AdamSmith

Side note. A Massachusetts resident, I'm married to my partner of 14 years. After the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2004 that marriage discrimination based on sexual orientation violated the state constitution, we laid aside notions that marriage is a conformist bourgeois institution, etc., etc., and got hitched. Because (1) it was what our hearts told us to do; (2) in this context, being old married farts seemed, paradoxically, the best way to stake a life on the social frontier; and (3) my thought especially - if they ever repealed it, the marriages entered into while it was in force could not be revoked, so we would stand as something of the same reminder as Jewry during the Christian Middle Ages - incontrovertible reminders that an alternate reality exists. Main note, and civics lecture: Massachusetts, after some saber-rattling by rightist elements in the legislature, did NOT enact a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and thus reverse the court's ruling. Part of why not was the genius of John Adams, author of the Massachusetts state constitution (by most accounts, the oldest functioning constitution in the world). Adams believed, and said repeatedly, that the people's good sense would win out if they were given enough time to consider any issue and not be swayed by the passions of the hour. To amend the state constitution, therefore, not one but two successive sessions of the state legislature have to approve the proposed amendment, and then it has to go before the people in a general ballot. After a couple of years of seeing gay marriage in operation, the balance of popular opinion in the state turned from against it to in favor of it. To be sure, there were what opponents called legislative shenanigans in preventing the measure from reaching the ballot, but polls did not show any groundswell of sentiment to have it come up. All this is to say that even if CA residents vote against it, I think it will only be a verdict on the flaws of their direct-democracy approach over the strengths of representive democracy, not on people's underlying sense of the rightness of gay marriage rights. History has begun moving the right way, I believe, and the tide will prove irresistable.

overjoyed that Obama now has consensus There it is. As odious as many find the Clintons, some with good enough reason (disclosure & disclaimer: I myself have been rabidly for Hillary; although I will support Obama without reserve if the inevitable happens), none of the recoil I've seen from Hillary & Bill's cold, hard calculus thus far has been based on their electoral math, but only on the admitted fact that theirs is not a PC or sensitive conclusion. Even if one accepts that Obama's persona, vision, etc. would be preferable to all the effects of another Clinton regime (I don't), the question of electability remains. Especially given the recent sober analyses pointing out that Obama's delegate lead over Clinton is due to his organization's superior organizing in caucus states, and pointing out how much of a stretch it will be for his organization to transform this caucus-based lead into victory in the very different electoral mechanics of the general election.

Agree completely. Whomever we elect, these are the real worries. Two great consequences of the G.W. Bush regime, I think, will turn out to have been to accelerate the end of the American century -- arguably the lesser evil, as it was driven by forces more or less beyond the control of anyone in this country -- and, in my view the greater evil, to have made explicit to the world the finite extent and the outer limits of our powers and influence. One reason for the excellent advice to walk softly in the world was so that they could not -- to our benefit -- be exactly sure just how big our stick was.

I can suggest JimRay. Last week I had 2 hot hours with him. http://www.maleescortreview.com/106040653/ Fantastic/left wanting more! As they say. Hot, sweet, bright, engaged. Profile says versatile bottom; I found him to be totally versatile, my ideal. Highest marks.

16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008 Postlude... On March 19, 2008, the NASA satellite Swift observed four separate Gamma Ray Bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe, each the signature of a massive star reaching the end of its life and exploding. Never before had Swift seen four bursts in one day. "...overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." ("The Nine Billion Names of God") http://www.clarkefoundation.org/docs/ACClarke.pdf

Properly intimidating! And apologies - this faction of the posse is in mad chase of the dollar and temporarily without leisure to post at length. But see (not necessarily to condone this): http://www.freebooknotes.com/

Welcome back, KY. It always helps a forum to have at least a few sane members. As Conway says, you've been missed.

Closed and sheltered world is where today's kids live who haven't seen a dozen friends waste away, or the physical toll that long-term HIV therapy can take.

R.I.P. Taught me how to think about last and first things. http://www.space.com/news/080319-arthur-clarke-tribute.html

Well, I'm sanguine about the irrepressibility of lust, and of commerce. (Actually rather buoyed by that!) And of their intersection. Which does, being the oldest profession, command a certain profound regard. Please forgive, but -- I'd be fascinated to know more. Is the cloud the risk of discovery, or something else?

Just wait a little while and it'll be different again. An acquaintance in the Secret Service says their biggest mission by far these days is fighting international counterfeiting of US currency. Thus the elaborate new doodads on and in our paper money, and the stepped-up frequency of changes to the designs.

Ahh, Stu, I want so strongly to think the real lesson is upside down from that. I have Lucky to thank for pointing me to where Faulkner said it all: ...Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both ­touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am’s private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement...

Exquisite! My rhetoric strives toward yours with ponderous speed.

Mine is random, tied to my travel schedule and other determinants of opportunity. I have not had the sense to throttle back just because hiring at a given time was a foolish endangerment of cash flow.

