something to be desired

Dollhouse

2009-12-09T22:44:00.003-05:00

The best show on television has already been canceled, and it's being shown 2 episodes at a time every Friday night for the next handful of weeks until its done. It is called Dollhouse. Thanks for doing your best again, Mr Whedon.

A repost of a repost of a riposte: BigMuscle.com 6

2007-11-26T00:31:00.000-05:00

I no longer feel the need to introduce this series. If you want to read the others, click the Bigmuscle bigtab.

11 June 2003

Where do we begin, and where does the other leave off? Can we answer this question, or do we sometimes feel like love is joining flesh into seamless flesh at points of contact like joined twins? In the beginning, this union is exhilarating. Later it's stifling as you find yourself trapped in another's skin, in another's desires, inside another's flesh and expectations, and the only way to escape is to chop off the other like you would your own arm. (The metaphor extends: later after the amputation of the other, the remainder can feel less like the phantom itch on the hand that no longer exists than the urge to reach or gesture with a limb that isn't there, that is no long attached, no longer a part but apart.)

But this metaphor covers over another: the union of the dyad is how it feels to the organism, on the other hand how the relation functions is another matter entirely. What is this metaphor that gets lost under that satisfactions and frustrations and loathings and self-loathings of loving and hating? The metaphor is one of reflection. We see ourselves in the mirror of the other without recognizing who we are looking at--and that indeterminate who is left open, because the me we misrecognize covers over the other's "me," and we never see him because we see what we want to see, which is further complicated by the fact that we almost never have conscious awareness of what we want to see in an other in the first place. This is best illustrated in the way we loathe another person because he has traits that we loathe in ourselves, yet we never recognize him as being like us, as being akin; as we do when we see ourselves in a mirror looking unflattering, we turn away with a pained look of disgust. We turn away from ourselves. And so we never see. This dynamic lays bare the dynamic of Love.

On Celebrity

2007-09-25T08:10:00.001-04:00

And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Britney after all she's been through! She lost her aunt. She went through a divorce-uh. She has two fucking kids. Her husband turned out to be a user, a cheater, and now she's going through a custody battle. All you people care about is readers and making money off of her.

She's a HUMAN!!! What you don't realize is that Britney's making you all this money, and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her. She hasn't performed onstage in years. Her song is called "Gimme More" for a reason—because all you people want is more, more, more, more, MORE!

Leave her alone! You're lucky she even performed for you bastards! Leave Britney alone. Please.

[Sobs.]

[Pause. Composing himself.]

Perez Hilton talked about professionalism. And said if Britney was a professional she would have pulled it off no matter what. Speaking of professionalism, when is it “professional” to publicly bash someone who's going through a HARD TIME? Leave Britney alone! Pleeease. [beat]

[Sobs.]

Leave. Britney. Spears. Alone. Right. Now. I mean it. Anyone who has a problem with her, you deal with me, because she's not well, right now.

[Quiet sobs, then loud sobs, some choking.]

[Pleadingly] Leave her alone.

[END]

I almost always listen to music when I write. Tonight’s selection, for a variety of reasons, is Sufjan Stevens, and my least-listened to disc of his, The Avalanche. Remixes, failed attempts, favorite non-releases, and would-be B-sides. Check it out.

Chris Crocker. How is one to speak of him without resorting to phobia or condescension? Or perhaps affection? What I would like to do with this post is attempt a critique of something I believe he represents that does not have recourse to those other things. This offers a fairly fine line, between fire and tears, let us say; it is a finite walk, a balancing act. It is a highwire act, and it is up to whoever is reading to determine when and if I fall.

In all honesty, my initial reaction to the Leave Britney Alone video was a certain kind of boredom. It was my first exposure to Chris Crocker, and I fully recognize why it fascinates and could imagine how this boy has become such a phenomenon on the internet, even before his exposure reached me, the least exposed to this world except through friend and boyfriend. The intensity, the personality, the personal nature of it, which is to say the intimacy of it, is captivating. This video has the sort of thing that makes good porn captivating—the idea that you are getting a peek into something sincere and unguarded. Good porn feels like a true voyeurism, which is to say a perspective that is supposedly hidden from the object on view. As in this situation, porn is never the case of unknowing spectacle. As much as a performer "forgets" the camera, the camera's presence and its recording function is reliable precisely because this recording is intentional. Someone wants you—yes, you—to see this footage, so it is always shaped to some to degree, and this is another way of saying that there is an aesthetic involved, and that there is a desire, and this is a self-conscious desire. And there is therefore an audience—an audience of which the subject is aware. The implication of an audience means the awareness of an other watching in this case—isn’t that funny that the awareness of the self is contingent on an other watching? Yet, not so much. It is not so surprising that the circle that encloses the observing other encloses the self. Self awareness is a mirror and the mirror is the other, or, as we say, the audience. And within this doubly enclosed circle we have performance.

BOREDOM/LAUGHTER/PHOBIA
As in the tradition of a Shirley Bassey concert, Chris Crocker begins his Britney monologue at the level of 11, and he sustains that level throughout with occasional spikes to 12 and sometimes even 13. Just when you think he can’t take it up a notch, he does so, and then goes up another notch. But without the artistry of someone like Dame Bassey—and how should he have this power at such a young age when she has had a long lifetime to learn how to overwhelm us so completely?—Mr. Crocker can only hover like a hummingbird or an insect around the same high pitch. Though his attack is sustained and intense, it is this deadly consistency that is the hobgoblin of his speech, and the thing that makes it boring. But that which makes the monologue boring is, of course, the thing the makes it funny. On the level of a temper tantrum, which can only be the first way anyone apprehends this clip, it is hilarious. And I think this aspect is what accounts for a good portion of its popularity.

For me, close on the heels of the amusement, is the urge to reach into the screen and smack some sense into this kid. It is difficult to tease out the differences among the utterly vapid subject matter, the grandiose self-involvement, the chip on his shoulder, and in-your-face femininity. I’d like to say that this final factor lacks power for me, but I can’t, and that shames me. The moment that comes to mind, strangely, is from the movie Carrie—not the adaptation of the Dreiser novel starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones, but the movie version of the Stephen King book—in which the gym teacher played by Betty Buckley saves Sissy Spacek’s Carrie from the humiliating, locker room maxi-pad attack by Carrie’s schoolmates and in the next scene confesses that she wanted to smack Carrie too. It is this annihilating, knee-jerk demand for normalcy of which I am so ashamed. But one doesn’t have to honor that demand any more than to recognize that it is there and to therefore resist it. This is instructive. Your fears and repulsions needn’t be something from which to—or with which you—recoil, but they can teach you; they can remind you that what we learn to react to with irritation or revulsion can tell you who you are by reminding you who you would like not to be, and therefore remind you of how brave those people are who reflect these parts of yourself back at you.

They are not brave because they show you who you are, but because they are unafraid or unashamed to do precisely what society would prefer they not do. We constantly torture the feminine out of little, queer boys, and the kid who resists this is to be admired. Anyone who resists this is to be admired regardless of his or her age. This accounts for precisely why—and I don’t know if this applies to Chris Crocker, nor do I think it matters one bit if it does or doesn’t—this phobic encounter accounts, however, precisely for why the rights of the transgendered matter so deeply to the politics surrounding same-sex desire. This is not my point with this piece, but it is worth mentioning that there are gay and lesbian folks who find insult in being grouped with those who wish to become the other sex. But if you find femmey guys and butch girls offensive, is it because you were one at one point that person, and don’t you wish someone stood up for you instead of making fun of you, ostracizing you, or kicking your ass? And even if you never had this experience, how could it be any clearer that wanting to become the other sex isn’t that different, to the straightest of the world, from having a hint of the other sex in you? Since there is only one relationship that is recognized—between a man and a woman—do you really think, as a man, that you’re earning points by playing rugby and following the Yankees? You only invoke a playground pecking order by rejecting the transgendered in this way—even if you never had any interest in liquid eyeliner (or for you lipstick ladies out there, even if you did). Seeming straight will never protect you from the people who want to hurt you because you’re not straight. Just ask Senator Craig.

ON THE QUESTION OF COMPOSURE
Part of what, I think, makes Chris Crocker so fascinating to so many is his lack of composure. Whether his tearful or defiant face is a purposeful performance or not—and I cannot tell if it is or not and is therefore a composure of its own or not—Crocker’s temper tantrum is the very representative of a lack of composure. On its face, Leave Britney Alone is an uncensored display. Within a culture that is obsessed with composure, with being what you seem, with a self-identical clarity, with a hygienic fear of infection by terrorism or an untoward desire, where our politicians are supposed to be appear to say the correct things and toe a certain line, there is an exhilaration in the exhibition of someone ranting with a complete lack of composure. It matters not at all that it is about Britney Spears, in fact the serious investment in something so trivial makes it that much more delicious, that much more personal, and that much more pornographic.

The political creature in our Land is the paradigm case of this composure of which we are so tired that we turn to a screaming child on YouTube to find something—anything—that feels different from the calculated sincerity that assaults us every day on our national media. Senator Craig shows us all what it’s like to inhabit that suffocating demand to embody the joyless place of expectation that only finds its relief in an airport men’s room stall. No one can withstand that demand to please. American politics has become so willing to please on the surface—and only on its face—to maintain its place, that it has lost sight entirely of what it means to care for, to husband, to uphold, the public interest. The public interest is not what the public finds interesting, which is the domain of the celebrity, but that which is actually for the public good, what is sustaining for society, both now and in the future. I speak of civic duty, which is a grave duty, and one that has been traded for the triviality of a popularity contest, for likeability, for respectability, for a composition. We live in a nation where a politician would willingly promote laws that would punish him for his own desire only to maintain his power. This is not just a betrayal of the self, but it is the betrayal of the public trust on the most egregious level. Yet, we forgive, because we understand pressure, pressure to conform, to compose, to seem and not be, and not to lead. We forgive because this is a collective arrangement, and we understand how the collective can force the hand, force it into a handshake, a handshake deal, how it can force the face into a shape: a ghastly blissful smile.

That last line is a reference that will pass over the heads of many readers, which is a pity because it comes from a Brecht poem, which only survives in English, which Bertolt Brecht wrote about the actor, Peter Lorre, and his experience in Hollywood. I quote it now, only because our politicians are indistinguishable from our celebrities, to our great national detriment:

The Swamp

I saw many friends
And the friend I loved most
Among them helplessly sunk
Into the swamp.
I pass by daily.
And a drowning was not over
in a single morning.
This made it more terrible.
And the memory of our long talks about the swamp,
Which already held so many powerless.
Now I watched him leaning back
Covered with leeches in the shimmering,
Softly moving slime,
Upon his sinking face
A ghastly blissful smile.

Smile for the camera, Senator—Senator Craig, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, Senator Spears, Senator Crocker. Do you vote for the world your grandchildren will live in or do you vote for the person with whom you’d most rather enjoy a beer? Smile. Smiles everyone. Smile. Smile for the camera.

RAGE
We might now, after such a long excursis, return to what should by now be the obvious topic of this post, which is clearly Chris Crocker’s deathless outpost, Leave Britney Alone.

We are, or I should say, I am, presented with a number of problems, or shall I call them, opportunities, to end this post. But instead I will invoke anger. Rage, O Goddess, sing of the rage of Chris Crocker.

When I happened upon Leave Britney Alone, I had never heard of Chris Crocker, or rather I had never heard of the videos and the phenomenon that travels under that signature. Though his name is a pseudonym, Chris Crocker is not, or does not appear to be, a fiction in the order of a J.T. LeRoy or Anthony Godby Johnson, though he bears the markers of a similar fascination. It is really in the order of an insult to invoke the names of these great fakes of the internet and the publishing world in the same paragraph mentioning Chris Crocker because 1) “Crocker” does not lay claim to any of the spectacular hardships of those ersatz Lost Boys and 2) it is the video transparency of Chris Crocker, and his meetability, that exempt him from such a distasteful hoax, or, at any rate, lends him some much-needed credence. Yet there is a striking similarity in the collective taste for such a creature. This similarity is not his fault, yet the desire for the sexually-transgressive/sexually ambiguous, uncensored child remains. The appetite for this strange configuration remains so powerful that no one has mentioned it thus far to my knowledge. Except me.

But let us speak of rage. According to an article on thestranger, Chris Crocker is a boy, somewhere in the South of our Nation, and he is supposed to be who he says he is. I am circumspect in the way I present these facts because I have been taught to not trust the media. I don’t know why I feel this way but it probably has to do with the utter inability—or perhaps lack of interest—that the media has shown of late in reporting what happens in the world. I don’t blame my circumspection. Yet, here we are, and we have this piece, and we have “Chris Crocker”’s video posts, which are no more or less real than these words you are reading now on your screen.

I did some research on the C.C. phenomenon—only a little, I promise you, because, Gentle Reader, I wanted to honor, a little, the context, or truly the contextlessness of the Leave Britney Alone experience as I first found it. You see, this single video has far surpassed any of C.C.’s previous video-posts. In fact, the last time I checked on YouTube, Leave Britney Alone has had more viewings—well over seven million—than the original cause: Spears’ appearance on the MTV music awards (which had a reported viewing audience of seven million—this number, as with all other reports, is subject to question, yet this is what I read). Try to imagine seven million. That is only a million less than what is supposed to be the population of New York City (according to the US Census Bureau). Okay, try to imagine a million people. Have you met a million people? Do a million people know who you are? (Is this circle getting smaller?) Now, are you nineteen-years-old? And are you being home-schooled by your grandmother because it is feared you’re too femmey to literally survive public high school? Is your first boyfriend someone you’ve never met in person but is—like almost all the other intimate relationships you have ever had—relegated to the internet and the telephone? Now, assuming all these factors are “true,” let’s go back to seven million people knowing who you are. Who are you now?

“Chris Crocker” is a resistance to some boy’s situation, which is to say his environment. In thestranger article he says he has always been femmey, he looks up to women, not men, not gay men, but women, specifically. He puts on eyeliner (beautifully) and posts videos titled Bitch, Please, wherein he enumerates the various useful ways of saying “Bitch, please…” (though I felt he missed a few good iterations as his performance escalated) or This and That wherein he responds to people, real and internet, who have attacked him. This appears, on the face, to be the reaction of an embattled person, a person who must resort to the internet to be credible, or at least heard. This is a person who describes the people who “friend” him on MySpace as “fans.” Fans. This is a person who believes himself—whether its true or not, according to this thestranger piece—to have fans. Do you have fans? Does he have fans? Or does he have people who watch him to see what he’ll do next? And what is the difference between having fans and being a freak show and being Edie Sedgwick?

But our topic is rage. Where is this rage? The Muse of Epics—who is even less truthful, who is much more enamored of effect, than the Muse of History—knows because in Bitch, Please, This and That, and Leave Britney Alone that rage is on view for all to see, in Epic display. What disarms these pieces—what takes them away from self-conscious, calculated performance, or in fact, what arms them entirely—is, for example, is the imperious gaze that Mr. Crocker gives the camera—his camera, his eye to the world—at the end of Bitch, Please, or his, as he states on YouTube, entirely seriously tearful defense of Britney Spears in Leave Britney Alone? The world he speaks to is so much larger and therefore so much entirely smaller and specific than his viewers might believe. The pain he imputes to Britney Spears is his pain, it seems. How else to understand the emotional level to which he rises in this defense of a celebrity he can only know through the news or what he reads and believes? He tells us that if we have a problem with Britney that we should come to him. He tells us that we should leave Britney Spears alone, and that he means it. He speaks to us as though he knew her personally; he speaks to us as though he knew us personally. Chris Crocker defends Britney Spears as though she were himself, and I have little doubt that—if this is a sincere display, as I think it probably is as much as it can be—that this is the case. Replace “Britney Spears” with “Chris Crocker” and you have the real message to the world. Seth Green hit the nail in the head far more accurately than he might have intended in a celebrity-parody of an internet-celebrity defending a pop-music-celebrity. To this imaginary personality, even to himself, called “Chris Crocker,” an attack on a celebrity like Spears is an attack on himself. In his mind, he is her equal; he is capable of accepting the blows thrown at her, in her stead. Though he is a kid in the South who refuses to reveal his real name or location—for obvious reasons—he feels capable to speak to us so easily, as though his internet fame is on the same level of the manufactured fame of a Britney Spears who has had corporations and smart managers-since-fired behind her. Mr. Crocker not only takes on the machine that produced Britney Spears, that has turned on her, but the audience that consumed her, and that now consumes him as an object of derision. His rage is a delicious internet treat that we chew on as a zero-calorie moment, which we discuss for a week or two until the flavor is gone. Then we spit it out and forget it. The joke we call History will remember Monica Lewinsky, Anna Nicole Smith, and Britney Spears longer than Chris Crocker and his undisguised tantrum about himself. It is being forgotten even as I type this. Even as he signs the contract to his reality series.

But now that we have put his rage for recognition to the side, finally, I can get to the purpose of this post, and by that I mean the title of this post, which is the nature of celebrity.

About three decades ago, Andy Warhol declared, presciently that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. When I think of statements like this, I usually think of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin and wonder what they would think of the world today, because the stuff they wrote about--what Adorno called the Culture Industry--and the way media affects the populace haunts me to this day, every day. I think they would commit suicide rather than live in a world of reality television and the blogosphere. Similarly, I imagine that the men who wrote the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, if they came in a time machine to the Twenty-First Century, would be appalled by the state of the Nation, despite, or, really, probably because of, their patrician sensibilities.

We live in a time when everyone believes in the necessity of their own celebrity. The person we call “Chris Crocker” is young enough to believe that this is the way the world is supposed to be. Celebrity is now available to everyone, for a time, as Warhol said. The larger question is: do we want it? And within that question is why do we want it? It seems that in this version of reality we are stuck with is the question of if we are only real if we are on television--and that being on television has become coterminous with being on a screen, any screen, even a computer monitor. Somehow, now, being famous—which is being known—is the same thing as being real. For politicians this may be one thing—which is awful enough—but for you and me, this is something else entirely. We have entered into a time when Warhol’s whimsical prediction has taken on the quality of a curse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We close, appropriately, with the delicate Sufjan Stevens song playing as I write these words. In my mind, in my mind, this song is titled, "I made a lot of mistakes."

I fell in love again

all things go, all things go
drove to Chicago
all things know, all things know
we sold our clothes to the state
I don't mind, I don't mind
I made a lot of mistakes
in my mind, in my mind

I drove to New York
in a van, with my friend
we slept in parking lots
I don't mind, I don't mind
I was in love with the place
in my mind, in my mind
I made a lot of mistakes
in my mind, in my mind

you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
all things know, all things know
you had to find it
all things go, all things go

if I was crying
in the van, with my friend
it was for freedom
from myself and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes

you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
I made a lot of mistakes
all things know, all things know
I made a lot of mistakes
you had to find it
I made a lot of mistakes
all things go, all things go
I made a lot of mistakes

"Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version)," music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens on The Avalanche, 2006.

A repost of a repost of a riposte: BigMuscle.com 5

2007-08-14T04:07:00.000-04:00

To see the other BigMuscle.com meditative reposts, you can start at the beginning or go to the last one. I suggest the former, but you are, of course, allowed to do whatever the hell you want. It is the Internets, after all. This is the fifth in the series.

11 June 2003

Where do we begin, and where does the other leave off? Can we answer this question, or do we sometimes feel like love is joining flesh into seamless flesh at points of contact like joined twins? In the beginning, this union is exhilarating. Later it may be stifling as you find yourself trapped in another's skin, in another's desires, inside another's flesh and expectations, and the only way to escape is to chop off the other like you would your own arm. (The metaphor extends: later after the amputation of the other, the remainder can feel less like the phantom itch on the hand that no longer exists than the urge to reach or gesture with a limb that isn't there, that is no long attached, no longer a part but apart.)

But this metaphor covers over another: the union of the dyad is how it feels to the organism, on the other hand how the relation functions is another matter entirely. What is this metaphor that gets lost under those satisfactions and frustrations and loathings and self-loathings of loving and hating? The metaphor is one of reflection. We see ourselves in the mirror of the other without recognizing who we are looking at--and that indeterminate who is left open, because the me we misrecognize covers over the other's "me" (or "I"), and we never see him because we see what we want to see, which is further complicated by the fact that we almost never have conscious awareness of what we want to see in an other in the first place. This is best illustrated in the way we loathe another person because he has traits that we loathe in ourselves, yet we never recognize him as being like us, as being akin; much as we do when we see ourselves in a mirror looking unflattering; we turn away with a pained look of disgust. We turn away from ourselves. And so we never see. This dynamic lays bare the dynamic of Love.

I Translate German Poetry Sometimes: The Lover

2007-08-14T02:32:00.000-04:00

The Lover

That is my window. A moment ago
I woke up so softly.
I thought I would float.
To where does my life extend,
and where does the night begin?

I could think that everything
were still me all around;
translucent as a crystal's
depths, darkened, dumb.

I could also contain the stars
inside me still; so large
does my heart appear to me; so gladly
it released him away again

whom I began perhaps to love,
perhaps began to hold.
Strange, as something never-described
my fate looks at me.

For what am I laid under this
unendingness,
fragrant as a meadow,
moved here and there,

calling out at the same time and afraid
that someone will hear the call,
and determined to find my downfall
in another.

R. M. Rilke, 1908
translation attributed to me, May 2003

Die Liebende

Das ist mein Fenster. Eben
bin ich so sanft erwacht.
Ich dachte, ich würde schweben.
Bis wohin reicht mein Leben,
und wo beginnt die Nacht?

Ich könnte meinen, alles
ware noch Ich ringsum;
durchsichtig wie eines Kristalles
Tiefe, verdunkelt, stumm.

Ich könnte noch auch die Sterne
fassen in mir; so groβ
scheint mir mein Herz; so gerne
lieβ es ihn wieder los

den ich vielleicht zu lieben,
vielleicht zu halten begann.
Fremd, wie nieberschrieben
sieht mich mein Schicksal an.

Was bin ich unter diese
Unendlichkeit gelegt,
duftend wie eine Wiese,
hin und her bewegt,

rufend zugleich und bange,
daβ einer den Ruf vernimmt,
und zum Untergange
in einem Andern bestimmt.

RMR Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil [1908]

FAQ: The Bush Daughters

2007-08-07T00:04:00.004-04:00

They are so mysterious. A classic from modernhumorist that I wish I'd written. But I didn't. The well isn't dry, only sandy, so I direct you to wetter places. From 2000.

Q: The Bush children are so mysterious. No one seems to know anything about them. What can you tell me?
A: The President’s daughters, Jenna and Barbara, are fraternal twins. They are 19 years old and attend the University of Texas at Austin (Jenna) and Yale University (Barbara).

Q: What else?
A: Barbara is the dark-haired one; Jenna is blond.

Q: Oh, come on…what else?
A: Barbara was named for her maternal grandmother, Barbara Bush. She was her high school’s homecoming queen, loves sushi and she has been thrown into public life through no choice or desire of her own. Jenna was named for her paternal grandmother. Her favorite musician is Robert Earl Keen and, because of her father’s career, she will not be able to live a normal life.

Q: What else can you tell me about the Bush girls?
A: Barbara can produce a powerful magnetic field with her mind. She uses it not only to manipulate metal but, under certain rare circumstances, to alter the temporal stream and reverse the flow of time. Jenna has been described as the trendier twin, and wore a camel and bone cashmere ensemble to her father’s inauguration.

Q: What are their hobbies and accomplishments?
A: Jenna made a fortune in 1966 by inventing and patenting Wite-Out® brand correction fluid. She parlayed that money into a real estate empire that included a 200-acre manmade island off the coast of Baja California, where she established a utopian community. Barbara was born with the ability to summon and command the beasts of the forest and the birds of the air. A talented writer, she has authored 27 mystery novels under the pen name "Mary Higgins Clark."

Q: Does either of them have a boyfriend?
A: The girls prefer not to release any information about their personal lives. No doubt they have the normal social lives of any college students whose father is the President.

Q: What if one of them married Prince William of England?
A: In fact, it would be impossible for Prince William to marry one of the Bush girls because they are actually sixth cousins on their mother’s side!

Q: If they auditioned to be on MTV’s "The Real World," would they get in?
A: "Should Jenna or Barbara Bush want to try out for 'The Real World,' of course we would be delighted to consider them," said a fictional MTV spokesman who is completely made-up. "Of course, we would certainly take into account the security considerations, which might be a problem." The spokesman then added, "I’m not real, you know."

Q: What advice might other sons or daughters of presidents give Jenna and Barbara?
A: Chelsea Clinton’s brother Matthew had this to say: "The best thing to do is to remain completely unnoticed, so that no one even knows you exist. It’s not impossible."

I Never Do This: Against Reproduction

2007-07-09T00:54:00.001-04:00

I have had many, many, arguments with friends and relatives who have told me they want to have their own baby over the years. Not so astonishingly, no one wants to hear you suggest that adopting or just not having children is an option that helps the planet, or that not reproducing might be the correct ethical choice. Why do I think this?

Well, when I was a kid there were 4 billion people on the planet, and it was only a little while ago that the world population passed 6 billion. We live on a finite planet, each new person takes from every other person in terms of resources, plus we live in a terrible time where choosing to bring a new person into the world invokes a whole series of questions about why we might want to do this, plus there are already people here living in shitty conditions who would benefit from a nice parent who wants to care for them, and lastly, I never understood what was so special about anyone's specific DNA that forced them to reproduce that code.

In short, the magnamity that causes a person to want to have a child is somewhat called into question by their need to own that child, to be certain that it is their child. Raising a kid is a huge deal, but to disavow it unless it belongs to you genetically conjures notions of property and immortality that make me very uncomfortable. If you don't want to take care of a kid unless it's "yours," then by my lights, you probably shouldn't be having children. What's so damn special about your DNA anyway? All kids need a good parent, an education, food, and a home. If you can provide these things, why can't you take on someone who is already here?

Anyway, the GayProf says it better than I can and hence this post. Here is my favorite part:

In the seventies and eighties, the nation had explicit discussions about the notion of zero population growth and suggested that people needed to carefully consider the consequences of bringing new humans into an overpopulated world (This idea has seemingly become so unpopular in recent years that the organization Zero Population Growth changed its name in 2002 to “Population Connection”).

The earth, however, is still overpopulated. Since 1980, the earth’s population has grown 30 percent. More people mean more consumption and more waste. It means already exhausted urban structures are going to be pushed to the breaking point.

The United States, which accounts for just 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 25 percent of the word’s resources and produces 25 percent of greenhouse gases. One new human born in the United States will consume 30 times more than a brand new human born in India and 20 times more than a new human in Africa. Much like the individual who imagines it’s not their SUV or giant pickup truck that is the problem, parents in the U.S. assume no accountability that their individual decisions to have children have broader environmental consequences. Actually, in many cases, children become a justification for a gas guzzling SUV.

No, I am not begrudging people in the U.S. who have children, nor am I interested in the government or anybody else meddling in people’s reproductive decisions. As a nation, though, we need to remember that having children is a choice. Nobody is required to have children. Nobody. End of story.

I Translate German Poetry Sometimes: Nannas Lied

2007-07-08T01:40:00.001-04:00

People like to say that Brecht is cold, but I believe he has a deeper game. When I read a piece like Nannas Lied, I can't help thinking that despite his political and sexual opportunism, he actually had a great deal of sympathy for women. I think this comes out in the poetry and the plays. This is a song about a streetwalker making sense out of her world using a famous Villon refrain as her own. So what if Brecht plagiarized this line or meant it as an intertext, it's the overall effect that seems like it's most important, and in this case we find the delicate and the brutal coming together in an explication of what happens when a girl sells her body and feelings in the market of "love." And apparently, it's not so easy.

Nanna’s Song

Gentlemen, with seventeen years
I came to the market of love
And I had been through a lot
Bad stuff happens a lot
Indeed that’s the game
But nevertheless, I have some of the blame.
(After all, I am a person too.)

Thank God everything goes by so quickly
Both the love and even the sorrow.
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?

Of course as you go through the years
The love market becomes easier
And you embrace them by the score.
But your feelings
Grow oddly cool
If they’re rationed far too little.
(After all, any supply has to come to an end.)

Thank God everything goes by so quickly
Both the love and even the sorrow.
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?

And also if you have learned the trade well.
In the measuring of love:
To transform desire into small change
Still is never easy.
Now, you’ll make it.
Meanwhile you become older.
(After all, you can’t stay seventeen forever.)

Thank God everything goes by so quickly
Both the love and even the sorrow.
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?
Where are the tears of last evening?
Where is the snow of yesteryear?

Nannas Lied by Bertolt Brecht, English translation attributed to me.

And now, auf Deutsch:

Nannas Lied

Meine Herren, mit siebzehn Jahren
Kam Ich auf den Liebesmarkt
Und Ich habe viel erfahren
Böses gab es viel
Doch das war das Spiel
Aber manches hab ich doch verargt.
(Schlieβlich bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber
Auch die Liebe unde der Kummer sogar.
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Freilich geht man mit den Jahren
Leichter auf den Liebesmarkt
Und umarmt sie dort in Scharen.
Aber das Gefühl
Bleibt erstaundlich kühl
Wenn man damit allzuwenig kargt.
(Schlieβlich geht ja jede Vorrat zu Ende.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber
Auch die Liebe unde der Kummer sogar.
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Und auch wenn man gut das Handeln
Lernte auf der Liebesmess’:
Lust in Kleingeld zu verwandeln
Ist doch niemals leicht.
Nun, es wird erreicht.
Doch man wird auch alter unterdes.
(Schlieβlich bleibt man ja nicht immer siebzehn.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber
Auch die Liebe unde der Kummer sogar.
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern Abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Get Home Safe

2007-06-28T03:50:00.000-04:00

"Get Home Safe." I heard that phrase tonight. It’s something I often say, and now we enter again that domain in which I am most uncomfortable: the personal experience, Dear-Kitty-type essay. How I hate this form. I don’t mean to belittle those who pursue it, like one of my favorites—the Gay Prof—but it truly is not the sort of thing one should do on an anti-‘Blog, such as the one you are reading.

