in the hearts of Hillary operators everywhere.

GOP candidate Mike Huckabee, whose recent surge in the polls has prompted renewed media scrutiny, has refused to disavow remarks made in 1992 that implied people with HIV/AIDS should be quarantined. Meanwhile, Kanye West and Amy Winehouse led the Grammy nominations, US home foreclosures hit a record high and the stock market continued its wild 200-point weekly swings. Ken Doll-candidate Mitt Romney (who probably hasn't had an original thought in his head in years) gave a talk--completely unlike JFK's infamous speech about his Catholicism--in which he A.) failed to discuss any of his odd Mormon beliefs, B.) only said the word "Mormon" once and C.) assured the wacky right-wing evangelical voters of Iowa that he'd govern with God as his guide.

In NYC, Broadway opened its doors once again as the strike ended, the holiday shopping season kicked off with a frenzied atmosphere as retailers braced for lower profits amid fear that the US is already in a recession, the MTA announced yet another proposed fare hike, a Columbia graduate student (of South Asian or Mideast appearance, oddly enough) is suing the NYPD for arresting him as he photographed subway stations for an art project--and your truly jumped on the Facebook bandwagon while staying busy with writing, editing (at Plenty) and getting ready for my relocation.

My 30th Birthday Party

2007-11-08T12:52:00.000-05:00

I've officially (finally) sent the Evite for my party. What a relief. I'm having the main event at Flatiron Lounge, a classic cocktail lounge where the mixologists behind the bar take their work seriously (left). Other plans for the weekend include dinner at Marlow & Sons, Sunday brunch at Diner and dinner on my actual birthday at Bar Centrale. I can't wait!

Sorry I've been missing in action...

2007-11-07T17:47:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile since my last post, so here's a quick update: my laptop, which I used a lot in Austin, is hibernating. I'm letting the battery charge for a few days (hopefully I won't have a Carrie Bradshaw freakout moment, where Apple tells me that my hard drive has to be wiped clean). I'm in the midst of planning festivities for my 30th birthday; if you're going to be in or near NYC the weekend of November 25th (yeah, that's right after Thanksgiving) stay tuned. While I was enjoying perfect sunshine and beautiful 70-degree days in Austin it seemingly became fall in NYC. Or winter, based on how folks are dressed here. I've spotted countless double-wrapped thick scarves, layered sweaters, knit hats and gloves and heavy wool coats. I miss Austin. I think I've figured out where my life is headed for 2008. Next year's going to be all about change. More on all that later...

In the Mix: Austin Edition!

2007-11-03T12:06:00.000-04:00

"Welcome to Texas!" bellowed the Austin Chronicle's style avatar Stephen Moser in his New Orleans-meets-Austin drawl as he gripped my hand at last night's Arthouse Texas Prize ceremony and dinner. The party only happens every two years, it's one of the biggest regional art award competitions in the country and the festivities did not disappoint. Several hundred guests filled circular tables outside at Stubb's, one of Austin's best BBQ spots, to enjoy beer, champagne, margaritas, fried okra, creamed spinach and some tasty Texas BBQ.

From the mechanical bull that guests were riding to win various prizes to the pre-party dancers who reminded me of the cast from Bring It On (think more actual dancing, as opposed to cheering) and the dessert that featured a cup of lime-flavored ice next to a shot of tequila--the whole affair was perfectly Texas. Styles ranged from bedazzled cocktail dresses and pumps to cowboy boots and jeans to button-downs and semi-formal gowns. I received some important outfit consultation from Marques, who gave me a red and white bandana that was the perfect compliment to my blue jeans, white (with grey stripes) button-down and beer-bottle-opening belt. It was just the right amount of Texas and earned me a few kudos.

Investors savaged the stocks of financial companies (Merril Lynch, Citigroup, Washington Mutual and Bank of America were hit hard), as credit fears and overall anxiety about the economy--including suggestions from some that the forthcoming holiday shopping season will be lackluster--lead to a pullback in the markets this week. The dollar continued to slide against other currencies and the price of oil topped out at $95 a barrel, which prompted major airlines like American to raise their domestic fares. Hillary Clinton, lambasted in the press for supposedly playing the "gender card" (which is what, exactly?), told reporters that her male rivals are piling on not because she's a woman, but because she's winning, telling reporters in New Hampshire: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen; I'm very much at home in the kitchen."

