November 17, 2009

Very Important Update

Well, that “500 Days of Summer” post must have really taken a lot out of me since it’s taken me TWO MONTHS to get back on my blog.  Let’s see, what’s happened since then?  I took my star turn as Frances in “The Sun Also Rises” to Sarasota where the old people loved us and the young people fed us dangerous mai tais.  I swam in the gulf of Mexico with the very large dive-bombing pelicans.  I missed the Equality March in D.C. so I made my fellow company members stage our own protest (with slightly less focused demands…)  I got to page 250 in the first draft of my new teen novel.  I lost the battery cover to my cell phone on the floor of a particularly dingy nyc bar.  Someone found my blog by googling “why people are afraid of puppets.” I was an extra in von Hottie’s Time Out New York naked photo shoot (on news stands Thanksgiving week!) I trotted out my “Tippy Hedren being attacked by birds in The Birds” costume for Halloween.  I bought a copy of “Swann’s Way” and have made it to page 11.  And my Saturn Return ended and I met all these amazing gay men (coincidence?  I think not!)  Wow!  What a two months it’s been!

But perhaps most importantly, I learned that there is such a thing as dwarf goats, and that they look like this when they are two weeks old.  (And that they must beware of house cats)

I like to call this “Tiny Jumpity Goat Navigates Suburban Obstacle Course.”

1 Comment

Filed under Fun to Watch!, Kittens

September 11, 2009

She’s Just Not That Into You

And so the time has come to talk about the movie “500 Days of Summer.”  I have put this off because this movie makes me angry.  Really, really angry.  I have already listed some of its offences in the misuse of whimsy.  Now it’s time to face the demons and add an entry to my “Heterosexuals having trouble” category.

(Warning – many plot points of the movie will be discussed below.  But the upside is if you read this then you don’t have to see it.)

We are told at the beginning of this movie that it is “not a love story,” and that’s true.  It is a one-sided breakup story that pits a well-intentioned boy (Tom) against an impenetrable wall of feminine inscrutability (Summer)

The problem in critiquing this movie is trying to differentiate between the obliviousness of the character and the obliviousness of the writer (Scott Neustadter).  It seems that Neustadter is willing to concede that Tom didn’t see the signs leading to being dumped, and paint him as a little naïve because of that.  Btu his naiveté is supposed to be seen as charming and romantic and sweet.  Still, Neustadter allows the two women’s voices that are heard in the movie (one is Tom’s pre-teen sister, the other is a girl who goes out on a regrettable blind date with him in which he acts like an ass but it’s supposed to be funny) to shout loud and clear that Summer gave him fair warning – she told him she didn’t want a relationship.

But here’s where the “just not into you” premise comes in.  To a man who is smitten, “I’m not interested in a relationship” evidently means “I’m not interested in a relationship until I give it some time and you continue to pursue me and inevitably I’ll fall as hard for you as you have for me,” when, as the self-help genre by way of Oprah has taught us, it actually means “I’m not interested in having a relationship with you in particular.  But we can hang out and mess around if you want.”  So for the heterosexual ladies dealing with this coming from a guy the advice is to adopt the attitude of “If he doesn’t see what I’ve got then he’s not worth it.”  The problem here is that both Neustadter and Tom seem to believe that “If she doesn’t see what I’ve got, she’s an insensitive bitch.”

Never mind the fact that Summer as a character is crafted to be a pretty, indie mannequin in adorable retro dresses, all things that would be positive attributes in an Anthropologie magazine, not so positive in a movie where she’s the love object and has absolutely no personality beyond her styling.

This makes me extra angry because I love me some Zooey Deschanel, but there has always been a serious danger in her just being an adorable indie cutie pie with no substance in her roles.  I haven’t see all of her movies (Yes Man? ugh), but in Elf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and in her role on Weeds she definitely brought the adorable, but there was always something else there to make her a real person.  Elf is a good example of a place where her powers could have been used for evil instead of good.  It’s a ridiculously adorable movie, with a crazy adorable premise, and Will Ferrell allowed to go all out with his man/boy persona by playing a human who was raised as an elf in Santa’s workshop and is now trying to integrate into the real world.  But the movie works because there’s a little bit of an edge to it.  And Zooey’s character is, yes, mostly just adorable (she works as an elf at the department store with Ferrell and he, of course, falls for her), but there is a little bit of darkness to her character that makes her feel real.  She’s a little hostile, introverted, and mistrustful.  And, yes, maybe this is just because she needs to learn how to sing with Christmas cheer in public, but it feels authentic, and really specific to a kind of New York single working girl.

So what scares me about 500 Days of Summer is that it has accomplished the removal of substance from Zooey’s adorable act.  She is intentionally just lovely, that’s all, and that’s enough for Tom and it’s supposed to be enough for us.

more about “Exclusive: Love At First Sight | Vide…“, posted with vodpod

(I’m not going to even comment on “there’s only two kinds of people in the world – there’s women and there’s men” remark – and nicely summing her up by her height, weight, and shoe size, or the overly forced adorableness and the use of Belle and Sebastian as a shortcut for cute cool.  Also – Evidently there has been some important work done on the topic of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon.  Fascinating.)

