TEA TO POUR

Butch Cassidy

2012-01-29T10:57:00.000-05:00

I love Sam Shepard. I don't love all of his plays, but there are some truly wonderful ones and, because of this, I love Sam Shepard. So: a movie where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid get away instead of getting killed in that shootout and where Sam Shepard plays Butch Cassidy twenty-five years later? I'm in!

The film is directed by Mateo Gil, who has written some excellent films over the years (Mar Adentro, Abre los Ojos), and is from an original screenplay by Miguel Barrios. The very fact that this is an original screenplay makes me happy, actually; it feels as though there are so few of those out there.

Blackthorn is the kind of revisionist western we're used to seeing these days, and you might say it is filled with clichés, and in a genre that is tired and old. But the thing is, Blackthorn is just so enjoyable. The film focuses on this old, tired bandit and what he knows will probably be his last adventure. Shepard is paired up with Spanish matinee idol Eduardo Noriega (You'll recognize him. He was the star of Abre los Ojos, El Espinazo del Diablo, Plata Quemada and a whole bunch of other stuff.) and the two are enjoyable to watch together.

I'm not saying the film particularly breaks new ground. The very idea of this new world being no country for old men was explored gorgeously by the Coens, and I don't expect too many films to deal with the outdatedness of the cowboy as well as that one. But, I didn't ask this film to do that, and Blackthorn is more interested in morality than the Coens, Blackthorn is more of a meditation on living with oneself after one has done things one regrets, on how to craft a life out of loneliness, on the difference between who we love and who we are.

Blackthorn might not be your thing if you're not into westerns, and I wouldn't blame you. This one is gorgeously shot but slow-paced and more contemplative than action-packed. But if you want to watch an old legend play an even older legend in a very well made genre-film, Blackthorn is for you.

Oscar Hopes

2012-01-23T00:49:00.000-05:00

My favorite day of the year is this Tuesday, January 24th. My friend Jaime calls it my christmas morning.

That's because on Tuesday, at 8.30a, the Oscar nominations will be announced. (You can watch the announcement live here.)

Now, the reason I love this day so much is because nomination morning is all about surprises. By the time the little gold men are handed out in February, we pretty much know how it is all going to break down: who is going to go home with which little gold man can be fairly easy to predict if one has been paying attention (not always, but for the most part). But there are always surprises on nomination morning. People get snubbed. Various branches choose bizarre people to award. Actors no one has been talking about get nominated. It can be really cool.

So instead of posting predictions I would rather actually not predict who is going to get nominated and instead tell you who I'll be rooting for on Tuesday morning.

Alberto Iglesias. He has some great scores this year, and I hope he gets some recognition. Perhaps for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In general. I am definitely rooting for Gary Oldman, but also for a screenplay nomination, editing, and cinematography, as well.

A Separation. I would love it if this got a screenplay nomination as well as a foreign-language nomination.

Win Win. I really liked this picture, and a screenplay nomination would be great.

Tilda. I haven't seen her movie We Have to Talk about Kevin yet, but I love Tilda, and she didn't get a deserved nomination for last year's I Am Love.

Terrence Malick. His movie is my favorite film of the year. Heaven knows the man does not need awards or recognition in order to continue making good pictures, but I am crossing my fingers for the master anyway.

Janet McTeer. I loved her in Albert Nobbs. Here's hoping.

Michael Fassbender. They wouldn't leave him out, would they? They might. I'm crossing my fingers that they don't.

I am also hoping for one or two nominations each for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

And in general I am, of course, hoping that all of my favorite movies do well on Tuesday morning.

What do you all think?

I am so excited...

Poetry

2012-01-23T00:21:00.001-05:00

Two films I've seen recently are more like gorgeous cinematic poems than they are anything else.

Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is a film that approaches the idea of life itself by addressing what it means to possess life or live life, or maybe the movie is about how life and death are not really good ways of measuring what it is we actually mean when we talk about being alive.

Le Quattro Volte follows a very old goatherd as he tends his flock in a mountain village in Italy and performs the various rituals that fill out his day. Being a very old man, some of his habits are slightly peculiar, but the film follows him in silence and without apparent judgment. Often the camera simply sits and we watch the old man move about his daily existence.

Spoiler alert: the man dies at about the forty-minute mark in the film, and from there the camera follows a goat as it is born and as it learns about the world. This part was, for me, the most magical part of the movie. The baby goat discovers his universe, learns about gravity, learns about friendship. Watching this is fascinating and extremely engrossing. The little animal sees things we take for granted, and its vision is really remarkable. (Incidentally, some of these shots are just extraordinary and I have no idea how the filmmaker captured them.)

Le Quattro Volte follows a tree next. The camera sits among its branches or stares at it for extended periods. The tree is cut down and put to use in various ways in the village. This part of the movie was the part that really got me to thinking about life and death. Watching a man die is something a film can do easily, but watching a tree be put to use after it has died was something very interesting. In a way, the tree lived still. I feel as though Le Quattro Volte asked me to rethink the idea of living and the good we can do while alive – death is the end for us, sure, (Woody Allen always said he'd rather live on in his apartment than live on in people's hearts) but the effect that we have on our world does not end with us. What we do lives after us. We will be put to use when we are gone. This is comforting and challenging at the same time, and if I am having trouble expressing what I mean in words, the film does it eloquently without words.

The other poetic film I had the privilege of seeing was Abbas Kiarostami's Copie Conforme (Certified Copy). Unlike Le Quattro Volte, which had almost no dialogue at all, Copie Conforme is filled with dialogue. At first the film is a dialogue about a point of art. Isn't a copy just as much a work of art as an original? (The question seems particularly salient to theatre artists, but to be honest I don't think it that valuable of a question, mostly because I am not very interested in art with a capital a.) But it is the relationship between the film's two protagonists that is the most interesting here. And what is odd is that their relationship is not always clear in Kiarostami's film. Are the two married? Have they just met? The film seems to tell us one thing and then show us the other. It is disconcerting, certainly, but fascinating. Absolutely fascinating, in fact. And Juliette Binoche is absolutely riveting in the lead role as she speaks English, Italian, and French without skipping a beat.

At one point in Copie Conforme the conversation between the two turns to the shifts that love must take as it ages. Love is bubbly and bright, restless, breathless, hungry, when it is young, but as it ages love mellows. And as the couple speak of love that is old, the gentleman quotes a line from the Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavān Sāles. The garden of leaflessness: who dares to say that it is not beautiful?

Aside from the line's obvious power, I think the film, too, manages to meditate on love itself as it is born, as it ages, and as it very old. The film is poetic, as I say, and I can only say what I took from it, or perhaps what I mean to say is that this meditation on love as it gets older was what I wanted the film's subject to be. What I know is that I found the film engrossing and beautiful and deeply moving.

To be clear, I don't really want to recommend Le Quattro Volte or Copie Conforme to readers of this blog. If you don't like slow movies you will hate these. And if you aren't into films that don't make narrative sense, these movies are not for you. But I completely loved both of these pictures. They are easily two of my favorite films of the year, and I found many of their images and ideas absolutely unforgettable.

When Great Minds Think Alike

2012-01-22T12:11:00.004-05:00

Aaron: ...And going back to something that will be rocky just because you can is not necessarily a natural idea.
Rae: Right. And I don't want to ruin another college experience because of that. I don't want to just offer up another year of my life.

Aaron: That's a 1950s mentality. And we all know what the 1950s created.
Rae: Hahahaha. God. Truth.

Aaron: Cuba.
Rae: ...I WAS JUST GOING TO SAY THAT HOLY GOD. bahahahahhahahaha
Aaron: You were not. HAHAHA.
Rae: Aaron I swear on my life. I was like, where is he going with this? Surely not Cuba.
Aaron: No you weren't. HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Rae: AARON I HAVE NEVER LIED TO YOU AND I WILL NOT START NOW OVER CUBA.

Aaron: Chernobyl was my next one.
Rae: Oh, I'm glad you went Cuba. Chernobyl would have been, like, my 7th guess.

Weekend

2012-01-21T18:57:00.001-05:00

I really liked about Andrew Haigh's Weekend – I had read other gay internet commentators say that they loved it and so I definitely wanted to check it out.

Weekend is a realistic relationship movie about two gay men who begin an intense love affair that lasts over the period of a few days. It captures so much of the way I understand my interactions with other gay men, and for my money it portrays these men in a realistic, generous, and fleshed-out way, that struck me as honest.

I didn't quite love the film. I thought it conventional in many ways, but I really enjoyed it, and I liked it a great deal. Weekend is a film that believes in love, in the ability of people to truly connect in a very short span of time, and in the power of honest, open communication. Weekend believes in love, though, not in a rom-com kind of way where we know what will happen at the end of the film and the heroes (in this case) kiss sweetly and walk into the sunset as the credits roll. Instead, Haigh's movie manages to understand baggage and the sacrifices we make for those we love, and the complications that real life places upon the notion of love conquering everything. Love does not conquer all in Weekend, and that's because it doesn't always conquer all in our real lives.

One thing that I completely loved about Weekend is its camerawork. When the two men are in public together, chatting or riding the bumper cars or on the tube, Haigh shoots them from the perspective of other people in the public place. Frequently our view of the two is slightly obstructed. Sometimes we only slightly hear what they say to one another. The effect, here, is one that communicates that these two men are always being watched. What I love about this is that gay relationships that move in the public sphere are always spectacular relationships. The men are literally always being watched by the camera, and when they are in public, they know (and we know, too) that they need to watch themselves because other people are watching them. This double watching is simply a fact of gay relationships (both male and female) and it factors into the way that these men fall in love. How can it not? Their behavior with each other is constrained by the fact that they are in public and people are watching them. It is a bold and fascinating choice for the director to make, and I appreciated it.

At any rate: it's totally worth seeing if you're a gay man. If you're not... you probably won't be into it.

Furniture Music

2012-01-20T00:02:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking about furniture music.

A dear friend of mine and I were having a conversation about his artistic work over at the American Laboratory. I had this vision of their new installation happening and the artistic director running around telling people not to listen to the words, but to keep on drinking their alcoholic beverages.

That is what furniture music is.

It's kind of an important moment in theatre history and in modernist art. I mentioned it to a colleague at work today, however, and he just looked at me blankly, so I thought I would share the story, though many of you probably have heard it before. It's an excellent one, told in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years:

In March, 1920, the actor Pierre Bertin organized at Paul Poiret's fashionable Barbazange gallery a concert of music by les Six, songs by Stravinsky, and a play by Max Jacob. The walls were covered by a show of children's paintings entitled "Les Belles Promesses". At the start of the first intermission in the play, Bertin presented Satie's and Milhaud's new discovery: "musique d'ameublement" or furniture music.

We urgently beg you not to attach any importance to it and to act during intermission as if the music did not exist. Specially written for Max Jacob's play (always the ruffian; never a bum), it hopes to contribute to life the way a casual conversation does, or a picture in the gallery, or a chair in which one is or is not seated.

When the audiences began to get up for the break, a piano and three clarinets, placed in the four corners of the room, plus a trombone on the mezzanine, struck up what sounded like popular ditties played over and over again in close rhythmical patterns. The audience began to take seats again. Satie rushed around the gallery exhorting them to appropriate behavior. "Talk, keep on talking. And move around. Whatever you do, don't listen!"

What's so funny about this story is that, of course, this is how we listen to music now. We listen to it as background at the gym, in the elevator, during intermissions, of course, but also at the grocery, in our cars, at the bar, while we do the vacuuming. In 1920 this was not the case and Satie, as usual, was far ahead of his time. It is the extraordinary achievement of artists like Satie (I don't dare call him a dada, but couldn't I?) to make art into something to which we don't pay attention. To elevate the quotidian to the level of art by demanding that music not be listened to, by asserting, in fact, that art itself was just as important as a conversation with a friend.

Best Actress 2011

2012-01-18T01:01:00.000-05:00

My top choices in the order I would place them on my Academy ballot if I were allowed to vote. In other words, I acknowledge that this list is already influenced by awards buzz, and the actresses who I think need the most votes are at the top.

YOON JEONG-HEE, Poetry

JULIETTE BINOCHE, Copie Conforme

CHARLIZE THERON, Young Adult

GLENN CLOSE, Albert Nobbs

MERYL STREEP, The Iron Lady

Also loved:
Brit Marling, Another Earth
Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene

Related:
My Best Actress Picks for 2010
My Best Actress Picks for 2009
My Best Actress Picks for 2008
My Best Actress Picks for 2007

Best Actor 2011

2012-01-17T00:54:00.000-05:00

My top choices in the order I would place them on my Academy ballot if I were allowed to vote. In other words, I acknowledge that this list is already influenced by awards buzz, and the actors who I think need the most votes are at the top.

GARY OLDMAN, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

DEMIÁN BICHIR, A Better Life

MICHAEL FASSBENDER, Shame

BRAD PITT, Moneyball

JEAN DUJARDIN, The Artist

Also loved:
George Clooney, The Descendants
Dominic Cooper, The Devil's Double
Matthew McConaughey, The Lincoln Lawyer

Related:
My Best Actor Picks for 2010
My Best Actor Picks for 2009
My Best Actor Picks for 2008
My Best Actor Picks for 2007

Best Supporting Actor 2011

2012-01-16T10:32:00.000-05:00

My top choices in the order I would place them on my Academy ballot if I were allowed to vote. In other words, I acknowledge that this list is already influenced by awards buzz, and the actors who I think need the most votes are at the top.

BOBBY CANNAVALE, Win Win

CHRIS PRATT, Moneyball

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

VIGGO MORTENSEN, A Dangerous Method

KENNETH BRANAGH, My Week with Marilyn

Also loved:
Niels Arestrup, War Horse
Luke Evans, Immortals
Chris O'Dowd, Bridesmaids

Related:
My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2010
My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2009
My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2008
My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2007

Spielbergfest

2012-01-16T02:00:00.000-05:00

I suppose that it seems logical to speak about both of Steven Spielberg's 2011 films together, and since I saw The Adventures of Tintin recently, I think I will.

If you know me even a little bit you probably know that I find Spielberg's work... there's no perfect word for it... irritating, frustrating, maddening. Something along those lines. Enervating, perhaps.

Mostly what I resent with Spielberg is the way the films manipulate the viewer, tugging insistently at the heartstrings and moving me, inexorably toward tears. I always feel rather empty after this sort of thing, but Spielberg movies almost always do it to me. War Horse is no exception, and I resented it for its almost cynical powers of manipulation.

Actually, though, War Horse is not a very good movie. It's first twenty minutes or so are shot like comedy, with saturated colors, a silly script, broad performances (including an absurdly cartoonish turn by David Thewlis, who plays Lupin in the Harry Potter franchise), and a running joke with a duck. In a way, this first segment of War Horse is a kind of children's movie, something heartwarming but not one bit serious. But, then War Horse becomes a WWI film, and the film leaves its first few characters behind in favor of the British army, Tom Hiddleston, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The film, in fact, continues to leave behind its characters. I was delighted, for example, to see David Kross in this movie, but he is only in War Horse briefly and then he, too, is left behind by the film.

In short, I rather thought War Horse was a mess. It is insistently silly and at all times spends its time begging for a suspension of disbelief that it constantly pushes to its limits and beyond. Aside from that first segment, the actors are almost uniformly wonderful: Hiddleston, Cumberbatch and Kross, of course, but also Niels Arestrup (from Un Prophète), Jeremy Irvine, Toby Kebbell, and Matt Milne. And yet... well the film is so ridiculous that it was hard even to take these very good actors seriously.

As for The Adventures of Tintin, I really liked it. First off, the animation is absolutely superb. I have decided that I pretty much love mocap, and the movie is worth seeing for the animation alone. But more than that, Tintin knows that it is a silly movie. This is a movie that expects its storyline to be silly and just runs with it. It also expects us to think that its storyline is silly. I mean by this that I think Tintin works where War Horse doesn't because Tintin treats me as though I am reasonably intelligent whereas War Horse never does. Tintin is self aware, where War Horse has no idea how silly it is being while asking us to treat it seriously.

I do have another gripe to make about these movies – both of them this time – and that is there nonsensical treatment of violence. War Horse is a film about one of the most disastrous global conflicts of all time, and yet there is no human blood shed in this film. Cumberbatch and Hiddleston attack a bivouac of German soldiers using swords and are in turn machine-gunned down by the Germans. Yet there is no blood on camera. Now, I know the film is silly, and I have already argued precisely this, but this is actually part of the problem. From the violence in War Horse, one might think that war doesn't actually hurt people and machine-gun rounds cause nothing but vague stomach pains and fainting.

