Dec 05

Sam Wagstaff: The Impresario Who Made Mapplethorpe

Posted in: Today's Chili

Robert Mapplethorpe is a household name, known for his stunning and often erotic black and white photography. His lifetime lover and patron Samuel Wagstaff is much less known. That may change now with the publication of a new book.

Philip Gefter, who was on staff at The New York Times as its picture editor for fifteen years has just written a comprehensive and scholarly biography entitled Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe; Gefter presents Wagstaff as a leonine figure with an indelible influence on late-twentieth century art. Gefter’s thesis is that Wagstaff was the father of the metamorphosis of photographs into expensive museum quality art.

By all accounts, Wagstaff was a fine physical specimen of a man.

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Tall with high cheekbones and transcendentally handsome, he was named as one of New York’s most eligible “bachelors” in the 1950’s. Borne of a patrician family that owned part of the land that became Central Park, educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, he strayed from high society and became a sandaled, beaded and pot-smoking hippy in the 1960’s.

After a hateful boring stint at a Mad Men-type advertising firm, Wagstaff eventually found his true calling and became a collector and curator of fine art. He easily surrounded himself with such luminaries as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ray Johnson, all of whom happened to be gay and lived in Greenwich Village. Years after Wagstaff facilitated the acquisition of an Andy Warhol masterpiece, he said “Andy Warhol is for me one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. I think Campbell’s Soup Can is, undoubtedly, up to now, the single greatest image in art painting as we know it at this moment.”

In 1972 the then-fifty-year-old Wagstaff met his lifelong protege Robert Mapplethorpe, a skinny street urchin from Queens, New York who was half his age. They were both born on November 4th exactly twenty five years (a generation really) apart. The aspiring photographer had been living with the poet and rock star Patti Smith at the time in the Chelsea Hotel.

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Wagstaff affectionately referred to his young lover as “my sly little pornographer.”

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The A-list diabolical power couple became ensconced in the demimonde of orgiastic sex and party drugs who lived in a crazed pursuit of erotic sensation while simultaneously seeking aesthetic perfection.

In 1984, Wagstaff sold his collection of photographs to the J. Paul Getty Museum for 5 million dollars. At the very end of his life between 1984 and 1987, Wagstaff turned his obsession from collecting photographs into an obsession for collecting silver. A short time before his death, he was observed on the streets of downtown Manhattan as an “an old man with AIDS dragging plastic bags of silver.”

Wagstaff remained enamored of Mapplethorpe until the bitter end. By the mid 1980s both men became infected with HIV and died from AIDS complications two years apart. A short time before his death he told Patti Smith “I have only loved three things in my life—Robert, my mother and art.”

Gefter’s smart, sexy and eloquent biography of this commanding arbiter of taste and culture serves as a definitive and memorable portrait of last century’s intersection of gay life and the evolution of the hobby of photography into a way of producing collectible fine art.

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Dec 05

Entrepreneurship, Mother's Guilt and Empty Nest Syndrome

Posted in: Today's Chili

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Why Are We So Afraid?

Keyon and Carly get together and talk about some huge topics and show their vulnerable side. Last time Carly asked for some help in relation to how she can juggle babies and entrepreneurship and this time, they discuss fear, self doubt in entrepreneurship: Keyon also spills the beans on feeling guilty, sad and a loss of identity due to her kids flying the coop.

This time they are asking for some tips that can help her through her new phase in life, so if you have any tips, please comment below or visit our site.

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Dec 05

Evangeline Shelland, 70, Fighting Bingo Ban

Posted in: Today's Chili

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. (AP) — A 70-year-old New Mexico woman banned from a bingo hall is fighting to get back in the game.

KRQE-TV reports (http://goo.gl/m0bYBK ) that Evangeline Shelland of Alamogordo has asked the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office for help since she was banned two years ago from playing her favorite game at the Fraternal Order of Eagles club.

She says management banished her after telling her they had received letters from people accusing her of driving erratically in the parking lot. Shelland denies the accusation. The club declined to comment.

The Attorney General’s Office says it didn’t have jurisdiction over the club and couldn’t force it to allow Shelland to play.

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Dec 05

Notes from the 3rd World

Posted in: Today's Chili

I have been traveling in Indonesia for October and November.

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I know I am in the Third World there because I can’t get a stable enough Internet connection to blog on the HuffPost. Tough luck, Trules.

But it’s the other side of the world, about 13,000 miles away. About 24 hours by plane. We leave on Sunday at midnight and arrive on Tuesday afternoon around 3p.m.. (We lose 15 hours crossing the international dateline.)

But those are some of the wonders of travel. Time changes. Perspective changes. You get to see the world differently. You get to see your life… differently.