Friday night continued with drinks (amazing and cheap!) at Oil Can Harry's, where DJ Roland Belmares was spinning some hot Britney and Rihanna remixes ("Don't Stop the Music" is my new anthem) for the crowd: we danced atop the platform overlooking the entire club and had a blast. Belmares is the same guy who's spinning at tomorrow's Octo-Tea, Austin's annual tea dance benefiting AIDS Services Austin. It's held at Oasis, where participants can dance, sip cocktails and watch the sun go down; the style avatar advised us to check it out, saying the party is the last of its kind...we shall see. Yesterday I had my own taste of Austin's history, having a great lunch with a friend at 34th Street Cafe, which was a favorite spot of Laura Bush when George W. was the governor of Texas. We experienced a blast from Austin's past at OCH along with a taste of city's future. The future arrived in the form of a rectangular book that was left in Marques' Altima after the valet returned it. The bound book was a lavish marketing tool/advertisement for The Austonian. Who knew?! Finally, we popped into the club Rain for a nightcap and met a nice guy who pegged me for a visiting New Yorker without any prompting. All in all, good times.

Thanks, Colonel Driskill

2007-11-02T15:45:00.000-04:00

The Driskill Hotel, a gorgeous Romanesque-style building in downtown Austin, is the city's oldest hotel. It opened in 1886 and was founded by Col. Jesse Driskill, a cattle baron who made his fortune providing the Confederate Army with meat. The hotel is serene and well-appointed yet still very Texas (dark wood, leather couches, animal-hide-covered chairs, low lighting, brass fixtures and a guy playing the piano not far from a huge TV tuned to football).

Although the service left a little to be desired, the cocktails were great. Marques ordered his usual Sidecar and I enjoyed the Longhorn Manhattan.

SoCo Dining

2007-11-01T15:41:00.000-04:00

Last night Marques and I enjoyed a lovely dinner at The Woodland, a somewhat hidden gem of a restaurant in SoCo. I say hidden because although the spot's been open for almost a year, word doesn't seem to have reached the masses (yet). The woodsy decor, including antler-shaped light fixtures, green walls and a real tree in the dining room, set the relaxed but sophisticated mood. The restaurant's comfort American fare (Mac 'n Cheese, Pork Empanadas, Salmon, NY Strip Steak, Meatloaf) is simple, well prepared and loaded with flavor. Their French '75 cocktail—a tasty concoction of gin and champagne in a flute glass—is the perfect complement to any meal.

I also finally met Marques' assistant—who was everything I expected and more. So I've decided to stick around Austin for a few more days (I'm flying back early Monday morning) to catch the Texas Book Festival, the launch party and premiere of L Style G Style and a few other events.

(Picture courtesy of The Austin Chronicle)

Debate Recap

2007-11-01T10:44:00.000-04:00

The Holiday That Keeps On Giving

2007-10-31T15:13:00.000-04:00

In honor of the fact that Halloween has finally arrived, here are some more pics from the weekend. Chris, Laura and John all spent lots of time preparing—and it shows! They looked hot. I look pleased about my $1 tip...or my '70s blowout (kudos to my stylist, Ray). I expect to see plenty of insanity tonight when I venture downtown with Marques—part of the city shuts down for the parade and festivities.

She takes a lickin' and...

2007-10-31T14:16:00.001-04:00

Although I didn't catch one second of last night's Democratic debate (I read Texas Monthly and became entranced by the season opener of Nip/Tuck and the latest episode of Desperate Housewives), by all accounts Hillary Clinton's performance was dreadful, full of long-winded non-answers, obfuscation and triangulation. Hillary's not as talented as her husband, so she needs to start giving straightforward responses. As the frontrunner, everyone knew all the men would gang up on her—and they didn't disappoint: At one point Sen. Edwards said, "Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes."

Nevertheless, the folks in Hillaryland must be mighty pleased that AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), one of the country's largest and most politically influential unions, has announced that it's endorsing Hillary for 2008.

Here's an excerpt of the AFSCME president's preparted remarks:

This is no time to take chances. We need someone who knows how to fight and knows how to win. Sisters and Brothers, Senator Clinton is a seasoned fighter. Believe me, she knows how to fight and she knows how to win.
Some of you may have seen last night's debate.

Six guys against Hillary.

I'd call that a fair fight.

This is one strong woman.

This is the Democrat with the strength and experience to make change happen.

This is the Democrat with the strength and experience who will always stand up for working Americans.

This is the Democrat with the strength and experience to take on the Republicans in the fall.

This is the Democrat who can win the White House in 2008

Brunchtastic

2007-10-30T15:06:00.000-04:00

The entire group went to Chez-Zee and feasted on generous goat cheese and tomato omelettes, sausage, bacon, potatoes, creme brulee french toast, mimosas and blood marys. Chez-Zee's a funky American bistro in Austin.

(Clockwise from left: Laura, Chris, Dan, John, Marques, Me and Ray)

The Oasis

2007-10-30T14:35:00.000-04:00

The Oasis is a restaurant with a large outdoor deck that's perched on a cliff 450 feet above Lake Travis and offers breathtaking views of Hill Country and the setting sun. We enjoyed a lazy Sunday afternoon sampling their "perfect margarita" while taking in the beautiful landscape.

