A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Via White Crane Institute / HARVEY FIERSTEIN
1952 -
HARVEY FIERSTEIN,
American actor, born; An American Tony Award-winning and Emmy
Award-winning actor, playwright, and screenwriter is perhaps known best
for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and starred in and originating the role of Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical Hairspray.
The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play
and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New
Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theater World Award, and
the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male
Lead. Fierstein also wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983), winning another Tony Award, this time for Best Book of a Musical, and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Book. Legs Diamond, his 1988 collaboration with Peter Allen, was a critical and commercial failure, closing after 72 previews and 64 performances.
His other playwriting credits include Safe Sex, Spookhouse, and Forget Him. Fierstein developed a new musical titled A Catered Affair
in which he starred with Faith Prince, Leslie Kritzer, and Tom Wopat.
Fierstein is an occasional columnist writing about Gay issues and appears regularly on the PBS series In The Life. He was out at a time when very few celebrities were. His most recent Tony was for Kinky Boots, with Cindy Lauper.
Via White Crane Institute / THOMAS MANN
This Day in Gay History
June 06
Born
1875 -
THOMAS MANN,
German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955); a German novelist, short
story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel
Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic
novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the
psychology of the artist and intellectual.
His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used
modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe,
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his
sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through
the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy
Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).
Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio
describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the
Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became
enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old
Polish boy. Considered a classic of homoerotic passion (if
unconsummated) Death in Venice has been made into a
film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred
Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle
classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex
desire to the common culture.
Mann himself described his feelings for young violinist and
painter Paul Ehrenberg as the "central experience of my heart." Despite the homoerotic overtones in his writing, Mann chose to marry and have children; two of his children, Klaus, also a writer, who committed suicide in 1949, and Erika, an actress, and writer who died in 1969 and who was married to W.H. Auden for 34 years, were also Gay. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut) and The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte).
Via Be Here Now Network / Francesca Maximé – ReRooted – Ep. 29 – Legacy Burden, Implicit Racism, and Activism with Dr. Richard Schwartz
Dr. Richard Schwartz joins Francesca to discuss legacy burden, implicit
racism, privilege, social activism, and healing the planet. Richard
Schwartz, PhD, is the founding...
Via Daily Dharma: Transforming Actual Lives
If
spiritual or transcendent insight doesn’t lead to healing and
transformation in our actual daily lives, it is clearly incomplete.
—Henry Shukman, “Light and Dark”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
—Henry Shukman, “Light and Dark”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Friday, June 5, 2020
Via FB / Elis Regina
Elis
Regina participava ativamente da política, principalmente, contra a
Ditadura Militar no Brasil nos anos de chumbo em que viveu.
Via Daily Dharma: Changing Your Conditioning
Practicing mindful awareness of... our conditioning and habits of the mind helps us to know what we are up against within ourselves as we seek to make change in the world.
—Rhonda Magee,“Making the Invisible Visible”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
—Rhonda Magee,“Making the Invisible Visible”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via White Crane Institute / FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
1898 -
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,
Spanish poet, lyricist and dramatist (d. 1936); a Spanish poet and
dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. An
emblematic member of the Generation of ‘27, he was killed by
Nationalist partisans at the age of thirty-eight at the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War. Born in Fuente Vaqueros, province of Granada, on
June 5, 1898, Federico García Lorca is internationally recognized as
Spain's most prominent lyric poet and dramatist of the twentieth
century. His poetry and plays have been translated into dozens of
languages and have been the object of study by critics all over the
world.
Since his murder in 1936 at the hands of Spanish fascist forces,
Lorca has become a legendary tragic hero. One cannot help speculating
about Lorca's unfulfilled projects, the many more works he had planned
to write and would have written had he not been the victim of a death
that to this day is still clouded with controversy.
Equally controversial are the thinly veiled homoerotic motifs and
themes present in Lorca's work that have long been intentionally
silenced and overlooked by those wishing not to "soil" the reputation of
one of Spain's most respected bards; among them, the Franco regime, the
Lorca family, and homophobic Lorquian scholars who have dedicated their
lives and careers to Lorca's work yet refuse to acknowledge a line of
criticism that takes into account homoerotic desire.
In 1919, Lorca went to study at the University of Madrid and lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes--a
student residence founded in 1910 as a center of intellectual life for
gifted students. Among the students at the "Resi," as it was familiarly
known, were Spain's most talented young artists and writers. The
surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, with whom Lorca fell deeply in love,
and Luis Buñuel, later famous as a film maker, became close friends with
Lorca, whose room soon became a popular meeting place for intellectuals
around Madrid.
For a marvelous treatment of these relationships, see the film
Little Ashes, directed by Paul Morrison. With Javier Beltrán, Robert
Pattinson, Matthew McNulty. After what has been generally described as a
"mysterious emotional crisis" (in fact, a depression brought on by
Dalí's sexual rejection as well as by a stormy relationship with a young
sculptor, Emilio Aladrén Perojo), Lorca traveled to New York City in
1927. This trip inspired some of his most singular poetic pieces, later
collected under the title Poet in New York (1940).
