Beaus, Buddies, Bachiana, Blow Jobs & Other Interesting Things

I am happy to report that I successfully beat the case of The Blahs I told you about in yesterday's post.  However, I was remiss in reporting that yesterday was the Tenth Anniversary of Marriage Equality in the state of Massachusetts.  In the ten years since the Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down that state's ban on Same Sex Marriage many things have happened.  Gay people got married and the world did not end.  No harm has been done to any 'traditional' marriage because LGBT folks were allowed to join the matrimony club.  The divorce rate in Massachusetts actually went down until they now have the lowest divorce rate in the nation.  Nationwide, only 13% of Same Sex Marriages end in divorce while 52% of 'traditional' marriages end in divorce.  Thousands of children have found loving adopted homes headed by Same Sex Couples.  No school was forced to indoctrinate students in the homosexual lifestyle nor were any children recruited.  In fact most children, either natural born or adopted, living in households headed by LGBT folks grow up to be heterosexual.  Children in Same Sex Households have also been proven to fair emotionally, mentally and scholarly as well as or better than those raised by heterosexual parents in study after study.  We now have a great many local, state and national offices held by LGBT politicians.  The odious law known as 'Don't Ask/Don't Tell (or DADT for short) was repealed allowing openly LGBT people to serve in our nation's armed forces.  The even more odious Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA) was declared to be unconstitutional in court after court culminating in the June decision by the Supreme Court of the United States confirming the previous courts' findings.  Legally Married Same Sex Couples now enjoy the Federal Benefits bestowed upon Marriages no matter what state they live in.  That is unless you are in the National Guard where several states including Texas are in open defiance of the Federal Government and the Department of Defense Directive ordering that Same Sex Couples should be treated like any other married couple in the military.  There are now 16 states plus the District of Columbia whose citizens are allowed to partake in Marriage Equality.  I am sure there are other events that may have slipped my mind at the moment, however, in any way you look at it,  it has truly been an amazing ten years of progress for us of the LGBT persuasion.

That brings us to today which is the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address given by President Abraham Lincoln shortly after the battle there that cost more than 8000 lives of soldiers on both sides of the War Between the States (Civil War).  The Address was brief, to the point and memorable unlike the preceding speech which lasted more than 2 hours.  To commemorate this Anniversary, I have a video of the 5 Living Presidents and other well known folks reciting the Gettysburg Address posted below this paragraph:

Noah Michelson, editor of The Huffington Post: Gay Voices, yesterday published his blog post A Few Words From A Real, Live C*cksucking Fag re: all the flap around Alec Baldwin's latest anger management issue.  Baldwin, who has since semi apologized in his own post at Huffington, allegedly berated some paparazzi using the homophobic slur Cocksucking Faggot.  Michelson observed "Recently several (presumably) non-cocksucking straight men have had a lot to say about these terms and whether or not they've ever used them, whether or not they should ever use them and whether or not those terms are (or should be) considered offensive by real, live cocksucking fags like me.  Seeing as I have some practical (humility keeps me from going so far as to say "impressive") experience here, I'd like to clear up a few things for those men and anyone else who might be confused by these terms and/or when they can and should be used".  Michelson went on to list 8 distinct points relevant to that particular phrase.  The piece is informative, concise, witty and to the point.  I really loved his conclusion, too: "I just want people to start thinking twice about what they're saying and why. Words do have meaning. Words are important. Words make things happen. And they have consequences. We can push for equality and pass all the laws we want in hopes of achieving it, but as long as terms like "cocksucking fag" are used against us or to shame anyone -- queer or not -- we will never truly be liberated, because the underlying attitudes and assumptions we're operating with will still be inherently homophobic.  So let's grow up, give it up and spend our energy sucking cock instead of talking about it. I promise it's a lot more fun, and it's much less likely that anyone will get hurt.",  Check it out for yourselves.

Your Musical Moment for today features "The Bachianas Brasileiras (Portuguese pronunciation: [bakiˈɐ̃nɐz bɾaziˈlejɾɐs]) which constitute a series of nine suites by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, written for various combinations of instruments and voices between 1930 and 1945. They represent not so much a fusion between Brazilian folk and popular music on the one hand, and the style of Johann Sebastian Bach on the other, as an attempt freely to adapt a number of Baroque harmonic and contrapuntal procedures to Brazilian music (Béhague 1994, 106; Béhague 2001). Most of the movements in each suite have two titles: one "Bachian" (Preludio, Fuga, etc.), the other Brazilian (Embolada, O canto da nossa terra, etc.).

Villa-Lobos made a number of recordings of the Bachianas Brasileiras, including an integral recording of all nine compositions made in Paris in the 1950s with the French National Orchestra for EMI. These landmark recordings were issued in several configurations on LP, and later were reissued on CD. Other musicians, including Joan Baez, Enrique Bátiz, Leonard Bernstein, Nelson Freire, Werner Janssen, Isaac Karabtchevsky, Jesús López-Cobos, Aldo Parisot, Menahem Pressler, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kenneth Schermerhorn, Felix Slatkin, Leopold Stokowski, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Galina Vishnevskaya have subsequently recorded the music.

Because Villa-Lobos dashed off compositions in feverish haste and preferred writing new pieces to revising and correcting already completed ones, numerous slips of the pen, miscalculations, impracticalities or even impossibilities, imprecise notations, uncertainty in specification of instruments, and other problems inescapably remain in the printed scores of the Bachianas, and require performers to take unusual care to decipher what the composer actually intended. In the frequent cases where both the score and the parts are wrong, the recordings made by the composer are the only means of determining what the composer actually intended (Round 1989, 35)." (source = Wikipedia)

Included in this play list are Number 5, scored for Soprano and 8 Cellos; Number 6, scored for Flute and Bassoon and Number 9, scored for String Orchestra. The performers were not listed, however I believe these recordings were from those made in Paris by Villa-Lobos himself in the 1950s with the French National Orchestra.

Finally for today is a sweet and sexy collection of Beaus and/or Buddies in this week's edition of Two for Tuesday.  Thanks for sharing part of your day with me, see you again soon.  Until next time as always, Enjoy!