If this was a movie about a guy being oblivious to the fact that the girl that he loves for superficial reasons (their first moment of bonding is over the Smiths) isn’t as into him as he is into her, it might be interesting.  And it might stay being about the characters rather than about the author.  The problem is what happens after the unexpected dumping.  Tom is heartbroken and determined to get Summer back (not recognizing that he never had her), but it’s no go.  So time passes, he’s starting to recover, and they run into each other on the train to a co-workers wedding.  He’s freaking out, but she’s friendly, and they end up having a great night together – dancing, talking, etc.  He’s thrilled – maybe this thing could be back on?  So she invites him to a little party at her house.  He brings her a present of the book he had been reading that she had remarked on.  Cue the intervention of a whimsical gimmick to emphasize the unfairness of what’s about to happen to him.

Split screen – one shows what his expectations were for this evening, one is what actually happens.  In real, harsh, unfair reality, she doesn’t hug him affectionately at the door, she’s weird about the gift, and she’s disparaging about his job to her friends*.

*Please note that what she says here is that he could be a great architect if he wanted to be (“architect” in this movie is shorthand for a creative, but respectable, career) instead of writing copy for greeting cards (the dumb, brainless, go nowhere, but conveniently cute and quirky job that he has allowed himself to get sucked into – which my wife points out is a job that many people would want and would consider an actual career.  He’s not working at a convenience store or something.  AND please note that the greeting card copy-writer as shorthand for cute and quirky but go-nowhere job was already used extensively on Will and Grace, when Edward Burns guest starred as Grace’s writer boyfriend who wants to write screenplays but writes schlocky cards instead.  And at least that guy was a writer.  How does someone who’s studied architecture get this job?  Is there no writing skill involved at all?)  Okay, so Summer is being a bitch at this party because she’s saying he doesn’t apply himself and use his degree to get a job in his field instead of being the affectionate and flirty girl of the other side of the split screen.  And then the entire victory of the end of the movie is that he does get his act together and starts pursuing a job in architecture!  So is this a self aware insight into the fact that sometimes the things we hate hearing about ourselves the most are the things that are the most true?  Nope.  Her behavior here only exists to demonstrate that she’s an uncaring bitch.

And then it happens.  The piece de resistance.  The thing that makes this movie the piece of insulting crap that it is.  On the sad, reality-based side of the screen, Tom watches from a distance as Summer happily shows off an engagement ring to a friend.  And the thought that has been engineered to go through our minds at that moment is “What a bitch.”  Why?  Because all that we have been given is what Tom chooses to see about her.  We as an audience have no insight at all into her character, because, well, it doesn’t exist!  So this moment comes out of nowhere as much for us as it does for him, which, from the point of following the arc of the story, is a little bit frustrating.

So now Tom knows it’s really over.  He falls apart and lies in bed eating only twinkies (just like a heartbroken girl!  And that’s what we’re supposed to think here.  Look at the tables all turned around!  Boys are sensitive too!)  He quits his job by having the most by-the-book “I can’t stand this job anymore” outburst in a meeting that has ever existed.  And then he puts himself back together, better than before – that’ll show her!

At the end of the movie we get to see a full scene that we had been given a flash of at the beginning – Tom and Summer sitting on a bench together.  Her hand resting on his has an enormous engagement ring on it.  Now we learn that she has shown up on this bench (his favorite) hoping to see him.  Although we’re not given any reason why she wanted to see him, of course, and in the end the interaction seems to exist only to provide closure for him in a convenient way that didn’t have to involve him asking for it because she just magically showed up to give it.

Tom gets to have his gender-reversed “Sex and the City” moment of asking “Why not me?”  And Summer kind of shrugs and just says that the things that she wasn’t sure of with Tom she is sure of with this guy.  And finally Tom gets to understand that she just wasn’t that into him.  There was nothing else he could have done.  And it lets him off the hook in this Man-version of the idea, where if you just persist you’ll get her.  You just have to pursue.  Well, this girl was a bitch who didn’t want to be pursued by him.

Now keep in mind that we never get to see the fiancé, not even at the party where she was showing off the ring.  And we get no indication of why she is going into this (convenient for the plot) quickie marriage besides her saying that she feels sure of it.  Aren’t women just so inscrutable?  And the problem is, it’s so clearly the writer trying to prove this to us.

How do I know this for sure?  Well let’s just take a quick moment to mention how the movie starts.  On a blank screen the words read “Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.” Then it says, “Especially you, Jenny Beckman. Bitch.” Ha ha…. ha?  Um, not so funny?  Because he has just let us in on the fact that this movie has an agenda.  And it’s not adorable or excusable.   It’s about calling this girl a bitch.  It’s badly executed misogyny, the worst kind.