After leaving New York City, Lorca spent three months in Cuba, a
place he had dreamed of visiting ever since he was a child and where he
spent, according to his own account, the happiest days of his life.
Following his stay in New York City and Cuba, Lorca began to be more
daring in the representation of homosexuality.
Far away from his family and conservative Spanish values, he was
able to conceive and begin writing his most openly homosexual work: "Ode to Walt Whitman," the dramatic piece The Public, and the unfinished The Destruction of Sodom. "Ode to Walt Whitman,"
published in Mexico in 1934 in a limited edition of fifty copies, but
never published in Spain during Lorca's lifetime, reveals the poet's own
contradictions concerning homosexuality. The ode takes on a moralistic
tone by marking a clear distinction between a pure and de-sexualized
homosexual love, epitomized by Whitman the lover of nature, and a
debased sexuality, associated with the "maricas" or faggots (effeminate
homosexuals).
The Public, which with the exception of
two scenes published in a Spanish magazine during Lorca's life was not
published until 1978, and even then in an incomplete version, presents
an examination of repressed homosexual desire as well as a defense of
the individual's right to erotic liberty.
Lorca categorized The Public, his most experimental play, as belonging to his "impossible theater." Also belonging to the impossible theater is The Destruction of Sodom,
of which Lorca apparently wrote one act, although today only the first
page of the piece survives. The theme of this play, according to Ian
Gibson, was to be "the pleasures of the homosexual confraternity, who
have made such a contribution to world culture."
Via White Crane Institute / IVY COMPTON-BURNETT
1892 -
IVY COMPTON-BURNETT,
English novelist, born (d: 1969); Published as “I. Compton-Burnett,”
all her many novels, which have been called “morality plays for the
tough-minded,” are satires of the least attractive aspects of human
nature as found among the nobility and landed gentry of the
late-Victorian world. They are very strange and very intelligent novels
by a very strange and intelligent woman. Compton-Burnett lived most of
her life in a “romantic friendship” with Margaret Jourdain, a woman
several years her senior and a well-established scholar and expert in
18th century furniture.
There was no question in the Jourdain/Compton-Burnett household as
to who was numero uno. Jourdain talked and Compton-Burnett listened.
Even when the novelist’s fame far exceeded the scholar’s, no one entered
their sanctum sanctorum without paying court to Jourdain alone. They
had no sexual contact with each other, nor with anyone else, Jourdain
believing that only men experienced sexual desire and Compton-Burnett
explaining that they were “essentially a pair of neuters.” When Jourdain
died, the novelist was almost sixty, but her subservience and
dependence never ended. She continued to talk with her friend” I say,
what do you think? Do you like it? Would you advise me? What shall I
do?” Strange. Fascinating. Eerie. Like her novels.
Thursday, June 4, 2020
Via Daily Dharma: Act on Awakening
It
is said that the Buddha, after emerging from his awakening under the
Bodhi tree, distinguished himself from other enlightened beings by not
dwelling in quiescence, but demonstrated his unsurpassed and complete
awakening by speaking up.
—Duncan Ryuken Williams, “At Fort Sill, a Prayer That History Would Not Repeat Itself”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
—Duncan Ryuken Williams, “At Fort Sill, a Prayer That History Would Not Repeat Itself”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Via Lion´s Roar / How to Practice Metta for a Troubled Time
How to Practice Metta for a Troubled Time | ||
Mushim Patricia Ikeda teaches us how to generate loving-kindness and good will as an antidote to hatred and fear. |
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Via Lion´s Roar / Race, Reclamation, and the Resilience Revolution
Race, Reclamation, and the Resilience Revolution |
In
the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by police in
Minneapolis, dharma teacher Larry Ward says we have to “create
communities of resilience,” and offers his mantras for this time. |
Via Daily Dharma: Keeping Steady with Emotions
The
intention when meditating with emotion is to stay steady with every
sensation, just as we might do with sound meditation. Just listening. No
commentary.
—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov,“Leaving Everything Behind”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov,“Leaving Everything Behind”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - June 3, 2020 💌
"Tall order: We’re asked to enter into this volatile environment of division and separateness, but with as much consciousness of unity as possible. So King sets out for Selma. Gandhi begins the Salt March, or any number of us join movements for peace and justice. Seeking to recruit others, experiencing divisions among ourselves, confronting opposing power, wrestling with fear and anger, trying to keep a clear sense of our goals… there are plenty of places to get lost in the struggle.
We need all the clarity and inspiration we can get in order not to violate, in our own behavior, the very principles and ideals we’re fighting for."
We need all the clarity and inspiration we can get in order not to violate, in our own behavior, the very principles and ideals we’re fighting for."
- Ram Dass -
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Via Daily Dharma: What Is Genuine Happiness?
Genuine
happiness doesn’t require that you take anything away from anyone—which
means that it in no way conflicts with the genuine happiness of others.
—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “Hang on to Your Ego”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “Hang on to Your Ego”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
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