Anyway, I was on the subway tonight, and at the stop before mine, a man said to someone—I could not, and did not, see either of them—“Get home safe.”

Why do I say this often, O Reader? It is something people in my family often say, almost always say, really. I come from farm-stock, Midwestern people. Should I begin here? I find myself saying it to anyone, whether they are walking, taking a cab, driving, or flying in a plane. Is the farm somehow an important place to begin?

This command, this injunction, comes from a world when travel was dangerous. Anytime you put your fate in hands of a bus driver, a train conductor, or the wheel of your own car, was something that was not like the stillness, the safety, of home, of table, of bed. You can die out there, you know. You can die.

I was fortunate to move to a New York that was dangerous enough, or used to be, so that friends gave me a couple bucks if my wallet was empty, so that if I got mugged on my way home, I had some cash to give that angry, desperate other on the other end of a knife or gun. Get home safe.

This has, I think, to do with the history of the night. It has to do with that dark, unlit place, that time, when travel was uncertain—I mean a time, which is also a place that was mysterious, and unpredictable, before electric lighting, before everyone lived in cities. A time when we lived by the sun, a time when after the sun fell, we had a long night of moon, if we were lucky. Get home safe, we said, because in that darkness, in that confidence we put in the driver, the conductor, the pilot, there was a certain uncertainty that we might never arrive home.

I hate to share this, but, I recently had a disturbing death—two of them—in my extended family, where people headed home, did not get home safe. They were making their way in the most banal fashion, yet they did not get home. They died.

The people who died were sort of in-laws, the sibling and spouse of an in-law, and it made me think of how I would feel if one of my siblings had this fate right now. It was unthinkable. My mind literally could not go there, could not imagine this, this thing that happens to all living things.

Any unexpected death probably has a similar effect on the survivors of it. I am talking of people I knew so little, yet it needs must remind me of the preciousness of the people around me. Do they know I love them so much? Have I told them recently? Told them enough? How do we tell this to anyone? I expect that we do the best job we can, and yet it is probably never enough. Get home safe is always an I love you.

I am, frankly, very thankful that I have been instilled with this fear of the unpredictable night, the exigencies of travel. Life turns out to be always fragile. It is not a bad thing to be reminded of that of that. Have I told you how much you mean to me?

Get home safe.

This. That. No Other.: I Never Do This

2007-05-23T01:22:00.001-04:00

As a fairly dyed-in-the-wool anti-metaphysician, this post by my pal, Brett, in Toronto--you know, the one in Canada--warmed the cockles of my tiny, cold, evil heart. I never make a post about someone else's post, but this one, this one is special. Thank you, Brett.

I Post Song Lyrics Sometimes: Spring is Here

2007-04-11T11:19:00.000-04:00

Spring isn’t here. Every morning I get up and it’s still colder than I think it should be by now. I mean, it’s April. Maybe global warming has “spoiled” us all as we ride the fast train to no ice caps and a higher sea level, but of course, more energy in the ecosystem doesn’t just mean overall rising temperatures, but more erratic weather, more cold snaps, and blizzards every four years between mild winters. We don’t just have more heat trapped in the atmosphere, that heat is energy and that energy can fuel cold fronts as well as hurricanes. As more energy floods the system, winter and summer become longer and spring and autumn, my two favorite seasons, become shorter.

So with this cheery news in mind, I bring you a lovely, melancholy song from a 1938 Rogers and Hart musical called I Married an Angel. The song, “Spring is Here,” captures my feelings this morning because not only are April, May, and June sadly out of tune, but the first line is a special delivery of the whole damn show.

And now for the song.

Once there was a thing called spring,
When the world was writing verses like yours and mine.
All the lads and girls would sing,
When we sat at little tables and drank May wine.
Now April, May, and June are sadly out of tune,
life has stuck a pin in the balloon.

Spring is here.
Why doesn't my heart go dancing?
Spring is here.
Why isn't the waltz entrancing?
No desire, no ambition leads me,
Maybe it's because nobody needs me?
Spring is here.
Why doesn't the breeze delight me?
Stars appear,
Why doesn't the night invite me?
Maybe it's because nobody loves me.
Spring is here, I hear.

[dance break with clarinet solo]

Why doesn't the breeze delight me?
Stars appear,
Why doesn't the night invite me?
Maybe it's because nobody loves me.
Spring is here, I hear.

“Spring Is Here” from I Married an Angel. Music by Richard Rogers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, 1938.

Blogger has let me down

2007-03-29T02:57:00.000-04:00

I spent a few hours last night perfecting a post that will now be delayed a day or two while I try to reconstruct it. Blogger has let me down and has saved none of the many, extensive edits I performed into the wee hours. I hate you, Blogger.

The Trouble with Smallville

2007-02-15T22:55:00.002-05:00

Matthew Shepard by way of Pierre et Gilles? What will they think up next?

I am not a Smallville enthusiast, I am a Smallville stalker. It’s a shitty show, so I hang back in the sidelines, TiVO episodes, close my eyes or fastforward through the dull scenes (of which there are many), and try to catch a glimpse of what really gets me off.

It’s a shitty show, as I said. I was never offended by the Matthew Shepard ad campaign when the series first went on the air because those ads were erotic and squared neatly with the (possibility, anyway) of a queer take on the oppressed outsider. Let me explain (while I abhor the personal, this is relevant): when I was a kid, I always thought the hottest part of any Superman story was when he was rendered helpless by Kryptonite. The idea of this nigh omnipotent god rendered weak and defenseless held a clear sexual thrill for me (does this make me kinky? I sure hope so). Part of the story is that Superman always eventually triumphed—while he may momentarily be the plaything of whatever sadist of the moment had chained him, he always escaped and won in the end. Compare this with the original Superman movie when Luthor puts the Kryptonite soap-on-a-metal-rope on Superman, yet Miss Teschmacher kisses him and frees him. Hot. “Why is it I can never get it on with the good guys”? Honey, you just did.

Anyway, Smallville. The problem I have with this show is that when it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, it’s just plain, stultifyingly awful. I mean, a viewer suffers, and I mean that very literally, through many, many episodes of crap before hitting one that has decent writing and actually offers a payoff.

The most recent episode (tonight) explains what I mean: In the past couple years, the show has slowly—very slowly—become (slowly) populated by other known DC Comics characters: Kid Flash (Beaver on the far superior Veronica Mars), Aquaman (or should I say “boy”—a lovely specimen who couldn’t act his way out of a goldfish-containing-ziplock), a young Green Arrow (more or less [what does that mean?] the opposite number to Lex Luthor’s rich-boy-using-his-money-for-kicks act), and Cyborg (? again a question mark?) of the Teen Titans. When all these heroes team up, it’s a mini-Justice League, and a lesson to Clark that he doesn’t have to work alone (shades of “Buffy”). My friend, Josh, who is the only person ever to have his real name revealed on this blog, called this episode “Superhero Porn.” And so it was, Gentle Reader. But even this is not what this post is about.

No. This post is about a crappy show that occasionally rises above its sub-par status quo to really say something, or to finally show off its actors as being more than automatons. In this case we have both.

Kristin Kreuk may or may not be a capable actress—I will fault the material in her favor. For now. But she so often goes to the same three, or four (to be generous), places that she has become my most hated performer on the show. Finishing just behind her is Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor. I can’t tell if it’s an actorly choice or not, but every word that comes out of this motherfucker is a lie. You watch him lie on every episode—and it's totally unconvincing. This is either brilliant technique or stupid blundering, and the only—and I mean only—example of how Rosenbaum (who has clearly been shaving his head since 2001, which is similar to but not identical with James Marsters’ commitment to Spike on "Buffy") is making choices is last year’s Christmas episode a la It’s A Wonderful Life wherein the actor exhibited humor, charm, warmth, confusion, and irony. These are things he should exhibit, but never does, on a regular episode.

You see this is why I blame the show, and by that I mean the creators and writers, for making it so dreadfully dull. In someone like Rosenbaum, we occasionally, and by that I mean rarely (and by that I mean almost never), see the actual talent of the actor. And on this note I have to say that the greatest casualty, or rather the greatest success, is Annette O’Toole as Martha Kent, who spins dramatic shit into gold every week. Somehow, this woman finds a way to make sense out of every idiotic narratival maneuver and she does this effortlessly. I always wait to see Martha Kent on Smallville, because when it is bad, she’s the only good thing coming—and she’s really good. This is the test of an actor. She can turn what would be a “Your father’s right” on the Brady Bunch moment into a real dramatic event. Annette O’Toole rooles. Alas, though she was absent tonight, the episode stood on its own.

But let us return to the Trouble with Smallville. This is the problem: the writers write the same shit for nineteen episodes a year, but they reserve the right to write three episodes where something really happens. Tonight was one of those episodes. And Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang) perked up and became more than a little interesting. The writers have been pushing her character a bit recently, and tonight she was fairly real as she tried to reconcile her suspicions about Clark and his strange ability to be always at the right place at the right time with Lex’s (her fiancé and father of her unborn child) ability to always be at the wrong place at the wrong time. As I said, I hate Kreuk as Lana. It may not be her fault and we can look to the writing for that, but Lana Lang became an interesting, truly conflicted character for me for the first time tonight. And now a brief excursion about lying.

Smallville is based entirely upon the question of lying and being an ethical person. What this means as a viewer is that this theme is present endlessly throughout the show, but in three episodes a season it receives a fair appraisal. Clark is, and has always been in love with Lana, and their relationship has constantly (and quite consistently, which is to say boringly) foundered upon his mysterious absences during miraculously averted crises. When they were together, the narrative thrust depended on him saving the day without her finding out and also her knowledge that something was “up.” This became (occasionally) an interesting meditation on the merits of the Lie and why good people might tell them. Clark dreamed of marrying Lana, but through all the (many, many) permutations of him trying to keep her safe by protecting his secret, he ruined the relationship and she turned to Lex Luthor for comfort, love, certainty, and became pregnant by him.

Now, we all watch as she discovers that Clark isn’t who he seems to be and that Lex isn’t either. The closer she gets to understanding that Clark Kent is “different,” the more she wants to protect him. This is good television! You have to understand this in the context of season after season of Lana knowing "something" and Clark denying it. We’re at an interesting juncture in this show where Lana, logically, should learn Clark’s secret, but where the writers will let us down by keeping it from her. Part of this is the continuity of the DC comics universe where Lana must be kept in the dark so that Lois can move into the frame, but it is strikingly unsatisfying. For this reason the series will always get it wrong when it is closet to getting it right. The love affair must always never actualize; Clark will never tell Lana the truth; and as interesting as she becomes, and as hard as Kreuk works, Lana will always end up on the trash heap of comics history, because this story was written before it ever aired.

This is too bad, by the way, because the best episode of last year was about Lana finding out how super Clark is, and forgetting (shades of Superman II) and Pa Kent (the delicious John Schneider, oh daddy!) dying--but the viewer needs some sort of satisfaction. Endless denial is not really the coin to barter. After six years, it just becomes a big-ass drag. Even when it’s really good.

God's comic: The Bible Code

2007-01-20T16:55:00.000-05:00

No, not His comic book, or His comedian, or even His court jester or fool--something no ruler can afford to do without. What I mean here is that... God's a pretty funny Guy.

I started thinking about this because of the great comedian, Bill Hicks (dead, you know), who treated the conundrum of fundamentalist christian faith in the following monologue/hypothetical conversation:

Fundamentalist Christianity. Fascinating. These people actually believe the world is twelve thousand years old. Swear to God! "Based on what?" I asked them.
"Well, we looked at all the people in the Bible, and we added them up all the way back to Adam and Eve, their ages--twelve thousand years."
"Well, how fucking scientific! Okay. I didn't know that you'd gone to so much trouble, there. That's good. You believe the world's twelve thousand years old?"
"That's right."
"Okay, I got one word to ask you. A one word question. Ready?"
"Uh-huh."
"Dinosaur."

You know, the world's twelve thousand years old, and dinosaurs existed, they existed in that time, you'd think it would have been mentioned in the fucking Bible at some point. And lo, Jesus and the disciples walked to Nazareth, but the trail was blocked by a giant brontosaurus... with a splinter in his paw. And O the disciples did run a shriekin': "What a big fucking lizard, Lord!" But Jesus was unafraid and he took the splinter from the brontosaurus' paw, and the big lizard became his friend. And Jesus sent him to Scotland, where he lived in a loch for oh, so many years inviting thousands of American tourists to bring their fat, fucking families and their fat dollar bills, and, oh, Scotland did praise the Lord. Thank you, Lord, thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord."

But get this, I actually asked one of these guys, "OK, dinosaurs fossils--how does that fit into your scheme of life? Let me sit down and strap in." [mimes sitting down and strapping in]
He said, "Dinosaur fossils? God put those there to test our faith."
[contorting face in an almost simian manner as he attempts to understand] "Thank God I'm strapped in right now here, man. I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. You believe that?"
"Uh-huh."

Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God... might be... fuckin' with our heads? I have trouble sleeping with that knowledge. Some prankster God running around: "Hu hu ho ho. We will see who believes in me now, ha ha." [mimes God burying fossils] "I am God. I am a prankster. I am killing Me. Hu hu ho ho."

You know, you die and go to St. Peter. "Did you believe in dinosaurs?"
"Well, yeah, there were fossils everywhe--" CRASH! [screams and mimes falling into Hell]
"You fucking idiot! Flying lizards? You're a moron! God was fucking with you!"
"It seemed so plausible.... AAAAAAAAH!"
"Enjoy the lake of fire, fucker."

Yes, who knew God was such a comedian! LOL!!!

Okay, I told you that story to tell you this one.

I recently caught a History Channel program devoted to a hypothesis called "The Bible Code," which claims that one can find the history of the world (important shit, like the Kennedy assassination and the leveling of the WTC) and perhaps even predict future events (like nuclear apocalypse) by way of a code hidden in the Bible. If you go check the Wikipedia link, it'll explain the ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequence) Bible-Code-Decoder technique better and faster than I can (and in a MUCH more nuanced way than the History Channel managed, I might add, and in just a couple paragraphs. I had to sit through an hour of typical History Channel sensational bullshit. With commercials. But more on that after your educational break).

Edited down (slightly) from Wikipedia:

Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are words, phrases and clusters of words and phrases that some people believe are meaningful and exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible. These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code [by Michael Drosnin ~L.], which claims that these codes can predict the future.... [Emphasis added. ~L.]

Overview
The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative [i.e. 3, 75, 1,776, -15, or any number. ~L.]. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold, red letters in this sentence form an ELS--the word SAFEST. (The skip is -4. Spaces and punctuation are ignored.)

[~L. note: Like this, though I'm actually fudging a little for clarity because the skip is -4:
t[skip 3 letters]his s[skip 3 letters]ente[skip 3 letters]nce f[skip 3 letters]orm a[skip 3 letters]n ELS
Now read the red letters backwards: TSEFAS = SAFEST. So, neat, right?]

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each pair of adjacent lines.

Arrange the letters from Genesis 26:5–10 in a 33 column grid and you get a word
search with "Bible" and "code." Myriad other arrangements can yield other words.

Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).

As you can see, the technique allows you to form a rectangle of letters (sometimes in Hebrew and only using the Torah), in which you can find more words that relate to your original search term. In the age of computers, it is possible to plug a letter array. like ARMAGEDDON. into an ELS program, which will search the Bible until it finds that letter combination (remember, backwards or forwards) somewhere, no matter how many other letters come between the A, R, M, A, G, E, D, D, O, and N. Then you make a rectangle out of the whole text that comprises the word and then circle other words that appear in the rectangle, which sometimes seem to have a very queer, surprising relationship indeed to the original ELS search word. Yet, I had questions, even as I was watching this miracle unfold. I reveal them here:

1) Do other words show up that have nothing to do with your search? You know, you look up ABRAHAM LINCOLN and you find F-R-E-E-D and S-L-A-V-E-S in your rectangle--cool! Thank you, Lord, thank you!--but you also find T-A-M-P-A-X and C-H-E-E-S-E-W-H-I-Z. Your ways are mysterious, O Lord.

2) I started becoming suspicious when one of the amazing proofs featured on the History Channel show (which drew heavily on Michael Drosnin's book, The Bible Code) came from a search using MANONTHEMOON, and the result was--I will never forget it as long as I live--S-P-A-C-E-S-H-I-P. Spaceship? First of all, there's a Hebrew word for "spaceship"? Really? And even if I accept that, am I supposed to believe that the omniscient Creator of the Universe thinks of the lunar landing as involving a fucking spaceship? Doesn't He have a few other words above the third grade level that He could use to describe this technical and complex operation? It's like even God is impressed, "And then they made a spaceship. And it was good. And God clapped His hands together and said, 'YAY.'"

On a similar note: one of the famous claims of the Bible Code was that it had predicted the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. While some of the nearby terms that occurred in the ELS were thrillingly compelling [e.g. "AMIR" (the name of Rabin's killer) and "TELAVIV" (the location of the murder)] others were disappointingly, well, retarded--I just can't describe it any other way. I mean, ASSASSIN WHO WILL ASSASSINATE is an impressively long sentence for the Code, but that said, it's pretty damn lame. This is proof of a prophecy? I don't know, I guess I just expect better from God....

3) So, then I started thinking: couldn't someone try this technique with Ulysses or some other long novel--hey, maybe the phone book--and see what happens? Well, some doubters did me one better. According to Wikipedia, an Australian mathematician named Brendan McKay found ELS letter matrices related to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabin in Moby Dick. In the Rabin word cluster, McKay discovered the killer's first and last name, the university he attended, and the purported motive, "Oslo," for the accords named after that city. But here is the absolute best part (also from the Wikipedia piece):

Other people, such as US physicist Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran worked successfully with McKay to look for evidence of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire

Can you imagine anything more delicious? O Reader, how I laughed and laughed. But is it just me, but doesn't it seem almost like that fossil-faking, prankster God of ours is laughing too? In His way, I mean. If He is behind the Bible Codes--and indeed He is supposed to be behind all things, after all--if He is behind the Bible Codes, it can only be to fuck with our heads. If the childish blahblah-babble through which these "messages" arrive to us weren't enough to kill your willing suspension of disbelief, it doesn't strike me as very clever to discover part of the Lord's secret design using a letter-skip technique and a computer. I can only imagine the disgust with which Maimonides would have greeted the very idea of this magical Bible code. God's not that easy. So all this clearly means is that God's having a bit of fun at our expense. "Hu hu ho ho. I am killing Me!" Hey, it's His universe, right? We just live in it.

Incontrovertible proof! The WTC disaster turns up in the Bible Code! It's true, look!
Check out the huge size of this rectangle--someone needed a LOT of letters to get
this puppy to make sense. Um, and THIS is a convincing word cluster:
WORLD, MANHATTAN, CENTRE (spelled the British way),
THEY SHOOK OFF THE DUST, THE NINTH HOUR, and
BLOOD AND FIRE AND VAPOUR (Brit spelling) OF SMOKE?
What the hell is "vapour of smoke," anyway? And then there's
the mysterious letter E hanging there. It clearly can't be
anything but the 911 attacks!

I understand this sort of mania for meaningfulness. Honest. Suffering is the feature of mortality that draw us to religion as such. There must be a reason why this is happening to me, so if it can fit into a larger, even cosmic, meaning, if I can find personally relevant material in the Torah using the Bible code (and people have) or if the reality as I understand it is upheld by these telegraphic messages from the Torah using the same decoder ring, then there is meaning to existence. How can you argue with this hunger for meaningfulness that so readily accepts S-P-A-C-E-S-H-I-P and A-S-S-A-S-S-I-N-W-H-O-A-S-S-A-S-S-I-N-A-T-E-S as proof of a higher power, whose secret code we have cracked? You cannot. The most important feature of the ELS system is that it always knows what it's looking for when it makes its search. It's like a metaphysical game of Scrabble or Boggle: you begin with the knowledge that you're searching for a sense, a letter string or strings that make sense and that are similar to the term that prompted the search. This is why we never hear about C-H-E-E-S-E-W-H-I-Z in the result--it might be there, but since it doesn't fit the frame in question, the appearance of "cheese whiz" is omitted from the report.

Last April, I posted on something I consider similar to the phenomenon we see in the Bible code--the entry concerned the way numbers can line up in dates and time, for example on May 6th the date will be 05/06/07. When we notice this happening, there's often a tingle or a shiver that goes through us, like an unsettling order has been revealed. I like this comparison precisely because the meaning that shows up in a consecutive number sequence is minimal yet a recognition comes out of it, as I said, as though time were seeing you. The moment feels profound somehow, but it's just chance that you noticed the date.

The Wikipedia entry on the Bible Code also mentions this interesting tidbit: apparently "[t]he primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that information theory does not prohibit noise from appearing to be sometimes meaningful." The difference between the "noise" of the time/date system that lines up numbers in a surprising (yet always inevitable) sequence and the noise of textual information that uses letters, is that letters form words and words signify better than numbers. Hence the very spooky phenomenon of the Bible code, but credulity is begged by the necessity of knowing what you're looking for, the silliness of some of the word results, and the rejection of results that do not match the desired result (CHEESEWHIZ).

And this brings us, of course, into the domain of psychoanalysis. Yes, I actually told you that story to tell you this one. And do not misunderstand, all roads do not lead to psychoanalysis by any means, but when a metaphor that does lead there presents itself, I'm getting on it to see where it goes. The Bible isn't a person, therefore it doesn't have an Unconscious, but the way words emerge from a letter sequence using the Bible code, is interestingly similar to the phenomenon that happens in analysis. The biggest difference is that if TAMPAX turns up, it is just as valid and valuable as ASSASSINWHOASSASSINATES. Humans can uncover Unconscious connections using free association, but the Bible code functions only by way of forced association; therefore, the results of the Bible code searches will always say more about the person running the search than it ever could about history, the future, God, or anything else. It's a ghost story, a parlor trick, a computerized Ouija board. Let it pass.

And now, something suggests itself: what if meaningfulness as such is noise in the information system? People are always reflexively searching for meaning and motivation, or at least expectant of it, and usually expectant of a certain meaning ("Why do I always date the same kind of GUY?!"). That doesn't mean there is a lack of meaning (there's always too much) or there isn't an ethics (these things can be agreed upon to some degree), but that we exist in a world made up of the history of a network of cultural codes wherein we swim as individuals, and we each have a subjectivity based on an Unconscious (our own) that is essentially a kind of non-sense, yet impels us toward certain directions, relationships, identities. This makes ignorance of the history of cultural codes and of the individual's unconscious drives two things we cannot afford to bear. That's really all I'm saying. Now compared to the Bible Scrabble game of the code--and make no mistake, it is a game--the concept of the mobile spark of meaningfulness, the noise of meaning and the meaning of noise seems a lot more intricate, subtle, interesting, and even haunting than finding a way to get your Bible to spell out "S-P-A-C-E-S-H-I-P."

See? I told you God was a funny Guy.

I Post Song Lyrics Sometimes: That's Him

2006-11-27T02:34:00.000-05:00

Miss Mary Martin, being not arty, not actory

So, Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perelman wrote a Broadway musical for Marlene Dietrich about the goddess, Venus, doing her best with contemporary New York City way back during World War II. Dietrich toyed with them for months, batting them around like a semi-interested cat who knew the mouse's final outcome, until she finally rejected the project in the eleventh hour. This made Weill so angry that he cursed her out auf Deutsch, which is reportedly the only time he ever used his mother tongue after he moved to the States. Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this one.

It ended up that Miss Mary Martin, mother of Larry Hagman, got the role in One Touch of Venus, as the show came to be called. It's a light musical comedy with a wonderful score and a witty book that, as a reviewer in the current Kurt Weill Newsletter points out, contains the injunction from the goddess that the audience should "make love while they still can," at a time when the war's outcome was far from certain (the show opened in 1943). This is a context many of us, especially those in New York, can well understand; and we should also remember that to "make love" to someone can have many meanings, and especially in 1943 it could mean to woo, to flirt, to enjoy the presence of another, not just the crass suggestion of fucking. Wooing and the feminine side of it are neatly crystallized in a song that was (if memory serves, as if often doesn't) cut from the score, a title song oddly enough "One Touch of Venus"--the final lyric goes: "With a little touch a damsel, a little touch of goddess, life can be a goddess-damsel cinch." If only we had lyrics of such adult lightness and clever heresy on Broadway now. But as usual I digress. I am here to discuss a different song, one of several show stoppers in this lovely score, and that's "That's Him."

There is a category of song written by men for women in love to sing and this is one of those numbers. Because of the nature of Broadway, American composers, and poets in general, the ;intersection of these categories often signals the presence of a homo. But not always. There are many showtunes sung by women disfigured by desire and not all of them are by Sondheim. His mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, wrote a bunch (we also have Cole Porter and Blitzstein and Menotti to name some less-than-strictly-hetero lyric writers), but in this case we have Ogden Nash, who was a terrific light poet, who was married and had kids, and, as far as my terrifically light research is concerned, seems to have not been gay. But who knows? No one knows. After all, he never sucked my cock (as the Bankhead is said to have proclaimed once, so gloriously). So, let us , just for fun, assume he was straight. In this song, Nash presents a portrait of Venus describing her love for a man in the terms a bourgeois urban lady would use, and it is a tight, loving portrait in the final analysis, despite the insipid notion of love being like having your hair done by a fegeleh named "Antoine." Even this image is one of feeling more beautiful, feeling refreshed, feeling more yourself, or a better version of yourself, than you did before you paid someone to improve your look--surely we all can identify with this moment, as feminized as it may be. This is the least of Nash's lyrics here, and, as with any good song, it pays to read the thing closely, like a poem, which is what a lyric is, of course: "You know the way you feel when you smell bread baking," a consummate moment of sensual pleasure; "The way you feel when the fireflies glimmer": a gorgeous visual, evoking the twilight melancholy of childhood summers; "the way you feel about the Rhapsody in Blue": a description of love as listening to an example of the musical sublime; "He's like a book directly from the printer, you look at him, he's so commenceable": a more intellectual notion of the lover as an object to begin, an object to read; "He's comforting as woolens in the winter: he's indispensable": the beloved is like simple comfort in a cold world, but more than that, he is that which you cannot do without; "You know the way you feel that you know you should conceal, the way you feel that you know you shouldn't feel": the deliciousness of being in forbidden love (and all love feels forbidden somehow--one is not supposed to feel this way; it's always a bit of a secret), the deliciousness of not showing it to "him" or anyone else. But you can't help it.

These images accrue. And Nash builds them very carefully even within his chosen conceit--note his cunning reversals seen for example in the first two stanzas where he takes us from the sweet sense, the taste and smell, of autumn to having one's hair done; then he shifts us from the comforting enveloping warmth of baking bread to the surprising cognitive dissonance of a toothache subsiding--the idea of bread and therefore eating and the pain of a toothache jars. He builds and surprises, he speaks to you directly: "You know the way you feel" he says to us over and over, like an intimate whisper in the ear. The song develops to these amazing moments where love transforms everything: "Wonderful world, wonderful you"--being in love makes everything better, makes the world wonderful. It's like love is similar to all these experiences until the pressure of the description explodes into the ineffability of wonderfulness. Love is and isn't all these things. In the final analysis the description of love fails even as one struggles to make the experience concrete. This is how you have to approach the lyric because as you go deeper into the poet's logic, despite its irony, humor, and double entendre (he's like a plumber when you need a plumber?), the more beautiful and moving it becomes. The beloved is simple, satisfactory, commenceable, comforting, indispensable, but most importantly he is the way he makes you feel.

The simplicity of the comparisons despite their middle-class origins is a double window into the wartime, bourgeois, heterosexual, female mind and the hetero intellectual male mind that channeled it here. In the end, though appealing and evocative, even beguiling, the portrait of the beloved as a series of objects, feelings, goods, services, and moods, is still always Nash's fantasy of the mind that sees love this way, and with this frame the gentle mocking of the song becomes foregrounded. But we mustn't ever forget that this song also describes a third mind which is of the goddess herself, and in this sense the song is a trap because while it offers a Venus domesticated by modern ideas and cultural conceits, at the end of the show she rejects the drudgery of the modern American housewife and returns to Olympus. But honestly, it could never be any other way, could it? And Venus comes to this realization in an Agnes DeMille ballet called "Venus in Ozone Heights"--a hilarious juxtaposition, or impossible environment, to be sure. It is both of course, which is the point and the joke of the show. Venus fell in love with mortals on a regular basis back in the day, with a certain amount of hijinks ensuing as they tend to when gods dilly the dally with those who have no choice but to die (and who also don't, by the way, embody some overarching metaphysical concept, such as love). These stories often end with some sort of metamorphosis into a flower, or whatever. But what's funny about Venus in 1943 New York City is that 1) the guy she falls in love prefers his fiancée to Venus (at least, initially), and 2) the world has become a place that's kind of not so much fun for a goddess. 1943 is a bit too early for Betty Friedan (though it is the source of her critique of the Feminine Mystique) or Gloria Steinem, but no matter how powerful Betty Crocker was, in a grudge match with a pagan goddess, Betty will lose every time. So, in a frothy, fun musical hit, for the female audience member there is a disruptive double-aftertaste: you should enjoy life and love while you can (a pleasure denied anyone truly trying to be a good girl, but let's face it Johnny's "over there"), and the knowledge that the bliss and joys of suburban domesticity are not just overrated but a boring, repetitive dead-end. In this way, an urbane musical diversion manages to look forward and backward at the same time, and so One Touch of Venus stands astride the faultline of American mid-century femininity. And with that, we return to Feminism, yet again. Somehow this musical is ignorant of Feminism yet succinctly describes the conflict between expectations and freedoms that mobilizes the critique itself and is thus outside and and inside Feminism at the same time--it articulates the cause of second wave Feminism (with nods here to Friedan). Of course, the show reserves the freedom of autonomy for a goddess, but since gods don't exist, we'll have to bite the bullet and imagine that those freedoms--that the freedom to choose between domestic servitude and, well, something, anything, else--might actually be imagined by real mortal American ladies. Huh. Imagine that....

