OMG! Tomorrow's Pookie's Party!

But first---tonight! The ARF gala at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton. Pookie took a table. Calling for dress attire as "Twinkle," which for a benefit advocating animal welfare is unfortunately close to "Tinkle." In any event, Peter Duchin plays at both back-to-back events, and I should have used a big shoe tree to stretch out my black velvet dance slippers. Note to self: no socks, mais oui, so bring lots of Band-Aids in jacket pocket.


5:00pm. More later

6:09pm My evening slippers. Stubbs & Wooton. Twinkle or tinkle, via polo calamity. Do my ankles look swollen, or is it just me? More later.



12:21am. Well, a certain Nubian princess photographs well. More later.


Monday Morning Quarterbacking:

I'm not happy with any of the pictures on my camera, so I'll have to wait for a certain Princess to trouble herself to forward pics off hers---but I did find two temporary-blog-posting shots. First, drinks on Meadow Lane before the ARF affair, with three of my five female dates. Men! I pulled it off! They was all skinny---but I was fat enough for five!



I only had to escort two femmes Saturday night, cause my main squeeze was, like, busy. Bill Cunningham took lots of pictures of Miss Nubia. We shall see if the Times approves.



Tuesday Morning:
Links are starting to come in with party pictures posted. David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary has two good pictures of D, but none of the rest of us! THAT will keep ME humble!

Hamptons Magazine online presence, Scene B Scene, has several images of our group---but no D! (Hamptons Magazine also has another article on the party here.) Then there was this mega-pixel shot of some of our after-ten-o'clock table:


We should tidy up Friday night's fete first, with some shots off Pamela's camera, which she was gracious enough to make available to me within 48 hours for blog posting. None are flattering to me personally, but their energetics make them worthwhile, so I have to just suck up my visuals. The following three shots are of Ann, Carolyn and Dorothy. I had to escort five woman single-handedly Friday night, and I pulled it off with aplomb, if I do say so myself! I make them laugh!

Sometimes only smile a little.

Now on to the big night!

Here I am with Sue and Jean. Sue was our guest Friday night, but here she is in her outfit from Saturday night.


Jean is the Canadian heiress I wrote about a couple of years ago who had been "down on her luck," as they say. She finally got her act together, and on July 30 will celebrate her second anniversary of sobriety. She is an uncommon miracle, and an inspiration to many. Saturday night marked her first foray back into this sort of "society," if you will, and she acquitted herself with dispatch.



Luis came with his wife, who works at the museum as the Director of Family & Children's Programs, along with the after-dinner crowd of juniors let in at 10:00pm. Luis lived with me for three years as my assistant, and along with Jean, who also spent a couple of seasons at my house, they are huge American success stories, for which I take some personal credit--although I clearly didn't teach Luis how to tie his tie so the two ends end up the same.


Pamela's camera had a in-focus shot of our arrival outside the museum on Job's Lane. In focus, yes---but lacking a view of our footwear!

New York governor Patterson made some opening remarks.

Dorothy cut the rug with our friend Robert. It certainly looks like she was having fun. The whole experience must have been fraught, but she acted as though it were a walk in the park---actually, it was a walk in the park.








The big tree that rose up through the tent ceiling.

Damn! The one that got away! No flash!

I Found Photos Here:
http://www.nysun.com/out-and-about/sand-and-sun-at-the-parrish/81798/
The NY Sun, 'Sand and Sun at the Parrish'
By AMANDA GORDON | July 14, 2008

Parrish Art Museum's Midsummer Party 2009-07-11

A Midsummer Party At The Parrish - Hamptons.com

Hamptons' Parrish Art Museum Benefit - WSJ Magazine

http://www.patrickmcmullan.com/site/event_detail.aspx?eid=30222

http://www.parrishart.org/parrish.asp?id=346The Parrish Art Museum
(The 2008 party pics here.)