But I enjoyed The Adventures of Tintin thoroughly. I found it consistently surprising. I was ahead of it occasionally, but I loved the editing and art direction, and there was some gorgeous movie-making on display. The transitions between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, are breathtakingly achieved. Mostly, it was just so fun. And the usual Spielberg manipulation at work seemed to fit the generic conventions of the animated children's film. I didn't resent being tugged at nearly as much as I do in his films for grownups. All in all, I had a great time.

Best Supporting Actress 2011

2012-01-15T10:16:00.000-05:00

NICOLE BEHARIE, Shame

KATHY BURKE, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

MARY PAGE KELLER, Beginners

JANET McTEER, Albert Nobbs

BÉRÉNICE BEJO, The Artist

Also loved:
Julia Ormond, My Week with Marilyn

Related:
My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2010
My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2009
My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2008
My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2007

2011 In Review

2012-01-12T23:31:00.000-05:00

LOVED
~ ~
1. The Tree of Life
2. Shame
3. The Skin I Live In
4. In a Better World
5. Moneyball
6. The Artist
7. Poetry
8. Attack the Block
9. Midnight in Paris
10. Le Quattro Volte
11. Copie Conforme (Certified Copy)
12. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

REALLY LIKED
~ ~
13. A Better Life
14. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
15. Win Win
16. The Descendants
17. Weekend
18. The Adventures of Tintin
19. The Trip
20. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
21. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
22. Jane Eyre
23. Warrior
24. Drive

LIKED
~ ~
25. Albert Nobbs
Super 8
Chico & Rita
The Lincoln Lawyer
Blackthorn
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Bridesmaids
Melancholia
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Three Musketeers
Young Adult

LIKED MORE THAN I DISLIKED
~ ~
Hugo
My Week with Marilyn
Thor
Beginners
Immortals
Puss in Boots
War Horse
A Dangerous Method
The Iron Lady
The Ides of March
Another Earth

BARELY LIKED MORE THAN I DISLIKED
~ ~
The Devil's Double
In Time
50/50
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Incendies

DISLIKED
~ ~
J. Edgar
The Help
X-Men: First Class
Captain America: the First Avenger
The Future
The Rum Diary
Beautiful Boy
Puncture

HATED
~ ~

COMPLETE AND TOTAL WASTE OF TIME
~ ~

My Best Actor Picks for 2011
My Best Actress Picks for 2011
My Supporting Actor Picks for 2011
My Supporting Actress Picks for 2011

Loving This Song

2012-01-08T14:59:00.001-05:00

Somebody wishing on a shooting star
Shooting star streamin' 'cross the sky
Y'know it's just a meteorite

People throwing pennies in a wishing well
Wishing well's gonna run dry
But I ain't gonna leave you tonight

Everybody talking 'bout changing the world
World ain't ever gonna change
But you can always change in front of me

I'll shuck all the oysters and you can keep the pearls
I do my shuckin' and my jivin' for free
Free
Like walkin' down the beach at night

Throw a bunch of lines out to the one you want
'Til you get it right
Sometimes you don't
Get it right
Sometimes you won't
Get it right

But when you do
It's outta sight

Sometimes you do
Get it right

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

2012-01-07T18:41:00.004-05:00

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is great. Based on the famous novel by John le Carré, Tinker is a 1970s spy story that works methodically and skillfully to build suspense and deepen the development of characters. The film is directed by Tomas Alfredson, who directed the original disturbing Let the Right One In from 2008. Tinker has a similar mood to that picture, and moves – it seemed to me – at a similar pace.

I happen to rather love spy movies, but I have to admit that the Cold War as a topic strikes me as a rather tired topic (I was incredibly bored with it, for instance, in Clint Eastwood's snooze-fest J. Edgar). But I found Tinker invigorating, suspenseful, and at times deeply affecting. I think that this is probably because Tinker is less interested in the idea of A) saving the world or B) protecting "very important secrets" from the Russians or C) stopping the development of some new weapon. The past is the past. The world wasn't destroyed in the 1970s, and the only people living under capitalism these days who are terrified by Josef Stalin or Russians or even the principles of communism are easily dismissed as hysterics. Instead of a focus on these now-dated ideas (although James Bond seems still intent on fighting them), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy focuses on relationships, loyalty, betrayal, and the material effects of espionage on actual people.

I was particularly impressed by the film's treatment of violence, which is never romantic or softened. Tinker makes it clear that the secrets and betrayals in which it traffics result in blood and (literally) guts. There is no room for thinking that espionage is all just fun and games (or cloaks and daggers). And yet there's no battle of ideas here. There are no questions of who is "right" or who is "wrong." Tinker focuses in on the ways in which the spies all work together, the way they fool one another, and leave ruined lives in their wake. It's a fascinating film.

Gary Oldman is fantastic in the lead role – a legendary one once played by Sir Alec Guinness – and he is supported by an astounding array of actors including John Hurt (a favorite actor of mine), Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones, and Colin Firth. I love all of these actors, and it is such a pleasure to watch them all work together. Kathy Burke is also absolutely fantastic in the film, but my favorite performance is from relative newcomer (but suddenly exploding everywhere) Benedict Cumberbatch. (That's him to the left – but how can that seriously be someone's name?) Cumberbatch plays Oldman's man on the inside. It's a great role and a nerve-wracking one. I absolutely loved him. The scenes that involve only Cumberbatch and Oldman are particularly great. The writing is excellent, and the two actors execute the sequences just perfectly.

One more note on Oldman, quickly. I know that Oldman has not historically been the Motion Picture Academy's particular cup of tea. I am not sure I understand why this is, but I know it is true. The work that he Oldman does in this film, though, is as superb of a performance that I can think of in recent years. He performs this role with all of the ease of an actor who is a master at his craft. Nothing is over done. There is not one false note in the entire performance. Surprise and contempt and despair all register on Oldman's face in the merest flickers; the character is adept at giving nothing away, but Oldman manages to portray this desire to give nothing away while also letting the audience know exactly how deeply he feels what he feels. It is really great work.

Dada in the Netherlands and The Printed Head

2012-01-06T15:08:00.000-05:00

The amazing, amazing people over at Atlas Press in the UK publish several very cool series of books. One of my favorite series is called The Printed Head. This series publishes all kinds of hard-to-get-ahold-of things like, for example, a sequence of Federico García Lorca plays that have never before been translated into English, or a sequence of poems by Symboliste poet Saint-Pol-Roux, or Jacques Rigaut's impossible-to-find "Lord Patchogue".

This series is filled with unknown and undiscovered gems. I am a little obsessed. So, when they recently published Theo van Doesburg's "What Is Dada???" I treated myself to one of the 300 copies in print.

"What Is Dada???" is phenomenal, and gives a great picture of what dada became and where dada went after its demise in Paris in the early 1920s.

As you probably know, I am in love with dada, so I found Doesburg's writings pretty wonderful. I want to share some thoughts that Doesburg includes in his list of aphorisms entitled "The Other Sight" which is included in The Printed Head text. This stuff is so cool!

From Theo van Doesburg:

Dadaism. Should a deeper meaning lurk behind "nonsense" than that of normality, then "nonsense" is not only permissible but indeed necessary. Thus shall Dadaism create new supersensible norms.

Portrait painters. [...] Drawing up an accurate formula for a face in paint has no more artistic value than a legal document has literary.

Truth and religion. They cancel each other out. One is a blossoming of life, the other the suppression of life, cause of sickness and coercion into normality. Do you love truth? Then spit poison. Love yourself? Then practise religion.

The value of abnormality. What is abnormal? That which deviates from form rusted into dogma. The denial of this norm makes new value possible. The abnormal is the prerequisite of new values.

Representation and reality. All ages created an idea of life for themselves. That is now in the past. The idea of life is creating an image for itself in us at present.

Tape-measure morality. Vegetarianism is a question of the tape-measure. Hardly a second passes when we are not feasting upon animals or being feasted upon by them. The microscope, caricature of large and small, is a material "other sight". The principle of life is completely amoral. Before every birth there is an annihilation. The morality of the tape-measure is a blind self-defence; if blood had a different colour, vegetarianism and Christianity would have had fewer adherents. By casting ourselves with all of our weakness against this morality of the tape-measure, with no other intention than keeping ourselves beyond the external exchange of forms of life, we deprive ourselves to a great extent of the opportunity to take a creative part in the universal events of life.

The bloated corpses. Every era has its vultures and jackals, which prey on the corpses of perished art, religion or culture. They gorge themselves on it and grow fat contentedly.

Dragons

2012-01-06T12:04:00.001-05:00

I have been running around a bit like a crazy person in California – seeing friends and actually going to the theatre (I saw Fela! and loved it a couple days ago) – and I have also been trying to see movies, mostly without success. A week or so ago I caught the new David Fincher/Steven Zaillian version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Not to be confused with the Swedish version of tGwtDT directed by Niels Arden Oplev, released in the U.S. just last year.)

The opening credits are awesome, with the typical Finch touches and an awesome, pulsating, truly astounding score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Right away I was excited and pretty well hooked.

It's impossible to talk about this 2011 film, though, without comparing it to its Swedish predecessor. And, for my money, Fincher's version doesn't quite measure up to the movie it follows. Some comparisons:

Fincher's film is sexier than Oplev's... with Daniel Craig in the leading role that was pretty much a given. I liked the film in a sexier version – it was especially nice to see some heterosexual sexual activity in the film that wasn't degrading and violent and horrible (most of the film's sexual content is very violent.)

Fincher's film approaches rape slightly differently than Oplev's does. The terrible rape sequence in the center of the film was approached so humanely and terrifically in Oplev's film that I was very curious to see how Fincher would do this. But Fincher's film sees Rooney Mara as a sex object (understandably), and Fincher approaches the rape sequence in much the same way that he approaches his other sex scenes. I missed this terrifying, horrific aspect of the rape in Oplev's film. And, actually, I think the way Fincher does it leaves a bit of a plot-hole. (Not that Lisbeth's revenge on her rapist is unjustified, just that it seems less justified in Fincher's movie.)

For me, as well, the mystery-plot aspect of the story is more pronounced in Oplev's film. This may be simply because I already knew the solution to the mystery... There is no way around this, of course, because I saw Oplev's last year and I saw Fincher's this year, but I felt like there just wasn't as much mystery-solving in this new film. Who knows. My only other gripe is that I thought the villain in Fincher's film was not nearly as scary. The actor playing the villain is intentionally underplaying things, and that's fine as far as it goes, but I just wasn't has horrified or scared of him and I wasn't nearly as revolted by this film's villain as I was by Oplev's villain.

All that to say, it's still a really good film that I liked a lot. I guess... well, I am not sure why we needed this film. It's been literally just over a year since the other one was here and Fincher and Zaillian's reimagining of the plot is not different enough to really merit an entirely new movie. I sort of don't get it.

The Lady of the Camellias

2012-01-04T22:57:00.001-05:00

To me, the play to begin with when teaching the representation of sex and sexuality in the theatre is La Dame aux Camélias or Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils. The reasons for this are many.

First, Camille's plot is the basis of all hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold plots. To name only the most famous: La Traviata, Moulin Rouge, Pretty Woman, and Rent all owe their plots to Camille's narrative.

Second, Camille's attitude toward sex is a complicated one. The play loves its heroine, Marguerite Gautier. She is a big ol' whore and the play has a great time sharing with the audience the pleasure of being a whore. And then, of course, the heroine must die. She is punished for her sexuality at the same time as the play itself cashes in on that sexuality. It's an extraordinary dramaturgical move that, frankly, I am not even sure Dumas fils knows he is making.

What I really love about the play, though, is Dumas fils's absolutely sparkling dialogue and wit. Take for example, the play's first scene. Marguerite enters to find the Baron de Varville (who is, basically, a whiner) waiting for her to come home, as he always does. As she enters, the Baron complains:

Varville: Is it not my fate to be always waiting for you?
Marguerite: Is it my fate never to come in without finding you here?
Varville: Is it my fault that I love you?
Marguerite: My dear friend, if I were to listen to all the people who are in love with me, I should have no time for dinner. I allow you to come here at any hour when I am at home and to wait for me whenever I am out, but if you will persist in talking of nothing but your love, I must withdraw my friendship.
Varville: And yet, Marguerite, last year at Bagnères, you did give me a little hope.
Marguerite: My dear, that was at Bagnères, when I was ill and bored; this is Paris—I am much better and not at all bored.

Later in the scene, Marguerite is told that a new character, Armand Duval – whom she has just met – visited her every day for a year when she was ill but never left his name. She calls to him across the room and uses this occasion to further beat down the Baron de Varville:

Marguerite: M. Duval, do you know what I have just been hearing? That you called to enquire after me every day when I was ill.
Armand: It is quite true.
Marguerite: Then the least I can do is thank you. Did you hear that, Varville? You never did that for me, did you?
Varville: I've only known you for a year.
Marguerite: Don't be silly. This young gentleman has only known me five minutes.

At any rate, I adore her and find the play delightful.

Whitman Whednesday

2012-01-04T13:59:00.001-05:00

Song of Myself - §11

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

Brief Review

2011-12-30T03:46:00.000-05:00

I really liked The Lincoln Lawyer. It probably has a few too many plot twists for the film's own good, but so what. Matthew McConaughey gives a great, confident central performance – the kind only a movie star can really give – and his supporting cast is wonderful, particularly Marisa Tomei. The Lincoln Lawyer also features an excellent opening credits sequence, it's beautifully shot, expertly edited, and was – most importantly – fun to watch. The Lincoln Lawyer isn't trying to be L.A. Confidential, and it doesn't need to be. It's doing great at what it's trying to do: entertain. I had a very good time with this movie.

La Streep

2011-12-29T01:18:00.000-05:00

There are so many fabulous things about this Kennedy Center tribute to Meryl Streep, but my favorite is the set and song (!) from the Mike Nichols film Ironweed, which came out in the late 1980s and which this tribute devotes something like a full five minutes. I loved this entire thing. (And I love Meryl Streep. Obviously.)

Silence and the Artist

2011-12-28T23:48:00.000-05:00

The Artist is a gimmick. And I think it's going to win Best Picture, or rather, I should say that I hope it wins Best Picture, because if it is a gimmick (and it is) it is the most clever gimmick I've seen in years.

See, The Artist is a silent film. It's made in black and white and also in the old 1:37 aspect ratio. There is a gorgeous Old Hollywood score undergirding the whole thing (just like silent pictures of old) but we don't actually get to hear the actors (Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell) actually speak.

And it works. It works like gangbusters. Of course, silent movies worked too, and many of them still work, a fact to which anyone who has seen Sunrise or 7th Heaven or The Gold Rush can attest. The Artist is delightful: movie magic from start to finish, drawing particular attention to an aspect of the cinema that is not given a lot of attention on its own (think of how very much we always comment on camerawork, or editing, or acting, and how little on the audio in a movie!).

Ludovic Bource, who scored the film, has, as far as I can tell, never scored anything this enormous, but his music is great: instantly hummable, was nominated for a Golden Globe, and seems destined to be nominated for Best Original Score come January.

The acting in this movie is also wonderful. It is impossible not to fall in love with Dujardin and Bejo. They're simply the most lovable pair I can think of. Dujardin in particular has such a charismatic way about him that it is hard for me to imagine anyone else achieving anything anywhere near what he does in this role. I was in love with him within the film's first ten minutes. He's simply astounding.

The film is indebted, of course, to Singin' in the Rain – any film about the transition from silents to talkies is bound to be – and the plot is heavily dependent on the iconic plot of A Star Is Born, but none of that matters in The Artist. If it's derivative, it puts such an original twist on its source material that I didn't mind one bit. Instead, I went along for the ride, mesmerized by the audacious filmmaking, the sheer cleverness, and the sheer magic up on that screen.

(Just as a sidenote, I can't help but think of last year's silent film, The Illusionist, and how much I absolutely loved it. And, as you can probably tell, The Artist is also (as people are so fond of saying) a love letter to the movies, but Michel Hazanavicius's love letter is so much more interesting than Scorsese's. (I know, I know. I should leave Marty alone. I'll stop now.))

Whitman Whednesday

2011-12-28T10:00:00.000-05:00

Song of Myself - §6

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation,
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
...
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

Plays into Movies So Frequently Signal Disappointment

2011-12-26T02:37:00.003-05:00

This isn't always the case, of course, and War Horse may turn out to be a fascinating exception to the rule of 2011, but if The Ides of March and A Dangerous Method set the rule, then the rule is disappointment.

