BijouBlog

Posted by Madam Bubby

Vinyl is still around and actually thriving, especially in indie music and hipster circles, but I the same revival hasn't quite happened for the VHS, which means those old video tapes one sees in thrift stores may end up in landfills or supporting window air conditioners.

According to this source, Japan's Funai Electric, who claimed to be the last VCR manufacturer, stopped producing the machines several years ago, in July of 2016. This source also gives a brief history of the medium, which for readers of a certain age, will certainly bring back memories.

Beta tapes? Wow. I remember my Dad got every James Bond movie he could find on Beta. Yes, Beta, which did not last. What happened to all those Beta tapes?

And those bulky cameras. People started to get really obsessed with them, I remember, at least initially, and this before the days of easy selfies and youtube videos. Want a movie of someone eating mashed potatoes at a 1980s christening celebration? It's on a VHS tape, and probably now remastered digitally and streaming somewhere on youtube.

 

Some even attributed the supposed narcissism of Generation X and millenials to this phenomenon. Hey, can I see the tape of me when I was four throwing water balloons at the next door neighbor? Or how about when I got ten Atari video games for Christmas when I was ten and threw a tantrum (captured for time immemorial) because my brother got a more expensive one?

Digital hoarding perhaps started with the VCR. There was the woman on the show Hoarders taping constantly on a multitude of TVs. Think walls of tapes. Her son said, well, I guess if you want a Phil Donahue show from the 1980s, this is the place to go.

 

Of course, the advent of this medium totally revolutionized the porn industry. Instead of having to go to a porn theater like Chicago's late, great Bijou Theater, one could rent and even buy tapes and watch porn at home. Or even tape amateur porn. Porn creators made a killing for a while on these often very expensive tapes, but now with streaming and youtube, the sex exists in cyberspace rather than captured on a concrete medium like a VHS tape.

 

Will VHS make a comeback? Some grassroots indie artists and retro collectors may be rediscovering the medium (and also the major consumer movie format before video, Super 8 film). Is it the appeal of retro, or some other specific component of the medium? Time may tell.

25 years ago, Chicago experienced a deadly heat wave; 739 heat-related deaths occurred in Chicago over a period of five days. Most of the victims of were elderly, poor, and parallel to the demographic of the victims of coronavirus death toll, people of color, who could not afford air conditioning and did not open windows or sleep outside for fear of crime.

The hottest day was July 13, where the temperature soared to 106 °F (41 °C). The weather had been exceptionally hot and humid for some days before. At that point, I was working in an air conditioned office in at a low-level law firm support staff job.

I was also in the primal, exciting throes of my first major BDSM relationship (in fact, relationship of any kind), albeit a long-distance one (he lived in New York). Essentially, I was expending my energy on living LGBTQ rather than a career.

I had bought a condo. It was not air conditioned. I could not afford at that point to purchase and install the special air conditioner needed for a casement window.

 

After another boring day at the office, I figured I would take cold showers and sleep my way through it. If it got really bad, I was going to see If my brother would perhaps let me stay with him and his family (I was not counting on that option; family support was generally limited in scope during that period).

I got home. The electricity went out.

I called an elderly neighbor, one half of a gay couple in the building I was very good friends with. He said he was fine, and he was waiting for his partner to get home.

Then I remembered: a former friend of mine and I were scheduled to see a performance by a lesbian called The One-Woman Sound of Music.

He showed up at my place, and we were thinking, go to the play, which was in an air conditioned building with functioning electricity, come back to my place, and see what happens.

The play was literally a scream (her imitation of the Mother Superior saying “The borders have closed” especially), though the overly lecherous captain impersonation (too many jokes about “teddies”) was a bit coarse. Still, I was impressed with her energy and commitment.

 

Anyway, we got back to my place. No electricity.

We talked to my next door neighbors, who were fleeing down the staircase with luggage to find a motel.

My friend said, “You can’t stay here.” I fumbled for underwear, socks, and a shirt in the darkness, and we went to his place, a condo he shared with his somewhat … er … “older” partner.

I spent the night, the partner made frittatas in the morning, and by the afternoon I was back at my place. The lights were on. The humidity had decreased, I was getting a lake breeze, and I relaxed.

I called my partner/Sir in New York City, who told me to thank my friend. I called my elderly neighbor. He told me he was able to fall asleep, waking up only briefly bathed in sweat.

