Adventures in and out of Mainstream Media

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2009-02-28T15:21:00.000-08:00

13 Ways of Looking at Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat

2009-01-25T17:32:00.000-08:00

Excerpts, with apologies to Wallace Stevens

I
Among a surfeit of hats that dazzling day
The only hat that moved
Was the one with the oversized bow

II
I was of many minds
Like her hat
A story made of rhinestones

III
The hat held its pose in the winter light
It melted monuments and choreographed the crowd

IV
The voice and the song
Are one
The voice and the song and the hat
Are one

V
I do not know which to prefer
Her entrance with the hat that was both somber and whimsical
Or the way the hat punctuated her closing
The image of the embellished bow
Or the trace it leaves behind

VII
O suited men of Foggy Bottom
Why do you imagine thin hatless singers?
Do you not hear how the ample voice of Aretha
Sanctions the brave chapeaux
Of the women around you?

VIII
I know regal crowns
And endless caps and predictable berets
But I also know that Aretha’s hat is involved
In what I don’t know

XIII
It was morning all day
It was glittering
And each moment wriggled free from the last
The grey hat
Clinging to the contours of the renewed nation

----------------------------------------------------

Richard Dawkins to Give Invocation at Obama Inauguration

2008-12-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't it be great if noted atheist Richard Dawkins was giving the invocation at the Obama inauguration. And with it, perhaps the 21st century could begin. Surely one can dream.

Yet Obama remains committed to using a homophone and gynophobe, a name I won't mention, giving this man publicity and legitimacy that he doesn't deserve.

If Dawkins is booked for the day, I have other suggestions for religious scholars and practitioners who might be available:
--Rev. Canon Martin Brokenleg, Director of Native Ministries Programmes and Professor of First Nations Ministry and Theology, a gay episcopalian
--Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, a ministry serving the glbt community
--Vivianne Crowley, High Priestess of the Gardnerian coven of the Wiccan faith
--Robert Thurman, Je Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, and father of Uma
--Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the leader of New York’s Congregation Beth Simchat Torah and a lesbian.

Nashville

2008-11-19T05:16:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I was in Nashville for a conference and I had a chance to discover parts of the city. It is quite a unique place and has really succeeded to brand itself as "Music City" for the tourist. I daresay I found the city really ugly and was never able to stumble upon a charming neighborhood but that just could have been how the city is laid out and where I was staying.

One can see the dueling strands of the city pretty clearly--around the corner from the sprawling "Christian Store" (I was afraid to go in, but I imagine that it was chock full of vibrant bibles and new testament kitschery) one found "Hollywood Hustler"--one of the largest porno shops I ever seen (I felt far more comfortable going in there, but you already knew that). Endless rows of dildos, edible undies, DVDs. Indeed as much as it is a God-fearing town, it is also a hard-drinking one and I noticed some serious partying, foot stomping, and hips gyrating happening both on Honky Tonk Row and the gay bar/restaurant I had dinner in. The drinks were strong (and watch out those of you on a low-sodium diet for the food was salty!).

One can also see this contradiction in Ryman Hall, the beautiful home of the Grand Ole Opry during its heydey (I was not so interested in going to the Opry theme park near the airport). Ryman Hall was built as a tabernacle for a rising preacher in 1892--and the seats are still pews--but it became a concert hall where now the likes of Margaret Cho come and perform. So even as Nashville may be the buckle of the bible belt it is also the place for undoing that restrictive belt so that one can show just a little bit--or even more--of one's undergarments...

I loved going to the Country Music Hall of Fame. A very great homage to Kitty Wells ("It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels"). I got goosebumps when I saw the scrap of paper she used to write those lyrics, bless her. There was also an exhibit on the Williams Family. I am much more interested in Hank Williams Senior of course especially as Junior followed McCain around and was happy to learn that Senior did a few spoken word recordings under another name. I was very pleased that a rather friendly docent convinced me to take the tour to Studio B, which is where Dolly recorded Jolene and Elvis recorded countless hits after moving from Memphis. It is truly a historical landmark of American popular culture and I shivered in the presence of that honky tonk piano and vibraphone. Its also a conflicted place because the producer who worked there Chet Atkins was determined to increase the popularity of country music and in so doing he took out its twang (the banjo) and replaced it with strings (bringing in the schmaltz), which is probably why I don't like too much country music beyond the 60s.

Nashville is also home to some of the "great" works of the sculptor Alan LeQuire http://www.alanlequire.com/. He created the gigantic Athena that is housed inside the replica of the Parthenon. It was closed when I went there, but I have seen photos of this bejeweled towering beauty who apparently is wearing lipstick. Athena is clothed, unlike the Bacchantes dancing in abandon in LeQuire's other controversial project "Musica", which is at the roundabout at the entry to Music Row (where all the recording studios are located--including Studio B as well the one where Dylan recorded "Nashville Skyline") As these youthful dancers are naked and bronze and tall (and lets face it quite campy), the Christian right has become upset with the display of genitalia and nipples--but to me this controversy sums up the conflict that makes Nashville dynamic. Of course I hope the Dionysian abandon wins out over the censorious, harsh voices of the Christian sect, but I am not convinced it will. The battle over Nashville rages on.

I asked people how come McCain won Tennessee--they shrugged their shoulders as if to say they didn't want to go there, but announced with pride that Nashville county was the only one in the whole state that voted for Obama.

What If Barack Obama Really Was A Socialist?

2008-11-03T06:35:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is not a socialist. But what if he were...

1. We could have a National Health Service like much of the developped world.
2. We could really have a safety net.
3. The extremely wealthy could actually begin to pay taxes like they should.
4. We could nationalize telecommunications industries--an industry that is really profitable--so that the government could get out of debt swiftly.
5. We could fund public higher education education so that we have an educated populace with professional skills.
6. We could work on ending the homeless population and begin to decrease the prison population.
7. We could extend democracy and begin to decrease the power of multinational corporations--or at least they would have to come to the table to negotiate.
8. We could stop involving ourselves in imperialist wars and realize that we defeat terrorism via intelligent propaganda and law enforcement and that any military involvement increases the likelihood of recruiting new terrorists.
9. We could make America officially bilingual.
10. We could overthrow the tyranny of the oil companies, develop new eco-friendly industries, and slow down global warming.

Barack Obama and the Presidential Voice

2008-11-03T06:34:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama and the Voice of the President
Edward D. Miller

The voices of the candidates are a crucial part of their campaigns’ brand identity. Sarah Palin’s use of folksy expressions and her regional accent has energized party loyalists and has received much attention in the media—and indeed Tina Fey not only looks like the candidate but sounds like Governor Palin and mimics her accent and cadence expertly. Yet it is Barack Obama’s voice—not only on the campaign trail but also during the debates—that has proven most successful. I am not referring to his choice of words (and indeed they are well-chosen) but to the pitch, volume, and rate of his vocal delivery.

Presidents are usually baritones (as well as being tall) and Obama’s vocal range is soothing not only in what he is saying but in how he is saying it. He speaks at a relatively slow WPM (words per minute) and his moderate rate is matched by the use of predictable pitches. McCain varies his tempo as well as his tone–he goes up and speaks fast and loud when he appears angry or excited. His vocal qualities reinforce the Obama campaign’s use of the word “erratic” to describe him. Though Obama’s voice is deeper than Franklin Roosevelt’s and less revealing of his social class, Obama uses his voice similarly. Like Roosevelt, Obama invokes confidence in the deliberate pacing of his vocal delivery. During the third debate Obama’s rate was often below the 120 words per minute that is desirable for talking heads on media (radio DJs speak faster, especially right wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh). In the last debate McCain’s rate was usually far above 120 words per minute and the pacing of his delivery was not consistent--McCain’s performance was probably better suited to radio than television. Obama’s speech patterns during the debate offered a respite from anxiety in the very sound of his voice. The way in which he lingers on the conjunctions “and” and“but” as he collects his thoughts serves a similar purpose to Roosevelt’s elongated vowel sounds. They reassure the American people. Obama’s voice reinforces a message that he does not have to repeat in the meanings of his words. The message that he is trustworthy is enunciated in the measured way he speaks. Whereas McCain’s outbursts that he can tackle the economic crisis or find Osama bin Laden are undermined by the fashion in which he utters these reassurances.

Obama employs very different vocal techniques on the campaign trail. He quickens his tempo toward the end of his campaign speeches as he heads toward the climax. Yet even as his rate and volume increases, he does not vary his pitch much (certainly not as much as McCain), which suggest that he is still in control. Obama uses anaphora to great effect (the repetition of clauses at the beginning of sentences), which serve to involve his audience. When he tells the story of meeting the Republican owner of a diner where he ordered dessert, Obama also uses epistrophe in the repeated use of the word “pie” at the end of a series of clauses. Such repetitions add rhythmic intensity to his speech, and satisfy the listener’s expectations. In using these rhetorical flourishes, Obama provides assured tonalities at a time of economic uncertainty; his vocal style proclaims that he knows what he is doing. The resonance of his voice and the patterns of his iterations combine in an attempt to persuade voters. Not only does he have the bearing of a leader, Barack Obama also sounds presidential.

Phone Calls for Obama

2008-10-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, after K and I raced from an excellent yoga class taught by F to go see Beverly Hills Chihuahua (very cute!), we headed back downtown to make phone calls for Obama. We went to the very swanky Bowery Hotel at 3rd Street. Even though the Bowery has been gentrified in the last 10 years, it still stands out among the flop houses and rundown buildings that surround it or face it. Yet I loved the second floor lounge that we were stationed at--it aspired to a hunting lodge or a ski lodge, very comfortable, with a sense of humor, and a roaring fireplace to warm us. The campaign workers were very organized and were able to quickly train us on what to say and how to record our phone calls.

We were calling Pennsylvania, which is good but I don't think the campaign should take the state for granted (or Ohio either) now that polls say Obama is leading in Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, and other states the Democrats have not won in the last two elections. In my mind, Pennsylvania is still a battleground state. The people were more receptive in Pittsburgh than they were in Allegheny, and when the exchange numbers seemed to be move into a black neighborhood I was met with enthusiasm. I think I might have recruited some people to volunteer for the campaign which I hope will help in getting the vote out. One guy really didn't like Obama and I politely bid him adieu and a few resented that I had blocked out my number before I called.

I was impressed by the diversity in the people who were calling and though I met with mostly answer machines, it helped to alleviate the anxiety I feel about this election. Mind you, I also feel very excited that McCain will lose. Personally I don't mind if Sarah Palin keeps the clothing the RNC has bought for her.

Indiana Jones vs Iron Man

2008-05-27T06:39:00.001-07:00

I caught up with my Hollywood blockbusters this past weekend and saw Ironman and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not on the same day mind you. Ironman is so much better--and its not because the special effects were more impressive or the budget was bigger or the story was more engaging. Ironman is superior due to acting. Robert Downey Jr. as the hero/antihero was riveting, believable, yet unpredictable. He looked wizened at times and full of youthful bravado at others. A bald Jeff Bridges as the villain revealed his duplicitiousness and depravity measure by measure until by the end he was believably evil just as Downey had been redeemed. Blanchett was fantastic as the evil Russian domantrix in Indiana Jones but she revealed all in the first five munutes. And let's face it when it comes to a Hollywood blockbuster, you are as only good as your villain. And sometimes acting trumps computer generated imagery.

I'm Over Hillary

2008-05-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

With her latest comments that mention the RFK assassination as a way to justify her staying in the face, it is clear that Hillary has lost it. She is not thinking clearly. The super delegates have to take her out of her misery and delusion and pledge their votes to Obama right away. Please. I don't want my Senator on the campaign trail anymore--uncensored, exhausted, and inappropriate. She has turned herself into a SNL skit.

Kirov/Forsythe

2008-04-17T08:19:00.000-07:00

The female dancers of the Kirov Ballet are otherworldly. Their extensions are breathtaking, verging on the grotesquerie of circus contortionists, yet always done with apparent ease and bravado. The extremeties of their positioning, the twist in the torso, the unlikely balance they hold, is truly shockingly virtuosic. One imagines they have been taking class and rehearsing nonstop since they were four years old.

Truth be told they aren't as good at dancing itself--that is moving from one position to another, with grace. But they sure do not how to punctuate their arrival at a position. I'd also say that their turns are not as strong as New York-based dancers, but no one can equal the stretch in their limbs--and no one else should even try. My favorite was the copper-headed Ekaterina Kondaurova though it must be said that the hoopla around Diana Vishneva is deserved.

The male dancers are not as muscular as their American counterparts, which allows them more flexibility in their torso and expressivity in their limbs, though they are not as athletic. Less concerned with extensions than the female dancers grants them with more of a chance to achieve grace in their movements: they have more time because their limbs have less distance to travel. The women move at breakneck speed--its exciting to watch but cuts into their ability to express movement; they focus too much at racing to the next position.

The angularity and litheness of the Kirov dancers is well suited to the choreography of Forsythe. I have no desire to see them attempt to perform Balanchine, except maybe his later leotard ballets, which are stark and dwell so much on the extreme female body. The Kirov dancers seemed liberated from Petipa and Folkine doing these modern works--they may not have intellectually understood Forsythe's subversiveness and attacks on theatrical conventions, but they certainly bonded with Forsythe's interest in the dancers' life--coming to class or rehearsals with street swagger, adopting the pose of the committed dancer in class and in rehearsals, and then going for broke in live performance. They responded to these tensions in Forsythe's work with integrity and commitment.

The ending of the dance "Approximate Sonata" is beautiful. It ends with the final couple discussing the dance to each other, repeating phrases. The man then reclines in a pose that cites Nijinsky in "Afternoon of a Faun" and the woman dances a solo in perfection. She moves to the lip of the stage as the curtain begins to come down slowly. She continues to dance--as if she might move forever--regardless of the audience, now that she has the admiring attention of her male counterpart, energized by his gaze, but lost in the intensity of the logic of the steps. The final image is of her dancing feet as the curtain lingers for a second before its descent is complete.

Elitists Can Be Bitter Too

2008-04-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

Like Obama (according to Hillary), I am an elitist. I don't go to small towns--unless it is charming, has a film, dance, and theatre festival and is near a mountain or along a coast. I only visit a church when I'm in Europe or South America and the edifice is old and historic and considered architecturally significant. The only beer I'd ever consider drinking is from Belgium. I will never believe in Yahweh. I will never hunt. I will never own a gun. I am not a vegetarian so I guess I am okay with other people killing animals. Forgive me Goddess, but I eat foie gras far more often than a hamburger.

Like Obama (according to Hillary), I am out of touch with small town America. I don't consider a town filled with gun totting, church-going, perhaps underemployed white people more American than my hardworking neighborhood of trendy gays, upwardly mobile straight people, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Eastern European families, and Japanese, Bangladeshi, and Isreali restaurant owners

I agree with Obama. Trained as a lawyer, he clearly has an inner sociologist inside him. (Hillary is also trained as a lawyer but she is truly a policy wonk.) I think his comments go a long way in explaining why working class and middle class white people in small towns vote against their economic interests in order to vote for a party or a candidate that professes to take away the rights of women, glbt people, and ensure their access to firearms and decrease the separation between church and state. One imagines Obama read the book What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank.

Is the country ready for a sociologist as President? Obama explained Rev. Wright's conspiracy theories by focusing on the Reverend's generational experiences and the racism of an earlier age. He distanced himself from the Reverend's anger. Rightly so. Likewise, he noticed that small town people often feel ripped off and have given up on the government helping them and have turned to restricting others' rights as compensation for decreased economic power. And he should distance himself from this anger too.

Anger is not always righteous...unless it is the well thought out anger of an elitist.

The Seagull with Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming

2008-04-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

For my birthday, K took me to the see new production of The Seagull. We had front row seats at the right corner of the stage area! The audience sat on three sides. The actors raced passed right in front of us when they make their entrances, storming onto the stage, in order to utter their witticisms, self-deprecations, and iterations of despair and/or joy. The experience was very exciting but disallowed us from stretching out or legs lest we trip one of the stars. A few thoughts:

in the last 20 years, I've only seen "deconstructions" of Chekhov done by the Wooster Group and truth be told it was so good to see an interpretation of the play (by Viaccheslav Dolgachev) rather than a pretentious reconsidering.
Dianne Wiest, who recently shocked me with her performances in In Treatment, was even better than I suspected. She was furiously exciting to watch as Arkadina. At times I felt as if she/Arkadina looked at me with disdain, disagreeing with my colorful green shirt when she responded with disdain at one of her Konstantin's challenges. When Wiest wasn't onstage, I grew impatient, always eager for her return. Yet I wanted her to be able to change outfits! After all Arkadina needs to laud herself with the line "say what you want about me, but I know how to dress!"
Chekhov is very funny, even though the play ends darkly--particularly in this production which digs into the humor and irony embedded in the first three acts.
I now realize tha Alan Cumming is a good actor. I had found him almost annoying before but his Trigorin was entracingly manipulative and he was never overshadowed completely by the necessary histrionics of Dianne Wiest.
the play documents the burgeoning entrance of the aesthetics of modernism--sounds pretentious, but the character of the son and his artistic aspirations, even though they are defeated in the play, also suggests that theatre that aspires to naturalism will no longer be possible. Chekhov uses humor and plays within plays to attack "the old ways."
Americans, including the Wooster Group, don't understand this. The Wooster Group adds postmodern schtick rather than mining the radicalism of Chekhov's work itself. Other Americans view the play too seriously, overlooking the subversive wit that challenges the enterprise of traditional theatre itself.
the best scene occurs when Arkadina realizes that Trigorin has been tempted by a younger woman. Flattering him, his talent, his importance, she ensnares him again. He can't help but respond to her over the top adoration (when a man is prisoner of his own ego, he is vulnerable to anyone who utters sweet words of praise) . After they embrace, reunited, they part and laugh, realizing that they have repeated one of the rituals of their relationship, and each has been acting up a storm. Also, the actors move momentarily out of their parts, laughing and enjoying each other's performances, as a way of contining to play their roles. Arkadina and Trigorin need to perform for each other in order to keep their relationship going; and at the same time Wiest and Cumming salute the wit in each other's acting. Total virtuosic genious, well directed.

