Tag: Michael Moore

Categories
art

I thought having a vagina would be fun but now I hate it

…which was how somebody found the blog yesterday.  Nothing worse than a tranny with buyers remorse.

Golden Angel Head

Resting my lap top on my ball.  Did I learn nothing?  I can feel it burn my thighs.

NYC.  Why so secretive?  Secret love?  Maybe.   Secret litigation.  YES!  Not so secret.  Secret parties after the Armory?  Well…of course.  Secret drama at my favourite places?  Definitely.  Secret film stars at NYU.  Secret fuck buddies who don’t want to wear condoms.

Secrets…and I am on the verge of giving birth to this huge secret shit.

A love affair?  maybe.

Walking the dog as usual.  Selling art.  Not selling art.  Fuck!

Met up with a gay friend who is just so pissed at Obama and the HRC and can’t imagine how things are going to change for him and his lover.  How are things going to change?

It’s only a matter of time.

Don’t give up.  Read this:

Speech Michael Moore delivered at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here’s what I learned: Money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the state can’t function. The schools can’t produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs.  That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It’s part of the Big Lie. It’s one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can’t win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. LOTS. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn’t work, they’ve got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don’t rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it’s Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin’ awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. “Here! Take our money! We don’t care. We’ll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!”

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It’s just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois — whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn’t have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn’t be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job — their $19,000 a year job. That’s how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he’s stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn’t have to sleep in his car between shifts at O’Hare airport. That’s how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn’t be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he’s just another slob.

And that, my friends, is Corporate America’s fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement — a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don’t understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. “Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

“There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you…?”

America ain’t broke! The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it’s one person, one vote, and it’s the thing the rich hate most about America — because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Categories
prison Rant

Guardian Article

duncan roy as anthony rendlesham

This week, we met Thomas Salme and Adam Wheeler, the former fined for lying about holding a commercial passenger pilot’s licence and the latter for reinventing his academic career.

When I read about men like this, I remember the time I was, in the words of the News of the World, “The Lord of The Lies”.  I was the “Credit Card Earl” who apparently funded his “jet-set lifestyle” by spending money on his credit card with no intention of paying the bill.

For this petty crime I was sent to prison for 10 months.  I was 23.  Made an example of just in case there was some other working class lad who thought he could con his way into the aristocracy.

Wheeler, also 23, was “showered with scholarships” and will be harshly punished; Salme has escaped with a smallish European fine.  Yet, even as they wish to punish them, the public’s attitude toward accomplished liars will be tempered by some envy.

Yes, of course, it’s scary that a man with no formal training can fly commercial passenger jets but, really, who gives a damn if Wheeler reinvented his CV so that he might enjoy the delights of a great university?  Wouldn’t we all, at some level, like to reinvent ourselves?   Public condemnation conceals a private longing for becoming who we always wanted to be.

Come on! Let’s face it, we all tell lies. Some of us just do it rather grandly.

I was 18 when I changed my name. The press loved to describe me as coming “from humble beginnings”.  I would describe my childhood differently: born into a complicated family shamed by illegitimacy.   I realised that there was a better life, a simpler life to be had by telling a lie.  Lying from the earliest age because I simply had no idea what the truth was. My family was riven with lies. My father was in fact my stepfather and the entire family colluded to keep a secret from me, a small boy, by telling lies.

I ran away to Paris, away from the tears and the drama, the secrets and lies. I took the truth by the scruff of the neck and chucked it on to the Rue St Anne. I not only changed my name to Anthony Rendlesham but also appended a delicious title.

Lord Anthony Rendlesham.

Oh, just remembering it now, that moment in Paris after nearly 30 years of not lying about my name causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. It was so bloody exciting!

When I first lied about my name I expected the lie to vanish after a few hours. In fact, I would tell the same lie for nearly three years. Every time I said my name I buried my sad and ghastly past under the psychic woodpile.

Both the fake pilot and the fraudulent Ivy Leaguer must have known that they would one day get caught. Yet, from my experience that risk fades into the back of one’s mind as the lie grows exponentially. The lie becomes one’s life; the past becomes hard to recognise as one’s own. I often wondered when the ghost of Duncan Roy would come claim me.

For some, pretending is cathartic – a rubbing out of the past one seems to have no control over. I can spot a liar at 50 paces and can tell the truth about others like no one else I know, but the truth about myself was far too excruciating.

Telling the truth is made harder because we live, in the words of Michael Moore, in “lying times”. Honesty has very little currency in modern life – especially in the US where everyone feels that to tinker with the truth is essential if one is going to get on – from the monumental lies politicians tell about weapons of mass destruction and secret torture to the grotesque micro lies we tell ourselves when we allow the plastic surgeon to reinvent our faces.

Both of this week’s imposters worked very hard on their lies: Salme trained all night on a flight simulator; Wheeler became a convincing academic. I was a mere amateur compared with these two. I did not profit from my lie (the credit card was in my own name – I used it right at the end of my adventure, to pay for dinners and shirts).

I simply changed my name and learned how to hold a knife and fork properly. The various aristocratic tribes I infiltrated seemed to accept what I told them as the truth because I sounded right and I was a great deal of fun. They liked having Anthony around.

Of course I didn’t know how (Anthony’s) friends would react to finding that they had a dog in their aristocratic manger. Years later, however, a few of them contacted me, invited me to dinner and told me how sad they were that I had vanished, that they wanted me to know they had liked me, whoever I was pretending to be.

