Cranky Cuss's Open Salon Blog

A Contest for Self-Published Authors

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:05:16 -0400

Ordinarily, I would have sent this as a PM to selected OSers. However, when I send a PM to multiple recipients, it often ends up in the spam folder.

Writer’s Digest is holding their annual contest for self-published books. Deadline for submission is June 15. I should warn you in advance, the entry fee is a steep $100. That may be the single factor that stops many writers (including me) from entering.

From the website:

Enter your book into one or more of these categories:

· Mainstream/Literary Fiction

· Genre Fiction

· Nonfiction

· Inspirational (Spiritual, New Age)

· Life Stories (Biographies, Autobiographies, Family Histories, Memoirs)

· Children’s/Picture books

· Middle-Grade/Young Adult books

· Reference Books (Directories, Encyclopedias, Guide Books)

· Poetry

The grand prize winner gets $3,000, while nine first place winners net $1,000. All of the winners get promotional benefits. The website has full details and qualification rules.

I haven’t decided yet if I will enter. After all, my book doesn’t easily fit any of the established categories. I guess it would qualify as “Nonfiction,” though I assume the judges in that category are expecting essays about history or important social issues – something like Nikki Stern’s about-to-be-released book – rather than some smart-ass treating the Presidential candidates as if they were auditioning for a community theater production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

If you enter, I wish you good luck. If you win, remember: I like beer.

http://www.writersdigest.com/competitions/selfpublished

For Memorial Day: "Let There Be Light"

Sun, 27 May 2012 18:05:23 -0400

In 1945, John Huston filmed a documentary about returning World War II veterans suffering from what was then called shellshock, but which we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. The resulting film, Let There Be Light, was stunning in its blunt portrayal of soldiers displaying nervous tics or relentless stuttering or suffering from amnesia, loss of motor skills or other psychosomatic disorders.

Too stunning, perhaps, because the U.S. Army banned public showings for decades, going so far as to seize a copy from Huston moments before he was to show it at the Museum of Modern Art. Apparently, they were concerned that nobody, having seen what up-close combat could do to the minds of ordinary American citizens, would ever enlist in the armed forces. In 1947, the Army filmed a cleaned-up version of Huston’s documentary, using actors with scripted dialogue which downplayed the severity of the problem. It was also notable that the cast of the Army version was lily-white; the soldiers seen in Huston’s film were a racial mixture.

In 1980, the Army finally approved a showing for a Los Angeles retrospective of Huston’s films, and it has circulated in poor-quality prints ever since. In 2010, it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry. A high-quality copy of the film is now available for streaming or download for three months at the National Film Preservation Society website.

On the weekend we honor those who gave their lives for their country, it is worthwhile to spend 58 minutes with Huston’s film. Although some of the onscreen recoveries seem too easy, try watching the GIs treated with hypnosis or sodium amytal for having forgotten their identity or losing the ability to speak clearly without being alarmed at what war can do to one’s lucidity. Try watching the African-American soldier suddenly breaking down in tears while discussing his sweetheart without feeling the normal human decency of all of the patients. Try watching the soldier whose brain had shut down his legs during combat later circling the bases during a softball game without realizing how much these men, once recovered, still had to offer to the country.

Try watching the film without thinking: May we never subject our youths to these horrors ever again.

Here’s the link: http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/let-there-be-light-1946

The Huffington Post Circa 1969

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:05:40 -0400

(Trying to imagine what Arianna Huffington’s site would have looked like if it had existed in 1969.)

SUMMER 1969

THE HUFFINGTON POST

THE INTERNET NEWSPAPER

“All the News That’s Fit (To Steal from Other Media Outlets)”

WHY IS THIS MAN LAUGHING?

45,000 American GIs Dead … Civilian Massacres … Half-Million Protesters Expected for Nov. DC Anti-War March … Ho Chi Minh Dead: Can We Bring the Boys Home Now?