"Love Me Less, But Love Me a Long Time"

2008-03-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to two cinemas and saw three movies. A grand Good Friday, even though I got so hungry at the Kip's Bay cineplex that I ordered chicken tenders, which then made my stomach a bit upset. Luckily it was nothing an overpriced Sprite couldn't fix.

First J and I went to see Be Kind Rewind by Michel Gondry, starring the usually tiresome and overly-schticky Jack Black and the more refined, versatile Mos Def. The film starts off slow, but turns into a laugh riot when the duo is joined by a local girl (Melonie Diaz). The trio make remakes of recent Hollywood blockbusters in order to satisfy the clientele of the soon to be shut down video store. These remakes--called Swedes--are brilliant. They make outrageous fun of and yet pay homage to traditional Hollywood product--from Robo Cop to Rush Hour II and especially Ghostbusters. The plot is heartwarming in the grand tradition of 40s weepies when a town unites and puts on a show, but here the town films its own mythic origins and deliberately agrees to invent its past. The films within the film are priceless and illustrate the importance of movies to people's lives without being preachy and judgmental.

After this hilarity , we sneaked into a recently opened animation feature based upon a book by Dr. Seuss. It features an elephant with especially good hearing, voiced by Jim Carrey (who was good in Gondry's Eternal Sunshine but I can't stand him generally--whoever told him he was funny when he was a child should now be punished!).

I wasn't so keen on seeing this film but J was eager to see it--he is a fan of animation in the cinema. I am not--I like animation on TV (especially South Park, but also Family Guy--I no longer care for the Simpsons) and I don't like Disney or Pixar. Shrek is okay but I am not a huge fan. (I did like Persepolis but that film subverts animation cliches--its almost anti-animation) Anyways J fell asleep almost immediately (well the seats are comfortable and they do recline) and seemed to be enjoying his nap so much that I decided to sit through it. After all it was made for kids and it couldn't last too long. Well it went on and on and no kangaroo with Carol Burnett's voice was going to save this venture for me (I kept thinking kangaroos don't live in jungles with monkees!). Plus in a game of "would you rather" -- I'd have to choose Jack Black over Jim Carrey anytime.

After J woke up and I visited the ATM, we jumped into a cab to take us to the IFC cinema on 6th Ave to meet up with D in order to see Love Songs (Les Chansons d'Amour) on opening day. D and I saw the coming attractions--and as it was a musical set in Paris that featured Louis Garrel who has the most pouty lips, the most unruly black hair, and the best Gallic nose this side of Gerard Depardieu--we decided it was a must-see. Garrel looks like he could have stepped out of a 60s Godard film, one in which he talks incessantly about the necessity and yet the tragedy of revolution as a way to seduce a female who may have the soul of a poet, but has the hair style that includes the bangs of a fashion model.

I remember Garrel from The Dreamers and from La Mere and if I were a few years younger I would allow myself to put a poster of him on my wall. He is perfect for movies about threesomes, fluid sexuality, and the most expressive ways to walk down Parisian streets--either with your male or female lover--or even by yourself (immersed in thoughts about the impossibility of lasting love or the ridiculousness of the bourgeoisie). Homeboy was born to brood.

Love Songs is a musical. Watching the film, one never knows when an actor is going to start singing--but they never burst into song like in an American musical, rather they slide into a recitative with music and rhyming lyrics. Written by Alex Beaupain, the songs are simple and hark back to Les Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Michel Legrand but also reminded me of Francoise Hardy at times--and Jacques Brel. Nobody sings with beautiful, trained voices but each has a singing voice that reveals a sweetness that the dialog might not show. I loved the music and must confess to having bought the soundtrack from iTunes. None of the staging of the songs is fantastical or especially imaginative--except one song that has two potential male lovers discuss their desires via singing into cellphones even though they are on the same street. Its easier for them to sing of their potential attraction via the phone rather than face-t0-face. Indeed.

Garrel's character looses his great love in the film, but then finds another unexpectedly. When he realizes his vulnerability he responds to the ardent confessions of his new amour, "love me less, but love me a long time." Those words stung me. Without revealing too much about my own romantic travails, I wish I had uttered such a line to those charming ex's who hit all the notes when they sang of love. If its my turn to be melodramatic, if I'd have to say that sometimes its not kind to rewind and its best to make your own remake...or Swede.

Rev. Wright Is Not Wrong

2008-03-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, I understand why Barack Obama has to distance himself from Rev. Wright and the feverish sermons he delivered about the U.S. He has to ensure potential voters that he disagrees with his spiritual mentor in order to advance his candidacy. For example, I spoke to my friend C from Chicago--proud of her Senator but worried about McCain winning--and she said her mother professed that she just can't vote for Obama now. As if she was looking for a reason not to vote for the right candidate and found the rationale in finding evidence that he has been revealed as an "angry black man" from the South Side. And indeed Hillary and McCain are doing better in the polls since these sermons "went viral" even though Obama gave an excellent speech, and did not rely upon his oratorical flourishes in order to "sell it."

But I like that Obama sought out inspiration from a fiery preacher who is angry at the American legacies of racism and imperialism. It makes me like Obama more. And I don't agree that the anger that energizes Wright is of an earlier generation and that we have now moved beyond it. We are not "post-anger." Sexual and racial minorities--and the working classes--have neither achieved equality nor amassed power to transform their situation--nor do I think that they ever will under this economic and political structure that ensures oligopoly and the maintenance of a two party system through elections that privileges states with the smallest and the whitest and the most presumably heterosexual of populations via the electoral college (okay I'm still am armchair marxist who leaves his rent stabliized apartment to shop for designer goods at Century 21--I can embrace and critique my commodity festishism at once...as well as my own contradictions). Obama is wrong: the power of lobbyists is not an etiology for our stand-off. Lobbyists are but a symptom of a larger malady.

Yet I will feel better voting for Obama against McCain--knowing that he has been witness to Rev. Wright's righteous fury.

And I admit to my own contradictions--I don't believe that right wing preachers and Catholic priests should be allowed to espouse their political views on abortion and gay/gender rights. I defend the secular state and demand that the separation between church and state is strengthened. But I do think left wing clergy should be able to challenge their parishioners to see more clearly the reasons for political divisions and economic inequality.

Drunk Enough to Say I Hate Caryl Churchill's New Anti-American Play

2008-03-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Its happened. I've been offended by an artwork's anti-American stance. Me! It occurred as I was watching Caryl Churchill's new play at the Public Theatre, ridiculously entitled Drunk Enough to Say I Love You. The only kindness Churchill showed her audience was that the play lasts only 45 minutes.

The play is an attempt to distill the relationship between American and English postwar economic and political structures and especially foreign policy ventures into a relationship between two men. In this over-simplified allegory, one is a brash unapologetic American guy, the other is a more timid Englishman who is over-impressed by his lover's bravado, and his all encompassing world view. The Englishmen (named Jack as in "Union Jack"), though, shows signs of disagreeing with his American counterpart (named Sam as in "Uncle Sam"), but his love for his more butch American pal blocks him from really taking a stand. How tediously reductive! And wrong! How long will English writers put forward this notion of the more reclined, muddled Englishman who is dazzled by the more action-oriented American. Its a horrid cliche. And its just not historically accurate or politically useful.

I hate that European leftists use seven years of George W. Bush's regime here to act as if their countries have no colonial legacy and no history of imperialist atrocities. If America is an expansionist empire, it has only carried forth the traditions inititated most recently by the English and the French and before them the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch. And England's recent imperialist misadventure in the Falklands/Malvinas and its recent mistreatment of Irish prisoners shows that independent of American influence, England has continued its neo-colonial tactics all on its own. England is not a timid, impressionable wimp homoerotically charged to reluctantly go along with American foreign policy.

This play evades how culpable England is to how the world was--and is--carved up. Think how many of the world's geopolitical crises have to do with the European legacy of imperialism. Think of civil war in Iraq which was provoked not only by America's invasion (Iraq's borders are a result of English colonial governance) and think of ongoing conflicts between Pakistan and India--the trace of England's cruelty is everywhere, beginning far before the U.S. entered the world stage and continuing alongside it, motivated by its own indigenous ideologies, not those imported from the States. And lest we forgot, the U.S.A.'s birth as an Anglo-American pseudo-democracy is a result of English repression. Otherwise America might just be a femme settler colony, all too willing to be a butt boy in the English empire.

The implicit, reductive message of the play is that America is fucking England in the ass. How tiresome and typical to reduce global politics to heterosexist views of "sodomy." I suppose Churchill knows nothing of power bottoms! She has to return to the old binaries of active and passive. And somehow Jack/England becomes an enabling partner in a dysfunctional relationship in which "Jack" looses his identity.

Shame on you Caryl Churchill!

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence

2008-02-22T08:39:00.000-08:00

Friday night audiences can be tough, its true. Tired after a week of work, they can be grumpy, distant, reluctant to leave their lives behind for two hours and instead wallow in their own anxieties. At the Joyce on 15 February the audience was tough--seemingly unable to fully acknowledge the exuberant, virtuosic dancing onstage. Also the Joyce had many empty seats, which is very surprisingly because Evidence is a hot dance company that gets alot of press (a puff piece had come out in the NY Times the day before) and Ron Brown is also known for his choreography for the Alvin Ailey Company (the most popular dance company in the world), including the sublime piece I saw a few years ago called "Grace." The Joyce needs to advertise a bit more and target specific audiences, and not rely on its subscribers. There was no reason for this not to be sold out.

It wasn't until the final piece, the older "Upside Down", that the audience completely came out of its stupor. Perhaps the addition of live music over the recorded sound (two drummers and the amazing vocalist Wunmi) helped, but I also think this was the most realized piece of the night, freed from the religiousity and gospel spirit of the earlier pieces, and completely devoted to expression, sexuality, and questions of tempo, gesture, and precision masquerading as abandonment. It was gleeful to watch and one wanted the dance to go on for ever and to enter into the joyous fray--I could not sit still. Brown's vocabulary--which draws from African, African-American, and jazz traditions--was exuberantly enunciated. With so many movement phrases and postures to choose from, he always seems to make the right choice.

His company is made up of dancers of diverse body types. Arcell Cabuag is not a tall fellow, especially in relation to the other male dancers. But his movements were so exact and seemingly so full of ease and rhythmic intensity that he loomed large. Keon Thoulouis was long and lean, with a physique that was thankfully unlike the overmuscled male dancer that is now so prevalent. He was especially limnal and when in extension he took up the whole stage. Each dancer had a distinct personality and each had their moment to stand out. At the end of the evening at the curtain call, with Munmi singing the refrain from the old Police song "sending out an SOS" we were all on our feet, clapping, singing along. I hope ticket sales were better for the rest of the run.

A Ballerina Tumbles; A Company in Trouble?

2008-02-22T07:13:00.001-08:00

To start with, I was suffering from a migraine. I was also tired and had been in meetings all day long. But I was determined to make it to Lincoln Center and enjoy my last visit to New York City Ballet this season on 19 February.

The program entitled "Inspirations" (not a very inspiring word) began with "Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fee.'" Perhaps this is not Balanchine's best work--in fact it may be one of his worst but I shouldn't judge it on this performance--but it does have a lovely ending that Balanchine added onto it later in 1974. The two leads, Megan Fairchild and Benjamin Millepied, were a disaster. First she stumbled by tripping over on her own feet while on point and then in the next passage she hit the deck, falling completely. The impact of her behind on the stage was almost audible and the audience gasped in disbelief, disdain, and concern for her. K and I looked at each other, both aghast--I've seen a member of the corps fall in recent years, and the general quality of the dancing has become recognizably worse in the last five years, but I've never seen a principal dancer hit the deck. It became difficult to watch her as one worried for her next misstep. I suspect she had the flu and insisted she was well enough to dance, but the ballet master should not have let her on the stage.

Her partner, Benjamin Millepied was incredibly boring to watch. We sit way up at the Fourth Circle but when a performance is right the dancers begin to loom large and actually appear closer than they are. Millipied was a million miles away and became a speck. I am sure he forgot the steps during his solo and begin to improvise--and let me tell you he is not very good at improvisation. K wondered if his poor dancing was deliberate, a form of protest against some backstage tensions between the dancer and management. The woman who sat next to us who has been coming to NYCB for other 30 years said she never saw anything this poor. I'm not sure if she'll come back. I felt like I was watching my classmates in my first dance class at college.

The company did rebound as the evening progressed and my migraine thankfully lessened. I finally saw a Peter Martins piece I enjoyed ("The Chairman Dances"), though ;part of my enjoyment was due to the beautiful John Adams score and the intensity of Abi Stafford's commitment to Martin's orientalist gestures and the chinoiserie of the costuming. In sum, the choreography was too simple and its relationship to the music was too literal.

Christopher Wheeldon's "Rococo Variations" featured two couples performing simultaneous pas de deux's. The couples often mirrored each other, but then seemed to smash through the mirror. There was wit and eloquence in the piece, but one wished that Wheeldon also made use of the corps--why do a ballet for four people when you have a huge company to work with? Some of the mirroring and synchronicity would have been nicely magnified by filling the stage with couples that both acknowledged and ignored each other.

The evening finished with Balanchine's "Star and Stripes." This piece is truly cotton candy at the state fair (or salt water taffy on the boardwalk) and its an unabashed crowd pleaser, but I love it. No one fell and everyone danced exuberantly and didn't look like they were making up the steps, so after a troublesome evening, Balanchine, not given to melodrama and not often interested in story ballets, provided us with a happy ending. It was an ending that did not erase the beginning, and it is clear that the company is in trouble.

Arte No Es Vida

2008-02-10T07:12:00.000-08:00

B and I went to a great exhibit at El Museo Del Barrio on performative actions by Latin Americans artists since 1960. While some of the recent work was familiar to me--Guillermo Gomez Pena, Coco Fusco, Jesusa Rodriguez, Carmelita Tropicana--either because it was NY-based or had traveled to NY--so much of the earlier work was new to me and some of it was quite funny, inventive, effective, and original, even as the influence of dada, fluxus, happenings, and early performance art was clear.

I liked the documentation from the Destructivist artists, especially Raphael Montanez Ortiz's video of the "Piano Destruction Concert." The piano is such a sacred object in Western culture, so revered in bourgeous culture as the site of virtuousity and the display of genious, that it was a joy to see a piano attacked and defeated.

Antonio Manuel's piece "The Body is the Work" (1970) was a great example of an attack on the artistic establishment. He insisted his naked body was a work of art and when his proposal was not accepted by Rio's Museum of Modern Art, he ran into the museum nude. In the documentation, he looked like he headed up to the rafters of the museum, trying to evade capture by the guards. I suppose on one level he was just an early streaker, but due to the setting of his intervention, and the intensity of his performance in the video, the piece is quite funny and subversive.

Felipe Ehrenberg's "A Date with Fate at the Tate" (1970) continues this attack on the art establishment. He dressed up in an extreme costume and when to the Tate Gallery informing the guards that he was installing himself as a piece of art. He came with a tape recorder and was able to store the debate that ensued between himself and the gallery officials.

Marta Minujin's work stood out in the show for its monumentalism and its use of duration and its intelligent political intervention. Her Parthenon of Books (1983) was a replica of the famed Greek building made out of books banned by the Argentinean regime. Then it was disassembled and people were allowed to take the books home. More humorously was her piece "Panettone Obelisk"--an obelisk made out of sweet raisin buns. I love how she makes fun of these structures of symbolic import that resound through different iterations of European-based culture and uses them for her own devices.

Less political for sure, but perhaps most shocking was Maria Fernanda Cardoso's "Cordoso Flea Circus"--its an actual flea circus (appearing in a videotape). She actually enlisted seemingly eager fleas in a series of circus-like acts. I couldn't watch it too long without feeling itchy and uncomfortable but I also couldn't stop staring at those theatrical fleas.

After the exhibit, B and I walked cross Central Park to her home, but we stopped first at the conservatory gardens that are across the street from the museum. There was a lone gardener working in the tulip garden getting the soil ready and working on the vines over the trellis. He promised that the tulips will put on their show in April. But I liked how the gardens were orderly and evocative in this bleak, snowless, and dank February. Its a great site for an interventional art projection, but the place was so empty and seemingly cut off from the city no one would notice.

Yes, I Might Vote for Hillary Clinton

2008-02-03T13:18:00.000-08:00

Yes, its true. I might vote for Hillary, though I never liked her very much--until recently.

If I pull the lever for her (I am going to decide when I am in the booth), its really due to mainstream media, particularly the cable news networks and especially Chris Matthews. The news media has not treated her fairly. And they have set an agenda for Barack Obama and they have not scrutinized his candidacy--perhaps some of the gatekeepers themselves have become enthralled by Obama's oratory (part of me says "No we can't" when his crowds repeat "Yes We Can") or perhaps the Obama PR team has really succeeded in pushing its talking points forward--all that unity, anti-Washington, pro-bipartisan, gee whiz Republicans aren't all bad kind of talk. Please do not tell me that Reagan had ideas--he had an image not ideas, thank you. Indeed the Republicans did had new ideas, those generated by the neocon thinktanks--and these ideas have almost ruined this country and have destroyed Iraq.