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Padangbai, Bali, Indonesia

My Indonesian wife and I own a little piece of paradise in Padangbai, a small fishing village and ferry hub on the east coast of Bali, island of the gods. It is light years away from the tourist hordes of Kuta and Seminyak near the airport in the south of the island, and equally far away from Eat-Pray-Love, Ubud, in the center of the island.

We live amidst the locals in the middle of a banana and coconut tree field, and modernity vanishes there, almost altogether. Roosters crow all night long, dogs bark, cows moo. There are daily Hindu Bali ceremonies that stop work for days, showing you very quickly what’s important on this side of the world.

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Two things, in particular, don’t matter here in Padangbai.

1- America doesn’t matter. That’s right.. You heard me correctly. Nobody thinks or talks about us here. It’s not the center of the universe. It doesn’t define the conversation. It’s some place far away.

“Where you from, Tru-les?”
“Cal-eefornia. Los Angeles.”
“Ameri-ca?”
“Yes.”
“Far away.”
“Yes, far away.”

That’s what Kedek and I said to each other this morning. In English.

It was true. We were very “far away”. As I said, about 13 thousand miles, as the crow flies. Where there are absolutely NO newspapers (that I can understand). Where, like I said, there is a very slow, unbearably… slow… Internet connection. Where electricity fails during rain storms. Where you shop for food at 6 a.m. in the local market in the middle of an empty field to get freshly slaughtered chicken, freshly caught barracuda, to buy freshly picked fruits with names like “rambutan”, “mangosteen”, and oh yes, mango and papaya.

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All resulting in the fact that one is… pretty much… completely…. isolated here….

…and delightfully so.

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But forget about me. Here in this banana & coconut field, it’s more about the now. The culture. The weather. The gods. Ceremonies. Family. Children. Jobs. Food on the table — than it is about the international price of oil, the whereabouts and danger, danger, danger of ISIS or ISIL depending who’s spelling it, the next scary flare up in the Middle East, or the new “petro dictator” in whichever oil-rich desert America is currently hostage to. Oh, and how could I forget, the Ebola terror-scare that I haven’t heard about since I went through customs over ten days ago.

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Sure, America has created Iron Man and Spider Man and Starbucks & McDonalds, but there’s not one to be found in Padangbai. Maybe in a few more years, but I’m hoping it doesn’t happen.

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2- Time does’t matter. That’s right too. Because here, in the middle of the transcendent coconut and banana field, there is no sense of time. Just place: Here. Time: Now. Do this. Then that. Wake. Clean. Shop. Cook. Clean again. Swim. Shower. Go to town. Try to connect to the Internet. Go home. Swim. Prepare food. Eat. Clean again. Swim again. Rest. Sit on the porch. See the stars. Hear the hypnotic, marimba-like gamelon music off in the distance. Hear the jocular geckos; small lizard-like chameleons on the wall, making their strange, repetitive, chant-like chirps: “geck-o, geck-o, geck-o, geck-o, geck-o… at least 5 times in a row. All day. All night. Whenever they feel like it. Enjoy the green, green jungle, the spider-like fishing boats, the toil and the devotion in your neighbors faces.

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People who see you as a stranger. Which you are. Or maybe a visitor who comes and goes. Occasionally. Not someone who really lives here. Not yet.

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Here there is only “local” vision. People don’t grow up, move away, and leave Bali. They stay a member of the banjar (community) their entire lives. They have to. It’s expected in the culture. It’s very important. Very strict. There’s little “I”, mostly “we” in native Bali. There are only 4 names for children: Wayan (1st born), Made (2nd born), Nyoman (3rd born), and Ketut (4th born). After that, repeat with variation. Karma rules people’s actions. There is little theft. But a lot of smiling. A great deal of smiling. It’s infectious. And beautiful.

The big town is 15 kilometers away. It’s called Klungkung, and it’s where you get the piping and the tiling and the refrigerator and the toilets and sinks, and the chemicals for the pool. There’s unfortunately, very little “formal” education. Many don’t finish high school. Maybe that’s why there’s no “bigger” vision.

Take, for example, today. All work in the village stopped dead. Why? Another ceremony. Maybe a wedding, a birth, a death, a cremation, a graduation, a baby naming, a tooth filing. I can’t tell. But traffic stopped too. For how long? I don’t know. But… the ceremony is going on… right now… as I tap on these touchscreen keys.

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People are at home preparing meals! Or burning incense and making flower and rice offerings to each of their gods. It’s also sort of beautiful. At least to us “bules” (pronounced “boulays), the non pejorative word the Balinese call us Westerners.