Teddy: My Actions Were “Indefensible”

HUD Secretary George Romney on Open Housing: “We Have an Obligation to Assist the Less Fortunate”

Shocking Photos of American Child Eating Dog Meat in Indonesia

New Israeli PM: Will She Finally Bring Peace to Middle East?

New Libyan Leader Gadaffi: Can We Trust Him? … Au Revoir, Gen. de Gaulle; Bonjour, Mr. Pompadou

Catwoman Poses for Playboy (NSFW)

VOTE: Who Wore It Better: Faye Dunaway or Jacqueline Bisset? … Cher on Baby Chastity: “I Can’t Wait to Hand Down My Hippie Dresses!”

Aldrin: Lunar Colony Likely in Next Decade

Star Trek Films Last Episode, Headed to Oblivion

New Beatles Record Reveals: McCartney Dead!

New Palestinian Leader Yasir Arafat and Ringo Starr: Separated at Birth? … Lennon’s Controversial Tweet … Did “Helter Skelter” Inspire Mass Murder?

WATCH: Johnny Carson’s Joke About Spiro Agnew

VOTE: Which Octet Better Represents America – The Brady Bunch or the Chicago 8?

Outraged Conservatives: “Who Let the Stoners and Sodomites Into the TV Programming Office?”

SLIDESHOW: The Ten Novels You Should Be Reading Right Now … Little-Known Australian Media Baron Buys The News of the World

SPONSORED CONTENT

You’ll love the smell of Dow Chemical in the morning.

It smells like victory.

Don’t let pay TV be the monster in your living room! Don’t pay for what you currently get for free! Sign the petition here or in the lobby of your movie theater.

FEATURED BLOGS:

I Am Changing How We Process the News

Arianna Huffington

Do you know hard it is to aggregate all this information created by other people? I have to skim not just Time and Newsweek as well as U.S. News and World Report, but also several daily newspapers and three television networks. I may have to hire an unpaid intern soon to help me. But someday this effort will transform the media, and it won’t cost me – or you – a dime.

Read Post / Comments

What the My Lai Massacre Says About America

Vic Morrow

I’m not a soldier, but I played one on Combat! so I am offering my unique perspective on Lt. William Calley and this great American tragedy.

Read Post / Comments

Why the Senate Should Reject Haynesworth’s Supreme Court Nomination

Hubert H. Humphrey

Can you believe I was almost elected President of these United States last year but now things are so bad that some dame whose English I cannot understand has me writing blog posts, whatever they are, that are given no more prominence than the opinions of D-list celebrities, and for which I’m not being paid?

Read Post / Comments

You’ll Get Satisfaction at Altamont

Mick Jagger

Forget “Three Days of Peace and Love.” Our festival has the “Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the World,” i.e. my band. ‘Nuf said. Even better: no cops. Security will be handled by the Hell’s Angels and we only have to pay them in beer. How cool is that?

Read Post / Comments

After Black Power, Women’s Liberation

Gloria Steinem

Once upon a time—say, ten or even five years ago—a Liberated Woman was somebody who had sex before marriage and a job afterward. The idea seems antiquated now. Liberation isn't exposure to the American values of Mom-and-apple-pie anymore (not even if Mom is allowed to work in an office and vote once in a while); it's the escape from them.

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The Chicago Police Murdered Fred Hampton

Eldridge Cleaver

“You can kill the revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution,” said Fred Hampton. Well, the Chicago police, with help from the FBI, certainly killed the revolutionary. But in doing so, they stoked the fires of the revolution which will inevitably burn this racist society to the ground.

Read Post / Comments

The Population Bomb Is Ticking

Paul R. Ehrlich

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Read Post / Comments

What’s Going On in New York?

David Brinkley

We all know that America has gone completely Looney Tunes, with the hippies and their mary jane, free love and psychedelic “music,” and I use that term loosely. But what’s up with New York City? It’s bad enough that so many delusional Gothamites actually believe their lowly Mets can go to the World Series this year. But now homosexuals have their knickers in a twist because the police raided Stonewall, one of their dens of perversity. I suspect the Yippies have spiked the city’s water supply with LSD.