I began to listen to Hillary after she lost in Iowa and many of the straight white men in media started celebrating her emminent demise rather permaturely. I listened to her recite her policy initiatives clearly. She is resilient and realistic and specific. She doesn't move me, she doesn't make me believe in humanity, she doesn't preach bipartisanship--in fact she doesn't preach at all. No, she doesn't believe in gay marraige, she doesn't sound outraged and disgusted that Exxon has announced its highest profits ever but she does mention that executives are often overpaid. She is mainstream. She has a husband that lives on the border between kind of charming and outright annoying. Some of the Kennedys may prefer Obama--Obama is more elegant and dreamy. That's okay. I trust Hillary, feel like I have a sense of her. She is substantial and smart and wonkish in a post -Britney Spears/Paris Hilton world when the popular culture of the Bush era part two has been so antifeminist, so insistent that a woman's body is more important than her mind. She's pear-shaped. She wears pant suits. Who cares? I don't want to have a beer with her but I wouldn't mind running into her and pouring her a nice glass of sauvingnon blanc. I think I might vote for Hillary.

Mr. B and the Ladies

2008-01-20T09:34:00.000-08:00

K took me to my first visit to NYC Ballet this season. There is only one all-Ballanchine program (entitled Balanchine's World), which is unfortunate because it is very difficult to sit through a Martins ballet and Robbins' work is often tedious and obvious and derivative. But it was great to see four very different Balanchine works.

We sat in on our old row in the 4th circle. Everyone is familiar to us there as now we've been coming for years.

The evening started out with "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Boring. Much of the dance is at a funereal tempo, and it is constructed so that none of the four couples is featured over another. Yet the dancing from the corps lacked uniformity and accuracy and one wished for an old and cruel ballet mistress with a whip rehearsing the piece over and over in order to make it exact and martial as well as egalitarian.

"Tarantella' was frisky, yet once again the male lead, the newcomer Gonzalo Garcia missed some of the beats with his tambourine, though he did dance with a rakish charm. In fact, I would even say that Balanchine overused the tambourine in the choreography--its sound became a bit tedious and the device too gimmicky.

After the intermission the show really began. "Bugaku" was a spellbounding drama that weas shrouded in ritualistic orientalism yet at its core revealed a sweaty, sexy pas de deux, danced with steadfast tempo and virtousic intensity by Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans. I even thought that this piece might not be danced during a matinee as it was too sexual for the children. Choreographed in '63, this piece had a sexuality to it that transmitted so radiantly from the stage--one was watching the lovemaking of two Japanese nobles, and the increasing open-ness of Kowroski, responding to Evans' plaintive and urgent touches, walked the line between suggestive eroticism and overt pornography. Not one for the displays of heterosexual couplings, I'd have to say it was hot.

The pas de deux is surrounded by a dance that includes three other men and women. The entrances and exits were most exciting and so soft, and although one could find fault with the stereotypical Japanoiserie of the movements and the makeup and the set, it was exciting to watch the female dancers walk on their heels so softly, yet with the determination to involve themselves in a solemn ceremony. Balanchine's use of the flexed foot, particularly with the men, combined his interest in angularity and awkward posings with his investment in finding balletic movements that matched the Japanese sonorities of the music. It was a riveting piece.

The night finished with "La Somnambula" (as all nights should, though it is a very sad piece). When I say this is my favorite piece of Balanchine's I should say I love its last half, after the entrance of the sleepwalker herself (the beginning is tedious to me now and I just wish I could fast forward through frothy shenanigans at the court to the good part--the tragic, unlikely love story between a poet and a woman who may not be awake yet it is entirely responsive). Wendy Whelan was once again transcendent--part spectre, part ethereal Goddess--as Nikolaj Hubbe gently directed her about the stage in her state of sleep that allows her to be aware of her beloved but only in an unconscious way. As light as Whelan is in her dance on point, one arm outstretched to permanently holding a candle, she is intensely strong as she carries the very large body of the murdered poet (Hubbe is by no means skinny and he is surely over 6 feet tall) at the end of the ballet. K and I were once again undone by her performance and the power of her mourning. I did a "Hillary" and tears welled up in my eyes.

K and I raced down to the souvenir desk to see if any "Wendy Whelan" ballet slippers were for sale--with no embarrassment. The woman told us when they might become available--they are the hardest ones to get.

Yoko Ono is in Brazil

2008-01-09T08:28:00.000-08:00

I saw two exhibits of Yoko Ono's work in Brazil. One is Sao Paulo, the other in Rio. One planned, the other by chance.

At the almost abandonned museum of modern art (a brutalist dream/nightmare of curvilinear concrete that lacks the tropic utopianism of Oscar Niemeyer that is usual of Brazilian modernism) near the small airport in Rio (along the harbor). And the Banco do Brazil Cultural Center (a belle epoque mansion with lots of frilly embellishments) in Sao Paulo. I cried when I walked into the room that held the installation Endangered Species, 2319-2322; I felt the need for peace reverberate through me, both shocking and reviving.

So though I live in the same city as Yoko Ono, I encountered her in Brazil in a way I never had before (though I loved her outdoor concert with DJ Spooky and Thurston Moore in Battery Park). I thought a lot about her under-recognized place in art and politics and I spent dynamic time discussing her with my friends there. I wrote the following in the Marian Palace Hotel in the rather deserted downtown of Sao Paulo. The hotel is a mid-century fantasy. The furniture in my room would have sent E-bay dealers in a tizzy and the simple deco lighting fixtures in the room were iconic and pure. The large window opened up onto a breathtaking urban vista dominated by a dalipadated church in the foreground and skyscrapers in the background. I woke to church hymns and traffic and Brazilian voices. The morning light was caffeinated.

I wrote these instructions in homage to Yoko and the arc of her lifework and they also cite my recent memories of Rio-its beaches, sunsets, and the ways in which people assemble and gain expression by being physically and emotionally close to each other:

imagine Yoko, not as the center but as the periphery
imagine her laugh
remember there are two superpowers in the world, the US and humanity.

light a candle
sit and look at the flame
blow the candle out
imagine the light inside

encounter the sound of water as it meets land
imagine yourself as that sound
disappear into your senses as you emerge as one as many
surrender to a smile

look at the sweep of the beach at sunset
let the light quiet you
see the moon rise as an experience inside yourself.
hold hands

decide that tomorrow you will clean a place in your room
sleep

listen to the language being spoken around you.
decide it is nonsense but full of meanings
recognize that all language twists the tongue
say obrigado/a over and over
thank the gods and saints for Brazil
think of nice things to say about your friends

remember to treat a person
with the dedication and awe in which you treat your most beloved objects
and remember any object can always be replaced and is already a copy
but your beloved is an original

remember how fun it is to clap your hands
stomp your feet
snap your fingers
and sing

look out the window
go to the wall
remember the view
paint it

dance:
1. stand still
2 on one leg
3 than the other
4 stretch your arms out then up then out then down without telling your body what to do
5 stare at the roadmap of your hands and plan your route
6 abandon it and just move

The Bridge

2007-12-08T07:48:00.001-08:00

Due to popular demand I screened the film The Bridge in the last session of one of my courses. Admittedly it is odd to show a film about people who commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge but as the course was about madness and media, the film was an appropriate culminating moment for the course. Also in another course (about documentary) a student showed a clip of the film in her presentation when she was discussing contemporary nonfiction films that explore taboos (the student also showed Zoo, which is "about" bestiality). The Bridge may have left the cinemas over a year ago (and I don't remember it lasting very long) but it is having a very strong after-life.

The film is an eerie aesthetic delight; it encourages the oxymoronic imagination in any attempt to describe the film (gorgeous horror, horrific beauty and so on). One sees the Golden Gate bridge from a multitude of perspectives. In some shots, the bridge becomes shrouded in a cloak made of thick fog. In others, the bridge appears recently polished, shockingly bright, multiplying light. A feat of humanity in its engineering and construction, something that connects two shores once impossibly far apart, but a deathly object that lurks in the unconscious, haunting us.

The bridge, like the camera, takes on a dispassionate stance toward those who climb over the 4-foot guard rail onto the ledge. The film, like the camera, doesn't seem to care if you are a German tourist taking photos or a young American suffering from bipolar disorder with constant suicide ideation. The film crew trained two cameras onto the bridge for a year waiting to capture jumps/falls. Yet at the same time the crew tried to prohibit suicide attempts as they always called authorities whenever they saw someone go toward the railing and begin to climb over. The film only shows two jumps/falls--one in its complete trajectory, done gracefully, and begun by a backwards leap from atop the railing and another where the leap's velocity is too fast for the camera to keep up with. I don't want to indict the film for the emotional distance it keeps, but there is no doubt that the film indulges in the aestheticization of suicide itself, allowing the audience to understand why such a location is chosen in order to dramatize and heighten the event and render suicide into an act of performance as well as desperation.

The filmmakers are not present in the film: they are not seen or heard and there is no voice-over instructing the viewer on how to comprehend the footage. Instead much of the film is narrated by friends, families, and witnesses of the suicide victims through the form of interviews (again we don't hear the questions that were asked by the filmmaker). The interviews are filmed with the subjects talking straight into the camera (not at the interviewer) and the camera never moves in for an extreme close up, keeping a respectful distance. The friends and families are also dispassionate, never weeping, though they do wonder what if anything else could have been done. In sum, they seem remarkably philosophical and appear to be already processed by grief counsellors: they understand why the person committed suicide in most cases and do not implicate themselves or their own attitudes as causal. Often they sound incredibly selfish and fail to rethink the dynamics and situation of the suffering of the victim. One interview stood out in the honesty of his contradictory response: a close friend of Gene's (the fellow with the graceful jump/fall) spoke of being angry at him, yet at the same time he began to shed tears, allowing one to witness the range of emotions he felt from sorrow to rejection. There is a general denial of mourning in the film, and with somber background music that begins to suggest an interiority of the bridge itself, the film indulges in melancholy and shock. Again this is not an indictment of its strategy, and I appreciated how sad the film was, and yet it never made me want to cry.

For me the film has two heroes: one is a photographer and the other is a young man who survives the jump/fall. The photographer is brazenly forthright when he discusses in a voice-over beginning to take photos of a young woman who climbs over the railing. He admits how he continues to shoot, transfixed by the event, and feeling as if he is lucky to have the opportunity to document such an event. As he is behind a camera, he is unable to acknowledge how the event before him is actually taking place--it becomes representational. For a few seconds he is unable to recognize that a life is at risk and he has a duty to intervene. He stands in, in a sense, for the filmmaker, who also is drawn to witness the horror without stopping it. The photographer's sense of reality though does return to him, and we see him grab the young woman and drag her back over the railing and pin her to the ground. Though he recounts how the young woman stares at him without any gratefulness when she is taken away by police, he has done the right thing.

The other hero in the film is Kevin. As soon as he leaves the bridge he realizes that he doesn't want to die, and in the four seconds that it takes to travel the 220 feet (at 72 mph) he arranges his body so as to have the least impact when he hits the water. His interview is riveting and we can begin to see and hear how happy and fortunate he is to be alive now. When he is bobbing at the water after making his way up to the surface, unable to scream for help, seals come to his rescue and support him. Though Kevin views this as God helping him, I see this as seals themselves coming to his rescue in a way that his family never did. In my imagination the seals save him because they sense his will to live (I have always loved seals). They realize, like the photographer, that life must always be saved even if it is a life that seems to promise much pain.

I'm Not There

2007-12-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

When a Todd Haynes movie comes to town it is a must-see for those in my social milieu. There are few other filmmakers who have that hold on us (forgive me for not defining who this "us" is, but there is no way to do so without sounding like an elitist or pretentious). Pedro Aldomovar is also another filmmaker who has this relationship to his American audience. I imagine for for an earlier generation Wertmuller or Pasolini or Fellini (there's homage to Fellini in this film) had captured the imagination of New Yorkers, and going to the latest film of one of these directors probably took on the sense of urgency that I felt yesterday. Especially as the film has already been in the theatres for over a week now and I've read the reviews and friends and colleagues were raving--and not raving--about the film. I simply had to go Sunday--there was no choice and surely no early December snowstorm was going to keep me from going.

But then I went to the wrong cinema.

B got the tickets ahead of time. I wanted to go uptown because I find the Film Forum's seats too uncomfortable and the screen too small. I got it into my head that it was showing at the Lincoln Square multiplex, which would have suited me fine. But it was at the Lincoln Plaza theatre. Oops. S and I had to run down Broadway. I guess I just didn't want to sit uncomfortably--why does one have to suffer uncomfortable seating when going to "arty" films?

Of course Cate Blanchett was getting most of the attention before the film's release as she was playing one of the Dylan personae (and the one that inhabits the Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back) and she is apparently biologically female. It was a great feat of mimicry--she had clearly studied the film closely and knew Dylan's mannerisms, cadences, and the movement of his head, neck, hands, and feet. She was appropriately androgynous, which was part of the allure of the young Dylan--the tumble of unruly hair, the beautiful pale skin, and a rebel stance, rebelling against his own image as it was being concretized by reporters and critics.

Marcus Carl Franklin was also inspiring playing a young black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie. The character tries to keep a Depression era vagabond spirit alive, and he rides the railroads in search of song, speaking of unions and the people. In fact Haynes alternates between this notion of the 30s as a era in which voices and faces of the people appear (and some of the sequences are filmed in homage to WPA photographs, with the faces of urban and rural black and white Americans looking straight into the camera) and the 60s as a time of unrest both in the streets but also within the psyches of people who take on the role of spokesmen or women for their generation. Thus the unrest resides in tumultuous relationships and both inside and outside people.

Having one of the incarnations of Dylan played by a woman and another played by a young black man made a subtle but important point about how unfixed Dylan's identity was--and how his identifications with women and with black music infused his own mythology. Yes, he was a white middle Jewish man, but like Rimbaud (also another Dylan personae depicted in the film) his "I is another." He exists in a series of negations of who he is and suggestions that his "real" self if such an cohesive entity exists, is always in the next county or over the next mountain range. The American landscape itself allows for this slipperiness of identity.

There is very little interaction between characters in I'm Not There--instead there are scenes that focus on characters giving testimony, preaching, being interviewed, or performing in front of others. For me there was too much archival footage--after all, if one is going to recreate scenes from Don't Look Back, why rely on clips from TV to give a sense of the era? Why not recreate this footage? That seemed liked unnecessary shorthand, or laziness especially in a film that is meticulous, endlessly imaginative, and so devoted to diversifying and re-mythologizing an American icon rather than "deconstructing" (hate that word...gee thanks Derrida) him.

And oh yes, the music in the film was great. I'm sure to listen to and watch this film many times and will no doubt change my mind about it and notice new aspects and details. One thing I'm sure of now, though. I'm Not There isn't as sexy as The Velvet Goldmine.

Scott Matthew

2007-11-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

F and I walked down 1st avenue and onto Allen St to Rockwood Music Hall to hear Scott Matthew. He's been mugged and his hand and arm needs mending and he is without health insurance--like so many in the USA now (if Kucinich can't get elected because he saw an alien ship and has Vulcan ears, can at least some of his policies get picked up by the mainstream candidates?). Rockwood Music Hall is actually a tiny attractive square room, with great acoustics as the ceilings are as high as the width of the room, so when the audience is silent, Matthew's voice had free range to bounce about the room.

And what a voice! He did an evening of covers (my favorite was Lou Reed's "Candy Says") and with piano accompaniment he slowed each song down to a mournful, reflective pace allowing both the words and the temperment of his voice to become expressive. He pours emotion into his singing with incredible affect and when he slides into his falsetto I instantly want to cry, His chest voice has a rough grain to it--an ex-smoker perhaps?--and it sounds as if he is holding back on his vibrato, which adds tension to his voice that is very engrossing. He is breathy at times, but his pitch is always perfect. There is drama itself in the way he sings...and his voice has a flexibility to it. He has to make choices in how he wants his voice to sound and he usually chooses in service to the song, not in an indulgence of his own sonority.

In all his covers, he is faithful to the melody of the original (he plays with tempo though) yet he always adds his signature to the song--a sense that he has lived the words and that their meanings inhabit him. I know nothing of his personal life, but he clearly has gone through the travails of love and loss. For me, and for all who fought back tears in the room, Scott Matthew is New York's balladeer.

The Shadow of Isaac Julien and Russell Maliphant

2007-11-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

For her birthday I took S to see the Russell Maliphant/Isaac Julien collaboration at BAM last night--called Cast No Shadow, the performance was decidedly an event. Lots of important people in the audience and we ran into many people we knew and knew about (there were three other faculty from my department there, so it was almost a faculty meeting!).

I've seen Russell Maliphant's choreography before--he has worked with the incredible, rebellious ballerina Sylvia Guillem and his dances are always supplemented and energized by the lighting designer he works with, Michael Hulls. And such was the case last night, the lighting design was really the unsung hero.

Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston was on the syllabus of my nonfiction class this past week, so I thought it was kismet that he was also at BAM the same week. Seeing Looking for Langston again was a great pleasure, it is such a triumph of art direction and camera movement and editing (I'm not a fan of the audio in the film, until the last segment). It evokes both Harlem of the 1920s and the late 80s so perfectly.

Cast No Shadow is a dynamic collaboration between the filmmaker and the choreographer that worked best in the last piece, entitled "Small Boats", which depicts and ruminates upon those who travel across the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. The camera begins moving quickly across the frames of abandoned, washed up boats. A small black seam appears in the middle of the large screen that becomes larger, creating a triptych. The black seam expands and dancers behind the screen become visible. The composite image becomes more and more intense and fractured and enlivened as the dancing figures become more delineated and foregrounded by the lighting.

"Small Boats" was an incredibly evocative and affective piece--I thought I would burst out in tears at one point over the sadness of drowning anonymous bodies as the dancers become entangled in a net--that was both a feat of film making and dancing. At times the dancers appeared in the film and the dancers behind the scrim/screen mimicked their movements. The doubling was gorgeous and ghostly. At times the film stopped, allowing the choreography to come forward more, even though the dancers were always held behind the gauze. In one segment, a flag and pole that had been on screen became an actual flag and pole that three male dancers performed a pas de deux with, in movements that came both from martial arts and modern dance. It was a startling image to see each dancer contend with this object that both enabled and restrained their movement. Another startling image occurred in the film itself, when a dancer tumbled down--and then up (as the film was flipped upside down)--a staircase in an opulent, yet decaying train station in Sicily, showing both the dislocation of the dancer as well as the immigrant's survivability. The image was so strong that gasps were heard in the audience--and this was an audience that would not gasp easily!

The first two pieces were also beautiful but the collaboration and the integration and separation of dance and film was perhaps not as successful. "True North" was a meditation of the first person to reach the North Pole, Matthew Henson, who was African American. Filmed in Iceland, it was expansive and the film had a mysterious woman marching through the tundra and freezing beaches. She also appeared live on stage as counterpart to the dancers. "Fantome Africa", featured the same wandering, mysterious woman, and also depicted the importance of cinema in the capital city of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou. Julien made the presence of his small film crew clear and showed the placement of film posters and a film center in the city. He also included archival footage of "primitive" Africa in the triptych, suggesting how much of Africa appears to us through films and how much of the west appears to Africans via Hollywood film.

One left the theatre, as S said, realizing that one had seen something entirely new, political without being in any way didactic, with aesthetics that were both pleasing and troubling. I could have watched "Small Boats" forever--it was mesmerizing, but I also wanted it to end as it was almost more than my emotions and senses could take. It was a new kind of gesamkunstwerk, one that would have horrified Wagner.

Farnsworth vs. Sarnoff

2007-11-10T10:54:00.001-08:00

B took me to see a Broadway play in previews! The evening before the stagehands went on strike as it turned out! (Now the writers in Hollywood and NYC and the stagehands are on strike, a double whammy for the entertainment industry--management better settle) We saw the Farnsworth Invention, written by Aaron Sorkin who wrote A Few Good Men and The West Wing (I never could get into that show) and starring Hank Azaria (of The Simpsons).

The play tells the story of the conflict between Farnsworth (arguably the man who invented television) and Sarnoff (arguably the first media mogul of the 20th century, the guy who wanted to bring television to the American masses). The play, though it was inventively staged, need television itself. That is, some of it should have taken place on large LCD television monitors, so that the medium itself, and not just discussion of it and silly simulations of early experiments, could have become a character itself. There was extensive narration in the play (the Jewish urban Sarnoff narrates some of the scenes that tell the story of Farnsworth, the country bumpkin Mormon, and vice versa). This narration should have appeared on a large tv screen (or multiple screens), with the narrator in an extreme close up with the actor/narrator being televised from onstage. The director should call 1-800-WoosterGroup for some tips. The medium itself should have been imposed upon the audience, rather than just ironic dialogue about how tv will never work and never be popular and so forth.

The play was rather revisionist about the life of David Sarnoff, humanizing him, and making him almost sympathetic, or at least comprehensible. He wasn't so bad really, it was just that the Cossacks burned down his house in Russia when he was 10 years old and he had to make sure to burn Farnsworth's house down before Farnsworth torched the Sarnoff mansion. A little bit reductive I say--to explain much of American media history via childhood trauma but Azaria did a great job in trying to show how the most powerful of men often feel as if they are under siege, always about to go completely under if they don't stay on top.

And as much as I disagreed with the play, it was great fun to see theatre about a subject matter I've studied (well I know more about radio and Sarnoff) and how successful the writer was in explaining how television works and the kind of patent struggles that went into the development of 20th century media. Perhaps in order to keep up with contemporary audiences, we will see plays or biopics about Bill Gates/Microsoft and its legal battles or Steve Jobs and how the iPod saved Apple or how two guys at Stanford started Google or even how Major General Squier came up with Muzak. Entrepreneurs and inventors of new technology rival outlaws from the Wild Wild West as the most beloved of American heroes. Except that "losers" like Philo Farnsworth or Edwin Armstrong or Nikola Telsa often receive second billing. Even in this play, which argues the without Farnsworth, Zworkyin's "invention" would not have been possible, Sarnoff/Azaria still gets star billing.

Into the Wild

2007-11-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

I will always remember Sean Penn as Jeff Specoli in Fast Times in Ridgemont High. I know he is all grown up now, a serious auteur perhaps, a political activist, and an indulgent actor who like Jack Nicholson is sometimes good and sometimes annoyingly mannered. To me Specoli was iconic--his mischievousness, the text book fashion in which he uttered Californian "dude" terms (like "bud" and "bogus"), and the way the rest of his features dealt with a nose that was perhaps too big for his face--and still he was cute.

But now Sean Penn has made a very serious, beautiful film (not that The Pledge and Indian Runner weren't serious).

Into the Wild is about a determined young man, with no apparent libido, who instead of wanting to make a million dollars after graduating college and/or get laid a lot, wants to escape the grid/matrix and head out on the road without money or credit cards (though he does seem to have nice sweaters!) and experience life. In a sense since the kid was born in 68 and graduated college in 1990, he was born perhaps two decades late, but he has been traumatized by his parents and his childhood and wants to run away from family and not be found.

Ironically all the folks he meets on the road want him to join their family--no one wants to have sex with him (except an underage teenage girl--and instead of having sex they sing together!) but everyone wants to adopt him--a bickering Danish couple, a religious widower, a roguish hard-drinking farmer with some illegal activities, and especially a rather endearing hippie couple in a van complete with Buddhist prayer flags (the woman is missing her teenage son who also ran away). Each wants Chris to stay with them and he allows each to project on to him all sorts of psychic needs. Even the woman who works at a homeless shelter appears worried for him after he darts our of her facility, even though she has just met him. Everyone cares for him, almost instantly.

But his goal is to disappear into the Alaskan wilderness and he leaves people behind. Of course once in the wilderness and unable to survive he realizes that happiness has to be shared. There's almost no way to escape family and human entanglement, and if one does manage to slip through and evade all forms of companionship one is in posed in a dangerous if idyllic place--after all the landscape, the sky, the plants, the animals offer beauty and reason but do not provide an escape from loneliness. Solitude turns into an abject state and nature is no longer harmonious but full of dissonance. I thought of Herzog's Grizzly Man, a documentary about another fellow with mixed feelings about humanity who moves to Alaska to live with the bears as believes rather erroneously that he can live with another species.

But Into the Wild is also a travelogue and in each location the camera is always featured as an amazing, new found device that can give a sense of place--the way land, water, and sky interact, converge and sever. One can almost sense Specoli's ability to get siked and stoked in Sean Penn's insistence in spending the time to examine a vista and his romance with the people who live on the edges of the American terrain--those without social security numbers who have never paid taxes and have never used an ATM but know how to gather around a campfire. I prefer a boutique hotel in a loud metropolis (and a retirement fund)...but Sean Penn successfully evokes the romance of marginal types on the road.

Ballet Boyz

2007-10-28T11:01:00.000-07:00

Well Christopher Wheeldon may name himself the leading contemporary choreographer working in balllet, but after last night's performance of "C. to C. (Close to Chuck)" by ABT, I would have to say Jorma Ela is along with William Forsythe far beyond him. It was gorgeous, haunting, deep, and almost perfect.

Set to a score by Phillip Glass that was composed as a musical portrait of his friend, the painter Chuck Close (who has done numerous portrait of Glass), the piece also transcended the feedback loop that its premise suggested. Yes, the piece had a beautiful backdrop designed by Close (that paid homage to his self-portraits wearing glasses) and yes, the pianist who commissioned the piece orginally, Bruce Levingston, was on stage playing the very difficult music (whose second half moved beyond what one expects of Glass with its staccato rhythms). But Elo's choreography had its own meanings that yes, may have spoke of Close's physical condition (he is wheelchair bound) but also expressed the possibilities of partnering, with beautiful transitions, and individual expressivity in movement. The piece was also about the potential of movement itself. And so it glided away from Glass telling Close how great and important he is and vice versa (and also it avoids Elo telling both of them how great they are).

Ir began with a startling image of dark figures in barely lit circles, dressed beautifully by designer Ralph Rucci, appearing like whirling dervishes waiting to move. A figure came on stage to take off their jackets, revealing bare torsos for the men. The figures remained still, bathed in pale light. The dervish movement did not come until the end when three couples twirled, the man holding the woman aloft while he span. The curtain comes down as they are still dancing, giving the feeling that this movement is perpetual, endless.

Beautiful lifts were abundant in this dance. A few remain with me: the man stands with his arms stretched behind him, his fingers almost touching his lower back; the women then laces her leg through this loop that the man has created, and he begins to lift her. Startling. Another was a lift when the male moves onto one leg and continues to hold his partner aloft, further suggesting that they are unified. They have become one dancing unit.

The men in ABT are amazing. Jose Manuel Correno was exciting in Stanton Welch's "Clear"--a dance that really features men's dancing: Paloma Herrera was passed around like a joint and has no place in the dance. In "C. to C." Marcelo Gomes was riveting: he had a solo that began when he was so contorted that he looked like clay before it was formed into a shape. And Herman Cornejo, who has an oddly shaped upper body, is also an amazing dancer. In the final piece last night, "Free Here on Out" David Hallberg was also great--he is a throwback to an earlier era, kind of reminding me of the Peter Martins that I saw in videos from the 70s. He is not massive like Gomes, nor filled with latin fire like Correno, but Hallberg is precise and graceful.

Danspace Season

2007-10-23T07:10:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday F and I went to see the Parijat Desai Dance Company at Danspace Project; the previous Saturday we went to see a Japanese troupe Yummydance. Danspace has been programming for years at the gorgeous St Mark's Church and they are in the middle of a great season.

It is always a joy to be in the main room of the Church, which I think they refer to as the sanctuary. It is a beautiful room, with no altar (one sits in the altar space) and beautiful stained glass windows. Its so pretty when the lights go out and one can see light from the street illuminating the windows above the balcony on the other side of the room. The space is bare, simple, without the gaudy embellishments of most churches. One relaxes immediately in this environment, as if there is room for you and there is no clutter, and no reminders of the torment of Christ on the cross or any other bizarre Christian imagery.

It is also great to see dance and only pay $15 for a ticket. Especially when one thinks that I paid $30 for a seat at City Center and had to elongate my neck, cock my head, and twist my torso in order to gain only a partial view of the stage. At the Church the sight lines are always perfect and even though F and I didn't make a reservation, and it seemed as if the event was selling out, we ended up getting great seats even though we couldn't sit together.

Yummydance performed two pieces. The first "tony, and me" was a pas de trois between a puppet, a puppeteer, and a dancer. Their interaction was intense, and sometimes moving. The puppet was very animated (made in part from a cello) and it was exciting to see how it was being manipulated but at times the dance became a duet between the puppet and the dancer as they moved in sync across the floor. The puppeteer almost disappeared.

Bring Me a PPPeach was the second piece, performed by five women. It was a kinetic piece of much rushing, running, and jumping, less concerned with virtuosic movement and precise gesture than in creative pattern and trajectory while maintaining a deadpan expression. The five women were distinctive but also cohered into a unit of energy, and avoided any and all traditions of Japanese ritualistic dance and cliches about how femininity should be depicted. They were rebellious and enjoying it.

Parijat Desai Dance is rooted in the popular southern Indian dance traditional Bharata Natyam, but the company embraces a variety of other forms, including modern dance, martial arts, yoga, and Pina Bausch-inspired danztheatre (and probably other ingredients that I couldn't discern). Remarkably, the choreography is always coherent even as it is eclectic.

The final piece, "Quiet/Fire", was accompanied by live music (amazing to have live musicians included in a ticket for $15): a violinist, two percussionists, a vocalist (who used the vocal percussion style that I think is called Konnakol) and some sort of box that played the drone (they varied its volume). The dancers' movements were from martial arts, and at times one could have thought one was watching a kung fu movie because dancers fought against each other in very stylized fashion but with an intensity that was spellbinding. It was very exciting to watch. All the dancers were great, but Parijat Desai always stands out: she dances with ease and her gesturing is so articulated--at times it appears as if she is slow motion (because her process of movement is so realized and visible) even when as the leader of the troupe she is always slightly ahead of her dancers. Equally pleasurable to watch was Mohan Kulasingam but for very different reasons: his effort was always palpable and his commitment to the movement was never disguised by technique yet he was entirely graceful.

The second piece "Malaysia" was more Danztheatre than Bharata Natyam. the piece brought in the dancers' experiences as immigrants, students, and Asian-Americans, it also brought in some of the rehearsal dynamics of the company. It centered on the two deictics "here" and "there", which began to have two different distinctions--"here" as the United States" and "there" as wherever one came from before and "here" and "there" as designations of a movement within a dance phrase. Mohan Kulasingam's story about how he couldn't go back "there" because of his gayness was particularly moving, and the ways in which the other dancers, all female, but also all displaced to varying degrees, involved him and were attuned to him, was endearing without any sentimentality. The dancers' everyday personalities came through without sacrificing their virtuosic dance personas, and once again Parijat Desai was particularly charming, playing the choreographer who is rather befuddled by her dancers' concerns about their identities and just wants them to learn the steps in the right order. She is a major talent.

Wheeldon--Hype

2007-10-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

On the 17th, K and I went to opening night of the Christopher Wheeldon's new company at City Center. Everyone was there (we noticed Mark Morris, Caroline Kennedy, Isaac Mizrahi), eager to weigh in on this new venture--he is wunderkind who used to dance from NYC Ballet, became a resident choreographer, and in a few years, he is know considered to be the best hope for contemporary ballet, combining the neoclassical of City Ballet (Balanchine) with the more traditional romanticism of the Royal Ballet (Tudor). Unfortunately, as K noted, sometimes he also wanders into the pastoral terrains of Peter Martins, which is decided not where he should go.

A word about the unfortunate limitations of City Center as a venue. It has the worst sight lines and if you are not sitting in the orchestra, you end up sitting forward, or tilting your head, or pushing to one side of the seat (or some combination of the three) in order to be able to witness the dance. It is not a comfortable place to spend $30 for a seat, which is terrible because this is what I can afford, and I like the Center's programming. But if the event is sold out, every seat in the back is partially obstructed not by pillars but by the layout of the seats and the design of the hall.

Wheeldon may be hype. But there are flashes of his brilliance, but it is not to be found in his pas de deux's. They are tiresome. Though the woman is thrust into the air, balanced precariously, she only becomes an appendange and is denied her strength and her expressivity. She is an appendage. I thought of the feminist (Lacanian) critique of ballet that argued in the pas de deux the woman becomes the phallus. At least in Balanchine, the female in the pas de deux is always the star and the male dancer is a sturdy step ladder that allows her to reach otherwise unattainable heights. Not so in Wheeldon. Yet someone has whispered into his ears that he does a good pas de deux. He included in the program a pas de deux choreographed by my favorite William Forsythe -- a piece of so much tension (with the great dancer Wendy Whelan!) that had little of the athleticism of Wheeldon, but many more times intensity and visual interest. The couple were inextricably linked and unable to disconnect. It was riveting--as Forsythe always is.

Yet Wheeldon included some great pieces that he had choreographed--but at the end of a long night's program. Dance of the Hours was done for the Met and was a sugary, crowd pleaser that showed he had a Balanchine-like sense of geometry that could mix with a Mark Morris like sense of humor. He is not above simplicity and not above overstressing the musical themes for a bit of a laugh.

The last piece Fool's Paradise had the audience enthralled. It was a thrilling to watch and used the elements of stagecraft to full advantage. A rectangular ritualistic box of light, leaf-like paper falling from the rafters seemingly dancing in the wind--both were beautiful accompaniment to a dance that was pleasingly endless in its repetition of phrases and gestures, and appropriately autumnal in it colors and the motif of things falling and light changing . Once again Wendy Whelan was excellent, and Wheeldon is lucky--he has been able to work with the best dancers--clearly he is a favorite among NYCB dancers (perhaps he is a welcome relief from Martins....)though it doesn't seem that Wheeldon has yet to live up to his hype. As K said if he included only his last two pieces plus the Forsythe pas de deux the whole evening would have been much stronger.

Elizabeth: The Middle Years

2007-10-14T16:51:00.000-07:00

Ok I admit it. The film opened on Friday and I bought tickets online on Wednesday to make sure that I got to see it opening night. And so off we went to Chelsea to enjoy in a room full of gay men, the art of righteously reigning. Many a wish fulfillment was in the air in the cinema, performing a pas de deux with the wafting designer cologne.

I know that the film is called "The Golden Years" but as a 47-year old I have earned the right to call it "The Middle Years." Elizabeth ages, and becomes both herself and the Queen, at once. She settles into her role and melds with it in glorious acceptance of her fate and duty.

But ah the outfits she gets to wear, by "she" I now mean a corseted Cate Blanchett.

The film is operatic, not in the sense that there are arias and recitatives, rather that there are garments and appearances that stop the action as the camera moves ecstatically around the Queen, celebrating her form, her wigs, her ability to be expressive within such constraining clothes. One forgets about the story--who cares that Spain is about to invade--Cate looks marvelous, translucent, fiery. She is in orange, emerald green, royal blue, in metalics (when she is on horse--but not sitting side saddle--to motivate the troops), and then perhaps most spectacularly in flowing white atop a large map of England and Europe. She is purety versus the tainted Spaniards. The England that this Elizabeth lives in has endless light and Spain somehow dark.