These two films also belong together because they're both made by wonderful directors. But Ides of March is nothing like George Clooney's other two films, and A Dangerous Method seems a wide departure from David Cronenberg's last two films. Both directors have taken on projects this year that are really interesting to them thematically, but which (to my mind) had scripts that basically did not work.

To start, the chief problem with both of these movies is that they depend almost exclusively on talk. The emotional, narrative, and thematic life of these movies is so heavily dependent on dialogue that I actually got tired during both of these films. Shut up!!, I kept thinking. Why must they continue to talk about everything? Doesn't anyone simply have a feeling without describing it in the dialogue? Ides fares better in this department than does Method, but not much better.

There are some good sex sequences in A Dangerous Method, but even these are very brief, and in a film about masochism and sexual freedom, it seems odd not to tell at least part of the story through the sex sequences (as Steve McQueen's Shame does so brilliantly).

I blame the source material. I saw Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure many many years ago and didn't think much of it, and when I saw Beau Willimon's play Farragut North a couple years ago I couldn't figure out why anyone even produced the thing in the first place, much less why big stars were in it and why it was being made into a movie.

The main problem with Ides (and Farragut) is that one can't really care too much about these characters – Ides is a very cynical film about rather idealistic people. The main problem with Method is that even if we may care about these characters (and I did! – if you know me you know that I went into the movie already loving Sigmund Freud) we never really understand why they do the things they do. Method trades on the idea that we know a whole lot about the characters that Cronenberg never actually tells us. I feel like I know a lot about Freud and Jung, but I never really felt like I understood all of what was going on in this movie.

There is more to say, of course. The acting is very good in both films. Ryan Gosling, Max Minghella (I love him), and Marisa Tomei are all great in The Ides of March and Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Vincent Cassel, and especially Viggo Mortensen are all great in A Dangerous Method, but neither film works, and all the acting – and this may be because of the source material as well – feels a little bit like overacting.

Let me say once again that I love David Cronenberg as a director, and I might love George Clooney as a director even more. I think these two men are original, fascinating, important talents. I just think their offerings for 2011 were not very good.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-12-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

Song of Myself - §5

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the field,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder mullein and poke-weed.

Troubled Women

2011-12-17T04:38:00.000-05:00

This is going to be three movie reviews in one, and the films struck me as similar in some ways because of their troubled lead female characters.

I'll start with the least interesting first. Another Earth is the story of a young woman who makes a very bad decision and kills two people. She then proceeds to make many more bad decisions over the course of Another Earth's running time. Another Earth is also about this planet that is a second Earth that is somehow (this is unexplained in the film as far as I can tell) orbiting near the Earth's own orbit. The sci-fi stuff is somewhat intriguing, and also very much a retread of the grief-fantasy that forms the title of John Cameron Mitchell's film Rabbit Hole. In any case, the sci-fi stuff is not really a part of the plot hardly at all. In reality Another Earth is a two-person melodrama with the backdrop of this enormous scientific/space breakthrough that is (eventually) unrelated to the film's dramatics. There is a lot with which one could be annoyed with in this film, but I found its star Brit Marling interesting and didn't mind the movie too much.

Melancholia, Lars Von Trier's new film, also involves a planet moving toward the Earth, although this time the planet will actually crash into the Earth and (probably) destroy it. In a way, Melancholia's science fiction also takes a backseat to the film's real dramatics, but Von Trier is much, much better at personal wounds and melodrama, and Melancholia is always interesting, even when one is irritated with the film's main characters or frustrated with their private pain. One of the things I love about Melancholia is that I didn't quite understand a lot of it. I really like that. The film is deliberately obtuse at times, and there is much that feels very fleshed out for the actors and director, but which was lost on me. Fine. In a way, it seems to me that this is how sadness/grief/melancholia works, i.e. that there is much that outsiders simply cannot comprehend; there are things that don't translate, that sound trivial or stupid when put into language. (Also, I love that we are allowed to use the word melancholia here instead of the more medicalized depression.)

Melancholia also ends up being about that planet crashing into the Earth. I am not sure what all of that is supposed to mean or do, but I found it compelling. I do have a big gripe with this film, though, and that's that the soundtrack consists chiefly of the same seven-minute (or so) sequence from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Now, I don't remember the plot of T&I very well, but I don't and didn't need to know the plot to be distracted by the music, which recurs more than five times throughout. And whenever it did I was thinking What does this have to do with Tristan and Isolde? Is there going to be a suicide for love here? The film is so fundamentally not about love, that I found this music choice very confusing.

Last one, and I think I liked this one the best of the three. Martha Marcy May Marlene is about a young woman who becomes quite disturbed after living with a cult in upstate New York for two years or so. Her cult experience is disturbing, but the film also asks if what we see onscreen is real. Is this woman disturbed because of what happened to her or are we seeing what we see because she is disturbed. The film does this in a very clever way, and the storytelling here is excellent. The whole thing is interesting from the start, and Elizabeth Olsen, who plays the main character (Martha Marcy May Marlene) is superb.

Hugh Dancy and John Hawkes are also great (Hawkes is doing his usual creepy-man thing to terrific effect), but the whole ensemble is scary and very interesting. This is a psychological thriller, I guess, and it's a film that uses the (now tired) convention of questioning whether what we're watching is real in new and very smart ways. And the end of the film is perfect, asking us to rethink several other key scenes. It's a superb ending that makes this fairly good film a much better one because of its superb ending. I left the theatre a little shaken, and I have to say I've thought about this film many times since. It's stuck with me.

The Skin I Live In

2011-12-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

Almodóvar is awesome. I am literally in awe of the audacity of his films.

I saw The Skin I Live In about a week ago and I cannot gets insanity out of my head.

I wasn't really crazy about Almodóvar's last picture, Broken Embraces. I have felt, recently, as though the Almodóvar style has been getting in the way of the content. Broken Embraces, Volver, and Bad Education have all felt to me like very personal, almost self-critical projects. I liked Volver and liked the other two less, but who knows? I mean, the truth is, the pictures are astounding no matter how you slice it. There are so many good movies that even when the latest one is not my particular cup of tea, I am still in awe of the master.

And, actually, I have been watching some older Almodóvar films just to catch up on the oeuvre before The Skin I Live In came to my neighborhood. (Law of Desire is particularly outrageous and fun, if you haven't seen it.)

This is too much of a preface. Sorry. The Skin I Live In is absolutely fucking outrageous. It is sensational and totally insane. It is brilliantly colored (like his pictures always are), and it boasts astounding performances by Pedro's old muses Antonio Banderas and Marisa Paredes. And there are some great actors who are new to Almodóvar, too: Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet, Susi Sánchez (from The Milk of Sorrow) and particularly Roberto Álamo.

I can't really say too much about this movie without spoiling its absolutely batshit-crazy plot points, so I will not bother. Suffice it to say that there is a plastic surgeon who has invented a new kind of skin by using transgenesis and combining human genes with the genes of a particular kind of animal. And he is keeping a woman prisoner in his house on whom he operates regularly, grafting this new skin onto her. But those are just the given circumstances, really. The plot goes off the rails, back in time and then way back in time. But Pedro Almodóvar, as he always does, manages every bit of this deftly, creating an extreme amount of tension and, as always, avoiding the predictable. Even if and when you figure out what is going to happen or think you know what is going on, watching these characters unravel their predicaments is fascinating.

Like Law of Desire, The Skin I Live In is interested in why we love who we love and how we deal with loving people who are morally reprehensible and how and if we are allowed to escape those desires. I absolutely loved this picture. It was creepy and weird and beautifully shot, and also has a way of constructing moral quandaries that I can't seem to shake. I moved it to #2 for the year.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-12-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

Song of Myself - §2

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Reading Eve

2011-12-13T19:35:00.000-05:00

I finished my first draft of Chapter Two of the dissertation, and I only have about ten other things to do before I leave for California tomorrow morning, so I (obviously) didn't do any of those things this afternoon, and decided instead that I would finish a book that I've been reading before bed at a slow pace.

The book is A Dialogue on Love by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The book is about EKS's therapy for depression. It's also about realizing she is going to die and also dealing with grief for several of her friends. It is, then, about childhood, sexuality, EKS's parents, her feelings of transference for her therapist, all kinds of things. It's a lovely, generous, extremely open book that about the author's self in the extreme – deeply private thoughts – and yet, I related to this woman in so many incredible ways. The book also includes her therapist's own notes about the sessions, and A Dialogue on Love itself moves in and out of haiku; so at times the prose elevates itself into haiku and then drops back into a kind of prose that still feels, vaguely, like poetry because of the beauty of her own writing. The whole experience of reading this book was rather extraordinary to me.

The part I want to share is so amazing that I immediately called my friend Michael and read it aloud to him. EKS begins reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a way to deal with her own dying and the deaths of her friends. And she comes to the following realization:

I used to think it was embarrassing, in a religion like Buddhism, to have images of divinity scattered all over the landscape. It had that whiff of idolatry.
But I was reading this book, and I happened to look around my living room, and what was there? Like, twelve or fifteen stuffed pandas and pictures of pandas.
Not because I view them as gods! Not because I believe, even, in God—like my belief mattered.
But because to see them makes me happy. Seeing self and others transmogrified through them—the presence, gravity, and clumsy comedy of these big, inefficient, contented, very endangered bodies. With all their sexual incompetence and soot-black, cookie-cutter ears. It seems so obvious that the more such images there are, the happier.
And it means a lot, to be happy.
It may even mean: to be good. Ungreedy, unattached, unrageful, unignorant. Far different from the pharisaism that says, "I am lucky and happy because I am good," a modest occasional knowledge: I'm good, if I am, because I'm lucky enough to be happy (if I am).
It never seems sensible to pass along moral injunctions. I sometimes think that beyond the Golden Rule,

the only one that

matters is this: if you can

be happy, you should.

I want to be Eve Sedgwick when I grow up.

Summing Up 2011

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?
I went to a Florida State Seminoles' football game. And it was awesome. And I swam in a lake. Unfiltered water is a little creepy, I have to admit. But it was fun. Also I drove to Chicago and, for the first time, presented some of my work on the discourse surrounding male/male rape.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My New Year's resolution for 2011 was to have an approved dissertation prospectus. I crossed that hurdle in early November. 2012's resolution will be a degree in hand.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes. I have a new niece! Sofia Isabella was born on August 23rd. I built a lot of her baby furniture this summer, but I haven't met her yet. I will get to when I am in Los Angeles in December. She is so beautiful. I cannot wait.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?
I was in Montréal, QC this Fall for the American Society for Theatre Research's annual conference. It is a gorgeous city.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
A new job.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
On July 3rd I got to officiate at the wedding of my two dearest friends Justin Abarca and Elizabeth Triplett (I have always covertly referred to them on this blog as R&J). It was an incredibly special day – actually an entire weekend of fantastic times. The wedding was beautiful, and they threw a great party in the evening. An experience like this is so humbling and precious. I cannot tell you how meaningful it was to me. It feels so great to have been such a large part of such a special day.

I also had an absolutely great time in New York this May 13th at the reception for my friends Catie and Graeme's wedding. So many people I love were there and I had a great time drinking and dancing and wishing the bride and groom well. Bonus points for the impromptu afterparty we had drinking bud light and generally being raucous in the lobby of the hotel in Hackensack New Jersey.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Hm. It's hard not to feel accomplished this year. I passed my comprehensive exams and I have an approved dissertation prospectus. I have to say, though, that I continue to be most proud of my role as a teacher. It remains the most satisfying career I can think of. Being a teacher also means continually feeling proud of the work of my students and their achievements as learners. I have some truly extraordinary students.

I should also mention that I was extremely proud of the LGBTQ preconference we held at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's annual conference. We held it at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago. Our keynote speaker was the amazing Sharon Bridgforth, and for our keynote performance, my friend and mentor Brian Herrera performed his one-man show I Was the Voice of Democracy. It took a lot of planning, but my co-planner Jason Fitzgerald and I ended up really proud of the entire day.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Well, there are many many miniature failures of which I accuse myself every day, but I guess that if I have to pick a single big one, I would go with not publishing either of the two articles I wanted to publish this year. I will send them other places and maybe they will get published, but these kinds of things do make one feel like a failure.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nope.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
My buddy Rick was talking up rice-cookers one day when we were on the phone, and I had a gift-card to Williams-Sonoma, so I got myself one. It is a magic miniature devil. I always used to burn rice. No more. This little guy makes perfect rice every time.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My friend and former workout buddy Sean, who moved out to Los Angeles not knowing anyone.
My friend Kalon, who covered an entire dining-room table with nachos.
My friend Elizabeth, who is living her dream of being a writer.
My friend David, who put up a reading of his first play, MMF.
My friend Linda, who deservedly made full professor this year.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
I was absolutely disgusted by anyone and everyone who made the so-called "Anthony Weiner Scandal" into a scandal this summer. The sex-negativity surrounding this brouhaha made me angry beyond belief. A legislator with great ideas is actually driven out of office because he tweets a few pictures of his clothed penis? Are you kidding me?

14. Where did most of your money go?
This is boring but true: my mortgage.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Geoff and Ashley's visits to Tallahassee. Elizabeth and Justin's awesome wedding. The fourteen hours I got to see spend with Julie and then Caleb and then Michael in Manhattan and Brooklyn in May.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?

Irving Berlin's "You Can Have Him" sung by Nina Simone. I discovered this on Michael's laptop this summer and fell in love.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Happier.
b) thinner or fatter? About the same.
c) richer or poorer? Poorer.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Drinking beers with George McConnell.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Grading papers. Worrying about things over which I have no control.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Headed to Los Angeles to see my family in just a few days. I am very excited.

21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
I didn't fall, but I spent a lot of time falling for a very handsome guy this summer. He's such a good man, and I am grateful to know him.

22. How many one-night stands?
The big zero this year. I'm getting old, I guess. Ha.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
I finished The Wire finally this summer. And I've been watching Oz regularly – I am done with the first four seasons – for my dissertation. But I have to say that I think the show is awful, so calling it my favorite television program is decidedly less than accurate.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
You know, I don't think I do. I must be getting more generous. I will hope that's true.

25. What was the best book you read?
At the beginning of the year I finished Nicole Krauss's amazing Great House, the praises of which I have been singing since. You really must read it. It's wonderful.
Another of my favorite things I read this year is Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. And I really liked Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
My friend Bryce Page introduced me to James Blake this summer. And then Blake released a second (6-track) CD for 2011 called Enough Thunder, which includes a track with my other 2011 obsession, Justin Vernon.

27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw?
I mostly saw student theatre here at FSU this year. Probably a production of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife done by two of my students this Spring. I was really excited to finally be able to see a production directed by my friend Michael Stablein in Brooklyn, though, so seeing Stand: an Autumn Play was a highlight for me in 2011.

28. What did you want and get?
A Blu-Ray player. Finally broke down and bought one recently. It's so pretty.

29. What did you want and not get?
An iPad. But who can afford that? I ain't complaining about it either. I do not need one; I just wanted one.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
So far it's Terrence Malick's mindblowing The Tree of Life. I can't imagine anything being better than this picture this year.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned thirty. I celebrated by going to my friends Ashley and Geoff's wedding here in Tallahassee. It was so much fun and I love them a whole lot, and it was kind of a delight to be celebrating something other than my own birthday as I turned thirty. Also, a whole bunch of my friends made me an amazing (and hilarious) DVD wishing me happy birthday. It was coordinated by my friend Mark, and it made my birthday really special.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
I cannot think of anything that would have made my year immeasurably more satisfying. The year has been very satisfying. I would have liked the year a lot better if I had been living somewhere other than Tallahassee, but the work gets done, and the world spins forward. It is no good to regret things beyond my control.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
I am starting a new policy of dressing up much more frequently. But this is not a 2011 fashion concept. It is only a lesson I learned this year, which will be implemented in the future.

34. What kept you sane?
Talking to Michael, Ryan, Mark, Catie, and Jaime on the phone (the people in my life who just understand). Hanging out with Drew and George and Ashley and Geoff and Walter and Jeanne and Matt and Jenny in Tallahassee.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Armie Hammer. (Even if I did trash his new movie.)

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
I think I got the angriest about the so-called Anthony Weiner scandal. I was also completely delighted by the performance art of Herman Cain and his phony bid for the Republican presidential nomination. I remain fascinated by the 99% Movement.

37. Who did you miss?
I missed my friend Jaime in Seattle. I missed my friend Michael in Brooklyn. I missed my best friends in Los Angeles. I missed my boys Dayne and Dexter in London. I missed my friends David and Catie in Astoria. I missed my friend Wahima in Sunnyside. I missed a lot of people.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Chad Larabee, obviously.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
I am learning, this year – and this is a process, of course – to worry less about things over which I have no control, and to spend more time working on the things I can affect on my own. Again and again I am finding that if I buckle down and do my work, if I work hard at producing things of quality and remain a perfectionist with my own tasks, the things I want to happen will follow of their own volition. Other valuable life lessons I learned: about living in the present, and about balance.

