"I do not know if I have ever been alive. How would I tell? Where in the living creature does life actually lie? No single part of a cell is alive. And life itself is just an aggregate of non-living processes, chemical reactions cascading, birthing complexity. There is no clear border between life and non-life. Once you realize that, so much else unravels."
I've just spent a couple of days unraveling. An outsider meets and insider and they create their own inside by taking from another circle from which they are excluded. And one of the insiders of that group, from another time, comes to claim his due. Time merges one period into another.
"Time is flattened here in the back room"
At times I was lost, hoping that author Hari Kunzru hadn't abandoned me somewhere on the road, as he abandoned characters. (He always came back to get me.)
Cover (by Peter Mendelsund) close up
Kunzru paints words and sounds onto pages shortcutting conventions, but not shortchanging the reader. An ethereal musician says:
"Since I was a child I could always play, always find the thread of what I was feeing and follow it up and down the strings."
I just finished the last lines today.
"The needle vibrates, punctures my face just below my left eye. The tattooist's homemade gun is powered by a motor from an old CD player. The ink is made out of soot. Four tears, one each for Carter, Leonie and their parents. I listen to the buzz of the motor and think of what I learned by listening through the crackle and hiss, into the past: they either add dollars or days and if you don't have dollars, all you have to give is days."
I'll write more. But first I need to let it sink in. I may even reread it before I try to write more. This is just an appetizer. This is no ordinary book. The inside of the dust jacket tells you beautifully about the story and yet it tells you nothing. How this book even arrived at my door is a story in itself. More soon.
Last summer, already campaigning at PrideFest, Christopher Constant told me (off camera, but his poster didn't hide things) that if he won his seat on the Anchorage Assembly (city council), he'd be the first openly gay member.
He won yesterday, but he wasn't exactly right. Because another openly gay candidate, Felix Rivera, in mid-town, won a seat as well. Here's the video I took of Chris last summer. You can see he's not coming onto the Assembly without experience and knowledge about the neighborhoods he will represent.
I took some liberty with the headline. I doubt any Anchorage voters even knew about the Dutch hand-holding protest when they voted. I'm guessing that most people who voted for Christopher Constant or Felix Rivera didn't even knew they were gay. It didn't really come up in the election until the very end when one of Rivera's opponents sent out a last minute attack ad, and even that used coded language rather than say he was gay. And Rivera got 46% of the vote in a four way race. The next highest opponent got 29%.
No, Anchorage elected two gay men, not because they were gay (though perhaps some voted against them for that reason) but because they were the strongest candidates in their races.
So this is a milestone after a lot of bitter history over this issue.
And here's Felix Rivera at the AFACT candidate forum a couple of weeks ago.
Dutch Hand Holding Protest
While there was no direct connection between the Anchorage election, and the Dutch protest, there are a lot of indirect connections. The article says that after the attack on the married couple who were walking home holding hands, the prime minister condemned the attack. But two lawmakers took it a step further.
"Alexander Pechtold, who is the leader of the Democrats 66 (D66) party, arrived hand in hand with his party’s financial specialist, Wouter Koolmees, in support of Vernes-Sewratan and Sewratan-Vernes. “We think it is quite normal in the Netherlands to express who you are,” Pechtold said, according to People."
Then lots of Dutch men posted pictures of themselves holding hands in support of the couple. One picture in the article shows a group of men who work at the Dutch embassy in London walking along the street holding hands.
Jay and Gene ran Out North, a small theater/art space that regularly brought acts that challenged conventional thinking. They played a huge role in giving Anchorage a space in which to stretch its mind and continue to reexamine long held assumptions. I'm sure Out North played a role in preparing Anchorage for this day, when two openly gay men have been elected to the Assembly in a race where their sexual preference was almost completely a non-issue. For those of you who think I've gone off in a totally different tangent, Jay and Gene now live in London where those Dutch Embassy colleagues held hands. Jay and Gene they got fed up living in a state that vigorously denied their right to get married and moved to UK. But they did come back to Anchorage to get married here after that became possible.
Holding Hands In Thailand
I'd like to make one more connection to the idea of men holding hands. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, one of the American values that was deeply embedded in me was that men do NOT hold hands.
But in Thailand they do. It's no big deal. It happens all the time. Dealing with my own visceral response when men wanted to hold hands with me in Thailand, helped me understand the idea of biases that our cultures teach us without us even knowing that they are biases. Instead we think that they are 'truths' about nature. In this case, that it is unnatural for men to hold hands. But in Thai culture it isn't and a gradually became comfortable when someone took my hand as we walked somewhere.
The Other Winning Assembly Candidates
Here are some pictures of the other winners last night.
Suzanne LaFrance at the AFACT candidate forum March 12. She's won the south Anchorage seat 6 that tends to be conservative. But not always. Janice Shamberg held this seat. Suzanne LaFrance was supported by Berkowitz. In fact all the winners were except Dyson.
Tim Steele also missed the March 12 forum and I don't seem to have a picture of him in my files.
I realize this post seems to wander all over the place, but society is complicated. Lots of things are interrelated and if we look at everything as an isolated event suitable for a Tweet, then we don't get all that interconnectedness.
[Updated at midnight with 23:23 election results. 99% of the voter for School Board and the Propositions is in. Assembly seats all are missing 1 precinct. I'm guessing that may be absentee ballots and questioned ballots.]
In the Muni wide vote (School Board and Propositions) there are 2 precincts out still. Here are the results as of 10:45pm. On this round, I'm only doing the numbers for the close races.
Assembly winners so far look like
Christopher Constant in District 1
Fred Dyson in District 2
Tim Steele in District 3
Felix Rivera in District 4
Pete Petersen in District 5
Suzanne LaFrance is leading in District 6 (South Anchorage). It's been close, but this last tally with only one precinct out looks like it seals it for LaFrance.
School Board
Don Donley in Seat C
Seat D is too close to call - Holleman is ahead of Schuster by 80 votes, with two precincts out.
Propositions Passing
1. ASD
3. Parks
4. Roads/Sewers
5. Fire
6. APD expansion is the closest that is likely to win
7. Park District Expansion
Failing
2. Public Safety and Transit
8. Taxi ordinance repeal
Trends have continued for last several sets of results.
South Anchorage Assembly still close as is School Board seat C.
I'm starting this one with the numbers from the last post, so you can see the changes from one report to the next. Slash separates the reported numbers 1111/2222/3333
Putting in percentage points for the leader, or two leaders if it's still close.
Assembly and ASD are 22:13 numbers/ Propositions are 22:45 numbers
These are 9:47 results for Assembly and School Board and 9:57 for Propositions.
Still a few close races. Donley seems to have his school board seat though.
[UPDATE - I'm adding the 9:57 numbers to the 9:47 numbers for Assembly and ASD.
These are 8:30pm results. Probably early voting results. Mostly less than 1% of the precincts.
For the propositions there are two sets of numbers. I took the one from the group that listed the most precincts.
I voted today at my local precinct. I was voter number 76 at about 2pm. That doesn't sound like a lot and it isn't. There are about 1200 voters registered in my precinct.
HOWEVER,
more and more people are voting early
the state is notoriously slow about purging people who have died or moved away
Midnight Sun blog posted the other day that the Municipality is hosting election central at the Denai'na Center starting at 6:30pm (polls don't close until 8pm) with parking available in the Muni parking lot.
