This one goes out to the dreamers (a Scientology moment)

NOTE. Posting this video in no way endorses or promotes or says "hey, hey, hey" to the vile practice of Scientology. I just want to show you these guys' new strategy. They've replaced those cheesy rallies and Veg-e-Matic-style announcer with THIS - steamy, dreamy images that don't really mean anything. Nicely shot, however, which is really why I posted it. 

The cut-off text is just crap anyway.

Scientology: the wrong way to cry

Note to shameful-secret-watchers-of-A&E: I am just as hooked on "that Scientology show" as you are - maybe even more so, because I have a thing about cults. And I have a thing about cults because I have experienced devastating religious abuse, and dealt with it by walking away from it. I have yet to come to the point where I can write about it in any detail, but in two instances, trusted spiritual leaders were ejected or went to jail for breaking every moral and ethical law that exists, up to and including sexual assault. The fact that the religious trauma of my childhood somehow, unbelievably, happened again in adulthood still makes my head spin.

This means that shows like this can "trigger" me. And they do. Boy do they. Why do I keep coming back for more?

But I have to admit, the above video by a former Scientologist (I used only a snippet, and purposely didn't put a name on it) got to me. He literally stuck his face right into the camera and wailed. This is the opposite of what I see on "that Scientology show", where people seem to have an awfully hard time dealing with tears.

It's understandable that everyone cries on this show. If it were me, I would have committed suicide a long time ago, so to a person I think they are heroic, and have the right to display any and all emotions that are left over from this bizarre quasi-military UFO cult.

But to a person, including (and especially) Leah Remini, they cry in a funny way.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone allow a tear to trickle down their face on this show. It's always very carefully dabbed away with a tissue before it escapes the bottom eyelid.

I've seen people cry like this before, and it makes me wonder if they have trouble with emotion, or are even afraid of it, afraid of letting it overflow. 

Is this the Scientology way? Or are these people so emotionally brutalized that they are afraid to let that particular emotional rain fall?

In the case of Leah, the careful dabs are like a science experiment with blotting paper. I wondered at first if she were trying to preserve her perfect makeup. She IS pretty free with the lip collagen, after all (her lips are a different size and shape every week, which is a distraction), and maybe doesn't want puffy eyes to match.

But then I saw others doing it, and it was even more mysterious. In this one, the lady even seems to be offering up her single tear as a kind of sacrifice.

Dab, dab, dab. No nose-blowing either, no rivers of snot such as you'd get with a real flood of tears.

In case you think I'm being flip - all right, I am, but as compelling as it is, this is a reality TV show, which (as with all of them) you have to take with a tiny grain of salt. I have no doubt these people suffered horrendous trauma and will spend a lifetime trying to get past it. But I also get the feeling their ordeal is being packaged by the producers in a way which will appeal to the largest possible segment of the public. And this isn't fair to them any more than it's fair to the rest of us.

Scientologists are lunatics, in my book, and their ugly paramilitary organization is an offshoot of Nazi Germany more than anyone yet realizes. Some day, the connections will be found, whether from Hubbard or that insane little pipsqueak who comes up to Tom Cruise's belly button (and never mind the ramifications of THAT). Scientology rallies have a Nuremberg flavor to them, the wide, dizzying camera angles reminiscent of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. The histrionic announcer on those pep-rally-style videos is so ludicrous that it's almost funny, sort of a cross between Adolf Hitler and a spokesman for Ron Popeil.

Right. So we've established that this is an evil regime, and brutal for people to exit without consequences. But what about the guy in the first video? I confess I didn't watch the whole thing, because I couldn't, but I know that it's about Scientology and his attempt to escape it. He has a whole series of them, written from the perspective of a persecuted gay man who was lured in by the promise of acting gigs. I've never seen anyone cry "at" a camera before, to the point of nearly jamming it down his throat, and it kind of turned me off. I also noticed there were no tears - I mean, none at all, not even the blotting paper kind, though he wiped away "something" at the end. But he did not have the red or inflamed or even the watery eyes of weeping. HE WASN'T CRYING, folks, which means that he was pretending to cry, trying to make us think he was. And he wasn't.