Wait. Scratch that.

Quickly, there is another striking proto-Feminist moment in the show (at least one more, in my poor memory) that I feel the need to mention and it occurs in a rather saucy song called "The Trouble with Women," a number sung by men about their frustrations with the fairer sex. That moment is the final line of the song which states remarkably: "The trouble with women... is men." Boy, is it ever.

Okay, enough of history and culture, now I have a small amount of dish to share. A few weeks ago I went to the Spiegeltent and saw some cool performance that I won't go into here, but I ran into a friend there who had for some bizarre reason brought Mary Martin's autobiography with him. I flipped through the index and found One Touch of Venus, about which Mary had quite little to say--there was no real discussion of craft or other personalities besides Larry Hagman's mom, just the usual actor's all-about-me crap. But she did mention that when she auditioned for the producer she had learned "That's Him" and just grabbed a chair and sang it right at the guy in someone's living room. Then Mary declared that the producer told her he'd hire her if she promised to deliver the number the same way every performance from the lip of the stage. And so she did. Flash forward to this week's Kurt Weill Newsletter and a little anecdote from Hal Prince reporting that Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya (who was in the original Cabaret and the original Threepenny Opera), told Prince that Martin didn't get the song, so Lenya asked Weill if she should show her how to do it. Lenya accomplished this by sitting on a turned around chair and that, she says, is how the staging was set.

Now, Lotte Lenya is well known for being a sometimes unreliable source for historical facts--some of it's "true," some of it's not, and we'll mostly never know (who cares! the stories are usually great)--but she is also known for being a terrific performer, and one who had a genius for minimalism. Enter Mary Martin who was still in the early part of her career and I am inclined to believe the more seasoned performer in this case (being Lenya). When it comes to a Weill song, especially one as delicate, disarmingly, and deceptively simple as this one, underplaying is always the right choice.

One last bit of dish. Hal Prince also mentions an exchange he had with Lotte Lenya backstage of Cabaret when she learned he was headed out to see Dietrich perform. Prince says: "And she said, looking into the mirror without a pause, 'Say hello to Miss No-Talent.'" I'm sure they're friends now in Show Business Heaven. This brings us full circle, back to the very beginning. A very good place to start.

And now for the song.

You know the way you feel
When there is autumn in the air,
That's him, that's him.
The way you feel when Antoine
Has finished with your hair,
That's him, that's him.

You know the way you feel
When you smell bread baking,
The way you feel
When suddenly a tooth stops aching;
Wonderful world, wonderful you,
That's him, that's him.

He is as simple as a swim in summer,
Not arty, not actory.
He's like a plumber when you need a plumber:
He's satisfactory.
You know the way you feel
When you want to knock on wood,
The way you feel when your heart is gone for good:
Wonderful world, wonderful you,
That's him.

You could shuffle him with millions,
Soldiers and civilians,
I'd pick him out.
In the darkest caves and hallways
I would know him always,
Beyond a doubt.
Identification comes easily to me
Because that's he.

You know the way you feel
About the Rhapsody in Blue:
That's him, that's him;
The way you feel about a hat
Created just for you:
That's him, that's him.

You know the way you feel
When the fireflies glimmer,
The way you feel when overnight
Your hips grow slimmer:
Wonderful world, wonderful you,
That's him, that's him.

He's like a book directly from the printer,
You look at him, he so commenceable.
He's comforting as woolens in the winter:
He's indispensable.

You know the way the way you feel
That you know you should conceal
The way you feel feel that you really shouldn't feel:
Wonderful world, wonderful you,
That's him.

"That's Him" from One Touch of Venus. Music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ogden Nash, 1943.

The Nightmare Isn't Over; Now We Are Only Half-Asleep

2006-11-08T15:52:00.000-05:00

No matter how you interpret last week's election--whether as a referendum on Bush or the war or Republicans--the reality is that half the electorate still slumbers supernaturally, a Sleeping Beauty awaiting, I believe, the kiss from a handsome Führer. Darn, I’ve just turned my metaphorical screw too far because the truth is that these people want never to wake up and don’t even know they are sleeping. Such are the wages of letting your heart belong to Daddy. But as dramatic as the Democrats storming of the House and Senate was, one can't help wondering how much more dramatic it might have been if Diebold electronic voting machines had not been used. At least I can't help wondering that.

But we have to keep in mind that this election is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning. We have a lot of work to do to not only get this country on a better path but to understand how we ended up where we have been for the past six years--and we can't lay too much of the blame on the stain on this blue dress.

But to watch the news last week had the texture of a dream, its own disconcerting unreality. Had we become so inured to the debacle that was Republican-led government that we could no longer imagine what it could be like otherwise? Almost. I practically wept as I watched Nancy Pelosi’s interview with Wolf Blitzer because she came across as so sensible and poised, and it had been so long since I'd seen a public official and not a commentator speak that way. And then watching Rumsfeld resign only brought flashbacks of the many agonizing times I'd endured his smug face saying whatever the hell it wanted on my TV. Go straight to hell, Don, do not pass go, do not collect 200 million dollars--there are going to be a lot of familiar faces there.

But let us return to the specter, the spectacle of the blue dress, which hovers over us, haunts us, still, like a scare tactic with the sophistication of a Brady Bunch episode. We are stuck endlessly with this semen-spattered dress that never will go away. Never will ever, ever, go away. I said we can’t put too much emphasis on the blue dress in a piece that is about the emphasis on the blue dress because there were many factors that brought Bush into office, not just the national dismay at the image of the President of the United States unloading uncontrollably on a young intern’s dress like a randy old man. It really puts you in the room with them, doesn’t it?

What is one to do with this horrible frock that changed the course of a nation? Let's look at it again. Doesn't this look like a piece of fabric, buttons, and belt that deserves the distinction of ruining this great nation? It’s not entirely true to say that, to hold this thing—oh God, how the belt and long sleeves kill the soul!—up as the main factor that caused people to vote Republican, but its value as a signifier is not just how it represents Clinton, but how it represents the electorate’s opinion of him. What I mean is this: we can’t erase the embarrassing car-back-seat fumbling that the dress represents, which is sex itself, as fact, as stain, but the apprehension of the signifier in the minds of the electorate is what is at stake here, and that is to say, in the context of that mind or those minds, we see how they see sex itself. So, in a strange way, the dress represents the electorate that voted in a Republican Congress in 1998 and a Republican President in 2000. Isn’t that queer?

Let's look at it again.

This dress, this cum-stained dress, also represents a certain maddening function of the media, which is that the media goes after Democratic scandals with a vigor and venom that has always been absent from its coverage of Republican scandals. Is this because Democrats seem to either have more sex, enjoy it more, or get caught doing it more than Republicans? That is just a little joke. Lol! And so of course, the mind of the electorate is shaped by this media that, even in the New York Times, buries Republican scandals within the paper but rubs our faces in endless front page stories on “Whitewater” and this stupid fucking dress.

And this brings us to my final point, which is that the blue dress still haunts us because the last election showed that there are a lot of people still out there who are blue-dress voters. And is it just their revulsion for sex or are these same people the ones most easily scared by terrorism and its myriad invisible threats? And are they the same people who want the punishing Father-Führer? I think evidence suggests they are. But of course the blue dress voters go for the conservative Punishing Father because the randy Father of Enjoyment terrifies them so, which is to say, of course, that he turns them on.

We are only half-awake--or half-asleep--in the midst of the Bushian nightmare because the half of the electorate that the dress represents are still out there, and they're voting, and the Republicans will continue to offer them candidates tailored to their fear, prejudice, and ignorance. This is why, as a nation, we are only half awake, and why we have a lot of work to do. In the original Sleeping Beauty story, when the handsome nobleman discovers the unconscious beauty, he rapes her, and she doesn’t wake up. Then she has his children. And she still doesn't wake up. Was there ever a more apt or disturbing metaphor for the American people? The challenge, which will never be met while corporations and lobbyists more or less set the agenda, is for the the Democrats or even the Republicans to offer us candidates that actually govern for the good of the nation and its people--a grave civic responsibility. I think that's what people were voting for last week because the corruption of the current office-holders had become too apparent. They won't get it. Alas, for now the kind of candidate of which I speak remains a Prince Charming in a fairy tale; nonetheless, one hopes, and I think that hope is what last week's vote revealed. And finally, until the day comes when semen-spattered blue dresses matter less than a politician's actual record of service, we'll continue to encounter avatars of Bush along the great road of american politics.

A repost of a repost of a riposte: BigMuscle.com 4

2006-10-31T12:37:00.000-05:00

Am I freaking your shit out yet?

Please don't read this.

This is the fourth in a series on BigMuscle.com, which began as a sort of running critique of BigMuscle on BigMuscle. Most people on that site didn't give a damn about what I was saying, but I got some nice comments on those posts from time to time, nonetheless. You could read the first posts for context, but in this fearful new online universe all the choices are yours. Aren't they?

Don't read the first and second and(slash)or third posts.

13 May 2003

The mouth is an eye. Indeed, the mouth is the first eye, before even the eye is the eye (and our language reinforces this: we "drink" others with our eyes, or more aggressively, we "devour" them with our eyes). For all intents and purposes, the mouth is the original orifice through which we experience the world, though intent and purpose are very confused for the infant, of course; it can be said that neither exist initially because there is only this unnamed thing called "Hunger," and the care-giver, who takes it away. It seems like a pure dyad. Who knows what it is like for the infant, who perhaps is only capable of seeing the care-giver through the eye of its mouth without ever knowing it, itself, exists. Is this why we sometimes only feel we exist when we see another, and why the gaze of another carries such power over us? One reason, anyway. If we feel we don't exist, perhaps seeing another is enough. Perhaps being seen is enough. And here we have returned to the gaze again.

But to stay with the mouth, the first interface, the place that teaches us most cogently about inside and outside, about hunger, nourishment, and never far behind (how can it ever be very far behind?) love: that intimacy of the mouth, that enveloping warmth of feeding, being surrounded by the arms and body of the care-giver, warm, and warmth flowing inside through the mouth, the mouth which sees before the infant's eyes can focus: this is love. And is this why when we press our lips to those of another we do it to show love? How very queer indeed.

Graffito

2006-10-19T03:32:00.000-04:00

As you returning readers may remember, I disdain posting stories of a personal nature on this blog. I try not to but from time to time I do put them up, for several reasons, the most important being that I think it's funny. The story, I mean. But also that I state over and over my dislike of autobiography of any kind and yet still give into it every now and then--that; I think that's funny. The idea that other people could possibly have any interest in what I had for lunch is so alien and absurd to me, that... well, you know. Don't you? Fortunately, this text is not about today's luncheon.

So, there's this bar in New York City called The Phoenix. Its name refers to another, very famous bar tautologically called, The Bar, which opened in 1978 at 2nd Ave and 4th St. This place, The Bar, was a hangout for ACT-UPers and fellow travellers back in the day, and I have many stories, which I will not share here, regarding that particular establishment. Well, it burned in 1998 making for a neat twenty-year arc, and Fluffy, the Cat, the house mascot was never seen again. Did she die in the fire? No one knows, but a new bar rose from the ashes, if you will, as The Phoenix, up on 13th St and Ave A.

The Phoenix is a fun enough place, but the thing I loved about this bar was the graffiti, and one graffito in particular, which someone had taken the time to inscribe on the wall, in pen, on the left side over the left urinal in the "Men's Room," and it went exactly like this:

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for one
moment only. I would like to be
that necessary and that unnoticed.

I can't help you if you think this scrawl describes something sweet and romantic, I was revolted by the sentiment from the day I laid eyes upon it. My friend, Kikkoman, and I loved this poemlet so much that a ritual began where whenever one of us took a leak and came back, we tried to work it into the conversation. You know, he'd come back from the bathroom and we'd talk about some guy I was seeing and what a pain he was, and Kikkoman would say, "I know exactly what you mean, I've dated lots of guys like that, but the thing you always have to remember in these situations is that I would like to be the air that inhabits you for one moment only. I would like to be that necessary and that unnoticed."

Graffiti fascinates me. What does it take for someone to remember to bring a writing tool (hopefully, a Sharpie permanent marker) with him into the toilet and for the express purpose of displaying a secret message to strangers? People write anything from song lyrics to movie quotes to political opinions to personal attacks to URLs to poems--for a while some enterprising person was transcribing lengthy passages of Baudelaire in East Village Men's Rooms, which was lovely. What is it about the public/private in-between space of the toilet that makes a person write? I understand some of the reasons, especially if you've been drinking:

a) personal anger ("Dave Mastrogiovonni is a fucking asshole!!!" or "Stan B. gave me crabs!")
b) political anger ("Fuck Bush")

These are a kind of public service announcement as people might want to know about Gabe, Stan, and/or Bush. Then you have:

c) humor ("Fags suck")
d) art/quotation (Baudelaire)
e) commentary ("Whoever wrote this needs to get a life!")

The coda to our story is a real life example from this last category. Time passed, as it does reliably, and the walls of the Phoenix Men's Room were finally repainted, obliterating the years of scribbles and snide remarks. I think Kikkoman and I had a conversation at Phoenix that went something like this:

K: So, did you hear? They painted the bathroom walls.
L: No! Is it...?
K: Yes. It's gone.
L: Oh. How sad I feel.
K: It saddens me as well.
L: You don't have a Sharpie permanent marker on you by any chance?
K: In fact. I do. (Hands L. the Sharpie)
L: Will you cover me?
K: (Standing) Nothing would make me happier.

So, yes, gentle reader, imagine as Kikkoman and I crept down to the toilet, and whilst he kept watch (not that it really mattered), I reinstated the sacred text back into the approximite spot where it had glowed all those years. It felt exactly like putting a tiny Lego of the universe back into its proper place.

You realize by now how I felt a special protectiveness towards those scant lines of earnest drivel that I'd repeated so many times over the years. It is not that I had changed my mind about the content itself, which if anything had become more repellent with every thrilling repetition, but those lines had become an old friend to look for and find every time I took at slash at that bar. So imagine my irritation when I went to that urinal just a couple days later and found someone had written "BORING FAG" in huge letters over the text and not next to it, as dictated by tradition, with a helpful arrow.

What amuses here is that the original stood unmolested for so long, but the copy exercised some humorless twit so much that he had to deface this text with his much-less-interesting, wit-free remark. There are two kinds of readers for this little poem, those who agree with it and those who don't, and it took the erasure and reiteration by me for the message finally to find its mark. And die. Now that's comedy.

But I am sure you're quite bored with this little exposition on my favorite graffito, O Reader, so I'll close. But do me this favor next time you look at someone's bathroom scribble, remember that I would like to be the air that inhabits you for one moment only. I would like to be that necessary and that unnoticed.

I Post Song Lyrics Sometimes: Northern Lad.

2006-10-16T02:31:00.000-04:00

Yeah, it's Ophelia all over again

Tori Amos is a problematic figure in pop music . Her first album (though not actually her first), Little Earthquakes, somehow managed to stand astride the barrier between the personal (and therefore, the political, as in feminist) and the popular (as in pop). Strangely piano-driven, the songs still had a hook that grabbed people, both despite and because of the lyrics. But then the words were conveyed by the most wonderful instrument of her voice, which is one of the odder confections to be found on the charts in the last fifteen years. She gasps, she grunts, she takes breaths in weird places, she willfully mispronounces and extends words in order to make them fit the arc of the music.

People who don't know Kate Bush dismiss Amos as a Bush imitator instead of understanding that she pays a deep homage extending the crazy space that Kate Bush more or less invented in pop music at the age of seventeen. Bush is essentially a narrativist; she is almost always telling a story, often derived from literature or biography, but transformed by her own strange take on that tale and whatever musical idioms are nagging at her attention. They are both crazy, brilliant bitches, but the real thing that Amos learned from Bush, in a strange counter-intuitive reverse-alphabetical order, is that when you personalize your work it takes on a powerful universal application. If you're passionate enough about what you're doing and you have the capacity to realize that vision, you can approach a song as deeply embedded in the popular conciousness as "Landslide" (or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "'97 Bonnie And Clyde") and take the most remarkable and personal ownership of it.

This song, "Northern Lad," was on Amos' fourth album. After Little Earthquakes, she released her "sell-out" effort, In the Pink, which seemed so calculated and under-done compared to the earlier disc. Then she brought out Boys for Pele--the album art for which depicted her as a hillbilly woman burning a mattress in one photograph and suckling a piglet in another--a fearsome declaration of independence from the market that was only underscored by her use of the antiquated harpsichord. This is an album so intense that I cannot listen to the whole things in one sitting. The title refers to boys being sacrificed to a volcano goddess (as opposed to girls), and has provovatively titled songs including, "Father Lucifer," "Professional Widow," "Muhammad my friend," "Agent Orange," and "Putting the damage on." All good songs, but the album is so full of rage and forgiveness that it's almost unbearable. After this she released her first disc with a band--this from a woman who was content to be responsible for all the sounds in her music. It's a great album, containing the best and a some of the worst of what she's capable of and yet is a breakthrough. She pairs, implicitly anyway, a racous song about the undue, damaging influence of a woman on a man (it could be a woman, it couldbe anyone) called "She's Your Cocaine"--a terrific, funky number--with a song called "Northern Lad." I wish I had the abililty to upload the thing so you could hear what she's up to since I find this one of the most canny and moving pieces of music I've ever encountered. I know, it's always difficult to hear someone else speak in absolutes of any kind, but you have to understand two things: the refrain has an earthy and sexual logic that astonishes: "If you could see me now, /Girls, you've got to know/When it's time to turn the page/When you're only wet because of the rain"; the second thing is the way she sings this. The tune builds in the most lovely subtle way so that by the time she repeats the refrain, it becomes the most mournful keening. Maybe it's the image of rain in the song, but her voice takes on this elemental aspect, like a storm hitting or breaking. It is the sound of a voice describing the sky filling with light, and she does this without the words but only the tone, the grain, of her voice, which dissolves from this incandescent cry of loss into a weeping tremulo. It kills me every time I hear it. This sound she makes is an example of the sublime.

And now for the song.

Northern Lad

Had a northern lad,
Well, not exactly had, but
He moved like the sunset
God who painted that (there).
First he loved my accent;
How his knees could bend.
I thought we'd be ok,
Me and my molasses.

But I feel something is(n't) wrong,
But (like) I feel this cake still isn't done.
And don't say that you don't.

And if you
Could see me now,
'Said if you
Could see me now,
Girls, you've got to know
When it's time to turn the page,
When you're only wet
Because of the rain,
Because of,
'Cause of the rain,
'Cause of...

He don't show much these days.
It gets so fucking cold.
I loved his secret places
But I can't go anymore.
"You change like sugar cane,"
Says my northern lad, well,
I guess you go too far
When pianos try to be guitars. 'N'

I feel the west in you, but I
Feel it falling apart too.
And don't say that you don't.

And if you could see me now,
'Said if you could see me now.
Girls, you've got to know
When it's time to turn the page,
When you're only wet
Because of the rain,
When you're only wet
Because of the rain,
Because of,
'Cause of the rain,
Because of,
'Cause of the rain,
'Cause of
The rain.

"Northern Lad," music and lyrics by Tori Amos, on From the Choirgirl Hotel, 1998.

I Fag Out Sometimes: Fashion

2006-10-02T11:40:00.000-04:00

Rita. Not Rita. (Valentino.)

I wear clothes and I have what amounts to a personal style by default, but Fashion is not my forte. I appreciate it, don't really follow it, and tend to enjoy it as a simultaneously evolving and degrading network of signifiers where colors and styles refer to other things: images, cultural ideas and stereotypes, history, and other fashions and styles. This description probably seems needlessly cumbersome with the added advantage of being vague, but if we accept that "fashions" begin with high fashion--not just classic couture but the various big designers--and then disseminate over time out into cheaper, lower-quality, and less sophisticated hybrid permutations, then it makes a kind of sense. At least I hope it does. Other styles and fashions have subcultural, ethnic, and class markers, and don't necessarily depend on high design, though they may borrow from (or be inspired by) it from time to time. In fact, frequently the converse is often true and high fashion finds its inspiration in any number of style traditions or cultures, reshaping them, ironizing them, and otherwise converting the naive, banal, traditional, or declasse into "couture." Simultaneously, clothing and "looks"--let's say sensibilities--come in and out of "fashion" as designers work against, extend, or reject what came out in previous seasons; on top of that, it takes a year or two, usually more, for ideas and styles to work their way down to the Gap and K-Mart. This is why fashion is in a constant state of evolution and degradation as every season brings a new series of lines that are absorbed into the culture and then filter out--or better, metastasize--into other markets. So, while high fashion appears newly each season and thus redraws the field to some degree for the immediate present and the near future, the popular, diluted, and fragmented ideas from two to five years ago are finding their way onto shelves at the same time.

The fashion system I've been elaborating, or belaboring, is an undeniably reductive one. There is no monolithic "Fashion" handed down from the rarefied heights of the couture houses and the high fashion industry that decomposes into "bad" fashion as it is taken up--too late--by other, cheaper, markets. But some things--and, yes, I'm going to use "things"--hit hard each season, and others don't. The stuff that hits finds its way through specific, overlapping communicating media, most visibly, celebrities (media stars, politicians, the very wealthy, and events such as awards shows and First Lady appearances). The value of these "things" comes first from contradictory impulses where the people who can afford these items want either what everyone else is wearing ("everyone" here being an incredibly tiny and affluent percentage of the general population) or what no one is wearing. Also, specific "hot" designers receive special attention in the press--imagine a world where film actors were not asked "who" they are wearing as they file into the latest awards spectacle. The news and entertainment media's obsessive projection of this information into the world has fostered a most widespread awareness of trends and designers.

What interests me is the circulation of aesthetics, images, sensibilities, styles, periods, and philosophies in fashion; and, yes, I am focusing on the way couture becomes culture and decomposes in the world of the markets until it is slowly replaced by other decomposing trends.

There are other times to discuss the other "group-related" domains of fashion that are based on the utility or aesthetic of ethnic, class, professional traditions which consequently change very slowly, glacially in comparison (an easy to spot example in the fast-paced "Fashion" industry are epaulets, which were borrowed from a military context, and reappear now and then on dress jackets, trenchcoats, and windbreakers). But out and among these other domains, exists the milieu of "everyone else" in a clothing-sense--we could call this a style without style because the main concerns are practicality and thrift. We speak here of the graveyard of fashion, where all trends end up and eventually die. They dwell here as a fossil record of the last few years of fashion, and you can read these trends fairly easily when you look at color, cut, ornament, and so on. The trajectory I'm describing is neatly summarized in The Devil Wears Prada when the Streep/Anna Wintour character explains that the reason Anne Hathaway's Gap sweater is the particular color of blue that it is derives from a conversation had five years previous in the very room where they stand.

Most people are fairly thoughtless about their clothing and generally go for the demure, standard, and everyday (which is to say the unnoticable)--this describes the legions of citizens, women, in the Midwest, for one example, whose choices in, and awareness of, fashion is quite limited. The fact that they really don't value fashion at all is the reason they can be said to have no style (whatever fossilized trends can be found in what they wear), because a real style is chosen, and what these people are wearing was chosen for them, as though the clothing industry were some monstrous mother dressing her fashion-hapless children. If clothing choice is a way of choosing a kind of identity, then the clothing Midwestern moms wear expresses no identity, because there is nothing individual about it.

For the individual, fashion must be used; style must be chosen. It is a system of play that sends a message of who you think you are or who you want others to think you are--and sometimes that decision changes on a daily basis. The truly savvy--and the kind of people designers watch for ideas--wear whatever they want. If everyone aspired to this level of play and sophistication, fashion might be no fun at all, because the thing that sets the wealthy and the savvy apart from everyone else when it comes to fashion is knowledge, access, difference, attention, and invention. Those with no style lack all these qualities.

SIDEBAR/ENDBAR: Fashion can be read in other ways, of course: for the ways it represents a larger cultural view of gender (flamboyance and flash are still largely reserved for the female of the species), for the ways it incorporates war as fashion, the ways it reiterates earlier trends in the name of "retro," and so on and on; because the turnover is so fast the domain is great and yet strangely finite. This reading, this semiotic, of fashion requires a longer view than what I mean to describe here. I speak not of signs, of ideas that have specific cultural referents, but of signifiers of images. A semiotic, which concerns meaning, is different from a genealogy, and the genealogical is what this discursis circulates about. Fashion is a history of surfaces. Fashion is the first guard, the avant-gard, the armor, of the self. Those who put on their armor every day know the value of this. Moreover and furthermore, this whole setup I've outlined is a useful metaphor for the way other systems work, like history, hairstyles, and genre television: the infectious movement of Fashion reveals the way ideas move generally in culture. And you thought Fashion was just stupid and useless. Silly, reader.

So, I told you that story to tell you this one. Congratulations on getting this far.

Through a series of circumstances I prefer to keep anonymous, I recently acquired an haute couture item that belonged to one Mary McCarthy. Now, I don't know what is more bizarre: that I have high fashion in my home, or that it was worn by that wonderful and acerbic essayist, critic, and novelist, whom no one knows about anymore.

I gave the piece to Jeph for his birthday, and it has still a pricetag on it, Minnie Pearl-style, from a gallery sale in which the previous owner thought, with advice, it would go for $3,500. Though it didn't sell and was given to me, most generously, I am fairly certain that the price listed is not far off from its "value," which makes it the most expensive, non-appliance, thing I have ever touched, excluding the Rosetta Stone (which is now under glass) and a van Gogh at the National Gallery (which is not). Yet unlike those precious items it lives with me. And not only is it valuable because it is a vintage piece of couture, it has Mary McCarthy's DNA on it. This is exciting. This is dramatic.

Let's discuss the piece for a moment: it is a gorgeous, cream, satin, double-breasted coat, made double-wide to be worn over a ballgown, or some other formal wear for women circa 1958 or so, one that has many, many petticoats. Moreover it was designed by Lanvin, the oldest of the Parisian fashion houses. The oldest. Mind you, it was not made by Lanvin herself, who was long dead by 1958, or her daughter, who was, and still is, also dead. No, this is a coat made by one of the most respected fashion houses in Paris, who take, or took, their heritage very seriously. But the fossils are evident in the make of the thing, in its very large satin-covered buttons, and the way it fits a dress that would never be worn today, outside of California where there is no need to wear overcoats on formal dresses, fabulous or otherwise. If I had a decent picture of it, I'd post one, but for now you'll just have to use your imagination. Instead, I offer these images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's costume closet of classic Lanvin. Enjoy. [See below.]

UPDATE. I took some crappy pics. It needs cleaning and pressing, but:

But you really need to see the large satin button detail:

And now, for the frocks.

Evening dress, 1939, Jeanne Lanvin (French, 1867–1946) Steel-gray silk taffeta embroidered with metallic sequins and pink beads. Gift of Mrs. Harrison Williams, Lady Mendl, and Mrs. Ector Munn, 1946

Evening ensemble, ca. 1934, Jeanne Lanvin (French, 1867–1946)
Black silk taffeta with metal plaques. Gift of Miriam W. Coletti, 1993

Evening jacket, 1936–37, Jeanne Lanvin (French, 1867–1946) Silver lamé with black fox trim.
Gift of Mrs. Leon L. Roos, 1966

Robe de style, 1924–25, Jeanne Lanvin (French, 1867–1946) Ivory and black silk taffeta
trimmed with pink and black silk velvet rosettes. Gift of Mrs. W. R. Grace, 1956

Now I Know What Boyfriends Are For 2: Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch?

2006-09-22T02:41:00.000-04:00

1979: Dinah Shore sings Sondheim's "Ladies Who Lunch" with everyone's favorite full-figured gal, Jane Russell, who replaced Elaine Stritch in Company, so long long ago. Jeph found this one on YouTube, and exclaimed, "Oh, I love YouTube." And we do, for how would you or I ever know this existed?

You need to watch the wonderful amazingness of the film, but first, let's look at the "three-act play," as Stritch called it, of the song. It serves as the kinda eleven o'clock number in the show, but it comes off more like an out-of-nowhere song like Weill's "Tchaikovsky" in Lady in the Dark. What to make of this song? Well, looking at it briefly it concerns:

1. The ladies who lunch
2. The girls who play smart
3. The girls who play wife
4. The girls who just watch
5. The girls on the go

Which might just be a five act play, depending on how you count. This heartless vivisection of New York City women includes its singer, Joanne aka Elaine, most especially in the stanza about the girls who just watch, who get depressed, have a bottle of scotch or a vodka stinger (a repulsive drink, by the way), who disapprove, who jest, who don't move. But like the "Cellblock Tango" in Chicago, which Company predates by the way, the star is full-focus in the penultimate stanza, though in this song there is only one singer.