40. Share an important quote from 2011:
My friend Geoff Kershner said something to me this year that I am never going to forget. I was telling him how one of my life goals is to make myself smaller.
That's so interesting, he said to me, I see my goal as making other people bigger.

Marty's Kids' Movie. In 3D!

2011-12-11T11:31:00.001-05:00

The more I think about Hugo the less I like it. I have mentioned before that I have never felt like Scorsese movies really have anything that connects them – there have been a lot of good movies, but he doesn't have an aesthetic voice like Spielberg or, say, P.T. Anderson or Nolan or the Coens. When I watch one of their movies I know I'm watching one of their movies, whereas Scorsese's movies sometimes feel to me like they could've been directed by a whole variety of people. (This might be a good thing. I am not criticizing; just noting.)

I said earlier on here, also, that I kept thinking ~~Tintin~~ Hugo was an animated film. It's not. Well, it's partially not. There is so much CGI in Hugo that at times I thought it would've been better as an animated film. Hugo is also as candy-coated as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, but lacks the real magic of that picture.

Hugo follows a small orphaned boy who repairs clocks in the train station in Paris. And he lives in the train station and scrounges for food and tries not to get caught by the local security guard (played by the impossible-not-to-like Sacha Baron Cohen). He is trying to repair a little metallic automaton who he thinks can write him a message from his dead father, so he is stealing little machine parts from the toy vendor in the train station.

There are all kinds of charming side characters, as well, not one of whom is developed beyond a line or two. This is a particular shame because they are played by Frances de la Tour, Richard Griffiths, Christopher Lee, and Emily Mortimer.

Okay, well, the plot begins to revolve around this mystery. Who is this toy-maker (Ben Kingsley) really and what secrets does he hold? The trouble with this is that we know that Ben Kingsley knows the solution to the mystery from the beginning of the film. So all of the machinations of the film, the running around, the near-death experiences, the crying, the run-ins with Sacha Baron Cohen's giant dog, could easily be avoided simply by coming clean to Ben Kingsley about what they know. Instead, Hugo and his playmate do not, and we have a movie. I say this to say that I spent the whole movie waiting for Mr. Scorsese to tell me the information that I knew he was keeping from me. This made the whole thing excruciatingly predictable.

Hugo has been referred to as a love letter to the movies by many critics, and they are right. There are long sequences where we watch very old films. All of those sequences work like gangbusters. They are fabulous. And I would've preferred them put together in a documentary film narrated by Martin Scorsese instead of in this film that looks, for all the world, like a film by Frank Capra.

There is much more to say about this picture, I suppose. I loved Helen McCrory in it, and Dante Ferretti's production design is just gorgeous, occasionally breathtaking, even. Howard Shore's score is lovely and may even be nominated for an Academy Award (His scores for Scorsese are almost always disqualified by AMPAS because Marty uses well-known music in all of his films for the really important sequences. He does that only once in Hugo, as far as I could tell, using one of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies at a key moment.) Mostly, though, I just thought this film was slow, like its timing was just off for the entirety of the picture. It was pretty, and the old films were nice, but it was more predictable than Thor.

Hillary Clinton's Game-changing Speech on the Humanity of LGBT Persons

2011-12-07T10:58:00.001-05:00

This is worth watching in its entirety. Even if you already agree with most of what she says in this speech, it is exhilarating to hear her say these words.

I think my favorite thing that she says is this: "Progress comes from changes in laws. In many places, including my own country, legal protections have preceded, not followed, broader recognition of rights. Laws have a teaching effect. Laws that discriminate validate other kinds of discrimination. Laws that require equal protections reinforce the moral imperative of equality. And practically speaking, it is often the case that laws must change before fears about change dissipate."

Whitman Whednesday

2011-12-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

Song of Myself - §1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

The Descendants

2011-12-06T17:30:00.001-05:00

I've been going to the movies again! I am excited about it.

This weekend I got to see Alexander Payne's The Descendants, and I am pleased to report that I think this might be Payne's best movie.

To be honest, I have never really liked Payne's films. I have probably told everyone this by now, but I always think they are smug. His movies are funny and they are played for laughs, but I always think they have a tone of real meanness underneath them, as though his characters are only there for us to laugh at. And how stupid they are! And how clever we are for making fun of them! I usually feel a bit, well, icky after a Payne movie.

But, I should stop talking about this quality of Payne's films in my discussion of The Descendants, though, because the truth is, I found this film to be extraordinarily generous.

The Descendants has its share of characters worthy of ridicule, plenty of them, actually, but the film always takes a point of view that sympathizes with these characters, that can see their side of things, even when they are being stupid or ludicrous.

My own response to The Descendants was established very early on. Clooney is doing a voice-over where he explains the given circumstances of the film. He goes through information quickly, telling us what we need to know. His wife is in the hospital and he's been sitting with her for 3 weeks. She's in a coma after a head injury. He has two daughters who he's trying to wrangle. He owns a whole bunch of land that is in a trust and he has to decide how to dispose of it in a couple of weeks. He tells us all of this in a kind of flat tone. And then there is a slight pause. And he says something like "Elizabeth is gonna be alright. She's gonna wake up and it may be a long road of recuperation, but it's gonna be worth it and I'm gonna work less and spend more time at home with her and the kids and we can work on things." It is an absolutely extraordinary moment: as though if he says everything he wishes were true immediately after all of the other true things, then his wishes will all come true.

The acting is great. The film is very funny at times. There are wonderful sequences featuring Beau Bridges (!) and Robert Forster (!). I really, really liked it.

Music Share

2011-12-04T17:44:00.001-05:00

I know I'm not really a music person, but I am obsessed with this song right now.

Also, Chris Thile is 20 days older than I am. Literally. What am I doing with my life?

Thoughts on Movies 2001-2010

2011-12-04T10:59:00.001-05:00

A
~ ~
Across the Universe (2007)
After the Wedding (2007)
Ajami (2010)
Alexander (2004)
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
All the Real Girls (2003)
American Gangster (2007)
Animal Kingdom (2010)
Another Gay Movie (2006)
Another Year (2010)
Apocalypto (2006)
Art School Confidential (2006)
Ask the Dust (2006)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Atonement (2007)
August Rush (2007)
Australia (2008)
The Aviator (2004)

B
~ ~
Babel (2006)
Bad Education (2004)
The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)
Barney's Version (2010)
Becoming Jane (2007)
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)
Being Julia (2004)
Beowulf (2007)
Black Book (2007)
The Black Dahlia (2006)
Black Swan (2010)
The Blind Side (2009)
Blood Diamond (2006)
Blue Valentine (2010)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Breach (2007)
Brick (2006)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Broken English (2007)
The Brothers Bloom (2009)
Brüno (2009)
The Bubble (2007)
Bug (2007)
Burn after Reading (2008)
The Butterfly Effect (2004)

C
~ ~
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2006)
Caramel (2008)
Carandiru (2004)
Cars (2006)
Casanova (2005)
Cashback (2007)
Casino Royale (2006)
Cassandra's Dream (2008)
Changeling (2008)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
Charlie St. Cloud (2010)
Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
Chéri (2009)
Children of Men (2006)
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)
The Chumscrubber (2005)
The Class (2008)
Clean (2006)
Click (2006)
Closer (2004)
The Constant Gardener (2005)
Control (2007)
Coraline (2009)
The Counterfeiters (2008)
Country Strong (2010)
Crash (2005)
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2006)
Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)

D
~ ~
Dan in Real Life (2007)
Dans Paris (2007)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Days of Glory (2007)
Death at a Funeral (2007)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2006)
Defiance (2008)
The Departed (2006)
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
District 9 (2009)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Dogtooth (2010)
Don't Tell (2006)
The Dreamers (2004)
Dreamgirls (2006)
Duck Season (2006)

E
~ ~
Eastern Promises (2007)
The Edukators (2005)
Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007)
Enchanted (2007)
L'Enfant (2006)
Eragon (2006)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Evening (2007)
Evil (2006)

F
~ ~
Fair Game (2010)
The Fall (2008)
The Family Stone (2005)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Fateless (2006)
Feast of Love (2007)
The Fighter (2010)
Finding Neverland (2004)
Fish Tank (2010)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
For Your Consideration (2006)
The Fountain (2006)
Friends with Money (2006)
Funny Games (2008)
Funny People (2009)

G
~ ~
Gabrielle (2006)
Gerry (2003)
Get Smart (2008)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2010)
The Golden Compass (2007)
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Good Morning, Night (2005)
The Good Shepherd (2006)
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)

H
~ ~
Hairspray (2007)
Half Nelson (2006)
Hamlet 2 (2008)
The Hangover (2009)
Happy Feet (2006)
Hard Candy (2006)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009)
Head-on (2005)
High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008)
Hot Fuzz (2007)
The House of Sand (2006)
How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Howl's Moving Castle (2005)
The Hurt Locker (2009)

I
~ ~
I Am Love (2010)
The Illusionist (2006)
The Illusionist (2010)
I'm Not There. (2007)
Imagine Me & You (2006)
In Bruges (2008)
In the Land of Women (2007)
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
Inception (2010)
Into the Wild (2007)
Iron Man (2008)
Iron Man 2 (2010)

J
~ ~
Jarhead (2005)
Joyeux Noël (2006)
Junebug (2005)
Juno (2007)

K
~ ~
The Kids Are All Right (2010)
King Kong (2005)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
The King's Speech (2010)
Kinsey (2004)
The Kite Runner (2007)
Knocked Up (2007)
Kontroll (2005)
Kung Fu Hustle (2005)

L
~ ~
Lady Chatterley (2007)
Lady in the Water (2006)
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Last Days (2005)
The Last King of Scotland (2006)
The Last Kiss (2006)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
The Libertine (2005)
Little Children (2006)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
The Lives of Others (2007)
The Lookout (2007)
Love in Thoughts (2005)
The Lovely Bones (2009)
Lust, Caution (2007)

M
~ ~
Ma Mère (2005)
The Man of My Life (2007)
Manderlay (2006)
Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Me and Orson Welles (2009)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Melinda and Melinda (2005)
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
Michael Clayton (2007)
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
Monster House (2006)
The Mother (2004)
Mother and Child (2010)
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
Munich (2005)

N
~ ~
The Namesake (2007)
Never Let Me Go (2010)
The New Twenty (2009)
The New World (2005)
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)
Norbit (2007)
Nine (2009)
Nine Lives (2005)
Notes on a Scandal (2006)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Number 23 (2007)

O
~ ~
Once (2007)
Outside the Law (2010)

P
~ ~
The Painted Veil (2006)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Paprika (2007)
Paradise Now (2005)
Paranoid Park (2008)
Paris 36 (2009)
Paris, Je T'aime (2007)
Persepolis (2007)
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
Pirates of the Caribbean: at World's End (2007)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Ponyo (2009)
Poseidon (2006)
A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
The Prestige (2006)
Pride & Prejudice (2006)
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
The Promise (2006)
A Prophet (2010)
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

Q
~ ~
The Queen (2006)

R
~ ~
Rabbit Hole (2010)
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Ratatouille (2007)
Rescue Dawn (2007)
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2006)
Run Fatboy Run (2008)
Running with Scissors (2006)

S
~ ~
Salt (2010)
The Savages (2007)
Saving Face (2005)
Scoop (2006)
The Sea Inside (2004)
The Secret in Their Eyes (2010)
Sex and the City (2008)
Shark Tale (2004)
Shelter (2008)
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Shooter (2007)
Shopgirl (2005)
Shortbus (2006)
Shrek the Third (2007)
Sin City (2005)
A Single Man (2009)
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Snakes on a Plane (2006)
The Social Network (2010)
The Son (2003)
Sophie Scholl: the Final Days (2006)
Spider-man 3 (2007)
The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Stardust (2007)
Steamboy (2005)
Stop-loss (2008)
The Strangers (2008)
Sugar (2009)
Summer Storm (2006)
Sunshine (2007)
Superman Returns (2006)
Surf's Up (2007)
Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2006)
Syriana (2005)

T
~ ~
Tangled (2010)
Teeth (2008)
Tell No One (2008)
Thank You for Smoking (2006)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Three Times (2006)
Thumbsucker (2005)
Time (Shi Gan) (2007)
Time to Leave (2006)
Tony Takitani (2005)
The Town (2010)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
Transamerica (2005)
Transformers (2007)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Tron: Legacy (2010)
Tropical Malady (2005)
True Grit (2010)
Tsotsi (2006)

U
~ ~
United 93 (2006)
Unstoppable (2010)
Up (2009)
The Upside of Anger (2005)

V
~ ~
V for Vendetta (2006)
Venus (2006)
Vera Drake (2004)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
La Vie en Rose (2007)
Volver (2006)

W
~ ~
Waitress (2007)
WALL·E (2008)
Wanted (2008)
War of the Worlds (2005)
Water (2006)
The Way Back (2010)
The White Countess (2005)
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2007)
Winter's Bone (2010)
The Witnesses (2008)
The Wolfman (2010)
Woman Is the Future of Man (2006)
The World (2005)

X
~ ~
X-men: the Last Stand (2006)

Y
~ ~
Yes (2005)
Yesterday (2005)
You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008)

#
~ ~
127 Hours (2010)
13 Tzameti (2006)
2 Days in Paris (2007)
2046 (2005)
28 Days Later... (2003)
3:10 to Yuma (2007)
300 (2007)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

Attack the Block

2011-12-02T11:23:00.001-05:00

Hey, so, Attack the Block came out in July. Have you seen it? It's on DVD now, so you should get on that as soon as possible.

I feel like I am always posting here about movies that I haven't really liked very much. (Dear J. Edgar, I like you less the more I think about you and the more I talk to my gay friends about you.) And I think one of the reasons I post about movies I didn't like very much is that there is, well, more to say about them. I feel like it simply is not that easy to write six or seven paragraphs on something that I love. My good reviews all end up being something like "Go see this; it's really good." Maybe that's just me. Who knows.

But allow me to do that exact thing yet again. Attack the Block. Rent it!

This is a genre picture: a violent adventure film about killing aliens that invade Earth. Except this movie stars junior-high kids who live in a London project. It's a film that is smart about race, as well.

And let me just say that I find it a relief to watch a movie about black people that doesn't also feel the need to be a movie that's really about white people.

But the thing that is great about Attack the Block is, well, nearly everything. I loved this movie. The aliens are interesting and cool-looking. The plot is surprising and fun. The heroes are complex, attractive, and clever. The dialogue is witty. It's also suspenseful, violent, and very, very funny. Please allow me to recommend this movie to you. It's definitely going to be in my top ten for the year.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-11-30T15:42:00.001-05:00

Starting from Paumanok - §19

O Camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph—and you shall also;
O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.

(I love it when he talks sexy.)

Citing My Sources

2011-11-30T00:58:00.001-05:00

While writing my dissertation I am making it a point to always go back to the original source. I am quoting hearsay, viewers' experiences of certain pieces of theatre, that sort of thing, and reviews are paraphrased and taken out of context and made to appear more positive than they originally were – all sorts of things. Biographers and other writers are trying to tell their own stories, so it makes sense that they would place things in a certain light.

Which is why it's always good to go back to the source. (Plus, the Chicago Manual of Style says to.) I've always thought, incidentally, that when authors used the old parenthetical phrase "quoted in..." that it betrayed a kind of laziness on their parts, and I am interested, generally, in always projecting my own hyperproductivity. (Just keepin' it real, y'all.)

So.

When Pamela E. Barnett quoted Amiri Baraka in her book Dangerous Desire: Literature of Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties, which is a fascinating read, I looked up her source. She is quoting Baraka's essay "American Sexual Reference: Black Male," which begins (provocatively) "Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank, left without the hurt that reality makes—anytime. That red flush, those silk blue faggot eyes." Etcetera.

Silk blue faggot eyes. I've got to read the rest of this.

Except that this is what Barnett's source looks like.

Aside from the fact that Sidney J. Lemelle spells his name with an m and not an n and that both he and Robin D.G. Kelley are usually cited with their middle initials, their book does not include Baraka's essay – under the name LeRoi Jones or any other name. And anyway Baraka's essay is not from 1994; it's from the mid-1960s: an enormous difference.