(Pic of me with Ray)

In the Mix

2007-10-28T19:05:00.000-04:00

I write this from Jo's Coffee on trendy South Congress Avenue in Austin: on my left sits a young guy in pin-striped pants, vintage shirt and Vans with tiny hoop earrings in both ears and Manic Panic pink streaks in his hair; on my right is a lesbian couple chatting about work and having lunch. All around are young Austinites in jeans and studded belts and boots enjoying the perfect October weather—for the sixth day in a row it's sunny, clear and in the mid-70s.

Descending further into irrelevance, a sobbing Britney Spears stormed out of a Los Angeles courthouse recently screaming "Eat it! Lick it! Snort it! Fuck it!" while a soldier of the 1st Battalion 18th Infantry Regiment told the Washington Post that after 14 months of serving in Iraq, "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life." The Census Bureau reported that the home ownership rate fell for the fourth straight quarter—the longest decline since 1981. Sen. Larry Craig is set to argue in court that foot-tapping is, in fact, a constitutional right and Barack Obama is making what DC pundits are calling a last ditch effort to mount an effective challenge to Hillary Clinton's overwhelming lead in every primary state (except Iowa, where they're neck-in-neck). The Rev. Donnie McClurkin, Obama supporter and controversial gospel singer who's been working with Obama's campaign, claimed in a speech that God had "delivered" him from homosexuality, much to the dismay of GLBT Obama supporters.

Speaking of the gays, I met with a number of great folks here so far, including Keith Collins, publisher of Fave—a new product-oriented gay men's mag based in Austin. Keith's been making the rounds all over Austin seeking out potential advertisers for the magazine that he runs with his partner. In his travels, he's met with lots of folks—including developers and brokers involved in the vast expansion of Austin's downtown skyline that's in progress. He believes, and I tend to agree, that Austin's already significant gay population will increase as these new condo high-rises are finished over the next three years. These include The Monarch, a 305-unit complex scheduled for occupancy later this year, The Altavida, a 258-unit luxury tower to be completed spring 2009 and The Austonian, a 195-unit high-rise scheduled for fall of 2009. You can view the future skyline of Austin here.

A little more on Austin, since I know the New York folks are thinking, 'OMG, is he really going to leave the Big Apple!!??' Thus far, it's been a blast being here once again. I've had really good, productive meetings with editors at the Austin American-Statesman and I have still more things planned out. I once again tasted Amy's Ice Cream; sipped champagne in the courtyard of the fabulous Hotel San Jose; walked up (and photographed the gorgeous view of Town Lake—which is technically part of the Colorado River—from) Mt. Bonell (above); went to a fun house party (top: Ray's a green fairy, I'm a '70s go-go boy, Marques is a Diva and John's Bettlejuice); and saw Master Pancake Theater's send-up of the cult classic Halloween. Last, though definitely not least, I enjoyed a truly awesome meal with Ray at Eastside Cafe. Eastside is a gem of a restaurant—quaint and intimate, it's in a converted house right next to a 1/3 acre farm that supplies the restaurant with veggies and herbs; its menu is about local, fresh ingredients deliciously and simply prepared. The setting and great company made it my best dining experience in Austin.

Meanwhile, oil topped out at $94 a barrel on supply fears and continued blustery American rhetoric about Iran's nuclear ambitions, Google is working on a social networking site to take down Facebook and Laura Bush told The Hill that, contrary to popular belief, she's been "involved for a long time in policy." An AP poll found that among all the folks vying to be president, Hillary Clinton is the "scariest" costume; the word "vajayjay" (if you don't know what it refers to, click here) has officially jumped the shark—landing on the front of the SundayStyles section in yesterday's New York Times.

I promise more posts from Austin over the next three days. I meet with folks from culture magazine Tribeza tomorrow and award-winning Texas Monthly on Wednesday. Until next time, peace out...

Starting a Ballet Revolution

2007-10-20T17:44:00.000-04:00

For a man deemed to be "the most talented classical choreographer of his generation" by New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff six years ago, self-effacing Christopher Wheeldon (left) thanked a lot of people prior to the show's start. [My friend called Wheeldon my future ex-boyfriend; I admit a crush on the boyish Brit.] So I finally saw what all the fuss is about last night at City Center. The number of A-list ballet stars working with Wheeldon's brand new company, Morphoses, is impressively deep: Ashley Bouder, Maria Kowroski, Teresa Reichlen and Wendy Whelan of New York City Ballet; Royal Ballet's Alina Cojocaru; former San Francisco Ballet principal Gonzalo Garcia; and others. The live music, from the Orchestra of St. Luke's, was beautifully done, although my friend found the violin to be "grating" in one of the night's more melodramatic pieces.