The brilliance of this song is that on first blush it comes off as a bitchy song written by a bitchy man for a bitchy woman to sing, but when you spend a little time with it, the number starts resounding with an enormous sympathy and a great melancholy. In a weird way, and quite unintentionally I think, it starts becoming a feminist song about the hardships of living under the sophisticated urban Patriarchy, a song of boredom or too much money and too much freedom, of not getting what you signed up for even when you thought you were too smart to really sign up for it in the first place. The anger in the song is quite clear, though articulated through clenched teeth, but when we ask from whence the anger emanates, the waters become quite deep and dangerous. Good job, Sondheim. (For a lovely Cf. see "Every Day A Little Death" from A Little Night Music.) For now, we should just enjoy the words, as with PJ Harvey as a poem, before the delicious Dinah Shore massacre. Watch for Shore singing this like a pop song--she's practically Perry Como with this--and Russell doing her best world-weary Stritch impression. I love Jane Russell, and she's a fuckin' trouper, but the asides here are spectacular. And she was directed initially, but not for this broadcast.

Oh. One last note. Years ago, I listened to this song and called a friend, Todd, in San Francisco, and said, "I think 'The Ladies Who Lunch' is about gay men," and he said, most wonderfully, "All musical theater is about gay men." I'll leave that for you to decide on either count. And now for the song.

Here's to the ladies who lunch--
Everybody laugh.
Lounging in their caftans
And planning a brunch
On their own behalf.
Off to the gym,
Then to a fitting,
Claiming they're fat.
And looking grim,
'Cause they've been sitting
Choosing a hat.
Does anyone still wear a hat?
I'll drink to that.

And here's to the girls who play smart--
Aren't they a gas?
Rushing to their classes
In optical art,
Wishing it would pass.
Another long exhausting day,
Another thousand dollars,
A matinee, a Pinter play,
Perhaps a piece of Mahler's.
I'll drink to that.
And one for Mahler!

And here's to the girls who play wife--
Aren't they too much?
Keeping house but clutching
A copy of LIFE,
Just to keep in touch.
The ones who follow the rules,
And meet themselves at the schools,
Too busy to know that they're fools.
Aren't they a gem?
I'll drink to them!
Let's all drink to them!

And here's to the girls who just watch--
Aren't they the best?
When they get depressed,
It's a bottle of Scotch,
Plus a little jest.
Another chance to disapprove,
Another brilliant zinger,
Another reason not to move,
Another vodka stinger.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!
I'll drink to that.

So here's to the girls on the go--
Everybody tries.
Look into their eyes,
And you'll see what they know:
Everybody dies.
A toast to that invincible bunch,
The dinosaurs surviving the crunch.
Let's hear it for the ladies who lunch--
Everybody rise!
Rise!
Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!
Rise!

"The Ladies Who Lunch," music and lyrics from Stephen Sondheim, from Company, 1970.

And now for the film.

Hollywood Commie Love Story: Reds

2006-09-19T14:01:00.000-04:00

It says a lot when we see the guy's face but not the lady's
in a historical romance movie poster....

Turner Classic Movies showed the Warren Beatty motion picture, Reds (1981), last night, so I tuned in to see what all the fuss was about. The movie came well-recommended, and as far as I know, Beatty has the distinction of being the only man, the only person, besides Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, to be Oscar nominated for writer, director, producer, and best actor for the same film (and Beatty had done it before with Heaven Can Wait [1978], so he's the only one to pull it off twice). I like Beatty and I like his movies, though it's funny that after all his acclaim, he still seems to have a weird reputation as a pretty boy. It isn't easy to live down a face like that, I guess.

So, what's Reds about? Well, it concerns two people you've probably never heard of, and a couple others you might have. Beatty plays Jack Reed, a radical, American journalist, labor advocate, and later, Communist to Diane Keaton's Louise Bryant, an early feminist, Marxist, and writer. Heard of them? I didn't think so. The film is first and foremost an epic love story, and in that sense it is hugely successful as Jack and Louise follow each other across the world as they lose, find, lose, and find each other. Much of this is really lovely, though some arrives a bit over-done for my taste. The second major, and overlapping--competing--narrative concerns early 20th century politics, Communism, and the 1917 Russian Revolution, because, you see, Reed and Bryant were in Russia when it was all going down while reporting on the revolution and its major players. After returning to the States, Reed became a delegate from an American Communist organization and died in Moscow in 1920. He is the only American honored by burial at the Kremlin.

Our leads. (There's a terrific shot in this scene
on the train where Keaton looks like Louise Brooks.)

It's great, exciting, epic stuff, and the film covers a lot and is long (194 minutes), but probably needs to be a little longer in order to fill in a few historical and emotional holes. The problems I have with the film have primarily to do with Beatty and Keaton and I'll start with Keaton. She plays Louise Bryant as a dilettante who grows into a committed writer and intellectual--fine. But she comes off as a whiny bore for most of the first half of the film, espousing free-love when she wants to bed Reed's friend, Eugene O'Neill (played by Jack Nicholson in a complex performance), then throwing a ridiculous tantrum when she hears Reed has slept around too. Maybe this is historically accurate, maybe she was directed this way--who can know for certain--but it reduces the Bryant character to an unsophisticated, nagging pain, always annoyed that Reed is off doing political work when he should be with her. The incoherence of the character is only resolved at the end when she makes an arduous, and illegal, journey to Russia to be with her man. I don't mean to suggest that Bryant should have been more likable in the film--more the opposite--I feel her convictions and motivations should be more consistent and convey the vibrant, brainy woman she appears to have been. (Side bar: we get some of our info about Bryant from interviews with Reed's living contemporaries that brilliantly punctuate, and puncture, the film narrative. This device strikes me as the most interesting feature of Reds and serves to position the events in history, even while it unravels the film's portrayals of Reed and Bryant.)

Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman with Beatty

My other gripe about Keaton, is the way her acting conveys the politics of her character in the film. Only Maureen Stapleton really offers a sustained portrayal of political conviction as the anarchist, Emma Goldman--she won an Oscar for it, and she's terrific: sardonic, tough, utterly committed, and fierce. Keaton, on the other hand, gives a long speech at Nicholson where she just rants at him, and when she takes a breath, the whole thing falls apart, as if she were only trying to get through it. As I watched, I thought, is this a speech from someone who believes what she's saying, or a performance of what someone thinks conviction is supposed to look like? Obviously, I believe it's the latter, and especially when you compare it with anything Stapleton does--and almost all her onscreen dialogue is of a radically political nature--because she acts circles around Keaton here. Where Keaton blasts through her lines as quickly as she can, Stapleton modulates, punctuates, and colors, as though what she were saying didn't all signify the same thing, which is how it feels with Keaton. Thus Diane Keaton almost always comes off as politically naive and a crass ideologue, which isn't moving or involving, and makes Bryant's politics seem flat, not passionate. The exception that proves the rule occurs in Bryant's scene before Congress--here, Keaton is restrained, wise, and sarcastic, which suits the character immeasurably.

Love triangle-y

Beatty has a similar problem, and his Jack Reed just seems to repeat himself without displaying any of the charisma we are told that Reed had as a public speaker. I know Beatty had his plate full as producer, director, and star, but the part demands more than the attitude of political conviction--all we really get of Reed is that he was a hard-worker, and all his real passion is relegated to the love relationship with Keaton. Because Reed's radicalism is meant to complicate, and be at some odds with, the love story, the muted nature of Reed's politics and Beatty's performance throws the film off balance. Clearly, this wasn't Beatty's intention as the movie is structured around the back and forth of love and politics, which again only "works" when Bryant throws her lot in with Reed entirely in the final chapter. This sort of politics vs love/work vs domesticity/male vs female matrix could only be written, as far as I'm concerned, by a man. This, for lack of a better word, gender bias accounts to some degree for the way Bryant appears--incomplete, inconsistent, vacillating, and hysterical--for much of the film, and therefore Stapleton's Emma Goldman rises as the spectre of what Bryant should or could have been, which I think is both an intentional contrast in the script, and a kind of return of the repressed in the Bryant character; a repression that occurred in the way she was written.

Stapleton died this year at 80, by the way

Beatty's acting demands one last note about how he often resorts to a comic reading of a scene, line, or reaction. I'd need to look more closely at his work in other films, but here it comes off as a crutch, a short-hand to make Reed sympathetic, and perhaps as a conscious foil for Beatty's own good looks. I'll only give one example: Reed and Bryant's Moscow flat has a crystal chandelier that hangs a little low for Beatty's Jack Reed (Beatty is 6'2"), and he hits his head on it every time he passes by it, and reacts comically every time as the crystals tinkle distractingly. Twice, this would work, but after that, even the most absent-minded professor would remember to duck or do something, anything, differently. Nuff said.

So is Reds any good? Yes, I think it's a great, wonderful film--though uneven here and there and a movie who's project and execution are at odds with one another. In short, Reds is an important, American film that is absolutely worth seeing. I cannot leave unmentioned the spectacular photography by Vittorio Storaro (a Bertolucci DP who has received well-deserved recognition for his work on films as different as The Conformist, Apocalypse Now, Dick Tracy, and The Last Emperor), which locates simple, intimate rooms; huge, frozen landscapes; moody, crowd scenes; emotionally-relevant, figure/spatial arrangements; and unsparing, facial close-ups on the same screen. His work is the great bond that holds the film together where the script and performances falter. There is much to learn of what not to do as well as what succeeds in this film. Joe Bob says check it out. PS Stephen Sondheim wrote parts of the score.

Of course, I can't help thinking of another Hollywood Commie Love Story, which I'll gripe about another time because it shares so many of the problems that plague Reds. That film, of course, is...

Jewish Radical loves Aryan God

But I've said enough for now. Instead I leave you with two seconds of comic relief and Babs, in one of her more unfortunate outfits:

The Norma Desmond look was hot hot hot that year

Fun with the New York Times: The TV Listings

2006-09-15T11:23:00.000-04:00

I usually read the New York Times online, but when I pick up the snail edition, I cannot help myself--after reading the front page and the editorial section--I go straight to the TV program grid, which offers all the delicious televisual treats the culture industry has planned for us this evening in thrillingly microscopic detail. I say "thrillingly" because, for me the best part of the program grid, with its overwhelming array of channels--a grid that stretches across, that consumes, an entire page of the newspaper--is that so little space remains to actually describe the program appearing in each shallow rectangle. I'd love to meet the person in charge of writing these telegraphic, almost haiku-like, sketches because, when the words aren't truncated almost to the point of unintelligibility, our writer includes a sardonic opinion in what is surely intended to be a straight-up program guide. It makes me wonder if the Times is writing for a perceived "hip" audience, or if this is the work of a precocious mind desperately fending off boredom. Plus, all the capsule bits are written by my favorite author, Anonymous.

Enough of that exposition. Let's take a look at yesterday's paper.

The first main rectangle of network and local channels offers the most descriptive and therefore, usually, the least interesting examples:

7:30pm, ch 2, CBS
Entertain Tonight
"C.S.I.: NY"
[This is fun, only because space requirements tighten "Entertainment Tonight" into "Entertain Tonight," which I'm certain is only wishful thinking. I especially admire the punctuation-happy quotation marks, periods between C, S, & I, and, of course, the colon. (Keep an eye out for hyphens.)]

8pm, ch 2, CBS
Survivor: Cook Islands
Based on ethnicity, contestants divide into four tribes.
[Yawn.]

8pm, ch 7, ABC
Grey's Anatomy
The interns care for a family involved in a car accident.
[This is where the theme of a show comes into direct conflict with (or maybe the direct realization of) a given episode's specific story. I mean, except for the "family' part, doesn't this sort of thing happen every week on a show set in a hospital? When space is even less available, these can be shortened into: "Doctors care for accident victims." Or even better: "Doctors work in hospital." Will the excitement never stop?]

In our next two examples, from an NYC local channel, we get consecutive descriptions that sound alarmingly like, well, like the same show.

8pm, ch 9, WWOR
Desire
Fate intervenes in love affairs.

9pm, ch 9, WWOR
Fashion House
Surprises in love.

While I have no idea what "Fashion House" could be about (is it an import from Japan?), if we do a little rearranging, it becomes clear that perhaps all TV really is interchangeable:

Desire
Surprises in love.

Fashion House
Fate intervenes in love affairs.

Or maybe we could just make them one fabulous 2-hour program:

Fashion House Desire
Love surprised when Fate intervenes in affairs.

NEXT WEEK on Fashion House Desire!
Tensions build when Love borrows Fate's designer shoes.

It is in the Cable listings that our intrepid writer really shows her stuff. Extra points for creativity and critical opinion when the star list crowds out the story.

6:30pm, ENC
Elf (2003)
Will Ferrell, James Caan.
Joyful.
[Bitchy irony or heartfelt admission? You decide.]

8pm, ENC
Out of Sight (1998)
George Clooney.
Escaped convict and federal marshal, via Soderbergh. Sultry, steamy charmer.
[So much with so little. Or is it so little with so much? We get the director and the opinion, but as for plot: "Escaped convict and federal marshal." What on earth could that mean? The possibilities are... endless?]

8pm, FLIX
Better Off Dead (1985)
John Cusack.
Lovesick teenager. Surreal romantic comedy.
[You have to admire Anonymous' ability to distill the essence of a film, even Better Off Dead. Protagonist + Genre = Um... lame description for readers who won't watch it anyway?]

9:30pm, FLIX
Fearless Fighters (1973)
Chang Ching, Chen Lieh [Oh my god! I LOVE them!!]
Martial artlessness.
[Snap! Snap! Oh, no you di'n't! (Oh, yes. You did. Oh, Anonymous....)]

6:30pm, HBO2
Indecent Proposal (1993)
Robert Redford [Oh my god! I LOVE him!]
Sleek, strained, with absurd ending.
[Here, the snobbery of our author overrides any attempt to submit a cogent, or even a coherent, plot. And where's Woody? Where's Demi?? How about "Million Dollar Adultery. Strained."? See? I could do this job! I could write the TV Listings for the New York Times! See? See?]

10pm, SHO2
The Hazing (2004)
Brad Dourif, Philip Andrew [What-the?]
Lacks class.
[(slapping thigh, wiping tears from eyes) Oh, stop, Anonymous! Stop!]

6:30, AMC
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Dirk Bogarde
Pounding, graphic WWII drama.
[I don't know about you, but it sounds like, well, it sounds like porn. I'm renting it tomorrow.]

8pm, AMC
Enemy of the State (1998)
Will Smith, Gene Hackman
Victim of assassination cover-up. High-tech turn-on. [Yay! Double hyphens! Double whammy!]
[With AMC, Anonymous clearly turns to thoughts of love, or at least becomes a bit over-heated. What are the odds of seeing descriptions of back to back films that use "pounding," "graphic," and "turn on," I ask you?]

Dirty little Anonymous continues the sexual subtext with our next AMC film:

10:30pm, AMC
Narc (2002)
Ray Liotta, Jason Patric.
Guilt-ridden cop [hyphens!] with nowhere to turn. Grimy and entertaining.
[Cop with nowhere to turn? This is an alleged plot? You'd be better off with--oh, who cares! The spectacle of seeing "grimy" and "entertaining" together at last in the same sentence is excitement enough.

I leave you with a quick listing of some of the everyday tresures (and I mean every day), because I think the beauty of Anonymous' work truly only shines when robbed of context.

Color of money downtown. Brilliantly constructed, with feet of clay.
[Gives with one hand, takes away with the other.]

Half-baked and faintly ridiculous.
[But only faintly. Do you smell that too? This is Cruel Intentions, by the way.]

Women and Baseball, back when. Immensely enjoyable.

And my favorite:

American scrambles through demon-filled mystical world and falls in love with goddess. Wildly uneven.
[Oh. My. God. Where do I sign, bitch? I assume the "American" part is very, very important to the plot. I mean, right? It at least gives you a visual feel...?]

I Post Song Lyrics Sometimes: Rid of Me

2006-09-14T13:54:00.000-04:00

I know I posted a video of this little ditty last time, but some things deserve a more focused appreciation. The sheer obsessiveness of this song is breathtaking all by itself, but to really understand what she's up to, you have to hear the original on the album. It's fucking scary. For now, just read the lyrics like a poem.

And now for the song.

Rid of Me

Tie yourself
to me,
No one else,
No, you're not rid of me.
Hmm, you're not rid of me.

Night and day I breathe,
Ha, hah, eh, ay,
You're not rid of me,
Yeah, you're not rid of me,
Yeah, you're not rid of me,
Yeah, you're not rid of me.

I beg you, my darling,
Don't leave me, I'm hurting.

(Lick my legs I'm on fire)
(Lick my legs of desire)

I'll tie your legs,
Keep you against my chest,
Oh, you're not rid of me,
Yeah, you're not rid of me.
I'll make you lick my injuries,
I'm gonna twist your head off, see

Till you say don't you wish you never never met her?
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her?
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her?
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her?

I beg you my darling,
Don't leave me, I'm hurting.
Big lonely above everything,
Above everyday, I'm hurting.

(Lick my legs, I'm on fire)
(Lick my legs of desire)
(Lick my legs, I'm on fire)
(Lick my legs of desire)

Yeah, you're not rid of me.
Yeah, you're not rid of me.
I'll make you lick my injuries,
I'm gonna twist your head off, see.

Till you say don't you wish you never never met her,
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,

Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs I'm on fire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs of desire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs I'm on fire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs of desire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs I'm on fire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs of desire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs I'm on fire)
Don't you don't you wish you never never met her,
(Lick my legs of desire)

Lick my legs I'm on fire,
Lick my legs of desire,
Lick my legs I'm on fire,
Lick my legs of desire.

"Rid Of Me," music and lyrics by P.J. Harvey, on Rid of Me, 1993.

I Post Videos Sometimes

2006-09-08T14:06:00.000-04:00

On a lighter note.

Kick-ass video from Enon: "Daughter in the House of Fools." It's been around a while but always brings me pleasure.

Solo, acoustic Polly Jean (my girlfriend) doing one of my favorite songs in 2001, "Rid of Me." She doesn't tear your face off like she does on the album, if anything, this offers a kinder, gentler "Don't you wish you never never met her."

Krazy Kate Bush (another GF) singing "Wuthering Heights" on Top of the Pops in 1978. Her facial expressions on this are awesome, proving once again that when you're a genius, you can do just about whatever you want.

Labor Day

2006-09-04T22:17:00.000-04:00

What do we celebrate, after all, on Labor Day? Grover Cleveland set it up in the 1880s but placed it at the end of the summer, in September, to keep it far away from May Day, the Communist and labor movement European honoring of the worker and the establishment of the eight hour work day. That's an easy way to remember the difference between Labor Day and Memorial Day, incidentally: Labor Day can never happen close to May.

That initial reticence of Cleveland's has now blossomed into a full denial of the value of labor and the worker in twenty-first century America. Unions? A joke. A labor movement? What's that? Worker's compensation? Fair wages? Benefits? Insurance? Vacation time? Job security? In the Age of the Corporation, the pursuit of profit has overshadowed everything else. Companies move production and customer support off-shore in the pursuit of ever-higher profits. CEOs make salaries many times over lower-ranking employees for the first time in decades. And who suffers in the pursuit of corporate expansion and profit: always the rank and file worker. Always.

How did this happen? Well, the founding fathers put careful strictures on corporations, keeping them within states and denying them the right to buy and own other corporations. But one day, the Supreme Court allowed that corporations were persons, and therefore granted the right of freedom of speech, ownership, etc. The 50s and 60s especially marked a backlash--thanks in part to the labor movement and Teddy Roosevelt--against earlier corporate exploitation and indulgence, but with Reagan and deregulation, the backlash against the backlash has increased exponentially. Under the current occupant of the White House it has only gotten worse, as if you needed informing of that with the many scandals of corporate interests and the lobbyists who serve them. Your government serves corporations, not you. Your government does not care about you, your health, your livelihood, your job, your wages, your ability to feed your family, or your safety (remember the mine workers killed recently, none of the many violations reported were investigated. If those violations had been acted upon, those men would be alive today).

But always remember, even if Labor Day is a joke, always remember that your labor has value. Even as you toil in a salaried job for more than the eight hour work day that was guaranteed over a century ago, I hope your labor has some value to you.

Hey, let's repeal the child labor laws too!

But don't worry, be happy. There's always a silver lining in every dark cloud. Trust in the American Dream in a country where anyone can become President. Remember that we live in a society unburdened by class. Trust that progress is the driving engine of our time and that your representatives have your best interests in mind. Don't forget that when God closes a door, he always opens a window. In spite of everything, still believe that people are good at heart. And always remember that murder will out.

I Read the New York Times Sometimes: The Trouble With Trannies.

2006-08-28T01:57:00.000-04:00

So, a pal of mine, a dyke, sent me an email with a New York Times link for an article called, "The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack." It purports to describe the relationship between lesbians and F2M transsexuals. I guess. The piece was so fraught with misunderstandings, on the part of the writer especially, that I wrote a commentary within parts of the article in the form of long temper tantrum as an email to my friend. I am posting this tantrum, warts and all. I expect this post will change over the next week as I think about it more and hopefully as my friend sends me comments on what I've written.This is therefore a dialogue, and perhaps a trilogue, that will change and grow over the next few days. But first, you should read the actual piece, if you have bought the Times Select function, that is. If not, all you will get from the link is this abstract:

DISPLAYING ABSTRACT - IN the most recent season of the lesbian soap opera, ''The L Word,'' a new character named Moira announced to her friends that, through surgery and hormone therapy, she would soon be a new person named Max. Her news was not well received. ''It just saddens me to see ...

Correction: August 27, 2006, Sunday An article last Sunday about transgender lesbians referred incorrectly to Judith Halberstam, a gender theorist and professor of literature whose books include ''Female Masculinity.'' She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; it has no San Diego campus.

Let this errata stand as a fitting coda/prologue to the article itself, with which I have many issues. Please, post all the comments you want. And now for the email:

Ok, I can't believe you sent me this article without comment. The funny thing is that transitioning has come up a couple times in the last few weeks, though now I'm blanking on one, the other was a short film Jeph's sister showed us concerning a family who's relative (an uncle/brother, and straight, by the way) was becoming a woman, a ,well, a lesbian. The film focused on his (now her) nieces and their confusion and questions about the matter. Interestingly, the youngest girl, 6, I think, had really no problem with the change, but viewed it as a fun new way to engage with her uncle that was unavailable before. It's called "No Stupid Questions"--or something like that, "No Dumb Questions." Oh, I remembered the other: Rosanna Arquette was on a talk show for some reason, and the host referred to her "brother Alexis," and Arquette corrected him: "My sister, Alexis." The remarkable thing about it was that there was a defiance in the way she spoke, but she also had a funny expression on her face, a very intense one that signaled unresolved feelings mixed with supportiveness (it seemed to me). It was almost like an irony. And when she first said, "My sister, Alexis" it seemed like she was snapping at the guy and lightly deriding this transition. As I've already suggested, I think it's more complex than this.

Now to the NYT piece. I'm beginning on p 2 because that is where I started getting really annoyed. In the end, I found this article to be quite sloppy even while raising many interesting issues that cluster around what we call "transgendered." I wonder why the Times bothered to print it at all, but then I think of that truly bizarre follow-up to the 2000 Florida election recount, and…nuff said.

The numbers are slight, considering the estimated five million gay men and five million lesbian women in the United States. Still, coupled with a simultaneous trend among the young to reject sexual identity labels altogether, some lesbians fear that the ranks are growing of women who once called themselves lesbian but no longer do.

Is THIS what this article is about?

"It's as if the category of lesbian is just emptying out," said Judith Halberstam, a gender theorist and professor of literature at the University of Southern California, San Diego, whose books include "Female Masculinity."

I was excited to see Halberstam until I read her quote. I am assuming that this statement is not in context because if anyone should have an awareness of the complexities of gender, particularly regarding lesbianism's relation to the masculine (and within that a specific kind of lesbianism's relation to that gender, that lesbianism being the butch or bull dyke), it's Judith. This quote, however, just makes her sound like a paranoid reactionary. Did she mention other reasons why she felt the "category of lesbianism" was being emptied out that the writer didn't include (I dunno, like the infamous Lesbian Until Graduation)? As it stands, this statement sounds like an absurd hyperbole and smacks of that whiny victimhood we find in one of the caricatures of feminism and LGB(T) activism. I blame the journalist. I mean, the ONE voice I was hoping to hear from on this matter was stripped of its nuance--she gets one fucking paragraph, and one stupid statement. Either that or lesbian-inflected gender theory in the academy is much worse off that I thought. Furthermore, the author totally conscripts her statement to support this idea that lesbians are disappearing and that those damn F2Ms are part of the problem! What is this stupid article about (a theme to which we will return)?

One more thing about Halberstam’s (strange) quote too is that I would expect her to be aware that all kinds of categories have been “emptying out” in the last fifteen years, as if a conceptual leveling out were occurring across traditional identity categories. People seem to be far less apt to identify along the lines of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality (including gay), and class. This is illusory too because I think those categories retain more of their power among the poor, but the middle classes have always sought homogeneity; and as same-sex loving people and racial and ethnic groups are more assimilated into culture and the middle class, they seek that comforting homogeneity too. The fools. But America is a conformist culture and the vanishing of political activism and civic duty is a result of, and a pursuit of, this assimilation; moreover, I think the social-political climate since Reagan has everything to do with this impulse. I don’t know what’s going on among the youth of today, exactly--and by this I mean the people in high school and college. The conservative impulse towards traditionalism is strong, and yet I know in many places the phobias about homosexuality, and the fear of being perceived as gay, are being dissolved in a sort of, for lack of a better term, apathy about sexuality. My suspicion is that more kids are experimenting with both boys and girls in a sort of dismissive, thoughtless way; a naïve way. I don’t think this is necessarily bad. This “experimentation” allows them to move without labels, but that also denies them the social ties that those labels allow. Nonetheless, when they leave college, no matter how many boys they kissed in school, the ones who were going to get married will still get married, and the “gender-queer” will move to New York, or wherever, and call themselves gay. Halberstam’s view is marked by the academic world within which she moves and she’s probably seen a big drop in lesbian-identified women, but her diagnosis about lesbianism is probably overdetermined by her positioning in the one real place kids might get the chance to dismiss categories and labels (if we can even understand her diagnosis in this decontextualilzed situation). But the unknown history always repeats, and the repressed always returns, in one form or another.

Leaders of some lesbian organizations dismiss the idea of a schism or contend that it has been resolved in the interest of common human rights goals among lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

I am so relieved! Thank heavens someone's got her eye on the classic mandate of GLBT politics and activism. Of course, this comes with its own frequently under-theorized rose-colored glasses syndrome. But we'll leave the kumbuyas in the background for now and just be grateful that the writer included something that I actually believe in vis a vis queer politics and sexual-gender oppression, the theme of which continues below:

"The view in some lesbian corners that we are losing lesbians to transitioning is absurd," said Kate Kendall, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "Given our history of oppression, all lesbians should encourage people to be themselves even if it means our lesbian sister is becoming our heterosexual-identified brother."

AMEN, sister! Or to state this last bit more precisely: the "lesbian sister" turned "brother"'s very struggle was with his/her gender. To him, he didn't stop being a lesbian or a woman; in his understanding, he never was. The journey by which he came to this conclusion is long and confusing given the gender-conforming demands of our culture, and then the demands of certain kinds of lesbian culture to "be" a lesbian or a certain kind of lesbian--and this from the group in whom he sought to find safety, protection, and community, an identity, or at least understanding. Of course transgendered men gravitate towards the lesbian: it's the only cultural category that seems close to how they see themselves, but eventually this identification—the lesbian, yet another in a chain of how many—breaks down, and the transgendered person, whom I will call "he," realizes that he doesn't fit here either. The issue isn't that he is a lesbian trying to live under the Patriarchy, it is that he is a man living in a woman's body under the Patriarchy, socio-medical categories that mostly find his existence unintelligible or invisible, and lesbian culture that might take this misnamed, mis-shapen, mistaken identity personally (those don't all take the same referent). What could be lonelier than the person who's joy in learning who he might actually "be" is coterminous with the wholesale rejection of that self by every community he has ever tried to be a part of as a female?

Now this brings us to an interesting place, and that is, of course, do we believe that a man can be trapped in a woman's body? Firstly, I feel the need to mention, I was taught—to quote from the nice lady above—that "[g]iven our history of oppression, all [gays and] lesbians should encourage people to be themselves." For me, this comes first. Therefore, if someone wants to be called "he" or "she," you call them that, just as when a person asks you to call them by a certain name, "Kate" instead of "Katherine." It's respectful, but also a bit radical, and it is part of the wonderful legacy of Queer Theory at its best when it took all the nuanced, critical, resistant good stuff from feminism, the civil rights movement, and gay and lesbian politics and culture. So, in our respect for the strange, the creative, the queer, and all the ways people don't fit neatly into categories (no matter how reassuring that would be for lesbians and gays too), we submit to the fact that, we agree that, it is not the job of the person naming herself to make us feel comfortable. That comes first, so for me, in a very important sense, the "science" behind the "wrong" gender in the "wrong" body doesn't even come into play. Who the hell are you to tell me I'm not a woman--or a man--which is the history of homophobia in a nutshell with its inverts, perverts, nellies, queers, sissies, butches, mannish women, gays, fops, outcasts, ad nauseum.

Many transgendered people invoke a kind of biological argument to account for the profound alienation they feel in and from their bodies and the cultural expectations that come attached to those bodies, when their own expectations of themselves seem modeled on the other sex. As I said, these feelings are marked by culture, and from a psychoanalytic perspective, cultural or even gendered expectations or desires cannot be genetically wired—and this makes perfect sense to me. So, if it comes down to a primordial identification with a gender—one so old and embedded it might as well be genetic, because you can't undo it—what is it exactly that makes a certain gay man's identification with and interest in things feminine, or a certain lesbian's identification with and interest in things masculine, any different from a transgendered person's identification with a certain cluster of gendered traits, life expectations, and so on, except a matter of degree? Do we punish them because they resort to dressing as the other sex? Do we ostracize them because they use surgical techniques to allow themselves to look to themselves as they feel, and probably just as important, to appear, to be, to everyone else, the way that they feel? The difference between lesbians who eschew frilly frocks, makeup, and hairdressers for pants and cropped hair and gay men who dress flamboyantly or in drag—and who must deal with prejudice and even violence against these "styles" (is it a choice? a defiance? a fashion?)—doesn't seem so dramatically different from the transgender question at all. This is particularly true when we note that many transgendered folks don't commit to all the possible surgeries, for financial, health, or other reasons, and so their transition is revealed in terms of a code, a sartorial one. If we allow the sartorial enough elasticity, if we think of it in terms of sumptuary laws for example, why shouldn't our "clothing" include the performance of gender roles or our very bodies, for that matter? And so, despite this last-minute, imaginative loophole, the thing we've been trying to tease out here, the difference between a butch dyke and a female-to-male transgendered person, is that at the end of the day—no matter how many masculine traits she evinces, performs, enjoys, or embodies—a lesbian still “is,” and wants to be, a woman. And somehow, according to this piece, to some lesbians the fact of a lesbian-identified woman transitioning to being a man, is a diminishing of the lesbian domain, a threat. But a threat to what?

We continue....

But in private conversations and in public forums like women's colleges, the questions about how to frame the relationship among lesbians, former lesbians and young women who call themselves "gender queer" rather than lesbian at all, seem largely unresolved.

Okay, this is already a fucked-up description. I'd like to sit in at a public forum at a women's college, which, the high population of women-loving women notwithstanding, certainly were not set up in the last hundred plus years to be a lesbian institution. There have to be some heterosexual women matriculating, who will pass through unseduced by the rebellious, experimental allure of being a Lesbian Until Graduation (an experiment that has the built-in clause of cashing out on graduation day to make a prodigal's return to the Patriarchy, marry well, and become, perhaps, a soccer mom). Do college women really sit around fretting over the "unresolved" questions regarding lesbians, "former" lesbians (the mind reels: were they ever lesbians? are they sell-outs to privilege [and this is what? women who prefer women but don't want to lose their trust funds? Do we want these lesbians]? lesbians who fell in love with men?), and women-loving women who abandon "lesbian" for "queer" because lesbian connotes something too political, not political enough, or the wrong kind of political? Have the discourses and investments surrounding same-sex desire among women become so intractable and balkanized that this question deserves this ridiculous paragraph? Or is this another example of a bewildered journalist (Paul Vitello--probably not a lesbian, though potentially transgendered ß LOL!) groping his way through a story he doesn't understand and to which he has no real connection. Let's watch as he cements his confused example of the anxiety among lesbians (former lesbians?) regarding the disconcertingly fluid domain of lesbian identity (or self-naming at any rate) as the cornerstone of his story. Remember, the last paragraph was about questions "in private conversations and in public forums like women's colleges...about how to frame the relationship among lesbians," former, and queer.

"There is a general uneasiness about this whole thing, like 'What are we losing here?' " said Diane Anderson-Minshall, the executive editor of Curve, a lesbian magazine. The issue stirs old insecurities about women being "not good enough,'' she added.

I assume Ms Anderson-Minshall is talking about lesbians (former lesbians?) transitioning to the male sex, but there is so much going on in this paragraph ("What are we losing here" becomes linked somehow to "old insecurities about women being 'not good enough.'" Huh?) and the prior one that the logic goes on vacation. What could we be losing, I wonder? Are we losing members in the lesbian ranks? Losing ground to the Patriarchy? Losing at lesbian public relations? I can't tell. Now I really love this next part.

Koen Baum, a family therapist in San Francisco who is a transgendered man, said the anxiety some lesbians feel has complicated roots. Some, he said, believe that women who "pass" as men are in some ways embracing male privileges.

Realizing that single line quotes from a lesbian academic and magazine editor might not present a balanced account of the problem (whatever this problem is), our intrepid reporter interviews real live F2M former lesbians for the transgendered view. Sure, I imagine "some" lesbians do imagine transitioning as a way of entering the comfy gentlemen's club of the Patriarchy. I wonder what other lesbians think? Left entirely behind is the history of women—and not all of them lesbians—dressing and passing as men on the frontier and elsewhere as a matter of survival, not as a bid for the luxury of hegemony. Just as not all lesbians are historians of women's history, not all lesbians are politicized, or politicized in the way Vitello and his sources suggest. I bet there are one or two dykes out there who actually know a thing or two about transitioning, who understand the difference between a lesbian and her struggle with male privilege and a person who feels he is a man in a woman's body, and therefore—if we have to invoke essentialisms—was essentially never a lesbian in the first place, but was, and this is important, a fellow traveller. We return to the article, which makes another dazzling logical leap.

Ben A. Barres, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford and a transgendered man, recently provided fodder for that view in an article in Nature and an interview with The New York Times. "It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants," he told The Times.

And this is why lesbians become transgendered men? The absurdity of this string of quotes makes the mind boggle and reel. Is this really all Mr. Barres had to say on the subject? Whom am I to believe in this puppet show of pulled quotes: the disgruntled lesbian betrayed by transitioning or the transgendered man who admits, what everyone already knows, that men have an easier time in the world, get more grants, receive higher salaries, etc etc? Oh, wait, these two puppets are saying the same thing. Maybe it's because they share the same puppet master. And now, the dark heart of this piece on transgendered men and the lesbians who no longer love them.

The idea of male privilege was also part of "The L Word" plot: When Max learns he is to be offered a job that he was rejected for as Moira, he promises that he will refuse it and tell off the would-be boss, but he later decides to take the job and say nothing.

Yes, "The L Word" and the awful specter of the sell-out lesbian, abandoning her principled stance against Patriarchy and its bias against women, their talents, bodies, lives, and value, for the undeserved advantage of maleness. It is the lesbian version of the self-hating nightmare Mart Crowley described so well in "Boys in the Band" when a character admits he would become straight and give up everything he is and enjoys, if he could do it with a wish. Gay activism was formulated against the straights; lesbian activism is always a feminism. And I, at least, can't help wondering if this reductive crystallization of lesbian mistrust toward F2Ms as seen on the high-gloss, fantasy-lesbian, soap opera called "The L Word" is the actual reason behind this article. All of the logic that Vitello's exposé sustains gestures back to this plot—and it seems like a plot in more ways than one—on a TV entertainment.

Mr. Baum said the anxiety also stems from fear over the loss of an ally in the struggle against sexism. "The question in the minds of many lesbian women is, 'Is it still going to be you and me against sexism, you and me against the world?'" he said.

Another thing that strikes me as loaded here is how the stand out expert lesbian reactions to the supposed problem describe anxiety, confusion, uneasiness, and loss, whereas it is left to two transgendered male voices to interpret, the otherwise incoherent, lesbian collective unconscious. Despite a couple nods toward reasonable and accepting lesbian voices, the overall impression of lesbians in this piece, regarding both themselves, and the bogeyman they've allegedly made of F2Ms, is one of hysteria. In his cursory exploration of what is undoubtedly a very interesting and very complex phenomenon (I still question its pervasiveness), Vitello's bedtime story of events even manages to pull double duty by acknowledging that men have an advantage in our society and then re-casting the feminist (read here: lesbian, since they appear to be the only feminists left) critique of male privilege in the familiar stereotype of overreaction. Are the women quoted in this piece ruing the day they answered the phone to talk to this reporter?

There are also practical questions: What place should a transgendered man have in women's spaces such as bathhouses, charter cruises, music festivals and, more tricky still, at women's colleges, where some "transmen" taking testosterone are reportedly playing on school sports teams?

Um, if an F2M guy is far enough along in his transition, from what little I know, and as that old saw common sense would dictate, he probably wouldn't want to use women's spaces. I mean, isn't that really the goal, to be able to use the men's toilet without seeming out of place? The corollary that logically follows, or perhaps precedes: if you want to be a man, leaving behind the spaces protected for women is precisely the point. A little sensitivity, patience, and reason can manage these unimaginative "practical" questions that truly are an index of the cultural resistance to the existence of transgendered people in the first place. This rationale is akin to the current mealy-mouthed hand-wringing about gay marriage opening the doors for polygamy, bestiality, and other alarming, better-keep-the-kids-inside horrors. Such reactions remain depressingly unsurprising in a culture that long ago consecrated, concealed, and contained the rank fact of sex in holy matrimony, the miracle of childbirth, the family, and motherhood. Heterosexuality doesn't properly have a name, because it is normal, so it is left to the named sexualities to raise the unseemly odor of coupled bodies and the body itself and that, even in the post-Madonna age, never fail to provoke the most demure, nose-holding, bourgeois hypocrisy. Lastly, and I have to comment on this: whenever "reportedly" pops up in a sentence regarding something as preposterous as the epidemic and insoluble dilemma of testosterone-enhanced "transmen" playing on women’s sports teams, I can't help feeling a little skeptical. Did someone start taking her testosterone in mid-season or something? Call the police! Moreover, in this case, the women’s field hockey coach who is unable to reasonably clarify why transitioning men are ineligible to play on the team should be fired.

Laura Cucullu, a freelance editor and recent graduate of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., phrased the question this way: "When do we kick you out? When you change your name to Bob? When you start taking hormones? When you grow a mustache? When you have a double mastectomy?"

When you cut your hair short, stop wearing make-up, and put on pants? Hey, I have an idea, why don't we ask the people in transition what they think? Gee, that might afford a novel take on the issue, I mean, instead of all these speculations from the sidelines. My question still stands, at what point does a transitioning man no longer want to attend a girls school? If we want to know when a man is no longer a woman, it might be best to talk to the person in question. But did our intrepid reporter think to ask these people this question? No. And by the way, who is Laura Cucullu, and why do I give a fuck about her opinions and her fretting over "kicking" anybody out of school, or the sisterhood, or humanity?

These questions do, however, raise another question: perhaps some transgendered men are reticent about giving up the friends, lovers, and safe female-spaces they’ve been in for so long. This strikes me as understandable, but not always unmanageable. I can’t help thinking that there are all kinds of conversations available between people, college administrators, friends, and lovers that include the transition and its social effects. No one gets to have it both ways. At some point the woman who wants to be a man has to accept that social role, but it is up to himself and the women and institutions of his recent past to accept the difficulty of the transition. A reasonable conversation must take place, and if the case of a transitioning woman in a women’s college takes place long before graduation—and I wonder how often this problem arises—this conversation must allow the possibility of the transitioning man finishing at a different institution, because of the mandate of the women’s college to graduate women. It should not a question of “kicking” anyone out, but a question of the transitioning man and what will allow this transition to occur with the least prejudice. Only the transgendered person can answer this question. And I wonder at any rate, should the burden of comfort not reside with the institution that has accepted this person for the brief period of education? And with this question, we return to the question of the damage inflicted upon the non-transgendered, the "normal," which is the message of this article. Those who worry about their sexed bodies drop away before the needs of those who have never thought such a thing. As always. And yet, this discussion about the sexed body seems to not occur in some places according to the article at hand.

The fact that there is no apparent parallel imbroglio in the gay community toward men who become women is a subject of some speculation.

There's an "imbroglio" in the lesbian community? Is there more evidence outside of the anecdotal evidence, I mean serious investigative reporting, of this article (and freakin’ “The L Word”)? And did the author call the editors of "Genre" and "The Advocate" to learn the self-evident gay take on trannies? I'll tell you, anecdotally, what I have noticed about the way gay men view the transgendered: they see them from afar as somewhat spooky freaks. I suspect that lesbians who don't go to all-women colleges and/or who don't go to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival probably hold a similar view when they think about it, which is probably almost never, just like most of the people in the world. Furthermore, I know lesbians in New York who have known all kinds of transgendered people, and I don't think it ever occurred to them that transitioning was a betrayal of lesbianism, feminism, or womanhood, or a joyous leap into male privilege. I wonder again how much the presence of the academy and youth has to do with some of the statements in this piece. Except for the editrix of “Curve” (have anyone heard of this publication?) the other negative opinions came from, or were in reference to, women’s colleges and academic theorists. Is the presence in these places of women transitioning into men more disruptive and confusing than elsewhere given the climate of idealism and that exciting first blush of community and feminism? I am left with the nagging doubt of why the author didn’t pursue the real world basis of “The L Word” plotline. Now, that would be interesting.

Despite the tangled set of issues involved, the survival rate of lesbian couples seems higher than among gay couples when one partner changes gender, advocates say.

Oh, I see. But before we can allow that statistic to sink in and perhaps look like the success of feminism and its take on gender and identity, let’s go directly to a relationship that didn’t make it.

[...]

Other couples, like the former Sharon Caya and Natasha, found the transition much rougher. Sharon’s decision to become Shane coincided with Natasha becoming pregnant, having conceived with donor sperm. “When the baby came along, I wanted to become myself,” Mr. Caya said. “I wanted the baby to know me as I truly am.”

[...]

For financial and practical reasons, Mr. Caya, the legal director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, decided to forgo “bottom surgery,” which could cost as much as $100,000 and would involve two or three operations to graft on an ersatz penis. [italics mine]

You didn’t really think we’d get through this piece without doubts about the authenticity of transgendered people’s, well, gender, surfacing, did you? And if “ersatz” didn’t drive the point home enough….

According to the standards of the European study, Shane Caya would not be counted as a transgendered person.

What is this doing here and what purpose does it serve? A paragraph like this is what drives me crazy about journalistic feature writing: it purports to present facts, but how does this do anything but support the (probably unexamined) bias of the writer and reinforce the ignorant received “understanding” of transgendered people as permenantly broken, freakish, and unnatural?

Natasha, a financial manager in San Francisco, still cries when describing Sharon’s decision to become male.

Sigh. Transitioning is just bad for everyone. Damn those selfish transgendered people!

“You’re in love with a person, but there is something about gender that is so central to identity it can be overwhelming if the person changes,” she said.

Yes, central to your conception of their identity. The question is what do you love when you love someone? Or maybe, what is love? I’m not trying to be harsh here, and I do sympathize with how overwhelming and upsetting this experience can be, or is, but it’s the way the problem is phrased here that bugs me. I imagine that Natasha said lots of things that never made it into the story, but this article repeatedly frames transgendered people as this problem, even as a trauma, to loved ones, partners, Feminist values, even Lesbianism itself. Yes, gender is central to identity…in the transgendered person, whose voice is absent in this place. “I decided I couldn’t be in a romantic relationship with a man,” Natasha says—which is fair enough—but that underlines her desire and its nature vis a vis her object, not the identity of the object in question, which in love is always the problem and the answer to the problem. Do we love the person as they are or the person we thought they were or would like them to be? And, by the way, is the “survival” rate (which immediately invokes danger and death) of cross-gendered lesbian relationships a testament to the power and success of lesbian-feminism in overcoming the prejudice against certain kinds of bodies? And to ask a very different question, what is the survival rate of cross-gendered gay male relationships? I bet it’s not too damn high. Sure, drag queens are fun, but if your man wants to be a woman, watch out, girl!

[...]

And when Mr. Caya attended a lesbian organization’s lunch recently, he recalled, he was welcomed by a woman who said she was “pleased to see a man supporting us lesbians.” His reply, he said, was quick and to the point:

“Of course I support lesbians,” he said. “I used to be one.”

This is a sweet way to end the piece, but it fails to resolve the troubling ambiguities surrounding the alleged troubling ambiguity of F2Ms in the lesbian mind that the author has done so much work to expose, confuse, and under-explain. This ersatz peace belies what even the most cursory deconstruction of the article reveals: a series of cultural categories in ideological conflict with one another with ignorance of one another being the common theme. Please, New York Times, do a follow-up by someone truly plugged into both the lesbian and F2M worlds instead of a straight, male feature writer from your Long Island beat stumbling with bemused surprise through places he knows nothing about. I have to go to watch “The L Word” now to see what fascinating lesbian feature will be in the paper next.

So, where does this leave us? I began this piece with the spectacle of a straight man becoming a lesbian. One of the things this article does not, cannot, address is the reality of heterosexually-identified people transitioning to the other sex. What has been taken by some lesbians, and this article, as a specifically lesbian problem, turns out to be a different animal. Yes, any situation with a transgendered person often involves confusion because it confronts troubling questions of our own gendered bodies; our fears about who other people are; our dependence upon gender and sex and self-evident, unchanging categories; and our need for simple, clear distinctions about, well, about everything. I had a great education in gender trouble, and this article made me confront the fact that not even the lesbian mainstream, certainly not the urban gay world, has the same take on these issues that I have. Twelve years after I learned about and thought about these questions, during a time in which I hoped the politicized parts of the LGBT community had resolved or at least tackled the questions of gender and sex and discovered or, let’s say, invented a resistance, or at least an ironic stance, to the essential positions and categories that structure and plague us all, through this article I have discovered at least two things: that there are lesbians that still cling to an uninterrogated sense of the feminine and the transgendered and that there are other lesbians who see the basic struggle as one of self-identification and respect for anyone in a rejected position. I had hoped that Feminism, which is the most underrated and most powerful critique of the world as it has been and continues to be, would allow lesbians a space to accept the transgendered and to re-understand gender itself. This assumption was a mistaken one to make wholesale. Simple answers always receive the widest reception and the mission of third wave Feminism has clearly failed and, as a most wonderful revelation, has died fallow for the majority. I don’t expect anything from gay men, they betrayed their political efficacy a long ago for any entry into the larger imaginary either through steroids, television, or marriage, and HRC is its most awful corporate-activist emanation. But the group that has held on so steadfastedly to a sense of the political, the lesbian, if this article is to be believed at all, is a travesty of the essential. Womanliness becomes the repository of self, of politics. I blame lesbians nothing for the misogyny of gay men, and so lesbian impatience must be understood, but any dyke who rejects the transgendered merely on ideological grounds pulls her into the same absurd arena as the Bush administration: if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists. In fact, not being in Bush’s binary logic allows a whole world of possibility, not just an either-or formulation. What is most dismaying about this article is that it airs the dirty laundry of the LGBT to those who have no idea what the issues at hand might actually be. What is that dirty laundry? That “we"--and who are we anyway (do you know?)--that we don’t support each other. And how are we supposed to get anywhere with that?

7 September 2006
An Update of Sorts
Dan Savage weighed in on our Times piece in his column recently--it's fun... in his way. What interested me the most is that he brings up the "fluidity" of sexualilty, particularly feminine sexual identity, and sets it against what Savage sees as the marked stability of masculine identity. As I'm sure you recall (<-- lol!), fluid sexual identity was a major tenet of Queer Theory back in the day--"queer" was always intended as a rigorous interrogation of and resistance to sexual categories, as such. It is (or was) an interesting side-step on the issue, but the usefulness of the critique was neutralized long ago. Queer sought to jostle thought and find creative ways of escaping or even parodying the categories always imposed on the individual from the outside--the feeble remnant of this bold position resides in the image of young women calling themselves "gender-queer" so as not to have to identify as lesbian. Far from an informed affirmation of the queer, this depoliticized gesture grapples not at all with the questions of gender and sexuality. But is sexual identity fluid? Even back in 1993, I wasn't sure. Queer theory offered examples of kids who engage in boy-boy sex play as children but emerge into adulthood as the very definition of hetero maleness, but I could not dismiss the nagging fact that my own history did not describe this sexual fluidity at all--I had always been attracted to men. For Dan Savage the changeable nature of sexual attraction appears clearest in females: "A guy that's sucking cock at 18 will be still be sucking cock at 28, 38, and 108--but it seems that a woman can be eating pussy at 18, sucking cock at 28, and having her cock sucked at 38." The facile cleverness of this comment is especially disappointing after he had admitted a complexity to gender and transgender identity earlier in the piece. Transmen have an "M" on their ID now, Savage notes, they are legally male, penis or no penis. In addition to the legal status of the F2M, he is aware that former lesbian transmen feel they were always male on the inside and never "really" lesbian or even female, so his parting shot where he says a woman can end up "having her cock sucked at 38," only muddles the much of what he'd tried to explain. This is a logical quibble--and I know it's useless to hold advice "columnists" to a standard of clarity at the expense of a hammy and inaccurate bon mot (standards of writing, clarity, and reason loom near in the Times piece as well)--but his logic got me thinking because it returned to the easy comfort and assumed self-evidence of sexual identity, a self-evidence that he put into question by the felt status and legal status of the F2M.

Two questions. 1) Is a woman's performance of cunnilingis or fellatio at any age a safe marker of her sexual identity? 2) Is a woman who identifies as a lesbian at 18, but doesn't at 28 a lesbian? For that matter what is a lesbian? Common sense has always held that sexual identity is not just unchanging, it is intrinsic; it is your identity. This self-evident, self-identical, foundational status of sexual identity is what makes issues like gay marriage so intractable: though the anti-gay marriage laws stipulate the physical sex of the participants, it is the inherently perverse--i.e. immoral, unnatual or evil--quality of the homosexual person that is the problem (hence the instant logical leap to bestiality and other abominations). But, leaving aside the question of identity itself for a moment, what if all these names for various identities were only that: names? The point, in cultural studies (and queer theory), of describing the identities as "categories" was to issue a direct challenge to the oppressive history and assumptions behind the discourse of identity. So, to look at the 18-year-old, pussy-eating woman, perhaps the answer is as obvious as to say that she simply called herself a lesbian, and that she was mistaken. To put a finer point on it, the "former-lesbian" has just changed the name under which she traveled, not her identity; whereas the F2M transexual is heeding his inner-most sense of who he is, and was therefore, in his mind, never a lesbian. These are not examples of the same thing or even items on the same continuum--there is no "fluidity" to be found here, unless you count the possibility of changing one's mind.

I think the category of the Lesbian is a deeply fraught, contested, and dismissed one within the culture at large. The stereostypes of lesbians seem brutally oversimplified and sexualized, especially when compared to the media images of gay men. The confusion is only propounded, particularly in academic settings, where lesbianism as a "lifestyle," community, ideology, or politics might be unusually co-optable by the confused, the adrift, or the vicariously rebellious. It could be that the large, welcoming, feminist tent may very well admit some women who, after a while, realize they are not congenial toward its expectations and implications, and leave. This sort of thing doesn't happen to gay men because this form of articulated lesbianism is a Feminism; it is a politics, it is a stance. There are some women who decide to no longer identify as lesbian but who still call themselves feminists, and there are others who reject lesbianism (and its politics) as a larky, juvenile phase, and cast off feminism with it. Does this constitute an emptying out of the lesbian category, or simply a clarification of it? And if we look at the base fact of visibility, any woman-loving-woman relationship, even when called "gender-queer," still moves culturally under the sign of lesbianism. And so in the sense that queer theory did not alter the terms of the larger cultural discourse on identity, it can be termed a failure.

But we still wonder, does sexual identity exist, and if it does, in what sense is it fluid? This is a loaded question, of course, because all the terms that name sexual identity are human designations, indeed the very notion of sexual identity--or identity itself--is an assumption, or at worst a psycho-medical mechanism for social control. Before the homosexual was "invented" in 1896 (as a descriptive term), according to Foucault's narrative, there were acts. The primal scene of sexual identity is the act of sodomy, which could be anything from anal sex to fellatio to bestiality--a grab-bag of "unnatural" or "abnormal" sexual practices, in other words non-procreative--and sodomy was punishable as a crime; however, the act itself did not necessarily support an identity. The suspicion held towards an inherent sexual identity continued well into the twentieth century with terms such as "homosexual tendencies" and "practicing homosexual" preserving the notion that the problem involved acts and choices, that people choose deviance from the normal. "Tendencies" do not imply a "self" only an unfortunate pattern, but The Homosexual was a being with an unchanging essence. This concept was invented by a Hungarian human rights activist named Benkert as a reaction to the Prussian anti-sodomy laws of the day and as a defense for the men who suffered under that law. Benkert postulated that homosexuality was inborn and immutable and therefore the people who committed sodomy should not be punished as criminals--this is a novel approach to the law, which concerned itself with acts and to which identities were invisible. [An aside: one has to wonder how the law came about; did it seek to single out a particular kind of undesireable man who committed sodomy with regularity? It is unclear if the penal code was aimed specifically at men we would now stereotype as gay or at certain classes (working classes), certain urban locations (like waterfronts), or professions (like sailors)]. The category of sodomy creates the category of the Homosexual.

Benkert later used this template to establish other sexualities including, heterosexuality; and so, counter-intuitively, it can be said that The Homosexual is the father of the Heterosexual. It shouldn't be surprising that this is the case since, as I said before, the deviant is always named first as a way to define "normal" by giving an example of what "normal" is not. On the other hand, if sexuality is inherent and unchanging, there must be a name for normal sexuality, and thus we have heterosexuality. The concept of sexuality as identity and as in-born became widespread through sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, and it is clealry still with us. Then came Freud, who rejected the idea that sexual identity was genetic and suggested that sexuality has nothing to do with the bodily sex of the individual, but is produced in each person as part of her or his development. Psychoanalysis helped to enshrine sexuality as identity in the cultural imagination, but alas in the US his American followers declared homosexuality a mental illness (in contradiction to Freud's teaching) and used their authority to maintain a repressive climate against gay men and lesbians in America for most of the last century. In a tragicomic sleight-of-hand, American psychoanalysts privileged sexuality as the core of identity, yet rejected the paradigmatic example, homosexuality, as an illness.

Interestingly, all of the features from the strange history of The Homosexual are evident today: sodomy laws; the connection to illness, the unnatural, and the perverse; the concept of choice; and the medical model of inborn sexuality. But is there any such thing as sexual identity? Is there any such thing as a lesbian? If we believe Freud, each person has a sexuality, it is not genetic but is uniquely derived from infantile experiences. This nuanced model has been lost in the public discussion of sexuality, which is framed entirely and exclusively by the sexual object choice of the individual, and sexuality and identity are much more complicated than that. For example in lacanian psychoanalysis, homosexuality can occur in any of the list of psychic structures that describe the subject--by itself, object choice, either "homo" or "hetero," is relatively unimportant in this psychoanalytic perspective. So, if the lesbian is, bewilderingly, an effect of the history of sodomy, can she be said to exist? I could say that no matter the source of it, the nominalism that founds the social, sexual, and political struggle of lesbianism in history is enough: the Lesbian exists because and when she says she does. The existence of the Lesbian is most important to the Lesbian. To the State, to the status quo, to tradition, to power, it is her non-existence that is of concern: these murky, ill-defined clusters of ideas, interests, and prejudices just want her to go away, and so except when she is made an example of, she is invisible to them. That's so heady and abstract, so I'll say it differently: the lesbian exists and always will, because there will always be women-loving-women in the world, who do not stop being that way at college graduation, who do not wake up one day and want to sleep with men instead of women, and who do not want to become men. It's that simple and that complex. And this isn't because--or not just because--they really like pussy. Yes, the Lesbian is alive and well, right here in River City.

I Read Sometimes: The Omnivore's Dilemma

2006-08-24T15:39:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder why American are so fat? Have you looked at the ingredients on processed foods and noticed that "high fructose corn syrup" (HFCS) seems to be in everything? Have you ever passed a massive cattle farm where thousands of cows stand on a mountain of shit and wondered why there is no grass for them to eat? Well, wonder no longer! Michael Pollan, journalism professor, contributing writer for the NYT, and confessed omnivore has a newish book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, that everyone--and that means YOU, my reader--should devour. The first section on corn and the juggernaut of industrial farming alone should be required reading for every American. This book is a page-turner, a thriller really, about the places from which the food on our tables and in our bellies comes, how it gets there, and what happens to it in between. Buy it or check it out of the library, and write your Congressperson after your outrage settles into a slow boil.

And yes, if you want to know more, here's a nice review from the New York Times that surprisingly claims Pollan doesn't go far enough.

I Go to Amusement Parks Sometimes: Hurricane Hell

2006-08-03T23:23:00.000-04:00

As much as I loathe "Dear Kitty"-style, personal-experiencey entries on this "'blog," from time to time one has an experience that demands recording. This is one of those times.

A long time ago, yesterday, my boyfriend, Jeph; his sister, Kerry; her daughter, Phoebie; our pal, Kikkoman; and I; went to Six Flags! Hurricane Harbor, the sister water park of Six Flags! Great Adventure, in gorgeous suburban Jackson, New Jersey, and, well, it just might be the most perfect experience of Hell that I will ever have in this mortal coil.

We thought leaving by ten a.m. would be early enough. We were wrong. We got there just before noon and I knew it was all going straight to fuck when we had to walk through a metal detector. What the hell is that all about?

This is an experience you will never have.

Oh wait, I'm leaving out the THREE lines that were open for the many people trying to enter the park. We got into one of these very long lines, which became considerably longer as we waited in the hot sun of mid-heat-wave Summer 2006, as the idiots in front of us did some mysterious transaction that took us less than a quarter of the time when we finally arrived at the window. Is this your experience too? I mean, do you notice that any line you're in, from the bank, to the ATM, to the grocery store, the MTA machine, the train ticket line, or the movie ticket line, it seems like everyone in front of you takes years to make their transaction? What the fuck is this about? It either means that everyone who reads this and sympathizes with this experience is above average intelligence, and that therefore the people in charge of making lines move at an agreeable rate have failed miserably in their role of creating a mechanism that allows the average person to do business efficiently; or that the people in charge of this mechanism are below even average intelligence; or that these masterminds are inescapably in the wrong job; or that there's another factor involved that I haven't foreseen, I dunno, maybe that the people making these decisions are incapable of designing the mechanism correctly for people like them so that they can use it efficiently. Doesn't this sort of thinking just make you hate the world? I mean, SO much? So much.

Anyway, I passed my wallet and keys, which are on a vintage (as much as I hate to say it) Raymond Dragon keychain (only the keys were on this chain), through the detector which made nary a noise, which is to say it made no noise in the least. Figuring I was all good, I walked through and retrieved my wallet and keys, and the guy on the other side picked up the chain for examination. "They're just keys," I said. But he looked at the chain strangely and called the other metal detector guy over to take a gander. Now, I have been with this chain through countless post-9/11 airport security checks in many airports in many states--even nations--and never receieved a glance at it, and I muttered, "Oh, come ON!" I'm just saying, if airports aren't worried about this as a serious danger, what kind of ghetto experience am I in for when my keychain is being considered a possible weapon at a water park, when airports the world over haven't even noticed it? I know it's NEW JERSEY and all (and I'm from fucking New Jersey), but I was honestly bewildered, as a thirty-eight-year-old, gay man, that the chain on which I've carried my keys for eight years without comment, were now being scrutinized as if I'd walked into this family-oriented water park with a fucking pistol.

So, they let me through, and we're all quite hot and cranky at this point because we waited in an extremely long line to get into a refreshing water park on one of the hottest days of the year to find a very badly-marked amusement park. Where are the lockers? There have to be lockers in a water park--in which, in other water parks, I have only dealt with quarter lockers--no, in this park, you have to wait in, yet another, extremely long line, to BUY a locker. Yes for seventeen to twenty-two dollars you can buy lockers of two different sizes, in which you can keep the crap you don't want to get wet. Then after baking in the hot sun for twenty minutes to buy this locker, the under-paid staff person will direct you in the wrong direction to the locker you have purchased, which, no-thanks to the vague signage, you eventually find, and discover the 1.5 foot-wide space allowing access to your locker is full of families accessing their lockers because the lockers have been released in numeric order. Okay.

Let's say you put your crap in the locker. Then you have to pick your way across dry, foot-scorching pavement, to the nearest wet attraction, which, after an interminable, painful scamper, turns out to be the "wave" pool, which is teeming with New Jersey families and friends, and in which the waves have been turned off for some reason. Also, mind you, the pool is warm, as though it were filled with urine. It tastes salty to the tongue, but you are so happy to finally immerse yourself in something cooler and even wetter than the air that you don't care if the salinity is human-derived. You really don't. Seriously, when it's this hot you would bathe in a well of piss just to cool off. You know you would.

We were there, in this park, for at least five hours and we went on--not including the "wave" pool--three rides. We went in said pool at least three times, passing crowds of families supine on chairs or face-down in the pool, just to relieve ourselves, not of our urine, of which we had little in such a shade-free, hot-pavemented place, no, we went there because it was one of the few places in this "water" park where we didn't have to wait in line for an hour to enjoy the thrill of a ten-second cooling experience, on a slide. We estimated that in the five hours we spent there we had under a minute of actual water park fun. Three rides. THREE rides. It was as though someone had invented some new form of torture.

Me, around 2 pm, at Six Flags! Hurricane Harbor.

I won't even go into our attempt at "lunch," which was an inedible assortment of "foods" served by people who didn't know the menu posted over their heads, where a third of the fried crap that was promised was unavailable, and when, after twenty-minutes of getting said "food," and actually paying (an enormous amount) for it, the cashier assured us that the park was terribly run. No, I won't even start to tell you about that.

We went on our third ride after that. And after that yet another dip in the "wave" pool.

I will say one thing about this experience, and to tell you that story I have to tell you this one: I had a boyfriend in 1996 who went, without me, to Six Flags! Great Adventure, and had a terrible time. Sure, the rollercoasters were awful fun, but the people were just so, well, they were just so ugly. He wasn't trying to be mean, but the other people there were really fat and really, just, ugly. He and his friends, which included two lesbians, dubbed the park "Great Ugliness."

Now, I have always given him great shit for this, for the last ten years, because I love diversity, and I moved to New York to be in the World instead of the World of the Midwest, and though New York has let me down in the last decade by its homogenization, I realized, seeing the people of the tri-state area who come to Six Flags! Hurricane Harbor, that he's right. When you look at these people with their clothes off, the part of you that is used to seeing relatively trim New Yorkers yearns to see, relatively trim New Yorkers. I'm not talking model-trim, emmaciated people, or zero-fat faggots, or bodybuilders, I'm saying the kinda FAT people who exist in the rest of this nation. I'm saying, these people look better in clothes. I didn't dislike them for this, or think they were ugly, but I did find myself unconsciously searching for someone outside our little group whom I found attractive. It wasn't easy.

There was this one guy, whom Kikkoman and I dubbed the "Magical Christian" because he was this very sexy, twenty-one or slightly less, hottie in the "wave" pool, who was part of the most diverse group in the park: everyone was of a different shape, ethnicity, age, sex, or body-type, and they were all playing together. They were either a summer camp or church group, and the Magical Christian, who was beefy and cute and sported a silver cross around his neck, allowed kids of all sexes, shapes, sizes, and colors to jump up and hang off him, and who took it all with a smile and a game attitude, and whom I first spotted in a conga line, dancing to the piped-in crap music played in the pool--in the most height-uneven, race-and sex-uneven conga I have ever seen--having fun, unselfconsciously being generous, and whom, I think, himself, became the center of why this sort of place, as badly managed as it is, as awful as it is, can be a lovely place for someone--anyone--for kids or church groups or summer camps--to have a great time. The Magical Christian, in addition to the wonderful people I was with, turned a nightmare into something sorta sweet.

All the same, if you're still reading, I feel nonplussed as to how to tell you whether you should try this place, except to say: NEVER go to Six Flags! Hurricane Harbor. This is one of the worst experiences I have ever had. There are better water parks to go to, better places to waste your money, to take your church groups, your summer campers, or yourself.

We returned to New York and I said, " You know what? I can't stand the fags, but the straights are so much worse. After a day like today, I realize I would much rather live in a world of gay men than the straight world."

And Kikkoman said, "Man, I come back to New York, and I see the people here, and even if they are assholes, they at least take care of themselves and aren't crazy fat like the rest of the U.S. I thank Satan we live here."

I wish it were otherwise, but I do too. (Try to tease that "it" apart.)

And it's not because of the Satan part.

I See Movies Sometimes: The Devil Wears Prada

2006-07-27T12:01:00.000-04:00

Hathaway, Streep, and the always-hot Tucci (even when playing an effete fashionista).
Plus check out that FAB plaid suit.

Why add my voice to so many others regarding this trifling film? Two words: Meryl and Streep. She makes a meal out of the Anna Wintour-inspired Miranda Priestly and perhaps invents a way of chewing scenery through understatement. Honest. Directors have finally figured out that she's a terrific comedic actor, and "Devil" gives her plenty of time to show off by not showing off. The scene where she quietly dresses Anne Hathaway down by detailing the fashion history behind the color of Hathaway's shitty bargain basement sweater is worth the price of admission all by itself. And now on to destroy the rest of the film.

The above-mentioned scene is the keystone to why the film ultimately doesn't work because it economically reveals what the film could have been but is not: well-written and featuring a fully-realized protagonist. Anne Hathaway fails utterly to project the necessary intelligence required for this character. That's the acting failure. The above scene also shows the writing failure (which is expected, mind you, since this is a Hollywood movie), because if the Hathaway character were truly as smart as the script tells us ad nauseum, then Streep's explication of the genealogy of the color of Hathaway's sweater would make sense to her and this scene would be her "Ah-ha" moment. It is not. Rather it is the "Ah-ha" moment for the audience as we watch the film dispose of itself so neatly, because if the quality of the writing in this scene, or I should say in Streep's monologue, were indicative of rather than in exception to the rest of the movie, we might have had something really cool. Instead, we get yet another workmanlike retread of a Cinderella story with a half-hearted feminist twist. The subplot involving Hathaway's friends and boyfriend is so pathetic and perfunctory that it's this side of unbelievable, and certainly on the other side of involving in any way. The film seems constantly unsure of what to do next--except when Streep or Stanley Tucci (as Streep's right-hand man cum tart fairy godmother to Hathaway) are on screen--or even of who the Hathaway character is. It does not have a consistent opinion of the value of fashion, the value of Hathaway's experience under Streep, or even the value of Hathaway's independence. This is the kind of shitty "writing" that occurs these days--an enterprise done by committee, product placement, moronic producers, and test audiences. In other words it's less writing than a projection of a hive mind.

Anyway, it's nice to see Streep doing her thing, even if it is often over a cardboard cup emblazoned with a STARBUCKS logo, when such a character would never drink that coffee and certainly would not drink it out of a cardboard cup. And that image represents the coalescence--perhaps the apotheosis, perhaps an obsolescence--of how narrative, character, and art will always experience the wobble introduced by the powerful gravitational field of economics. Quel reprise, Hollywood.

A repost of a repost of a riposte: BigMuscle.com 3

2006-07-22T12:11:00.000-04:00

Please don't read this.

A long while ago, I posted two installment about BigMuscle.com--this is the third in a long series of such online vomitus, which began as a sort of running critique of BigMuscle on BigMuscle. Needless to say, most people on that site didn't give a damn about what I was saying, but I got some nice comments on those posts from time to time, nonetheless. To get the proper effect, you should really read the first ones, but hey, this is the Internet, and I sure can't make you read anything you don't want to read.

Don't read the FIRST and SECOND posts.

16 April 2003

One way we can engage with the question of who we are is to think about our relations to another, to the other, if you like. And again, we might return to the question of jockeying for the other's gaze, for his glance, his stare, or his appraisal--however one may read that eye on one's body. But beneath this notion, like the submerged frozen mountain under the iceberg's salient tip, there is another question, a literal question in one sense, in that what we are asking, what we are always asking in our dancing before this other eye, in our dialogues and questions, in our choice of clothing, haircut, gym, and workout schedule, all which always have to do with love, and that question of love is formulated every time, is implicit in all our convoluted gestures, words, and sighs: What do you want from me?

This question, and the ways we have attempted its answering, the ways we imagine it being answered, has everything to do with who we think we are and who we want others to think we are and who we want to think we are--which, of course, are never the same thing no matter how much overlap occurs among the three. But we do all this work because we imagine it is what the other wants, what the other wants from us, what we need to do, for example, to get all those eyes turned in our virtual direction, all those eyes listed in a Who Likes Me list that are saying, Yes. This much, here, this is what I want from you. And all along, no matter the satisfying frisson of that growing number of eyes rising like some thermometer measuring our heat, we never know what that thing is that has hooked the eye of the gaze. We never know what the other really wants. We always disappoint and are always disappointed.

Don't read the FIRST and SECOND posts.

Fun With Shakespeare's Sonnets! Sonnet 94

2006-07-11T01:06:00.000-04:00

This is the second in a series that closely reads several of Bill's sonnet cycle. The first is over here. Apologies to Helen Vendler, to whom I owe most of what is good in here.

Sonnet 94

They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none, Q1
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovéd, cold, and to temptation slow—
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces, Q2
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet, Q3
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flow’r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their own deeds; C
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

What is going on in this strange sonnet to the young man?. First of all, this is a rare example in the cycle of an entirely impersonal sonnet—there is no mention of “I,” “you,” “we,” “our,” or the rival poets. There is a sense that pronouns are being studiously avoided and a cautious strategy employed. In Q1 and Q2, we only have an enigmatic description of some sort of, it seems, exemplary person; but what sort of person is this who could do harm, who exercises that power over someone, or someones, yet never does so? What does it mean to move others—is it his beauty that gives him this second power? But the third line describes something more peculiar in that they that have this power are like “stone” and in the fourth line are described as “cold.” Being stone-like and cold aren’t usually positive qualities; moreover, these people are “slow” to temptation, not immune to it. Q2 gives the screw another turn with the not-quite-so-logically derived revelation that they “rightly” are in the good graces of god, or heaven, and are the conservers or caretakers of nature’s bounty, only to describe another odd quality: they are in complete control of how they appear, of their emotions, their faces; yet, others who may be excellent themselves, do not own that excellence as a lord, but only mind it, as a butler or steward would.

Now, as if this weren’t weird enough, in Q3, the speaker suddenly, bafflingly, changes gears altogether, and considers the image of a flower, which suggests that something about the argument in the first eight lines may be intractable or insoluble. Perhaps this complex depiction of the social realm and this “they” that live in it has become confused even for the speaker, and so he revels in the fantasy that the young man (we assume) is a flower, a thing to enjoy for its beauty, but that gives nothing back, since “to itself it only live and die,” no matter how sweet the summer may find it. The speaker clearly has mixed feelings about his subject, since his tenderness moves him to go from a portrait of a sort of person to a description of a flower. But we’ve already seen this back and forth in Q1 and Q2: are these powerful people good (they spare their power, are in favor with heaven, and responsible for nature), or are they bad somehow (they are deceptive in their appearance, cold, and unmoved by others)? The flower is also aloof, but it is free from the problem of doing something, instead, it “meets” with a base infection. It’s not the flower’s fault if it becomes infected—and here we return again to the discourse of medicine, sickness, disease, and infection that reappears constantly in the Sonnets. Furthermore, the event with the flower is a subjunctive one, an if/then statement of possibility and result, not present certainty: the flower in question isn’t infected, but if it should be, even a weed has more dignity. An ambiguity, a doubt, however, about the powerful person in Q1 and Q2 insinuates itself from the tension among the words “doing”/”showing,” “cold,” “unmoved,” and “lords and owners of their faces”: there is an implied discrepancy between appearance and action here. Similarly, while the delicacy of the flower quatrain shifts the register away from the stern social dimension, and while an innocent flower is said to have its infection thrust upon it unlike in the deeds-based moral space of human free will, the rapid degeneration demonstrated by “flow’r,” “base,” “infection” (line 11) “basest” (12), “sourest” (13), “fester,” “smell,” “worse,” and “weeds” (14) makes the qualification of “to temptation slow” (4) seem disbelieved even as it is uttered.

We must now look closely at the couplet (C), since it, and uniquely so among these sonnets, splits itself thematically as the sonnet itself does. The first couplet line resolves Q1 and Q2 (the description of the, until this point in the sonnet, irreproachable person) while the second half of the couplet does the same with Q3 (the innocent flower, now lily (a famous symbol of purity), that might meet with infection). Yet there is an overlap in that “sweet,” which has only been applied to the flower, now describes a thing that can do (i.e. a person), that has a will and the power of action (“deeds”), and therefore, the power to hurt. Also, superlatives appear for the first time in “sweetest” and “sourest,” and while the couplet at first appears to split its two lines into individual commentaries on the two sections of the poem, the superlatives join the couplet into a unit analogy: as sweetest turns sourest by deeds, so do lilies that fester smell worse than weeds (not festered lilies, but lilies that almost seem to have chosen to fester). We can only conclude that the unspecified, undone “shown” thing in line 2 has been done.

Historically, this sonnet was interpreted as a detached observation on human nature, but it is clearly, and in the context of the surrounding sonnets, a direct address to the young man, who has done something very wrong to the speaker—the power to hurt finds its object in the sonnet speaker himself. In this light, the sonnet is a demanding admonishment, offering an image of someone the young man could have been if he had chosen, and even offering the flower as an exemplary image of innocence and beauty, only to sabotage any praise the sonnet might have given by way of the many, tiny, intricate logical explosions within the sonnet structure that destroy all tribute in the way a building is brought down in demolition. So, on the surface, though the speaker seems to offer a moral description that could apply to anyone, he intends his message for only one person’s eyes. Yet, touchingly, the speaker appears unable to express his hurt or anger directly; he cannot even bring himself into the frame with “I” or the young man with “you”—intimacy seems dead in this sonnet. Instead, the speaker expresses his disappointment in generalities, and so a despairing impotence pervades the poem, and the true import only shimmers and shivers among the play of words and meanings, and defines itself in the backwards revising gaze of the couplet. We confirm the final sense of the poem’s meaning in sonnet 95, where the unnamed “deeds” of 94 erupt as “vices” and “sins,” and where “evil” resonates phonemically throughout, as though the frustration of being unable to say how the speaker truly feels in the poem in question has finally surged forth into 95.

That was so cool, don't you simply just have to read the first one? I won't be mad if you don't....

Superman. The Movie.

2006-06-27T13:15:00.000-04:00

Chris Reeve as Superman. What's not to love?

Origin Stories
It's funny. My re-interest in comics is almost neatly coinciding with the revival of the Superman movies (or we hope movies if Singer does a good job), which were the source of my first fascination with comics. As I've mentioned before in this silly online whatsis called a "'blog," Superman, The Movie, and by that I mean the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder/Gene Hackman/Mario Puzo et al. film of 1978, was a fairly powerful factor in my childhood. I am clearly not alone among gay men (and others) in this. Blogs are a-buzzin' with anticipation for Bryan Singer's Superman Returns--opening at the end of the month (and by the time I post this, has already opened)--and most of the excitement I've been reading has been fueled by a strong fondness if not downright love for the first two movies. I am such a painful geek about this stuff that when I saw the first preview for Superman Returns--a loving tribute to the initial cloud, sun, and sky trailer for the first Superman, complete with what sounded like a Brando voiceover, and snippets from the original, John Williams score--I actually got teary. And I'm not so easily moved. But it struck a chord for me, a very old one in an old place that hadn't been touched in a very long time, and that is sort of the reason I'm writing this little tribute to Superman and to some extent Superman II.

Clark parts his hair on the right.
Superman parts his hair on the left (with the spit curl).
You are seeing a rare moment where Clark turns into Supes
and his hair is ALL CLARK. And Chris Reeve is still so hot.
Tremble and wonder, people.

Superman, The Movie was the first film I saw multiple times--when it was on HBO at a friend's house, I made a point of making an excuse to go over and watch it. I remember leaving the theater after seeing this movie--and this was also a first--with a wonderful feeling of happiness and satisfaction. It was a kind of buzz that I went back for more than once, and thankfully, the film was re-released at least one or two times in those years before video. Studios used to do that sort of thing back then. It's how I saw Jason and the Argonauts (1963)--that deliciously empty but beautifully stop-motion animated Ray Harryhausen treat of a film--on the big screen after many viewings on television. I sometimes wonder how impoverished, in a way, the children of today are, paradoxically, by the explosion of media and TV channels. I grew up with ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a couple local channels in Toledo and South Jersey, and something about the limited options allowed for surprises on a Saturday afternoon, or on the late show, or even prime time. You could only see The Wizard of Oz, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Robe, Mad Monster Party, The Fury, or The Ten Commandments when they were on, usually once a year, and this was part of the act of viewing them. Contrary to popular opinion, love does not come from having everything you want. Frustration, to a certain degree, incites and sustains desire. Children want boundaries. They want to know how far they can go, so at some point they want an ending to how far that going is. Boundaries in childhood create identity, and yet we live in a strange American culture that is in some way limitless and on-demand for the child but also over-protective and paranoid. I can't imagine a worse situation for American kids. But I digress, as I often do. I didn't have to put up with that stuff. I had six channels, I skinned my knees, I looked at Eddie Brown's dad's porn in 7th grade, and I watched Superman every chance I got. And that last thing is what I am here to talk about today.

Secret Identities
There is a quality of sweetness about our childish obsessions, because, and not despite, the fact they were tinged with a green eroticism. There is no doubt whatever that part of the appeal of Superman for me was Chris Reeve, his muscles (especially because he was a skinny, but tall, shrimp of a man before he worked his ass off to get big for the role), his clumsiness and shyness, the sweet holding back he showed with Lois, his manliness, his politeness, his selflessness, and his vulnerability. There is no doubt that as with other hero figures in any boy's life, there was the unintelligible, ineffable difference between wanting to be him and being in love with him. For gay boys, a similar thing happens with the confusion about powerful women: Am I in love with Ann-Margret or do I want to be her?

Curious, isn't it, that gay men seem to be attracted to power of one kind or another: physical, sexual (as we've seen in some cases, but hopefully not often, political power). Yet for me, the appeal of Reeve's Superman was also the vulnerability, the sadness, the withholding, and of course, as has been written on extensively, the double identity. It is a double identity that one yearns to reveal--as Superman yearns to, and eventually does, reveal to Lois--to the people one is attracted to, or to one's parents, or to the world. But the specialness of that secret, its secretness, is always sexualized as the it grows closer to its revelation. It is a tease in the movie--and a self-tease in life, as you struggle to not tell your high school best buddy that you love him, of which it reminds, whether you know it consciously or not--when Clark starts to tell the dazed Lois, just after her interview with Superman, that he is Superman. In these movies, Clark telling Lois his secret is exactly telling her that he loves her. This little piece is what differentiates the Superman films from your garden variety romance films. Can gay men identify with the players in a straight movie romance? Of course they can and do. I do, and this is despite the repugnance I feel at having heterosexuality shoved down my throat by almost every fucking movie that Hollywood produces. Hollywood enshrines a straight love story in nearly every product it puts on the market, whether an action picture, a historical narrative, or, of course, a chick movie. In grad school, studying film theory, I learned this useful bit: it's called "the heterosexual embrace," and this occurs historically at the end of almost any film you can look at, but especially those in the Hollywood mold. Keep an eye out for it. Is the last or the second to last image of the movie an embrace or a kiss between two lovers, two would-be lovers, or two soon-to-be lovers of different sexes? It's as though it were a government directive. It's as though this were so ingrained that moviemakers don't notice they're doing it and movie watchers don't even see it as unusual. The trend is changing slowly, but this still goes on almost all the time. Now, let's ask, do straight audiences identify with either figure in a homosexual embrace in a film? If Brokeback Mountain is any example, the answer is starting to become yes, at least for some straight female members of the audience. As for the heterosexual embrace, neither of the first Superman movies ends with this. It is true that Superman/Clark kisses Lois near the end of both films, the first when she is dead, the second to make her forget his secret and their love affair; and those kisses seal the forbidden nature of their relationship. Whether the times have a-changed enough for gay kids nowadays, or even gay adults, not to feel that same ache is not for me to judge, but the bittersweet denial is what appeals here and, I believe, continues to appeal. To tell the person you love your secret is to tell him you love him, even if you don't tell him the second part. It hides just behind the teeth, this secret, when you are with the one that you love. Gay men and lesbians do not have a lock on this phenomenon, everyone has the experience at some point of wanting to tell the secret of their love to the person they love, with that fear of rejection attached. But for gay folks, queer folks, and bisexual folks there is this layer, this barrier, for much longer than only the most shy or the most different-seeming of the straight fold (I am not insensitive to the fact that heterosexual people can be too "fat" or too "ugly" or too "old"--whatever those sad, mean words are supposed to convey), where revealing one's secret identity and secret love will alter or end forever the relationship one treasures. Superman can take it back with a kiss, we can't.

This isn't the scene, but I love this pic.

Man of Steel|Silver Screen
What is all this about? Yes, the erotics of wanting to be like someone else are, if not clear, then acknowledged--and the proper term for this in psychoanalysis is, of course, identification. What's left is precisely something to be desired. I think there is an ethics attached to the image we desire and somehow desire to be like. I think it's usually easy to discern the difference between people who wanted to be like Superman and people who wanted to be like, to choose someone related to a very different kind of super-man, Ayn Rand (see Alan Greenspan, see Hillary Clinton) at some point in their formative years. Superman represents kindness, justice, and power that helps those in trouble or danger, and Superman implicitly sets an example. What would the world be like if more people acted like Superman instead of Ayn Rand? Yes, what would Superman do?

Behold: Ayn Rand!

We'll table that and all the other questions of power and responsibility that Rand evokes for a now, because this post is really about Superman as embodied in Superman, the Movie, and that means as Christopher Reeve. It is Reeve's depiction of the Man of Steel that captured my fascination--and while the man and the character have to be somehow separable, you can't have one without the other. It was Reeve as a handsome, sexy, slightly-dorky, truth-telling, puppy-dog, super-powered Boy Scout of Integrity that lit the fire inside; and a nine-year-old could do a lot worse for an example, for an exemplar. What I've realized as I've thought about this over the last few weeks is that there will always be some unconscious part of me, whether I want to or not, that's checks in with Superman, that draws some kind of character from there, because the earliest things we use to build who we are will always be the most powerful. And in this case, as terminally geeky as it sounds, I wouldn't have it any other way.

When is a post not a post?

2006-06-22T16:09:00.000-04:00

When it's a lame excuse for not having posted anything. I've been working on a ridiculously long piece that only 4 of you will finish. Soon, you'll get your chance to not read it.

I Live in the Nation's Safest Neighborhood/WWJD?

2006-06-13T00:56:00.000-04:00

As much as I loathe to reveal personal information about myself, I learned when I moved into my new neighborhood in Greater New York, that it is in fact the safest neighborhood... in the nation. This may seem strange when you hear that I live in the East Village, but it's true. My apartment complex has its own security team on foot, bicycle, and in cars; there are security phones everywhere: it is, statistically speaking, the safest neighborhood in the United States.

So, imagine my surprise when I learned that Kevin Aviance, a well-known drag performer, recording artist, and downtown NYC personality--who gave one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen at the Tunnel, some time ago--had the shit kicked out of him a block away from my apartment Sunday morning, near Phoenix bar, while I was sleeping soundly in the arms of my boyfriend.

The reports say that there were others nearby, but they did nothing to stop the assault. This attack has made the news at least on MSNBC, on ABC.com, and of course, Queenmother; but I thank the redoubtable Joe.My.Blog for the initial alert. Monday reveals the usual superb GayProf post on the subject.

I've asked myself, as I think one must, what would I have done if I'd been there? I decided that I would have run into the bar, gotten some friends, or anyone I could find, and gone back to help stop what was going on. We all think, or hope, that we will never be gay-bashed, but this is a case (and Aviance was not in drag at the time, as that must mean something to you) of there but for the grace of god go I. (It's a catch phrase, people, I'm as athiest as they come.)

Now, this brings to mind a few things, at least for me it does: I hope you're aware that in the current White House, inter-office memos, whether from the current occupant or from the lowliest intern, often carry the acronym, "WWJD." You know what that means, right? It stands for: "What Would Jesus Do?" What would Jesus do?

I am sure, in except the most irony-free of the people who could possibly be reading this text I am writing, that the very idea of what Jesus would do, or even might do, couldn't be further away from almost anything this administration has accomplished or attempted. Cutting funds to youth-support groups? Waging war under false pretenses? Waging war at all? Depriving funds for body armor for the soldiers fighting this war? Cutting funds to returning veterans from said war? Cutting taxes to corporations and the very wealthy to put the tax burden on the middle-class? Cutting anti-terrorism funds to New York City and Washington D.C., the only two cities attacked, thus far, in the "war" of terror? Destroying the environment and the education of children with programs that purport to protect said national resources? I'm certain there are some who will read this and be baffled about this news, or believe it is leftist propaganda--but for the rest of you who have been following the news that doesn't appear on Fox, I am quite sure you find these gestures by our government, by the current occupant of the White House, to be the furthest thing you could imagine that Jesus would do. What would Jesus do, indeed?

There is a lovely piece by Hendrik Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker that touches on some of these issues. Hertzberg notes that there is an imprimatur that occurs when any official lends his name and his words to discrimination, to bigotry, or, no matter the soft-pedaling, to hate.

...The Constitution is not going to be defaced by the “Marriage Protection Amendment,” as its supporters style it. In Wednesday’s Senate vote, it failed to attract even a majority, let alone the sixty-seven votes that would be required for actual approval. But the President’s hypocrisy is not cost-free. He has stirred up prejudice. He has lent his imprimatur to an effort to make gays and lesbians—specifically, gays and lesbians who would like to formalize and solemnize their commitment to their partners and, in some cases, to their adopted or natural children—the scapegoats for the real troubles that afflict American families.
In the past forty years, the definition of marriage has indeed been changed, not by any homosexual master plan but by an epidemic of heterosexual divorce. Marriage is a social good—Bush is certainly right about that—but it has become a disposable good. The causes of divorce are manifold, and they do not include gay marriage. (The state with the nation’s lowest divorce rate, Massachusetts, is also the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The day after the Senate vote, USA Today reported that “the number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.” The divorce rate among Army enlisted personnel since 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, is up twenty-eight per cent. For officers the increase is seventy-eight per cent. Perhaps this, rather than the imaginary threat of same-sex marriage, is something that the President should look into.

Indeed. I encourage you to read all of Hertzberg's piece--it's quite short. But let us leave, for only a moment, the question of loving couples being allowed to marry, the impact of a difficult martial conflict on the marital relations of soldiers and their loved ones, even the ethical conduct of the current Commander in Chief. Forget those things for only a moment, and ask yourself, what would Jesus do, if he were standing on a streetside, while four men were kicking the shit out of Kevin Aviance, breaking his jaw, bloodying him brutally, and leaving him on the pavement to limp his way to the hospital? What would your Jesus do?

QUICK UPDATE
The police caught the bastards.

I Geek Out Sometimes: X-Men 3: The Final Movie

2006-06-02T18:19:00.000-04:00

[I assume you've seen the film. If not, I solemnly swear to take no prisoners and to spare no plot points. This is not a review so much as it's a sort of... "assessment." An annoyed one.]

X-Men 3: The Final Movie

Or we pray it is the final installment in this stalled series. Where to begin with the list of grievances and missed opportunities? Where to begin....

I should start by saying that I really liked the first two movies. Or I should say I loved the first one, and enjoyed the second. When I learned Singer was leaving the franchise, I did not ask for whom the bell tolled (I could hear it in the distance). The tolling became deafening when I read the auteur responsible for Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2, and Red Dragon was the new man at the helm. After seeing the final product, I was not let down by what I found.

X-Men 3 is NOT saved by Jackman, McKellen, and Stewart--whom, I might point out, are all non-American actresses. They do the best job they can with weak material, but the dialogue is just shit, and each of them says some truly stoooopit, out-of-character stuff. Stewart has to snit at Jackman--after the living hell of explaining the film's version of the Phoenix; McKellen does the best he can with, "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!"; and Jackman comports himself well with his "JEEEEAN!!!!"

Nothing can save the film from the awfully idiotic choice of writing Magneto to go off the callous deep end: his egging Joenix on, his heartless dropping of Mystique after she saved his ass and as a result lost her powers ("DAMN. That shit is COLD," I actually said out loud), his decision to use the mutant "cure" against other mutants, and most egregious his sending the Morlocks to their deaths in the final battle sequence, dismissing them with a gloating smile as "pawns." Nice brotherhood you got going there, Magneto. After the first two films spent so much time presenting Magneto as a textured, complex character, this latest edition pulls no punches and displays him in full fascist--Holy Richard the III, Batman--mode. Too easy. And lame. Did I mention lazy?

Now to pile up the corpses.

Halle Berry
Thank god they got Tina Turner to lend Halle one of her old wigs from the 80s.

"It's okay, Jackie!"

I mean, the wig in the first film was AWFUL, the second wig was a slight improvement, but this one is an affront to humanity (the filmmakers even refer to it directly in an icky moment between Storm and the Beast when Berry squeals, "You've changed your hair!" And the Beast notes, "So have you." Not enough). Anyway, Storm has a larger--a much larger--role in "Final," and it becomes eminently clear why Singer kept her lines down to a minimum in the first two films: the woman can't act. Compare the cut scene on the first X-Men DVD in which Storm teaches a class of mutants. Awful. Every word she utters is a lie, including "a" and "the." No, that implies too much intention--she doesn't know what the fuck she's doing. Okay, Halle. HALLE! Repeat after me: Storm is a what? A what? You don't know? Storm is an African Weather Goddess. She is regal. English is not her first language. I know, honey, I know, don't cry, baby. I know, accents are hard. But you're getting paid. You are a professional actress. Get to work.

Berry is so laughable with almost every syllable she utters. She's made Storm all sassy 'n' shit--watch her tell off Wolverine. You go, girl! Snap! Snap! She does Storm like she's just this side of white from Kim and Cookie. And every time she uses her "weather-witch" powers she goes all slack jawed like she's having a seizure (the whited-out, Little Orphan, Annie Eyes don't help). Ok, remember in the first film when Sabretooth is chocking the goddamn out of her in the train station, and she goes all slack and mouth-breathery in the face, and you think she's dying, then her eyes go all white and she calls down lightening from the heavens? It's like that every time in this movie. Oh, I'll vomit if I go on. Fire her.

Beast
Why hire Kelsey Grammer to do Hank McCoy? I dunno, because no one's looking to hire him to do Shakespeare again any time soon, and maybe he needed the work. But he's okay more or less. It's the atrocious make-up they've saddled him in that hurts the soul so. Okay, he's BLUE. He's fucking blue.... I can't help thinking Singer would not have been so literal. Just see for yourself.

Dr Jekyll or Papa Smurf, I presume.

Now, this is what the Beast is supposed to look like, as rendered back in the day by John Byrne at his prime (inks by Terry Austin).

First of all, the Beast is kinda sexy, even covered in fur. But come on people, make him blue-black or something. Whatever.

The Morlocks
Some genius working on this movie thought it would be way cool if the living-in-the-sewers, outcast, underground mutants, known as the Morlocks should all be various ethnic minorities, and dressed like some horrible, post-apocalyptic, fashion mistakes, fresh as hell from the 80s. I mean, honestly, they look like characters visiting from the set of a Pat Benatar music video. It's sorta analogous to the S and M themed costumes for Two-Face's gang in the Val Kilmer Batman Forever fiasco. Remember them? Someone who has no idea what they're doing thinks something they know nothing about looks cool, so that over-determined design makes it into the movie. The image resonates, that's enough; it doesn't really matter what it might mean. Hey! In a mutants-as-queer franchise, let's make the Morlocks all Latin or sorta Asian or sorta androgynous. What a great idea! There's such a misguided, bad-faith race, class vibe about this choice that my skin crawls. Except for Halle (and, let's not kid ourselves too much about her, anyway), all the major players are white white white. Then having Magneto send these "pawns" to their deaths for his cause--which superficially includes them--is simply repugnant. And this from a Holocaust survivor.... Yeah, bigoted Magneto's all about the end-justifies-the-means. This move drains all the nuance out of the character--it's just sad to see McKellen put through his paces this way. It doesn't serve the narrative or the character, it just makes him into the easy villain of the piece. Why make his morally complicated decisions interesting or even intelligible when he can just be a dick?

Phoenix
Okay, this is where the serious geek factor enters the conversation: Yes, I was a big X-Men fan back in the day when the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga was first published. X-Men writers since then have hopelessly muddled it--I gave up trying to follow the latest convoluted explanation for Phoenix long ago, having lost all desire to know or care. But when the story first came out, it was clean and relatively simple: Jean Grey, selflessly saving her teammates, perished in a radiation storm while piloting their ship back into the earth's atmosphere. The ship crashed and she emerged with much greater powers, a new costume, and a new name, "Phoenix." In a major, very cool plotline, an old X-Men villain, named Mastermind (he's an illusion-caster, and was re-tooled as Jason Stryker in the second X-Men movie), was able to enter her mind, and essentially alter her personality, making her the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club (don't ask, just know it's as bad as it sounds). Thanks to Scott (Cyclops) she came to her senses, but the damage was done. Mastermind's manipulation had unleashed a power-hungry side of herself that manifested, just as soon as they defeated the Hellfire Club, as the ridiculously powerful Dark Phoenix. She flew off into space, consumed a star (yes, you read that right), which had the unfortunate side-effect of destroying a planet of asparagus people. That's right, asparagus people. Dark Phoenix returned to earth, fought the X-Men, and with Xavier's help, Jean was able to reassert her personality and place "psychic blocks" which would keep her extraordinary, cosmic-level psychic abilities under wraps. All seemed good until a race of aliens arrived to claim justice for the poor dead asparagus people. In a fight with the aliens (on the moon, no less), Jean reverted to Phoenix, and knowing she couldn't control her power indefinitely, telekinetically triggered a space cannon to blast herself into smithereens.

She's dead, Jim.

As you can see, only a small handful of these elements found their way into the screenplay for X-Men 3. What Bryan Singer had in mind when he decided at the last minute to re-shoot the ending of X-Men 2, so that Jean died, complete with a "Phoenix Effect" in the water at the very end, is any one's guess. He had clearly decided to do the Phoenix story in the third film, but who knows what of his intentions actually made it to the screen. In fact, the Phoenix Saga is exactly what we do not get. Instead, Jean-Grey-as-God is a measly subplot in the much less interesting and far less operatic main plot of the mutant "cure" and Magneto's full-scale war against it. The lame and perfunctory Rogue-Iceman-Kitty love triangle got more freakin' screen time.

What-we-wanted vs. What-we-got

The movie should have been about Jean, the Phoenix, and the X-Men. I'm not an adaptation literalist by any means; in fact, I believe what was so admirable about Singer's two X-Men movies is that they departed from the comic to a significant degree, had their own internal coherence, satisfied fans and newcomers alike, and were sophisticated, well-crafted, superhero action films with a serious ethical undertone. Not easy, people. The Harry Potter movies actually got better as they went probably because J.K. Rowling was around to control quality and because after Chris Columbus left, the franchise finally got good directors on board, ones who have this thing called "vision" and the wherewithal to carry it out. But I digress.

Back to Phoenix in X-Men 3. I enjoyed the references to Carrie and The Exorcist--it's too bad that the cleverness regarding this character was relegated to a series of visual cues, but what can you do? Jean (or Phoenix) "wakes up" from under the lake, kills Scott immediately with a vampire kiss, lapses into a coma long enough to be discovered by Halle and Hugh and brought back to the mansion, wakes up, comes on to Hugh, leaves, kills the professor (in a mostly cool scene, effects-wise), joins Ian McKellen, and spends the rest of the movie standing there in a red dominatrix outfit, looking peevish. That's it! Sure, at the very end, she gets all scary, pretty much for no reason, so Hugh pops his claws into her. The End. This is the Phoenix Saga? This is a story? The original comic version told an epic and tragic tale of ambivalence, madness, loneliness, love, redemption, and finally death. I tell you, you hand Hollywood gold on a silver platter, and they still find a way not to get it. This thing had no-brainer written all over it from the get-go. But last and not least, where was the Phoenix Effect I ordered?? I'll tell you where: superimposed on a lake surface at the end of the last film.

One last thing: I like Famke Janssen--she seems smart, she played a mean transsexual on Nip/Tuck, she speaks four languages, and provides the Dutch-language narration for the Studio Tram Tour at Disney parks. I just wish she's had something to do in her last outing as Jean Grey. Oh. And I wish they hadn't dyed her hair that absurd magenta-orange too.

Rant over.

All that said, X-Men 3 isn't a steaming pile of shit. It's an engaging summer blockbuster, and the special effects with the Golden Gate Bridge are kinda breathtaking. The problem is just that except for having the same actors playing the same characters, it bears almost no relationship to what Bryan Singer did before it. I'm not saying don't see it, I'm saying it is a weak, empty-headed, by-the-numbers follow-up to a couple of movies that managed to achieve something pretty special. (Did you like how I saved anything nice to say till the end?)

Now, one last thing. People always wanna know why so many gay guys like comic books. It's because the artists draw men like this:

This is SO eighth-grade jack-off material. Thank you, John Byrne!

BUSHLANDIA: Bush Has a Positive Approval Rating in Only Three States

2006-05-18T18:26:00.001-04:00

The proud states of Bushlandia

Thanks to Billmon's Whiskey Bar, we have this lovely, hopeful map. According to fifty concurrent state polls, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho (which are surprisingly adjacent to each other) are the only three states in the Union where a majority of residents view the current President favorably. Isn't that nice?

And it was only a little while ago, when we painted the picture differently....

The truth is, no doubt, somewhere between these two countries.

So I Read Comic Books

2006-04-27T01:25:00.000-04:00

When I was but a wee slip of a thing, the original Superman movie came out (1978). I responded to it on so many levels that I can scarcely describe them all here, but the sheer romance and scope of the narrative: parental fidelity (doubled!), the injunction to do good, the sadomasochistic flirtation with Lois (to be explored in its full, self-denying fruition in the sequel), the helplessness of that first taste of Kryptonite, the humor, the drama, the tenderness of finding Lois dead, the erotic fixation on Chris Reeve, believing a man can fly.... This has been explored elsewhere, but the bottom line is that this began a fixation on comic books that was just this side of addiction. We're talkin' sneaking comics hidden in my tube socks under my jeans into the house, we're talkin' being kicked out of the Wawa in South Jersey for reading comics with the phrase, "this isn't a library," we're talkin' switching from bag lunches to school lunches to grub food off of friends and use the lunch money to buy comics. This lasted from age nine to my college years when, finally, the hold began to wane, but not before Alan Moore upped the ante of comic writing with "The Killing Joke," "Swamp Thing," and "Watchmen."

Nothing was so sweet as coming home with an issue of Moore/Bissette/Totleben/Wood's "Swamp Thing" and a fresh roll of Sprees, to lie on my stomach on my bed, the comic on the floor, and scan, then re-read the damned four-color addicting object. That's what it was like.

I gave up comics in college about the time that Marvel decided to use the X-Men craze to tell stories across multiple titles--some you couldn't give a rat's ass about--to get you to buy even more comics. It was a craven, cynical market move, and it killed my interest.

Sure, from time to time, I would pop into St Mark's Comics or Forbidden Planet to bewilderlngly examine the many titles I couldn't find myself caring about. This all changed last year (plus) when DC started to amp up their Infinite Crisis event with "Identity Crisis" and the "Countdown" (and mind you, I was cajoled into even caring about this by friends who were following it: to wit: DC had hired a dude to oversee production, and he had the idea that they could tell a story on an extremely large canvas, using all the books they were publishing. This ambitious scheme involved 1) creating a stronger continuity among all the books where there wasn't one before, 2) highlighting the "Big Three" of the canon, being Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and drawing a specific series of relationships among them, including Batman's obsession with Wonder Woman and the constant speculation, among the people living in this world, that Superman and Wonder Woman were lovers, and 3) pulling it all towards a Crisis (the twentieth anniversary of the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" [which I read in the original] that did away with the much-beloved [to me] multiverse of Earth-1, Earth-2, Eartch-S, etc. [which DC feared was "confusing," but frankly if you don't get the idea of a multiverse or a time-paradox, for that matter, you shouldn't be reading comic books in the first place]), which would shake up the DCU and make for clarifying, and hopefully, exciting new possibilities. The sheer gall of the enterprise captivated me, and I started buying comics again--on a weekly basis--for the first time in almost two decades. Wednesday became Comics Day.

I think the two--the only two--media that have the ability to explore narrative on a very large scale these days are comic books and, yes, TV series. After resisting for five years, and after the many demands of well-regarded, smart friends, I finally got into Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. You have to understand that I don't watch TV, and the title itself was enough to turn me off, but "Buffy" became a major education in surprises. It turned out to be an amazingly well written, very intelligent, exploration of a panoply of themes that got me in a way I wasn't expecting. I don't particularly care if you're a Buffy fan, but Joss Whedon was doing stuff with "Buffy" something that has been hailed on The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Veronica Mars, and The Sopranos as ground-breaking stuff before those shows were even an itch in their Daddy's pants. And on network TV. AND on fuckin' the WB. And all the while, you thought "Reality" TV was the bomb.

Because comics and TV series are basically trash media, no one wants to really give them their due. But the truth is that there is a generation of writers who came up through theory-ridden programs of lit and film, and they are using that education to write some of the best drama available in our culture in, that's right, TV and comic books: the only two media that afford such a large space to explore character, narrative, and storytelling in such a big, operatic fashion. Twenty-two episodes a year is an amazing gift; unending runs of a comic are the same; these people are exploring the uses of their media in a way that no one has done since Laurence Sterne, Woolf, Joyce, or maybe the postmodernist writers of the 1950s. [I don't have the energy to include the non-narrative arts: cubism, architecture, surrealism, etc. Oh wait, maybe I just did.]

Girls, this is exciting stuff.

So, suffering Sappho, that's why I read comics.

I'm not sorry that you don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm glad as hell that I do. There is so much more going on in the world than you think, and it might just be happening in places you don't expect. Open your heart to trash, motherfucker; it just might be smarter than you are.

And, again, that's why I read comics.

A great big shout out to Michael's So I Like Superman and his Uncle Mikey's Funnybook Round-Up and GayProf's Center of Gravitas, which offers a vintage Wonder Woman cover for every post, and most especially this goes out to the unfortunately-titled, but admirable Joe.My.God, who has never, ever, touched a comic to my great sadness.

O Joe. O Joe, My God; O Joe, my fuckin' God, how can I keep praying to you with this knowledge? Oh, my God, Joe. Oh. I am heartened, not that my opinion matters at all, by your enjoyment of this post, which can only be inscrutable to you [My favorite line is: "Random Woman, you stay low. We're moving in."]. Oh, Joe, My God. My God, why have you forsaken me?

Autobiography

2006-04-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

Okay, autobiography and memoir are the genres I am most dubious about. Why, you may ask? Well, I'll tell you: it is because they claim to tell the truth, or at least we expect them to tell the truth. Awright, I'll admit there is another, though closely related literary genre you may have heard of that also claims to tell the truth, and it is essentially the mama of all truth-claiming literary genres and that is course is (let's say it all at once, boys and girls:) [<-- oh look, I made a smiley-face] HISTORY. I think it's instructive (and I am hardly the first to note this) that in at least French and German, the word for "story" is the same word for "history": respectively histoire and Geschichte. And let me remind you that the root of "fiction" in English is a Latin verb, fictio, which means "to shape" or "to mold."

My Masters in the world of memoir-fiction are "of course" Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund White. There is no doubt, to my mind, that Nabokov presented versions of himself--which multiply across his novels in what one could construe as an autobiographical way--as fiction: this gesture arrives in its clearest representation (is it a turning inside-out of our expectations) in the changing of the title of his avowed memoir, originally called, Conclusive Evidence, but which was finally titled, after some revision, Speak, Memory.

That's quite a title change.

In the first example, we have Nabokov, stating a facticity that is conclusive, then we get a title that's more ambiguous, where he exhorts "memory" to "speak." Anyone familiar with Nabokov well knows this is a specific and careful dissembling, in which, the first title declares an evidential expression, but the second, while more poetic, offers an almost metaphysical hopefulness that can only be construed as ironic at best, and derisive otherwise. To my way of thinking, the only other greater ironist in English heretofore was probably Chaucer. But at this point, I'm jest sayin'.

Then we have the example of Edmund White, who has never disavowed the roman a clef nature of his novels, but presents them as fiction. Yet, they are in some sense "true" representions, especially in his trilogy (originally a quartet), A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (thank you, Kafka!), and The Farewell Symphony (thank you, Haydn!).

Thus, we have two examples of writers, one who moves further away from presenting himself as his fiction, and the other who does the opposite (his last novel notwithstanding). White is an interesting case of a writer who composed extremely novelesque [I intend that in the Barthesean-sense] works at the beginning of his career--the brilliant Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes For the King of Naples (not to diminish his later output at all)--but then wrote semi-autobiographical fictional pieces (already mentioned), a highly-regarded biography of Genet, a portrait of Proust, and declared memoirs about his life in Paris. The relationship between "fact" and "fiction," the ways one nourishes the other, and vice versa, the draws of composing for one over the other, are highlighted, in opposition, by the output of these two writers. [I note, only now, and briefly, that, Nabokov more or less gave his imprimatur to White, when he reviewed his Fire-Island-cum-"gay"-cum-Kafkaesque first novel for the New York Times, back in the day, and to some acknowledged degree, White has been living it down ever since--his other, competing mode of writerliness being Christopher Isherwood.]

In the case of Nabokov, we have a man composing words (in at least two languages), inspired by events in his own life and subjectivity. White, on the other hand, condenses and completes, but the shape of the narrative is closer to his own experience than Nabokov would ever feel comfortable with or admit.

So, who is the memoirist and who the fiction-writer?

This boundary is what interest me--if it exists as a boundary at all--and therefore this writing, and therefore my previous post(s) on the nature of writing and "truth." Therefore my reticence, in this blog, toward writing about myself, explicitly. If this is an autobiography at all, it is one of ideas, attitudes, and prejudices; not what I had for lunch today.

In my understanding, language itself is the disfiguring medium which causes the problem. Language and memory. Both are imperfect media of recording experience--and that word itself (I mean "experience," though I could have suggested "media" or "recording," just to be a dick) shrugs off the possibility of fact. Look at the example of the courtroom: first-hand testimony is valuable but ambiguous (the court knows that memory is fallible, even inventive). Even in photography, which until recently, the court of law--that place of facts, evidence, testimony, and circumstantial evidence--regarded as the "safe" and "objective" domain of recorded fact, has been degraded as record by the distorting presence of Adobe Photoshop.

Not only has the frame--the context, memory, genre, intention, forgetfulness--been questioned, but the objects inside that frame are now manipulable in ways that the Nineteenth Century, and its little sister the Twentieth Century, didn't really--I mean "truly"--consider.

So, what are we left with?

Well, we are left with a place of pleasingly confusing ambiguities. To be upset that "the record" offers no solace is no solace at all. In fact--or should I say "in fact"--this question really undoes our relationship to truth. Perhaps we are seeking the truth in the wrong places; perhaps the legal notions of experience are suspect; maybe we have been on the wrong track this entire time. If the "scientific" record of photography or videography has become a space of ambiguity, or even invention, what is a person to do?

I ask this question only to be a dick. Or perhaps a tool.

I suspect I have a hunch to the answer, but this post has already gone on far too long, and I applaud you if you made it this far.

A Rilke Post: Archaic Torso of Apollo

2006-04-21T01:35:00.000-04:00

Miletus Torso (Apollo), Louvre, c. 480-470 BCE, Marble, H 132 cm

Archaic Torso of Apollo
R.M. Rilke, New Poems [1908]

We cannot know his unheard of head,
in which his eyes like apples ripened. But
his torso glows still like a candelabrum,
in which his gaze, though turned low,

holds firm and gleams. Otherwise the bow
of the breast could not blind you, and in the gentle turn
of the loins a smile couldn't go
to that center, there where procreation endured.

Otherwise this stone would stand defaced and stumped
under the shoulder's translucent downturn
and not shimmer so like a predator's fur;

and not break out from all its edges
like a star: because there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

4 July 2003.
Translation attributed to me.

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Rainer Maria Rilke
1908

POPPERS, It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore....

2006-04-15T03:31:00.000-04:00

Okay, this is a true story I wrote soon after the events of September 2004. The names have been changed and some identities have been obscured to protect the... well, not-so-innocent. [The few editorial comments appears in brackets.]

I am here to relate a tale of embarrassment and fun. No one escapes unmarked or unbloodied. No one looks good. And no one has any regrets.

This is how it happened.

A couple weeks ago, some friends stopped by the bar where I work to partake of that evening's portion of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Epic Cycle that we host at **** every Monday. We had an appreciative crowd that week and among the throng (I use that loosely) were Jimmy; his [then] boyfriend, Wondra; my buddy, Tommy; and eventually my arch-nemesis-cum-alter-ego, Kikkoman. The episodes were fun, smart, and enjoyable as usual, and when it ended, Wondra and Tommy decided they wanted to go to Nowhere (where the infamous "Box" lesbian-themed evening plays every Monday [at that time]. You may recall that "Box" has appeared before in this column as part of The Woolfe Mating Project, whereby we hoped to aid our dear gal-pal, D’vorah Woolfe, in getting a girlfriend. Or at least some pussy. Alas, Ms Woolfe has revealed to me that she HAS in fact mated, and, as I am her sole confidant in the matter, I am keeping the details under wraps at this point, at her request. Stay tuned, Gentle Reade-- er, um, Gentle Viewe-- ah, um.... More later, Gentle Reader), and they talked Kikkoman and me into coming along. Jimmy, of course, went home as he is a journalist on the Fox News website (hates it) and had to get up early for work, which is good for the plot as it keeps the number of characters down.

As I counted my tips, Wondra, Tommy, and to my utter shock and awe, Kikkoman, purchased game boards to play ****'s bingo-plus-wheel-of-fortune rip-off that occurs around 10 on Mondays and is usually hosted by the often hilarious Pudgy--she of the great height and powerful Eric Heiden-sized thighs--but on this particular night was hosted by the occasionally funny, often scattered, and sometimes off-putting, Nomi Moore, described in HX Magazine as "disturbingly real," and fired earlier in the year by D*****, the bi-polar, moody mess who sorta-owns and sometimes runs the bar, when he isn't busy fucking one of the (usually skanky) go-go "dancers."

We made short work of the game and scampered uptown to 14th street to hang with the lez-beings in attendance at "Box." I don't know what it is, but I really enjoy going to a lesbian bar with guys or a mixed group (okay, usually "mixed" means D’vorah who is one of the few lesbians I have the honor of knowing in NYC). Is it that I need to stick out? Is it that I don't have to worry about picking up (or worry about straight people)? Is it that I just lyke dykes? Probably a smattering of all of the above. Nowhere was not that crowded, and we all procured beverages and went to stand by the fake fireplace, which is considerably less charming when the fire (a tiny orange light bulb) is turned off, as it was this evening. On top of the mantle one usually finds a wide assortment of flyers advertising anything from "Big Lug," the bear and hairy muscle man party Nowhere hosts on Tuesdays, to Kiki & Herb's farewell performance at Carnegie Hall. I'm always glad to see a stack of The Onion also represented, not just because I like to read the headlines (this week: "Homosexual Tearfully Admits to Being Governor of New Jersey," "Cat Taught Not to Sleep in Wok"), but because it offers a nice stable place to rest my Sauza neat.

As we chatted I texted my good friend, Misha, who was busy shepherding a visitor from DC named Mel, but whom I call "The Amoeba," because he's pale, short, and sort of insinuates himself into situations which then require near lethal doses of antiparasitic drugs to dislodge him (as I learned in DC when I visited Misha there while he did a show). Misha is considerably nicer than I am (or maybe more wary of hurting certain feelings--WHATEVERR!!) and so found himself playing host to The Amoeba, especially because Mel came to NYC especially to see the Richard II in which Misha had a major starring role (not really, but he appeared almost nude, which is at least a plus, and probably the real reason for the visit). Misha and Mel were at the Boiler Room; I declined an invitation to join them there and exhorted them to appear with us among all the lesbians at "Box"--a nigh irresistible siren song, no one can deny.

At this point Kikkoman noticed a bottle of poppers on the "mantle." "Well, look at this," he said holding them up.

"Oh my god, are those poppers?" <-- Wondra. "Where did you get them?"

"They were just sitting here…."

"On Lesbian Night??" Tommy was incredulous.

"I'm sure lesbians like poppers too, Tommy," I offered.

"Yes, I'm sure they do," he replied, majestically.

"Are they real?" Kikkoman wondered. [Imagine the spectacle of someone leaving "fake" poppers behind at a bar. Something to plan and do....]

Wondra and I smelled, without properly sniffing, them:

Wondra & Luciferus, as one: "Yes, they're real."

Wondra said, "Should we do some?"

"I don't think I want to here," Kikkoman snorted. "I mean I've never done poppers outside of sex."

"Me neither," Tommy said.

"Give me those poppers!" I demanded, and there, in front of my friends, God, and a half-filled bar of lesbians, I did a healthy hit.

Soon, all were partaking of the little brown bottle.

After that, it dissolved into hijinks worthy of an episode of The Patty Duke Show, except without cousins, identical cousins, and with the minor addition of amyl nitrate. In quick succession we passed the bottle and all became quite high in that funny-fizzy-fine poppers way that we all know and love until the headache the next morning (though this particular bottle claimed to be from Amsterdam, where only the finest of poppers are produced. I hear. I fear). We were all laughing our asses off, initially at the idea of us doing poppers at all. Then little things registered, the tiniest details, like Wondra taking a hit in mock disdain, a pose which made me nearly drop the camera.

Sniiffffffffffff....

"I can't believe I'm doing poppers!" Kikkoman announced before putting the bottle under one nostril, then the next.

"I… know…." Tommy laughed helplessly.

We passed the bottle around, I snapped off a couple shots, then after another round of dangerously euphoric laughing, I got a nice lethal group portrait of all of us, flush from hilarity, blood vessels pulsing, writhing even, on our foreheads. We looked at the picture and all fell out immediately. Um, here’s the image in question:

The first flushed group shot. That's Wondra at the top.

"Let's do more!" I said gaily, and did a hit.

"I couldn't," Kikkoman said. Then reconsidered and did the same.

Soon we were laughing so hard, Kikkoman and I were actually crawling on the floor.

"How did we live without poppers before tonight," I managed to sputter out.

Through the haze of my grunting-unable-to-breathe laughter, I heard Kikkoman gasp: "I ALWAYS want poppers!" which practically made me collapse on the floor entirely.

We returned to a standing position, wiping tears from our eyes, and reencountered Wondra and Tommy who had also recently dissolved into lukewarm pools of Jell-O.

This is the real: "I can't believe we're doing poppers in a bar!" shot.
Tommy's expression on the left is too priceless for words.

"Did you guys know poppers could be this much fun?" Wondra asked.

"I'd heard stories," I said. "But I never knew it could be this way," and I told the following story:

Back in the late 80s, D’vorah and a friend of hers decided that people weren't having enough fun anymore; everyone was just so dour and depressing. You know… AIDS and all…. Anyway. So they took some poppers and went to Boy Bar, where they would turn to someone on the dance floor and, while holding out the familiar bottle, say with a big smile, "Hi! Poppers??"

Each person turned away, laughing, and shaking his or her head, achieving, I suppose, the same sort of effect.

End D’vorah's story.

Eventually, we devised a little game wherein someone did a hit, and then immediately took a picture of the next person while he did the same. I submit the following montage as evidence:

Wondra.

Luciferus (thoughtfully).

Kikkoman.

Tommy.

"I think," Wondra reasoned at one point, "that we should take poppers with us wherever we go from now on."

"I agree," I agreed, as I held the tiny bottle under my nose. Snifffffffffffffffffffff!