I cannot tell you how many times this same thing has happened while I have been working on this dissertation. And I have only been working for a couple months so far. Issues of journals are dated incorrectly. Pages numbered wrong. Titles wrongly reported. It happens all the time.
Last month I came across a quote about John Osborne where the author had inserted into the quote the brackets [African-American playwright] John Osborne. Osborne is neither African nor black nor even American.
And a book that has impacted me in a huge way cites an essay by Warren Beatty Warner from Diacritics 13.4. I always thought it was weird that this guy was named Warren Beatty Warner and it wasn't until I looked it up that I realized that that isn't his name at all. It's William Beatty Warner. (P.S. I love Warren Beatty.)

I am not sure where this post is headed, really, but, well, all of this inaccuracy sort of bowls me over. I clearly do not want to write this chapter on which I am working. Instead I am posting about other people's bad record-keeping.

This post is absurd. I'll stop now.

Hope, Whiteness, and James Earl Jones

2011-11-27T09:42:00.001-05:00

I watched this a while ago, and I just wanted to share how much I really loved The Great White Hope. It's an old movie made from an even older play, but it's really excellent.

The Great White Hope also boasts some superb performances. James Earl Jones is just outstanding, and his later fame in other roles is completely obvious when looking at his work in this. He was already a master in 1970. The performance is big and brave and powerful.

I have to admit to being a little baffled as to why they didn't just call the character in the movie Jack Johnson. The Great White Hope is so clearly based on Johnson's life-story that it seems odd to provide any subterfuge. The film calls him Jack Jefferson, which makes the subterfuge seem even sillier to me.

One thing the fake name did do for me is that I kept asking "Did that really happen?" "They didn't do that to him, did they?" "They couldn't have ended up in Budapest performing in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin could they have?" That's probably not all bad. I mean, I ended up looking Johnson up and spending an hour reading about him after the movie was over.

The Great White Hope is a boxing movie only partially. Much of the boxing happens off screen – a choice that would probably never be made by a filmmaker working today and probably a formal device left over from the original play – and instead the focus is on the ingenious methods these racist jackasses in the United States invented as a way of punishing Jack Johnson for being a powerful pugilist and for loving a white woman.

But TGWH is, even more than that, one of those 1970s lonely-man films of which I am so fond, where the protagonist's morals are questionable and when the film ends he goes off into an uncertain, confusing future, but faces that future with a characteristic unflappability and fortitude. TGWH is a character study and an absolutely fascinating one. The writing is also excellent, though as I noted above, it's often a little too stage-y.

Jane Alexander is also great in the movie, and TGWH also boasts a fierce performance by Network actress Marlene Warfield (god I love her) and an appearance from the amazing Beah Richards.

One more thing. I have watched two James Earl Jones movies recently (the other was 1974's Claudine, which I loved), and both appear in this hilarious mashup, which my friend Walt showed me this summer. Enjoy:

Grad School

2011-11-26T23:59:00.001-05:00

I'm reading James Dickey a lot lately (for chapter 2 of the dissertation), and so tonight I was reading an interview he did with Playboy in 1973.

I really was reading Playboy just for the articles.

So Dickey is a ridiculous liar for the most part, but the interview is pretty great and about midway he gets to talking about graduate school. This is what he says:

"In my little bit of graduate work in American literature twenty years ago at Vanderbilt, I was a kind of two-bit Melville scholar. That was my only claim to fame after a year or so of working in graduate school, in those dark satanic mills."

Graduate school has been good to me, sure, but I do often think of graduate school as a dark, satanic mill. Strong work, JD, strong work.

Time Out, Please

2011-11-26T13:53:00.001-05:00

Andrew Niccol's In Time is, frankly, a bunch of cheez whiz.

I didn't dislike this movie so much as I was bored by it.
And I didn't object to the film so much as I thought that it wore out its welcome.

The premise starts out rather interestingly, I must admit. In the very distant future (a future which looks, frankly, exactly 2011, although it has to be many, many years in the future because) humans have been genetically modified to stop ageing at age 25. From age 25, they have one year on their clocks. This year of time is a life-clock as well as currency. So if you have only a half hour on your clock, you will be literally dead if your time runs out. But, see, everything also costs time, so you have to spend your own lifeline in order to get things: coffee, a ride on the bus, a shot of tequila, you get the idea.

So when a small girl says to Justin early in the film: You got a minute? She means, Brother, can you spare a dime? And time zones are really class sectors. Most importantly – and this might be the film's only real insight – working-class people run places and wealthy people walk. Some of us have time to spare. Others only have just enough time to make more time.

The movie looks pretty (you will recall that Niccol's Gattaca also had a gorgeous look to it), and it is exciting at times – there is a poker game that is really fun to watch and an arm-wrestling match that is equally bracing – but mostly the film is filled with half-baked political theories about where money goes and who has it and how rich people keep poor people poor.

It's not that I object to social equality – I do not – it's that I object to generic notions of what that equality might mean. I also object to any political theory about capital that does not also include a political theory of labor. In Time stretches any question of its believability and loses itself in abstract notions of universality that argue that we all should die and no one should live forever and rich people upset the balance of things by making some people die younger and living longer themselves. Except that this isn't the problem with the world. The problem is not that rich people ought to die as well as poor people. The problem is that rich people are rich and poor people are not.

It seemed to me as I was watching the movie that perhaps quality was the real problem instead of quantity, but In Time wasn't really interested in that either, frankly ignoring people's working lives and focusing instead on trying to stay alive. The movie is smart to equate the two, perhaps, but In Time is short on analysis and long on moral abstractions. The whole thing is rather stupid.

Still, it had redeeming qualities. Colleen Atwood's costumes are gorgeous if not at all futuristic, and Justin Timberlake is, as always, fun to watch. Amanda Seyfried runs at full speed for half of the movie and does every bit of this running in heels. I admired both her speed and her commitment to fashion. A lesser woman would surely have ditched those fabulous shoes in order to pick up the pace. It just goes to show you that even when time is money and even when running out of time means losing your life, there are some sacrifices that just ought never to be made.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-11-23T20:26:00.001-05:00

Starting from Paumanok

§9
What do you seek so pensive and silent?
What do you need camerado?
Dear son do you think it is love?

Listen dear son—listen America, daughter or son,
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great,
But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all.

§12
...
I will make the true poem of riches,
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death;
I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other,
And sexual organs and acts! so you concentrate in me, for I am determin'd to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days.
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul.
Because having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.

§13
Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.
All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
How can the real body ever die and be buried?
...
Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul;
Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!

§15
With me firm holding, yet haste, haste on.

For your life adhere to me,
(I have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself really to you, but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

Spotlight Seven

2011-11-23T11:06:00.001-05:00

I did this interview for a new interview series on the School of Theatre website at FSU. The interviews are only up for a week, so mine has been replaced now by someone else, and I figured I'd post the interview here.

Name: Aaron C. Thomas
Position in School of Theatre: PhD Candidate in Theatre Studies
Hometown: Los Angeles CA

1. How did you get your start in theatre?
Well, in high school, the drama class met at zero period, which was, I think, at some god-awful hour like 7.00a or somesuch. I was having none of that. And anyway I was already a big ol’ nerd, so hanging out with drama kids wasn’t exactly going to make me look any cooler. So I didn’t take classes in theatre in high school. But when I was a junior this very attractive senior (his name was Ali if you must know), told me that he was auditioning for the Christian drama club and that I should too. I obviously auditioned. I got in, but of course Ali never auditioned; so I ended up performing Everyman in Lutheran churches (seriously) and my dreams of spending time with my attractive friend were dashed. In college I was an Accounting major for two years, but transferred to Theatre Arts because I found it to be much more difficult than Business Administration.

2. What is the best performance you have ever seen OR what is the craziest thing that has happened to you during a performance?
Best performance I’ve ever seen? How can anyone even answer this? I have a couple, I guess. I saw Faye Dunaway play Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class in 1996 and we just kept applauding. We clapped through seven curtain calls. No lie. It was a brilliant performance. I’ll also never forget Julie Taymor’s production of Flying Dutchman at Los Angeles Opera. And… we did The Rocky Horror Show here a couple years ago and I might’ve gone three times.

3. If you could have any career outside of theatre, what would it be and why?
I’d be doing humanitarian work. Advocating for imprisoned populations seems particularly attractive to me right now. The amount of injustice that surrounds the prison system in this country especially when it comes to the treatment of men of color is extraordinary to me. Actually, I sometimes think about leaving everything and going and doing humanitarian work anyway. But I admit: I’m old and bourgeois and have a mortgage and things now. I may yet…

4. What inspires you in your free time/ what do you do for fun?
I watch movies. As many as possible. Before I came to graduate school I used to watch something like six or seven movies a week. I watch a lot fewer now, but I keep a movie-blog, and I am obsessed with the Oscars – I’ve memorized all kinds of useless trivia about them. Also, I’m all about cooking.

5. What brought you to Florida State?
FSU is a Research One university, and when I got accepted here I immediately decided I would go. Because I had been a fairly lazy undergraduate student (most of my students now are way better than I ever was as an undergrad) I felt excited that FSU even accepted me. I have to give credit to Mary Karen Dahl for seeing past my ridiculous record and believing in me despite it.

6. If you could give an aspiring theatre artist any piece of advice, what would it be?
Jeff Calhoun once said to me that “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.” I’ve always kept this in my mind. No one should be producing theatre just to do it. Really though, I probably don’t know anything. I was saying to a friend the other day that my only goals when making art are to try to avoid clichés and to remember that I am not there to teach anybody anything: I do not believe that the theatre is a classroom.

7. Wild Card Question: If you were a super hero, who would would you be and why?
I would definitely be one of the X-Men. I tend to be a little psychic, so I’d probably be some kind of telepath. Jean Grey? She was kinda fierce.

From The Castle

2011-11-22T00:02:00.001-05:00

I read this today in Howard Barker's The Castle. I feel like I don't remember this from before, but there it was staring me in the face when I read it today:

I do not know how we will win!
It is not a failing not to know the end at the beginning.
Our power comes out of our love.
Love is also a weapon.

And This

2011-11-21T16:29:00.000-05:00

Via a Blabbeando piece about really great LGBTQ-positive ads in Argentina:

Four (Easy) Pieces about Sex for Your Monday!

2011-11-21T14:08:00.001-05:00

From Gawker, How to Tell If Your Son Is Gay by Richard Lawson which lampoons the silly iPhone app that tells you if your son is gay. Lawson offers:

If you come home from work and you hear noises upstairs and you go up to investigate and your son's door is open and you catch him "hooking up" (as kids call it today) with his friend Michael, and you quickly turn around and walk back downstairs and later that night over dinner you say "You know, honey, if there's ever anything you need to tell me..." and he says "Mom, I'm gay," then your son is gay.

Also from Gawker, the delightful article In Praise of Queens by Brian Moylan, which includes a phrase I feel I am constantly using against homophobic homosexuals:

Those on the masculine side of the spectrum need to can it with the "no fems" bullshit. When it comes down to it, no matter how many sports they play, how much beer they drink, or how much Madonna they hate, they still suck dick just like the rest of us, and there are certain parts of the mainstream that will despise you for that, no matter how well you hide.

And then there is this fabulous piece on Slate by J. Bryan Lowder about a male porn star that women love. His name is James Deen and the piece is called Porn That Women Like: Why Does It Make Men So Uncomfortable? and is a great read, including:

Men (who largely control the porn industry) imagine that women want everything big—“Big arms. Big abs. Big dicks,” [...]—when what they really want is something a little less overwrought.

Anyone who describes porn stars as overwrought has, in my book, figured a few things out about the world.

Lastly, I want to share this blog post called The H-Word: “Make Your Own Porn” via BitchMedia. It's by a female porn star named Dylan Ryan who identifies as queer and at one point uses the phrase:

when I'm having sex with a cis gendered man on camera...

The transpositive and queer implications of this phrase are extraordinary to me, and I've decided that I am going to begin all sentences at Thanksgiving dinner with the phrase, "Well, when I'm having sex with a cis gendered man..."

Immortality?

2011-11-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

I got exactly what I expected from Immortals. Well... that might be a little too kind.

Let's do a little math. For me, Immortals breaks down like this:

Immortals > Alexander (what isn't?)

Immortals < The Fall

Immortals > 300

Immortals = Troy

I liked Immortals well enough. It was exciting and for the most part quite enjoyable as a film. Immortals is also über-violent. Like, crazy violent. And I have to say after the milquetoast Rum Diary that I really was pleased to see violence have an actual effect on bodies in space. I find PG-13 violence in movies quite offensive. But Immortals is insanely violent, actually. Bodies are smashed to bits and there were times while watching this film when my friend George and I cringed and crossed our legs and covered our eyes and all the rest of the horrible reactions people tend to have while watching truly grotesque violence on screen.

The most important thing to note about Immortals, if you ask me, is the costumes. I really hope designer Eiko Ishioka (Tarsem's usual designer) gets recognized by the Academy for her stunning work. I also want to note the performance by Luke Evans as Zeus. Evans was in the Musketeers movie earlier this fall, as well, and he is less interesting there, but in Immortals, he is fascinating. His Zeus is a tortured, troubled figure filled with equal parts hope and regret, and Evans manages to convey all of this wearing next to nothing and spouting inane dialogue.

A couple other thoughts. It's easy to object to the use of violence in a film. The standard logic here is that by giving us so much violence to see, we become desensitized to it, and violence seems to mean less to us. That may be true – probably is – but I think the horses have left the barn on this one. So it isn't violence per se to which I object here. What Immortals does that I find really troubling is the way that it justifies violent action by constantly utilizing ideological buzzwords like courage and freedom and honor and glory. For me, the mobilization of these words is much, much worse than representing grotesque violence onscreen. Words like courage and honor work to justify violence by behaving as though murder and rape and torture and brutality are equivalent to courage and honor and freedom and justice. If they are not equivalent (and they are not) Immortals behaves as though violence is the only way to achieve honor and the only method for demonstrating courage. To my mind, this ideological nonsense is infinitely more damaging than showing what happens to the human body when it is doused in alcohol and set on fire or when someone cuts his tongue out with a pair of rusty, ancient scissors.

Also: this movie is not The Fall. It is definitely a Tarsem Singh movie. It's gorgeous and feels like it takes place in the middle of nowhere even though we are constantly being told exactly where we are. But... well it just doesn't have the kind of emotional center that The Fall had. Instead, Immortals has beautiful costumes and gorgeous bodies and lots and lots of blood. I object to none of those things categorically, of course (I appreciate all of them, in fact), but at the center of Immortals there is no compelling relationship or powerful theme. In fact, there is not much at all at the center of Immortals.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-11-16T00:59:00.001-05:00

To a Certain Cantatrice

Here, take this gift,
I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or general,
One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea,
the progress and freedom of the race,
Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;
But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.

Fairy Dust

2011-11-15T00:59:00.001-05:00

I'm sort of reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love. In small spurts before I go to sleep.

I've been reading so much literature about Deliverance lately, however, that I gave myself a break and sat down and read a large chunk of A Dialogue on Love last night. I was rewarded with the following discussion about the way EKS sees her friends:

They do seem so glamorous and numinous to me. I always see the light shaking out of their wings. It does shock me when anyone views them in an ordinary light—or worse, when they see each other that way.
...
It's as though I want to start out powdering people with fairy dust when I first know them—like there's a working hypothesis that I'll trust them, we're playing the same exciting game, that they're radiant, kind, mysteriously talented, spiritually powerful. With lots of people the sequins naturally drop off soon, quite without melodrama or, really, embitterment. But if people stay numinous to me for a while, then there they are—in the pantheon.

I love this. And I think it is how I am when I first meet people, as well.

Many, many people in my life are simply magical to me.
And I always think it is so strange when other people in my life view the ones I love the most as though they are not luminous.

I Thought That Movie Was Called...

2011-11-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

I keep thinking that Hugo and The Adventures of Tintin are the same movie. And I realized today, when my friend George and I got out of seeing ~~300~~ Immortals, that the reason I think they're the same movie is because they're being sold as though they're the same movie.

Why are these posters exactly the same? A vague blue mist, implying some sort of magical aura, gold lettering implying (what does that imply? Christmas?)

And then there's the gold light behind each of the young male figures which are the posters' centers. The light hits these boys just so. These both appear to be chase films more than anything else. They are running from something, each of these boys, and running toward us, toward adventure. And we can join them...

I shouldn't make fun. By all accounts, both movies are quite good. But a little imagination for the marketing campaigns, it seems to me, is in order.

