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The Great Breast Milk Secret. Dad’s on the Boob!

~ Randy Blazak ~ 13 Comments

January 16, 2015 This blog is what happens when two much loved things come together, breasts and milk. Sorta like Reece’s Peanutbutter Cups.

There is a massive movement afoot (or abreast) and it’s exciting to see. England and the US have been hit with a wave of “Nurse-Ins,” as women protest Victorian views about breastfeeding. Babies have to be fed on a regular basis, and sometimes that’s when mom is in a restaurant or even an Anthropologie store in Beverly Hills. And if you tell her she can’t (because some funky hang-up you should talk to a therapist about), be prepared for an army of moms to show up, armed with babies and mammaries.

Breast-Feeding Moms Protest Nursing Incident at Anthropologie in Beverly Hills

For most of the 20th Century women were shamed away from breastfeeding. That was something that “primitive” women (i.e., not white) did, who didn’t have access to all that awesome baby formula. (Gee, who profited from that idea?) But now the evidence is clear, breast is best. Breast milk builds all kinds of healthy immunities and baby brains and dozens of other benefits for both mother and child. (Sorry Enfamil, Incorporated.)

101 Reasons to Breastfeed Your Child

So it’s a new day. Universities and workplaces have “lactation stations” where women can nurse and pump. Target has a whole row of breastfeeding supplies so women can pump the good stuff without ever missing a single post on Facebook.

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But there is another part of the story that is still taboo and I’m here to break it; Breast milk is not just for babies. Google shows lots of searches for “Is it OK to breastfeed your husband?” Apparently everyone is asking about it but no one is actually talking about it. When the topic comes up, you are obligated to say, “Ew!” or “No way!” or “That milk is for the baby!” Go ahead, do it. Get it out of your system now. The reality is partners are slurping up mama’s milk for a whole bunch of reasons other than pervy ones.

Obviously, there is an erotic element. When you think about it as an anthropologist (the scientists not the store employees), it’s pretty bizarre how western culture has festishized the breast. I mean, really, their primary function is to feed children but we use them to sell burgers at Carl’s Jr.. As Abby Epstein’s wonderful 2014 documentary, Breastmilk, discusses, there’s an entire sub-genre of “lactation porn” featuring women spraying the way men spray in traditional hard core porn. (I have no idea what these films are titled. How to Train Your Dairyman 2?) But people who are intimate enough to conceive a child should be allowed to mix it up with bodily fluids in the privacy of their own barn. I mean, bedroom.

Of course, all the health benefits the baby receives can help the partner as well. (I have not had the flu this year.) However, there are concerns because breast milk has a high fat content to help the baby grow, so you might have to hit the gym if you are slipping breast milk into your coffee. Breast milk also has about six times the cholesterol of cow’s milk. That’s good for the baby but might not be good for you (unless you own stock in Lipitor).

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The main reason for writing this piece (besides completely outing myself as now having an elevated cholesterol level), is that partners can REALLY help nursing moms by going on the tit. As we learned in our lactation class before Cozy was born, breastfeeding can be a lot harder than hippies make it look. And a good partner (husband, wife, boyfriend, local hobo) can really make the process a whole lot easier.

The first issue is helping with blocked milk ducts. This is going to happen a lot early on. And baby is not happy when there is no food coming down the pike. So, unless a woman in the rare position (physically and statistically) to fix this herself, Dad needs to get to work. Most people know how to suck a breast, even if they haven’t done it since they were a month old. So a good hard sucking session is going to bust up that roadblock and everybody in the house will be happy. I’m not going to say who will be the happiest. (Mom, you weirdo.)

Secondly, partners can help get the milk flowing for the baby. Sometimes baby is not willing to do the work to get the milk to let down and so, again, help is required. Some women can have a milk letdown with good Usher slow jam or an old YouTube videos of John & Kate Plus 8, but a more patient mouth usually does the trick. It’s for your family, for God’s sake.

Third is the issue of engorgement (which should be the best death metal band name ever. “We’ve got tickets to see Cannibal Corpse and Engorgement!”) Look, the milk is coming whether there is a baby on one of the nipples or not. A full breast may look “porn star,” but it can be painful, so be a good egg and help out, will ya. Momma is leaking while you are driving to a rare date night dinner? Pull the damn car over and relieve some of the pressure. No court in the land will convict you. I wouldn’t suggest doing this in a restaurant or movie theater, but in an alley behind a restaurant or movie theater is perfectly helpful (and, hot).

Of course, there is also the “pump and dump” matter. Occasionally, moms like to treat themselves to a glass of wine. Or a case of Fosters. That boozy milk has got to go somewhere besides baby. It’s not exactly like suckling White Russians, but you can always pretend that you are belly up to mother nature’s bar. Hiccup.

I know all this is “weird” to talk about. We don’t even have a term for it, it’s so taboo. “Partner nursing” seems wrong. I know I play a role in helping my wife get her supply up which helps her and our baby. It’s also an intimate bond between two parents who shouldn’t be shamed just like breastfeeding in general shouldn’t be shamed. I’ve really had enough of the Orwellian Sex Police who want to shame consenting adults. So maybe this is the next movement. A celebrity could come out as a proud “Lactation Dad.” (I’d like to nominate Kanye West.) There could be partner nursing workshops, sponsored by Lipitor. Let’s end the silence and enjoy the experience. Until then, I’ll just say, “Ew!”

Feminist Guilty Pleasure 2: The Bachelor

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

January 13, 2015

TV is bad for you. Books are good for you. Reality TV is really bad for you. I have a weakness for reality TV. I sent in audition tapes for the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Survivor. Somewhere CBS has a video of me swinging on a vine in Forest Park wearing only a loincloth and smoking a pipe. I will never run for office because of this.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about The Bachelor, most mixed between horror and revulsion. But my very powerhouse wife loves it, so out of solidarity, I’m tuning in.

I suppose one could argue that reality TV gives you a perspective on lives other than your own. Certainly, the world’s eyes were opened to the experience of living with HIV/AIDS because of Pedro Zamora in 1994 when he was part of The Real World: San Francisco. But the problem is there isn’t a lot of reality on most reality TV. There is a lot of editing and staged situations. I’ve always thought a good idea would be a season of Big Brother where they spiked the food with meth and put a gun in the house. That would be Must See TV.

So that brings us to The Bachelor, where some studly guy gets to pick his wife from a stable of beauties who have professions like, “make-up artist” and “cruise ship singer.” He gets to move his way through the crowd, like a jihadist’s fantasy of the afterlife. There’s even a few virgins in the harem to balance out the widows!

So here’s a feminist take on it. Of course, beautiful dumb people have a right to hook-up, breed and lower the national IQ score. But there is a message in this show that’s a familiar one. Women are bitches. Bag-stabbing bitches who will do whatever it takes to get the man, including of accusing their fellow bachelorettes of being crazy and having hairy buttholes.

Debate Rages Over Whether The Bachelor Censored a Woman’s Hairy Ass

Here’s the thing. Guys don’t compete with each other. Not really. Maybe on the rugby field but not on the rugby field of life. Early on we get the message of male bonding. It’s us boys against them. From Little League to the frat house to the boardroom, it’s “bros-before-hos.” The old boy network is the foundation of patriarchy. Michael Kimmel wrote about this so well in his study of college-age boys in Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008).

Quick name-dropping story. In 1992, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were in Atlanta for the VP debate. I brought Kevn Kinney to perform a few songs for a mass crowd at the rally downtown. I was standing behind the podium with Val Kilmer (then aka “Jim Morrison”) and Hilary was speaking. Val and I both looked at the black seams up her stockings at the same time and then at each other. It was a male moment, bro. I use that story as an example of the unspoken language of patriarchy.

So boys bond but girls are taught to compete with each over the same scarce resource, Prince Charming (or in this case some “awesome” dumb-ass from Iowa). There is no female bonding, just the war of all against all. “I hate her and her skinny thighs!” “That drunk bitch is a skank!” “Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” And it all plays out on The Bachelor to remind us that bitches can’t be trusted.

Now I don’t know what season this is. I know this show has been on since 2002 (I blame the terrorists!). It seems odd that any of these young women want to live on a farm in Iowa, turning cute pigs into bacon. But there doesn’t seem to be much intellectual discourse going to address that “reality.” I thought I might start a drinking game where I took a shot of whiskey any time anybody on the show said that something or someone was “amazing,” but I would be dead by the second commercial break.

On last night’s episode, Chris Soules, this year’s mentally challenged caveman, picked six women from the herd for a “group date.” Here’s what it was. 1) Pool party! So the women slide into their bikinis and climb on to each other’s shoulders to wrestle as Chris tries to not blow his load in the pool. 2) Tractor race! (Clothed) Chris parades his mini-harem through the streets of LA in their bikinis, where they then mount five tractors. (You know this was fantasy imported straight from the fields of the Hawkeye State.) The lucky winner gets a one-on-one date with Chris and tractors are sufficiently slow to give viewers plenty of time to watch the non-bathing beauties bounce down the road.

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It’s such crap and I’m not sure what the appeal is. Maybe, like The Jerry Springer Show, it’s fun to watch people who we feel somehow superior to. (“Jesus, these folks are stupid.”) But I suspect that part of it is the romantic Prince Charming fantasy that is so ingrained in our gender socialization. These women are willing to humiliate themselves on national TV (“Is that whore making out with him?”) to find “true love.” I’m willing to admit that for many the prize is just being on TV. Same reason people go on Jerry Springer.

Now I know that occasionally ABC mixes it up with The Bachelorette, but giving women the same opportunity to be douchebags as men is not “equality.” And I would love to see a sociological analysis about how gender plays differently on that version of the show. Maybe somebody could count the number of times the guys competing say, “Bro!” or puff up their pecs. But The Bachelor routinely beats The Bachelorette in the ratings game, and my guess it’s because it is the opposite of “girl power.”

People Prefer ‘The Bachelor’ to ‘The Bachelorette.’ Why? It’s Science.

Here’s what I would like to see. 1) A version of this show where the contestants all had IQs over 100 and could talk about vectors of oppression and the lastest op-ed from Paul Krugman (But that might be Portlandia). A show where, at least, the bachelor asked the women about their lives and thoughts. OR 2) A season of the show where the women realized that this “Compete for a Pig Farmer” set-up was bullshit and bonded together to take over the show, chugging all the Fireball themselves and making Chris walk around downtown LA in a banana hammock.

I don’t expect to see any feminist uprising on this season of The Bachelor. I imagine that some “amazing” woman named Ashley will get the final rose and they will live happily never after in Reality TVLand. In the end we’ll learn that all the “girls” are “basically nice” and wonder what we could have read in all those weeks.

This book was mentioned in this blog and can be bought at Powell’s by clicking the cover below.

Feminist Guilty Pleasure 1: Cowboys

Is it time for a career change?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

January 12, 2015

This might be a mid-life crisis (if I live to 100), but I’ve been thinking about a career change. I absolutely love being a university professor. I’ve got thousands of former students who are out in the world doing amazing things, perhaps influenced by something I talked about in a classroom or an idea I shared. One student, after my discussion linking the power theory of Ralf Dahrendorf to the genocide in Darfur, headed for Sudan after graduation to work with refugees. I have plenty of students like her.

That part of being a professor is infinitely rewarding. In my 20 years at my current university, I have created a legacy that has ripple effects around the world and will continue for generations. I know the world is a better place because of my work. But the part of the job that most people do not see is the bureaucracy that drives universities that is something out of a Kafka novel. I’m not one to tell tales out of school, just watch the Anthony Hopkins film The Human Stain (2003), to get a picture of the dynamic that pits administrators against faculty and students. It’s exhausting.

So I might do something different for a while. In 2011, I published my first novel, The Mission of the Sacred Heart: A Rock Novel. It was loosely based on my own issues with depression at the turn of the century. I based the structure on an Electric Light Orchestra album I had when I was a kid called A New World Record (1976). I know you know the songs. Each chapter in the novel riffs on a song from the album. When I started writing it, I had no idea how it would end, but writing it saved my life.

It did pretty well for a self-published novel. (50 Shades of Grey started out the same way.) It made it to #2 on the Powell’s Small Press Best Seller list and has been optioned by a very talented screenwriter in Hollywood for a film. It’s a long road but you might see me walking Andrea and Cozy down the red carpet someday. Hey, I’m a Pisces. Let me dream!

But the feedback from that book was been it’s own reward. Singer Storm Large was an early champion of the Kindle version. The reviews were all pretty amazing. But best was a military veteran who told me the book convinced her not to commit suicide and stick around for life. That’s enough. I could never write another word and have that.

But I love to write and university politics and committees have eaten into my writing space. There is no joy like sitting in the coffee shop with a blank page (or screen) and just letting it come. When I free myself from the technical requirements of academic writing, something transformative happens. The Irish call it the muse (something Bono once told me about). It’s a stream that you can just step in and let it take you away.

She might not be a literary giant, but my true influence here comes from singer Susanna Hoffs, of The Bangles. We were spending a lot of time together in the 80s and she asked me what I really wanted to do after college. “Be a writer,” I said. I was writing a lot of music journalism and had fantasies of being a new Jack Kerouac.

“How often do you write?”

“Uh, what?”

“Randy, if you want to be a writer, you need to write everyday.”

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That was the start of my tenure as a poet and I got good. I hosted a popular monthly reading in Atlanta and got to put together some of the spoken-word events for Lollapalooza ’94. In 2011, when The Bangles came to Portland, I gave Susanna a copy of the novel and thanked her for getting me started on this path.

So now it’s time to write again. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been writing. I’ve been working on a book on 4th Wave feminism and a memoir about my rock star friends (Hi Bono and Susanna!) and I have a short story about the ghost of Elvis coming out this year. But it’s time to really write.

Cozy and I just got back from my favorite Portland coffee shop, Random Order. She stared out of her stroller while I wrote the first page of the new novel. It’s called The Dream Police and uses the Cheap Trick album as a structure. It picks up with some of the main characters from Mission and their struggles to come to terms with some of the suffering of life in modern America. There are no aliens in this one, but there is some time travel. It will be more post-modern this time. (I was hugely influenced by Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad (2010), which made me just want to write like a madman.)

So I’m going to take a break from being a professor for a while. I know the university will be there when I’m ready to go back. Maybe I could find one that’s run by students, or elves, or bags of rocks. Sometimes your soul needs a break from the fight. There are other ways to reach people, and this book is gonna be great.

OK, here is the opening sentence: The dark expansive room was knee deep in steaming water, coming in waves from all angles.

These books were mentioned in this blog post. You can buy them at Powell’s by clicking the cover images below.

Feminist Herstory Pt. 1 – It is discovered that Women are PEOPLE!!!

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

Some people find history boring. Then they go watch an episode of Downton Abbey. I love history and the history of feminist theory is pretty wild. In feminism we talk a lot about waves. (Are you a second or third wave feminist?) I’ve been working on a book on 4th wave feminism, but before we get there, we need some history. So I will periodically drop in some excerpts from my, hopefully not boring, “herstory.”

Feminist Herstory Pt. 1 – Roots, Galileo and Frankenstein

There’s a famous quote I use at the beginning of my social theory class by Cambridge professor Geoffrey Hawthorn,  “The sociologist who begins a history of social theories is at once very tempted to stop.” Finding starting points for ideas is only asking for trouble. Capitalism existed long before Adam Smith became the father of it. Punk rock existed before Patti Smith became the godmother of it. So finding a starting point is an exercise in futility. And then everyone is going to complain about what and whom you left out. “How could you not mention Emma Goldman in your history of feminism???”

For me, the whole thing started in second grade, when I heard Helen Reddy’s song, “I Am Woman,” on the radio. I loved that song. I loved that it used the word “embryo” as a rhyme. I loved how it went into the minor key for the “Yes, I’m wise” part. I loved seeing my mom sing it in the car. The song was source of discussion among my friends at school and in the neighborhood. Apparently there was this thing called Women’s Lib and (some) women were as pissed off as (all) black people. That was about the extent of my feminist consciousness at age seven. But I can still do a mean version of that song at karaoke after a few whiskeys.

So any history is incomplete, insufficient, and inconsistent.  It is important to say, though, that at every step of the evolution of feminist thought, men have been there. Sometimes just as supportive husbands and sometimes as primary movers and shakers. Famous male thinkers, like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, had plenty to say on the equality of women. One of the first European intellectuals to identify patriarchy as a root cause of social inequality was Friedrich Engles in his 1884 book, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Engles was Karl Marx primary collaborator and addressing the core matters of feminism.

This complex history has two threads in it and it’s not what Rush Limbaugh and his army  of “femi-nazi” haters think.  It is not that feminists think that women are the same as men or better than men (although some individuals may think that). It is that women and girls are human and therefore deserve the same basic rights that men and boys do. The second thread is that there is a structured system that benefits men and disadvantages women (patriarchy). We feminists think there is a better way to organize society, but our views are shaped by the times we live in. As C. Wright Mills once pointed out, our history is our biography.

Galileo’s head was on the block

You could make the case that 6000 years ago, you didn’t need feminists as pretty much all people living in civilized settings were feminists. As discussed in the work of Riane Eisler, those cultures did not view males and females as occupying an inherent power imbalance. It wasn’t until the advent of patriarchal religions that “original sinners” got demoted to bitches and hos.

The long reign of the Catholic Church plunged Europe into a dark age of patriarchal violence. Women (and men) who challenged the new order were tortured and executed. At the peak of the witch trials (1480- 1750) it is estimated that 100,000 people were executed as witches.

But the hegemony of the papacy wouldn’t last forever. The Protestant Reformation worked to put non-Latin Bibles in Christian hands and help folks figure out the meaning of the Gospels for themselves (which many used to justify slavery and more oppression of women). Perhaps more significantly was the finding of one man, Galileo Galilei. Using the theories of Copernicus, in the early 1600s Galileo discovered that the earth was rotating around the sun, not the other way around as proscribed by The Bible and the Church.

Galileo began to promote this heliocentric view of the universe and, boy, was the Church pissed off. If the Bible was wrong on this simple point, what other lies had the Church been covering up? Galileo was denounced by the Roman Inquisition in 1615 and placed under house arrest as a heretic. The good news is that the Catholic Church eventually pardoned Galileo. In the year 1992.

The observations of the little astronomer from Pisa represented the beginning of the end of the Dark Ages and the birth of the Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought based knowledge on rationality and empirical evidence, not in blind faith of the unseen and the autocratic authority of church officials. Enlightenment philosophers across Europe and America ushered in a new age of science, philosophy, economics, and political thought, undermining the “divine right of kings.” Revolutions in America and France swept away monarchies and established governance based on the ancient rational process known as democracy.

It was in this period that the modern championing of women’s humanity began to take hold. You could argue that there is a long history of women standing up to the Man, or doing the job better than men, but it was never really based on a critique of patriarchal power. Joan of Arc was a badass, but she wasn’t a feminist. But in the 1700s, a chorus of voices took up the cause of female equality. American revolutionary Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason, argued that his new nation could not be completely free if its citizens could own slaves and its women could not vote. In 1775 he wrote:

“Nature herself, in forming beings so susceptible and tender, appears to have been more attentive to their charms than to their happiness. Continually surrounded with griefs and fears, the women more than share all our miseries, and are besides subjected to ills which are particularly their own. They cannot be the means of life without exposing themselves to the loss of it.”

If there is one name that stands out as the Enlightenment feminist, it is Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Wollstonecraft, who influence the work of Paine and others, was a British writer who covered many subjects. As a product of the Age of Reason, she applied the ethic of rationality to the wave of social change that was occurring in the late 18th Century. In A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), she assailed the aristocracy that had survived the French Revolution and advocated for true democratic forms of government. Her next book, A Vindication for the Rights of Woman (1792) is generally seen as the first feminist work published for a large audience. In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft makes what we would think of now as a standard sociological case on gender; that the passivity of women is not due to biology, but socialization. She advocated for educations as the primary method to change the role of women.

A Vindication for the Rights of Woman was still written in the language of the era (there is much discussion of how women’s role as mothers is crucial), but for the first time the language was clear, females are as human as males. They could be wives, but as full humans they could be her husband’s companion, not his ornament. She links racism and sexism, stating that the justification for gender roles as tradition is the same for the justification of slavery as tradition. “If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?” she writes.

If Mary Wollstonecraft had been born a hundred years earlier, she probably would have been burned at the stake. Instead her short life produced some of the most radical writings of her time. She died in childbirth at the age of 38 and her daughter, Mary, became one of the most famous female authors of all time. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein 20 years after her mother’s death. Pretty much everyone knows Frankenstein. Not enough people know about the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.

The following books were mentioned in this blog post and can purchased from Powell’s by clicking on the covers below.

Coming Soon: Part 2: Birth of the First Wave

2014 was a year of transformation.

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

December 31, 2014.

I’m not sure the first moment I started calling myself a feminist. Probably after reading Susan Faludi’s Backlash in 1991.  I was a feminist in my head. A lot of my behavior was still pretty douchebaggy. In 2014, I became a feminist in my heart. The birth of our daughter on August 17th was singularly the most transformative moment in my life. The cause of all women became my cause in that instant. Sex trafficked girls in India and on SE 82nd Avenue. Sexually harassed women in office buildings and Wal-Marts. Battered women seeking shelter. Girls who are told to shut up and be pretty. All of it. The world has to change for Cozette.

Ten years ago I published a chapter entitled `Getting it’: Women and Male Desistance from Hate Groups” in the book Home-grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism. It was about how the former members of racist groups all had a common story about why they left the world of hate; a female. It might have been a teacher, or a foster mother, or a girlfriend, or a daughter. When they found a woman that they loved, they understood that just because she is a female she is a target, similar to their targets of hatred. They developed empathy. They became feminists.

This has been the year of my daughter. Is started in Las Vegas because I wanted to take Andrea to see the Beatle’s Love show at the Mirage on New Year’s Eve. (I was going to propose but I hadn’t found the right ring yet. A few days later we were engaged.) The year was full of anticipation of our coming little girl. We took pictures every Thursday of the progress and posted the whole thing in this YouTube video: Andrea and Randy’s Little Project

Andrea’s mother and sister came up from Mexico to help out and increase the feminine energy in the house (that included Lita the Cat). Cozy’s birth was hard and dramatic (future blog post alert) but was something close to spiritual. My wife was a lioness. I didn’t know any woman could be that strong.

Of course being the parent of a newborn isn’t easy (see every blogpost before and after this), but I have never known such joy. Fortunately, I have a job where I can take a little time off for those precious first moments and then, later, translate the whole thing in the classroom. I also have a job that makes me a target for others, and so I have to really focus on the beautiful life I have and not the haters. I feel insulated from the bad energy in the world.

2014 has been stellar. We landed on a freakin’ comet and marched for racial justice. Who knows what 2015 has in store, besides endless political arguments on Facebook? If all goes as planned, Cozy will celebrate her first birthday on Isla Mujeres in Mexico. We will get first words and first steps. I will go nuts trying to baby-proof this house. Maybe we will even start making our own baby food.

But I just wanted to take a moment to thank all the friends who have offered advice and encouragement in 2014. You don’t know how much that has helped. There is so much goodness in my world. I know the coming year will have its challenges, but this little family unit is tight. Happy New Year!

“No, you’re not perfect but you’re not your mistakes. Oh, the good outweighs the bad even on your worst day.” Thank you, Yeezus.

These books are available at Powell’s by clicking their covers below.

 

 

 

Dad’s Favorite Discs of 2014

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

December 30, 2014

There has always been a lot of music in this house, but I want Cozy to be surrounded by the best there is. I feel lucky that my mom loved jazz and I think I became a Brubeck fan in utero. As you can see from Cozy’s College of Music Knowledge, I’m a fan of the ancient art form known as the “album.” It represents a complete vision from an artist.

This is probably the last year for a while that I will be buying a lot of new albums. Music got us through the pregnancy and now sometimes helps baby sleep. My love of rap music took a back seat this year as a screaming baby and Killer Mike raging against the machine really don’t work well together.  But it was truly a great year of music.

It was also a great year for Latin music, highlighted by our road trip to LA to attend the Supersonico Fest, seeing Café Tacuba, Calle 13, and other great stars. I discovered so much great music listening to NPR’s Alt Latino podcast, I could do another Top 20 list of just Spanish language albums.

So these are the 20 albums I spent the most time with in 2014. Maybe not the best, but the ones I really connected with. The Against Me! album is easily #1. Perfectly crafted punk songs that give voice to the transgender experience. Maybe the most important record of the year.

Top 20 Favorite Albums of 2014

  1. Against Me! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues
  2. Beck – Morning Phase
  3. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Hypnotic Eye
  4. St. Vincent – self titled
  5. La Santa Cecelia – Someday New
  6. The GHOASTT – Midnight Sun
  7. Jack White – Lazaretto 
  8. The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream
  9. Ages and Ages – Divisionary
  10. Miranda Lambert – Platinum
  11. Spoon – They Want My Soul
  12. Ceci Bastida – La Edad de la Violencia
  13. Thom Yorke – Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes
  14. Ryan Adams – self-titled
  15. Lucinda Williams – Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
  16. FKA twigs –  LP1
  17. Pacifika – Amor Planeta
  18. Lily Allen – Sheezus
  19. Chrissie Hynde – Stockholm
  20. Lana del Ray – Ultraviolence

Honorable Mention

Various Artists – The Art of McCartney, New Pornographers – Bill Bruisers, Steelism – 615 to Fame, Sinead O’Connor – I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, Beyoncé – self titled, Bob Dylan & the Band – The Basement Tapes Raw, Calle 13 – Entren Los Que Quieran, U2 – Songs of Innocence

I Hate Housework (2nd Wave Feminist Edition)

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 29, 2014

When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she described a world where women were told they could find salvation in housework. Television programs like The Donna Reed Show and Leave It To Beaver featured perfectly polished housewives in perfectly polished homes. Those women were fictional. Real women were popping mother’s little helpers, praying the laundry would be done before the pot roast and maybe there was enough money in the cookie jar to hire a maid on Fridays.

There is no reward in drudgery if that’s all you’ve got. If you have an actual life, there is something satisfyingly zen about going at the bathroom tile like your life depended on it. Like rock climbers who free climb and can ONLY think about where their fingers go next, you can block out all the noise when your are channeling Mr. Clean. (This is how yoga is supposed to work but my mind is usually focused on the percent chance I will fart before the hour is up.) But for those who are not grout yogis, housework sucks.

I get it. So much of being a house-husband is getting it. You gotta walk a mile in somebody’s slippers, pushing a vacuum cleaner. I so get it. I get my mom and why she had to get the hell out. I get all the women who were sold a bill of goods about the American dream and then felt like they were sold into slavery. A white picket fense ain’t gonna make Swiffing any more rewarding.

I have done housework my whole life, but it always seemed manageable. When I first moved to Portland I had a roommate who must have had June Cleaver for a mom. He never cleaned anything. He took his laundry to his parents’ house where it was magically washed. I once got a little fed up and said, “Hey, who do you think cleans the bathroom? Me. You need to do it sometimes.” I came home the next day and found a young woman cleaning our bathroom; his new “girlfriend.” (Happy day note – this guy has evolved since then. It was the grunge era after all.)

I’m the kind of guy who feels like the world is askew if my bed is not made. I am not anal. I am a slob. But there is a maximum number of dishes in the sink and a laundry on the floor before my inner neurotic begins to hyperventilate. So cleaning is just part of life’s routine. All that changes when a baby shows up.

A baby is the ultimate excuse for everything. I’ve completely missed meetings and just said, “Oh, the baby was being fussy” and people are like, “Don’t worry. I totally understand. Cherish these moments.” It’s like having cancer. You can totally get away with murder. “I stabbed that guy because the baby was crying and I just got stressed out.” “Don’t worry. I remember when my kid was that age and I stabbed a guy.”

So if my house is kind of messy right now and you don’t have kids of your own, back the fuck off. I thought I would have so much time as stay-home-dad. I would get my new novel started and work on remodel projects while the baby slept. Nope. The baby takes up all the time. Her quick naps allow me enough space to check my emails, maybe work on this blog and run down the street to give the outgoing Netflix of The Good Wife to the postman, who I missed because I was feeding the baby. While my wife watches time slow down at work, my day speeds by and I didn’t even get a chance to throw the dirty bibs in the wash.

When the wife gets home, she’s drained and in no mood to do housework. I get that, too. I was that guy. Who wants to tackle the kitchen floor after a long day at the office? So I try to make her coffee in the morning and a cocktail at night. But I’m still in Suzy Homemaker mode. Now that she can watch the baby, I can get a load of laundry through and wash a dish or two. Weekends are our time, but there is still bills to be paid and grocery shopping. So I’m first out of bed and the last in. There are baby bottles still to wash. So if my house doesn’t look like the Brady house, kiss my dishpan hands.

Dorothy Smith wrote in feminist classic The Everyday World As Problematic (1987) that women are relegated to domestic sphere doing the logistic work so man can occupy the public sphere. (“Behind every great man is a great woman – not getting any credit.”) I understand that the laundry and the dishes are now my job (and the kitchen floor and putting the diapers out and…) and that’s OK. My wife works hard. She brings home the bacon and nurses the baby and so much more. I can make her a bagel in the morning. But I can totally see how so many women get lost in this support role. When is it my time?

Empathy is the most important quality in the world. I wish the New York cops who turned their backs on the mayor this weekend had empathy for the members of the minority community who continue to be racially profiled. I wish the members of ISIS had empathy for anybody who is not in ISIS. But most importantly, I wish men had empathy for all the women stuck at home who are supposed be be happy because they have a new dishwasher and a front-loading dryer. Maybe if you would just lend a hand.

EDIT: The dishwasher is now officially dead and I have to wash everything by hand. Represent!

These books are available at Powell’s independent bookstore by clicking the covers  below.

Christmas Poem for My Wife.

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

How can I think of you without thinking of me?

Everything I think and do is because you set me free.

How can I think of where I am without knowing where you are?

When you are near I fear that you are still too far.

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You were the one who gave me the chance to finally arrive.

I was born with promise but got lost along the way.

Like a messiah who accidentally becomes a drunken sailor.

It was you who said, “Come back to your path.

You have it in you to shine like the greatest star in the sky.

I won’t hold your hand and but I will help you up the hill.”

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With love and grace.

With anger and forgiveness.

With salsa and tequila.

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I was a plastic bag floating in the waves.

Not even a comical jellyfish.

Something that fell out of somebody else’s luggage.

Happy to be a pinball spun around by rubber bumpers.

Until I saw your face, surrounded by a great green light.

You were burned into my cloak as I came out of the woods.

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With older hands and stronger back.

With patience and tears.

With hope and head on track.

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How can I think of you without thinking of me?

Everything I think and do is because you set me free.

How can I think of where I am without knowing where you are?

When you are near I fear that you are too far.

—————————————————-

The heart and mind are finally one not two.

My gift for you this year is simple,  I can only thank you.

– Randy Blazak 12/26/2014

Sex with Elf on the Shelf

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 23, 2014

There are a lot things they don’t tell you about being a new parent. Everybody talks about the sleep thing (so true). What nobody talks about is what happens to your sex life. You’re going full speed in baby-making and then comes the wild and wooly world of pregnancy sex. (I think that’s what Beyoncé meant when she sang, “Bow down, bitches.”) And then screeeeech! Where is THAT movie?

The first two months must be the roughest. You’ve got a baby that wakes up every few hours and screams for mama’s breasts, which, all of sudden, have a new purpose on earth, dammit. And of course the vagina needs some time to recover from a 1-week late kid climbing out of it. That can open up some exciting alternatives if it weren’t for said baby wailing constantly and filling her diaper with sticky poo that requires numerous wipe downs each time. Kinda kills the mood. The bed becomes a sacred place for a few minutes of sleep and only sleep.

Of course, dear sacred mother is dealing with the fact that her body is transformed after 9 months of cooking the kid in oven. Us Magazine will tell you that celebrities get their pre-baby body back in weeks, with the help of a shit-load of airbrushing. Real-world mom has to compare herself to fake supermodel mom and suddenly the lights are off and the culturally produced shame is on. (Personally speaking, I think the post-baby belly is awesome. It’s what the Elizabethans called the “silken layer” and that’s where you will find my hands.)

Once things get settled, the question becomes where to have sex. If the baby is not in eyesight, there is constant fear something might happen. OK, baby is taking a nap in the swing in the living room, let’s shove the binkies and the breast pump off the bed and get busy! Wait, is she still breathing? What if she falls out of the swing? Somebody could grab her! And… we’re done.

In most tribal cultures people just have sex in front of their kids. Everybody lives in the same hut. It’s not like you can send your kid for a sleep-over to the hut down the road. Christopher Columbus remarked on his first trip to the “New” World about how the savages demonstrated none of the decent Catholic guilt around sex and were just out doing it like animals on the TLC channel. That may be a rational option now, but you have to think a knock is coming from Child and Family Services and you’ll have a registered sex offender sign in front of your house. (Has this actually ever happened?)

So the option of having sex with the baby in the room becomes very real and, not surprisingly, is a hot topic for internet discussions. (Apparently, it won’t turn your child into a pervert.) But the logistics of it are a bit different. Where should the baby be? Cozy sleeps in our bed. How do we not wake her? I guess the role play where I’m 49’er panning for gold and screaming “Yeehaw!” is off the table. And what if she wakes up?

Whenever I look at my baby, I’m filled with overwhelming love. But’s not the kind of love you feel when Marvin Gaye is playing. It’s parent love and it warm a smushy and filled with hope and will kill a boner like THAT. Sex requires focus. (Unless you are a guy and trying to prolong things by thinking about taxes. Holla!) The worst is when you are In flagrante and suddenly baby opens her eyes. Elf on the shelf.

elf-meme

I don’t really know how this Elf on a Shelf thing became so big, but there is increasing debate about it. Some sociologists have argued that it prepares kids for an Orwellian surveillance state by reporting their misdeeds back to Santa. The elf is always watching. Well, your baby is always watching, too! And she’s reporting to the mothership of her future subconscious. If papa is slapping mama on the ass and whispering, “Who’s your daddy?” you don’t think baby elf is filing that away for a future therapy session, and making a copy for DHS?

This jujitsu kick the balls of sex-life has to be a temporary thing, right? I mean there is a crib in the other room waiting for this kid to move into and take up residence. We won’t have to worry about Cindy Lou Who waddling in and asking why mommy and daddy are Roman-Greco wrestling? Right? Maybe second babies really do come from storks.

I’m sure there is a culture where they have babysitters that magically appear when parents want to have sex. Japan seems like a likely, bet. But for the rest of us, who have a baby elf staring at us, it’s just going to have to be a little tribal for a while. Don’t tell Santa.