The movie sacrifices story to present tableaus of striking beauty, and quite frankly I couldn't have been more pleased.

Cate Blanchett did wonderful things with her voice--she has an amazing tonal range--her chirping soprano can get go quite deep like a contralto, and she can change volume unexpectedly. In this film, the queen ruled through her ensembles and her voice--to provoke her ire was a deafening experience for all near her.

Clive Owen (I hesitate to remark upon his good looks, suffice to say that he looked as if testosterone was issuing forth from every single pore) channelled Errol Flynn in a pirate movie and they were singularly gorgeous shots of him swimming beneath burning vessels with the camera looking up at a swimming horse that had jumped from a Spanish ship. It was impossible not to root for the success of such a roguish, if self-seeking player. Thanks for bringing us tobacco by the way Sir Walter Raleigh. This we needed? I would have been happy with potatoes.

Samantha Morton who might be one of my favorite actresses was a devious, imperious, and proud Mary Queen of Scots. The way in which she faced her beheading with a rebellious posture was a feat of performance that alone was worth the price of admission.

But in the end of course, it is Elizabeth and Cate's movie. This was a contemporary Elizabeth and director Shekhar Kapur couldn't help but to remythologize her. In the film, she is religiously tolerant and refuses to persecute English catholics; after all this thorougly modern millie believes in the rule of law, not in Machiavellian tactics. When Raleigh brings in native Americans to show that he has conquered land in the new world and called it Virginia in the Queen's honor, he states that they are eager to accept her as their Queen, Elizabeth retorts in almost pc fashion, "Don't they have a leader of their own" as if to say she is not eager to indulge in an imperialist adventure unlike the (bad) Spanish and their nasty, cruel inquisition. I suppose that Kapur (himself born into an English-dominated South Asia) is trying to say that England (unlike Spain and Portugal with their empire building) was an oasis of enlightenment in this period of its history before its expansionist tendencies took over.

But perhaps I read too much into all this--this Elizabeth is mythic not actual and as played by Cate the Queen is entirely in control of her myth. She doesn't wait for her closeup--instead she waits for the sweeping long shots that show her surrounded by her court, off on her own slightly, sending out more light than is humanly possible. One wonders if she has supernatural powers to control the wind.

I-Be Area

2007-10-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

It became the law to go see Ryan Trecartin's video at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery. This happens in NYC sometimes in the Fall--a new film/video/art installation captures the zeitgeist and everyone is told to go--and often for good reason. A couple of years ago, it was the film Tarnation. Everyone went.

So F and I took the crosstown bus on 14th Street all the way to the last stop on the West Side. As F said the meat market now looks like Barney's with the boutiques outdoors. I did want to go to Alexander McQueen, but I knew we had to remain true to our destination.

The video is in the back room, on a large screen, with two large on the left and right wall, so if you sit directly infront of the screen on one of two couches, the images on the screen are partially reflected, but after awhile one barely notices the mirrors. The video is a jaw-dropping experience, funny, frightening, and capturing the exact moment in which people present and sell themselves on line, but videos on Youtube in hopes that it catches fire, and people are convinced that they can upload and download identity. I want to resist making sense of the video and discerning the narrative and the meaning of the video's clever visual effects, but I will admit that I-Be Area is transformative.

Leaving the gallery after watching the 2-hour video (we came in halfway through and stayed to see the beginning), the world had changed. Passerbys looked like they could also have been digital constructions, with profiles where they listed themselves as adoptible, and each was in a reality show where they could be voted off. The colors of the city looked painted on like his studio sets and the building appeared to be facades that could be crushed and smashed as the room and furniture in the film. The kind of meta-hypernarcissism that Tretartin depicts is so much in the air in the last few years of the Bush regime. It is scary and seductive and involving: to think that you can change name, identity, appearance, gender, and enter into some sort of defiant monologue about who you are and what you offer in a video. This is the piece of art that shows more than any other new technology afffects consciousness--what it enables and what it prohibits. Right now, there is nothing like it--it exxagerates the cultural moment and chops it all up and reconfigures it in such a dynamic way.

I left the gallery giddy, disconnected, feeling disembodied, elongated, and as if my face was heavily made up. F and I needed to use the bathroom so we found a nice elegant restaurant in dark colors that helped me come down a bit. But back on the 14th Street bus when people came on the bus they all looked temporary and in transition, on the way to adopting a new persona, flashing their online passwords instead of their private parts.

Michael Clayton on Yellow Fever

2007-10-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

After spending hours waiting at my dr's to get my flu and yellow fever vaccine (I am traveling to a tropical country in December), I met B for an afternoon movie. She wanted to see Michael Clayton and I like seeing films on the day they are released (of course I like going to private screenings best of all). The nurse informed me about the yellow fever vaccine: it is live, meaning that she injecting me with a tiny bit of the fever so that my body can build antibodies to the virus. Many reactions to the vaccine were possible, some quite worthy of a visit to the emergency room.

I mention all of this to emphasize that I was a bit agitated upon my arrival to the cinema and due to my disastrous imagination, anticipating that I might have to leave the cinema in order to address any of a number of new maladies inflicting me (I already was suffering from allergies and an on again off again sinus headache). Of course Beth and I sit in the middle of the row, and the showing was sold out (at 4:05!...but then again George Clooney is a star and a sex symbol) and getting out of the row during the film to visit the bathroom--or the emergency room--was going to be near impossible.

Luckily the film was entirely engrossing, if formulaic (as B put it, the reluctant hero fights against the system). I loved the opening scene (no opening credits) with the voice over of Tom Wilkinson (I like that the possibly mad lawyer appears as an acousmetre first) as the camera prowls through a law firm in the morning following a mail room guy, effectively setting up the conflict in the film between appearance and reality and between that which is heard and that which is visible.

The first sequence serves as the opposite to the final scene, in which Clooney sits in a cab, silent. The camera remains steady on his face--after he has done the right thing--to see if there is satisfaction, or remorse at missing out on the big bucks, or even exhaustion. Allow of these emotions compete on his face as Clooney threatens to look straight into the camera, but his eyes manage to dart away at the last minute. The camera lingers on his face too long and then, at last, the credits begin to roll.

Tilda Swinton is excellent as Clooney's antagonist--the chief counsel for the evil corporation. Her character is equally conflicted by her role, but she chooses the wrong path and Clooney must make her pay for this (and since the film is formulaic, she does pay). Many of the scenes with Swinton are her alone, preparing for her public role as a corporate spokesperson. Swinton's character rehearses in the mirror, changing her lines, examines her face and body, and prepares to sound spontaneous and in control, when in fact we know that she is scared to death of what she is about to do for herself and her corporation.

When I watched Swinton acting the part of a corporate spokesperson falling apart, I totally forgot that I had yellow fever.

The next morning I checked my temperature and it was below normal. I do feel achy and painy though.

Party at Tavern on the Green for the New York Film Festival

2007-09-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Friday night S took me to the opening night party for the New York Film Festival (after the film A Darjeeling Express). A pretty glittering event, energized by celebrities and hordes of other self-important people. I enjoyed meeting quite a few people (the Director of the SF film festival, his gorgeous companion, the screenplay writer of the new Dylan film, directed by Todd Haynes, and one of the photographers for the Film Festival who used to shoot CBGB back in the day) but most of these film people will not ask you what you do but are happy to talk about themselves...

Angelica Huston looked very glamorous and Bill Murray appeared debonair. Jason Schwartzman keep wandering around looking for someone that he couldn't seem to find. Owen Wilson wasn't there and I didn't see Adrien Brody, but I would have been VERY happy to see him. Partygoers either looked chic or eccentric and once in awhile they struck a pose that was both chic and extreme. Everyone wondered who this particular woman was--into her middle years, she had Bride of Frankenstein hair, dark Lina Wertmuller glasses and sported plastic-looking earrings that were shaped into the map of Africa. She sat at Sylvia Miles's table but often went for walks in search of someone...was it Jason Schwartman?

Excerpts from my Intro to the Exorcist

2007-09-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, I gave opening remarks to the film The Exorcist for a student film organization at the Grad Center. Here are some excerpts:

THE EXORCIST: POSSESSED BY OPEC

The Exorcist is not only a horror film. It is also a geopolitical thriller.
Although few people remember, the film is not only set in Washington D.C., it is also takes place in Iraq.

In the version released in theaters at the end of 1973, the film begins with a blackened screen, and red letters spell “A William Friedkin Film” and then “William Peter Blatty’s.” The sound of a violin rises to a screech. When the red words “The Exorcist” are placed in the frame, the sound cuts from the atonal violin to a Muslim prayer, a remarkable transition that introduces the unfamiliarity of the location in Northern Iraq before it is seen (or read in a title). The screen changes from all black to one where a white sun is revealed over a craggy landscape.

Color is raised on the screen. The sun is bright and white and the sky takes on the red, hot color of the opening titles. An archaeological dig under a bright desert sun is revealed. The Muslim prayer mixes with the sound of axes and picks and workers’ conversations. As the prayer ends in the sound mix, the camera moves to focus on the movement of a young boy who darts about the site. When he reaches the place where an older white man (we can’t yet identify him as a Priest) is working, he tells the man in his language (and we read in subtitle) that “They found something.” Remarkably, the shot is taken from between the boy’s legs, creating an archway, and showing how deeply the old man is embedded in the earth. It also denies any possibility of humanizing the boy by showing his face.

In the version released in 2004 with original footage reinserted, the beginning is longer. The viewer sees a corner house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. Then a statue image of the Virgin Mary is shown, an image of purety that will be sullied. At this point the violin string begins to be scratched and in a remarkable cross-fade the violin screech becomes a Muslim prayer.

The old man, though he is elderly, is shown to be quite active and eager as an archaeologist. First he is given a strange Christian medallion by the worker. Then he finds a green amulet of the demon Pazuzo. An audible wind rises out of the hollowed space, causing dust to move into the air, suggesting that the demon himself may have been roused from his slumber. In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Pazuzo was a demon associated with the wind.

Cut to:

Like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) before it, The Exorcist showed that horror could entertain mainstream filmgoers and transcend the B-movie genre. It also showed that in the 70s the Devil was a box office draw (like God was in the 50s with films such as The Ten Commandments [1956]). Soon The Omen (1976) and other films followed--including four more films from the Exorcist franchise, turning the film into the first episode of a horror soap opera.

Not only was it shocking what took place in the film, it was also startling to the critics that a film they derided had mass appeal--people waited out in the cold for tickets. For example Vincent Canby of the New York Times, who dismissed the film as “claptrap,” tried to answer the question “Why the Devil Do They Dig ‘The Exorcist’?” (1974). Does Satan get credit for such a box office success? Or the special effects? Or did the anxiety of the time provoke people into attending the fright fest? Almost immediately The Exorcist became a subject of debate within popular culture, with psychiatrists, priests, and film critics entering the fray, trying to understand the film’s allure. Yet a good part of the explanation is obvious: If a film is only as good as its villain, pitting a foreign-born devil against an innocent American girl is a winning proposition. He turns her into a foul-mouth ventriloquist’s dummy who expresses all the cultural fears of unrestrained female sexuality. Who wouldn’t want to witness such performance art?
In hindsight, we can see that by 1973 the United States’ foremost conflict is not an ideological clash with the godless Soviet Union. Rather its standoff is with the Middle East, a region that it is increasingly reliant upon in order to fuel its economy. The film also tells this tale, one of two regions, and two nations in particular. The conflict embedded in Iraq is one that travels here—and this is a tale that is getting repeated—take the recent Paul Haggis film In the Valley of Elah—the seemingly once pure American GIs are transformed into amoral party boys by the their experience in Iraq, and once again we get the narrative of Iraq as a contaminant for innocent Americans. We are projecting our own domestic conflicts—of racism, of cultural exclusion--onto Iraq even as we are being told about the age old conflict between Shia and Sunni that no one could possibly solve, let alone the Shia or the Sunni.

In the Valley of Elah the only view of Iraq we get is through partially reconsituted video from a cellphone—the images are demaged, partial and depixaliting, once again reinforcing that for the American viewer Iraq is unknowable, cruel, mysterious. In fact what may be unknowable, cruel, and mysterious is the exportation of conflict performed by the oil oligarchy’s ability to rig U.S. foreign policy.

iPod/Muzak script

2007-09-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

Hi, Im Edward Miller aka the Ferry Home Companion.

This is the tale of the little iPod that could

I put on my iPod just before leaving my apartment. It is an orange shuffle--I am an autumn person. I leave early--before I feel ready to interact with anyone. I am one of the few people who commutes from Manhattan to Staten Island. I take the subway to the ferry. The music I hear motivates me to move quickly from the Whitehall Station. If the shuffle functions moves to a slow song, I skip to the next one. I need tempo. Missy Elliot or the Buzzcocks will do. Something that otherwise would make me want to dance. Music on the iPod is my caffeine.

I move into the terminal easily and wait impatiently for the Ferry. I glance around me, looking to see if there is anyone I should avoid—someone from work, someone who might be completely crazy, or a tourist who is looking to ask someone a question. I am friendly person but it is still too early for me to interact. Aboard the ferry, I go upstairs to sit outside—on the Verrazzano, Brooklyn, Governor Island side of the ferry, to the left as Beyonce might say, as I know most people want to go to the right to see the Statue of Liberty. The music on the iPod becomes the soundtrack for the movie I am watching. The old school skyline of Brooklyn, the surprising emptiness of Governor’s Island, the expanse of the ocean beyond the Bridge. My thoughts are voice-over. By now, I am happy to hear something quieter, maybe Nina Simone, something smart and contemplative. I close off the rest of the ferry and the experience becomes intimate, me, the view, my iPod. I am as they say zoning out.

I rely upon my iPod. Not only because it makes the trip go faster and it always corresponds to the moving images of the coastline and harbor. With my white earbuds visible, people know to leave me to myself. I am allowed to gloriously isolate myself with sounds from my very own music library; the shuffle function instantaneously creates miraculous playlists that remind me of the length and breadth of my collection from Handel to the Sex Pistols to Amy Winehouse. My posture says: "I am not to be roused from this state of near bliss.” I can’t be shaken into meeting the requirements of a social interaction." Sometimes my head moves to the beat or my foot taps.

When I reach campus I keep my earbuds visible as a way of warding off students who want to ask me questions about next semester's courses or their grades. Accompanied by my stern game face, my sunglasses, and my determined gait, the message is clear. I am not available. I am in a self-intoxicated state but also one in which I have a decided purpose and goal--to get to my office. It is a conscious pose at times, other moments it is as if I am remote control. But it works.

As I approach the Fine Arts building, I take my buds out, and I hear much more of the soundscape of the environment; I accept the responsibilities of being more fully in this space at this time. I am ready to put my friendly face on. It doesn't hurt. My tiny orange iPod has eased my entry into the day.

Who Here has an iPod? Who here has more than one? Who here uses it when they are traveling to and from work in order to make their commute more tuneful?
Who here can’t imagine a day without their iPod?
with our ear buds and our iPods,
MUSIC becomes a DOSAGE.
A sonic pill.
An audible antidepressant. The new prozac or zoloft.
A regression of listening. We may hear too much. We may never listen to music with the devotion and pleasure that was possible before the walkman, the radio, the phonograph.

The iPod is your transitional object, your technological security blanket. It protects you from the world. It provides a soundtrack to the subway ride, the ferry ride, a stroll down the street becomes an orchestrated affair. You are the conductor of your own experience. In this film you are casting all the extras that pass by you. Your iPod, which is an extension of you, your mini-Me, provides the soundtrack. This history of the iPod begins in the Department Store.

Me on Board the Staten Island Ferry w/ The FM Ferry Experiment

2007-09-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

On Friday the 28th, I was a lecturer aboard the Staten Island Ferry as part of Neurotransmitter's FM Ferry Experiment. It was fun to hang out in the studio alcove that V and A built on the top deck of the Marchi Ferry and to see the responses of the tourists and commuters aboard as well as the swell fellows that work aboard the boat.

Using the oeuvre of Percy Faith and his orchestra as sonic background, I presented a lecture/performance piece about the iPod and Muzak. Apparently it sounded fine, though I am very critical of my radio voice (wish it was just a bit deeper and my s's didn't last so long, but it sounded okay in the headphones).

My favorite Percy Faith song is Theme from a Summer Place (the Troy Donahue movie). It is the hardest easy listening song to hear. Very demanding and very relaxing at once--the violins are almost shrill, and the melody's catchiness is almost torturous--enough to get a Branch Davidian out of any compound.

Sketches from a Chronicle

2007-09-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

I went to Martha Graham Dance Company again last night--thank god I went again. The performances were so much better last night and the program much more well chosen. Sketches is the most exciting dance to watch, so involving and evocative, always contemporary.

I know that the dance is meant to evoke war and convey its effects and then, suggest a resolution. But to me, the dance is also about diva worship. The corps of women dance around Jennifer DePalo saluting her singular presence. The woman in the center, given a Noguchi pedestal (which she will share with the amazing Miki Orihara) energizes the periphery, providing them with gestures and with uniformity and individuality at once. The tempo of the final section threatens to send the women into a frenzy, yet they remain contained, strong, articulated, inhabiting a space between between anger and jubilance. Graham provides the dancers with a gestural vocabulary that resounds with expression, as the dancers move quickly from stage left to stage right, determined, when the return the pattern has changed and the intensity has increased. The effect is almost overwhelming, reminding the audience that so much remains possible--if we salute the Diva.