Here Neustadter nicely outlines for us exactly how he turned his sad, sad breakup into a movie!  Here’s a prime quote:

“Reliving every moment of my bitter-sweet, one-sided romance was a cathartic experience for me  -  and the end result, we were shocked to find, was pretty decent. The finished film tells it all just as it happened, however embarrassing my puppy-like devotion and however aloof it makes her look. “

You just know that he had to have a kickass denouement to make sure that we know that Tom is going to be okay, and is still, you know, a man who knows how to pursue.  At an interview for a job at an architecture firm the other candidate in the waiting area with him is a pretty girl.  They joke a little about how they each hope the other doesn’t get the job.  Then Tom is called in and starts to walk away.  Cue the horrible voiceover that has been used sporadically throughout the movie and that you had forgotten about at this point.  Again – it’s supposed to be quirky and adorable, and it’s either the exact same guy who did the voiceover on “The Royal Tenenbaums” or someone doing their best impersonation of that guy.  So the voiceover cuts in and tell us, No!  Tom hasn’t given up on love!  He must still believe!  All hope is not lost!  And to demonstrate this to us Tom goes back and asks the girl if she wants to go out with him after their interviews.  What heroism!  But – oh no!  She can’t!  She’s meeting someone!  Well, either she’s just blowing him off or she has a boyfriend.  Shot down again.  But wait!  She gives him her number, and she just looks tickled pink to have been asked.  Hurrah!

So, you understand, the victory of this movie is that this guy is able to ask out another pretty girl.  And hopefully this one won’t be a bitch.

Now, just to finish up this diatribe, I would like to direct your attention to a really crazy article from the July 26th New York Times Magazine.  It’s called “Love in 2-D” by Lisa Katayama, and it’s about Japanese men who claim that inanimate objects (mostly body pillows with covers depicting pre-teen anime characters) are their girlfriends.  Really.   One of the main guys interviewed, Nisan, brings his “girlfriend” Nemutan with him everywhere he goes.  He sets her up in chairs in restaurants and eats dinner with her.  They go on road trips together.

This is an entire movement of men called 2-D lovers, they are “a subset of otaku culture – the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade.”  They are so committed to their identities as 2-D lovers that when Toru Honda, the guru of the 2-D movement, admitted at a panel discussion to watching human porn, he was booed.  So not only is a real woman too complicated to deal with on an emotional level, she’s even too complicated to objectify.  It’s that third dimension that messes it all up.  Everything is so round!  (nevermind the fact that these men are fetishizing images of children, which nicely takes out even more of the complexity of a real woman, rendering the desired female form as a complete blank slate, uninfluenced by the burdens of maturity.)

Nisan is loyal to his Nemutan pillow, but some men enjoy the level of pillow promiscuity the “lifestyle” allows.  A guy called Momo sleeps with (and I do mean the euphemistic “sleeps with”) three pillows from his collection of a hundred and fifty every night.  He explains to Katayama that he was once close to getting married, but that the complication comes in the fact that “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean.  In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else.  With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Wow, Momo.  Way to really sum it up.  So, fellas, maybe it’s time to invest in a nice, simple, understanding body pillow.  She’ll never leave you.  Just be sure to wash her in gentle detergent to show your love.

Now would be a good time to listen to this song.

(By the way – this lady nicely summed up the 500 DOS issue a little more succinctly than I did.)

//

//

//

//

2 Comments

Filed under Heterosexuals having trouble

September 4, 2009

Friends With Food

So I’m on a bit of a food investigative kick.  And I have a few ideas about why this is proving to be really interesting to me right now, but mostly I’m trying not to question it and just to go with it.  I’m hoping in the end it’s going to help me make some peace with the kitchen, a place I have never understood or felt any need to understand (kind of like the treadmill, what’s the point?).  I think it’s hard for a woman with any kind of consciousness of what women have gone through in the past hundred years in order to get where we are today to feel comfortable with spending hours of her day cooking and cleaning.  So what is the answer to getting past that justifiable resistance?  Well, having a partner who is interested in sharing these responsibilities with you equally helps, but in the end you have to want to do it for yourself.  And this is where I get hung up on both food and exercise.  I can learn all I want about how these things are important, but the crabby baby that lives inside of me will always want to order pizza and sit on my growing butt.

Because I’m going through it, I tend to attribute a lot of things to Saturn return, the time in your late 20s/early 30s when Saturn returns to the place it was in when you were born and things go all wonky on you.  Things that you’ve always taken for granted go away and you’re forced to question some pretty big parts of your life.  The challenge is to come out the other side of that having fought that fight and ready to live this new life that has been born out of that fight (that is, until 60, when it all comes back again).  Even if you’re not into astrology and the whole thing sounds too airy fairy for you (and of course, people go through big changes throughout their entire lives), I still find it to be a helpful way to think about this transition into real adulthood (cause, lets face it, your 20s are kind of a joke).