This video produced a flood of sympathetic comments, the usual Greek chorus of deliberately elicited/stage-managed support. I don't know what's going on here, but my solar plexus gong is ringing, and I feel as if I'm being played. It's powerful stuff, which means it should NOT be played with, at all. Ever.  People have been jerked around enough, haven't they? But here it is, and I know there is a lot more. It just seems offensive to me, like a plea for my sympathy. I also see all sorts of tweets and loyal fan comments and even a "documentary" this guy made, but I have to say to you at this point, I really doubt if this guy was ever a Scientologist. My spidey sense/fake-o-meter is telling me he wasn't. 

Even if he was, I think it was peripheral. He saw an ad in the back of a comic book, walked in and out of his own volition and never spent time licking floors in the Hole. Maybe he even did it to have something to blog about? I don't think he was ever enmeshed or entrenched like the survivors on the Leah Remini show. He walked out, disappointed that he wasn't getting gigs. The YouTube thumbnails are a bit depressing: Sex with Scientology Celebrities and my $5000.00 Tshirt! Mom Interviewing Me about Scientology, Big Blue and Masturbation! Offer to Star in Scientology-Themed XXX Gay Film! etc. etc. etc. He even boasts of meeting Tom Cruise. 

Scientology is a way for this guy to get the kind of attention he thinks he needs, and it's working. Behind it is that peculiar stew or fever that means he is working his way relentlessly towards a reality series of his own. 

For after all - isn't that the ultimate goal of every one of us?

Post-blogservations. I noticed today - not that I notice these things - that the above YouTuber announced the reason he went so over the top the other night. He says his grandma died. He never said anything about this last night when he was swallowing the camera lens. At least he could have made it his dog! His Nana must be really pissed, because now he can't write about her any more.

Small Men for Scientology

You had me at hellow

 

"You.       Com.       Plete.       Me."

"You had me at.       Hellow."

You had me at hello: positively my LAST gif!

Intense scene, one of the most iconic (God, that word!) love scenes in contemporary cinema. It kicks ass, in other words. Would it play today, do you think, given the revelations about Tom and Katie. . . about Suri's high heels at 3 years old. . . about that Scientology video, and the naked bathhouse candid shots (just kidding, but Katie may have had "something" up her sleeve to get that divorce so fast)? 

And how about Renee, and her by-now-famous sudden loss of literacy, the way she was completely unable to read off a card at the Oscars? She wasn't even straining to read or trying to hold the card up to her face or do any of the things we'd associate with having trouble reading. She tilted her head and stood there, later just handing the card off to someone less incapacitated. 

In Jerry Maguire, Renee was a sweet little thing, a cinnamon heart in the middle of a toxic world, and we ate her up. People made fun of her unusual looks (after all, she does have a strange kind of squint), unaware that her mother is descended from the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia. But not being able to read or stand very straight is something else again, alarming, and seems to indicate a shocking lack of self-awareness. It's ironic, since Hollywood is all about self-awareness, vanity and narcissism. Was she just too far gone to realize how she looked?

Things that smell

Things that smell

 

 

 

 

Stale pee in stairwells

BO that leaves a visible trail and should have its own postal code (note: this should be a punishable offense)

Old vomit in the crack between seats on the bus

Old Navy stores (why do they always smell like the inside of a vacuum cleaner?)

The inside of a vacuum cleaner

Dog

Dog pee (or anything else a dog does)

The dishwasher before you run it

Cigar butts

 

 

I'm sorry, but some people smell. Some things smell, but not as bad as people.

I wrote this list, which is far from complete, a long time ago and just stumbled upon it while trying to make my computer work the way it is supposed to. This may never happen, which is heartbreaking, but at least I have this list. It touches on the main issues, I think. But worst of all is the smell of an unwashed human.

It's as if they are sitting on your face and farting. It is public pollution. When BO is so strong that you can tell the person has been there half an hour after they leave, it should be a punishable offense.

If you had a gas canister or ammonia or a bucket of horseshit or some other noxious substance that you uncovered in a public place, you'd be charged, no?

I recently took a hearing test and was told I had unusually acute hearing and could hear frequencies that most people my age can't. Fine. My sense of smell is equally hypersensitive. What does this do for me? It's seen as a "disorder", no doubt. Hypersmellism or something. Every asset is now medicalized.

But there are times. . . there are times. . .