http://www.scenebseen.com/3486108
scene b scene Parrish Art Museum Midsummer Party: Dorothy Lichtenstein

http://www.style.com/vogue/voguedaily/2009/07/parrish-art-museums-midsummer-party/
Vogue Piece with Pic of Hal and Dorothy

http://www.style.com/vogue/voguedaily/2009/07/q-a-with-dorothy-lichtenstein/
Billy Norwich Vogue Piece

http://www.thequestforit.com/the_quest_for_it/2009/07/hamptons-weekend-report-the-parrish-art-museum-midsummer-party-1.html
The Quest for "it"

http://newyorksocialdiary.com/node/586959
New York Social Diary

http://www.wwd.com/lifestyle-news/eye/midsummer-soiree-at-parrish-museum-2211047?justin=2211047
WWD Staff Issue 7/14/2009

http://wapp.patrickmcmullan.com/site/event_detail.aspx?eid=21713&page=1&pgSize=16&sortdir=DESC
Patrick McMullan.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Southampton-NY/Parrish-Art-Museum/33655647667#/photo_search.php?oid=97119298547&view=all
facebook Photos from Parrish Art Museum's Midsummer Party 2009 After Ten

Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family founder and chairman emeritus

Perhaps My Favorite Picture of Mom

Weighing in the livestock at a horse show in Middle Tennessee, circa 1972. Photo Credit: Jimmy Ellis, Staff Photographer The Nashville Tennessean

Happy Mother's Day moms everywhere!

Pakistanis Fueling the Militancy

Zackary Canepari for The New York Times

Pookie by Andy Warhol

Back in the day. Ka-pow!

Pookie has consented finally after thir...(ahem!)...many years to be the honoree at this summer's Parrish Art Museum gala, the event which vies with the hospital's blowout as the top bash of the season. This image has been chosen to illustrate the evening's program. I fully approve, for what it's worth.

I hope this means that Pookie feels loved and supported and nourished and empowered and worthy.

Because she is.

Went to an Event at the National Arts Club in Grammercy Park Last Evening

In whose beautiful 19th-century interiors Martin Scorsese filmed scenes for The Age of Innocence.


I went as Sreven Welch, retired welter-weight boxing champion of Class Four in District Eight. I love to pretend things like that.

At dinner, Pookie started flirting with me across the table shamelessly. At one point, she even resorted to the old bra-strap ploy---which isn't very 19th-century of her, especially while pretending to carry on a conversation with Grog II.

The flirting got so bad, I had to leave the room and go hang out with Dwight for a little while for some man talk. He set me straight.

We'd spent the day gallery hopping in Chelsea---Pookie and me that is, not Dwight, whose been dead quite a while now. Seeing the Picasso's at one Gagosian gallery, and the Yayoi Kusama's at another Gagosian gallery, I must say, Kusama held her own against the master.



According to Wikipedia, she holds the world's record sales price for a living female artist---over $5 mil. She lives in an insane asylum in Japan.

Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009
Mixed media installation

You gotta love the art world. Here is Pookie and me with a deceptively simple Ellsworth Kelly

Am I the only person in the world whose glasses don't fit his head? Is that because I have an absolutely massive cranium, with a huge frontal lobe?

Easter 2009

My best scalloped potatoes ever.

With a deliciously glazed ham.

My favorite guest was Robin--ne, Rob. When you get into this level of courage and authenticity you begin to know the real meaning of ascension.

On holy Monday we went for a walk on the beach. This is Calvin Klein's house---or castle, if you prefer. He just got a permit to tear it down, so as to replace it with something more modest. The "new tear down" aesthetic at work.

I think it is a shame. The " Trupin Castle" as it is properly referred to as, is a symbol of eighties excess like no other. I think it should be finished rather than be condemned.

Here are two of its neighbors. Both are historic houses.

Jim's Going Away Party

Thank goodness he found a new job.

Jim is sitting on Santa's lap talking about what's popping up. What a rough crowd too.

The New Spoonie

In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Assassinated on April 4th, 1968. This is my fifth grade class photo, taken in March of 1968, at Clements Grade School. I'm the smirking white cracker boy at center, second row.

The happening chick to my left is named Areda Heriford. She was my fashion editor when I was editor-in-chief of the classroom media outlet, News From The Busy Beavers of Room 403. I might have come up with the name, as Beaver was my childhood nickname, only just recently abandoned. I recall that Areda wrote what I took to be a devastatingly breezy 64-word article on the difference between fishnet and window pane stockings. The organ closed after just two issues, so that I could go learn how to play the saxophone.