So one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot recently in the context of this transition is learning to do the things that you don’t really want to.  And not just doing them, but kind of learning to enjoy them in some way.  Even if it’s just the satisfaction of getting the laundry done, cleaning the house, cooking a meal.  It’s the idea that if you commit to these things and really pay attention to them, maybe they can prove to be rewarding in some way after all.  Now this is a slippery slope, of course, because I’m not a lady who is about to devote her life to the joys of housework and domesticity (um, not that there’s anything wrong with that, as they say), but if you look these things as a kind of essential self-care that comes with maturity and responsibility, they start to take on a new meaning.

So now about food.  I have never been one to understand dieting, but I have tried to change my eating patterns in the past in response to health problems.  A few years ago I was having trouble with acid reflux and my doctor tested me for food allergies and found that I have a gluten sensitivity.  I knew that dairy also made me feel a little ill, so for about six weeks I cut them both out.  And it helped!  Imagine that!  The reflux went away and I was able to stop taking my medicine without it coming back.  Now the problem with making these kinds of changes is that you can’t always see the big differences when you’re inside them.  It’s like watching a kid grow up – if you’re around them every day you don’t really notice the difference.  So the only time anything felt really different (besides the reflux) was when I would eat a large portion of bread and feel like crap.  So obviously without the gluten my energy and digestion and all those good things were better, but it wasn’t some kind of superman transformation or anything.  And there’s a danger in making these little changes that have an effect but aren’t “Oh my god, how did I ever live the other way!” Because it’s very easy to go back, which is what I did.  After that experience I tried to limit my gluten and dairy intake, but it was usually too much work.  And like any good American, I am not so into working for my food.

But I’m thinking that now with my inner baby momentarily under some kind of control that I might be receptive to hearing about how a lot of little changes can add up.  So this is the time for food and health to start making their case to me.  And so far I’m convinced.  The problem is, you do need to get at least a little bit hippy dippy about it.  But I’m (not so) secretly kind of into all that.

Here’s what I’m thinking about at the moment:

It seems to be all about erasing the effects of the fact that Western humans have almost completely divorced themselves from any connection to the natural world.  I was just listening to Susan Allport on the Leonard Lopate show talking about Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids in our foods.  We need both of these things to like, um, make our brain work and, you know, our bodies function, but the current Western diet contains way more Omega-6s than Omega-3s.  Omega-3s come from leaves (which is how fish get them, and how livestock used to get them when they were allowed to forage for food, now we put them in the feed of chickens to compensate for that loss).  Omega-6s come from seeds, and they show up in all of these vegetable oils that we use so much (olive oil has Omega-3s).  In the natural world animals gobble up leafy plants in the Spring when they are abundant and Summer is coming and it’s time to frolic in the fields, and seeds and things in the Fall when Winter in coming and it’s time to gain weight and have your brain slow down for a nice warm, long sleep.  So as animals, when we consume all of those Omega-6s we are basically telling our bodies to gain weight and our minds to slow down.  What? Crazy!

And it’s not just about sticking those Omega-3s back into the processed foods we eat in order to compensate for the disparity.  I’m reading Michael Pollan’s new book “In Defense of Food” where he talks about the curse of “nutritionism.”  This is where scientists spend their time trying to isolate those magical vitamins and minerals that will make us healthy and stick them into potato chips.  And then people buy those potato chips because they are freaking out about what they are supposed to eat and they heard on the news that Omega-3s are good for you.  The problem is that it doesn’t work like that.  You can’t just take the good things out of the broccoli and put them in a muffin and call it a day.  There is something about that broccoli that is important and unique in the way in which is provides nourishment, and I propose that it’s a kind of human arrogance to assume that we can completely understand that.  Not that it’s not important to try to learn more about these nutrients.  Just that we need to eat the damn broccoli.

in defense of food

Pollan takes this argument to the point of saying that this is why vitamins don’t work, you need to be getting these nutrients from your food.  But I’m also deep into Dr. Mark Hyman’s “The Ultramind Solution,” and I know that both he and Dr. Andrew Weil are big on vitamins as a way to supplement a diet that is inevitably not going to be perfect.  I have a hard time believing that vitamins are useless, because I know that if I feel sick and take a megadose of vitamin C I get better.  Can this completely be the placebo effect?  I guess it’s possible.  And one argument about studies of people who take vitamins says that these people are already skewed to be healthy because if you take vitamins you are someone who cares about your health in a more general way and also can afford vitamins.  But as far as I can tell, it can’t hurt.