Hoover's Tale

2011-11-13T10:31:00.001-05:00

Well, I really wanted to like Clint Eastwood's new film J. Edgar. I obviously think the story is interesting, and I have noted before how I am actively interested in what I see as Clint Eastwood's larger project of examining Americanism as a concept. I see him as taking apart pieces of iconic American historical moments and re-interrogating these time periods that so many of us see as nation-forming. So, I don't see his films as about nostalgia at all (though many have accused them of exactly that), but as reinvigorations of history, anti-nostalgic, and restless.

...But J. Edgar is a misstep for me, and not because I don't think Eastwood's project is still a valid one, but because I just don't think the film works.

For starters, the film's structure is off from the beginning. It has this frame where Hoover is telling his side of the story to these various agents who type up what he says. I know I am not one to advocate for a film to trick its audience a little, but J. Edgar starts off by telling us that what we are seeing is a lopsided version of what happened – Hoover's own version of facts most of us understand very differently from the way he understands them. There is a big emotional moment in the film's third act where all of these so-called facts are called into question, but this moment rings completely hollow, because as an audience, we've been skeptical of Hoover's version since the beginning.

J. Edgar is filmed in the style of an old Hollywood flick, sumptuous and without – for the most part – flashy camera work. Tom Stern's cinematography is a little too washed out for my taste (nothing wrong with a little color – especially in a film about the thirties and forties), but I think that's a sort of standard look for pictures about law-enforcement these days, as though there were only grayscale movies in the thirties and forties. More importantly, the film's sequences are scripted as though we are watching an old Hollywood flick. I'm gonna come right out and say that I thought J. Edgar was a really conservative film. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (an interview with him at Towleroad is worth reading) has chosen mostly scenes that he feels like he can verify publicly, but the problem here is this means that J. Edgar does not break enough ground in exploring Hoover's personal life.

And I'm not just talking about the gay thing.

The idea that Hoover was terrified of socializing with women and was terrified that he was homosexual is so much a part of the film that it feels like it is in the movie too much on occasion (especially since the film's perspective is allegedly Hoover's own spin on things). But for me the movie botches all the queer stuff too. It looks like J. Edgar is building up to some sort of sexual release for most of the movie. Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer (dear lord he is gorgeous) look longingly at each other for the film's entire second act, but then the film never defines what is actually going on. And, okay, okay, I understand that we don't know what happened and that Hoover probably didn't understand himself as a homosexual, and that the filmmakers clearly want us to imagine what went on. But that makes J. Edgar the kind of movie that would have been made about the queerness of a famous figure in, say, the early 1970s, where we would understand that a character was gay because the film created silences that we could read as homosexuality.

I am not sure if I was simply bored with the film, but all of this talking to the side of sexuality is boring to me. If you're gonna present Hoover's sexuality (or lack of such) as this defining force in his life, then you also need to flesh it out a little more, and who cares if it is mostly imagined by a screenwriter.

I didn't hate this film (it was no Good Shepherd) but I found myself constantly pulled out of it. I don't think it ever hit its stride, and I was constantly wanting it to move in directions in which it refused to move. And even more importantly, I never really thought any of it seemed very real. The makeup was obviously a big problem – many in the blogosphere have commented that it does not look realistic – but the entire film felt to me like these actors were playing dress-up. Hammer and Naomi Watts looked comfortable in their skin, but I felt like most of the other performers looked slightly stilted for the film's entire running time, as though they were hoping no one noticed that they weren't really those characters.

You will all probably have different reactions to this movie than I did, and I expect that it will pick up at least a few Oscar nominations come January, so I am interested in what you all think.

Viola Davis

2011-11-13T02:25:00.001-05:00

I know this was making the rounds a month or so ago, but I wanted to share it again. If The Help is dumb about race (and it is) the actress who anchors the film is certainly not, and the clarity and hope that she shares about representation and roles for people of color on film are communicated beautifully in this speech.

Love her.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

2011-11-09T11:11:00.004-05:00

Well this is a little weird. I don't know if you know this, but Sony Pictures is releasing films on DVD-R on a manufacture-on-demand basis. These are movies that the studio cannot really afford to release on DVD to the general public (there is not enough of a demand for these films). So what they are doing instead is allowing people to order the DVD for around $20 and then they burn the movie onto a DVD-R and send it to you. Universal is doing this too. They're calling it the Universal Vault Series. You can actually buy these movies via Amazon.com, so the whole thing is very very easy. And we all have better (if a little expensive) access to hard-to-find films. And if you really want to see these movies, $20 is not so bad.

So I ordered Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams a few months ago when I was watching all of those movies from 1973. But I only watched it a couple days ago.

The movie is odd – a smallish sort of melodrama about a woman who is emotionally disturbed and can't seem to find her way in the world, her relationship with her husband, her children's lives, her mother's death, etc. I was interested in this film because I love Joanne Woodward and because it is about her dealing with her son being gay (evidently a big deal in 1973, oh yeah, it still is in 2011).

I don't know. It is not a film to get excited about, really. The acting is wonderful from all involved, and it is interesting in a museum-piece kind of way. I am glad I saw it, but that's about it, I think.

The weird thing is that after keeping this flick on my shelf for a few months and then finally watching it, the film's director (who was also the producer of the Academy Awards show for many many years) died suddenly. So strange how the universe is: I watch my first Gil Cates movie (no one watches his movies anymore) a few days before he dies. It's all just such a fluke.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-11-09T10:22:00.002-05:00

For Him I Sing

For him I sing,
I raise the present on the past,
(As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,)
With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,
To make himself by them the law unto himself.

When I Read the Book

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Welcome to Puerto Rico

2011-11-06T12:41:00.002-05:00

What the hell?

Seriously: I don't get it.

The Rum Diary is a disaster. I can't say I totally hated it, but it was almost unbearably boring. The imdb synopsis of this film says that "American journalist Paul Kemp takes on a freelance job in Puerto Rico for a local newspaper during the 1950s and struggles to find a balance between island culture and the expatriates who live there." Okay. Sure. Sometimes the movie is that.

Mostly the movie is simply a collection of nonsensical scenarios, grotesque characters, and slow-motion photography. The Rum Diary is (it seems to me) attempting to find a productive tension between a fun drug-trip movie and a film about a man who comes to political awareness in a colonized land (something like, say, The Year of Living Dangerously), but mostly The Rum Diary can only achieve silliness.

The film is filled with silly and unique characters, none of whom is particularly fun, and then there are the villains, of which there are quite a few, who all have decided to play their roles with a sort of stock-villainous flair. And Johnny Depp gets drunk a lot and plays drunk a lot, mugging around the movie with the same faces we've seen in other drunk Johnny Depp movies.

And then the movie turns and wants to be a film about the exploitation of Puerto Rico and other northern Caribbean islands by greedy capitalists in the 1950s. And we are all supposed to immediately understand (though the film has been mum on the topic for at least its first sixty minutes) that Paul Kemp is really struggling to help the exploited islanders (not one of whom is a character with more than one line) and speak for a free Puerto Rico.

But the drunken haze with which with the film began cannot be shaken, and The Rum Diary remains a film for teenage boys who've never had more than a few drinks and never had sex with a woman (and endlessly fantasize about both). If the movie is never a movie about a political cause (and it is not), neither does it ever manage to be a fun movie about drunken debauchery or hallucinogenic trips. My companion Jon and I had a debate after The Rum Diary was over because I thought it must've been a PG-13-rated film since it was so tame. Jon said (correctly) that the film was rated R, but that we had the debate at all should tell you plenty. The Rum Diary has no nudity (None. Seriously.), very little drug use, and a single scene with a computer-generated tongue extending too far out of a guy's mouth.

The bottom line here, is that The Rum Diary is a cartoon version of an early Hunter S. Thompson novel. And it is not a film for grown-up people. It is a movie for adolescent boys that only looks like a movie for adults.

Such a Win

2011-11-05T17:16:00.000-04:00

I have to admit that when I saw the trailer for Thomas McCarthy's Win Win I was highly skeptical.

I tend to be skeptical of Paul Giamatti in general these days. His brand of schlubby but lovable, difficult but ultimately charming heroes has begun to wear thin with me. Last year's truly awkward Barney's Version is a perfect example. (He does historical dramas a lot too, I've noticed: Cinderella Man, I liked, but The Last Station and The Illusionist? I dunno. To me he seems sort of out of place in these.)

But Win Win is something else altogether.

First, and I want to stress this because I don't think it's an all-that-common occurrence, Win Win is a really funny comedy. By this I mean that I laughed, many times, at jokes that the film told well and that absolutely landed.

Second, the film knows that it's a genre picture. It's totally aware that it's a movie about a white, bourgeois, middle-aged man learning a lesson about his middle-aged manhood. Win Win always knows that it's riffing on a theme that's been played before, and it never pretends to be doing anything else. This makes Win Win smart. It avoids all the typical ways that those films work and does its own thing.

Third, Bobby Cannavale (who is fabulous in McCarthy's first film The Station Agent) is a genius. The man is a genius. He is simply one of the most skilled actors working today. I don't feel the need for any equivocation here. His performance in Win Win is excellent. It's brave and self-effacing and also manages to be absolutely hilarious. And it's one of Cannavale's typical side-man movie roles, one he could have easily phoned in. Instead he plays the part with a nuance that make his version of this rather stock character feel almost revelatory at times. Like we might want to look again at all of those good-for-a-laugh side-men in buddy comedies. The performance is just extraordinary.

I loved everyone else in the film, too. The little kid (Alex Shaffer) is great. Giamatti is great. And so are Amy Ryan and Burt Young and Margo Martindale (who is understated in a way I never see her).

Even more, the film is never schmaltzy. It doesn't get bogged down in the kind of sentiment that the trailer appears to promise, and it treats the film's relationships realistically and respectfully.

If you're looking for something light, and you want to see some excellent performances all around, check out Win Win. This is the comedy that everyone should be renting. Step away from the Kate Hudson movies and pick this one instead. You won't be disappointed. I promise.

(P.S. I have loved all three of Thomas McCarthy's movies, but I just want to note that I hate hate hate his character on The Wire. I think I just wanted to punch him in every single episode. Shall we chalk it up to good acting...?)

Whitman Whednesday

2011-11-02T01:51:00.000-04:00

Two today.

To Foreign Lands

I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

To a Historian

You who celebrate bygones,
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself,
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests,
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself,)
Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
I project the history of the future.

America, Fuck Yeah

2011-10-28T10:32:00.000-04:00

This film's subtitle The First Avenger doesn't make any sense without the Avengers movie which is coming out next summer, right? Otherwise what is he avenging? I don't get it.

In truth, I didn't understand most of this movie. It is just so dumb. I sort of loved Tommy Lee Jones and Dominic Cooper in it – and it was nice to see Derek Luke all grown up (remember Antwon Fisher?) and speaking French, no less. Captain America: the First Avenger is a film that totally rewrites history in more ways than are worth listing. I also really hated that the villain is this expressionless red skull dude and all of his minions were (literally) faceless automatons. Good and evil were just so easy in this movie. The right choice is always an obvious one in this Captain America universe.

Say what you will about Thor (I liked it) or Iron Man 2 (I was not much of a fan), their main characters are complicated and make difficult decisions. The extent of Captain America's decisions is only ever: Am I actually gonna do this thing that we all know is the right thing to do? Of course I am!

I find worlds like this kind of boring and I found Captain America pretty boring.

I will say one thing about it that I appreciated, which is that at least (unlike, say, the Transformers franchise or Iron Man 2), Captain America's fight sequences move us past the hand-to-hand combat tradition. You guys have crazy-magic guns that make people explode instantly and you're punching each other? Captain America does this a lot too, don't get me wrong, but there is also a lot of technological firepower on display here. Not enough to make this flick worth watching, but still.

P.S. Chris Evans has a gorgeous body in this film. And the camera is interested in it for a sum total of about thirty seconds. Foolishness.

Two Walks

2011-10-27T06:00:00.000-04:00

Overwhelmed by work, the writing the reading the studying – all about violence, prison, torture.
Images of mutilated bodies of genocide, invading my dreams, even.

Away from my desk and its bright screen with its tiny letters and big blank spaces I gulp in air.
Big full breaths, as though I have forgotten how to inhale.
Or as if, actually, I've been indoors all day at my keyboard reading and writing about prison-rape.

And I walk around this silly man-made lake in the middle of town and keep breathing.
I am aware, of course, of my breath as I walk. In. Deep in the lungs.
To the bottom. And out again. Walking.

And I am aware, of course, of my walking. Hyper-aware, actually. How
Is my posture? Are my hips sinking? Is my back aligned? How is my neck?
Do I feel my feet as they touch the sidewalk, even in these trackers? Does my breath have a rhythm?

Finding my center, locating alignment, will, I know, enrich this walk,
Allow me to calm down quickly. Worry less. And it does.

Back to a time I hardly remember. Walking to church.
Walking to school. My walk the subject of much consideration
By my parents and other adults, the cause
Of much anxiety for my eight-year-old-or-whatever self.

Hands at sides. Straighten up. Don't swish. Keep your eyes forward. I
Perfected that walk as carefully and methodically as I could.
It was never quite right, of course. But I approximated the something at which I aimed, anyway.

The art of walking.

I keep walking. High on my hip sockets, not thinking about swishing one bit.
And I look down and I'm – surprise – wearing a pink tee-shirt. Femininity not
A concern of mine these days.

And as the muscled twentysomething runs by and looks just a tad longer than normal
I smile at him broadly. And breathe in again.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-10-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

Proud Music of the Storm - §6

Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
I said to my silent curious soul out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,
Haply what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk's flapping wings, nor harsh scream,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers of harmonies,
Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps,
But to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.

Les Trois Mousquetaires

2011-10-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me only while watching this new adaptation (if you can call it that) of The Three Musketeers that musketeer movies never seem to be about muskets and are actually always about swashbuckling.

The most important things about the new version of The Three Musketeers are:

1.) The costumes (by Pierre-Yves Gayraud, who hasn't had an assignment this cool before) are spectacular. Absolutely gorgeous. They might even be revelatory. I was in love with almost every piece. And costumes become a kind of running joke throughout the film, so the audience is actively scrutinizing the costumes. There are fabulous hats and ludicrous colors and extraordinary brocades. I was in love.

2.) This movie has nothing to do with any novel ever written by Alexandre Dumas, père. Nothing.

3.) A lot of money was spent on this movie. And it showed.

4.) The Three Musketeers is completely, almost wholly derivative of two recent films: Sherlock Holmes and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Three Musketeers doesn't have beaucoup de slow-motion the way Sherlock does, but it has enough of it that it's debt to Guy Ritchie's movie is obvious. The whole idea of refiguring of a plot from seventeenth-century France so that it has lots of action sequences and explosions also seems indebted to the new Sherlock franchise. The debt to Dead Man's Chest will become clearer when I tell you that Three Musketeers involves airships. That are armed with cannons. That are, for some reason, steered using that same big wheel that pirate ships use.

5.) I love the young man who plays the King of France, Freddie Fox. He is adorable and (again) ludicrous. All of my favorite things about this movie are completely absurd.

6.) There is a poop joke and a puke joke. I hated both of them.

7.) Milla Jovovich is a big ol' mess in this. I hope they recast her (or at least reduce her role) for the sequel. (I'm guessing they'll call it The Four Musketeers like Twentieth Century Fox did in the 1974/1975).

8.) I love Orlando Bloom. I don't care what anyone says. I don't care if he doesn't know what kind of movie he's in. He's fabulous and earnest and I just love him.

I guess there is kind of a lot to say about this movie. I sort of had a blast. The whole things is laugh-out-loud funny. There isn't more than ten consecutive minutes in it that anyone could possibly take seriously. The plot is an absolute nonsense. There are more anachronisms than I could count if I were even to bother to try. But to worry about anachronisms here would be to completely miss the film's own delightful charm. The film is chock full of residents of Hollywood playing dress-up and doing their best to make unabashedly silly dialogue work. It had the best time. Think about this movie like a big old history book dressed up in a rhinestone-studded bridesmaid gown.

In other words, just let The Three Musketeers wash over you like a very pretty bit of inanity.

Aside from musketeer, I thought I would also look up swashbuckling. Because what the hell does that mean anyway. Well, a swash, as it turns out, is a swipe with a sword through the air. And a buckle is a shield. So swashbuckling appears to mean something like swashing-the-buckle or making a sound by hitting a shield with a sword.

Tales from Teaching

2011-10-25T20:50:00.002-04:00

A student and I were discussing a paper she is going to write for my Violence, Ethics, and Representation class. I am encouraging them to write about anything they want, as long as it involves violence, ethics, and representation. So the topics are their own.

My student has decided she wants to write about some screen depictions of lesbians who are crime-fighters. We discuss books she should read and then she looks at me a little worried.