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Hey, I’m Walking Here!

Ratso Rizzo

Hey, cabbie! Can’t a guy cross the street while making a movie in New York without being sideswiped? Don’t you need to pass a freakin’ eye test to get a driver’s license? It’s bad enough I got one bum leg from polio, you wanna ruin the other one too?

ALSO: Milton Friedman on Wage and Price Controls … Pauline Kael on Easy Rider … Sen. Gaylord Nelson on the Cuyahoga River fire … William F. Buckley … Charles Nelson Reilly

I'm Not Depressed. The World Just Sucks.

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:05:46 -0400

I’ve lost my sense of humor. When not even Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert can make me laugh consistently, I’ve got a problem. I’m not depressed. The world just sucks.

Much of my unhappiness is entirely personal: nagging health issues that make me realize that the concept of the golden years is a crock; the sad realization that a couple of people I considered friends are not; the stress-filled atmosphere at my wife’s job which has her returning home many nights looking like a beaten dog. A lot of it, however, is too much contact with a culture that feels increasingly vapid and rude, especially the toxicity of public discourse.

I can’t surf the Internet, whether it’s the blogosphere, news sites or even my goddam email inbox, without feeling like I’m under assault. The Net gives everyone a forum and everyone takes advantage of it by airing their outrage about everything, whether major or trivial, and they expect me to share it. Either it’s something Barack Obama did or didn’t do, or something Mitt Romney did or didn’t say, or else it’s some offensive thing some Republican hack or some unpaid blogger wrote, or else it’s some very important issue that’s being overlooked or some issue that’s getting way too much attention, or it’s some politically incorrect ad nobody’s seen for some product nobody wants, or it’s who got eliminated last night on American Idol or .. God, enough already. There are six billion people in the world and there will always be someone doing something unpleasant. I just don’t have that much outrage in me and often I’m only outraged by how easily people are outraged. I’m suffering from outrage overload.

I’m tired of reading screeds by people who are so cocksure that their opinion is right that you must be a fucking moron to … wait a second, let me change to language they’ll understand … YOU MUST BE A FUCKING MORON TO DISAGREE. I have strong opinions about many things, but I’m not cocksure about shit. I am always aware that I’m a flawed human being evaluating flawed human beings by using flawed knowledge to build flawed analyses, and frankly anyone who doesn’t feel that way frightens me. Too few essays I read today indicate a writer wrestling with his or her thoughts. Well, I wrestle with my thoughts all the time.

The atmosphere has gotten so vitriolic that if either Obama or Romney discovered the cure for cancer, there are people who would be angered by it. We’ve gotten so antagonistic that now we’re arguing about dumbass shit that Romney did as a teenager – because we know that teenagers doing dumbass shit is so rare – and we’re arguing over what Obama ate as a child in Indonesia. What next, which candidate as a baby peed on his mother when she was changing his diaper? Election Day isn’t until November, so we have six more months of this bullshit and it’s going to get worse.

Political discussion inevitably brings out the worst in people. We may tolerate widely varying opinions and tastes in any other venue – “You love punk rock, I love Baroque composers, but we’re still BFFs!” – but air the smallest disagreement on Obamacare and we’re reaching for the knives. Yeah, I know outrage and overreaction have been par for the course ever since God got pissed off at mankind and instructed Noah to build an ark, but only in recent years has the 24/7 cable-Internet combination turned our rancor into a nuclear cloud that constantly chokes our lungs.

The anonymity of the Web allows people to infect even innocuous forums with their abuse. Recently I read an online article about Will Smith and wondered, “How many comments will I have to read before I encounter one that’s blatantly racist?” The answer: two.