Of course, keeping in mind that the main issue here is the food.  I really like Mark Hyman’s analogy of saying that you need to think of your body as the hardware and your food as the software.  The hardware can only run the software that you put in it – so do you want to run the broccoli program or the cookie program right now?  I like that because it’s a very simple and unemotional way of looking at it.  We’re so emotional about our bodies and our food and appetites, and I don’t think it helps to deny that and just become completely clinical about all of it, because you can’t sustain that and you’re going to have the baby inside stage a huge backlash against it and rise up in a powerful baby coup demanding all chocolate cake all the time.  (Pollan talks about a great study where Americans were shown pictures of chocolate cake and asked what word they associated with the picture – the top answer was “guilt.” In the same test done with French people they said “celebration.”  Hello, neurotics!)

mark hyman book

So then it becomes – my body is a kind of computer, but I love this computer.  This is a very expensive Macbook Air or whatever, and it’s really pretty and I want to have a lot of fun with it.  So let’s give it all the good updates and get the programs we need and do awesome stuff with it.

I’ll have more thoughts as I keep reading.  I haven’t even started in on the drug companies, which are Mark Hyman’s big target.  Did you hear about this big settlement with Pfizer the other day for 2.3 BILLION DOLLARS for “allegedly paying kickbacks and using off-labeling marketing campaigns to promote drugs it manufactures”?  Did you know that once a drug is approved it can be prescribed by any doctor for ANY purpose?  Okay, this is already too long.  So more later.  But I highly recommend Mark Hyman’s book if you’re really interested in all of this.

3 Comments

Filed under Eat it

August 26, 2009

A Roundup of Upcoming Cinematic Whimsy

Now I am a big fan of your well-employed whimsy in a film, say your “Royal Tenenbaums,” your “Amalie,” I would even argue that one of my all-time favs, “My Own Private Idaho,” is pretty whimsy-centric.  But whimsy used for evil instead of for good… oh boy, there is just nothing worse.  Actually, the place where whimsy-users often go wrong is by just throwing it in there without backup or a coherent vision.  You can’t just toss in some random arty animation and a musical number and expect them to bring charm to your otherwise charmless movie.

I’m actually not going to go into the particular culprit that has got me so riled up at the moment.  Suffice it to say that two of its specific no-nos are an arbitrary use of parentheses in the movie title, and the offense of giving your character a cute name that will allow you to come up with a cute title (this makes me crazy!  Total “Will and Grace” syndrome.  For example, you name your main character Joy simply so your title can be “Life Without Joy.”  Could we be a little more heavy handed about this?)

The reason I’m going to hold off on getting down and dirty with this particular offender is that misplaced whimsy is the least of this movie’s problems (I feel a rant about gender issues coming on…).  And right now I want to keep a more positive outlook on what promises to be an exciting Fall for fans of the cute and clever and odd.

Now please be warned – if you do not have a very high tolerance for the offbeat and adorable, do not attempt to watch all of these previews in one sitting.  The real danger exists that such a barrage of whimsy could send you running out the door to catch the next showing of “Inglourious Basterds.”  Take it slow.

First, the much anticipated “Where the Wild Things Are” – with blessings given by Maurice Sendak.  Written by Dave Eggers, directed by Spike Jonze, and what’s that?  Karen O’s doing the soundtrack and that’s Arcade Fire in the preview?  Well, my, my.

Number two in our showdown – a stop motion version of Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” directed by Wes Anderson?  Yes, indeedy.

And finally, a more risky contender, since it comes from the director of “Napoleon Dynamite” which was not my particular brand of whimsy – “Gentleman Broncos.”  Why do I have high hopes?  Hello, Jemaine from “Flight of the Concords” as some kind of crazy sci-fi author?  And the kid who was Jack’s son on “Will and Grace” as the main character?  And, what’s that?  You have a Shout Out Louds song in your preview? Well played.

Now these could all be awful and drag the good name of adorable-ness further down the craphole that “(500) Days of Stupid” has dug for it.  But I still have high hopes that one of these will raise us back up to the glory days of whimsy.  Meanwhile, I hear that people get scalped in the Tarantino movie… so yeah… You know, something for everyone.

2 Comments

Filed under Fun to Watch!

August 12, 2009

What We Need Today

Today we need some of this right now:

Thanks to David Zinn and the magic of Facebook for bringing this important information to my attention.

1 Comment

Filed under Fun to Watch!

August 3, 2009

For Your Viewing Pleasure

What happens when Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr team up against Twitter in what should be a simple afternoon “photo shoot?” This film – from the twisted minds that brought you your favorite “man eating a sandwich made of ladies” movie – Colosi, Villalobos, Scelsa, and von Holt – may confirm all of your worst fears about social networking. Whatever you do, keep your cold, clammy grip on that iphone…

//

Leave a Comment

Filed under Fun to Watch!

July 23, 2009

Let’s Check in With the Media…

Logo recently gave these hilarious cutie youtube stars their own show.  Of course, I think the only difference is that Logo provided them with a slightly nicer webcam, but still – if Cole continues to do his Bernadette Peters impression I’ll be happy.

This means, Logo Network, that I can almost forgive you for canceling “Exes & Ohs.” which wasn’t the best show ever in the whole world, but at least it had a sense of humor and women who looked like real lesbians (and, imagine this, some who actually were lesbians!)

