Through the Looking Glass!

People!!! The 4th wall of Reality TV has come down!!
Actually, maybe it's the 5th or 6th wall...um, what kind of room is reality tv in, a hexagon? Probably more of a rhombus.

Whoa, off topic.
Much, much more importantly, someone I am tangentially acquainted with was on Project Runway! AND, on the very, very, best episode ever; this weeks Good Queen Fun, exclamation mark!

I was watching it late night at the bf's house. I thought he was asleep but OUT OF NO WHERE he bolts up and yells, "That's Steven!" Which scared the bajeez out of me because, as I said, I thought he was asleep.

He only heard his voice, which is uncanny, but low and behold, it was Steven but as his drag alter ego, LeMay!




Jake, who's very sensitive about embarrassing reality tv situations, almost had a heart attack waiting for Steven to get chosen by a designer. Ugh, he got Jerell and then was subjected to this horrible outfit.
Poor Steven!



Steven owns a rad vintage/tshirt/drag supply shop, Retro-Fit, in the Mission that used to sell Headline Shirts and Revel's lines, which Jake is the designer for. Besides selling my boyfriends tshirt designs, he's also known for his ridiculously amazing window displays.

He and Jake even collaborated on this great Flash opener for the Headline Shirts website that's an, I think, hysterical rip off of American Apparel.
You should probably check that out, and maybe buy some tshirts while you're at it.

Long story short I think they fell out a little over Jake's unwillingness to explore his homosexual side but we were still rooting for him to have a rad outfit and a fun time on Runway. ESPECIALLY because Steven's a totally huge Runway fan and throws a huge finale viewing party slash fashion show.

But then he gets the lame designer and the ugly outfit that was totally mocked in the judging. Here's what Tim Gunn said in his blog about this sequin mess, "This look was the biggest loser in my opinion: (Tim Gunn called it the worst dress!!!) The dress was a simple silhouette, albeit jazzed up by the piecing of the sequined fabrics; the green collar was too high and too GREEN for LeMAY's relatively short neck and fair complexion, thereby dwarfing her head and giving her a sickly pallor; and that fringe along the hemline?"

Steven handled the situation well, and I still think he looked great but yikes! It really made me think twice about how awesome it would be to be on a show. Sigh.

Regardless I'm trying to pressure Jake to reconnect with Steven so we can get the inside scoop on all things Runway. Will report back with my findings

TGIF!

The (no longer) pregnant man's baby!!!
Have a super weekend!

Books I cannot WAIT to read!!!!!!!!

It's no secret that in my head I'm a gay, black man. It's a source of constant disappointment to wake up a straight, white, woman every day, but I just listen to a little Mariah Carey, I get centered and it's all okay.
Point?? I ordered Hiding in Hip Hop today from Amazon. Yay!

The only problem is there were totally rumors that he was going to name names and apparently HE DOESN'T.
Gay!
I'll read it and try to figure out who's who - I'm looking at YOU Babyface!

Secondly, OMG, guess who else has a tell all????? One of the last people you ever wanted to see naked, but then ended up watching at least half of the sex tape.
Not Vern Troyer. Yes, Dustin 'Screech' Diamond! Supposedly they were all having sex all the time on SBTB but I have to believe that he knows that only because of accidentally walking in on the other actors, not because he was involved.
Sorry but Zac and Slater are more than hot enough for 3 chicks.

I know this is the 2nd thing I've scammed off Radar in as many posts but damn, they got the goods! I'm actually going to give you all the copy they got from the publisher because I don't want you to unnecessarily stress your clicking fingers. Enjoy!

On the face of it, I am no more qualified to take my own inventory than the chick from Punky Brewster who shows up on Entertainment Tonight or The Insider every five years or so. Ask her how she wound up repeating the same old anecdotes to Billy Bush again, and she may have an answer, but she doesn't really know and probably couldn't bear it if she did.

To be a washed-up actor best known for a show which ended in 1993 is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs—you need, actually—to keep yourself in the public eye, no matter how much mockery it entails or how diminishing the returns. Let's stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of craft services M&M's. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than a washed-up actor. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get publicity.

Here is what I deserved: a small cameo on NYPD Blue when the Goss was on it, a mid-afternoon radio show in a minor market, and then a total fade-out leading to complete anonymity punctured by soul-crushing loneliness and, at best, a cashier's job at a dry cleaning supplies store.