We feel a need to make every difference sound apocalyptic and we reward the commentators that are the loudest and most outlandish, like Rush Limbaugh. Really, Bill O’Reilly is the “Worst Person in the World” while Charles Manson and the butchers in Darfur are still drawing breath? We have a “war” on religion and a “war” on women; I wonder what the PTSD-affected soldiers returning from the Middle East, or the parents of soldiers who never returned, think about us comparing our political disagreements to mortal combat.

The tipping point for me happened when I watched MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, so angry about George Zimmerman’s lawyer leaving the studio before a scheduled interview that he yelled questions at an empty chair. I know O’Donnell expected me to share his outrage but all I thought was: Please, somebody slap me silly if I ever act like that big a fool.

I am 61 years old. I don’t know how much time I have left on this planet. 25 years, hopefully. 25 days or even 25 hours, possibly. I don’t want to spend that time with bile in my throat and anger in my heart, so I’ve been spending much less time online and I’ve stopped participating in any discussion that has the potential to grow caustic. I’d like to believe that I can hold an opinion without thinking that someone who disagrees is a moral midget. I’d like to believe that I can feel disdain for the political views of candidates like Mitt Romney without feeling the need to trash him and his family as human beings. I’d like to believe that I can have critical thoughts about public figures who do stupid things without feeling that they are evil personified. That probably makes me a fucking moron.

Stop the world. I want to get off.

June 28, 1969 (Repost)

Wed, 9 May 2012 18:05:51 -0400

(In honor of President Obama finally declaring his support for marriage equality, I am reposting what I wrote two years ago about my own “evolution” in thought.)

June 28, 1969. I was beginning my last summer vacation before heading off to college. I was also enjoying the new driver’s license I’d just received. Perhaps I was having a pizza with some buddies, talking about social issues that bothered us, like Vietnam and racial injustice. Probably we were chatting about girls we thought were hot and out of our league. Certainly we were talking about our big plans for our lives and the wonderful things we hoped to accomplish. Our futures were bright.

Homosexuality wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary.

June 28, 1969. Gay men in a West Village bar named the Stonewall riot when police make one of their regular vice raids. At the time, homosexual acts are legal in only one state, Illinois. Homosexuals everywhere, even in liberal and tolerant New York, were forced to keep their attraction behind locked doors with the windows covered, out of sight. Gathering places are frequently raided by the authorities, with people arrested just for fraternizing. Being arrested at a gay gathering place could cost the arrestees their jobs and ruin their lives. The uprising at the Stonewall, which lasts for three days, is the first time gays have resisted authority, and it is considered the “Rosa Parks moment” of the gay liberation movement.

Homosexuality wasn’t a word in the media’s vocabulary either. There are few news photos of the events and mainstream coverage, when not demeaning, is mostly nonexistent.

Mid-1970s. I meet my first openly gay man at the manufacturing firm where I worked, except that when I first met Ronnie, he was struggling to stay in the closet. Unhappily married – there was a rumor about his angry wife putting broken glass in his sandwich – Ronnie was difficult to work with. He came to work every day with a lunch box featuring Peter Pan and a logo that read, “I Refuse to Grow Up,” and it was appropriate. He had a sense of humor not unlike mine, but he was often testy, uncomfortable around co-workers and somewhat unreliable. Once I found him wedged into a small space between a machine and the wall, hiding from co-workers, and you don’t need to be Freud to analyze that sight.

I don’t remember when Ronnie accepted his homosexuality. There was no great proclamation. What I remember is that he suddenly became happy. He was more reliable and more pleasant to work with, even getting a promotion. I certainly didn’t understand this same-sex attraction thing, but I was a child of the Sixties and if it made you happy and didn’t hurt anyone, then hey, whatever floats your boat.