Next, Logo, I would like to hear that are you in talks with Becky Drysdale, okay?

And while we’re on the topic – is anyone more excited than me about Ellen’s Cover Girl status? I know I’m always behind the times with these things because I don’t watch a ton of regular TV, but I saw one of their commercials with her the other night and it just felt really huge  How many things are amazing about this?  She is 51 (and yes, okay, hawking for “age defying makeup,” but still…), an out and proud, married, butch (yes, butch can still be “pretty”) lesbian.  And a comedian!  But the fact that Covergirl wanted her is not so much a testament to some kind of forward-thinking move on their part (although, yes, some credit due) – but it’s mostly about what Ellen has been able to accomplish with her talk show in the past 6 years – become daytime-tv-watching-America’s sweetheart in a very real way.  And in a way that brings a younger audience to the 3pm timeslot without pandering to them by trying to be self consciously hip.  Ellen is the Conan of the afternoons – hilarious, self-deprecating, and adorable.

So, next step – Ellen gets the Tonight Show next?  Or maybe Letterman gives her his show when he retires? Ah! How amazing! If Conan and Ellen were the new Leno/Letterman!  Come on, people, how do we make this happen?  Please don’t let the lesson of this all be that the highest level of success a lady TV personality can reach is selling beauty products.  I want to see her use those Converse sneakers to kick a giant hole in the late night wall of testosterone.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Fun to Watch!, Gay Stuff

June 29, 2009

Pride it up

Happy Pride, people!

I am going to take the occasion of NYC Pride (which I actually went to this year – imagine that!  Usually I can only work up the energy to walk out my front door as the one float in the Brooklyn Pride parade rolls by.  Wife and I are going to wear our “just married” shirts with two ladies on them.  As long as the issue is timely I think we can still call ourselves “just married”…) to comment on some gay stuff.  Since that other topic of my blog, cats and kittens (also koalas now maybe?) has gotten a good amount of attention.

DSCN6146

First of all – I’ve been slowly easing myself back into listening to WNYC now that I’m back in the country, and I’ve spent most of the week getting annoyed at a certain morning talk show host who shall go unnamed who I feel like often manages to miss the point, especially when he’s talking about queer issues.  They’ve got this new “Greene Space” where they can do live shows in front of an audience, and evidently that means having so many guests that there isn’t enough time to talk to all of them, never mind time for them to start a dialog with each other.  There’s just such an effort to keep things neat and make sure you get everything in (within the 15 minutes allotted to a segment, which makes me nuts coming from my Dad who will ramble on his show about something for hours if he thinks it’s needed) that it makes me just want to run in there and mess up everybody’s hair or something.  This is why people hate public radio – it’s stuffy and restrained and overly structured.  If there’s an opportunity for a really interesting (and possibly messy) debate, why not let that happen?

I guess what I’m saying is that it makes me angry when public radio is simultaneously dumber and more boring than it should be.  I mean, if this is the only place where meaningful conversation can happen on the radio, then let’s do it.

To his credit, I think Mr. Morning Talk Show knew that by having 30 guests on his show where Pride was discussed he had shortchanged a few issues, so on Friday he brought back Pauline Park – a transgender rights activist with the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy.  But the question he posed to her was basically a less offensive form of “what’s up with trannies?”  Well, Ms Park was way more democratic in answering his questions than I would ever have been.  One of my main problems with Mr. MTS is that on his show I think he frequently hides behind a weird mask of journalistic neutrality that has this attitude of “I have a responsibility to my listeners to consider every point of view as valid.” So he actually says to Pauline Park something like, “What would you say to people who get that sexuality isn’t a choice, that you’re born that way so it’s not your fault, but think that transgendered people are just weird, so why should there be laws to protect them?”

Well, if I had been in Ms Park’s position I would have yelled in his face, “First of all – many people claim that changing their gender isn’t a choice, that they were born a certain way and never felt comfortable with themselves before they transitioned – so if you’re going to go with the ‘born that way’ argument why would you just stop at gays?”

And then I would have said:

“Second of all – this whole ’sexuality is not a choice so don’t blame me’ thing is a slippery slope that people need to get the hell off of asap.  It’s one step away from saying, ‘I would never choose to be this way,’ and it perpetuates a victim mentality that needs to end.  The point is that it’s none of anyone’s damn business.  There’s a quote by a gay activist whose name I can’t remember that I loved which basically says – why would it be so bad if it was a choice?”

But Pauline said something that I thought was very smart, which was that there are plenty of laws to protect things that are not inherent parts of people’s makeup – people are protected against being discriminated against on the basis of their religion, even if they chose that religion.

Basically it’s the opposite of saying that, for example, if you convert to Judaism and then are discriminated against because of it, it’s your own damn fault for deciding to join a group of people that are discriminated against.  Which goes back then to the “is it a choice?” sexuality question.  I think people are so afraid of this question because it puts a level of responsibility on the individual in the face of a discriminating society – if you chose this then it’s your own fault.  You have made yourself the victim.  So then all of a sudden the challenge turns into saying, no – these are not people that you can discriminate against and they are not going to stand for it.

