“You’re not supposed to look like popcorn!”

Retired as a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet, Jock Soto filled the dance need in his life with teaching. I like some of the metaphors he uses with his students:

[W]hen you take a ballerina by the wrists it shouldn’t look like you are riding a motorcycle.

Never paddle a ballerina in a turn. Stir her discreetly with your finger in finger turns, not like you have a spoon and she is a pot of soup.

I can’t quite picture what paddling a ballerina would look like. But that probably just indicates how ignorant I am of the art. Plus maybe I like imagining a ballerina as a canoe?

Soto says he finds himself using cooking metaphors while he teaches. I imagine Soto quietly giving the advice above, then shouting when the boys are on the floor.

”Don’t stir her like a pot of soup! She is not a pot of soup!”

“Don’t stand there like a frozen fish stick!”

When an ensemble exercise with eighteen boys was horribly executed I stopped them and scolded: “You’re not supposed to look like popcorn!”

source: Every Step You Take: a memoir by Jock Soto

word of the day: tyro

word in context: “[O]nly a tyro asks what a poem ‘means’; the only thing that matters is what effect it has.”

definition: a beginner in learning : novice

source: An Introduction to Haiku: an anthology of poems and poets from Basho to Shiki by Harold G. Henderson

“a death of fabricated personhood”

For Laci Lee Adams being called to ministry and coming out as bisexual are intertwined stories. In one of her sermons she uses death as a metaphor in a way that is exciting, transformative, and kind of creepy:

There can be no new life without a death of an old life. Coming out is a death. It is a death of an old way of living! It is a death of a life of lies! It is a death of unhealthy expectations! It is a death of fabricated personhood! And let me tell you, death is difficult! And we need to be able to sit with death because when we can really embrace death, we can more fully appreciate resurrection.

Lies do not die a quiet death.

I can imagine being stirred as this sermon is delivered. But there’s something about the metaphor that disturbs me. We do not die every day. We do not die, only to be reborn every year like a crop of barley. “When we … embrace death,” Adams says, “we … appreciate resurrection.” Are we really talking about death here? Death is permanent. Except when negated by resurrection. In which case death is not death. For death is permanent. Death-with-resurrection is death-as-temporary-thing. “What happened to you?” “Oh, I died.” “You died!” “Yeah, but I got better.”

The paragraph quoted is from “A Quietly Queer Revolution” by Laci Lee Adams in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

words of wisdom from the Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Travis Stanton remembers a life-changing encounter:

I had the good fortune to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak to an arena full of students and faculty at my small private liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Toward the end of the presentation, Tutu allowed for a brief question-and-answer period. One student stood up and addressed the archbishop. She noted the work he had done in his own country of South Africa to address the issue of gay and lesbian equality, and asked, “Isn’t that contradictory to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality?”

The archbishop paused for what seemed like an eternity. I remember naively thinking that his answer would change the world – either opening up the hearts and minds of the audience members, or forever slamming the door on my neatly appointed closet. Then he started to laugh. “The Bible says a lot of things I hope you don’t believe,” he chuckled.

quoted from “A Fairy’s Tale” by Travis Stanton in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

“So, you think you might be gay?”

Here’s a striking image from a coming out story:

I checked out every book the library had on queer youth, fiction and non-fiction. They had seventy-six. I spread the books over the house, stacked on the kitchen counter, balanced on the arms of the couch, perched by [the] desk chairs, piled on the coffee table, and liberally scattered around my bedroom. A few days later one of [my parents] said in passing, “So, you think you might be gay?” and I said, “Yes.”

quoted from “Queer: Five Letters” by Kat Wilson in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

The Most Famous Song Moldova Ever Produced

"[T]he minibus blasted a song I heard in every Eastern European country in 2004: O-Zone's tune 'Dragostea din tei,' which most of the world knows as 'Numa Numa.' It hit number one on the charts throughout Europe and was number three in the UK. YouTube amateur lip-synching video versions of the song have gotten over one billion views. ... Eastern Europeans consistently told me that they were a Romanian pop group. However, they originated out of Moldova. Sadly, Moldova rarely gets credit for the most famous song it ever produced."

source of quote: The Hidden Europe: what Eastern Europeans can teach us by Francis Tapon

That's the nice thing about the internet, it can provide the audio-visual dimension to what otherwise is flat text.

As long as I'm posting one goofy overplayed pop song, why not one more? Kent and I finally caught up with "Gangnam Style" by PSY, the most popular South Korean pop song ever:



Oh, why stop with two? Let's go on to Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." Could it be the most popular Canadian pop song ever? We'll see.

giant artificial manhood

“The women are voluptuous and curvy, with enormous strap-on dildos that look like authentic if colossally oversized penises. The site is full of scenes of attractive, busty women stroking their giant artificial manhood until geysers of fake semen spray across the room.”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Ogas and Gaddam are describing a website devoted to futanari porn. It's big in Japan, it seems.

Puts me in mind of Steely Dan III in Burroughs' Naked Lunch - "Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. 'Steely Dan III from Yokohama,' she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room."

I've posted about Steely Dan before.

"almost anything homosexual"

“During the 1992 Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, an estimated 80 percent of the audience were straight women who wanted to watch men have sex. As journalist Richard McGregor writes, ‘In Japan, almost anything homosexual can attract an all-female audience.’ … [W]henever a Japanese animated television series or male-targeted manga series becomes extremely popular, the producers almost always issue a boy-love version, where the male characters have sex with each other. ‘It’s widely understood that the audience for these boy-love stories is women.’”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam