Liebe will riskiert werden.

Majora Carter–co-founder/leader of the Green For All campaign alongside my boss Van Jones—was an Olympic torch bearer during the San Francisco leg yesterday. We figured she’d have something up her sleeve in terms of making her feelings known with regard to Tibet (and Darfur). We just didn’t realize it would be literally up her sleeve, where Majora had stashed a Tibetan flag.

Last night over a post-torch dinner with her, she described her bizarre day: despite (her kidnappers’) orders not to communicate with the outside world, she managed to hide her husband’s cellphone in her underpants (hers was too big), and from the back of the bus in which the torchbearers were shuttled around, to whisper haphazard info to the outside world about her location. “Can you see any streetsigns?” we were asking on our end. “Do you see the water?”

The route of the “Houdini torch,” as it came to be known, entirely circumvented the picturesque planned itinerary along the Embarcadero, instead heading up Van Ness and down to the Marina, from where they took it onto the highway—yes, the highway— towards the Golden Gate. But just a short way up the cleared expanse of concrete, they aborted the course towards the bridge, shoved the torch into the bus, and sped it off to San Francisco airport.

Majora, for her part, had her moment of glory at some random Civic Center-y corner—Sutter?, Pine?, Gough?—some street name I get confused with so many others down in those parts. She had spent an hour and a half feeling out her torchmate about his stance on politics in general (he felt we should focus our attention more on problems at home, apparently was the gist of it), and she ultimately confided in him shortly before their turn came up that she planned to pull out the Tibetan flag as soon as she had the torch in hand. And was he cool with that? He told her he “knew her heart.” He’d be cool.

And, as has now been liberally broadcast, she did just what she said she’d do, but didn’t get far. The Chinese officials snapped the offending flag away and had both her arms behind her back in a matter of seconds, as she insisted that she was exercising her constitutional right to free speech in support of human rights internationally. For a moment she wondered if she was going to be arrested by the Chinese. Then the SFPD just forcibly deposited her on the other side of the barrier they formed, into the people, and barred her from further contact with the torchbearing elite. And that was that.

Our experience of the day, out to support her while also displaying pro-Tibet and/or “save Darfur” signage, was nearly as bizarre and uncomfortable. We weren’t there to be hating on Chinese folks, or Chinese-Americans. Just as many or most of us in this country don’t support the Bush administration’s warfare, torture practices, and imperialist foreign policy, many or most of them don’t support their government’s actions. But the scene on the streets yesterday was ugly. Ugly, ugly. I understand a lot of the Chinese folks were bussed in to show some pride for China; they were greeted with real nastiness by the protestors.

Then there were the tourists and the local sleepwalkers who came out just to see the torch go by. And honestly—I sympathized with them too. I happen to have a huge soft spot where the Olympics are concerned. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve loved the idea that all the countries of the world come together and bring forth their talents—particularly when underdog countries take home gold medals. I know it’s not as simple as that, I know—but still, when the national anthem of Senegal or Uruguay or Jamaica plays and the people of that country are in the world’s spotlight as Number One, I get (ridiculously) sentimental. So shoot me.

And as the day progressed, and we realized there was no way we’d get to see or cheer Majora on, our little crowd felt sicker and sicker to our stomachs. Mahfam in particular, upset by the barbs, started calling out “I love you—I just love Tibetans too!” as she walked by people with Chinese flags.

In the end, the shirt I’d chosen to wear seemed particularly appropriate. We’d been told not to wear any Green For All-branded stuff in support of Majora, and I didn’t have anything related to Tibet or Darfur, and so I went with a T-shirt that my friend Uta sent me from Berlin. I saw lots of folks trying to figure it out (either that, or they were checking out my rack.)

It reads: “Liebe will riskiert werden,” which translates, more or less, to “love wants to be risked.” IMHO, that’s what we all really need: the anti-hate, the anti-fear.

The Last of It

I have taken a certain amount of pride in being tatless. Nearly one in four U.S. adults between 18 and 50 has one or more tattoos, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Among my age group I’m certain it’s distinctly over half, since we were in our impressionable late teens and 20s during the tattoo boom of the 90s.

Nowadays it’s tattoo removal that’s hot, a procedure that’s costlier and more involved—although apparently recent developments have improved its effectiveness.

Infamously, there’s Johnny Depp’s “Wino Forever,” which—before its retooling— commemorated his romance with the Petaluma-born Ms. Ryder, of shoplifting fame. (Vanessa Paradis and France: well done.)

I took pride in being tatless not because I dislike tattoos—many people I love wear beautiful ones… I think of M’s Escherlike wreath of cranes, birdclan member B’s saturated wings, the red star on S’s wrist, and the blacklight-reflective cuttlefish wrapped around B’s thigh and torso… And of course tats are no pet rocks—for thousands of years before the 1990s people have been adorning and marking their bodies with ink.

But I felt proud just cuz I hadn’t ever felt compelled to get one to get one, and was here, distinctly past the halfway mark of this first decade in the new millennium, as a 30-something with a trampstampless and butterflyfree body.

And then somebody did something nasty to me, which left a small scar about the size of a nickel. After regaining my balance in the wake of that experience, I decided I wanted a tattoo to cover the scar. Something that would remind me of my beautiful transformation.

I was drawn to science and mathematics, to symbols, then to sacred geometry. An intricate geometric figure with mystical meanings spoke to me. I changed the wallpaper on my laptop to the figure so I could stare at it every day for months and imagine it on me.

I had made up my mind. I started asking folks where they got work done. And then out of the blue my tatless friend Caroline told me she was getting a tattoo to honor a heroic rescue operation her brother had been part of. She had a solid recommendation for an artist.

Both of us went in for a consultation with the dude—Scott at Black Heart Tattoo. When he saw my drawing, and the area where it was headed, Scott shook his head and sent me to Mike. To the drawing, Mike said no problem. When he heard I was a virgin and saw where I wanted it, though, he raised his eyebrows. We set a date anyway.

About five hours ago I was lying under a bright light and his steady gloved hands, getting zapped with ink over an area about the size of a hockey puck. I couldn’t really see him working. I had to Just Trust that he would get the fiddly pattern right.

Caroline sat by my side. Just one spot was especially sensitive, and hurt more. Caroline squeezed my hand and said “that was the scar.” I think she also said “that was the last of it,” but I can’t be certain, since I was under the influence of a little something I’d had for the pain, and amped from the endorphins that my besieged body was releasing.

Mike did a brilliant job. I’m thrilled. Mine, this body. I’ve marked it as such.

Read my love.

I have a crush on a book. Not the characters, and not the author, no, I mean the book itself: a work of brilliance and beauty that challenges and expands my brain, tickles me with its wit, and turns me on with sensuousness. All of this not just at first read, but ongoing, for the book and I have become inseparable. Even as I read others, I find myself putting them down, reaching into my bag, and re-connecting with the pages of my obsession. My wandering eyes are encountering nothing comparable, at least not for now.

The book was a gift from a friend with impeccable taste (thank you, friend). At the enthralling first two chapters my cheeks flushed, my pupils dilated: what characters, what pace and suspense! But certain precious details, like beauty marks hovering by a full upper lip, gave me pause: wait, was this… nonfiction? I stopped, examined the front and back cover for the first time. It was nonfiction!…is: The Emperor of Scent: a true story of perfume and obsession.

Indeed, journalist Chandler Burr’s book is the true story of biophysicist and perfume connoisseur Luca Turin and his adventures in the scientific community and in the ultra-secret world of corporate perfumers, as he develops a new, hotly-contested scientific theory of how we smell things.

Some of Burr’s effusive yet incisive prose:

Turin is an instinctive egalitarian with an exquisitely refined aesthetic and unabashedly elitist tastes, and so he felt completely comfortable in the perfume world, which is populated by former members of the lower classes who spend their time creating outrageously expensive aesthetically oriented luxury goods for the rich.

Turin says:

“People will say, ‘But isn’t smell totally subjective?’ And I’ll say ‘What the hell does that mean?’ It’s not more subjective than color or sound. Real men and scientists feel slightly ridiculous smelling something. I’ll say ‘Let me show you some smells,’ and I start passing out vials and everyone titters, like I’ve just asked them to take off their clothes or something.”

For Turin, who can identify the ingredients of a scent down to the molecular level using only his nose, and can describe them in ordinary (and beautiful) language with absolute precision, smell is anything but subjective. It is scientific, and that’s the whole point. But what, exactly, is scientific? In a fascinating turn, the book reveals the political and petty and pretty darn subjective side of science—the peer review process in particular. Also and above all, it shows the paradoxically magical quality of science.

Burr notes:

The trouble with science is that, as a rule, oddity among scientists—perfume obsessions, strange work habits—is often indistinguishable from inefficiency. What appears ludicrous and implausible and outrageous usually is. And then, sometimes it’s not….

And Turin concludes:

“The problem of smell wasn’t that hard to crack. The catch was that to crack it, you had to know a huge number of disparate facts. It was simply a question of probability. How many people would be aware simultaneously of the recipe for Chanel No. 5, the vibrational numbers of boranes, Blitz, and Malcolm Dyson. And also have my particular approach, which was: if I smell it to be true, it is true…. Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful. Why. Because there is no such thing as disconnected facts. There is only complex structure. And both to explain complex structure to others, and, perhaps more important—this is forgotten, usually—to understand them oneself, one needs better metaphors. If I was able to understand this, it was because my chaotic accrual of information simply gave me better metaphors than anyone else.”

*sigh*

the freighted one

At first I refused to engage with him.
“I don’t have the qualifications,” I told him.
He said he wanted to try something different. Like I was a flavor of ice cream he hadn’t had before.
Vanilla.
He said he felt like he needed to have a real relationship, not something based on the extreme sex alone.
“Can you enjoy sex if it’s not like that?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
His honesty turned me on.
We kissed for weeks, him plunging into my mouth like if he just got enough momentum it might work out.

I told him I’d decided I wanted him to spend the night, so he did. We didn’t have sex. Partly because I still felt awkward about not having the expertise I’ve heard about his former lovers having, and partly for reasons I’m sure he held but didn’t voice.
“How’s this going for you?” I asked afterwards.
“I’m thinking it all through very intently,” is what I think he said. When someone tells me something that stimulates a strong emotional response in me like horror or shame or upset, I have a hard time catching the actual words.

He has zero capacity for telling me what I want to hear. I think I need that. I’ve been a sucker for people who tell me what I want to hear. I prefer it if it’s their raw umbilically-attached truth, but even if it comes from their read on me I’ll fall for it. If they’re bothering to read me it must mean they’re focused on me, and it’s the pinpointed focus, like the sun through a magnifying glass, that has made me catch fire. Like him, I want to try something different.

He told me he had had wild fantasies about me, pictured me mounting him with a strap-on. I wondered if he thought that fantasy stemmed solely from his bent mind. I wondered if he remembered the half-hour before I’d gotten up, him still mostly asleep, when I’d sunk my belly into his back and wrapped my arms around him, ground my pelvis into his ass, and with my hands in the soft hairless dips below his hipbones brought him back towards me. Pushed into him, felt him push back. Lazy, not enough friction to start an outright fire, but comforting, delicious. I’d taken a shower and had let him sleep another hour.

“That doesn’t seem entirely foreign to me,” I said. “I could imagine doing that.”
But he protested, told me it couldn’t just be something I’d do just to please him. “It doesn’t work that way,” he asserted.
As if he knows what works. As if any of us do.
“Regardless, we’ll be friends, right?”
I said it pre-emptively. He nodded.

Divine free wet secrets,

or, how I love Mark Morford.

See http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/a/2007/07/25/notes072507.DTL for today’s prickly column about the chaos of love & relationships.

Also from him, from a while back, one of the most inspiring things I read in the past decade. He calls it a “spiritual perspective frappé”:

1. Choose not to believe much of the disinformation spinning forth from the White House at this time. Look at Donald Rumsfeld’s shockingly beady and pitch-black eyes and realize this man, these people, they are deeply convoluted and power blinded and do not have your best interests at heart.

2. Choose, furthermore, not to believe the world is really full of these vile power-mad slugs and lizards and prevaricators and fools and Rumsfelds. Stop thinking this is all there is, war and suffering and apparently very pale and egomaniacal and spiritless men running the world into the ground.

Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and environmental devastation and bogus Iraqi attack plan, there are a thousand counterbalancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral.

3. Resist the great surges toward nihilism about the media, in seeing them all as either a bunch of depressing snickering pansy-assed gol-dang liberal scum or corporate-controlled sensationalistic J-school lackeys all parroting the same old pro-Shrub war stories and beating the same thudding pro-violence drum.

Seek out nuance and counterargument and subtle irony and contrarianism and balance and perspective. Realize it’s never as one-sided as they want you to believe. Read more outside your normal box of viewpoints and interests. Find out for yourself.

4. Remember the world does not consist of simpleminded and reductive good/evil polarities, but, rather, is a living organism, interconnected and breathing and dying and renewing in constant flux, religions interflowing, beliefs inbreeding, crammed full of ecstatically bejeweled people who are just as contradictory and confused and gorgeous and kaleidoscopic and baffled and sleepy and horny and lost and desperately craving of juicy unfiltered spiritual nourishment as you are, in this very moment, as you read these words.

5. Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel and head for the mountains with a case of Grey Goose and a box of Scharffenberger chocolates and the entire DeLillo collection and “Baraka” on DVD. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

And instead you can more fully engage, openly celebrate and share the items you happen to love — vodka, chocolate or otherwise — as tools of knowledge and power and luscious imbibing of life, throw them right smack in the face of all the Ashcroftian scowling and limpness, upping the vibration instead of merely enduring it, thus countering the urgent federal mandate to please live in a constant state of shuddering obedient paranoia and fear.

6. Realize the divine is not quite what you think it might be, that old methods of imploring, say, a cantankerous bearded patriarchal figure to please please please let you win the lottery and help you have better orgasms and oh yes smite your enemies might be a bit antiquated and prohibitive and just slightly lacking in vital ancient sordid chthonic feminine power.

Realize, further, that it is just these very outmoded and fervid mind-sets that are fueling a great many current hatreds and arming a great many warheads, and that maybe, just maybe, blind devouring adherence to any narrow doctrine — Christian, Muslim, Jew — is potentially fatal to the soul, bad for the skin and also just no fun at all.

7. Change the way you pray. Choose to believe in true orgiastic, energetic, self-realized divinity inside the self and emanating out, as opposed to an angry vengeful righteous God out there, one who demands that everyone must pay and suffer and kill and die, in His name, same as it ever was.

After all, it is your intention that sends the energy into play, that directly affects the world, every single person and every single soul, and your hate and fear and self-righteous belief does nothing to up the patriotism not just for country but for the entire planet. You have so much power. More than you know.

8. Realize that this is the perfect moment to change the energy of the world, to step right up and crank your personal volume, right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious, right when the snakes and pit vipers and squinting finger-pointing cowboy wanna-bes are all distracted — there’s your opening.

9. Remember magic.

10. And, finally, believe you are a part of a groundswell, a resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending karmic overhaul, a great shift, the beginning of something important and potent and unstoppable. You can breathe like this is the most lucid thing there is to believe. You can walk down the street like you are full of divine free wet secrets.