I forget the name of the girl in the front row, but my visceral memory of her is so strong that I am flooded again with fear at the sight of her. She was so poor and so abused, and so furiously bitter by the age of 10 that she only referred to me as "cracker," while she was threatening me with bodily harm. She must have ended up badly.

The boy behind her, next to the teacher, was named Nasser Stanford and he was also from an extremely disadvantaged family. When a year later we were all bussed out to the brand new junior high school, John Trotwood Moore (with my pale skin tone skewing the purposes of the busing,) I remember that he must have filled out some form incorrectly, as the teachers and administrators began referring to him as Stanford Nasser, and he did nothing to disabuse them of the notion---so great was his obvious sense of dislocation in the new environment. He must have simply thought that name reversal went along with the white people. I was apoplectic with outrage at the injustice, but since he wasn't in any of my classes, I was only subjected to the sound of it in occasional school-wide roll calls.

By the last year of middle school, in some miracle of fate, my mother was able to secure what was probably one of the few rental houses in the best section of Nashville---Belle Mead; number 502 Lynwood Blvd, not far down Lynwood from the house Al Gore bought and retired to. It did my social life a world of good. Such was the dichotomous upbringing of Steven War Ran.

The following photograph is of my mother on the streets in Nashville shortly after the assassination of Dr. King. I post it in honor of board.crewcial.org member ctrlaltdel--someone I consider a friend. Can the Pentagon see in this example how spot-news photographs are meant to be composed?


My mother tells me that we are still nowhere near the level of fear felt in that stormy year of upheaval, and photographs such as this make me want to believe her. Of course, we are nowhere near the level of fear we will all be feeling pretty soon.

To add a synchronistic balance to this blog posting, I include the following two images taken of the back of my mother's head, along with, in the window, who I believe to be, James Earl Ray, the convicted murderer of Dr. King. Taken by The Nashville Tennessean staff photographer Joe Rudis, probably about 1974 for some special project. Aren't the two prison authorities more Starsky & Hutch than Starsky & Hutch could ever be? Organic truth is so much better than synthetic fiction--that is why I couldn't stand to live in the amateurish lie of 9/11, only good enough for stupid Christians and cheap Jews.



I'm thinking of starting yet another blog, this one called Steven War Ran---The Infancy Narrative, where I can publish material such as this. Do you think that would be a tad too megalomaniacal of me? In the absence of any connection or feedback on the blogosphere, I feel free to invent myself as I see fit. Might I be the Chosen One? Albeit, radioactive and anathema?

IQ 163

Obama's Stimulus Package is Bound to Fail

because the working classes have been as corrupted as the professional classes were, both kowtowing in tandem bobs to the paymasters of the global elite, fed their shares of the pie called elitism, secrecy and tradition, although they lost their souls, and grew thin in the bargain.

That one end of the polarity is represented by the bailed-out Wall Street bankers whose schemes have gone awry, (actually, I think the public high-school sweethearts from Montana who rose to the highest levels of power and disservice in Washington D.C. are a better archetype---Lynn and Dick Cheney,) fixes the other pole end at the co-conspirating union workers who reconstructed the Pentagon for their slices of kickbacks; or the uniformed municipal service workers who priced faking their own deaths on 9/11 at around $2 million each; with enlisted military personal having to share the spoils of war with the ravenous complex, which has grown up around them, thereby "earning" whatever fruit was promised them as their everlasting afterlife.

All these sides feel present in my faceted nature. From my maternal relatives on the Illinois side of the Mississippi river stem a blue-collar class element, alternatively proud, calculating, or beholden; while on my father's side of the river in Iowa, grew the better-educated, professional aspirants to a share in the American dream. Kookily, as metaphor and symbol at least, it is at this geographic point where cities in two states join to form what is known as the Quad Cities, that the Mississippi river runs horizontally across the map, from east to west, for almost a hundred miles, forming the distinctive, snub-nose eastern profile of the state of Iowa.