Eastern Promises

2007-09-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Clearly the Russian Mafia is in. We not only have Eastern Promises set in London but We Own the Night set in Brooklyn. Russians are the new media invention of a white ethnic group who are prone to violence, family allegiance, and overeating. Like the Sicilians, they are menacing and charming, unfathomable, yet somehow just like us even though they do seem to lack a WASPy censorious superego.

The Sopranos are over. The Godfather franchise is long gone.

Clearly we need to familiarize ourselves with another group of loyal family men who philosophize about life, kibbitz about the mundane, and are capable of extreme murderous cruelty and then go home for a family dinner (one that includes ethnic specialties of borscht and caviar).

Its only a matter of time til HBO grabs hold of this trend and provides the discerning television viewer with a lovable group of Brighton Beach Russians with enduring ties to the old country. The family runs a restaurant as a cover to their more illegal activities. The husband/father has some sort of disorder...perhaps tourette syndrome...or a stutter...or erectile dysfunction...something that makes him vulnerable and his primitive cave man-like behavior somehow almost endearing. His wife wears fur coats in May. The children like rap music and fast cars and have friends of other ethnic groups, which allows the parents opportunities to express ignorant racism. The dinner table is lively and some of the dialog is in Russian.

Come to think of it I might contact HBO myself...

Martha Graham Dance Company Smiles at the Joyce

2007-09-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

I've seen the company now four or five times--once when She was still alive. One time--I think it was at BAM--I had to hold back laughter at the melodrama and intense seriousness of the piece (this was during the funny Mark Morris era and when Pina Bausch was full of schtick, so one expected parody at dance and if it wasn't there, one placed it there). But I still think of Clytemnestra piece (with Christine Dakin) that I saw almost 15 years ago.

This reincarnation of the Company occurred at the Joyce, not my favorite theatre, though it is intimate, and under yet another artistic director and management team. I plan on writing AD Janet Eilber a letter.

Francis Mason, a venerable writer/reviewer of dance, was charming in introducing the evening but didn't really say anything to illuminate the dance or Martha Graham though it was interesting to hear that they drank bourbon together, no soda, in thick glasses with ice. He spoke how he was charmed by Martha when she appeared on his radio show in the early 70s, but forget to give us an example of her wit or verbal acumen. There was no insight or poignant remembrance.

The company is made up of strong dancers (I use strong deliberately as many of the male dancers are quite muscular, with admirable thighs and 6-packs). Yet not all of the dancers have entirely embraced the dances beyond getting all the steps and as a result sell the dance by tring to show exuberance in their faces, and even smiling! Imagine smiling in a mid-century modern dance piece! The point is to leave your face blank and perform the dance through your gestures and contractions and extensions, the dance is realized through the body not the face. At one point during "Diversion of Angels" I wanted to jump on stage, become Martha, and slap two of the dancers who were smiling. They looked like imbeciles. As D remarked being in such a small theatre made the smiles all the more annoying, for if we were looking down on the dancers we might not have seen their pasted on grins. At one point it became like the Cheshire cat, all smiles and no body.

Luckily when Cave of the Heart (a retelling of the Medea myth from 1946) was performed no one smiled, though I will say that Medea relied again too much on her face to show her rage rather than letting her inhabiting a Noguchi sculpture do the work. The other performers in this piece however kept their faces solemn and silent. Jason (Tadij Brdnik) was particularly intense and how about that fetishy costume! I love you Martha.

Now, the Times critic has repeated what is often said about Martha Graham's choreography--her best work was created before 1956. I don't exactly agree. The first piece last night--Acts of Light (from 1991)--contained some beautiful ritualistic moments when 5 male (and later female) moved across the stage without music in complete unison in simple lateral steps. When the women appeared to repeat the men's steps (much later in the piece), draped in mustard-colored fabric, I got goosebumps--the vision was so clear, a procession of the deepest layer of the psyche, ancient and current at once.

In the Valley of Elah

2007-09-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

Paul Haggis's new film (the guy who directed Crash) on opening day at Union Square: the multiplex was crowded but mostly with people seeing Across the Universe, the Beatles' musical by Julie Taymor. Hippy-ish looking NYU students, copping a feel of the 60s through cinema. Yikes. The coming attractions look pretty. The coming attractions of the new Elizabeth film with Kate Blanchette make the film look amazing.

In the Valley is an appropriately somber film--B and I couldn't contemplate something as indulgent as shoe shopping afterward and instead had a good discussion about how exactly this Congress could end the war in Iraq, or at least the American attempt at occupying the country. It has to end.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a retired Army man whose son is murdered after he returns from Iraq. The scales fall from the father's eyes--a patriotic man, he believes in the Army and believes in the young men (no women are seen in the Army base) who are over there fighting. He comes to learn not only what sort of man his son has become (perhaps involved in torture) but that the War and his country's leadership are wrong: he learns that when a squad is travelling in their armored vehicle, they do not leave it--if they hit a dog or a pedestrian they move on. Tommy Lee Jones--a face almost as wrinkled as a raisin, dark eyes so deep in their socket, but with a posture and a gait that resounds of the military, sticking to its everyday rituals of shining shoes and making beds according to regulations--investigates his own son's murder and confronts his own lazy-eyed racism. He can't believe that the handsome, fit young white men are covering up the truth--only a cherubic Mexican-American with a criminal past is capable of this crime. In believing this lie, he falls for the Army's suggestion that his son might have been involved--however reluctantly--in drug smuggling. And so American racism is used to hide the emotional facts of the U.S. invasion and occupation. Our young men and woman even when they are not dying are all injured by this experience.

The film is brave in suggesting that the Army men may not be heroes at all. They may have little or no chance to show any heroics because of the nature of the mission. Instead they become cruel and in the end cruel to each other. We are going to have many returning vets who are very damaged. The film also suggests that Iraq is a poisonous. tainted place (as in the Exorcist--a place where the demon Pazuzo comes from and thus chaos itself). If this is so, the U.S. government is only responsible for unleashing the dogs of war and the film buys into the Orientalist myth that Mesopotamia is not a place of learning but a place of duplicitous evil that contaminates the soul of all that encounter it. A truly radical perspective would be to depict how the U.S. has brought its own chaos--its own racial division and ethnic conflicts and religious bigotry--to Iraq. Instead the story gets retold that we have innocently brought ourselves into the midst of an infectious pre-existing condition that we can not remedy. And so we must get the hell out of there. And seal our borders. To keep ourselves safe.

The film is most successful in showing how a man is forced by events to stop reciting the myths of his nation--and how there is little reward but the truth for this. It does so with little dialog, a very restrained soundtrack, showing a sorrowfilled landscape drained of color, a military town filled with seedy bars and exploited women and drunken G.I.s with nowhere to go but toward their fate.

Dutch Art at the Met

2007-09-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Age of Rembrandt show at the Met is as much about the history of collecting Dutch art at the museum than about the artwork itself. I liked that emphasis of the show very much--the show was divided by the period in which the artworks were purchased and also by the patron who donated who the painting. So the Rembrandts, the Vermeers, and the Hals were spread out among the room, rather than each artist and their school having their own section. Interestingly much of the first major purchase of Dutch art in 1871 were proven worthless (most of the painitings don't remain as part of the museum's permanent collection) and a few paintings that were once considered Rembrandts were later deemed not to be by the master.

Well, everyone in New York loves Vermeer--who isn't drawn to pale scarfed women who stand or sit pensively, drawn to the limited light of a domestic space? The distribution of light in Manhattan is uneven, and we relish the slant of sunlight into our dirty windows.

But spurred on by B's enthusiasm and N's insights into the paintings, I was loving the Hals. His paintings stood out as funny and lighthearted and unlike the many somber portraits and the intricate paintings of domestic life, his painting depicted public spaces enlivened by revelry. I understand that as he grew older his work became more serious, but as represented in this show, Hals is the painter of the drunken, celebrating the excess of partying.

Live Tennis vs Tennis on TV

2007-09-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

I went to the US Open again on Thursday evening. The night started late and the matches were pretty long, so S and I didn't leave the Billie Jean King tennis center til after 2pm. Quite a marathon--we had to wait for the last afternoon match to finish til about 830 so we went over to the Grey Goose hut and had a very strong drink to relax our nerves.

Now, I am happy that Arthur Ashe stadium is huge and that at least at the US Open tennis is no longer an elite, gentile pasttime. Its entertainment as well as sport. Fine.

And yet, sitting in front of us were a group of drunken straight white guys who drank incredible numbers of beers, talked incessantly during the point, and had the nerve to root for Justine Henin instead of Serena. People started moving away from them as the evening went on. S had to reprimand one especially rude guy at one point.

Also sitting next to me (but luckily one seat away --there was an empty seat between us) was a rather pleasant seeming late middle-aged woman with her younger friend. They brought strawberries and applauded each point regardless of who won it. Polite and demure...or so I thought. Later she lifted her butt off the seat and allowed herself to fart quite loudly. S and I looked at each other, first in shock and then in laughter. One runs into all sorts of behavior in Row X (we moved down for the Radal/Ferrer match) and I did yearn if for but a moment to be surrounded by uptight, sober WASPs who seemingly never burp or fart or never drink beer.

When I watch TV at home, I always root for a player and often get very emotionally involved. Serena and Rafa become sensual liberation fighters, Henin and Federer become fascists who must be defeated. I yell and scream, feel betrayed, identify with the heroics and cheer on the underdog mounting a comeback.

At the match, I become more involved with the match, not the contest. I could never applaud Henin, but I did begin to appreciate her shot-making and her focus. I wasn't happy to see Nadal loose but it was great to see Ferrer play so well and I so enjoyed the tempo and grace of the game itself and the struggle from both players. Television intensifies the conflict, with closeups of players, multiple angles, and the narrating voice of John McEnroe also supplements the importance of the struggle between the player.

On TV, the ball seems to travel much faster than live. At first I was surprised by how slow Serena was hitting, but I realized in seeing the complete arc of her shot (a pov that television doesn't provide) seems to slow the ball down. Even Rafa's forehand seemed slow. Television increases the velocity of the ball. Also TV amplifies the sounds of the court so that one hears the grunts and shrieks (and comments of the players)--as well as the sound of the racquet meeting the ball--much more. Even when S and I moved forward away from Row X, the match was a much more silent event. The audience is louder live and the umpire, who has a microphone, is also quite loud. During changeovers, when music was being played and the audience dancing with a roving camera searching for particularly expressive or attractive or cute dancers, the umpire would end the festivities by barking into the mic "Time!" Our umpire was particularly effective--he had a great Eastern European accent and a booming baritone. As the match between Nadal and Ferrer wore on way past midnight he clearly wanted to make sure that the sets did not drag on and his assertive declarations of "Time" were both humorous and effective.

Madame X meets the Buddha of the Future

2007-09-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

Gorgeous Labor Day weekend and B and I went to the Met to go spend time on the Roof Garden. She wanted to see the painting John Singer Sargent's Madame X and I wanted to see the sculpture Buddha of the Future. On opposite sides of the immense building of course, fitting I suppose as they are from different worlds. Asking the Met guards is so fun, because they are so concerned to give you the right directions and it is so hard for me to listen to people when they are giving directions (is it a guy thing?)--I just end up hearing the sounds of their words. Though I do remember snippets like "go as far as you can til you get to the marble fireplace" or "go through Egypt and then take a left." Such epic phrases from some lost manuscript by Herodotus. "Can you tell me how to get to Madame X" sounds a lot more intriguing say than repeating "Can you tell me how to get to .... Sesame Street." Or "Which way to the Buddha of the future..."has more import than "can you point me in the direction of the nearest subway." This is part of the magic of the Met, one hears and speaks the most magical phrases.

Against the tendencies of at least my own character (I won't speak for B), we found our destinations -- though I must say finding the elevator to the Garden is a feat worth celebrating with a Snoopy Dance atop the doghouse. And its not like B and I have never been to the Met before.

B insisted I knew the painting Madame X, which I did, but I couldn't remember the impact of the image of Madame Gautreau. Wow! I was undone. As B told me the story of the painting--and how it had to be retouched in order to return a strap of Madame's black dress to alabaster shoulder (just too salacious to show so much decollete and cleavage) another woman behind us began to tell her male friend the same story, using quite similar words. B and I looked at each other and laughed. Facts become stories, which then become myths retold. I do feel duty bound to bring another friend so as to recite the myth of Sargent and Madame X. But also the story of the image itself (a proud woman, defiant profile, a tale of pale skin and dark fabric, red hair aflame in front of a green background) becomes interrupted by the backstory of societal outrage and cultural conservatism.

The Buddha of the Future (Maitreya) that I like is from Pakistan (the Greco-Buddhist period). Surprisingly masculine (a twirling mustache) and broad shouldered, yet very adorned by fabric and garment, blissed out, balanced, and evocative. His stance is defiant too, but since he is a representation of an ideal that doesn't (yet) exist, he is not subject to any rebuke for the self-absorption in his pose.

Roddick and Sharapova at the US Open

2007-08-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

K and I went to the US Open this past Tuesday, the second night of the tournament, to see Sharapova and Roddick. Amazing sunset atop the Manhattan skyline (it matched Sharapova's pinkish red dress!) from the top of the stadium. Overpriced food and wine, but the Pinot Grigio went down nicely and the turkey sandwich with melted provolone was just fine.

Most of Sharapova's drama was in her supermodel entrance onto the court. The red sequined dress and black bolero jacket with sheer sleeves. And then her personality re-enters when she wins and finally smiles and twirls. During the match apart, from her sopranic grunt, she is all business. The crowd encouraging her opponent Roberta Vinci to win at least one game. She did to a roar from the crowd and a robust fist pump from the Italian, but Sharapova won easily and thre was little intensity to the 40 minute match

Roddick (versus a soon to retire Gimmelstob) is more of a showman on the court, during the game. He and Gimmelstob are friends so there was banter between them and little spontaneous comedic routines and lots of facial reactions. And they played hard and as Gimmelstob wants to be an annouoncer they interviewed each other after the match, which was charming as they traded one-liners and compliments.

Its definitely fun to watch Roddick serve and to check to see how fast it travelled--nothing over 150 mph but alot over 140--they look like a blur.

Great audience too. Prety diverse. The in-stadium cameras search for cute dancing viewers during the breaks (like at a basketball game) -- and the camera seemed to find quite a few older white guys with trophy wives. After the match, the winner signs three tennis balls and hits them into the audience. Roddick hit one straight toward K and I sitting high up in the stadium. I felt nervous and excited like I was in left field as a child and the ball was actually hit toward me. the guy sitting in front of me, very quiet, ignoring his family with his headphones, stood up, reached out and up and quickly caught it. His family shrieked in delight. I realized it was actually heading for him, but I would have had it if he wasn't there. K joked with him and said she let him have the ball.

Okay I never heard about Larry Craig until this week

2007-08-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

but now I have a lot to say about him:

1. It is always good when a hypocritical conservative republican is exposed. Not only is Craig anti-gay in his voting record and espoused views, he is leader of a crusade against the environment. Salmons will jump a bit higher without him in the Senate.

2. Compared to the crimes committed by Bush and the members of his cabinet, the incident described by the undercover cop in the St. Paul airport bathroom is less than nothing. The country of Iraq, our enlisted men and women, the people of New Orleans have suffered enormously from this administration. Mr Craig's "crime" only provided justification for the cop to spend time in this bathroom, hanging out in a stall, waiting to arrest men on the DL. If republicans are so concerned about wrong-doing they should impeach Bush.

3. As J told me on the telephone, when DeLay was suspected of all sorts of misdeeds the Republicans stood by him. Now the Republicans have apparently written Craig's resignation statement for him. Yes, he "confessed" (I'm not sure if tapping a shoe and swiping a hand underneath a toilet stall door is a crime--if he farted would that be disorderly conduct?) but his actions were victimless.

4. Craig is an asshole. His statement repeating over and over that "I am not gay" was disgusting and shameful--far more so than acting sleazy in a men's room. As if admitting to a gay identity was unfathomable and impossible. Of course, he did not say he was heterosexual. His denial did not proclaim a normative straight identity. Saying what you are not is a way of eliding who you are.

5. Craig is a homosexual (and no doubt the republican leadership is calling him a fag behind closed doors). In order for him to become gay, he would have to admit at least to himself that his sexual (and romantic) preference is for his own gender, which he has clearly not done. Therefore he remains a closeted homosexual. And that is sad. Many of us have marched up and down the streets of all the major cities (and small towns) asserting our identities proudly, and it is sad that some have refused to listen to our voices. Craig has decided in order to save his career he must remain closeted. In order to gain satisfaction, he seeks out furtive encounters in public places.

6. Furtive encounters in public places can be hot (or at least I've been told!). I am not exactly sure why anonymous sex is hot (O sweet mystery of life), but making love with a lover, cuddling all night long, and then holding hands the next day as you walk toward a restaurant to enjoy brunch with your lgbt and gay-friendly straight friends is better--certainly better than lying and hiding, even if you give up heterosexual privilege.

7. Tucker Carlson should be arrested for a hate crime. He confessed to gay-bashing when he described to his more macho brethren at MS-NBC (Chris Matthew and Joe Scarborough) what happened to him when he was approached in a bathroom for sex. He told his pals (and the viewer) that he left, got a friend, came back, grabbed the guy, hit him. and then pushed the guy's head against a toilet stall, while the police came. (apparently for Carlson the idea of touching the man in a sexual way was intolerable, but touching him violently was fine). If you are not interested in having sex with someone, just say no and leave. Approaching another with a question (however phrased) is not a crime, but homophobic violence is. Arrest that man.