Here is what I got: A poorly-received sex tape, a slot on Season Six of Celebrity Fit Club, and the deal for this book.

But I suppose you're not interested in my musings on the vagaries of fate. You'd rather just hear about the part where I was up to my nuts in Principal Belding's guts while Kelly Kapowski blew lines off of Mario Lopez's cock. Man, they never let us back into that Bennigan's again. Anyway, here's what happened.

Pandrogeny? That's a new one even for me...

I looked this all up and down the internets but it seems that this is, as of yet, a newly invented what, idea? Identity disorder? Conceptual art piece? I have no idea. It looks as though pandrogeny was invented by one Genesis P-Orridge and his late spiritual wife, other half, what have you, Lady Jaye Bryer.

You see, "The idea behind pandrogeny, as they called it, was for two people to literally become each other—or to come as close as possible. At first, it was a matter of simply dressing alike, going in for the same hairstyle, getting Jaye a set of contact lenses to match Gen's eyes. But that wasn't enough. The Valentine's Day operation gave them matching breast implants, size C. Later, Jaye had her eyes and nose done, and got a chin implant, to resemble Gen. Gen received cheek enhancements and a lip job. At one point, they looked into the idea of smoothing over their belly buttons, like angels."

Like angels!
So obviously you're going to read this article in Radar anyway, but the weirdo surgery part isn't even the half of it!

This dude Genesis is kind of amazing, but have you ever heard of him??? I haven't.
He's epic though, apparently his first band, Throbbing Gristle (awesome name or what?!!?) basically invented industrial music. No, I don't like that shit either and when hear, "Reportedly, some performances featured frequencies so low they induced vomiting" and "If it weren't for Throbbing Gristle, people like Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor would never have existed at all." I don't exactly get all hot and bothered to download that shit off iTunes.

But!!! There's more wacky to this article than you can shake a dildo at. Genesis has sex on stage, eats his own feces, throws it up and then eats the vomit, rides around in a baby carriage thinking up new art movements and, for some reason, crashes at Winona Ryder's parent's house when she was a kid.
I won't even get into how he gets married. Hint, it almost kills him.

Oh, also here's his personal website incase you can never get enough half crazy art-speak.

Annette Obrestad: my new HERO

Do you know that when Oprah talks about a female hero she calls her a 'she-ro'
Yeah I can't support that. Sorry Oprah.















More on topic have you heard about this awesome bitch??? I read about Annette first in BUST though of course I can't link bc they're the kind of magazine that wants you to BUY the magazine to read the content. Ugh, you can read her profile here though, and really, she's all over the damn place if you read poker sites.

She's 19, she lives in Norway and she's the youngest winner of the World Series of Poker (you get a bracelet) and the only female player to EVER rank #1 in online poker play.

Whatever, I know, you don't care about poker, especially online poker.
Well how about how she won a 180 person online tournament without looking at her cards!!! Well she peeked one time during an all in situation. BUT STILL!!!

She's like a zillionaire now and she's only getting started, keep your eye on her! Or don't worry, I will for you.

You're not my best man till I see some sword work

Last night I was at a wedding (yay Mar and Tony!) rather drunkenly trying to explain this article I read on Mental Floss a couple of weeks ago.
It's about the weirdo (and violent and misogynistic and patriarchal and superstitious and frankly, gross) origins of modern wedding traditions.

They're pretty crazy so you have to describe them with authority to make people believe you, which I don't think I was. I got a lot of incredulous looks especially when I talking about throwing the bouquet and the garter belt. But lo and behold!!

It used to be that after the bride and groom said, “I do,” they were to go immediately into a nearby room and “close the deal” and consummate the marriage. Obviously, to really make it official, there would need to be witnesses, which basically led to hordes of wedding guests crowding around the bed, pushing and shoving to get a good view and hopefully to get their hands on a lucky piece of the bride’s dress as it was ripped from her body. Sometimes the greedy guests helped get the process going by grabbing at the bride’s dress as she walked by, hoping for a few threads of good fortune. In time, it seems, people realized that this was all a bit, well… creepy, and it was decided that for modesty’s sake the bride could toss her bouquet as a diversion as she made her getaway and the groom could simply remove an item of the bride’s undergarments and then toss it back outside to the waiting throngs to prove that he was about to, uh, get ‘er done.

