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:

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

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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.

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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…


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April 28, 2009

Does Anyone Actually Like “The Big Chill,” or Do They Just Like the Music?

Because, if so, why not just say, “I enjoy the popular music of the 1960′s”?  Why lend your support to a film that is mystifyingly bad?  Are you just a Boomer so longing for your own disaffected life experience to be mirrored back to you that you will take whatever you can get?  (Note here that Gen X and those directly on either side of it are lucky enough to have both “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “Kicking and Screaming” to mirror both their super earnest and more snarky disaffection back to them.)

Perhaps without BC we would not have gotten our Elmo’s or our K+S, but I do not accept this as an excuse – BC was made in ’83, Elmo’s in ’85.  Can Hollywood have learned so much in two years?  I suspect something more tragic at the heart of this.  BC is indeed supposed to be the boomers “approaching middle age” lament, while the other two films may be about post-college disaffection, but it is still the disaffection of the young, and therefore more entertaining.  But why were the middle aged boomers forced to settle for something so mediocre?  We  cannot know the answer.  All we can do is ask the important questions:

#1 Why does Kevin Kline’s character have a southern accent?  There is no explanation of his southern heritage, and although he and his wife live on this strange southern estate, there is no explanation of that either.  I am hoping that this is something left over from a concept in an earlier draft, and not a direct request from Kevin Kline to show off his ability to do a Southern accent,  because he can’t.  His idea about it seems to involve talking very quietly and not using any consonants.  So that “I can’t believe it” becomes “Ah ca buh-leave i.”  There is no excuse for this.  None.

#2 Why does Kevin Kline’s character wear a long sleeve shirt and a t-shirt on top to go jogging, but the tiniest shorts known to man on the bottom? You can hardly see them under the shirt!  I know that tiny shorts were big in the ’80s, but do only his legs get hot when he runs?  He needs two shirts on top to keep warm?  What is going on here?!?!? This may seem like a petty complaint, but a bunch of important and deep conversations happen while he is on jogs with people, and between his shirts and his accent I couldn’t focus on anything that was going on!

#3 Glenn Close’s character is a doctor (which we know for sure because when someone gets hurt she runs out of the house with the kind of little black doctor bag not seen in film since 1932 (not seen in real life ever).  So has she never heard of artificial insemination?  The entire climax (so to speak) of the movie centers around her oh-so-generous decision to let her friend have her husband’s sperm, which seems to mean that (without any conversation between her and her husband) he needs to go immediately into the friend’s room and make super weird love to her (cut into a montage of the many kinds of weird love being made that night).  Creepy.  Gross.  Not believable.

#4 BC gave us one of the first classic “Why are all of these people white?” posters.

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Which brings us to the fact that there is something really weird going on with race in this movie.  The friends all sit around talking about the past and what they do now, and Mary Kay Place’s character talks about how she went from being a public defender to a corporate lawyer because she thought she would be defending good people, but they were just all so guilty.  Someone comments, “She thought she would be defending Bobby and Huey.” So, what… instead of defending the righteous black power crusaders that she came to love in her youth she was just stuck with poor people?  And then William Hurt mentions that he tried to teach kids up in Harlem, but that didn’t work out.

Oh, these poor, poor, disaffected white people.  They tried! I mean, if this was really a movie about middle aged white boomers who gave up on the ideals of the sixties (which I think this movie thinks it is) that would probably be really interesting.  Instead we get passing references to Black Power and expect that to be shorthand for, you know, the 60s or something.

#5 What is Jeff Goldbloom doing?  I mean, I know what he’s doing, he’s being Jeff Goldbloom, but he is from another planet in this movie.  And the overly self-referential thing at the end about how he’s going to quit his People magazine job and “write about this weekend” as a novelist is perhaps not his fault, but still inexcusable.

I’m not even going to get into the flaws with the basic premise of this movie, how everything is just sloppy shorthand (our friend killed himself, but we don’t know why, and there’s no way for us to know, so the audience won’t know either.  oh well) or how it’s supposed to be a happy ending that drug dealer William Hurt has decided to move into the basement where the dead friend killed himself with the dead friend’s girlfriend.

And perhaps some may argue that I am having an unnecessarily strong reaction to the shortcomings of this film, but when you have heard about a film for 23 years and finally get to see it for the first time when you are sick on the couch and flipping through the on demand options on Netflix, perhaps your expectations are slightly raised.  Or maybe you just don’t expect it to be god awful.

So, lesson to learn from this – put some of the best songs ever on your soundtrack and the majority of the world will think that you made a good movie.  Done.

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Filed under Heterosexuals having trouble, Why are all of these people white?, WTF?