Tim Garrigan @ Trash

2007-08-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

S and I grabbed a cab to take us over to Williamsburg to go hear Tim Garrigan play (the rising full moon was bright over Brooklyn when we crossed the bridge--I felt like howling [so I did not sure if the cabbie liked that!] and wanted to turn into a werewolf). I've heard Tim play before and I know that he is not yet getting the attention he is due as he is a major talent. But I've heard him play acoustic sets, mostly solo, with his plaintive, yearning voice that is pleasingly reminscent of Dylan circa Lay Lady Lay. Last night he was singer and guitarist of a power trio. They rocked loud and hard (took it me awhile to get used to the volume and being back in a rock club). The Tim Garrigan Trio (my name) sounded like they had been playing together for years (he and the drummer have played together many times, it was a bit of a reunion apparently). Who knew Tim was also a rock star? Lots of power riffs with his voice pushed to the top of his register in the best tradition of rock singing.

The club was called Trash (I'm sure it was named something else before). Very friendly place. Shout out to the bartender who flirted with me and gave us a couple of shots that I wish I hadn't accepted now. All the seats in the place were old car seats, except the bar stools. I was worried that it might be a bit musty to sit in one (and they were some nice old bucket seats) but not so bad.

Big Steel

2007-08-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

On Friday evening I went to MOMA to see the Richard Serra with J and some of his friends. I actually had fun, even though it was free night (thanks to Target) and the place was mobbed. Luckily I didn't have to wait in the heat to get in because J had his corporate id so it was like getting into Area when you were on the guest list and everyone else had to wait.

So Serra's work is not something I am going to get very emotional about--though I did not agree when Tilted Arc was removed from Federal Plaza. But the huge steel oxidizing sculptures were like huge curving letters or warped parentheses. Navigating them was almost ecstatic--noticing how my body responded to the changing slants and how once I was inside a seemingly guarded interior space, the steel (how nonporous a surface!) walls provided a slight echo to our conversations. I am not going to attempt to explain or justify the work, but I will say in its monolithic drabness, it animated our interactions and made me giddy.

Primary

2007-08-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

I watched Robert Drew's Primary (1960) again after not seeing it for years. Kennedy appears in it like a leading man and Hubert Humphrey like a character actor. Jacqueline is his leading lady, smiling, barely talking (she addresses the Polish American audience in Polish for a second or two). Kennedy is the ladies' candidate--the female voters all look so dressed up to go see him and line up one after other, as if they are getting autographs from Frank Sinatra or some other hearthrob. Whereas Humphrey is mostly surrounded by men wearing overalls, hearty country stock. He barely stands out amongst this meat and potato crowd save for the fact that he is in suit and tie. The camera barely acknowledges his wife. The Kennedys are magnets and the cameramen are drawn into finding the moments when they pause so that they can zoom in for a closeup. We barely see bore old Humphrey up close--even though he was pitching himself as the everyman's candidate. Kennedy placed himself as the fans' candidate; those who love to be near famous people.

I remember when my brother graduated Harvard. Caroline Kennedy was in the same school as his (those who elected to live off campus). At the graduation, I was not far from Ms. Onassis. At that time in my young life, I rejected the Kennedy mystique and disdained fascination with celebrities. Yet, Jackie was stylishly understated, almost entirely masked by huge sunglasses yet stood out as radiant. By radiant I mean she sent out light. Trying not to stare at her proved impossible, much to my chagrin.

American voters love their sexy young dashing couples as President and First Lady. In this way, I think Barack Obama is right to feature his wife and to use her to give another side to her driven man, so that no matter how ambitious he is, he is also a family man who can't find his socks--he is a bumbling sitcom dad. Hillary can't use Bill in this way--their relationship is too tangled and so clearly an arrangement.

Cowardly Knees and Transplanted Hands

2007-08-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't been to the cinema since Saturday and I am busy getting ready for my classes and finishing the chapter I'm revising (Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs). What to do in the evenings? Watch Guy Maddin films of course.

The first one to arrive from Netflix was Cowards Bend the Knees (hereafter "Cowards"), which I hadn't seen in the cinema. The last Guy Maddin film I went to was Brand on the Brain. An amazing event, the film was accompanied by two live Foley Sound Artists, an interlocutor (Isabella Rosselini!) and a small orchestra.

Cowards started life out at as a peephole installation and it is probably one of the more perverted films I've seen (this is not a negative) but I did feel like washing my hands after watching it to make sure there was no blue paint on them (the protagonist thinks he has had the blue hands of his beloved's father sewn onto him). My leg twitched and I became convinced I had restless leg syndrome (rls), but then I remembered that I had barely left the apartment all day.

Getting rid of all dialog and using interstitial titles opens up all sorts of possibilities for Maddin. His use of sound is not like that of the silent film era, though it is easy to think so. His soundtrack consists of more than just music. When the hockey team is playing, the viewer hears the sounds of skates. At the beauty salon (that doubles as a abortion clinic and a bordello), one hears the sound of water in the sink. Certain details within the frame are emphasized through sound and become menacing The result is that certain objects (skates) and activities (a saw grinding through a wrist) are given voice, resounding far louder than any textual utterances of the characters (though he uses a nice font).

Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady

2007-08-19T07:55:00.000-07:00

B and I went to see Once at Landmark Sunshine. First we met up at Berekt, the great Turkish restaurant on Houston Street. Best grape leaves in town. Lotsa cardomon. Not sticky in anyway. After the film we went to Oliva on the corner of Allen to get a margarita. Shout out to the bartender who poured us free shots after he heard it was our first time there.

B turned to me after about 20 minutes of the movie--can't the goddam camera man focus his lens? Its true--maybe the cinematographer was trying to get a grainy filmy look using digital video but it was a blurry Dublin that the (male) busker musician and the (female) Czech immigrant inhabited. For a moment I had to touch my glasses to make sure I was wearing them. Yes, they make beautiful music together and the performers are so natural and entirely charming together. But the filmmaking wasn't great. For example, one scene begins with a long shot of the busker singing in front of an alleyway between two Dublin stores. His face is so blurry that one can't make out the features on a face. The structure of his songs are such that by the second repeat of his chorus he raises the volume of his voice or he moves into a very plaintive falsetto. He pours out emotion very effectively (though each song is performed in this way). At this point the camera moves in for a medium closeup. The scene's camerawork should have been reversed. Begin with a closeup and when the song moves to a climax, pull away to a long shot to show the largeness of the moment, not its intimacy. How his voice changes the environment and creates space, not that its a private moment of him almost losing it in his song.

Not to sound like a pseudo-nostalgic Irish American, but the film did make me yearn for Dublin and Ireland. Especially one scene at a party where everyone gets a chance to play music or sing if for a but a minute, everyone else listening with intensity and respect. I remember when I was in Galway and I went on an undirected pub crawl. In each there were musicians playing--with their voices, the fiddle, the tin whistle, the guitar. Drops of water leaked from nicotine stained pub ceilings into buckets. Rooms were saturated with sound but never too loud just full. The culture revealed itself to me as so incredibly musicalized. Not as audiences indulging (oh no I am going to use a term from Adorno) in regressive listening of recorded music, but as producers of music. Music was spilling out of every building that had lights on. I was intoxicated...I'm sure the Guinness helped (yikes can't imagine ever drinking any of those again) but it was a real joy to be in such a place of music. ONCE even it is blurry vision brought me back to that night.

The Bourne Afternoon Nap

2007-08-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

I took the afternoon off from writing yesterday to head over to downtown Brooklym to see movies with J. Saw three films, but paid for one. I won't mention one, but the other two were The Invasion (another version of the The Bodysnatchers myth) and The Bourne Ultimatum. J sneaked in healthy popcorn and we were like two fabulous retirees enjoying our retirement funds (if the stock market doesn't ruin our TIAA-CREF! yikes!).

I napped as soon as Bourne started. The incessant quick edits and endless use of shakey hand held cameras was just too much for my brain, so I dozed. My kingdom for a dolly and a steady cam or holding the camera in a long shot and letting the action pass through a frame (I woke up in the middle of the night and had a bout of insomnia and found Gus Van Sant's Last Days and I so enjoyed his camerawork--long shots; shots from outside windows with reflections andhints of people). But then I thought I paid $2.66 for this film and I kinda like this franchise so I must stay awake.

I couldn't help but think of Valerie Plame when I saw the Joan Allen character (Pamela Landy). She's just the kind of CIA operative/administrator that the right wing would love to out as she believes in the rules and follows protocol. Her adversary is running a secret program that trained Bourne and Bourne is struggling to regain his identity: he agreed to have it taken from him when he joined the program. Hence his new name Bourne--he is born again as the ultimate CIA operative--asking no questions why the assissination and murder are necessary, he is a skilled killing machine who has almost lost his humanity, and most of his memories (his memories come in hiccuping flashes that overtake his consciousness like a Proustian madeleine. The films is a search for lost time and for his original name. Two women aid him in his search--Pamela Landy becomes like an absent mother for him, leaving clues to his identity, and Julia Stiles' character Nicky Parsons, though she has so few lines of dialog travels with him in search of another operative in Morocco. Men want Bourne dead (countless numbers of operatives are sent in to kill him as the program must not exposed); women want to save him and want the truth to come out. As Bourne learns more of his past he kills less (he certainly ravages an agent in Morocco) and refuses to shoot an operative who has continually rammed his car--when the operative pulls a gun on him on a roof, Bourne is even able to talk him out of it. So the film endorses a position against violence while indulging in all the cinematic pleasures of representing violence. The fight scenes are great and sell the movie.

The film did prompt a good discussion about the CIA between J and myself as we stood under the cinema's awning waiting for a thunderstorm to end. Why does the CIA exist after the cold war. J asked. Perhaps its a source book for Hollywood narratives I responded. Its certainly not making us safer. J said that a new parliamentary building in Scandinavia was being made of glass, so as to say to the people that whatever happens here is visible and the whatever goes on in the government is transparent. Here in the United States of Opacity the secret attactivities of our government encourage the populace to indulge in paranoid fantasies. Some of these fantasies are generative--the myth of Jason Bourne is one of them.

Dried Sauteed Green Beans cooked with Pork; a Dog on a Pier with Three People

2007-08-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

After my father's panel at the American Sociological Association, my father, A, and I headed down to Grand Sichuan on 9th Avenue and 24th. The cabbie we took ended up being a half Greek/half Italian Jew who had been raised in the Soviet Union. He wanted to tell the story of his life, which was somewhat interesting and also to tell us that New York City was the best city in the world, which I find tiresome even though I agree. I also have to say that sociologists are very talkative folk with distinctive tribal traits. Having grown up around them, I can pick them out anywhere. Something about the forehead. Something about the gait. Though they are genuinely fascinated by the world, they seem to watch their feet as they walk.

Yum. The green beans were excellent as always. The duck cooked in tea was succulent, fatty, and served atop cucumber as an excellent counterpoint. The soup dumplings are arguably the best in town (Joe's Shanghai certainly rivals them) and it was fun to watch my father master the delicate task of eating (slurping) the dumplings. Although an article from the Times recommended that one nibble at the edge of the dumpling in order to release the soup from the dumpling, I like the technique taught to me by J. Pierce the dumpling with a chopstick to let the liquid out and then slurp the soup out, and then eat the remaining dumpling.

As we were already in West Chelsea, I took A and my father over to some galleries on W. 24th. We went to a good show at the Matthew Marks of European artists of the 60s and 70s (curated by Mitchell Algus, the show was called "Project for a Revolution in New York after a novel by Robbe-Grillet). I became fascinated by a painting by Jacques Monory called Arachon: http://www.matthewmarks.com/index.php?n=2&c=7&e=434&i=1801&iv=1

A cinematic blue dyptych of three figures (a woman posing between two men) with a dog on a pier; an inset of the bottom left of a boy at the end of a jetty. A blown up still from a film, sad and intriguing. There are no visible connections between them save for their proximity. Even the dog appears disconnected; he looks up at one of the trio who gazes absently toward the viewer. His face could be a mask. The dog is looking for validation that it doesn't get; similar to the lone child who may have just thrown a stone--there are circular ripples on the water just in front of him.

On the web this morning I found that there is a book in English about Monory called The Assassination of Experience (it includes an essay by Lyotard). Perfect title for this painting. It depicts an occasion (and a memory of another one) as if it was an erasure of feeling, the opposite of an event.

Could green beans cooked in pork save the characters of this painting (or film) from their pose of malaise? I don't think so--I think for them soup dumplings would appear as dreadful, impossible chores.

Big Love

2007-08-14T06:37:00.001-07:00

My father is in town for a conference and we all met up for dinner last night in a very lovely Tribecan restaurant called The Harrison. Lots of Wall Street types casually dressed. Though I had to have a very strong drink to unwind after a hellish cab ride where the driver got lost in the one ways, it was great fun to be with my family and to hear about the latest adventures of my nephew, who just can back from summer camp in the Poconos and earlier in the spring went to Costa Rica. I ordered well: I got scallop ceviche as an appetizer and as a main course I got a side dish of corn polenta that was savory and fulfilling. We talked of movies we had seen and TV shows we like. BIG LOVE came up. My sister-in-law said she loved the show, and especially was fascinated by the character Chloe Sevigny played (second wife to upstart Bill, compulsive shopper, banished from the compound, rebellious daughter of the Prophet that she still adores). I agreed and said that I was also captivated by the evil ingenue Rhonda (once the newest bride to be for the Prophet, she uses her escape from the compound as a way to get media attention and dream of becoming a pop star). I remembered that the latest episode was just beginning (10pm). Dessert was good: I ordered a lemon tart and it was almost tart enough. I was happy to share it with my father and his ladyfriend A.

After getting my father and A into a taxi another cab emptied out right at my feet. The cabbie was very young. When I told him my address, he asked very politely if I wanted to go via the West Side highway and then up the FDR to Houston Street. I thought what a great idea--not short in terms of mileage, but probably quickest, avoiding lights and the horrors of Canal and Houston Streets. I looked at the speedometer when we were on the empty FDR--we were going 80mph! I was home within ten minutes. In time for the 11pm showing of the episode (Thank you HBO for showing it twice). I even had a moment to decide whether I should watch the first episode of the new season of WEEDS but I thought I'll see that on demand later in the week.

BIG LOVE is a soap opera and I am gloriously hooked. I love gawking at the polygamous Mormon family and intrigued by the power shifts and alliances within the wives. I suppose my gaze is almost anthropological--I am meant to think that I am catching a glimpse into a secret society. When I watch the scenes set in the Mormon encampment run by the Prophet Roman, with his strident wife and his troubled, closeted son (as opposed to the small suburban enclave of Bill and his three wives), I feel as if I am gaining access to a secret, exotic subculture, one that is repellent to me, but I can not stop staring at it fascinated.

Certainly myths about Mormons are not being debunked in BIG LOVE and I don't know if its shadenfreude but I do feel guilty pleasure at peering in at this hugely dysfunctional Utah family that makes my own look like a healthy grouping of like-minded, semi-conscious individuals who wisely have decided not to spend too much time together.

Lady Gresham and Judge Langlois

2007-08-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

I love Jane Austen and I love Jane Austen movies. Is this SO wrong? My mother reread Jane Austen constantly (and listened to tapes of actors reading the novels aloud) and I no doubt will follow in these footsteps. I saw a coming attraction for a movie called The Jane Austen Book Club. It looked terribly awkward and could effectively end the Jane Austen craze in the film industry, which might not be the worst thing as she certainly can't write another novel and I'm not sure a film about people who read Jane Austen in a group is very enticing (image the pitch session....).

And yet I went with K on Friday night to see Becoming Jane, which is about the young Jane Austen and how her life inspired her work. It was uncommonly cold for an August evening and I wore a jacket and long trousers and once again jumped in a cab headed for Chelsea to sit once more in the reclining seats of the multiplex near 8th Avenue. Not my favorite cinema but the only other place the film was playing downtown was the dreaded Angelica, which I have sworn I would never go to again. Landmark Sunshine is my favorite movie theater. Aisles on the sides. Good wide rooms. Good carpeting in the halls. The popcorn isn't as good as Film Forum, but I sneak in my organic popcorn in these days anyways.

It was a joy to watch Ian Richardson as Judge Langlois (Richardson's last film) and Maggie Smith as Lady Gresham (thank God Maggie is still alive). Both characters were venerable guardians of the traditions of society and each took turns reprimanding the young Jane Austen for her transgressions (though they never meet they tag team our brave Jane). At dinner, when Jane is meeting the Judge (she has become involved with his nephew, a Darcy like young lawyer from Ireland) she makes a rather witty, if ill-advised comment. The judge straightens his skeletal frame and incrimininates her with his brow. He utters with total disdain "Do I detect irony in your tone?" as if irony was beyond reproach and a crime in and of herself. With her comment, the stage is set for the Judge to forbid his nephew to ever see such a reckless upstart. Its a funny scene, but effectively shows how a woman like Jane Austen was policed and how her prose and attitude was entirely subversive. Later, after Jane runs away with the Irish lawyer (she comes back after realizing that his siblings survive on the allowance given to him by his uncle), Lady Gresham insists her nephew not see Jane for she is guilty for "unauthorized travel." The way in which Maggie Smith spits out these venomous words is both horrifying and hilariously over the top, but nevertheless reminds us that an unmarried woman of Jane's fraught station in life (desirable and from a good family as her father is a respected clergyman but without any money to offer a dowry) she is meant to act subservient, ever grateful for the attention of eligible bachelors of a higher station, however inappropriate they may be.