Summer 1980. I spend six weeks bumming around the country. In San Francisco, I head out to the Castro for an afternoon to check out some indie record stores. I know it’s the center of gay life in Frisco – I’d followed the murder of Harvey Milk - but I’ve spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village and I’ve seen gay couples before, so I’m cool. Or so I thought. Until I discover that nearly every couple walking around the Castro is gay. I’m curious in a sociological sense but also a little uneasy. It takes a while before I realize that my unease arises because, for the first time in my life, I’m in a community where I’m the minority. It gives me a quick slap in the face about what life must be like every day for gay people.

November 24, 1984. I get married. Denise and I spend the evening celebrating our heterosexual love with our friends, dancing, drinking, eating and laughing. I don’t spend one second considering that if Denise and I were of the same sex, we couldn’t have such a celebration sanctioned by the state.

Mid-1980s. I meet my first HIV-positive man. He works in my sister-in-law’s video store. I don’t know him well, but he provides a recognizable face for this “gay disease” that’s been decimating their community. We begin making contributions to groups fighting AIDS. I’m not completely free of homophobia, though. I’m alarmed to find myself now appearing on the mailing list for gay-oriented products, and when something of an erotic nature arrives, I call the provided phone number and ask to be removed from the list.

Mid-1990s. Like a good liberal, I preach tolerance. I go to see, and talk up, the movie Philadelphia (even though I secretly consider it a little crappy). I’m outraged when Bill Clinton signs the Defense of Marriage Act (even I though I’m not quite sure about this same-sex marriage thing, I just don’t want to rule it out).

But I fall in love with the music of the Pet Shop Boys, particularly their album Very. It seems to follow the singer’s progression from closet to gay pride, and the message goes down easily with irresistible, danceable rhythms and with yearning, intelligent lyrics. It closes with a cover of the Village People’s “Go West,” produced with an orchestra and choir, that feels anthemic. Love is beautiful, I realize, no matter who the lovers. I play the record repeatedly.

The ‘00s. I’m proud that both of my daughters get involved with the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance; Nicole acting as President. They participate in seminars and retreats, and teach me to say “LGBT.” They begin school campaigns to eliminate epithets and ridiculous statements like “that’s so gay;” I vow to never allow epithets in my presence ever again. They have close friends, delightful kids, who are gay or bi, and they shrug their shoulders, considering the difference in orientation to be as insignificant as someone my generation would a preference for the Rolling Stones over the Beatles. I vow to follow their lead. I strive to remove anything from my conversation that implies that same-sex relationships are any less legitimate than my own.

June 21, 2010. At the Film Forum in Manhattan, I purchase a ticket for Stonewall Uprising, a documentary about the famous riots, and chuckle that walking into the theater alone to see a gay-oriented film, an act that would have made me self-conscious not that long ago, now feels as normal as apple pie. The film recounts the events of June 1969, but also stuns me by portraying the hostile atmosphere toward gay people at the time. It plays clips from anti-homosexual public service announcements from the 1950s and 1960s that seem even more deranged than Reefer Madness. It plays clips from a 1967 CBS documentary, hosted by Mike Wallace, who declares in one of many travesties, “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” The clips seem so stunningly ignorant in retrospect that it’s as if CBS gave the Ku Klux Klan 60 minutes to explain black people.

I come home, sit down at my keyboard and type in the things I’ve learned in the nearly 41 years since Stonewall. I’m anxious to say a few more things:

That “homosexuality” is part of my vocabulary now, as much as “love” and “family” and “marriage” and “equality.” That the arguments against legalizing same-sex marriage seem as desperate as the Church’s insistence, after Copernicus and Galileo, that the sun still revolved around the earth. That the legalization of same-sex marriage is inevitable, and that the continuing debate over it reminds me of a movie where the ending is preordained, but the script keeps throwing ridiculous obstacles in the way to drag out the viewer’s misery. That, while I’m a patient man by nature and even more patient as I age, I am grossly offended that my gay friends have to wait longer to experience the same legal sanction of their love that heterosexuals like myself take for granted.

That I’m tired of this idiotic argument, and that I want this story fast-forwarded to the inevitable happy ending right now, so we can go on to discussing issues that are actually complicated.