I'm afraid I am going to move too far away from violence if I do all of this research on representations of lesbians in film.

Oh, I say, well there's no worry there, really. Representations of lesbians have been mostly violent. They are invariably killed, usually violently, by the ends of films.

Okay, she says, but I really want to focus on lesbians in film and I'm just worried that I won't talk enough about violence.

No, I say sadly, You misunderstand me. You won't actually be able to avoid it.

And then I say: The history of lesbians in film is a violent one.

Got it, she says.

And we look at each other and both feel that there isn't much else to say. See you Thursday.

He Even Mentions Gayle Rubin!

2011-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

I got a shout-out in the FSView/Florida Flambeau this week. One of my most brilliant students, the delightful Perry Powell, has an op-ed piece in the FSU newspaper about sex and the current generation.

Decide what’s right for you and do what turns you on. Perry says. Do it for humanity.

The Man for Whom I Still Write

2011-10-24T02:10:00.000-04:00

I wrote this in June 2009, soon after I found out my friend Andrew had passed away. This was, it should be noted, written during a time of deep grief for me. Part of this was me attempting the work of trying to mourn someone whom I loved deeply but with whom I had a troubled relationship. There is something in this that I keep pondering: How do you mourn the loss of someone whom you used to love but for whom your feelings are now more complicated than love? There he was, and I was busy having so many complicated feelings about him, and then he wasn't there any more.

I have been thinking about sharing these musings for a while, mostly because I still think about him all the time – almost daily. When I'm writing I think about Andrew, and when I do yoga, and when I see a movie I know he'd love, and often while I go through my day in the most normal way, there he is. And I think the experience of grief is as complicated and rich as anything else I discuss on here. So: here goes...

I spoke to Linda this afternoon and she was able to articulate some of what I have been thinking about Andrew. She is the first person who has said to me that he was a very difficult person. His misanthropy, though it has gone unremarked by many people on the internet, was perhaps Andrew's most defining characteristic. Andrew had such contempt for so many people. He let very few in, was downright hostile toward many, and was openly derisive about more than a couple people who had not wronged him in any way: harmless people who simply didn't understand his melancholy, his dedication – obsession, really – with his craft.

But, then, Andrew was impossible to understand for many people. He was terrified and mysterious and hateful. He was also beautiful and magical and amazing. I cannot seem to refer to him as lovable. That he most certainly was not. He seemed to actively resist being lovable, in fact, at every turn. There was so much hatred – so much hatred – that to love Andrew, to actively love him, demanded an act of will. I say that having loved him, known him incredibly well, having understood him.

He was not easy to love. Or perhaps I mean to say that he did not wish to be easy to love. And I will confess that it was often difficult. I often loved him in spite of himself, often against his will, even. He was so filled with anger, resentment and hate, not least of which he directed toward himself. But I loved him still, for the better part of six full years. For me, the sun rose and set with Andrew, and even now, as recently as February when we last spoke, he had the ability to get under my skin (he knew this, of course). The traces of my love for him lay ignored by me but always, at any moment, ready to reawaken.

I have more memories than I know what to do with. My heart is so ambivalent about him. Having loved him, of course, I also had to kill him, to attempt to cut him out of my heart in order to move on from him, to let the love of someone else in. And so many of my memories of Andy are laced with pain, like a vein of gold running through a mineral.

There is wreckage. What does his absence leave us with? No, I should stick with myself. I do not actually understand anyone else's experience of Andrew: only my own, and even that...

He told me many lies; we were frequently dishonest with one another, so that there was much that he intended to hide. I saw much of it anyway, but I offer this as evidence of an occasional lack of trust. He did not always feel safe, even with me, and perhaps he was correct not to. I wanted – for many years anyway – something he refused to give me. I spent so long cutting him out of my heart. There is a lot of bitterness left. Much of what I remember is darkness, grief.

And there is only emptiness when I consider Andrew and the uselessness of his death. He lived a life filled with suffering. Even he, I would wager, did not understand its source. He certainly could not envision its endpoint. Well... I guess he did, though it is not, perhaps, the end any of us would have chosen for him. So sad. He was the saddest person I ever met. The saddest. No contest. But how I loved him! For me, that love remains. It no longer feels like it is a part of me – I can only speak of it as something I no longer feel as love. But I can remember feeling it. I remember what I was like while I was feeling it, and I remember precisely what it felt like. Its traces remain in my body.

He was twenty-eight years old. And he loved me. And I loved him. And now he has died.

To Begin

2011-10-22T15:57:00.000-04:00

The little terrier on the poster talks. And this film is really charming... for a while.

There are a lot of good things to say about Beginners, and I was with it for a really long time, so I will start there. The film charts the story of a man in his late thirties who has been unlucky in love as he embarks on a new, quirky relationship with the completely wonderful and equally quirky Mélanie Laurent (who you will probably remember from Inglourious Basterds). Beginners also tells the story of the death of the man's gay father, which happened right before he starts this new relationship. The film moves back and forth from the present (romance) the immediate past (loss and mourning) and the man's childhood (also quirky and very interesting). I want to note how easily the film moves back and forth between these storylines without ever having to flash dates up on the screen. Beginners is never confusing; I never once thought okay when is this? I note this because I feel like I have recently seen quite a few films that have a lot of trouble keeping track of time.

Okay, so Beginners is about dealing with a gay dad who has recently come out at age 75, falling in love, and trying to be happy, and then it is also about mourning his father, mourning his mother, and trying to grow up. The film actually manages to do all of these things. The performances are great – Christopher Plummer is a particular delight – and much of the script is clever and not so whimsical as to be annoying. The actress who plays Plummer's wife, Mary Place Keller, is extraordinary and is probably the film's best feature. I also think Beginners is pretty smart about sex. Also, Mike Mills (who directed Thumbsucker, a film I love) manages to constantly historicize various events in the film, by quickly charting who was the president when certain things happen, what pretty looks like, what happy looks like, keeping things in perspective.

There is a great moment late in the film when Ewan McGregor's character says that he and his girlfriend feel sadnesses in a way that their parents would never have had time for. This was my favorite moment in the film and I felt it as a kind of relief. This is because Beginners is rather a depressive film about two depressives trying to love each other. As such – and I hope this doesn't sound too unkind – I became irritated with the characters in act three.

Cheer UP, y'all, I kept thinking.

I suppose, though, that in a film that has two very distinct storylines, it is normal for one of those to stand out as more interesting than the other. I loved the father-son stuff throughout, and I loved the romantic stuff for most of the movie, but after awhile the romantic self-destruction of these two frustrated me. And this was probably because the other story was so compelling; the film itself invited comparison between the two narratives, and the father-son tale, in my mind, won out. Still, if you liked the whimsical, slightly depressive tone of (500) Days of Summer, Beginners will totally be your cup of tea.

A Prayer, Perhaps

2011-10-20T20:15:00.002-04:00

As flippant as I occasionally am about violence, it is a huge part of my life. I spend my days reading about violence and thinking about violence, and (increasingly) my nights dreaming about it. Currently, I am teaching a course on Violence, Ethics & Representation at FSU. I have assigned theatre pieces to my students that I think approach violence in interesting ways, and we have spent so far – and will spend in the weeks to come – many hours discussing the ways violence is represented and how the theatre can ethically represent violence, genocide, torture, atrocity.

This week was designed to be part of a module about ritualistic drama for our contemporary moment. Without really thinking about this other connection, I assigned two plays about genocide: Cecilia Parkert's play Witness about the genocide during the 1990s in Srebrenica, and Erik Ehn's play Maria Kizito about the Rwandan genocide (also in the 1990s).

Today we spoke in class about Maria Kizito and I asked my students to talk about the end of the play. Near the play's close, Maria Kizito, a nun who was responsible for the deaths of seven thousand people, speaks the following prayer/elegy:

I have done what I was told. I have been told wrong things.

I have imagined terrible things.

I have behaved as if the world and my imagination were real, as real as each other.

I have straddled wealth; walked over the dead.

I have failed to envy the dead.

I have treated the past as if it were real, instead of the past.

I have hidden in fear instead of hiding in God.

This century is a few centuries long.

This century is an account of holes.

This century is a hill, no matter which way you walk: downhill.

This century is an abdominal wall too weak to hold up the intestines.

This century is skin carved instead of stone,

stone carved instead of soil,

soil carved instead of soul,

soul butchered instead of sacrifice,

sacrifice offered rather than known,

knowledge rather than heaven,

heaven rather than God,

God idolized rather than God,

God rather than God.

I was glad I had asked one of the students to read it, because I couldn't get through it without crying.

I said in class that this piece of the play seems to me to be a kind of vision of the ways in which we fall short of what we ought to do, a series of images that depict our inability to make the world into the kind of place it could be. And I see it, too, as a kind of apology, a mourning but also a repentance for what we have made of our humanity. This century is a few centuries long. I am sorry if this is a little bleak for a Thursday, but I have been spending a lot of time with the worst of human behavior and it is weighing very heavily on me these days.

Whitman Whednesday

2011-10-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it is so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?

Fog

2011-10-18T01:22:00.003-04:00

There is a particular joy in having seen a lot of films from a certain director. People occasionally insultingly tell me (usually after I've told them I didn't like some film they particularly liked) that I watch too many movies and so that's why I can't enjoy them. The implication is A) they are better judges of movies because they've seen fewer of them, B) that my judgment about that film they loved is wrong because I am a stuffy academic or something, and C) that I don't enjoy a lot of movies. In fact, I like most movies that I see and I am not even close to being an academic about film. I am at best an amateur. And as for being wrong about that film they liked, who cares? We like what we like. My take is, if you like a film, great. We can't argue about whether or not either of us liked a film objectively. It's not an objective discussion and never will be. If you loved Forrest Gump or Click or I don't know The Good Shepherd, you go right ahead and keep loving it. We don't all have to like the same things.

So I finally sat down the other night and watched Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog from 1991. It is a weird little movie. The plot is bizarre and the film jumps from sequence to sequence through a series of episodes with characters we only meet once and who never return. Madonna, for instance, has a single scene, as do Wallace Shawn, Julie Kavner, Kate Nelligan, etc. The whole setup is strange.

And indeed the whole point of the film is really the shadows and fog. Allen and his costars run up and down this sound stage which is built to look like some city in 1920s Europe and the whole movie is lit in bizarre ways, like an extended parody of film noir. It feels like Allen wrote the script just so he could shoot the picture in this way. And he and his DP have pushed this whole concept past the point of any sense, creating shadows with light from impossible sources and filling scenes with gratuitous fog. It is a delight.

The movie is also a comedy about a serial killer – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is also a sort of murder/comedy film – a singularly odd combination. I had a great time watching this movie, and I think the reason I liked it as much as I did was because I am so familiar with Allen's other movies. The whole time I was watching Shadows and Fog I was thinking about how much fun Allen obviously had making the movie. His joy with the process of filmmaking was evident throughout the movie. And I found this pleasure infectious as I watched it.

I have seen almost all of Allen's movies, and I have this great book called Woody Allen on Woody Allen where he is interviewed by Stig Björkman about each of his films (up through Manhattan Murder Mystery), so whenever I see one I haven't seen before I go look up the interview to see what Allen had to say about it. Some of the fun things he said about Shadows and Fog are...

On being an artist:
I don't agree that the artist is superior; I'm not a believer in the specialness of the artist. I don't think that to have a talent is an achievement. I think it's a gift from God, sort of. I do think that if you're lucky to have a talent, that with that comes a certain responsibility. Just in the same sense as if you were born rich.

And on night and civilization:
Once you get out in the night, there is a sense that civilization is gone. All the stores are closed, everything is dark and it's a different feeling. You start to realize that the city is just a superimposed man-made convention and that the real thing that you're living on is a planet. It's a wild thing in nature. And all the civilization that protects you and enables you to lie to yourself about life is all man-made and superimposed.

Allen ends Shadows and Fog with a ridiculously whimsical sequence that steps outside of reality completely, even the reality of the film. It's a kind of senseless deus ex machina that I found quite charming, although I can see how some people might be really irritated by the device. Critics ate this film alive when it was first released and it doesn't surprise me one bit, but I found the whole thing just unabashedly silly – and that's a good thing, I think. Also, the movie is filled with cameos: It stars Mia Farrow, John Cusack, and John Malkovich, but Jodie Foster, Lily Tomlin, Kathy Bates, John C. Reilly, and William H. Macy all make brief appearances.

Inside/Outside

2011-10-17T01:01:00.003-04:00

By now, perhaps, you have read that actor Zachary Quinto has publicly stated in New York magazine that he is a gay man.

The gay news and Awards Daily both reported this on Sunday, and a few of my friends also shared the above link on facebook. I read a couple of posts on Twitter, too, noting that hopefully other famous people will also feel the need to "come out" now.

I am going to speak ambivalently. True story: I recently refused to go out with a man because he is over forty but still not out on facebook. It seemed like a good rule for myself. I don't need to be on a date with a grown man who isn't also proud of being gay. And yet when I told one of my kids about this he said Well, I'm not out on facebook.

That's different, I said. You're young! You have your folks to worry about. And other family. And bullying and all of the fear that goes along with being still dependent on other people, including parents, teachers, etc.

And I do think it's different. I'm not saying that this gentleman who wanted to date me should be out on facebook. Just that I don't date people who aren't. It's not a prescription for him; just a rule for myself.

Sedgwick has this moment in Epistemology of the Closet where she says that all gay people are always to some degree or another in the closet. Am I out to my next door neighbor? Am I out to the checker at the grocery? To my mechanic? To all of my teachers? To the woman in the seat next to me at the theatre? To the Dean of my College?

And sometimes I am intentionally in the closet: with some of my relatives, with old family friends (I did that just this summer!), with various bartenders I know, when I'm on the phone with payroll. I am not saying that it's right to be in the closet (however fully) in these moments, but I also don't think it's wrong, either. It's a kind of code-switching, something queer people are actually asked to do by a homophobic society that constantly polices public space: make your sexuality invisible, please. We don't need any of that around here!

I get very uncomfortable when people call for public figures to come out of the closet. Not that I wouldn't love it if they did. Not that I don't think that being out and proud is helpful. I do think it's helpful, and I know from my own experience how helpful it has been to my own students who – because I am very open about my identity as a gay man – feel like they have someone who understands them as lesbian and gay kids going through difficult things. But I don't think anyone owes it to anyone else to declare his or her sexuality. I don't believe that queer people like Zachary Quinto or Ricky Martin or Jodie Foster have any responsibility to be out and proud. In fact, some people are in a better position to do good work (I am thinking now of a certain newsanchor) if their sexuality stays an open secret.

I am probably extra-sensitive about this topic because I teach undergraduates. They are constantly being asked to declare their sexuality. And sometimes they can really pressure those who are unsure about their sexuality – or unsure about their sexuality qua identity or afraid their desires will be misinterpreted – to just come out already. To my mind these young people do not need to declare who they are, do not need to speak about what it is that they think they might want, do not need to decide if they wish to identify with one or another group until they are ready. And I get very protective when others wish to hurry them along (particularly since our society promotes a near-complete disavowal of the existence of bisexuality).

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that queer people don't owe the rest of us anything. And if they don't feel like publicly declaring their queerness, that should be up to them. I am proud of my queerness, and I am a privileged white male who is in a position to be queer publicly without undue detriment to my career prospects, my work, and my personal safety. To me, a call for someone else to "come out" covers over this privilege and pretends that everyone else is just as privileged as I am. Indeed, it seems to me that a call for someone else to "come out" pretends that coming out is actually easy, when it can, to many queer people, feel like a nearly impossible task.

Tales from Teaching

2011-10-13T17:48:00.001-04:00

Teaching Aristotle's Poetics today in my text analysis class, my students and I had the following exchange:

Aaron: So Aristotle says that tragedy is an imitation of an action. That is, a mīmēsis of a praxis. From praxis we get our words practice, of course, and practical. And from mīmēsis we get our word...?

Luis: Mimosa.

Aaron: ...

The Plague

2011-10-12T12:00:00.000-04:00

I do not often think about what I want the theatre to do. At least anymore. The last full-length play I directed was over two years ago and it accomplished exactly what I wanted it to do, but I am not a director at our School of Theatre (nor would I wish to be). At any rate, I am usually busy thinking about how the theatre works, what it is trying to do, and I only rarely think about what I would want it to do were I in charge in some way.

And yet... I assigned sections from Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double to the students on Tuesday and I find reading Artaud so exciting! I assigned him to them because of his theories about how watching violence can impact the spectator, but it is his theories about the theatre itself and its capabilities which I find the most invigorating.