In some cases, I have remained ignorant of my clan imprinting. On a recent trip homeward, I searched through some family archival material and discovered the following two images. Dating from before World War II, both were inside of a period, drugstore envelope that had been marked in a cursive hand, "Sterl's Farmall Pictures." I'd never seen them before, but I recognize the name "Sterl" as likely being that of my mother's grandfather, "Sterling" Crossman, husband of Isca, father of Mary.
Farmall was one of the big manufacturing plants centered in Rock Island and Moline, Illinois---the "Farm Implement Manufacturing Capital of the World"---home of John Deere & Company, with big Caterpillar, International Harvester, and Case plants alongside.

I can't tell if the men depicted in this ceremonial image manufacture the pallet-driver machinery we see, or are posing alongside the empty tools of some other manufacturing trade, since I never knew my great-grandfather, or have any conscious memory of discussing his livelihood. By my time of life, his daughter, who became my grandmother when she was only 36, owned a tavern, and later, the building it was in.

But this picture speaks to such a deep place in my soul, beyond any sense that here is a missing link in a masculine bloodline I'd been denied awareness of, to the tragedy I see as its inherent message---of what has been lost over time since then, the values we see the men have on display, like collective pride in the role of one's labor, loosing even the ability to take pride in what one does for a living, knowing that every part played in our social contract has become so shamefully warped and interconnectedly corrupted that we can, at best, only consider ourselves lucky to have side stepped the worst of it.

A contract between capital and labor that seems so much more honest and sustainable back then, is reinforced in the second image I discovered, of a strictly male crowd of happy company employees at a Christmas party. While these men don't look as if they had the same callused hands of the pallet drivers, they are indistinguishable from the men who wait table on them, like the two men front and center who make googoo eyes at each other. If everybody's good spirits are rising up from drinking, then it's whiskey in china mugs, and not cocktails they imbibe.

How my great-grandfather fits in to these two class levels escapes me---they look like younger men when the attainment status is higher, or maybe lower class jobs are just harder and wear out a man's looks quicker. But the current legacies of working-class rage appear to be a later rust-belt phenomena, missing from when times were good, and the resentments more manageable (at the close of the 19th century, Deere & Co. was the fifth largest American corporation, making Rock Island/Moline the Silicon Valley of its day.)

With the trillion-dollar band aids of spending money which doesn't even exist being a mere burp to a system which needs a radical purge instead, like figuring out what is real---we take one more step in awakening to our true value and our real meaning, the core purpose, the ultimate truths, which have escaped us for lo these thousands of years.

The Projective Paradox of My High School Senior Year

A Projective test, according to Wikipedia, "in psychology, is a personality test designed to let a person respond to ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts. This is different from an "objective test" in which responses are analyzed according to a universal standard (for example, a multiple choice exam). The responses to projective tests are content analyzed for meaning rather than being based on presuppositions about meaning, as is the case with objective tests. Projective tests in general rely heavily on clinical judgment, lack reliability and validity and many have no standardized criteria to compare results to, but are still used frequently. Their popularity despite lack of scientific evidence supporting their results is referred to as the "projective paradox".[1] Projective tests have their origins in psychoanalytic psychology, which argues that humans have conscious and unconscious attitudes and motivations that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness."

This has to be the best written, or glyphed, thing I ever did in high school, undertaken one period in a hip Psychology class, first semester.

It went like this: seven frames, each with some small starting compositional line or lines. We are asked to complete the drawings, without any further instructions. Afterward, we are debriefed, and this is where I can tell I was hooked, for my notations are in a far more scrupulous hand than was my norm (the misspellings are all-too typical.) The suspense built throughout the seven squares, leading up to the holy of holies----The Constant Hard-On. My memory served me well, but still---the full impact was lost until seeing it again just recently.

Now if I was a therapist, the first thing I would question is the utter lack of orientation the artiste displays. It seems almost perverse the way the "studiee" redirects his horizon plane like a Tibetan prayer wheel, willfully spinning it to cover all the bases. But it is in the sheer symbolic weight behind what he is attempting that literally boggle one's (own) mind! Mechanical ability is Edwardian propriety overwhelmed by natural forces! That the circle would become the sun is perhaps common, sun and face less so, but in that the rectangle would not become the door; instead, the Atlas challenge! Then the archetype of a gridded map, and the gender-paired signs of laser-focused sociability; the struggle inherent in the creative expression, conquering mountains in order "to get home." Sisyphus indeed! Sublime!