Meanwhile, an apocalyptic scenario was occurring. Just a couple blocks south of me, people had been trapped in elevators. Even in the gentrifying and gentrified north side of Chicago, swaths of neighborhoods were without electricity for a couple weeks. People slept outside and at the lake (according to my grandmother, a common occurrence in her life when air conditioning was primarily limited to movie theaters). Food rotted in refrigerators. People fled the city.

And people died. So many people in areas that I still have never visited.

Source: National Weather Association

 

A couple weeks after the event, I wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune, which was published. I claimed a “hot but cold” Midwestern culture of not knowing one’s neighbors and racial segregation was responsible. An anonymous person mailed me a piece of paper with Nazi symbols on it.

It’s almost become a cliché to talk about LGBTQ persons choosing a family, having to choose and build one because of familial and social rejection. I think the story reveals that like blood family, the “gay family” looks out for each other.

Compared to so many people who suffered in that heat wave, I lived a life of comparative privilege. What’s really tragic is that many who died couldn’t or even, in some cases, wouldn’t get help from not just their blood families, but from a human being. For them, the borders were indeed closed, and for many like them, they still are.

Recommended reading: Klinenberg, Eric (2002). Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

The current national anthem of the United States is extremely difficult to sing. As someone who has done some professional singing and is now currently trying to rejuvenate his voice, trust me on this one.

It keeps plunging down into low notes or what some vocal pedagogues call chest register, which can drag the rest of the voice down, and at the end, one is supposed to sing a high note on an “ee” vowel, “land of the free.” Because of this difficulty, it even gets transposed down even lower, which means it ends up sounding like a growling monotone.

The composer, Francis Scott Key, was aiming for a heroic line that matched the bombastic lyrics, and he perhaps was thinking of situation like those that occur at baseball games where one listens to trained singer sing it.

Times have changed in that manner, and unfortunately we have been subjected to travesties like the dreadful yowling of Roseanne, or in the manner of many pop singers, adding to what is already difficult by adding vocal turns and coloratura and the like (perhaps to keep the voice flowing as it tries to surmount the line’s irregular see-sawing movement).

Vocally it’s problematic, but regarding the text, many have complained about the militaristic imagery, especially “rockets’ red glare/bombs bursting in air.”

More significantly, given the social changes now occurring because of the Black Lives Matter movement, some activists say the United States should replace “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Its lyrics were written by Francis Scott Key, a slaveholding lawyer who expressed white supremacist views.

Songs that some have suggested as replacing it have included “America the Beautiful,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “My Country ‘tis of Thee” “God Bless America,” and “Lift Up Every Voice and Sing.” John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Dolly Parton’s “Color Me America” are also on the list.

See this link for some performances of the some of the above songs.

I have in the past tended to move with the “America the Beautiful” replacement crowd. Why? It’s easy to sing, with a range, and more significantly, meter that matches many of the hymns people were used to singing in church. In fact, it’s got the same meter as “Auld Lange Syne,” the common meter, which means one can sing the lyrics and melody for each song interchangeably.

Common hymn meter - Source: https://poemshape.wordpress.com/category/guides/about-common-ballad-meter/

 

Now, some have noted the text by Katherine Lee Bates tends to read like a travelogue or landscape; it doesn’t really proclaim and develop an idea as much as describe a landscape, vast mountains and plains and “spacious skies” surrounded by “shining sea.” But that’s the part of the lyrics we usually sing. There’s much more!

In 1893, there’s the verse:

God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free

Which was then changed in 1904 to:

May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine

The 1893 verse actually sounds more radical, given the context of the previous lines, which refer to “liberating strife,” which could refer to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, “once or twice” events that liberated Americans from “selfish gain.” Ultimately, war is vain and degrades the human person to a number, an impersonal body, rather than as earlier in the verse, “a precious life.”

Katherine Lee Bates - Source: https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/cambridge-harvard/katharine-lee-bates/

 

In 1904, and in a later revision in 1911, one encounters stereotypical imagery of heroes sacrificing themselves for America and tying in more the Manifest Destiny idea. The result of the liberating strife veers between martyrdom and material prosperity; I am getting more than a hint of the Prosperity Gospel. Success, in whatever shape or form, means one is blessed by God.