We're supposed to put up with it in teeth-gritting politeness and not even mention it to anyone when a 350-pound man in a creased polyester suit that hasn't been dry-cleaned in 14 years squeezes himself into the aisle seat beside you, emitting an odor so gaggingly bad that you don't see how you're going to stand it during that long flight to Australia.

You hope to God he doesn't move around very much. But when he yawns, which he does every 30 seconds or so, he thrusts his big mutton arms into the air and goes, "Ho, hmmm, ho-hoh-hoh-HOHHHH, hm, hm hohoooh, hm hm hm, hoooooooooooohoooooooooooooh." This would be obnoxious enough without the slaughterhouse waft that escapes from his swilling pits, soon to form a dense storm cloud that looms over the entire cabin until it begins to rain sweat.

Last time this happened to me it was in a movie theatre, and fortunately it was empty enough that I was able to move. I had to nudge by a little old lady (twice - I forgot my popcorn) who gave me a nasty look, and I said to her, "That old man over there stinks and I can't stand to sit beside him." She gave me a startled, offended look as if I'd said, "He's a Jew and I can't stand them." You just don't SAY things like that.

You silently endure. But I was tired of having to try to tune out that disgusting stench and keep my mind on the movie, which suddenly appeared to be in Smell-o-Rama.

I think we should bring back expressions like "the great unwashed". Personally I can't see harboring all that greasy gunk on your skin without realizing how noxious it is, and I REALLY can't see how your mate, if you have one, can withstand lying next to it all night. Being married to it.

Of all the things that smell, human beings smell worst of all. They say Bigfoot smells, and no doubt Neanderthal did too. But almost all of us now have access to a marvelous little thing called running water, both hot and cold! Most of us have the wherewithal to wash our clothing, and ourselves.

I have sat next to homeless people who smelled better than the fat guy in the polyester suit. Maybe being outside airs them off.

Who's Gay in Hollywood: and why do we care?

  

“WHO’S GAY IN HOLLYWOOD” the rag/mag said.  Not a question, but a statement. I saw it as I was waiting to buy carrots or something in the checkout line. I didn’t have time to look the article up, but I assumed Tom Cruise figured large.

Katie Holmes had him over a barrel, I think, with nude bathhouse scenes or something like that, and had her dainty little twitterfinger poised on "post". This is why he put up no fuss, though he claims to have been “blindsided”.

Men still have beards, apparently, and not the nice scratchy ones I like to nuzzle up to, with the merest hint of aftershave masking the natural scent of their. . . oops, there I go again. I guess I’m not gay after all.

Not even after all that corset stuff.

I mean beards, as in women who carefully protect their male partner’s gay identity. But I don’t know whether it’s as simple as all that.

Some men (Anthony Perkins comes to mind) have tried desperately to “straighten” themselves, often with the help of so-called therapists in the business of normalizing people and forcing them into boxes of conventionality. Some of them are successful in meeting and marrying and, I assume, feeling a degree of sexual attraction to their female partners.

But it seems that something always “happens”. Sooner or later, there is a rebellion, a sort of bursting out. Look at those bloody televangelists, like the one, what’s his name anyway, the one with the rectangular smile who was caught suck - : oh sorry. I’m sorry, but I can’t avoid using technical language for the sake of precision. They break out. Their wives stand beside them in their pastel polyester dresses, smiling tightly during the press conference and explaining why they’re going to “stand by their man”, who isn’t gay anyway but merely misunderstood (or maybe bipolar, a very popular current explanation for questionable behaviour).

This “who’s gay in Hollywood” mentality flies in the face of that classic Seinfeld line, “not that there’s anything wrong with that” (which of course means the exact opposite). It’s like revealing who’s an axe murderer or an identity thief or one of those people who steals the money for the Remembrance Day poppies. I mean, I will admit I hungered and thirsted to open that National Midnight Star or whatever it was, but I didn't, because every time I do, I always run out of time to find the article because the cover story is WAY inside somewhere without an index, like, after Rosie O’Donnell’s heart attack or something. So I never get to read the story or look at the pictures (and the text is never more than 50 words or so).

If this lip-smacking over who's gay and who isn't is so prevalent, just how far have we come in accepting sexual differences? Why is it that the chief insult I hear among young people today is, "Ohhh, that's so GAY"? When used this way, can it mean anything good?