For anyone who looks up at the night sky and feels wonder, more sad news about our misplaced priorities... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/...ose-792768.html

I would like to have written that. But I'm being salacious again. (...And last year's garden grows salacious weeds...)

Where is the 'swoon' avatar? A thread on the Other Site took appreciative note of hot males now gracing the opera stage. Welcome change from the days when most could play Fafner without makeup.

Speak for yourself! Seriously, just to agree with those who find details of the physical action essential. My own reviews can get clotted with the gauzy lyrical atmospherics, which I hope communicate something useful about the encounter. But one also tries to give some idea of how and when knob A was inserted in hole B. Without that, how could anyone guess whether their experience with the guy might feel anything like mine?

Well. When the eyes were rolling back in the head due to Andre having me pinned to the floor with what felt like the Louisiana Purchase up my rear. For instance. Outed! http://www.hplovecraft.com/ Or, more derivately & belatedly...

You know, laying aside the illogic and cant in Jesse's rant, it's interesting to compare and contrast the professions of porn performer and in-person sex worker. Performing in a sex flick seems a predictable, understood, rote job. All the performers know that's what it is -- a performance for the camera, even though the sex itself is not simulated. Whereas escorts go into every situation having to navigate an ocean of unknowns. How to discern what the client, often a complete stranger, wants, often enough when the client is confused and even conflicted, thus not much help in communicating. And then deliver. With no rehearsal. And, in those impossibly tight one-hour engagements, with little chance for a retake. And beyond that, the ontology of it: what is being sold? The body as commodity? That, at least. But then some clients seek more -- at least the simulacrum of an emotional component. How as a provider to fulfill that? Blake called poetry "the lineaments of gratified desire"; Yeats called him on that beautiful lie, revising it to "a hollow image of fulfilled desire." The escort has to navigate that conundrum: providing a true experience of a beautiful lie. By comparison, porn performers, safe behind the lens, would seem to have it easy.

Rod, you're a writer and reader of nuance. Could it be that StuCotts's laconic two words in fact winked wholehearted assent to your sentiment?

Stu, everything you enumerate sounds like a positive to me. Thanks for dragging this out of the shadows. UBS is on a culture kick, it seems, though with varying results. Last fall an acquaintance with retirement funds under management by that estimable firm got from them a pair of tickets gratis to the Boston Symphony, and invited me. I thought, goodie. That week the divine Levine had programmed a provocative pairing of the Grosse Fugue with Schoenberg, to show how Ludwig van's final thoughts were a hundred years in advance of themselves. Alas, as it turned out, our maestro knew the UBS audience well enough to insert the ever-lovin' Beethoven violin concerto in place of the Grosse Fugue that night. And instead of Verklärte Nacht, we were basted with the New World Symphony. The audience, enthusiastic if naught else, applauded after every movement. (One of the cellists finally had to pretend to drop his bow at the end of each movement, to have an excuse to turn away from the footlights so we would not see him trying not to laugh.)

Ach. To live in New York. In the same nostalgic vein: http://www.hedda.com/ http://www.queermusicheritage.us/drag.html http://www.queermusicheritage.us/drag5.html http://www.queermusicheritage.us/drag9.html

Good to know. Yeats on the page, Piaf on the gramophone. So be it. It may be time to sit through another viewing of "La Vie en Rose."

Not here -- bottom-dwellers are, I believe, the familiars of Mr. Eliot. (Or "X," as Stevens called him. Much as Julia Child disdained to say "margarine" but would only refer to "the other spread.") Speaking (remotely) of which, today's NYT has an article on the music-making of Sarkozy's new wife, Carla Bruni. The article's author asked poet Paul Muldoon what he thought of Bruni's setting verses from Yeats and Dickinson to her own music. “My first observation is that she has exceptionally good taste in poetry," Mr. Muldoon wrote in an e-mail message. "Yeats was himself very interested in the song tradition and wrote, partly, within it. He was a master of the ballad and of that great device that spans both the verse and song traditions — the refrain. In the case of Emily Dickinson, much of her poetry is indistinguishable from the ballad tradition and, more often, the alternating eight- and six-syllable lines of the hymnal. So I’m certainly looking forward to hearing what Carla Bruni comes up with. In general, I welcome the idea of poetry casting its net as widely as possible, including its taking in the song tradition from which it sprang.†The article then takes a fateful turn: And the poems in the eight-six pattern are, as Mr. Muldoon noted, “eminently singable.†(It’s sometimes remarked that poems in that meter can be sung to the tune of the theme from “Gilligan’s Island,†although Ms. Bruni never goes that giddy.) Dickinson and much else is now running through my head, unstoppably, to the immortal music of Sherwood Schwartz and George Wyle. I have never before had the urge to send a newspaper reporter a letter bomb. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/weekinre...amp;oref=slogin