Now, I know, Gentle Reader, that at first blush, this transcription sounds like an inane, circular exchange essentially revolving around, well, poppers. This is largely true. But the problem was that, even when the conversation edged in another direction, someone would do a hit and exclaim in delight how much better everything was on poppers! I have no trouble accepting this thesis, by the way. I also feel that general laughter is always a great thing, especially in times of war and terror. But additionally, as when stoned on weed, tiny details became much more important, and suddenly air-gaspingly hilarious. Anything from the flushed expressiveness on Tommy's face to the different ways people would take a hit: circumspectly, defiantly, demurely, carelessly, surreptitiously, postmodernly....

Meanwhile, as all this was going on, everyone else in the bar was ignoring us, or at least not caring. When I went to the bar to ask for some more bar snacks the big dyke tending the thing actually handed me the whole bag. Maybe they liked us? I don’t know....

At any rate, as the hilarity and hijinks continued to ensue, Misha arrived with The Amoeba (aka Mel). Misha walked up to me with his manly, handsome smile and asked what we were giggling about.

"Oh, nothing," I said. "We've been doing poppers."

"No, you haven't."

"Oh yes." I pulled the bottle from my pocket. "Would you care to join us in Poppertown?"

"You HAVE to!" Wondra cried from across the circle.

Misha chuckled as he took the bottle and did a hit without batting an eye.

"I'm surprised at you, Misha," I said. "Oh, wait. No, I'm not."

I'm saying something to Misha that apparently begins with an "F."

"I don't think Mel will do them," Misha said. "He's a Republican, you know." Misha has a shameful fascination with older, bearish men of the Andrew Sullivan stripe. I've surmised that it's some form of self-punishment.

"Well he HAS to," said Kikkoman.

Mel came up with his and Misha's drinks. "Poppers?" I proffered.

"Well, okay, but if I'm gonna do poppers, I'd better get fucked."

Shock around the circle.

"It doesn't have to be about sex," Tommy suggested dryly." As we've learned," he added in a sotto voce giggling aside to the audience.

"All I know is that if I'm going to do poppers, I'd better get fucked," The Amoeba repeated. Later he was overheard extolling the virtues of his large penis, which he labeled "enormous." Tommy left about this time.

C'mon, you know this looks like fun.

Eventually, one by one, we all left. As Wondra took his leave, he said, "See you next week. I'll bring the poppers!"

But that, of course, is another story….

The farewell look and lick.

And that, my children, is the story of how we started bringing poppers out with us on a regular basis. There's more: like the time people came up to us at The Hole and asked if we were doing poppers, took the bottle from us, and ten minutes later the thing actually came home--but there was a circle of deliriously happy people around us; some guy even made out with his best friend (he always makes sure to remind me of this when I see him). Then there was the time the poppers bottle cap got cracked (thanks, Wondra) and someone ended up setting his hand on fire (never smoke and do poppers at the same time), but that, Gentle Reader, is another story.

A repost of a repost of a riposte: BigMuscle.com 2

2006-04-10T00:58:00.000-04:00

Please don't read this.

I while ago, I wrote an installment on BigMuscle.com, which included my first rumination on said site. This is the second such vomitus. To get the proper effect, you should really read the first one first. But hey, this is a 'blog. Do whatever the fuck you want, killah.

I GUESS I REALLY WANT TO READ THE FIRST POST NOW <--click here 4 April 2003

For the male homosexual the central question always has something to do with the Feminine and his relationship to it. We say it is a question and as such it remains an open question for the individual but also in a general sense. The subject attempts to close this question for himself in any number of ways, and so answer it. And there are a series of standard responses, which for our purposes here we will term generic. Which genre the subject works toward has everything to do with his acceptance of the Feminine, his rejection of it, or most dramatically, its abjection. The subject may find satisfaction in the performance of the feminine, both or either the admiration of it or the imitation of it. Conversely, or would it be better to say obversely, he may instead build a fortress against it, a truly self-containing fortress in his mind and often times of his body. From here he may resist all the doubts that lay siege to his composure, his artful, careful composition. But in the long run, we do not really know what the Homosexual is, we can only discern whom he doesn't want to be.

NOW I WISH I'D READ THE FIRST BIGM POST (you still can!) <-- click here

NOW I Know What Boyfriends Are For...

2006-04-06T00:20:00.000-04:00

...among other things, a good boyfriend introduces you to crazy shit you wouldda never seen otherwise. Take the Gem Sweater Lady, Leslie Hall. I know you've always known about her, but I was astonished and delighted, even thrilled, to discover that this awesome art school chick--who turns out to also be an awesome, fat art school chick--did a project involving gem sweaters: rhinestone-encrusted, sequin-adorned, and otherwise bedazzled, well, sweaters.

It's almost too good to be true.

Leslie Hall in character

You can see a gallery of sweaters.

You can watch a sweet music video courtesy of youtube.com. There's more on her website, but this video is all you really need.

Don't confuse her with the earnest Canadian songwriter of the same name; no, the real deal is to be found in the links, right here. Yes.

I can barely describe the pleasure of seeing a woman work so many levels of irony, ambiguity, and just plain wrongness. If she'd worked with John Waters twenty years ago, shit, blood, chicken-rape, dying for art, or just plain murder might have been involved, but this may be the most dangerous bad taste we're allowed while living under Emperor Bush. Joe-Bob says check it out.

01:02:03 04/05/06

2006-04-05T15:59:00.000-04:00

I'm a sucker for number games with dates and stuff. The Krebs Cycle has a lovely post on stuff the author finds fascinating--scientific discoveries, mainly--and ends with the note that the date today, if you write it in the American style with the month first, is 04/05/06. And he posted this at 1:02:03 (or there abouts).

These sorts of coincidences, where something as insignificant as our sequence of numbers aligns, as it must occasionally (even a broken clock is correct twice a day), with the time or the date. Does it signify? Well, yes and no. Because we're meaning-based beings, coincidences like these tend to feel significant, which is to say they twinkle with a magical charge, like synchronicity. There's just something downright spooky about it.

When I changed my major in college (long story), and the registrar office lady handed me my official document--basically my receipt--I glanced at it and got a shiver from the fact that the computer had printed it as 8/8/88. Didn't mean anything really, but I've never forgotten it. I think that time is an elusive dimension, so the way we talk about it is mediated by metaphors of space (things are in the past or future) or money (you waste or spend time), for example. Yes, time is an invention that measures something that doesn't exist. So when such an abstract thing gets punctuated by birthdays; holidays; turning 40; anniversaries of deaths, weddings, and breakups; or funny "jokes" of a consecutive sequence of numbers like today's date, it gives us a little thrill of meaningfulness, a sense of design or order, or even paradoxically, a disturbing out-of-jointness. But for a moment--for a moment--time stops. For a moment, it's as though time sees you.

Trump v Manson

2006-04-05T00:23:00.000-04:00

Aw, I can't resist this shit. If you haven't seen this already, some crazy person made an episode of "The Apprentice" for the ages. Consider this a short post to make up for the long difficult one I threw up last time.

Trump v Manson

On Bad Films

2006-03-24T19:38:00.000-05:00

"Mommy? Where do bad movies come from?"

Well, darling, like bad people, bad movies are made. Now, I happen to love bad movies—many of my friends will attest, and my boyfriend will object, that I will watch anything. As a firm believer in the idea that you can learn how to do things "correctly" by studying things you, and others, admire, not only do I think the converse holds true, but I also say you can even learn how to do cool things by looking at films, or other cultural objects, that went terribly terribly terribly awry. This is really a roundabout way of saying that if you study how things work, and examine their effects, whether it is "good" or not, doesn't necessarily matter.

Let's go back to "bad." Rather than accept that that this one word accurately describes a whole host of films, I submit the uncontroversial hypothesis that there are many kinds of bad films. A whole spectrum, in fact. We round up the usual suspects: "Plan 9 from Outer Space," say, or "Ishtar," or "Valley of the Dolls," or "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," or, what is to me the most reprehensible in this list, "You've Got Mail." The list is as long as you might like to make it, and will be different for everyone, as I have no doubt that there a number of admirers of the late Ephron oeuvre reading this. I'm not really interested in splitting hairs over personal taste; my point is that there's a common sense notion of film badness out there, and most of us share opinions—many of them received, sure—about which films are supposed to be bad.

An Ironic Excusion
Here's where we get into a glitch. At this historical point in American mainstream culture, there is a powerful factor that muddles what have traditionally been, I think, clearer cut notions of quality and the ways we engage with the"bad," and we call that factor irony. We live in a world where taking an ironic stance about something—anything, everything?—is a pop cultural article of faith. Irony used to be the tool of the educated and urbane, and therefore, often, of the upper classes and of urban places. Ducking into a brief history of Irony, we learn it is a figure of classical Rhetoric derived from the Greek word, eironeia, which means "affectation of ignorance" (NOTE: I ripped off the following examples from the link, they are not mine, but I did study this stuff in school. Honest). Following this cunningly simple source, we are given a definition: "Speaking in such a way as to imply the contrary of what one says, often for the purpose of derision, mockery, or jest." This sounds closer to what we're used to hearing when Irony is in the room. Yet, if we dig a little deeper, because this is Rhetoric, a more nuanced taxonomy has been derived down, and that means, Figures of Rhetoric, such as Irony, have related Figures depending from them, the Figures for Irony are:

antiphrasis: From the Gk. "to express by antithesis or negation." Defined: "Irony of one word, often derisively through patent contradiction; e.g. Referring to a tall person: "Now there's a midget for you."

paralipsis: From the Gk, "to leave to one side." Defined: "Stating and drawing attention to something in the very act of pretending to pass it over"; e.g. "It would be unseemly for me to dwell on Senator Kennedy's drinking problem, and too many have already sensationalized his womanizing...."

epitrope: From the Gk, "to yield." Defined: "A figure in which one turns things over to one's hearers, either ironically, or in such a way as to suggest a proof of something without having to state it. Epitrope often takes the form of granting permission (hence its Latin name, permissio), submitting something for consideration, or simply referring to the abilities of the audience to supply the meaning that the speaker passes over. Epitrope can be either biting in its irony, or flattering in its deference"; e.g. "Because all things [be] taken away, only is left unto me my body and mind. These things, which only are left unto me of many, I grant then to you and to your power. —R. Sherry." Clearly, this example of epitrope is one where the permission isn't given with much of a choice.

sarcasmus: From the Gk, "to tear flesh, to speak bitterly." Defined: "Use of mockery or verbal taunts"; e.g. like when those impolite Romans said to Christ on the cross: "If you be the son of God, descend from the cross —Matt. 27."

mycterismus: From the Gk, "to sneer." Defined: "It is a mock given with an accompanying gesture, such as a scornful countenance"; e.g. as in telling a misbehaving guest as they leave, "We're SO GLAD you came," with a kind of sneery-smile.

What all of these figures share is the element of negation; each case makes a surface statement that is undermined, mediated, or called into question by the way it's phrased, by a gesture, or the inclusion of an out-of-place contradictory word that can be frivolously ridiculous (tall person as a midget), or contain a derisive meaning as well, relating maybe to his failed performance in business or sex.

But for irony to become a good commodity in common discourse, all those Rhetorical Figures are forgotten, and a streamlined model of irony comes off the assembly line, and that line is the mass media. We can imagine Oscar Wilde as being the godfather of this irony as he played intricate games that seemed frivolous but did so with a high degree of seriousness. But it wasn't until mass media became televisual that this irony—which is a kind of "having on," a dubiousness, a mock, and a maintaining of two frames of mind or reference—was truly produced for and became a part of the masses. The Prometheus that delivered this fire to mortals was our very own Andy Warhol, through his low-art-as-high-art aesthetic (among other things). But more than that, he presented his whole persona and project—stuff that, like Wilde, he took greatly seriously—as silly, meaningless, and empty. The joke was on the viewer or the culture if one decided to believe his shenanigans. It also allowed him to get away with a great deal: were his silk screens clever comments on our culture of reproduction? did they play on the sense that people are things? that ugly photographs of car crashes can be screened with colors to make them go with the couch? or was his art only empty but hip "pop"? Warhol doesn't need to have invented The New Irony, but he certainly practiced it very well, and a lot of people noticed this (I think, by the way, that Warhol was very sophisticated in the ways he employed his ironic stance: the quality of the thing when it's introduced is always different from what it becomes to be more easily disseminated). Furthermore, his Factory produced films and rock groups, which played this irony out into larger audiences outside the art world. "Walk on the Wild Side" is a perfect example of droll ironic shrugging about drag queens, street people, and urban ennui with a great pop hook. We can include the punk aesthetic in this mini-history, but the next big shift happened with MTV and its wild popularity. Suddenly, a New York style of sarcastic hipness was everywhere, and after that you eventually have "Seinfeld" and "Friends." I'm skipping many many steps, but the upshot is that this irony is a much more powerful—and less risky—stance to have toward the world than sincerity (not that I'm holding up sincerity as a better option), and it's deeply embedded in the culture now. Everywhere you look, and I mean primarily in popular culture, there is a smart-ass quip or phrase announcing itself as the next bon mot. I submit Maxim magazine: reading it you get the impression that the editors are making fun of even the things they like. Does this mean that we're all more sophisticated now than our forebears? Yes, I think, yes and no. In the same way more people are literate now than ever before, our use of irony and that double-mindedness which it denotes is more sophisticated; but on the other hand, we're not exactly Oscar Wilde, either.

Back to Bad Movies
I told you that story to tell you this one: so now, taking on the question of a "bad" movie has become rather moot, because everyone likes bad movies now. There is certainly a generational barrier that keep some people over 50 or 60 out of the loop, and you have another cultural resistance in smaller towns, or "Red" states, with people who don't watch TV, go to the movies often, or read lad mags. And then, the best thing is that Hollywood hasn't entirely gotten on board with the new irony, because it is blinded in its pursuit of the test-marketed blockbuster: the film that will appeal to as many people as possible. Yes, we see the release of other, smaller kinds of movies that have no intention of making $100 million the opening weekend, but by and large Hollywood hasn't fully realized that its big money making scheme isn't working (or very cost-effective). Instead, they hire people like Quentin Tarantino, Joss Whedon, and Carrie Fisher to add some zippy dialogue, but it's just another checkbox on the Blockbuster checklist, and while their aesthetical-financial obsession should give us hope for "bad" movies we can enjoy ironically, the results tend to be pretty bland.

Back in the Golden Age before mass-produced irony, no one even knew about "Plan 9 from Outer Space" unless he caught it on "The Late Late Show" or "Creature Double Feature." And the ones who didn't find it incoherent and boring decided it was funny, which is what Tim Burton did. And so a few "bad" movies, by way of a specialized audience were reinvented as "cult" films, a term that has the odor of weird fringiness about it, and that odor is the scent of marijuana. It was the dropouts, freaks, stoners, and funny bachelor men who were members of the various cults surrounding certain films, because who else had time to stay up for the late show or watch "Doctor Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses" on weekday or Saturday afternoons when Mr and Mrs America were at work or ironing? College students were the next wave, and why not? It's just another feature of rebelling against your parents by deciding the movies Mom and Dad think are bad, are actually trippy, interesting, or just plain funny.

I Didn’t Mean Anything by It
This is where I come in (did you really think this wasn’t about me at some point?). I am not a fan of The New Irony—I mean, sure it can be fun and all, but often it comes off as a reflex reaction of smug knowingness, a joyless exercise. I had a professor in grad school who wrote in one of his books that “the skeptic annihilates the world” (an always haunting phrase) and, in my opinion, The New Irony contains an irreducible kernel of skepticism. It isn’t a gesture of solidarity with an audience, or it doesn’t need to be. As opposed to a lie, which depends on the ignorance of the audience or listener, Rhetorical irony only functions when the listener also has knowledge; with The New Irony, no audience is necessarily even necessary. Just you. With Rhetorical irony, there is a space or a gap between what is said and what is meant, but there is an intention behind it, and a meaning, that despite its ambiguity is still meaningful; the New Irony believes in nothing, and therefore is about playing a game without a goal. So, the fact that bad movies and bad TV and bad fashion are valued for their hipness is a reliable index, not of nothing exactly, but of nothingness. It is an empty play of signs, signals, and signifiers, wherein the action of arrangement is the art, but to no discernable intentional effect, except, let us say, to be noticed, to register. It is as though an impatience with meaning itself (or even a radically antisentimental stance towards meaning) has supported this shift, this play that somehow has no rules, and no seriousness at all; therefore The New Irony becomes almost pure gesture or style. I know this paragraph is riddled with judgments, and while I engage in The New Irony myself sometimes, just like you, what I’m trying to state here is a preference. I’m old fashioned, and I don’t mind it.

Sometimes You Have to Be Bad
I still like to think of cult movies, mistakes, and trash as "bad." To name something as bad is to locate it someplace, perhaps not a precice location, but one nonetheless, whereas to relate to a film by way of The New Irony is to locate it no place, exactly. Rather than view a bad film by way of an I-know-better ironic agenda, I try to take it for what the "film" seems to be trying to do—and let me say that can get you into some pretty strange neighborhoods. Somebody set out to make these things, and that's more interesting to me than “enjoyment” served up with a condescending ironic twist—I guess what I mean is, you have to take these films seriously on some level. Besides, anything that disappoints, offends, baffles, or bores mainstream tastes is something I want to see. And a lot of these films are bad because they were made by freaks with no budget and a bad handle on production; others are just trashy B—or even C movies—where the plot is only a pretext for getting as many big breasted women with guns on screen as possible. But the holiest of bad films are the ones that were made with a budget, a certain amount (sometimes a lot) of expertise, a recognized if not respectable cast, a lot of pre-release publicity, and the utmost desire to make a really great movie. But either because of the material and the way it was handled, or just some crazy cinematic curse, each person from the director to the screenwriter to the star to the grip and the best boy made the wrong choice at every step of the way, and this created an impossible crystalline-like structure that a creative team could never hope to accomplish on purpose. It just happens. And all the audience can do is gape in disbelief at the embarrassment of otherworldly riches on display. The three timeless examples of this sort of movie magic are, of course, "Valley of the Dolls," "Mommie Dearest," and "Showgirls." If you've never seen them, or you aren't in the ten-plus club yet, you'd better get your freak on and take care of it, because some things really do make living better.

I Post Song Lyrics from Time to Time: Give a Little More

2006-03-21T15:38:00.000-05:00

Duller than dishwater and twice as exciting....

This horrible song got Neely O'Hara fired from her first big break on Broadway! Early on in the ineffable film classic, "Valley of the Dolls" (1967), we observe a rehearsal for a new Helen Lawson musical; Miss Lawson coils in her dressing room, spitting invective at anyone who comes within reach; suddenly she is distracted by Neely singing "Give a Little More" (even the title is dismaying) from a rehearsal room and Miss Lawson decides right there to get the talented Neely fired, because, as I'm sure you know, say it with me: "The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson. And that's me, baby, remembuh?"

The other thing you should know about this song, and Patty Duke sings part of it twice, is that the first time we meet Neely, she's sitting in rehearsal singing this song to the cast, who are surprisingly transfixed--everything is "supposed" to scream that THIS GIRL HAS TALENT! But note the awful, smug sneer Neely has plastered on her mug the whole time (it's supposed to be a smile). She's just so cocky and gross and inappropriate, and I don't know if Patty just didn't know what she was doing or if she really thought Neely was supposed to be that full of herself in the scene where she's introduced to the audience. All I know, is it makes me hate Neely O'Hara from the get-go every time.

And now for the song....

Give a Little More

Try, my friend, to face yourself
with all you have in store.
But if you can't,
then brace yourself
and give a little more.

So, you wait
and find yourself
with blues you can't ignore.
Well, then, my friend,
remind yourself
to give a little more.

Make tomorrow dance for you,
strike a brand new pose.
There's always one more chance for you
before the curtains close.

Sure, that old inspired heart
ain't all it was before.
But then, my friend,
that tired heart
should try it's best to soar.

Dry those tears,
forget those fears,
and smile the smile you wore.

Come on, my firend, and give a little,
come on, my friend, and live a little.
Give a little more, more, and more.

Lyrics by Dory Previn, Music by Andre Previn.

Fun With Shakespeare's Sonnets! Sonnet 75.

2006-03-13T12:37:00.000-05:00

We call love an emotion, but it is distinct from feelings, such as sadness or anger. In fact, while we can be said to “feel” love, or “feel in love,” when one compares such a sensation with sadness or anger, love suddenly thrusts itself into relief. Love is, properly speaking, an attachment, a relation, a configuration, a projection, and a denial; love has the properties of reflection, absorption, and immersion. Is sadness like this? No. Instead, we notice that something odd occurs when love is around, to wit, that a phenomenon of love is sadness, and also anger—loving someone sometimes makes us sad, sometimes angry. Yet it is difficult to imagine the converse and love coming out of the experience of sadness. Is there any other emotion that produces so many other emotions? And what is the strange nature of love that it can make us feel exhilarated or depressed, whole or fragmented, connected or terribly alone? We'll let this musing stand for a moment and veer into a more literary and less speculative zone.

I recently had the opportunity to work on a collection of short plays called Love’s Fire, in which seven playwrights were asked to each write a play based on a Shakespeare sonnet. (NOTE: I will post another time on my thoughts regarding the deathless Bard, or as I like to call him The Shakespeare-which-is-not-one.) Though I’ve read through the Sonnets off and on since college, I never took too much care with them until this project—man, was I in for a surprise. I used online research, a couple books, and especially Helen Vendler’s monumental The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for my resources. (Vendler’s book is probably the best I’ve seen on the Sonnets, and it works incrementally: the more you read the sonnets and her commentaries on them, the more you understand how crazy and beautiful the whole collection is—and therefore the more you understand what a fucked-up, twisted freak Shakespeare was.)

For a quick review of what you may have forgotten or never learned: the sonnet is a fourteen-line iambic pentameter medieval poetic form initiated by the Italians in the 14^th century and brought to England about two hundred years later. The English sonnet that Shakespeare used, consists of 3 quatrains of 4 lines each (noted Q1, Q2, Q3), and a final couplet (noted C); its rhyme-scheme—which allows for greater flexibility in English rather than Italian or French—is abab cdcd efef gg. The classic themes of a sonnet include love, time, the beauty and chastity of a maiden, and frequently, comparisons of the beloved to flowers and other natural features (for example, blushing cheeks are like roses).

Shakespeare came to the form after its popularity had begun to fade, and when his Sonnets were published in 1609, they sold poorly and received little critical attention for about two centuries. But what a complex and difficult treasure trove the Sonnets has turned out to be. Ever the innovator, Shakespeare performs a poetic sleight-of-hand so that the beloved addressed in these poems is not the virtuous woman of tradition but, respectively, a frivolous fickle young man and a promiscuous not-very-beautiful Dark Lady. Furthermore, Shakespeare takes the reader on an intellectual, emotional rollercoaster never seen in the literature before or since. The speaker (whom we distinguish from his author) of the 154 poems not only celebrates his beloved, but expresses his lust, frustration, impatience, anger, disappointment, possessiveness, forgiveness, despair, self-mocking, and even self-loathing. (Imagine the mind that conceives a love poem should begin, not “Be wise as though art beautiful,” but “Be wise as thou art cruel.”) Until a reader immerses himself in the cycle, the truly twisted nature of the Sonnets remains obscure. To read them is a disorienting experience that can leave a person feeling a bit demented, but he might also find it exciting to encounter a tightly-controlled fourteen line lyric on the frightening desire for control that results in the loss of it, in one case (sonnet 75), or in another, a not-so-veiled threat wrapped in a humiliating plea to the Dark Lady to pretend to love the speaker even though she has found love elsewhere (140). Many of the effects we attribute to love appear in these poems, and Shakespeare’s fearlessness in exploring the exquisite complexity, strangeness, and troubling dark places of love and desire make the Sonnets one of Shakespeare’s—and literature’s—great achievements.

So, this is the first installment in a short series of pieces (re)visiting a few of the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Attributed to me. Apologies to Helen Vendler.

Sonnet 75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life, Q1
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon Q2
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world might see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight, Q3
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had, or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day, C
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

This relatively early sonnet to the young man is remarkable for its frenetic turnover of metaphors, as though the impassioned excitement of the speaker were forcing him to jump from one image to the next, even as he puts on casual airs with "now," "anon," "now," "then," "sometime," and "by and by." But it cleverly uncovers the dark obsessiveness of this love by shifting from a beautiful, elevated depiction of the young man as the thing that gives the speaker's thoughts life (doubled in the image of life-giving rain) in Q1, to a portrayal of him as the coins coveted by a possessive miser in Q2 [the "filching age" has been interpreted as a reference to the rival poet(s), from whom the speaker wants to keep the young man], to the frightening description of the speaker as a glutton, starved and feasting on the young man, possessing him even by force ("or must from you be took") in Q3. We start with a grateful plenty that turns into desperate acts of control and bewildering wildly vacillating sensations of starvation and overindulged satiety. The speaker has no delight except in the young man, and waits for what the young man will give him—or what must be taken. These fantasies of possession, control, and absorption are belied by the depiction in the sonnet of the pursuit of the young man by the speaker, not his ownership of him, because the young man clearly comes and goes as he pleases, thus starving the speaker for another look. The nature of their relationship is implied with sexualized words ("enjoyer", "treasure", "pursuing", "possessing", "had") and there is a sense of the immoral, or an ironized recognition of it, by the inclusion of the deadly sins: avarice, pride, gluttony, explicitly, and the implication of lust and envy. Finally, it is the lack of control that the sonnet depicts so forcefully not just in the frantic grasping and discarding of metaphors, but in their ultimate form as degraded bodily ravenousness. The final couplet not only says, to paraphrase, that the speaker pines and overindulges, or overeats everything or has nothing at all ("all away"), but implies the desire of the speaker to glutton on the young man until there is nothing left of him ("gluttoning… all away")—to love him so furiously that he destroys the young man entirely. In sum, the speaker seems disgusted, frightened, embarrassed, and guilty about his dependence on the young man, and this expresses itself in a kind of panicked rage.

A repost of a repost of a riposte: BigMuscle.com

2006-03-03T01:37:00.000-05:00

Hey lady, you lady, cursing at your life....

Have you ever heard of BigMuscle.com? I've been "on" it for a while, and, after working in interactive for years, and being on a million sites (okay, a hundred, at least), I find it difficult to represent myself, well, with sincerity, on, um, anything online. I said "difficult." My great problem with Internet culture, and blogs especially, is that everyone is trying so hard to give up who they are, when everyone else is making a disposable identity. This makes for a bad dichotomy. It's as if half the world were writing memoirs and the other half were writing novels. And I mean this avowadly so in the first instance, and implicitly so in the second. This is the perfect example of how media has changed in an extraordinory way in the last fifteen years. Truth-claims for writing, whether online or elsewhere, have become very confused, but the online world is more and less sophisticated than the print-world: its boundaries are much more flexible. While we might be pissed off that that certain someone is not whom he or she said she or he would be online, we have learned to relax about it some; yet if a memoirist confesses to amplifying, extending, or even, yes, lying about his or her life on Oprah (or anywhere else [and where else does this happen, exactly?]), readers take great umbrage. (Alas, our current President and most others in elected government are held to a lesser standard.)

I don't know why this happens. Online, we let go of someone's misrepresentation (depending on one's experience and history), but on paper it's much more serious--it means something. Is the money we've paid for the paper and the incredibly well-financed cover and the PR the thing that prevents us from seeing a memoir as a story or as entertainment? And should we believe that any autobiography or biography is anything but a story? And lastly is any history anything but a story?

I had a few of these things in mind way back in 2003 when I wrote my first self-critical post on BigMuscle.com. To tell this story, however, I should tell two others first: the earlier is that I have a background in literary theory, cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis, so if you dislike one or all three of these options, you should probably stop reading now because my take will bore you. Latterally, BigMuscle is a funny "community" that allows you to post a profile with a number of pictures; it also requires your physical stats, including your geographical location; allows you to say as much as you might ever want textually, even, as some do, in a blog-style format; and lastly allows you to link out to other BigMuscle profiles, even in the thousands, so that your reader can see who you "like" in what in some cases is a vast list at the bottom of the your profile page.

So, here I offer up my first real post on BigMuscle. Read at your own risk.

Undated Winter 2003

We begin with the question of the gaze. Although the mouth is our first point of interaction with the world, and as much as orality typifies the way we greedily suck images inside ourselves as though they were some form of nourishment, it is a feeding that never satisfies. We begin instead with the gaze not in terms of our own looking but, naturally, the gaze of another, which, unlike our looking, does bring a kind of satisfaction with its own compliment of frustration and addiction. We throw ourselves at the world in fragments hoping to hook an eye, catch the gaze of another whose appraisal--of desire, delight, disgust, derision, or dread--will only feed something inside ourselves that demands that attention. We anxiously link out to other bodies we've constructed--bodies of words and disassembled parts--hoping to evoke a kind of wholeness, to trick the other and therefore ourselves into buying this wholeness with the coin of his gaze. But just as every signifier refers to every other signifier--and never to itself--we become lost in the web of signification, never finding a resting spot, a ground to stand on, a place that stays still, a signified. Or as Max Frisch says in one of his famous diaries, "I have only sought to explain myself but find I have only betrayed myself."

So, are you still looking?

OH YES, I JUST HAVE TO READ THE SECOND INSCRUTABLE BIGM POST!!

Day 1: Already Leaving Something to Be Desired....

2006-03-02T01:19:00.000-05:00

The first thing my boyfriend said to me when I told him I was having difficulty coming up with a name for "my" "blog" was, "But blogs take up so much time!"

Well, I guess there's only one way to find out....