tychoish, now without a net

As part of my heavily structured plan to avoid productive tasks, and my writing, I’ve been watching the HBO Angels in America that a friend finally gave me on videotape. Which reminds me that I saw a real live production of the play a few months ago, and I don’t think I ever properly wrote about that here, so I’m going to talk a bit about both of them.

I’ve only seen the HBO edition of the first part, as was the play only the first one. I’ve read both of them, but as of today, only seen productions of the first one.

In the live production, Louis (the Jewish boyfriend who leaves his lover whose (slowly) dying of AIDS) was amazing. I had a hard time being ambivalent about the character (as I suspect you’re supposed to), Prior (the (slowly) dying boyfriend), wasn’t quite as good, but he was good, and most of the other characters ranged from so-so, to horrible.

I didn’t like the HBO Louis very much, but the Prior is way better. Which I think is a good thing, ultimately. I liked Joe, the (closeted) gay Mormon, whose married to a valium addict more than I perhaps should have (probably because he was cute,) and Mary Louise Parker did a wonderful job as Harper (his wife).

I suppose the thing I disliked most about the HBO version, is that they cut my favorite scene, where Joe’s mother, and her real-estate agent are looking out over Salt-Lake City, talking about saint’s, moving on, and other stuff. They’re smoking (the Mormon mother, included, which is a bit funny,) and in response to discussion of the church of later day saints, the mother says something like “[laterday saints] are the only kind of saint’s that are left.” Which struck a chord with me, for some strange unknown reason.

So I’ll watch the second half tomorrow, and maybe I’ll write another report of it. Or not. My memory from reading the play, is that the second one tries to hard to explain things, and answer questions.

As we’ve all learned from the last entry, answers and I don’t seem to get along very much. It’s all about the questions.

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tagged: TealArt

I realize that this isn’t exactly a new post (at least conceptually,) and I realize/hope that this kind of discourse isn’t ultimately useful to anything or anyone; but at the same time, it’s an issue/debate that I find myself caring about a lot. Additionally, I think I’ve become a lot more coherent on the issue of late, which might be helpful. This doesn’t mean I have any answers, but my questions are more crystallized (to mix metaphors a bit,) which I need to learn to become content with. Let us also not forget the fact that I’m bored out of my mined (mostly,) and musing about this is one of my favorite things to torture myself with in fits of boredom.

I suppose these statements/questions, on some level apply to every kind of group identity, social identities like race, class, education, age, and of course gender/sexuality for starters. Because gender and sexuality are my thing, and while I’m perfectly content to go on about race and class, I’ll constrain myself a bit, but I would beg the readers to not be so constrained.

As I explained briefly in the Why it all Matters post, identity is made up of: what you actually do, what you see yourself as/claim, and how other’s see you.

I think there’s a Vorlon quote from Babylon 5 that says something like: Truth is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and fact or something like that. It’s an interesting analogy that I don’t want to stray into, so I’m moving on.

I view the trifold aspect of identity as one of the unexplainable facts of the world. I’m not sure how I feel about the “how others see you” part, and “what you claim,” and while I’m at it strict behavioral identities don’t really fully account for the complexities of identities.

So the questions I’ve been asking

• If an effeminate (gay acting, for lack of a better term) guy, says he’s bisexual, but only has relationships with women; then what’s up?
  
• What would the “status” bisexuals in long term monogamous relationships be, and how does their previous relationship history affect their identity?
  
• Are non operative transgender people, who don’t take hormones, aren’t seeking surgery, and often live in the gender of their birth, really trans?
  
• If a women exclusively dates women, and is out as a lesbian, and then falls in love with a man and gets married and lives in that relationship happily for 20 years, is she still a lesbian?
  
• If someone is out as a bisexual, but is only has relationships with one sex, are they really bisexual?
  
• If someone claims a particular identity, and then “changes” identity at some later point, is that identity shift apply retroactively? Does behavior affect this?
  
• If someone who is out as a gay man doesn’t have relationships with men at all (or only occasionally), are they still gay?
  
• If a man, who dates women exclusively, has sex with men occasionally, is he still straight?
  
• In cases similar to the one above, would that man’s behavior affect the answer; that is, if he bottomed (took the receptor roll during anal sex) would that affect the answer?
  
