The queer history of Grace Jones:
That night, Grace Jones sang “I Need a Man” just like a man might—tough and lusty, she was a woman who was not just singing to them, but also forthem, as them. She was as queer as a relatively straight person could get. Her image celebrated blackness and subverted gender norms; she presented something we had never seen before in pop performance—a woman who was lithe, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribald, butch swagger. In ’79, Ebony got her je ne sais quoi exactly right: “Grace Jones is a question mark followed by an exclamation point.”
Even now, her transgressive charisma remains bold. She still feels outré.
Turkey has too much history (every word of this Elif Batuman piece is EXTRAORDINARY):
“The essence of all your work is in those crates,” Sibel told him. “It’s not in a few cleaned-up ships in the museum. The real thing is in the boxes.” For Sibel, the most characteristic finding from Yenikapı was precisely “the surplus.” “When one piece is found,” she said, “it teaches you something. When thousands of pieces are found, it’s something else. At a certain point, you have the knowledge already, and the rest is a surplus.” You don’t have to be a conceptual artist to see in the surplus an irresistible metaphor for certain historical questions in Istanbul: once you start digging, so much stuff comes out that there’s nowhere to put it, and, eventually, you have to just bury it back in the ground.
Tansev seemed moved. He made a few phone calls, and wrote a number on a slip of paper: 83,562—the number of boxes his workers had removed from the site.
I have rarely been so outraged as this piece made me:
Her mother glanced at the words, then back at her daughter. “What does this mean all of your payments were sold to a third party?” her mother recalls saying.
The distraught woman said the letter, written by her insurance company, referred to Rose’s lead checks. The family had settled a lead-paint lawsuit against one Baltimore slumlord in 2007, granting Rose a monthly check of nearly $1,000, with yearly increases. Those payments were guaranteed for 35 years.
“It’s been sold?” Rose asked, memories soon flashing.
You are more than welcome to talk about the tragedy in Virginia yesterday, I don’t have much editorializing spirit for it.
On why the Rentboy.com bust is a useless waste of taxpayer money, and is only going to hurt people:
I think that to many in our community this feels like a throwback to when the police raided gay bars in the 50s and 60s. Despite the salaciousness of the language in the complaint I don’t think the charges will stick because basically the site provides a forum for people to meet and make personal arrangements on their own. Rentboy.com may be a provocative title but sexy, fun language is not illegal. This invasion of a consensual hook-up site which is run for and by members of the LGBT community feels like a real slap in the face after gentrification, and the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations drove so many NYC gay bars out of business and forced people to meet online instead of in person.
HOW did I miss Stacia L. Brown on Surya Bonaly!!!!
In addition to pegging herself as a rebel during that practice session, judges seemed prejudiced against Bonaly. In his Rebel On Ice interview, Frank Carroll, a former U.S. Olympic coach, said, “Even though she was wonderful [and] spectacular and she did great performances, she didn’t look like the ‘ice princess.’” (Until recently, “ice princesses”—skaters who emphasize graceful artistry over raw athleticism—were preferred among judges. A recent ESPN article asserts that this may be changing.)
Retta, who recalls watching Bonaly’s performances on TV as a child, also thought Bonaly’s appearance made her conspicuous on the ice. “She was shorter. She had a ‘black girl’s body,’ [which meant] thicker legs. She was never going to look like the other skaters.”
My friend Carrie’s new puppy taking a walk with the big guys again:
LOVE the illos by Friend of The Toast Matt Lubchansky.
Deleted comments of the day:
