Kooky & Nutty: 2 Icons Share A Birthday

Shirley MacLaine: 6 Oscar nominations with a win for Terms of Endearment, 20 Golden Globe nominations with 7 wins including Best Newcomer in 1955 & the Cecil B DeMille Look Alike Award. 14 books, all best sellers. Her brother is Warren Beatty. They have never worked together, but that is something I would pay to see, especially if they would play senior citizen lovers. She talks to her dog- Terry & her dog talks back. My favorite MacLaine role – Doris (a thinly disguised Debbie Reynolds) in Post Cards From The Edge.

Barbra Streisand: 5 Oscar nominations with 2 wins, including one as a composer, 16 Golden Globe nominations with 8 wins including the Cecil B DeMille Look Alike Award. 8 Grammy Awards, & one of only a handful of performers to have an Oscar, Emmy, Tony & Grammy on their mantle, & the only artist to have a #1 Album in 5 different decades. Her son-in-law is Josh Brolin. Last year she wrote a frightening coffee table book about her questionable interior designing taste. She gave her very cute son-Jason Gould a role in the underrated Prince Of Tides.  She talks to her dog- Sammy. My favorite Streisand role- Doris in The Owl & The Pussycat.

They share a birthday today- April 24th. MacLaine turns 77 & Streisand, 69. Traditionally, they spend their birthdays together. I would like to be a fly on the wall at that party.

He Is Risen!

We Love Jesus At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia!

19th Century carved ivory Cruxifix from India, found in an Indian import store In SoHo, NYC in the late 1990s.

"Our Lord- As Is" is how the tag was marked at a junk store in the Phinney Ridge of Seattle, circa late 1980s.

In a canine memorial niche in the small hallway, Jesus looks over & protects our dead dogs in their urns: Baby (1985-1999), Sister (1990- 2006), & Butch (1994- 2007). They are joined by a mason jar of the ashes of Pearl, a close canine companion without a place to be, as her Mommy travels around the world seeking answers.

Jesus chose to be born in a stable among donkeys & cows. He chose to ride into his last week of life on a donkey. He said the foxes have their lairs & the birds their nests. He said the Father watches over the birds of the air.. the sparrows. Jesus became angry in the temple when animals were butchered.

"The lion also shall dwell with the lamb, & the leopard shall lie down with the kid; & the calf & the young lion & the fatling together; & a little child shall lead them."

Isaiah 11:6-9 (King James Version)

Close Encounters Of The Canine Kind

I woke with a start in the middle of night, feeling compelled to go to the back garden. I wasn’t completely awake or fully conscious when I found myself naked, standing among the hydrangea with little Junior by my side. I had a surprising feeling of calm & introspection. As my consciousness shifted, several lights appeared, accompanied by a strange mist. I watched as Junior levitated, seemingly passing through solid objects like the fences & trees, rising through a tunnel & into the light.

I awoke in my bed. It was still dark. I went to the back window just in time to witness & photograph Junior being returned to the back garden. He seemed very sedate for a terrier, but none the worse for the experience. 3 hours had passed, although it seemed like minutes. Like all the inhabitants of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, Junior seemed to have enjoyed his occasion with an alien anal probe. It is difficult to ascertain if there is any damage to his little doggie brain, Junior is just a bit nutty anyway. If it was an alien abduction, I am left to wonder, when I am the highest evolved life form in residence, why they would take Junior? Is it because he can lick his own private doggie parts? Will the mystery ever be revealed?

Do You Hate It When Bloggers Post Photos Of Their Pets?

Photo by the Husband

Good News!

While reading the NY Times on line this morning, it was so nice to read some good news for a change: A strong majority of Americans now view married same-sex partners as families. Better still, most consider an unwed gay or lesbian couple with children to be a family, too. There's also an increasing willingness to see homosexuality as a natural, innate trait, & most people know or have family member who is gay, quotes the report in the NY Times. This good news is from a survey included in the new book out next week- Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations & Americans' Definitions of Family.

I was so excited for this bit of good news instead of gloom news. Until I read the details & found this little tid-bit: "There's a solid core resisting this trend who are more willing to include pets in their definition than same-sex partners." It's a solid core of 30 percent. In an interview lead researcher Brian Powell was understated in his assessment of this stat, "The sheer idea that gay couples are given less status than pets should give us pause". I will have to inform my terriers.

What makes a family?

Born On This Day- September 10th... Rin Tin Tin

Born on a battlefield in World War I, Rin Tin Tin went on to be an American movie star & icon. Rin Tin Tin is credited with saving Warner Brothers from bankruptcy in the 1920s. He received 2,000 fan letters a week, that’s 286 a week in dog years. He remained a huge star until the talkies did him in.

Born on a battlefield in World War I, Rin Tin Tin went on to be an American movie star & icon. 2 months before the war would end, an American soldier- Corporal Lee Duncan discovered a bombed out German war dog station while on a scouting mission. Inside he found a shell shocked mother German Shepherd & her 5 puppies.


Not wanting to leave them helpless, Duncan brought them back to his base where he took care of them. When he returned home to California, Duncan brought Rin Tin Tin with him. Rin Tin Tin was named after small dolls French soldiers carried for good luck.


Duncan settled into his home in L.A. & he became interested in the new movie industry. Knowing his dog was special, he made the rounds of the studios, but they showed little interest in a canine movie star.


Finally he got his big break when he came upon a crew shooting a scene with a wolf. Rin Tin Tin was able to perform a feat in 1 take that had frustrated the crew trying to work the scene with a real wolf.

In 1922, Rin Tin Tin ( his friends called him "Rinty") , made his debut in a low budget western called The Man from Hell's River. He did all his own on screen stunts.

Rinty’s charisma, good looks, fearless ability & acting talent attracted the attention of the struggling Warner Brothers studio. Together they made 24 films that helped establish the new studio & made Rin Tin Tin a household name, & a magazine cover boy.

At the height of his celebrity, Rinty earned a salary of $1000 a week, had his own production unit, a chauffeur driven limousine, a personal chef & a diamond studded collar. Not much is known about his personal life, but Rinty was spotted at several underground gay spots around Hollywood. Although he was quite a stud, siring 48 pups, including a favorite named Junior, Rin Tin Tin was known to hump male stunt dogs & was very probably bisexual.

In 1930 in an ungrateful gesture, Warner Brothers released Rinty. He was forced to work low budget serials. He admitted to a Milk- Bone addiction & went into rehab. After 40 movies, he retired in 1931.






Following Rin Tin Tin's death in 1932 in L.A. (in the arms of actress Jean Harlow, according to Hollywood legend), Duncan arranged to have the dog returned to his country of birth for burial in the Cimetière des Chiens, the famous pet cemetery in the Parisian suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine.


His son, Junior went on to appear in movies following the death of his father. Rin Tin Tin is one of 3 dogs to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame along with Strongheart & Lassie.


As a child, I was devoted to The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, an ABC television series that ran from 1954 to1959. It featured Rin Tin Tin IV as the star.

Golden Slumbers... Nap Time At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia

Once there was a way, to get back homeward.

Once there was a way, to get back home.

Sleep pretty darling, do not cry.

& I will sing a lullaby.

Golden Slumbers fill your eyes.

Smiles await you when you rise.

Sleep pretty darling, do not cry.

& I will sing a lullaby.

Once there was a way, to get back homeward.

Once there was a way, to get back home.

Sleep pretty darling, do not cry.

& I will sing a lullaby.

Lennon/McCartney
1969

New Music... Tokyo Police Club

I am zany for this song & video. The boys are so adorkable & emo-rrific. They look they are practicing in one of the boy's rec room. I am zany for canines, & love the idea of all the neighbor dogs taking off to commandeer a swimming pool for their party. We live in Dogtown with 14 dogs on our block. I wonder if Larry & Junior have canine party time when we are not around.

The band is Tokyo Police Club from Ontario, Canada. All procedes from the song & video go to ASPCA. Their new album is- CHAMP, check it out. The boys are touring all summer & are playing Seattle tonight.

Junior Has An Anniversary...

Junior is our 5th dog. The poor Husband has never had any say. I bring the dogs home. I am never even considerate enough to grant a discussion. I know that when he sees the dog, the Husband's heart will open up & he will be unable to resist their considerable canine charm. Not fair, huh?

Junior came to be with us less than a week after our most beloved dog- Butch had died. Larry the dog was depressed, & we have usually had 2, so I started poking around, thinking a new dog would come to us at some point in the next year. It only took a few days. We were wrecks & inconsolable after Butch's end, but I was taken with the story of the little Rat Terrier who had been tied to a tree with a lead of rope for the 1st year of his life. I am a sucker for a canine hard luck tale... or is it tail?

Your host, napping in the Boys' Fort, is joined by Junior

I acquired him & spent a few hours trying to get close to him, to no avail. I left for work with a note on the door for the Husband- "His name is Junior. He is very shy. Be careful that he does not slip out. We will talk when I get home." The Husband could not have been happy,  he was changing his clothes as he read the note. From inside of our glass front door, he looked up to see the little terrier on the outside of the front door. To the Husband's horror, Junior started to run, with the half undressed Husband in pursuit, worried about the dog & furious with me. After a great deal of effort, he was able to catch Junior corned on a neighborhood porch. back they came to house & Junior has never tried to escape again, & the Husband has only tried on the rare occasion.