• An individual whose in the closet, has very little if any heterosexual attraction, dates heterosexually, but given the proper contextual situation, would be almost exclusively homosexual, is _______? Again, the idea of retroactivity plays into this one.
  

There is of course the obvious “why does it matter” response, but excluding that, I think there are two ways to answer these questions: what they are, is guided by what they do, or, regardless of what they do, they are what they say/feel they are. In my gut, I usually answer behaviorally, though on an intellectual level, I know that the ’say/feel’ option is probably closer to the truth. Something inside me says, bisexual people need to have relationships with both men and women, or they’re really hetero or homo, and that a self-identified gay man shouldn’t have relationships with women. That a man who had a relationship with a woman for a number of years, and then only had relationships with men would be gay. But bisexual people frequently lean one way or the other, that some homosexuals have hetero relationships (to varying degree’s), and that lots of homo-leaning bisexual people, identify as gay men (and lesbians). I suppose the thing is, that there’s no one right answer to identity, that it’s an individual combination of those aforementioned three aspects.

Once we’ve gotten that one mostly squared away, the issue of “Why it matters anyway?” remains.

Identity is important because it makes it possible, let alone easier to study sexualities and gender. It separates people into groups that you can study. It allows people to fit into communities based on their identities and the intersection of their identities. Having said that, you could also say, that identity segregates people and enforces stereotypes.

And it does.

Knowing this, is the fact that identity is the source for a great many things that are wrong, reason enough to abandon it, knowing that there is a lot of insight to be gained by studying identity?

Having asked that, I don’t think that its possible to ever completely avoid identity. It’s as central to the human experience as oxygen, Swedish Meatballs (Babylon 5 joke, please disregard,) curiosity, and fear. Therefore, if identity is unavoidable, how on Earth do you study it (in some form) without releasing (and therefore bathing in) the unavoidable detriments of identity?

Full Stop.

That about covers it for now. Maybe it’s enough just to write something like this, to acknowledge that the issues are out there, and then maybe it’s not. Well I tried. Hopefully I can avoid this for a while now. Carry on.

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Well, in two weeks time I’ll be driving up to Beloit. I learned on Friday that I got a single room. My form apparently shipped out that morning, and the lady was very apologetic. They’re brining in a big Freshman class, they had a higher than expected retention rate, blah blah blah. And then she said, But you got a single. On the 4th Floor.. Hmmm go figure. Well I kind of wanted a roommate, but whatever, I’ll take it. I haven’t really started to pack. I’ve done some abstract organization and basically know what I have to do, but I still have to sit down and make lists.

I’ve also been rather ambivalent about writing of late. I haven’t yet gathered the will power to figure out what’s happening in Another Round, nor have I had the will power to open up Circle Games and work on the never ending editing. But I did get my pen out and petted it. I realized that since I got my iBook I haven’t really used it that much. I need to give my pen a name. I recently decided to name my computer Anna Madrigal. Hehe. Suggestions are welcome.

I’m completely up to date on all of my ‘blog reading, something that happens only very rarely now that I’ve been thoroughly converted to the RSS reader. Usually I read the blogs once or twice a week. It saves a lot of time, and perhaps I should find more blogs to read.

I should probably put some work into the ASF, but can’t decide what story would be the best to tell, and given my tendencies to be too contextual about all of this, it’s going to be hard for me to come up with something that I’m going to like (as an editor). I have a little story, where the facts where *severely twisted,* that might (if I can untwist the facts) be a good starting place. Again, another thing I’m avoiding.

My old computer is still broken, but I’ve put the hard drive into my dad’s computer (mostly for the purpose of getting all my data off of it. I don’t have a clue as to what’s wrong with it, but it isn’t the HD, nor is it the RAM, which we verified as working before the mega-crash. Which means it’s the processor or motherboard. It simply can’t be anything else. But we’ve replaced both of those, and no combination of new and old parts work. Not only does nothing work, it all doesn’t work in the same way, which is utterly confusing. And I have conducted extensive trial and error combinations, and have documented this. I’m thinking of putting the CD drives and one of my hard drives in my dad’s computer, because at least they work, and it would probably make my dad happy.