Of course, this very thoughtful answer was not allowed to lead to any sort of discussion because it was on to the next idiot on the phone and the next inane question. Okay, so maybe I am being a little overly critical of Mr. Radio here – he did bring up these issues in the first place, so his heart is in the right place.  It’s possible that I’m just getting a little sick of listening to straight people talk about things they don’t know anything about, and then imagining how proud of themselves they feel for really addressing these tough topics.

Which brings me to my next point of gayness for today – a few things I want to say about the movie “Milk.”  Because it worked out very nicely for the folks who made that movie that one of Harvey Milk’s main messages – that being out and visible is the first step toward any progress – is so important right now with the whole marriage issue.  And I really think there are so many ways that this movie could have gone wrong and didn’t.  Like I’ve said before – putting a famous, straight actor in the role of an important gay martyr is skating on potentially thin ice, and you could end up with a “Philadelphia” situation on your hands where it’s like, “Did Tim Hanks and Antonio Banderas just kiss or did I imagine it?” – where sex is intentionally not an issue, either because they don’t want to scare off their mainstream audience or because their straight stars are not willing to go there.

(Footnote: recently watched “The Boys in the Band” for the first time, and while the film was kind of just the weird, dated, self-hating gay drama I expected, it was the interviews in the DVD extras that were the most revealing.  A lot of the gay actors in the movie died of AIDS, so it was mostly the straight guy who had played the more buttoned up, “had been married to a woman” character telling all of the stories.  So he was talking about how at the end of the movie he and the other straight actor who played his boyfriend go off to reconcile in a room off-camera, and he was explaining how the director had told them that he wanted to film the reconciliation scene, and these two actors were like, “okay, we can do this.”  And it was this huge, awkward thing that they really had to psyche themselves up to do and then in the end the scene wasn’t even used.)

Okay, so it’s not the ’80s or the ’90s anymore (even though sometimes it’s hard to remember that).  And I would argue that “Milk” marks a huge step forward in something really important – this level of boldness that can be tracked through attitudes toward gayness in film, not just because it’s a movie celebrating Harvey Milk, but because it was directed by a gay man who was not afraid to make this movie about real gayness.  I mean, you get Gus van Sant to direct a movie and it’s going to be pretty gay, that’s a given.  And what it means is that there is not going to be any big dumb “will Sean Penn kiss a boy?” controversy.  This movie is going to be all Sean Penn kissing boys.  And hitting on boys.  And rolling around naked with boys.  This movie is out in a way that I’m not sure any other movie has ever been – because it was intended for the mainstream and it is completely unapologetic in its depiction of sexuality.

And so on this day of Pride 2009, and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, when things seem to just need a little extra push in this world to get them to where they need to be, I’m going to focus on the unavoidable signs of progress – Sean Penn kissing boys and my iron-on “Just Married” ladies tank top.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Gay Stuff, WTF?

June 23, 2009

Return From Oz

I’ve been neglecting my mission of offering my very important rants to the world of the interwebs for the past couple of months in favor of focusing on actual un-blogged, non-virtual life which somehow took me across the world to a continent I never thought I would visit.  Not that I never wanted to, I just never gave it much thought, because, well, it’s on the other side of the world!  I think maybe that’s why people were more impressed when I told them I was going to Australia than any other country I’ve gone on tour to.  It’s like, “Australia!  Madness!”  And it seems to go both ways. When I would talk to folks there about NYC they acted like it’s a crazy dream that some day they would get to see it.

In an attempt to be at least a little informed I read Bill Bryson’s “In a Sunburned Country” before I left, but all I really knew about Australia before I got there was that giant worms are a real thing, not just something from a low budget ’90s horror film, and that you can “cuddle a koala” there, except in the places where it’s illegal.

We performed “Gatz” the first week in Brisbane, which as far as I could tell is the Ft. Lauderdale of Australia.  Palm trees, crazy birds, and a 75 degree Autumn, which they think is downright chilly.  I went into a store one day sweating from my sunny walk into town and the lady in the store said, “You’re hot?  Where did you come from? Tasmania?” And it took a big effort not to say, “Um, is that a real place?”

Here is me and my new koala friend Eeyore – who is less a friend and more a koala forced to spend half an hour every other week “cuddling” tourists in order to earn her eucalyptus keep at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary:

DSCN6880

We then spent three weeks in Sydney performing at the Opera House:

DSCN7086

It was nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but was nicely balanced out by where we were living, which I’ve since discovered is the most notoriously sleazy neighborhood in the entire southern hemisphere.  Our hotel was lovely, but it was in Kings Cross, which is like Bleeker Street on a balmy saturday night crossed with a less-family-friendly Bourbon Street.  Just to give you a little taste, evidently this happened one block away from our hotel on our opening night:

This girl is now an Australian internet sensation.  Or at least she was for a few minutes there.  And I like the guy who says “There was no need for it.”