The first 4 days that he was here, Junior was just a blurr out of the corner of my eye, as he skittered away. I often thought that he had found a way out of the back garden, & then I would see in my peripheral vision, a streak of white go by . On day 4, he approached me very cautiously. While sitting in the Boys' Fort, acting like I didn't care one tiny bit, Junior slowly came to me & put his head on my leg.

That was 3 years ago today. Little Junior came to live at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. The Husband loves him dearly. Junior is a sweet, special & a very simple little dog. He spent his 1st year tied to a tree out in the country. Now he lives in the city & he sits on pillows & sleeps with his daddies. I sometimes wonder how the Husband would react if another dog should "happen" into our lives. I have many photos of Junior. These are all from this summer. It is 95 degrees today & that little terrier is sacked out.

Happy Birthday To Writer Mark Doty

Mark Doty is my favorite poet, in a league with Walt Whitman & Frank O’Hara.

photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell

Elegant, unflinching, sometimes melancholy, his imagery haunts me. I appreciate the duality of the rural & the urbane in his work, indeed, he describes the plant life of a vacant city lot. Like the poet, as a gay man I have always sought out a life in an urban center while being enchanted by a cabin at the beach. I have attempted to take my city lot & make a place of & for nature. A tiny attempt at both worlds. Doty: "I've always been a poet who wrote about urban life because I love the layers & surprises & the jangly complexities of cities. I feel at home in cities, being a gay man. It's a place of permission & possibility. In 1990 I moved to Provincetown. I also love this landscape of salt marshes, beaches & dunes, but I had to write about it in a different way. In the marsh, there is no narrative. All that happens is that a bird flies by, the tide comes in & goes out."


His poetry also addresses the artifice & the natural: "I play around with the distinction between art & nature, the real & the false. My experience often feels pretty seamless. . . I've always been drawn to artifice & the beauties of surface and shadings and tone. A lot of the process of development is figuring out how to be all of yourself in a poem. How do you let your love of wigs & make-up, your sense of humor, your anger find its way into the poem?"


My husband & I have lived with, loved & buried 3 dogs. Just this past week we lost a canine friend of an important player in our lives, a dog loved as if she was our own. Doty’s poetry collections have altered my point of view & his language has transported me. But, it is a work of prose that has moved me the most. I read his lovely Dog Years: A Memoir in 2 sittings, ironically taking a break only to walk my terriers. A meditation on life & loss & the method that grief squeezes into your life & never lets go, Doty tells of the life he shared with his 2 dogs as he experiences the decline & death of a partner from HIV, & how the canines move & affect a new relationship with a new love & future spouse.

How many ways have all my dogs had a profound affect on how I have dealt with the heights & valleys of my life & my 30 year marriage? The Husband & I have had a dog, usually 2, for nearly all our time together. At one point, I think we stayed a couple because of the dogs.


In Dog Years, Doty, in an improbable decision, adopts a dog as a companion for his dying partner. Beau is a large golden retriever, possibly abused & in need of love & companionship. Beau is made part of the family, paired with Arden, another retriever, & Doty’s partner- Wally. Beau responds well to his new life, & bounces back to life. The 2 dogs become Doty's best friends, comfort, & the reason to keep going on the worst of days. The canines’ moxie, loyalty, & love give him hope when all else fails.

 Dog Years is a moving & intimate memoir with profound meditations on the life we share with animals & the lessons they teach us about life, love, & loss. Doty gives me a view of the vulnerability of dogs, how they rely on us, & the positive outlook they bring, & the gift of unconditional love. Dog Years is unsentimental, but intensely, mournfully, movingly affecting. We all will have to deal with loss. This book will help just a little bit.


The very handsome Mark Doty’s work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award &, the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a professor at the University of Houston. Doty lives in NYC, Fire Island, & Provincetown with his equally handsome & talented husband- writer Paul Lisicky.

Paul & Mark

We are the same age, along with a love of men, & dogs, Mark Doty & I are both bloggers. I don't impy that we are in the same league . http://markdoty.blogspot.com/ & now I must sign off. Larry & Junior are waiting for their morning walk.

Dog Days

It is 92 degrees this afternoon & these dogs are sacked out:

Louis, the special weekend guest canine is trying to fit in Larry's bed. God only knows where Louis's Daddy- T is or what he is up to..

I just hope that he is as worn out as his poddle.

Junior is fagged out on a tasteful & lovely Afghan rug from the early 20th century. Always a classic look. Junior is as calculating & shallow as I am. We both share a great concern that at anytime, we need to look cute.

Larry the Canine (his professional wrestling name) enjoys the cool cork floor, is it just because it is in the kitchen?

Larry is a food whore.

A Dark, Stormy, Rainy & Lazy Sunday Morning At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia

The little bits of "snow" are discarded petals from the Dogwood- Cornus Florida. One plant finishes blooming & then another will up the ante.

Is it a coincidence that I love to play with alliteration, & that I collect Heuchera , Hebes, & Hydrangea? None of these plant groups is in bloom, but the Clematis is showing off this week. I have had Clematis Montana in each of my gardens for the past 25 years. It seems indestructible. You can cut it nearly to the ground & it will grow 20’ in a season. Insects don’t bother it & seems impervious to any disease or problem. I never cut mine back & it has grown at least 30' into the closest trees, a large dogwood, & a white pine. In full bloom it looks like a low hanging billowing cloud. Clematis Etoile Violette came into bloom in the last few days, & unlike me, they seem to really have enjoyed the week of rain.

Even Larry & Junior are unmotivated.

I've got real balls!

I collect orbs. From marbles to bowling balls to globes, I am drawn to round objects.

This photo is a gathering of just a few out of more than 100.

There's Always Room For Improvement... It's The Biggest Room In The House.

My medical situation improves somewhat; after Friday’s blood draw, I receive a call from my physician that there is progress & I can now go from 2 injections (administered by the Husband) to just 1 a day. In celebration, I make the bad medical judgment, but a superior emotional move, & skip a day of shots. I rationalized that I had just had 2, so it evens out to 1 a day. Bad I know, yet lovely to go a day without a visit from the little prick, as the Husband refers to the needle & syringe. I have 22 dime sized black/blue circles on my torso from each injection. I am so shallow, all I can think is- “thank you God for not having this happen during nude beach season!”

This is where the magic happens.

You can click on the image to enlarge & get a better look at the sunbathing terrier.

Today is a beautiful, warm spring day in Portland. Larry the Canine has found a nice place on the hot tub deck, which is reached through French doors off the bedroom. Larry & the Husband are both true sun bunnies & can often be found in this spot.

Junior also has found a spot in the warm sun.

This Gives Me Pause...

I share my life with 2 rescue terriers, that despite a difficult start in both of their lives, are total princess dogs. These 2 terriers don't like to go outside if it is raining! I see photos of Jack Russells working on a farm in England, all muddy from their hard work of catching the critters. My canines can barely lift their heads to acknowledge that Anderson Cooper's T-shirt is super tight as he saves a young Haitian boy from danger.



I have been thinking about the horror of the situation on the island nation of Haiti. I have had an inner dialogue concerning our finances & our economic woes at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. The fact remains that we have have a roof over our heads, & we own that roof, & somewhere in our house is jar of change with probably $30 in it. How rough can it be? Yet, can I imagine Larry & Junior coming to the aid of people trapped in the rubble, after a major earthquake in Haiti?


These impossible curs couldn't be less concerned with anything other than the next cookie or DVR-ed connections to Project Runway. What a duo of faggy, selfish dogs! Hey you dogs… how would you like to be living in Haiti right now?

“If you don't create change, change will create you” Noel Coward

The Christian Right went ape shit over this commercial, saying that the mention of the Solstice promoted withcraft, which made me love it even more:


This morning I went to Ikea to gather some items that I had spotted to use as Holiday display at my store. I usually use the wholesale flower market for most of my retail decor, but I was really struck with these large red paper Amaryllis, which I am doing in a modern glass cylinder with silver balls in the bottom as an anchor. I will be spending Thanksgiving setting the store for the Holidays, putting the Holiday merchandise out, & tranforming the place into a winter wonderland. I think it is very civilized to wait until after Thanksgiving to put up the winter Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Solstice decor.

The Husband spent the day working on a wall of our dining room, a project that started with  tearing down the dining room walls to the bare studs (I don't mean the good kind) in 2005. This re-do has been making progress at a pace only the Husband could manage. I loved the old Post Apocalyptic Bohemian look, but I am more than pleased with today's result. Here are some photos to mark the transition:

Today's Progress:

& because I have posted recently about Junior, here is the other canine- the very crabby Larry:

There Is Nothing Like The Greeting From A Dog When You Come Home

I have posted several times about my love of canines. The poor Husband has never had any say so in choosing our dogs. I always just bring them home. He always seems to fall in love. This is Junior. He came to live with us in August 2007, just a week after our most beloved dog- Butch died. I was in such deep & powerful mourning at Butch's passing & I figured another new family member would occupy my time. Junior was found tied to a tree, on a length of rope, in a rural area outside of Portland. All of our dogs have been rescue dogs & they all have had "issues", but Junior is particularly nutty. The Husband has dubbed him "Junie Tunes". Junior is in need of constant attention, but when he is asleep or in repose, he is beyond adorable.

I saw this on the Huffington Post via WickedGayBlog. "We always think about wives, husbands & children of soliders, but we often forget about the pets. They clearly miss their loved ones at war as well. Lt. Schmidt posted this video his dog Gracie greeting him when he came back from Kandahar."