Of course, and perhaps inevitably, there is now a growing “outside” vision for the East Coast of Bali, specifically for Padangbai, where I’m living. Money is coming in from all over the world. Not particularly from America, but more from Java, the next Indonesian island to the West, where the capital, Jakarta, sits with its 20 million hungry and busy people.

But POW! The east coast is exploding with projects.

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Land is being bought up by the bules like it’s going put of style. There’s not much left. There’s evidence of big foreign-owned hotels being built overlooking the immaculately-undeveloped white and black sand beaches (“Padang Bai” literally means “Glass Bay” in Bahasa, Indonesia, the local language spoken all over the 17,000 island archipelago.

And now there’s talk of a touro-friendly international farmers’ market going up on the Black Sand Beach just down the dirt path from where we are.

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Hard to believe when I still have to ride my shaky motor bike over a rocky road full of potholes, where women still carry vegetables and water on their heads.

But, hey, it’s also a place where I can just call a local boy over… to gladly climb a swaying coconut tree for a dollar… so he can, well…. get me a coconut.

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—————–

To read more about Trules’ trip(s) to Bali and to many other places on the planet, please visit his WordPress blog, “e-travels with e. trules” blog at: http://www.etravelswithetrules.com/blog

And for more “Trules’ Rules”, please visit his personal WordPress blog at: www.erictrules.com/blog

Follow Trules on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/etrules

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Dec 05

Ryan Seacrest Is Reportedly Single Again

Posted in: Today's Chili

Ryan Seacrest has broken up with his girlfriend — so we’ve learned — and is out on the town with a new, attractive blonde.

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Dec 05

Actually, This Cat Is Blue

Posted in: Today's Chili

green cat

False cat, true cat. Green cat, blue cat.

Green cat is a lie, or the forgery of a mind addled with color blindness. The cat, to anyone with working eyes, is a shade of teal or cyan.

Teal: “a medium to dark greenish-blue color.”

Cyan:” a greenish-blue color.”

Greenish-blue. BLUE, with green qualities. Teal is also called “teal blue.” Forget everything you knew about green cat, if what you “knew” was that the feline was green. If you knew the cat was blue all along, remember what you knew.

Also the backstory claiming the cat obtained its unnatural hue from sleeping in brightly colored paint sounds a little suspicious, but that’s not the point right now.

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Dec 05

My Children Don't Know I'm a Lesbian

Posted in: Today's Chili

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I’m not the type of person who likes to keep secrets. I grew up in a house where secrets floated in the air at all times, and I never liked to keep track of who knew what. But when I realized at the age of sixteen that I was a lesbian, I suddenly had my own secret to keep track of. I did eventually come out to my old world Greek immigrant parents. Some years after that, my conservative relatives back in Greece found out when CNN broadcast footage of my partner and I getting married at San Francisco City Hall in 2004 when Gavin Newsom allowed same-sex marriage for the first time. I never intended to keep any secrets from my children, so imagine my surprise to find that my children don’t know I’m a lesbian.

When I met my partner in 1995, we found home within a community of interracial butch/femme lesbian couples. I was femme identified and my partner was a mixed Asian transgender-identified butch. We dreamed of a life together that included creating our own family and traditions. As we grew older, we stopped going to clubs and started trying to have babies.

With our first child, we suddenly found ourselves with a new set of questions to answer. What should our child call us? While my partner Willy had not medically transitioned at that point, we knew with certainty that he didn’t want to be called mom. It worked out well for me, because I secretly harbored a selfish wish to be the only person the babies called mama. We toyed with titles for Willy for some time, but in the end it was our son who finally named him Dada. Even as a baby he identified the parental label that best fit Willy’s gender identity. And when our son started preschool and the other kids said, “You have two moms!” he would calmly respond, “No I don’t,” and look at them with some pity for their confusion. In our son’s eyes, he always saw Willy as his dad.

All three of our children have attended San Francisco LGBT Pride parades, as well as our hometown Oakland Pride parades. They’ve heard us talk about the Proposition 8 campaign when some of our neighbors turned against us with their hateful marriage rhetoric. They see the equity in same-sex marriage and we rejoice as each new state affirms the right to marry. Every year we attend the APIQWTC (Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community) banquet, one of the largest gatherings of queer Asians I have ever seen. We openly discuss that we used a sperm donor to conceive them. Our community is queer, transgender, but admittedly much more straight since we have entered the elementary school culture. I know that since Willy’s full transition to a male presentation I often get read as straight, but in my mind and in my heart I still identify as a lesbian.

Recently I was sharing some updates about an ex-girlfriend with my partner, and my son asked, “Who is she?” I paused, because the idea of having ever been with someone besides Willy seems strange to me now. I said, “She used to be my girlfriend, before I met Dad. I used to date her.” My 8-year-old son, who’s always been rather contemplative, stopped for a moment to think. “What do you mean? You dated girls before you met Dad?”