OK. Dissonances relate, so I’m going to relate a few. I am working my way through one of the most harrowing biographies I’ve ever read. It’s called A Talent for Genius by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, and it’s about Oscar Levant, a celebrity that could only have flourished in the era around World War II. This book recounts, blow by awful blow, Levant’s slow descent into disabling mental illness and a Howard Hughes level of reclusiveness which caused him to spend the last five years of his life in his pajamas, seldom venturing out of his bedroom. If anyone came to see him, he’d stand at the top of the stairs and bellow, “State your business!”

Actually, I like that, and there’s a lot about Levant that I find charming and fascinating and even awesome. I mean awesome in the true sense, awe-inspiring. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone play the piano like that. In his movies, in which he’s often better than the predictable material, he rips open the triteness and boredom of the dialogue by blazing his way through Gershwin or Tchaikovsky or even Khatchaturian’s Sabre Dance. His musicianship was total, and his oddball role as an “Oscar Levant type” has never been equalled. (He even wrote all his own dialogue, which is still unheard-of.) The authors of the book describe this as his “disgruntled wiseacre persona”.

But something happened to Levant along the way. He was seduced by celebrity, first appearing as a devastating “wit” on radio, then later (much degenerated) on TV panel shows, the kind featuring Kitty Carlisle, Betsy Palmer and Bennett Cerf.

So why am I even mentioning this? I’m struggling with the bio, but I haven’t even been able to crack his autobiography, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, because they were written when his mind was half-disintegrated from the drugs his “doctor” was shooting into his veins at midnight, in a car parked down the block from his house. I am mentioning this because his memoirs are constantly mentioning and referring to “homosexuals”. Over, and over, and over again. It’s a sort of sad, veiled “I’m not gay, I’m not gay” that I might not have noticed before I got so deeply into this harrowing subject.

Hell, I don’t know if he was gay or not, and maybe he mentioned the h-word all those times because he was provocative, a social rebel, and sometimes downright obnoxious, a narcissist who would do absolutely anything to draw public attention to himself. He dealt in shock, and this was a shock word then, for sure. Homosexuality was a mental illness, something to be “treated” and, ideally, conquered so the guy could fucking-well get married and stop suck – sorry.

I’ve seen a few Amazon.com reviews of this book, and some are quite indignant because ONE paragraph mentioned his idolatrous relationship with the legendary George Gershwin, a man who would barely give him the time of day. (But he did give him a watch. Speaking of time. And let's not get into the little sketch he drew of Oscar, above, in which he seems to be wearing very heavy eye shadow.)

It goes like this:

“Levant, who once referred to ballet as ‘the fairies’ baseball’, was an unenlightened creature of his time when it came to the subject of homosexuality. His unthinking homophobia may have been a defense against his own powerful attraction to Gershwin, whose looks and style he admired as much as he admired George’s music.” Oh, and. . . there’s this: “Though he would have enduring friendships with gay men such as Virgil Thomson and David Diamond, he was not above making wisecracks.” (Blogger’s note: let’s not leave out his associations with those indisputably gay men of music, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Vladimir Horowitz, known in the Moscow Conservatory as "Vlodya the Boy Toy". And then there was Gore Vidal - founder of the Sassoon line of hair salons - and Christopher Isherwood, author of "Boys I Have Known: from Boston to Berlin").

I just detect a murmur below the surface here. A murmur of longing and ambivalence, a profound discomfort with his own feelings.  He loved to spend time, a lot of time, with men who were known to be gay, fairly “out” for their era. Horowitz, well. . . who wouldn’t want him? I’d jump him any day, fairy or not. How’s this for a buried reference to sexual attraction:

“While both men loathed the routine drudgery of the road, both felt that there was a sensual, almost sexual thrill to the physical contact with the keyboard.”

And here's another, a beauty:

"Horowitz once took Levant aside and showed him a number of photographs of himself as a youth, looking like Franz Liszt with long brown hair. In one of them, Horowitz was clearly wearing lipstick. Horowitz looked at the photograph with Oscar and said with a sly smile, 'Decadent.'"

Whoa.

But readers of the book don’t like this sort of thing, this implication. Even the suggestion that Levant had a gay side, that he had a jones for George and was horny for Horowitz, provokes a kind of fury: how dare you even IMPLY that my hero could have been gay? It’s slander, I tell you! And this from people who would be indignant if you accused them of homophobia.