Its easy to laugh at the Lady Greshams and the Judge Langlois'. But their sort are everywhere in contemporary postPuritanical America. Self-proclaimed guardians of tradition, eager to cluck at any misguided attempt at forthrightness and to isolate transgressors as contagious agents to a pure society. That Jane Austen succeeded to live an independent, if solitary life, is itself an accomplishment. Like those of us in America (or so we can now imagine with warrantless wiretapping) she was being watched everywhere she went.

Design of Logo Forum

2007-08-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Last night Logo network (owned by MTV; owned by Viacom) sponsored a forum for the Democratic candidates. Decidedly not a debate, each candidate was given 15 minutes (of fame). There was a three person panel (Melissa Etheridge, Jonathan Capeheart, Joe Solomonese) and a moderator (Margaret Carlson).

The forum looked like it was held in a very small (or intimate) television studio. The candidate sat on a raised stage in a comfortable yellow-beigey arm chair that was set off to the viewer's right. The moderator sat in a similar arm chair centerstage, and the panel sat on a couch (same design/same fabric) to the viewer's left. Underneath this somber furniture sat a rug, slightly more beigey, but of a similar hue. A small audience sat on the left and right of the stage, sitting in what looked like to be bleachers. Directly behind the candidate and the moderator was a blue backdrop, with the Logo and the Human Rights Campaign (they cosponsored the debate) repeated in rows from top to bottom. So in each shot of the candidate there was product placement for the network and the organization.

The set looked like a daytime talk show format. A little bit of Ellen, a little bit of Oprah, and in the four-person set up, The View. The set's effect was to put the candidate at ease in a comfortable setting (even though they were in a roomful of glbt people) and to suggest that gayness, even if it is not a choice (a mistake repeated by Richardson) it is a lifestyle and a marketing niche. One may be born glbt, but one's design sensibilities are definitely cultivated.

The only two candidates who came out for same-sex marriage, Kucinich and Gravel, turned to discuss about how great love is. Definitely children of the 60s. It was kind of sweet, but at the same time saccharin. Are those glbt people who don't care about monogamy and marriage and are promiscuous deserving of equal rights? Love doesn't convince right wing homophobes to abandon interpretations of the Bible; they'll say they are speaking in the name of Love.

Hillary totally got the daytime talk show format and was once again the most convincing. She felt Melissa Etheridge's pain in feeling betrayed by her husband's administration, but she offered Hope. She didn't necessarily offer immediately changes in the law, but she did unpack the H word and showed it off like a designer garment bought at a sample sale.

Hillary is a mainstream politician and she won't lead the nation innovatively. She is not for gay marriage because she thinks the country is not ready for it yet. She skillfully found someone she knew in the audience, the first injured American soldier in the War in Iraq (Eric Alba?), and retold his story in order to show how far we have come and yes, we have farther to go, but we will get there if we work together. Like Gravel said (but I paraphrase and change the quote): "a good politician will sell you a ticket to hell and make you think you are on the Love Boat."

But Hillary is a celebrity and her comfort around gay people is very evident--she's "our girl." It was palpable how the studio audience was held in rapture--even if they didn't love what she said--for she has an aura. I remember when I saw her march at the gay pride march when she was running for Senator this first time. It was exciting for me to be near her: she has star presence, she is bright and sends out light. She won't deliver the goods (change in legal structures, enforced equal rights, health care, etc), but she'll give you access to the image. After all, she probably LOVES her gay stylists who put her look together and found her that coral jacket.

Hillary: Is She Your Girl?`

2007-08-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

Let's face it. Hillary is so goddam presidential! She acts the part. She looks the part. I'd rather have Gina Davis but what can you do?

At last night's debate (in a football stadium!), Hillary told the audience: "For 15 years, I've stood up against the right-wing machine. If you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I'm your girl." Well, she has taken them on, but she has not necessarily ever defeated the right wing. And when Bush wanted Congress to approve his warrantless wiretapping bill, ending the FISA court, she voted against it, but she did not kick and scream. She did not act like the President in Waiting. She acted subservient. The President has got to do what the President has to do; perhaps she also yearns for the expanded powers of the president.

Well I suppose she's comfortable referring to herself as a girl. I'm not sure if this is an accomplishment for a 50+ woman with quite a cv, but the audience in Soldiers Field Stadium ate it up and for a moment turned into Hillary's cheerleaders. She scored a touchdown by attaching her defiant femininity with a possessive, and the union workers bought it. She's not one of the boys, but she can certainly play with them.

Senators Dodd and Biden acted like she was the quarterback and they were blocking for her. They are looking for cabinet posts no doubt.

Strong Career Women on Basic Cable

2007-08-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I stayed at home. In fact it was so humid yesterday that I only left the house once--in order to get more Poland Spring, some fruit, and yes truth be told, Sauza tequila. Sweating by this time, I rushed home and ordered Chinese food. I won't tell you what I ordered, but at least I requested brown rice.

So last night was a television night. Thank God for cable though I will not thank Time Warner. I wish I could invoice them for the hours I have waited to talk to a person, and then waiting at home for a serviceperson.

After watching the last half of the AFL-CIO Democratic Presidential debate, I watched THE CLOSER on TBS, with Kyra Sedgwick at 9pm. At 10pm I turned to FX and watched DAMAGES, starring Glenn Close.

Both Close and Sedgwick play successful career women in male dominated professions, as does Holly Hunter in SAVING GRACE (also on TBS; I watched the latest episode on Monday). Close is a trial lawyer who has become quite wealthy with a reputation for ruthlessness going after powerful men who have ripped off the little people, hence the title damages. Sedgwick plays a police detective from the South who works for the LAPD. Hunter is also a detective; her character is set in Oklahoma City--she is a harddrinking woman who loves to make love to married men and has now been confronted by a nontraditional angel who wants to set her on a more righteous path.

It is intensely pleasurable to watch these three women act. They are skilled. They do not rely on close ups to express emotions. And their line readings are always better than the script. They are big screen actors and the audience is lucky to watch them on their televisions on shows that are imaginative and have strong supporting casts. (An aside here. I know that Holly Hunter is short; but in SAVING GRACE this becomes most apparent when she is with other women in a tight two-shot. When she is shot with a man, it is usually a longer shot--or they are in bed--so the size difference is not so visible)

Each character, Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, Holly Hunter as Grace, and Kyra Sedwick as Brenda refuses to play by the rules and steps outside behavior that is prescribed for women. Each is in a leadership role and is forthright, articulate, compellling, and not always considered likable by her coworkers and lovers/husbands. Each gets the job done, and privileges their work over their leisure or their domestic lives. Yet each is brought down by their personal details.

Brenda, we find out this week, is suffering from the early onset of menopause, which may or may not be indicative of a larger health problem. In recent episodes, she has been suffering from hot flashes, drastic mood swings, and lightheadedness. Once she almost cried in front of her colleagues--and any display of vulnerability would be a complete failure and a transgression of her self-image. The only emotion she likes to display is anger and she unleashes it strategically in order to elicit a confession from a suspect. This week's episode brought home her vulnerability--she is trying to find out the identity of a serial killer, especially before another helpless woman is found dead. Unlike her male counterparts, who want to reveal the killer, she wants to identify his next victim, knowing that they fit a pattern. Of course, she becomes the killer's next potential victim and rather than being able to get a confession from him (her modus operandi), she has to shoot him after he has shocked her with a branding iron. Brenda's own body undermines her authority in the show, and no doubt in the rest of the season we are going to find out more about her health, and her struggles to keep it from her colleagues and put on her work-mask.

Patty, though older than Brenda, seems in good physical shape. Her hair is perfect and her outfits are flawless, though in this week's episode she too is threatened by (presumably from her male adversary) violence, a grenade that is delivered to her office (and then one later placed in her husband's car). She is undermined by her son's behavior who is hiring strippers, listening to rap music (wow that must mean he is troubled/bad), watching online porno, and hacking into his prep school's confidential records. She has already told her young malleable recruit that she has ambivalence toward her role as a mother and clearly her son works her last nerve. She is more comfortable with having her son being expelled than her headmaster (the son recites a dream she had about limos and replicants of herself to elicit compassion for his troubled psyche). Her struggle too is to come from meetings with headmasters and family therapists back to her office and like Brenda, put on he work-mask back on. So far, she has been able to hide any vulnerability and continue to invoke fear in her underlings (she uses the bomb threat as a rationale for a morale boosting speech for her remaining employees), but one wonders how long she can keep doing this "act."

Grace's harddrinking, hardloving ways undermine her in the first episode. She drives drunk and presumably kills a pedestrian. A defiant, difficult angel comes to her aid in erasing the crime, but she becomes reluctantly beholden to him, who shows up in her house (or in her mind) uninvited. The jury is out whether this is going to be another Christian/Jesus/salvation show (the 4400 club, Heroes etc) but Grace is the kind of girl who doesn't take shit from anyone, especially men. She is an alpha-gal, who loves to hang out with the boys in bars but if a rich cattleman mandhandles her, she will not hesitant to kick his ass. Yet when she gets home, she has to deal with this (male) angel, who is constantly trying to teach her lessons to get on the straight and narrow. Personally, I hope she gets to kick his sorry angel ass to the curb but I know full well he will get his scenes.

Each of these successful career women's professional demeanor is threatened by their domestic, performance l ives. Of course, this is a narrative technique that lends complexity to the character and alllows their ongoing personal stories to frame the drama in each episode. We get to see Brenda act in public and then we get to see her "real self" in her private life struggling with her body and her boyfriend, allowing the audience to feel that we might know the character better than her work colleagues. But all of these shows emphasizes the difficulty each woman has to undergo in order to put on her work-mask, excell in a man's world, and how their personal lives threaten to undermine their professional successes. They are great characters, but the writing--not the acting--reinforces that they are anomalies in what remains a man's world. Grace, Patty, and Brenda continue to have to navigate male violence. Like Gloria Gaynor, no doubt they will survive, but they will have to hide their bruises at work.

Chairs

2007-08-07T06:42:00.000-07:00

Its the dog days of summer. I tend to go to the cinema more now, alone and with friends. I am working at home and need to take breaks. My apartment is airconditioned, but its certainly not cold. Its small and I develop rls (restless leg syndrome). I seek refuge in the cinema.

I went with B to see Hairspray. We were reluctant to see it in the Chelsea Cineplex because last time we went to see the biopic about Edith Piaf (the airconditioning was good) but the seats recline automatically and they go back too far, almost as if the back of your head is in the lap of the person sitting behind you (which I suppose might be pleasurable for some). We needed to go to a showing around 6pm because she needed to catch an early morning flight the next day and the Chelsea Cinemas was the only theatre in town which was showing the film then, so we had to go. We also noticed that certain cinemas are sponsoring special times for sing-alongs, so I suppose there are fans out there that know all the words to the songs in the musical.

The lobby was nicely airconditioned but the actual theatre on the ground floor was not chilly. I had brought along a long-sleeved shirt to put on but it was not needed. B was also disappointed by the lack of air conditioning and I encouraged her to complain to the manager. But after awhile it was comfortable enough. Still though, the seats reclined too much and there was no way to sit upright; the weight of your back caused the seat to go back regardless.

The film was fun. I love when John Travolta dances and watching him dance in a fat suit, especially in the number with Christopher Walken (who is also a great hoofer) was a great treat. Travolta is truly graceful and expressive when he moves. I could get into missing the original film by John Waters but I suppose having John Waters appearing the film briefly as a flasher was a bit of a stamp of approval.

Truth be told I became very involved in the movie. B had bought me a medium size Sierra Mist. (We had a very fun discussion with the guys behind the counter about the Showtime series Weeds, which we all loved. Especially that a different versions of the opening song was used each episode, including a version in French. As we walked to the theatre I said to B I love guys who love Weeds) I thought well I'm going to have to go the bathroom during the movie and as we sat in the middle of the row and people sat down after us on the aisles I am definitely going to have an awkward moment trying to move in front of grump moviegoers, trying in vain not to step on their toes...but I forgot that I needed to pee until the end of the film, and even waited to see the closing credits. Even the reclining seats didn't bother me too much.

When I went to the bathroom, I went to pee at the urinal on the right (there are three urinals). A fellow came in after me and started peeing at the urinal on the left, leaving one urinal between us. Out of the corner of my eye, it seemed that he was sipping his soda from a straw while he was peeing. I thought how odd, and actually turned by head to verify this information. Yes, there he was peeing and drinking at once. I thought I could never accomplish such a confusing, contradictory task, but he seemed quite happy at this juxtaposition.

Upchuck

2007-08-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

I went to see the Simpson’s Movie last week in downtown Brooklyn with my pal J. He had already seen it and said he would go again if we went to a matinee. We are both teachers so we have the summers off to work on our research and freelance projects so we decided to take the afternoon off and avoid the summer heat in Cineplex air conditioning and stadium seating.

Afterward he suggested that we sneak it to another movie. There wasn’t much to see and he had seen a few of the other films playing. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was just beginning and I said what the fuck maybe its funny lets go, besides we should stay attuned to the portrayals of gay men (and men pretending to be gay) in mainstream movies. At least it will give us something to talk about, for sure.

Now, when I watching coming attractions to films that look incredibly ridiculous and preposterous or overly recycled, I start to imagine the pitch session, perhaps influenced by Altman’s The Player. Like imagine there’s a bee that makes friends with a beautiful woman. The bee is played by Jerry Seinfield…did I say its animation? I think we can get Renee to play the love interest. The bee is funny. Or what about a rat that is a great chef in Paris (I’m sorry ratatouille is an Italian dish, not a French one)? Or what about the Disney animated Prince and Princess that find themselves thrust into contemporary New York but still act like Disney characters.

Well Chuck and Larry was so bad and so offensive that soon after the film began I started imagining the pitch session. There’s two New York City firemen, one of them fat and lovable with kids (Larry), the other a confirmed bachelor with a taste for threesomes and foursomes (never with another guy) who is Mr. February in the Fireman’s calendar….that’s Chuck played by Adam Sandler.

(A brief aside about the Fireman Calendar. In NYC, the fire dept commissioner has announced that it will be discontinued because a guy on the cover this year was found to have appeared in Guys Gone Wild showing off his very prominent member. This response is prudery. First of all, he appeared in the video before he joined the Fire Department. Second, who cares? Good on him, if he stripped and celebrated his anatomy. As Pee Wee might say “Is it so wrong?” In fact it’s not wrong at all. And the calendar raises money…)

Adam Sandler may be cute (or cute-ish) but he’s no hunk. He just doesn’t have the body and he certainly doesn’t have the face. If he was in a gay bar, he’s the sort that only finds someone online on Craig’s List after he’s gone home and he posts fake pictures of himself. I’ve never found him funny. But in the film when two stereotypical, around-the- way Italian twins fight over him as his basketball-playing pals watch on in admiration, getting off of his apparent charm and prowess, the audience is supposed to think “wow, he’s such a player.” Instead I felt a bit sick to my stomach and started to think about the pitch session…

When we learn his pal (who has saved Adam’s live) needs him to get “hitched” in order to get insurance money for his children, Adam’s reaction was you mean like “fags?” Luckily the theatre was empty, but I can imagine in a cinema filled with straight guys who love their best friends more than their wives or girlfriends laughing uproariously in order to hide their nervousness at their secret desires being revealed.

Now I never leave movies. I am not PC and I don’t watch films or television with checklists to see if representations of minorities are appropriate, accurate, or socially helpful. I can watch schlock. I can watch reality television. I can enjoy a rightwing superhero movie and I even saw Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic anti-Semitic Jesus film and got lost in the Aramaic. (I did imagine the pitch session that Mel recited to his backers… it’s about Jesus but with all the chains and torture that Jesus Christ Superstar left out, plus there’s no songs.) I must admit i the image moves and there’s a soundtrack, I can usually stomach it and sit in the dark with all the other ripped off fools, especially if its summer and I want some real kicking air conditioning.

After Chuck acts like a sexist pig with the pretty white female doctor who is treating him after he recovers from an accident (Larry saves him), I imagined the male audience laughing along with this behavior, especially as we all know that he’s going to have to marry his best friend. At least she got to reprimand him and refused to be charmed by his sexist, pseudo working class salt of the earth, I’m just a horny Jewish firefighter schtick. (I’m sorry there’s something so suburban and spoiled about Adam Sandler, something so Great Neck, Long Island) But when Larry comes over to his house at night in order to ask him to get married and Chuck’s bedroom is filled with stereotypical giggling, submissive Asian women AND the white female doctor, I turned to J and said let’s leave.

As we rode the escalator down, a kid was riding up the escalator next to us. I didn’t see him but he turned to J (and presumably me too) and said “you a faggot.” J said, bless him: “Yeah and what are you going to do about it?” J might also have said “and I’ll kick your ass.” Or I might have hoped he said it. The kid shut up presumably startled by J’s assertive response. I don’t know if the kid had seen “Chuck and Larry” but he certainly felt permission to issue forth with a homophobic comment. And then presumably he’ll say sexist comments about women when he is hanging out with his homeboys, who he probably loves more than life itself. So in the mainstream imagination, it is okay to love your best bud, but it is still fucked up to love your lover, and any suggestion of femininity in a man’s man is remains punishable (or its actionable intelligence). Thanks but I’d rather see a porno film with a NYC firemen.

Now Chuck and Larry does bring up a point—or it should. So-called gay marriage should be thought of as same-sex marriage. There are plenty of men and plenty of women who are heterosexual but prefer the companionship of their own gender. I’ve met them. I hate to refer to Sex and the City, but Carrie should have married one of her gal pals, not some icky Wall Street Broker who wants to be on Law and Order. Heterosexuals should be allowed to marry their best friends.