It was a very moving moment. Yet, regardless, they didn’t really know me.  I didn’t really know me.

It would take years of therapy, trauma work and sobriety for me to get to know who I am and put a stop to the fear and shame and resentment.

Like Wheeler and Salme, I know how it feels to be thrust back into one’s own skin.

Part of me will always be Lord Anthony Rendledsham. Anthony is the dynamic, charming, forceful part of me that gets things done. He is stronger than the Duncan me. He protects me when I feel vulnerable or afraid. He is the furious part of me, the catty, sharp-tongued bitchy part  of me who can make terrible enemies. I know that he wants me for himself.

Recently in therapy I realised that I can take what I need from Anthony, the good parts, and leave the rest.

Occasionally I can feel him surging through me.  Whenever I feel that crippling toxic shame I used to feel every day – I can feel him want to stand in front of the child me and fight those who give me pain. But now I can say to him, hey, I can deal with this. Thanks, but no thanks. And he skulks away.

As I grow older I strive for authenticity. I embrace the truth. Even though I fail, I try living without telling lies.  It is the hardest thing of all, the decision not to delude others or myself.

Categories
Death Rehab

Wake Up!

Kristian’s death has affected me more than I might admit.   Rather foolishly I had a picture of him on my phone that lit up every time somebody called.  I deleted it today-I was making myself sadder than I needed to be.

Found myself looking at pornography last night-late-trying to soothe myself-trying to throw a warm blanket over my feelings.   It didn’t work.  I still woke up this morning overwhelmed with fear.  I wrote to John:

5am.  Waking up in huge amounts of fear.  Crushing, overwhelming fear. Think I may have come to the end of the line. Cannot go on.  Making bad decisions.  Can’t face anything.  Financial ruin facing me.  Nowhere to run to.   Don’t trust anyone. Obsessed.  Looked at porn this morning to try to sooth me-did not work.  Nothing works.  Do not see any more life ahead of me.

As dawn broke over the mountain I expected those particular ghouls to vanish, yet, those pesky demons lingered all day-like they were waiting patiently to claim me.

My father died when he was 53.

Found myself looking at pornography..

Now, that sounds like it happened to me rather than me searching around for that perfect porn moment.  Porn is like research, it’s scholarly, frustrating, intense.

Feeling desperately sad.  Not sobbing like when the Darling Big Dog was killed.

Cannot listen to Kate Bush or Soft Cell (remember listening with him) but rather strangely listening to the Spice Girls, which softens the edges-like having a wank.

Throwing the towel in.  “Goodbye my friend.”  Remember when we were best friends with Matt Rowe who wrote all those huge number one hits?    “Goodbye my friend.”   Remember New Years Eve at The Mercer Hotel in NYC with Melanie Sporty Spice and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?  Odd mixture that night?  What a night.

So I’m chatting with a friend about his childhood and he tells me that his father was sent to prison when he was 11 years old.  The only way he knew how to deal with the shame was to lie to his classmates.  He knew where his father was but told his friends that his father was on a business trip-he told lies because the truth was far too complicated.  Gosh, I related to that.  Lying to make life easier:  My father is on a business trip.  Telling palatable childish lies leading to a life of fantasy, pornography, disconnection.

It took me so long to let the truth set me free.  Now I try so hard to tell the truth.  Lyle brought word from England that I had a terrible temper.  Oh yes, I remember that.  My temper was a daily occurrence for so long.  Before I went to Sex Rehab I really had no idea why I was so angry-after sex rehab I fully understood why I was angry and the mechanism that controlled it.  So, to all that I shouted at and screamed at and made cry-I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong.

Sorry to repeat myself but..

When Kristian died suddenly a door opened into a world I considered closed to me.   I had considered suicide for as long as I can remember but never seriously.  Death, after all, is a very long time.  Suddenly there are enough fun people in the after life that I might have a good time.  Giggle with.   I am not scared of death-I was just scared of being bored when I got there-now with Kristian dead-death seems like a realistic option.  Holding the door open for me.

I am looking for clues for what might keep me alive?  What can I believe in?

This morning I heard John talking about being asleep and how much of the time I have been asleep.  I fall asleep when I first meet some one-a deep sleep.  I always thought that it was because I felt comfortable but now I see that it was to escape intimacy or worse that something might happen to me.

Moths in my clothes, little dog pawing at me…home sick for Whitstable, for Battersea Park..can we walk there together you and I?

Selling art-legitimate source of misery?  My friends didn’t want to buy my art.  They want to buy art from a legitimate source.  Funny.

Lying.  It’s a choice.  To tell the truth or lie?  It seems obvious doesn’t it?   Well, these muddled days, as Michael Moore reminded us when he picked up his Oscar, are ‘Lying times’.  Within a relationship there are all kinds of lies but I don’t want to tell HIM lies.  I just want him to know the truth.

The silence in the Malibu Mountains, the thudding base from the music playing in the apartment above my Hollywood apartment.   Both the silence and the interminable base making my head ache.   My head aches.

The questions that haunt me:  How could he have taken such a risk?   How can he be calling me to join him there and why am I listening?

One day I will write about FULL DISCLOSURE-a most unsavory practice.

I love you MR DARLING NYC-you are keeping me alive,  your love and your perfect smile are keeping the worst of these terrible demons from driving me to the gates of hell.

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