Given Kisselgoff's declaration, it's not surprising that Alastair Macaulay would review the debut of Morphoses with an eye toward taking Wheeldon down a peg or two, writing:

"Since Mr. Wheeldon emerged in the mid-1990s...it has been widely remarked how much he has learned from the legacies of George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Jerome Robbins and Kenneth MacMillan. A shame, therefore, that much of City Center’s opening program suggested that he has been either learning from lesser choreographers too or failing to learn useful lessons from those four."

I could, of course, see room for improvement. Wheeldon's company is like a 4-month old relationship: the kinks are being worked out and everyone is learning as they go. As my friend noted, his partnering could use some work; in particular, the couples sometimes seemed sterile—or lacking a certain intimacy or sensuality. Nevertheless, just seeing male/male and female/female pairings onstage (which you wouldn't see at City Ballet) was positively delightful.

The company's name (stress on the first syllable) means “changes,” which is appropriate because Wheeldon has big dreams for Morphoses: nothing short of reconceiving what ballet can be, while simultaneously demystifying a form of high culture for the YouTube generation. I couldn't agree more with the project: I'd wager the average age of the typical audience at City Center is fiftysomething. Between pieces last night, a large video screen descended to play clips of backstage moments and rehearsals.

All the movements fused classical ballet with elements of modern dance. These were trained, highly talented dance professionals, and it showed. The sensual athleticism of Wendy Whelan, Gonzalo Garcia and Maria Kowroski truly shined. The costumes, by Holly Hynes and Narcisco Rodriguez, were lovely. Twirls, leaps and effortless-looking lifts were the order of the evening. Perhaps Wheeldon summed up the situation best a few weeks ago in the Times: "There’s a danger of making the expectations too high. It just feels that all eyes are on me, and I better not fail or else.”

In the Mix

2007-10-18T14:39:00.000-04:00

Pink-haired, overweight and ubiquitous gay celeb-blogger Perez Hilton tells Rolling Stone that Britney Spears is a "dumb, druggie, awful bitch" while the talented actress Deborah Kerr, known for her sexy and controversial scene (left) on a beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953), is dead at 86. The Times' Paul Krugman summed up why Al Gore is so deeply reviled by the right-wing media machine, after having nabbed the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change efforts: he's right! Oh, and there's that little matter of having garnered 543,895 more popular votes than Bush in 2000.

New York (following my lead, no doubt) profiled choreographer Christopher Wheeldon on the eve of his new dance company's NYC debut. I'd love to know where he got his t-shirt that reads STOP BITCHING AND START A REVOLUTION. Israeli real estate company Elad, owner of the condo-converted Plaza Hotel, plans to contruct Manhattan's tallest residential building (pending approval), scraping the sky at 899 feet on Madison Avenue; NYC is gobbling up a chunk of priceless Williamsburg waterfront property via eminent domain so it can build a new 28-acre park. The NYPD is investigating why a package of white powder was found near the office of openly gay City Council Speaker/possible 2009 mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, and a woman in Brooklyn discoverd a 7-foot-long python in her toilet early one morning while brushing her teeth: Cops say it's "unclear" how the snake—normally found in Africa, Asia or Australia—got into the pipes.

Our spineless U.S. Senate struck a deal to protect corporations like Verizon and AT&T from being sued for their active participation in the NSA's eavesdropping and snooping on millions of Americans' phone calls. Meanwhile, the House fell 15 votes short of overriding Bush's veto of an expanded children's health care bill and Congress is set to further deregulate media ownership rules, to the delight of Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch.

Warmonger-in-Chief George W. Bush continues to rachet up the rhetoric against Iran—informing lawmakers about his cool plan for an endlessly spreading war in the Middle East, all part of Operation Stay Relevant—saying: "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." But of course Israel can have as many nuclear weapons as it pleases, enough to blow every Arab country that stands in its way to smithereens. Defense companies like Lockheed Martin—and Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs—are throwing millions of dollars at Hillary; her pollster Mark Penn recently predicted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she would get 24% of the Republican female vote in 2008, producing peals of laughter on the front porches, in the beauty shops and at the churches where Southern women congregate.

If you missed Matt Lauer's cringe-inducing interview of bathroom-cruising GOP Sen. Larry Craig, check out this clip. Poor guy—and how absolutely awful for his wife. Notice her pained expressions:

You can view the entire interview via the prompts on the right-hand side of this page.

Weekend DOs: ballet at City Center with Michael; planting and raking leaves in Fort Greene Park with Elijah; walking the 1.2 mile-span of the Williamsburg Bridge; finishing The Omnivore's Dilemma and starting Alan Weisman's The World Without Us; food shopping, exercising, cooking, apartment cleaning, sleeping; pitching ideas to Passport and New York and others; seeing friends. DON'Ts: working 12-hour days (as I have for most of this week).

Congrats to moi—I've finally joined the ranks of book reviewing professionals at the National Book Critics Circle.

(Columbia Pictures via AP)