April 20, 2009

Happens to the Best of Us

Listen, I get it. One minute you’re pouring over your Fodor’s guide to South America, flipping through your old AP Spanish textbook and making big plans, the next you just can’t deal with any of it anymore. What matters is that you get up in the end, my friend (preferably after making an adorable squeaking sound). Fodor’s South America will still be there tomorrow.

Thanks, Laura. As usual, you remind me of what’s really important.

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Filed under Fun to Watch!, Kittens

April 14, 2009

If You are a Smarty Pants, Then You Must Dance

I am not one to encourage the genre of youtube funny baby videos (although I seem to be okay with the funny animal genre, as long as they are cats riding roombas, or ducks riding trucks) – but I would like to make a formal request to the world that we all make an attempt to incorporate the Smarty Pants Dance into our daily lives (Laura, I believe that you are already on this.  As usual you set an excellent example for the rest of us).

So the next time you are a smarty pants, please allow yourself to celebrate with the Smarty Pants Dance.

Thank you.

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Filed under Fun to Watch!, Inspirational

April 8, 2009

The Political as Personal, Baby

Today Vermont’s legislature voted to overturn their governor’s veto of a bill allowing gay marriage in Vermont. The NY Times tells us:

“The step makes Vermont the first state to allow same-sex marriage through legislative action instead of a court ruling. The law goes into effect Sept. 1.

Approval had been expected in the Senate, where the vote was 23 to 5.

But the outcome in the House of Representatives was not clear until the final moments of a long roll call, when Rep. Jeff Young, a Democrat who voted against the bill last week, reversed his position. In the end the vote was 100 to 49, just slightly more than the required two-thirds majority of members present.”

So this is the first time elected representatives, acting through the power given to them by the will of the people, have made this happen. This isn’t a judge basing a decision on whether something is constitutional or not or can be justified by an earlier court ruling. These are representatives who will need to face re-election. And so, ever so slowly, our voices are starting to be heard.

Follow link for exciting legislature drama! Skip to 23:00 for minimum CSPAN-type monotony, maximum payoff.

http://www.wptz.com/video/19117148/

I’m not sure what the whole Catholic religious tolerance thing is that the one representative is talking about at the end, or why we have to have “let’s introduce our friends and family members who are here today” time after that, but that’s some pretty darn exciting legislature, people!

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April 3, 2009

A Goodbye to the Duck

We went to Lou’s funeral in New Jersey yesterday. It was one of these moments of looking around at my parents and two of their oldest friends George and Chris and just thinking, “Are we really here doing this?”   This sentiment was not helped by the fact that we were all feeling more than a little out of place in a Catholic church listening to a serious Catholic mass with all the kneeling and the mumbled responding and the taking communion and the blowing incense over the coffin-ing. Of course, it was obviously important to his family to have a very traditional funeral, and that’s totally okay – but I just sat there picturing the funeral I would have thought appropriate for him. Perhaps something like the scene in “My Own Private Idaho” at the end when Bob, the Falstaff character, dies and his misfits give him a fitting farewell.

Skip to 5:40 in this clip

Instead this funeral was more like the Keanu Reeves one happening up the hill.

But it wasn’t without its moments.  The priest was actually not bad as priests go.  It turns out he’s just recently become ordained in his 50s, and you could tell that this stuff still really meant something to him, even though he was doing a service for a stranger.  And he said something that I thought was really beautiful and really wise – which was that even though you can’t help feeling like you have lost so much when someone dies, the best thing to do is focus on what you gained by having this person in your life.  It’s not like it makes you hurt any less, but it is a wonderful thing to have this real sense of gratitude.  And he talked about how the greatest gift and the thing we have to be the most grateful for is love – that we loved this person and he loved us.  I thought that was a pretty cool sentiment for a priest.

But the show stopper was Lou’s son Jake.  Jake is sixteen years old and autistic and a total music genius.  At the very end of the service the priest announced that Jake would be playing something for us on the giant church organ.  Jake’s half brother Frank went up to the organ with him, and the organist got up and gave him his seat.  Jake fiddled with the knobs for a while and evidently the organist said to Frank, “That’s going to be really loud.”  And Frank was like, “It’s okay, he’s got it.”

It was probably only a minute or so, but it felt like at least five of everyone standing (for some reason we were still standing at that moment, which turned out to be a tactical error on the part of the priest) and waiting for Jake to do something.  Every once in a while he would sort of awkwardly press a key and the organ would toot out a noise.  I figured we were going to be in for some of Jake’s super experimental jazz noise work.  Just as certain family members were starting to look really nervous, Jake busts out with a full on rendition of Bach’s “Tocatta in D Minor.”