Overall, this conversation ultimately ends up being a “tough call,” and as the LGBTQ Pride Flag has now undergone a transformation to include people of color, one wonders if the traditional staples need to be cast aside as we confront the injuries in the name of those American, using Bates’ word, “glory tales” that oppress rather than liberate, enclose rather than include.

Update of the Pride flag with black & brown stripes introduced at 2017 Philadelphia Pride as an inclusionary revision highlighting people of color

2018 update of the Pride flag by artist Daniel Quasar that also includes the Trans Pride flag colors

 

Music moves flexibly in time; it’s not an immobile statue in physical space. As long as there is someone to sing a song, it will exist.

Ultimately, the act of singing itself is an act of vulnerability but also empowerment. Every time one sings, one re-creates, just as all are “crowned with good,” because they were created in the image of the Divine.

Greetings P(r)icksters,

Still sitting here with an idle shot glass. Illinois just moved to Phase 3 on reopening which allows for some businesses to reopen, restaurants to serve outdoor seating. Phase 4 will permit fuller openings, indoor dining and bars to open with strict limits on the number of patrons we can have at one time. Here in Chicago, we will move to Phase 3 next week and hope, hope, hope Phase 4 by the end of June.

This down time has given us at Touche some time to tackle a few projects that would have been hard to do if we were open. The big job is refinishing the main bar. The bar in the front room has wooden cabinets and front with black counters and bar top. There is a nice wooden bar rail that runs the length of the bar but years of elbows and such have worn down the finish.

So we began a couple of weeks ago to remove the cabinet doors, sand them down, re-stain them and then polyurethane layers to keep them clean. This past week, we began the project of stripping off the old bar countertop and then sanding down the top and bar rail. Today we finish this process by cleaning up all the dust.

Next week it will be time to stain the wood rail, then the polyurethane and, last, install the new countertop. Trying to do this with the bar open would have been a nightmare. We would have had to do it in sections to be able to serve and add several more days to complete. Guess there is one good thing about being shut down.

Since this past Memorial Day weekend would have been IML weekend in Chicago, we hosted a Zoom leather party on Saturday. It was my first time doing something like this and it seemed to go fairly well. We had about 100 folks log in during the three hour event, with many hanging around all night. Being new to Zoom, I did not fully realize that folks could message each other or the whole group at the start and was concerned why folks were visible but not seeming engaged. It finally dawned on me that they were busy chatting with each other.

Lots of compliments, “glad you hosted this” and more let me know that it was a success. I’ll be planning more in the next few weeks while we wait to get the bar back open.

Right now, I am finalizing plans for when we do reopen. Guidelines for reopening will limit our capacity to 50 people at one time, so there goes any thoughts about big events. We will just focus our attention on safety procedures for when we have guests, keeping seats and counters sanitized, etc. But the big changes will be how we operate with limited crowds.

First of all, we will limit the space open for customers. Touche has the main bar in the front and our Club Room bar in the back. This area was originally a garage behind the building - an auto shop, so it is fairly large. Years ago before this space became Touche, the previous owner had connected the two buildings and built a bar in the old garage space.

When we reopen, we will not open this back bar, keeping the crowd to the main bar. That way the place won’t look deserted when the small crowd spreads out between the two bar spaces. Plus I can save on the A/C back there, now that summer is here. along with the coolers running to keep beer cold.

Another change will be the crowd itself. Before the shutdown, you could see that guys were already staying home as the virus spread, and our numbers were coming down. One question will be how many are ready to venture back out once we reopen. Less travel means less visitors, too. So we may be lucky to get 50 guests at one time.

A third change would operating at a 50 person limit. Much as I hate to admit it, some folks feel they can hang at a bar without spending a dime. Going back to our days with the Great Lakes Bears, we’d have a packed house and a line of guys waiting to get in to the wee hours. After the demise of the GLB and competing bars for the bear crowd, we no longer had lines outdoors but still did about the same bar ring. This told me we had guys taking up space inside that were not drinking, or “sucking ice” as we call it.

To make sure we can make enough sales to stay profitable, we may institute a drink minimum on weekends to ensure that if you are in the house, you are supporting the house. It’s a whole new world.