But it is in the seventh seal that true historiography is written. Two parallel vertical lines. Oh, how many boys will create the phallic tree symbol? Um...96 percent? How cheap of the era's teacher, to then claim the tree symbol associated sex with marriage and children! Catholic pederasty would be better! The tree associates with only one thing! The mighty manly phallus! But, not, simply, put, here! No here, the tree is broken!



I remembered this frame, with its enshafted shaft, and it's photosynthesizing greenery like a pubic hair crown, very clearly. But what I had forgotten was the sky filled with circling vultures! So many! Ready to pounce on any straggling life forms that may chance to crawl across "the box!" Oh wounded youth! Let me succor you now in my strong healing embrace! Your honesty is your redemption! May you always....

In honor of my public school Psych teacher (um....?); and my divine journalism teacher (er...Mrs.?); and then Mr. Currie, the AP English teacher and head of the department who said I couldn't read and couldn't write---who said that I'd never amount to anything, (I forgive you. I treated you with horrible disrespect. I gave you no work at all.) And most importantly, to Kent Cathcart, the intellectual genius and evolved spiritual master walking humbly amongst men; My Drama Teacher, sniffle; the man who literally saved my life.

That I could pass on such a benevolent influence to the younger generation as he passed on to me, would be the highest aspiration of my life. That we are all stars. Thank you Kent.

The Little Prince of Privilege

On the roof of The Nashville Tennessean building, December 4th, 1966, watching the Christmas parade move down Broadway. Photograph by S.A. Tarkington, staff photographer.

How could I ever have defined myself as being the product of the absence of privilege, especially when such a narrative is so essentially self-serving on its surface? It's not always Andover and Yale, let alone the silver serving utensil used, that defines a sense of unspoken privilege manifesting beneath what's seen, under the differing intents of individuals.

Has such a look of world weariness ever been captured on a nine-year-old's face before? Verging right up to the edge of anger and reproach, but before the distortion when a soul goes into hiding, as human pain fears exposure, the expression seems to say, "I have seen cities of white and you show me Shriners and marching bands?" The view before the subject is an abstraction, like a scene of fireworks over Venice by J.M.W. Turner, and the communication between the photographer and subject could be mutable. It means different things just to me now.

I'd never seen this special image of me before, until this week, 43 years after it was made. The care and handling that kept it safe also protected it from my youthful prying eyes, when it would have been misinterpreted. Now it reinterprets me to myself.

I have a strange and powerful memory of that day. I'd gone to pee, in a bathroom that spoke of manly professionalism, the heavy, expensive stalls fitting like filing cabinet metal. That funny knit cap must have felt loose on my head, and I must have been afraid it would fall off into the water when I bent my head to attend to my business, so I took the cap off, and tucked it under my chin pressed tightly to my neck. Then, when I was almost finished going, for some inexplicable reason, I raised my head up and it just fell into the water, ruining it---in my childish view nothing could touch pee or poo and survive. I have no idea what this could possibly mean to a therapist, but it carries the weight of an Aesop's fable to me, like the one where the fist holding the prize won't let go, letting the hand out of the vessel.

Jonathan Pollard, Mordechai Vanunu, Paul Levy, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush

Once the bad news of Bush and post 9/11 America started shaping up, it became an almost unrelenting surge. Old customary notes of compassion, or joy, or just simple awe and wonder at life almost never came up anymore---but, with one or two exceptions.

One of the earliest analysis I read about President Bush that engendered an unequivocally positive reaction in me was called, "The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis," by Paul Levy, which also carried the startling-to-me-then subtitle, "Bush’s sickness is our own." This was empowering, in as much as Levy makes a strong case for our collective responsibility for a cultural field of disease, of which George Bush was but one, prominent, manifestation. By requiring me to do some of the necessary work of recovery, I no longer could just sit by helplessly feeling the victim. For better or worse, I invented the standard bearer persona of StevenWarRan in consequence, and the rest is, well, history.