So, yeah, believe it people!

Please!!! Be cautious about bringing this new knowledge up at weddings. Do not start this convo with any of the bridal party or close relatives, and no girls that you saw crying while the father of the bride walked her down the isle. That's a buzz kill.
You also have to be careful not to end up sounding like an early 90s women's studies major at a safe sex party dressed as a dental dam. Because while I'm more than aware that walking the bride down the isle is, 'just a tiny, barbaric little hold over from the days when daughters were nothing but dollar signs to daddy dearest.' You're no fun to party with if you say patriarcy too much.
These are lessons I've learned the hard way.

I think we all blocked it out as a nation the 1st time

I've been totally caught up in the 'holy shit' of the "world's first pregnant man", Thomas Beatie, ever since I saw him on Oprah (yes I'm mentioning Oprah again, I think I may institute a once a post Oprah appearance). In fact I've been stalking the story online like it was the Austrian basement story. Or the one about the girl who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for 2 years. (Make sure you click on the link to learn 'how can skin become fused to a toilet seat').

Wait, what? Let me get back on topic - pregnant men! In my searching and stalking I found an article in the Village Voice from 2000 (8 years ago!!!) about a family consisting of not one FTM transsexual but TWO! TWO!

...we are both transgendered men (female-to-male or FTM), and my boyfriend is the mother of my child.

Hello Dolly! Of course they lived, and live right here in the Bay Area! And as I've always said about living here, no matter what people tell you their deal is, you just need to go ahead and be cool with it. Otherwise you're judgmental. That's why when someone says,

I investigated sex reassignment in my twenties, but was discouraged by the poor quality of genital surgery and terrified of the isolation. I wasn't sure I could separate the effects of misogyny from gender dysphoria. So I tried to be a different kind of woman, a sexually adventurous gender-fucking dyke who enjoyed every possible male prerogative. But it just wasn't enough.

I understand.
Sometimes being a sexually adventurous gender-fucking dyke who enjoys every possible male prerogative is enough. And some times it's not.

Anyway read the article, here's the link again. I mean anything that was going on before George Bush was even President can't be that shocking.
Right? Or am I getting screwy from living here so long?
No I think I'm right.

Adorable!

Aggregator? I just met her.

No original thought here, I just wanted to share some fascinating interweb finds from the past 2 weeks. Some of them are kind of long reads (like this post) but there's no fluff. 100% satisfaction, 100% of the time, that's my motto!

First a pretty short one - This article from the NYTimes about the dying, rural, northern, Albanian custom of women who swear a vow of celebacy and become the man of the house is one of the most interesting things I've ever read, ever. Def check out the slide show.

'Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,' said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki.

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Actually, likewise this article in the New Yorker about itching. Well it's about itching but mostly about a new way of looking at how our brains percieves visual, tactile, aural...information and turn it in to what we consider our 'perception' of the outside (and inside) world.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

That may all sound like a lot of blah, blah, blah... but there's also a story of a woman who has a phantom itch soooooo bad that one night while sleeping she scratches right through her damn skull TO HER BRAIN. Then, because they can't find anything physically, medically, wrong with her scalp to explain the itch, she ends up spending 2 years in a locked medical ward sleeping in a foot ball helmet with white mitts taped on to her hands!!!! Now 7(!) years later,

...she has gradually learned to protect herself. She trims her nails short. She finds ways to distract herself. If she must scratch, she tries to rub gently instead. And, if that isn’t enough, she uses a soft toothbrush or a rolled-up terry cloth. "I don’t use anything sharp,” (BUT)...Still, the itching remains a daily torment. "I don’t normally tell people this," she said, "but I have a fantasy of shaving off my eyebrow and taking a metal-wire grill brush and scratching away."

The article is 8 pages long buy how can you not read it?????

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Behold!!! The most thought-provoking article you'll ever read about real dolls. Seriously, ah-mazing. It's from Salon from a couple years ago but I can't imagine much has changed besides some of the technology. I've been talking about this with anyone who will listen all week, and here's a little gem my boyfriend have been acting out ad nauseum all week-

"He asked me if I could make him a silicone dog, because he was a breeder, and he didn't want to hurt his dogs anymore, he said. He talked like right out of the movie 'Deliverance.'" ..."'Aw, I don't want to hurt ma dawgs, I like ma dawgs ... kin you make me one so ah kin still use it fer the sex?' And when I realized that he was legitimate, I was shocked. And I just politely said no, I'm sorry, gotta go, click."