It was one of the more amazing things I’ve ever experienced.  It was as if the heavens opened up and god was like, Jake, you need to rock this one out for Lou.  And Jake was like, cool.  The whole thing just kept getting better because Jake likes to riff and kind of go off in his own direction with things (which his jazz aficionado dad appreciated) – and that basically means that his songs don’t have endings.  He was not at all interested in stopping, even at the urgings of the organist, his brother, his mom… It was amazing.  It was just this force of nature and watching it I was having this feeling of, this kid just lost his dad, you let him play until he’s damn well ready to stop.  Because something intense is being channeled through him right now and it would not be wise to disturb it. But I guess we had a reservation for lunch and finally the priest just got back on the mic and announced the restaurant we were supposed to go to and Jake stopped.  But those in our little section of non-religious heathens were just smiling and thinking, “Lou would have loved that.”

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March 31, 2009

For The Duck

My Uncle Louie passed away this weekend.  He was an uncle by spirit, not by blood, and was better known to the world as legendary DJ Lou “the Duck” D’Antonio, starting in the early years of WFMU, back when my mom had a show reading Winnie the Pooh stories.

He’s one of those people who has just always been around, and it makes no sense to me at all that he won’t be anymore.  I’m crazy sad about it, but these little snippets that I found on the WFMU website make me smile and think of my parents and Lou and their friends in their wild youth.
From: Freeform Radio – The First Twenty Eight Years
A reprint of a 1968 article about WFMU’s freeform roots
http://wfmu.org/LCD/Early/firstdays.html

One Sunday on his Hour of the Duck, Lou D’Antonio spent an hour playing with some tapes, mainly doctored public-service announcements: “The Cancer Crusade presents Lawrence Welk…” Mr. Welk played champagne music for a while, then a mellifluous voice challenged: “Name cancer’s seven warning signals,” and a familiar voice ticked them off: “Spiro T. Agnew, Spiro T. Agnew, Spiro…”

In between a song about garbage and another one about sex and violence, the Navy Recruiting Service Band played rousing Sousa marches while The Duck led the studio audience in body exercises: “Bend and-a stretch…” A new listener from South Jersey phoned to see if he could be of any help. “I just wondered if you knew you were on the air,” he said.

From: Great Moments in WFMU History #4
Station Break-In (by Lou D’Antonio and Liz Berg)
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/02/great-moments-3.html

A frantic SOS call came in to a party that DJ Lou D’Antonio and other assorted WFMU staffers were attending. Fellow DJ Dave Myers was on the air and under attack by an irate pro-Vietnam War ex-Marine, who had barged into the station like a crazed lunatic. Even though Myers was well over 6 ft tall, his fellow DJs knew that he weighed no more than a Snickers wrapper. In a rash display of heroism, the party attedees rushed to the station armed with D’Antonio’s Dunlop Maxply tennis racquet (expertly strung with top-of-the-line imitation gut). Fortunately, DJ Vin Scelsa had already phoned the police, who were at the scene when the FMU rescue crew arrived. Engineer George Black sustained an injury to the forehead, and D’Antonio had to be restrained from executing a backhand half-volley to the assailant’s testicles. 1968.

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The Duck, first row on the ground on the left, Dad on the ground on the right, Mom behind him

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March 22, 2009

Technology… of the Future!!!!

In my quest to master the art of video chatting I have discovered something amazing about the webcam on my new laptop – It has this whole “special effects” feature which allows you to superimpose things onto the image of your chatting self – such as a hat, a mustache, an exciting hairdo, things swirling around your head, steam coming out of your ears… and the stuff follows your head when you move – amazing!  What will they think of next?!?!? This is me chatting with Laura and Amanda – they made me stop when I started playing around with the options to change your voice.

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I have already established that I am easily amused – but there is something about using pretty sophisticated technology to do something so silly that I find really charming.

Also using really unsophisticated technology in a polished way.  I am loving these two music videos in particular (both first seen by me on The Gay Agenda blog - thanks, gents).  The first one is by Lykke Li – this Swedish indie rock lady, and not only is it a great song, but the video is one of the best uses of stop motion animation using people that I’ve ever seen.  It’s a really cool technique and it’s such a simple thing to do.  I also love it when she starts boxing, and the sexy dancing teacher, and the old people, and the lights… this is just a great video.

And this is Santigold’s video for L.E.S. Artistes, which uses this old school puppetry/theater technique of fake blood and guts in a really amazing and surprisingly disturbing way.  I’m not sure if this is just the director indulging a vision of destroying nyc actor hipsters in the streets of DUMBO, but it sure is pretty.

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March 16, 2009

Get It Done, Scels!

I am in serious procrastination mode today – trying to finish transferring edits of my book from a hard copy to the computer.  An excellent form of distraction has been playing with the gadgets on my new laptop, one of which is my first ever webcam, which allows me to show you the other thing that often makes it difficult to get work done in my office/closet:

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Yes, a giant cat using you as his own personal body pillow, and getting very agitated whenever you use that arm to type something instead of rubbing his ears.

I will now attempt to work for an hour without making Laura entertain me through video chat.

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