Kings Cross doesn’t feel dangerous in an NYC “bad neighborhood” way, it’s a little more complicated than just a feeling that you are not going to make it down the street alive.  This is a place with nice coffeeshops next to the strip clubs where ladies too old to be wearing what they’re wearing are hanging in the doorways.  It almost feels kind of welcoming and charming in its seediness at first.  It took about two weeks for it to all start feeling very sinister.

The thing about Australians (who I now understand completely since I have now spent a month around them) is that they are such nice people.  And not in an intrusive or overwhelming way.  Just in a very generous “chat in a shop” “have a beer” kind of banter way.  But in the end these people are renegades.  Maybe it’s not so PC to bring up the criminal origins of this particular continent, but it really makes a lot of sense to me.  I mean, even if their recent ancestors hadn’t all been imported criminals, these are people who are very conscious of the fact that they are far away from anything and anyone.  And they’re making up the rules as they go along.  And maybe tomorrow there will be different rules.  Or none at all.

Of course, if we had stayed in a different neighborhood I might feel completely differently about the lovely Australian people (who, god bless ‘em, laughed their hearts out at our little show and leapt to their feet at the end).  But maybe not.  On one of my trips to Bondi Beach, very popular with surfers, there was a “shark sighting” siren and not a single person got out of the water.  There were at least 30 surfers there, and it wasn’t even a nice day, and no one moved.  I’m telling you – renegades.  Lovely people, not to be messed with.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Travel the World!

May 28, 2009

Straight White Dudes Team Up

Well – what I really want to post about is what life in Australia doing “Gatz” with ERS has been like for the past month, but I simply have so much to say (and so many pictures of koala cuddling to post) that it’s going to have to wait a bit more.

Meanwhile, life in the good old USA spins on without me, and just gets more bizarre.

This yesterday in the Daily news:

LOS ANGELES – The legal eagles who fought on opposite sides in Bush v. Gore want to walk down the aisle together in federal court to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage.

Theodore Olson, the ex-Solicitor General who represented George Bush in the 2000 ballot battle, and David Boies, who represented Al Gore, announced their partnership Wednesday, declaring  Prop. 8 denies gay couples a “fundamental right” afforded in the federal Constitution.

The interesting bedfellows filed their lawsuit in U.S. District Court in northern California Friday and asked for an immediate injunction against Prop. 8 until the federal case is resolved.

“It’s not about liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. We’re here in part to symbolize that. This case is about the equal rights guaranteed to every American under the United States constitution,” said Olson, a prominent Republican.

“For too long, gay men and lesbians who seek stable committed, loving relationships within the institution of marriage have been denied that fundamental right,” he said.

Olson said he asked Boies, a Democrat, to join his team to present “a united front” in the suit filed on behalf of two same-sex couples who wish to be married but, because of Proposition 8, have been denied licenses.

“Our Constitution guarantees every American the right to be treated equally under the law,” Boies said. “There is no right more fundamental than the right to marry the person that you love and to raise a family.”

“The courts exist to reverse injustices,” he added “This is not a question of state law. It’s a question of federal Constitutional law.”

The California Supreme Court decided Tuesday to uphold Prop. 8, the controversial ballot initiative passed by 52% of voters in November that defined marriage as between a man and a woman in the state constitution.

In a nod to its support of gay marriage before the amendment passed, the court let stand the estimated 18,000 gay marriage that took place in the state between June and November.

Have you ever seen a state with a guiltier conscience?  It’s like, sorry we said you guys could marry but then folks didn’t like that so we had to change it – but, um, you know, you can keep your marriage.  It’s cool.

Of course I’m not saying that these marriages should be dissolved – but how in the world can you legally justify allowing  same-sex couples who happened to get married before this whole mess went down to stay married, but then not let anyone else do it now because some people believe it’s wrong?  I mean, does that sentence even make sense? No, because none of this makes sense.  Which is why you have these two dudes fighting on the same side.  (I mean, they’re getting paid – but still – it’s a very clever way to drawn attention to their case).

I have more to say on this too (soon, World – i know it’s hard for you to wait for my many opinions like this), but I had a few thoughts when I was watching the movie “Milk” and thinking about Harvey Milk and the history of protest in the gay rights movement.  And right now I keep going back to this thought of – how angry do you want people to get?  And how angry to they have to get for you to listen?  And in what way can they focus their anger productively – since in the end we are talking about family and “family values” here – so does that mean this all has to stay nice and pretty?

In the end I know it all just happens slowly.  And it’s just some strange quirk of history that I got married right in the middle of it all.

Have to go now – the drunk backpackers who live across the street from my hotel have started yelling again. Ah, Sydney…


Leave a Comment

Filed under Gay Stuff

Older Entries