As I let this question sink in, I struggled to comprehend what I was hearing. “Yes, I dated girls before I met Dad.” I suddenly found myself coming out to my own child, and was quite honestly flabbergasted that this was something he didn’t know about me. It never occurred to me to discuss old girlfriends with my kids, or that omission only reinforced my invisibility as a lesbian.

Even though Willy and I make our intellectual and emotional home in the queer community, to our children we must appear to be a heterosexual couple. True, Dad is now a man and I am a feminine woman. I suppose we look like the families of many of their friends. But how many of their friends have stuffed animals that are transgender? How many of their friends saw their parents mourn the passing of Leslie Feinberg?

I realize that being a femme lesbian has always come with some level of invisibility within the LGBT community, and certainly in the straight world. But I never expected it within my own family. So the next question is, how do I teach my children about my identity without telling them bedtime stories about Mommy’s ex-girlfriends?

Visibility as the femme lesbian partner of a trans man can be hard to achieve, and in most circumstances it’s not my goal. But in my home and with my children I want to be all of me–the mother and partner I am today, as well as that young girl who found excitement and acceptance when she walked through the doors of a lesbian bookstore. I want to bring all of me into this venture called motherhood, even when the very nature of motherhood is to lose yourself in your children. I want my children to know that I had to struggle to find acceptance in my family and culture, and that no matter what, you should strive for pride.

So maybe I won’t tell stories about my ex-girlfriends. But I will tell them stories about coming to know myself, accepting myself even when I knew it might mean losing my family, and finding the courage to be my true self. And I can teach them about loyalty and loving someone through all the challenges and joys. These are the lessons that I can teach my children about being a lesbian, and lessons that will serve them well.

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Dec 05

Bill Burr Explains To Conan Why Charities And Sports Don't Mix

Posted in: Today's Chili

Bill Burr says “no more” to causes being attached to sports, but don’t send your angry comments just yet.

On Wednesday, the comedian explained to Conan O’Brien why he feels pro sports shouldn’t be sending out social messages. Burr says he views sports as an escape from the horrors of the daily news and bringing messages about disease and social issues into that is counterintuitive.

Burr also sounded off on the NFL’s PSAs on domestic abuse, saying the players should actually be watching the commercials since they were the ones causing problems in the first place.

“Conan” airs weeknights at 11:00 p.m. ET on TBS.

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Dec 05

Christmas Baking Rap 'Let's Get Burnt' Shows You How To Bake Like A Boss

Posted in: Today's Chili

Her gingerbread house should be on MTV’s “Cribs.”

Actor and writer Shantini Klaassen isn’t just going to tell you about her baking skills. She’s whipping up a sick beat, she’s cooking up the freshest lyrics, and she’s ready to bust a smooth flow not unlike the cream added to that cookie mix. “Let’s Get Burnt” is the illest baking rap this holiday season.

Check out more of Klaassen’s stuff on Twitter and go get your holiday bake on.

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Dec 05

Satanic Temple Wins Battle To Bring Lucifer Display Inside Florida State Capitol

Posted in: Today's Chili

This year, Satan is slated to join the pantheon of gods and agendas making a stand inside Florida’s State Capitol building.

The Satanic Temple successfully joined forces with other church-state separation advocates to pressure the Florida Department of Management Services into accepting its Lucifer holiday display, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

The religious diorama, scheduled to appear inside the Capitol’s rotunda in Tallahassee on Dec. 22, features an angel falling from heaven into the fires of hell. A Biblical reference next to the scene reads, “How you are fallen from heaven, o day star, son of dawn!”

“Nobody holds a monopoly upon the celebratory spirit of the holiday season,” Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves told HuffPost through email. “If there is fun to be had, then — like the responsible hedonists we are — we’ll have it. We hope everybody can put their differences aside and enjoy the holidays as they see fit. We think that our holiday display sends an affirmative message of inclusiveness and plurality.”

One year ago, a similar diorama from the Satanic Temple was rejected by the state agency for being “grossly offensive,” Greaves said. The organization retaliated this year by collaborating with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State to add legal pressure.

“Free speech is for everyone and all groups,” the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, said in a statement. “State officials simply can’t get into the business of deciding that some unpopular messages are ‘offensive’ and must be banned.”

The Satanic Temple describes itself an “organized religion” with a mission to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people.”

Florida’s Capitol building has become a veritable free-speech battle ground in recent years. Along with the Satanists, the Florida Prayer Network, American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are hoping to display their messages on government property.

Last year, a Seinfeld-inspired Festivus pole created out of beer cans also made an appearance inside the building.

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