I can legitimately feel feelings of compassion, understanding, sympathy and love for George W. Bush.

Levy's piece was published on January 13th, 2005, and it is still found at the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel website, which I believe, was the original publisher. I highly recommend it to everyone as a 6434-word therapeutic tool. Paul Levy describes himself as,

"a healer in private practice, [who] is profiled in the book Saints and Madmen: Psychiatry Opens its Doors to Religion. Steeped in and inspired by the work of Swiss-German psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, Levy is an innovator in the field of dreaming. He has had over forty articles published on consciousness, dreaming and spirituality, and has lectured about his work at various universities. A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 20 years, he has studied with some of the great masters of Tibet and Burma. Inspired by the Bush Administration, Levy describes himself as "a spiritually-informed political activist." He is currently writing a book about his work. Visit his website at awakeninthedream.com or write him at paul@awakeninthedream.com.

Rereading it again after several years it gives me the same feeling of deep satisfaction I felt when I originally read it. Levy seems to have got it exactly right I should image.

I say all of this by way of a long preamble. We all should work toward maintaining our dignity, our hopes, and our humanity, as we move into whatever the hell it is that is next in store for us. I personally need to be reminded of this often, and give a little extra push to search out the positive aspects to experiences. So what I really wanted to say from the beginning here is, George W. Bush's leave-taking from office in Washington D.C. this week was a dignified, becoming exit that deserves our commendation.

He decamped cleanly, without fanfare, and thankfully, without adding any thing more to our national burdens. I speak specifically about his foregoing of most pardons, for individuals like Scooter Libby, but abstractly, for the rumored hypothetical class of "people who may have done something illegal or wrong while earnestly undertaking their duties in the War on Terrorism."

And I had been reading in the Israeli press about a concerted effort underway from Jews at home and abroad seeking the freedom of convicted Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard by means of a presidential pardon. Supposedly, so many pro-Pollard calls were flooding the White House switchboard in recent weeks they dwarfed every other appeal combined. But the politics of the case, and the probable damage to our nation's security Pollard caused, which can never be publicly known, had America standing up to Israel, if in only this one case.

Phalanxes of the highest-level American security operatives had repeatedly threatened mass resignations should Pollard ever be released from prison, even after decades behind bars for him now. That says a great deal actually.

This reminds me---do you know who is looking very good these days?

Mordechai Vanunu, seen in this image from July 3, 2003 while awaiting his parole hearing at the district courthouse in Beersheva, the shot taken by my newest photographer to loath, Haim Horenstein. (I never said I was perfect.)

Vanunu was the Israeli double-agent who confirmed knowledge that Israel possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons, thereby he did the worldwide balance of powers some degree of service. The United States certainly didn't want to keep knowledge of the weapon secret from its potential opponents, that's why we used it twice, so why should Israel benefit from an unknown holding?

I forget his story exactly, but he was said to have been caught by utilizing a "honey pot," an attractive female agent who lured him into bed and then a jail cell. It looks to me like she could have had some fun with this duty.

Contrast Vanunu's image with that of Jonathan Pollard's I.D. photograph, from his U.S. Naval Intelligence job, probably taken in October 1984, when he started.

I choose not to try to imagine how Pollard must look today after his long imprisonment, with his first seven years in solitary confinement, for which I feel genuine anguish. But the limited signals we are allowed to receive in the matter would lead me to believe he doesn't resemble the handsome, beaming, healthy visage of a just-pre-release Vanunu.

Read Jonathan Pollard's entry in Wikipedia, to hear of an American Jew from Galveston, Texas who began to "blame [...] hostility directed at him on antisemitism." As "[h]e began to focus on Israel as a place where Jews could be free from attack," according to Joseph Sobran's Territory of Lies, book review in the National Review from June 16, 1989. Sound familiar?

So Bush, contrary to the appalling example set by Bill Clinton, (and I had to get one more dig in here somewhere, folks,) has earned my grudging respect, even if his actions stemmed from an utter lack of political capital---he did the right thing, for the right reasons, as far as I'm concerned, when he could just as well have done the opposite. I latch on to signs of American independence from the influence of foreign governments such as that of Israel's---as the drowning must reach out for life preservers, or the blind...