While I am figuring out when we open and what we will do for fun, go ahead and grab my P(r)ick this Week and make your own fun. It’s warming up so let’s enjoy the great outdoors this week. My first P(r)ick this week is Rangers from Surge Studio. Directed by Al Parker himself, this 1984 outdoor epic (shot in the Sierras) focuses on the exploits of the ever-vigilant, ever-patrolling park rangers (beefy, tattooed Chris West and lean Nick Rodgers) and the campers they come across.

Moving from the Sierras to northern California, my second P(r)ick this week is California Blue from 1983. The late, great cutie Scott O'Hara (the of the one time Biggest Dick in San Francisco) stars in and narrates this excellent little collection of sun-soaked scenes. This vintage gay porn movie is set in California, with beaches, redwood forests and the like, and it's definitely blue.

Enjoy a Bijou Classic to beat the stay-at-home blues (and beat something else).

David

To order from Bijou, visit bijouworld.com, call 800-932-7111, or email bijou.orders@gmail.com

When I journeyed to New York for the first time in 1994 for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I ended up the night before the parade at a wild sex/play party with a hot leather BDSM top I had just met at a dance in the Armory. The location of the party was in some area of the East Village, I think. When I saw the purple and green walls and the coked up bouncer, my first thought was I was in some kind of Fellini movie.

And then I saw it: the orgy. I couldn’t even distinguish the faces, even characteristics of the individual bodies; the guys groping and pulling and grimacing seems liked one writhing body. I was both attracted and repelled. My new friend and I looked at each other curiously; we tried to mask our insecurities in thinking we were above such lowly, ordinary lusts. My friend would have wanted to separate that group, tie up some of the hot ones with the rope he was carrying; he would contain, tame, and dominate that energy, that fervid rhythm. Yes, there would be pleasure, but not equality. He would break any boundaries, and they would follow him, succumb to his power.

Orgy scenes from 10:30 P.M. Monday, Turned On!, The Goodjac Chronicles, and Closed Set

 

Elias Canetti in his profound study of crowd behavior Crowds and Power claims that humans’ instinctive drive to participate in the power of the crowd comes from something at one level simple, something we don’t always think about consciously, rhythm, but the rhythm of footsteps. He makes the observation that we walk on two legs, but the feet attached to the legs strike the ground. A person can only movie if they continue to make this action.

And, those “two feet never strike the ground with exactly the same force.” We are different yet the same, and when persons listen to and in some cases merge into the footsteps of others, including animals that naturally congregate in herds, he was drawn to do the same, feeling that power, that ”invincible unity.”

Canetti analyzes a description of the Haka dance of the New Zealand Maoris, originally a war dance, but now performed by rugby teams as both a warm-up team spirit exercise before the game, and, after the game, a victory dance.

Haka dance - Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/10/14/haka-rugby- world-cup_n_8290712.html

 

What’s interesting is in its original situation as the war dance, the performers were naked. And after much showing off of individual agility, including some form of “perpendicular jump,” the dance escalates to a paradoxically frenzied yet controlled unity of movement; Canetti writes, “it is as though each body was taken to pieces, not only the arms and legs, but also the fingers, toes, tongues, and eyes; and then all the tongues got together, and did exactly the same things at the same moment; all the toes and all the eyes become equal in one and the same enterprise.” They are separate bodies, but it looks as if it one body with many limbs and heads. They are dense, equal, one. Yet ultimately it is a performance, done in times when the culture as a whole encounters boundary moments such as welcoming visitors, funerals, and communal feasts.

The literal hunt for the herd eventually became various forms of the dance, a release of that primal energy that for a brief moment blurs cultural boundaries that deter the power of the crowd, displace and deflect the power away from persons onto computers.

Rather than initiating rhythm from what we heard and felt in those original footsteps, we now try to contain it by digitizing it. It is seen, but we can’t always see who is seeing. Everything becomes a performance, but that means nothing really is one in the new world of Zoom.

Group Zoom meeting - Source: https://www.timeout.com/things-to-do/best-things-to-do-at-home- stuck-inside-bored

 

I just can’t imagine a Zoom orgy, BDSM play party, or even Haka dance. The separate but apart dynamic implodes, and it’s not just because of the physical dimension obviously isn’t there; what’s lacking is that feeling of invincible unity based on rhythm and density. Imagining yourself as a participant of course can evoke that feeling, but it’s like an imitation of an imitation. And you are alone. Not even lonely in a crowd.