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The Washington Post has a great article about the burgeoning use of ecstasy to help treat post traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is one of the hidden costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the Pentagon acknowledges that at least 50,000 soldiers (4% of those deployed) are affected, and their care, long term, is extremely expensive. PTSD sufferers make up only 8% of veteran's medical claims, but receive 20% of all payouts. Also, their therapeutic use could hasten ecstasy's legal, recreational use. Yay for all of us!

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The pregnant man gave birth!!!!!!!

Any excuse to show Oprah.

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In honor of 4th of July (which is already over, I know) here's a totally rad article from the Atlantic about competitive eating.

“Nostradamus, born in the early sixteenth century, actually mentioned the Grilled Cheese Championship in his poetic yet cryptic quatrains,” George Shea says. “He said, ‘And at one point under the bright sky they shall gather to eat, they shall gather to eat the cheese that has been pouched in bread and grilled!”

Yes it's competitive eating season. This article is also a little old but what the hey, you'll never have to read another article about esophagus stretching again, it's the definitive one!! Please, please, for my sake take a moment to really apreciate the seal of the International Federation of Competitive Eating. I don't know what genius created it but they have officially sold me on the 'sport'.

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One time 2 of my friends and I were doing a township clean up in high school for some extra money but there were so many ticks they let us go home early. Ticks are freaky. We went to a dinner to get grilled cheeses and check ourselves in the bathroom for hidden ticks - I had 9, and my friend Robbie had one on his junk. Lymes disease is no joke people, didn't you watch Real World Seattle??????

So, the secret life of a tick from slate, with this gem about how ticks make bacon -

The male approaches from below, then uses his mouthparts to pluck a packet of sperm called a spermatophore from his genital pore. He delivers the packet into his partner's genital pore with his hypostome, the same barbed hollow needle that he sticks into mammals....After the female drops to the ground, full of blood and sperm, she lays her eggs, and then the fun is definitely over. She begins to atrophy. Her intestines spill out in a yellow blob.

All this talk of genital pores is getting me kind of hot.
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This last one is just disturbing, read at your own risk.

Yes!! California Rules!

Same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday. -New York Times Online

I'm not transgendered

Which is, Duh, unless you never met me, which you may not have.
But I'm totally obsessed with gender identity issues.
No, I don't know why.

I mean gender is weird anyway. I had an ex boyfriend who lived in SF who was constantly trying to pressure me to act more girly, wear heals instead of sneakers, make-up, what have you. But at the same time in the East Bay I was considered way girly just for having highlights and wearing flowers in my hair and colors that weren't black.
So think about it.

Anyway, there's a great article in the Stranger (which is Seattle's free weekly, which I'm obsessed with bc Dan Savage, of Savage Love fame, is the editor. Not to over advertise but they also have a great column called I Anonymous which I also love.) this week about a straight dude who's totally not masculine in any way, shape, form and his quest to find out if that's something he should worry about. There's a great part where he hangs out with some drag kings and they dress him up like a 'man'.
Yes there's pictures.

Just for added whatever, here's an article from NPR today about two families with transgendered little boys and the two very different psychological and behavioral paths they took in order to deal with it. The family that tries to masculanize their son is so heart breaking (for me, maybe not for you)

"We would ask him, 'Can you draw a boy for us? Can you draw a boy in that picture?' ... And then he didn't really want us to see his drawings or watch him drawing because we would always say 'Can you draw a boy?'" Carol says. "And then finally after, I don't know, a month or two, he just said, 'Momma, I don't know how. ... I don't know how to draw a boy.'"


Okay and then last, last lastly to totally BLOW YOUR MIND an article in the NYT about Body Integrity Identity Disorder, meaning you feel that a part of your body (finger, leg, arm...) should not be there and needs to be amputated. Many proponents of greater understanding of the disorder have linked it with the (slightly) more acceptable idea of gender identity disorder.
But an obsessive desire for a limb amputation - one that drives people to cut off healthy arms and legs - tests the tolerance of even the most open-minded.

This article is 3 years old but it covers the basics.
Totally, totally, totally fascinating.