"The diamond that cuts through illusion."

Post Senate Fail, Whither 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'?

Yesterday New York magazine's Daily Intel blog ran my preview of what happens next in the effort to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." As Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, described it to me, the future looks bleak. So much for Lady Gaga.

Literariness: 'Cane' by Jean Toomer

I recently began my MFA studies in fiction writing at Rutgers, and for my literature course this semester on what's now known as the Harlem Renaissance, I read this genuine masterpiece of a book. Toomer was born into a black family but he later eschewed race as such, proclaiming himself to be neither black nor white but a member of the new "American" race. Nevertheless, Cane, based on the author's three-month stint as a temporary high-school principal in Sparta, Georgia, is widely regarded as the first literary classic of the "New Negro" movement that was taking shape at the book's publication in 1923. It's a zinging modernist text, split between narrative, poetry, and drama conveyed in sharply etched images, realistic dialogue, and potent symbols. Toomer's subject? The history and present of black life in the South during Jim Crow, counterposed and related to life up north as the Great Migration took off. A must-read for anyone concerned with canons or art.

Kele Okereke of Bloc Party: An Interview

I interviewed Bloc Party's Kele Okereke for New York mag's awesome Vulture blog. (He has a solo album out and played Webster Hall last night.) Kele appeared on the cover of Butt magazine in the spring, but he didn't want to talk about that. He did say, however, that James Baldwin is his favorite queer writer. "What he had to talk about was revolutionary."

Prior to Butt, he talked most candidly about his sexuality in a 2007 Guardian interview.

HIV/AIDS and Obama

Saw this ad from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation yesterday in DC, near the Farragut West Metro stop just up the street from the White House. It's one of 16 ads posted in bus shelters in the vicinity of POTUS's headquarters, and the numbers say it all: $6.5 billion spent on the global "war" on AIDS in 2010, versus $102 billion spent on the Afghan war. Not mentioned: the number of casualties related to each effort; I'd bet more people are dying of AIDS around the world than are dying because of the war in Afghanistan.

I wrote about Obama's lackluster AIDS funding to date in an op-ed for CNN in July. The campaign above launched August 9th.