But does it really matter who he rolled around with, so long as he was deeply unhappy?

It would be an interesting footnote to discover that he swung both ways, or tried not to, or was really horrified about the whole thing, or else just didn’t care. It might be true, and it might also be that none of this is true and he was as straight as the straightjacket he routinely wore when committed to the psychiatric ward.

Sexual orientation, now there’s a tricky one, a marshy, even murky topic. I once had a doctor tell me, “OK” (drawing a little diagram with “Gay” on one side and “Straight” on the other). “Here’s the most butch guy you ever saw, driving a ten-ton truck and tattooed all over his body.” (Drawing a little x on the far “straight” side.) “Here’s the gayest man in the world, you know, one of those interior decorator types you see skipping around" (similarly, the x on the “gay” side.) “But most of us are. . . "

The doctor (probably gay) then drew a whole series of pictures of flowers and rainbows and little frisking puppies who didn’t CARE what their sexual orientation was! Wheeeee, it’s spring and I’m in love!

Moreover, I had a psychologist (not that I’ve ever been to one) tell me that if society were different, which it isn’t, we would see a lot more fluidity in sexual orientation and less emphasis on “gay”/“straight” categories, with people moving back and forth along that continuum throughout their lives.  “I’m attracted to the person,” as the saying goes, not putting so much emphasis on whether their genitals go “in” or “out”.

(Addendum. Men are just women turned inside-out. The cock is the vagina. The balls are the ovaries. I don’t know what happened to the uterus: the prostate, maybe?)

But this fluidity, this flexibility between the poles of gay and straight would play hell with marriage and having babies and a lot of other things. It would create great confusion. And I am sure people are doing it, even as we speak, because things like sexuality are powerful and don’t want to be governed, and somehow have to be governed, or so we tell ourselves.

When someone has an “affair”, it means breaking out in some way, bursting the bonds of commitment and doing something illicit, exciting, and inherently shameful. I guess if a straight man/woman suddenly burst out and had a gay “affair”, the ante would be upped and the whole thing would be even more shameful, not to mention exciting.

Those supermarket social values! They do hang on. So maybe Oscar didn’t get to sleep with George (who strikes me as cool, ascetic and probably asexual, secretly believing no one was good enough to sleep with him anyway). Maybe he didn’t even want to. But I pick up this subtext, this murmur of longing, and it’s tragic. Did this have anything to do with his mental deterioration in his later years, his natural charm calcifying so that in his later TV appearances his face resembled “a Kibuki mask of pain”?

Clifton Fadiman, Oscar's close friend, was assigned to review his first book (A Smattering of Ignorance) for the New Yorker right about the time the Declaration of Independence was signed. No nepotism there, obviously. But he had something interesting to say about his pal's internal conflict:

"He has been immensely talented and could be again if the locked horns of the elks fighting inside his head could only be separated. He has suffered and still suffers far beyond what is proper to the human condition."

Two elks. Two rutting beasts, both male, in a battle to the death in order to reproduce. Interesting image.

Oh, he may have been gay, or fluid, or rigid, or this or that. We don’t know, and will never know. Or maybe he was just a tear in the stifling fabric of convention, frightening people into laughter by flipping politeness upside-down. He was celestial energy blazing through the concert hall or the living room, leaving behind him a sparkling mass of awe and confusion. For that I must thank him: and for never resolving his sexual identity problems.

CODA: a short one cuz I have to be somewhere. I have noticed lately that the term "bisexual" is fading. You're either committed to the gay cause, or you're not. If you also dip your wand in female waters, it's somehow suspect. You have to get on-board or be seen as disloyal somehow. I also notice that if male celebrities do "come out", they piggyback (sorry) or do the stepping-stone bit, first saying they are bisexual before turning into Elton John and adopting a bunch of kids, the latest fashion accesory. (Too bad they don't fit into a purse like Britney's chihuahua, later abandoned for having needs and being no fun any more.)  Why must society polarize? It's yet another way of putting human sexuality into a restrictive box.

So there.

Coda to the Coda: and saaaaaay, what's the deal with "gay woman" and "lesbian"? Why all the confusion? It's as if "gay woman" is just a subsidiary of "gay man", who is just "gay" and that's it. Sorry, have to go.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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