I’m realizing that my poor little hard drive on this iBook is going to be full in about four weeks at the current rate. And to think, I got the biggest possible drive. So in addition to getting RAM (which, I think, I should be able to push off for a little while thanks to Chris’ eternal kindness,) some sort of external storage solution looms large in my future. I’ll probably just buy an external (fire wire) enclosure, and a 120gb drive (which is only 130ish bucks). In the mean time, I think I should be able to pull some sort of brilliant hacked solution together involving my father’s old external CD-RW drive, and the 80 GB hard drive, which will keep me happy for a while.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time ripping CDs onto my iBook so I can have music when I go to school. I have, at the time of press, 2 hours short of 7 full days of music. Total space ~ 9 gigs. I’m totally going to want an iPod at some point, but given my frugality I probably won’t get that one for *years*. I’ll probably rip another couple of gigs, and leave it at that.

Well, that’s enough for now. Cheers!

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tagged: TealArt

Well, I think that the long awaited and much feared Quarto update has successfully transpired. As near as I can tell everything works now, as it should, and as near as all of you can tell, nothing has changed. So I’m going to do a little bit of talking about how TealArt works in part because I want to have some sort of geek post to balance out all the knitting and gender/sexuality things I’ve been posting, so here it goes.

There’s this massive mySQL database that has all of the TealArt information: everything that powers Quarto, plus all the static content pages, and all the style sheets and all the design elements. The files that are saved on the web server are nothing but creatively arranged PHP functions and database queries.

Quarto is the CMS (content management system) that Amy wrote to power a few of her sites. While Amy was writing Quarto, I was writing Circle Games, so we kind of bonded over our ambitious projects, and when Amy was looking for beta-testers. I started jumping up and down. I’d been switching back and forth, and had lost a lot of data, and really liked how Quarto was looking, so I jumped on board and never looked back. At this point it was clear that Quarto was beta software, and frankly, I don’t think Amy expected TealArt to remain Quarto-Powered.

Here’s how Quarto works: There’s this data base structure, and there’s an administrative interface that allows us to insert and modify information in the database. (so entries, settings, etc.)

At the same time, a completely different set of functions pulls that information from the database, sorts it out, and displays it in the form that you see here.

That’s the thing that makes most PHP/mySQL powered CMS’s unique: (and Quarto especially so) the backend (administration) and front end (display) are completely independent of each other, which gives the user (that would be Chris and I) an incredible amount of freedom in customizing output.

This is why TealArt looks exactly the same now as it did before: even though the database has changed a bit, and the admin interface is a bit different: I haven’t yet touched the display. Actually, as I look over it, I’m thinking that the display will be Chris’ province.

Now here’s what we have to do:

• Make the Archives Page More organized, probably using periodical (monthly) archives, drop down lists and the like. Right now the archive page is just a modified main index page, set to show all the entries.
  
• Fix the categories page somehow.
  
• Find some way to merge the linkage and main page log into one line of data. This will probably require some hacking to do properly.
  
• Implement Trackbacks. This one is for Chris’ amusement only. The database has a trackback table, but the support hasn’t been written into the file.
  
• Update the Entry page, and get commenting to work properly.
  
• Get (more…) links to work so that extended entry text doesn’t get shown on the main page.
  

That list will be updated as we find new things to do, and hopefully as we complete old items.

Now our second option is to ditch Quarto completely and start using Wordpress, which is the only other CMS worth using. Well other than GreySight, which Noah won’t even let his bestest buddies use, but that’s a non-issue.

The problem with switching at this point is that we have 630+ entries in Quarto, about 200 in the main journal 150 in the Aux Journal (formerly Paradigm,) 150 quotes, and 100 Links. Or something. All of the entries are in the same table (site differentiation are made in a site id field,) and seeing as Wordpress doesn’t have separate sites, (but their implementation of Categories, would *probably* allow us to accomplish the same thing. Where I was going with this train of though, is that writing an import script is going to be one major pain in the rear.

So that’s where we are now. Stay tuned (as always)!!

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Ok, this is a really rough update, which i’m not even offering the basic plesentries of route spell check. I’ve updated quarto, and asuming this posts correctly, it all looks to work right. There are a few things that I need to do yet, but we’re almost there. Bear with me. I’ll edit this later, as updates are forthcoming.

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http://www.tealart.com/content.php?q=chrisI’ve been waiting for this one for *years,* and it’s only a temporary update, but hey, I take what I can get. As a matter of fact, I rather like it. Check it out, and stay tuned for when he writes the real one.

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tagged: interwebs