In his discussion of the plague,
for instance, Artaud says:
The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition. Everything in the physical aspect of the actor, as in that of the victim of the plague, shows that life has reacted to the paroxysm, and yet nothing has happened.

The theater, like the plague, is a delirium and it is communicative.

The theater restores us all our dormant conflicts and all their powers.

If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.

Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction.

And he has the audacity to conclude that:

All the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation.
The theater, like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater but of life.

And if Artaud is fond of what he calls cruelty, it is because, like the theatre itself, cruelty is excessive, unnecessary, gratuitous.

Compliment of the Day

2011-10-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

Drew: Man, the other day when we drank really heavily – I was a mess the whole next day. I had trouble bouncing back.
Aaron: You know, Jeanne and Walter were saying that too after we went out on Friday night.
Drew: Yeah?
Aaron: I don't know what's wrong with you people. I am fine the next day.
Drew: Well, I think it's mostly because I'm not really a drinker.
Aaron: Yeah, that's true.
Drew: Jeanne and Walter aren't really drinkers either, right?
Aaron: I think what we're saying here is that I'm an alcoholic.
Drew: I think it's just that you're good at everything.

I love this guy.

Piñero

2011-10-10T10:52:00.001-04:00

I remember reading that Piñero had problems, but I also seemed to remember that there was a bit of Oscar buzz for Benjamin Bratt at the time that Piñero was released (2001).

In any case, I will be writing about Miguel Piñero's play Short Eyes in my book, so I wanted to (finally) watch Leon Ichaso's film about Piñero. It is a disaster.

First off, the film jumps back and forth in time, beginning in Sing Sing prison in 1972 or so, jumping to 1974, jumping again to 1988, and then also occasionally back to Piñero's childhood.Now, Denis Villeneuve's Incendies, for example does this and it is not confusing, so I am not objecting to jumping around in time per se, but in Piñero most of the time I had no idea when or where we were. It was downright confusing. Now they're fighting, now he's been forgiven, now they're sleeping together, I don't get it. This actually made the film downright incoherent.

Worse, the film feels guilty for liking Piñero himself and so the movie is, more than it is anything else, a kind of apology for who Piñero was. Honestly, this made me uncomfortable. Piñero was a troubled guy, erratic, he hurt a lot of his close friends, he was an addict, and he finally couldn't get his act together and died of cirrhosis of the liver. But... the film shows us that all of these friends loved him deeply; they are all, for example, at his funeral in the lower East Side. So why does the movie spend so much time showing us what a jerk Piñero was? Why did people love him? The film ignores this aspect of Piñero – we don't see the opening of Short Eyes, we don't see his friendship with Joe Papp, we only see the tortured side of his love affair with Sugar, his main female interest, and the film totally short changes his sexual relationship with playwright Reinaldo Povod.

The whole thing was just so strange. Piñero didn't necessarily need to be a celebration of this guy's life, but why is Piñero important? I daresay he is quite important, having founded the Nuyorican Poet's Café with Miguel Algarín, but Piñero seems much more interested in criticizing its main character than in anything else. I mean, why make a movie about a guy you don't really like all that much?

Struggles with Balance

2011-10-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

I have been doing yoga for about ten years. Sometimes I do it more frequently than at other times. For example, when I am doing P90X, yoga is only a weekly workout routine.

When I was an undergraduate, several of my friends and I would meet and do it at school in our studio theatre space. There were a whole bunch of us undergraduates who did this: probably more than ten. I did yoga a lot back then.

The thing is, I almost never do yoga at a studio. I have maybe done yoga at a studio a total of ten times in my life. And I've been doing yoga for ten years. This is a cost issue. Yoga classes are expensive and I do not have a lot of money. So that solves that.

My friend Jeanne (who blogs about happiness) convinced me to try a hot-yoga class last night and, well, I haven't worked out in about a week, and she wanted to try out this local studio, so I agreed to go.

It was hot in there. An average of 100º, actually, for the whole time.

One of the things that I was noticing while I was practicing, though, was how competitive I can be. Doing yoga by myself at home or with only a few people, usually means that I am not very aware of other people's work. And I shouldn't be. They are at their own place in their practice and I am in mine. There is nothing to compare. Our bodies are different from one another, and if I'm working hard I'm doing it correctly.

But when I'm in a room full of people, I can't help but think oh I am not quite doing this right or oh look how well she can do that. And I correct myself: no, release that: do your work. But, well, these feelings come up, and if I'm thinking about being as "good" as someone else, I'm not doing my own work.

Even more than that, I find myself looking to the yogi for approval! And what kind of approval do I want? Oh, who knows. Is he supposed to say Good work, today? And according to what rubric? He barely knows me, right? And he certainly can't know whether or not I am really pushing myself, working toward my personal edge. I notice myself seeking this approval as I move through one asana into the next. And then, of course, I judge myself for seeking his approval, for trying to get to some mythical level two (yoga is not tetris, no matter how much I want it to be). And then I correct myself again. I need to fail without judgment; recognize my failures and move on. Yoga means balance, and sometimes finding that balance can itself be a struggle.

I voice these pitfalls because I find that acknowledging the places where I fail is good practice.

And in fact, these struggles become a part of the practice of going to a studio. That is, they are not so much things that I'm doing wrong or problems that I'm discovering as they are a portion of the work that I ought to be doing when I do yoga. Doing yoga at home by myself would certainly allow me to avoid feelings of inadequacy, competitiveness, needing approval, but when I am in a studio, I have the opportunity, not simply to bypass those things, but to work through them.

The Duchess

2011-10-06T11:52:00.001-04:00

In my play analysis class this semester, I decided to switch out a play that I've been teaching since I started teaching this course in 2008: Hamlet. The last time I taught the play the students just seemed bored by it, as though they knew everything about it and that no amount of effort I put toward new ways of approaching the text would convince them otherwise.

So, I said, I spent a year reading other plays from this time period. I will swap one of them in in place of Hamlet. I chose to replace Hamlet with John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. At first I was a little worried: the kids seemed very frustrated by the play and its language. Nothing happens, they protested.

But as we got to the end of the play, the play's outlook on life convinced me (again) of Webster's brilliance. I just want to share some of the play's final thoughts because I think they are fascinating, and have a completely different perspective on the world than I think we normally credit the Early Modern English with having had.

For me, Malfi demonstrates an almost total confusion about why human beings exist, a near utter hopelessness in the possibilities of good government, and only bewilderment and absence in the face of death.

Julia, for example, as she is dying, declares "I go I know not whither." Those are her last words!

And when Bosola commits murder accidentally he bemoans the fact that "We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded / Which way please them." And later:

Oh, this gloomy world --

In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness

Doth, womanish and fearful, mankind live!

Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust

To suffer death or shame for what is just.

Mine is another voyage.

As for Antonio, he says that

In all our quest of greatness

Like wanton boys whose pastime is their care,

We follow after bubbles blown in th'air.

Pleasure of life -- what is't? Only the good hours

Of an ague, merely a preparative

To rest, to endure vexation.

I don't think I've ever read anything this bleak from the ostensible hero of a play.

This is a play that ends without the romance and sentimentality of, say, Othello or even of Hamlet, which at least ends with a son regaining his dead father's lands. On the contrary, The Duchess of Malfi has no such faith in the order of things. Instead it insists upon life as painful and confusing. Even the Duchess herself, probably the play's brightest character, questions why people are so fond of life:

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?

Sin their conception, their birth weeping,

Their life a general mist of error,

Their death a hideous storm of terror.

I mean, damn, girl.

Fish Tank

2011-10-05T12:14:00.003-04:00

Last night Drew and I watched Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank from last year's movie season. It's been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, which is why I first took notice of the film. (It ought simply to be a fact in all of our lives that any movie released by the Criterion Collection automatically deserves our notice; I treat a Criterion release as though a person whose opinion I deeply respect has given a film a stamp of approval.)

But I have to be honest: the real reason I rented this movie was that it contains a performance by Michael Fassbender, who in the last couple of years has become one of my favorite actors to watch. He gave one of my favorite performances of 2009; he is flat-out brilliant in Steve McQueen's Hunger, and I recently enjoyed his work in Jane Eyre and (though I thought the film was fairly asinine) in X-men: First Class, as well.

But never mind Michael Fassbender, because Fish Tank is not about him.

Fish Tank is about poverty and living in a world where there simply aren't a lot of choices. And Fish Tank is about bad – bad, bad, bad – decisions, and how sometimes we can't stop ourselves from making them because we feel powerless and don't know what to do.

My roommate and I watched this film and talked back to it almost throughout its entirety, frustrated with the choices the characters made and wishing we could talk sense into them and knowing that was impossible. Fish Tank is troubling in many ways, and often extremely uncomfortable to sit through. We changed our loyalties to the characters many times throughout the film, and fought among ourselves about responsibility and proper behavior, as well as horror and taste (this girl thinks she is a dancer, but Drew and I agreed she is most definitely not).

Part of the pleasure of the film, it seems to me, is its ability to make its audience squirm in its seats. If this doesn't sound interesting, Fish Tank is definitely not for you. It won't be fun for most people, I'd wager.

But wow. This film is excellent. I absolutely loved it, I enjoyed it entirely, and I've moved it into my top fifteen for last year.

Incredibly Close

2011-10-04T12:00:00.000-04:00

I know I am way behind on reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I buy books or books or given to me and then they sit on my shelves for a long time without me ever looking them. There are just too many! It's a curse. But after I saw the trailer for the new film (which is directed by Stephen Daldry) I immediately took the book off the shelf and committed to reading it. It only took me two days, which probably means I should actually take the time to read a novel now and then since they don't take me very long.

For me this trailer looks a little... schmaltzy. (I particularly object to that song at the end. What the ?) I am guessing it's just the trailer, though, because Stephen Daldry's first three films were Billy Elliot, The Hours, and The Reader, which are all superb movies that manage to be moving without ever being cloying.

The book, though. The book is really wonderful. The main voice in the novel is a young boy, and though I have started to lose patience with stories told from the perspective of young boys, Foer switches the book up with other voices enough that I didn't get tired of our little autistic narrator. But for me it is Foer's own presence in the book that comes through the most. He places the destruction of the World Trade Center next to the 1945 bombing of Dresden and also next to the bombing of Hiroshima.

And then it is a book about mourning for loss, and the importance of reminding those we love that we love them, and how much we can be connected if we wish to make connections with one another. And about parenthood. One of my favorite passages comes near the very end of the book (don't worry I won't spoil anything). The narrator is talking to a limo driver in the middle of the night:

Gerald smiled at me in the rearview mirror and asked if we wanted any music. I asked him if he had any kids. He said he had two daughters. "What do they like?" "What do they like?" "Yeah." "Lemme see. Kelly, my baby, likes Barbie and puppies and bead bracelets." "I'll make her a bead bracelet." "I'm sure she'd like that." "What else?" "If it's soft and pink, she likes it." "I like soft and pink things, too." He said, "Well, all right." "And what about your other daughter?" "Janet? She likes sports. Her favorite is basketball, and I'll tell you, she can play. I don't mean for a girl, either. I mean she's good."

"Are they both special?" He cracked up and said, "Of course their pop is gonna say they're special." "But objectively." "What's that?" "Like, factually. Truthfully."
"The truth is I'm their pop."

I don't know where I read that this is the first great book about 9/11, but I think I have to agree.
(Side note: Foer is married to Nicole Krauss, who wrote Great House – the best novel I've read in years – and The History of Love.)

Masochism and Aesthetic Pleasure

2011-10-03T12:00:00.000-04:00

I decided (finally) to look at Leo Bersani & Ulysse Dutoit's The Forms of Violence today. I am not sure why I felt compelled to do this, but, as it turns out, the topic of this book was exactly what I needed for the discussions I am trying to have in my Violence, Ethics & Representation class.

I have been trying to formulate a discussion of the ways in which aesthetics (or perhaps I mean narrativization) forestalls an ethical engagement with violence as such. To ask the students to engage with how aesthetics disallow or interfere with ethics. Well, as it turns out, it is precisely this topic with which Bersani and Dutoit are concerned in The Forms of Violence. Their approach is, understandably, through Freud (and masochism), and I am finding it absolutely fascinating.

B&D argue that:
The only psychologically intelligible explanation of the sadist's enjoyment of the suffering of others is this: that he is, precisely, enjoying that suffering. He has introjected the self projected into the suffering position of the other.

If I understand this correctly, the argument is that the sadist enjoys the suffering of the person he harms because he experiences the suffering as his own. The pleasure of sadism is, to put it a different way, felt through identifying with the masochistic pleasure that he projects onto the victim.

The next phase of their argument is that:
The fantasy-identifications outlined by Freud may be crucial to all sympathetic responses to suffering. [...] "Sympathy" always includes a trace of sexual pleasure, and [...] this pleasure is, inescapably, masochistic. If this is the case, there is a certain risk in all sympathetic projections: the pleasure which accompanies them promotes a secret attachment to scenes of suffering or violence. The psychic mechanism which allows for what would rightly be called humane or morally liberal responses to scenes of suffering or violence is, intrinsically, somewhat dysfunctional.

They say this because to identify with a victim's suffering is, precisely, what the sadist does, deriving, as he does, pleasure from the suffering of a victim through introjection. Right?

Last bit from B&D:
The very operation of sympathy partially undermines the moral solidarity which we like to think of as its primary effect. Our views of the human capacity for empathetic representations of the world should therefore take into account the possibility that a mimetic relation to violence necessarily includes a sexually induced fascination with violence.

Bersani & Dutoit think that the reason we enjoy watching violence – even when we are moved to sympathy for the victims of that violence – is that we take a partial pleasure in that violence as sadists.

Leaning

2011-10-02T12:00:00.000-04:00

One of the things I miss without you is a kind of attuning.

Before, even though we were far away,

you

were
Attuned to me.

I felt your presence throughout the day,

not just in the small messages I'd receive as the day progressed

("Hope your day is the greatest!")

but something else,

a feeling of knowing you were there behind me,

the way you walked up that night

after we drank wine in that field under the tiki torch –

I knew you were there,

felt you on the wind long before you materialized to put your hand in mine.

Losing you has been tangible to me,

though you may pretend there is no loss,

that this now is no different from that then,

because I know the difference between now and

the way

you used to bend your thought toward me

even when we did not speak,

even as we both existed in our separate busynesses of the day.

I miss the way you could talk to someone else in a crowd

while all your energy was directed, palpably, toward me.

It is this feeling of loss that makes me the saddest.

I sense not that you are gone, but that I am gone for you,

that you do not lean toward me across the distance

the way you used to.

So: mourning for you, for loss, for myself, all of the above. I do.

And I am awash with self-pity. Why not? And

I am not speaking, either, about love, although falling for you was a true pleasure.

I mean, instead, to speak around something I have

never been able to articulate when it comes to you

and your presence in my life. Call it magic or spirituality –

the physical sensation of connecting as we did.

And now I must relearn that connection as something other

than I thought it was, As something

more subject to the space between us

than I had imagined it before.

—This is from 29 August 2011

50/50

2011-10-01T16:00:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Levine's 50/50 claims that it is based on a true story, and, frankly, I believe it.

It should be noted, however, that no matter how real the story on which it is based, the film's trouble is that it leaves reality completely behind. I didn't hate the movie by any means, but 50/50 is uncomplicated, easy, and rather obvious. The young man at the film's center learns everything we expected him to learn after the film's first act, and the movie lacks both surprises and wisdom.

When I say that 50/50 is unrealistic, it's because everything is just so easy. The bad girlfriend is bad from the movie's second scene and all that's left is for the main character to realize what the audience and the man's best friend already know. And the film sets up a bunch of conventions at the beginning – a job that we see only in act one, a habit of nail-biting that lasts only through the first half, a friend played by Philip Baker Hall that inexplicably disappears after act two, a habit of pot-smoking – that it loses track of completely by the film's end.

Even the medical scenes are played broadly – in a kind of whimsical parody of healthcare in the United States: some doctors are really really terribly automatons who have no capacity for feelings and all of the others care so much they fall in love with you and give you rides home when you have to wait for the bus. I am being glib. And this is a film that is interested in whimsy and charm and actually doesn't ask much of the audience, so I should be less glib about it. It is a rather harmless movie, but also, when it comes down to it, rather contentless, as well.

I do think that the poster is pretty great, though. And Seth Rogen is funny. I found him very charming.

Also, I still love Joseph Gordon-Levitt and will see everything he's in no matter what.

Sorrow for the Dead

2011-09-28T10:40:00.002-04:00

One of the interesting things that has happened in the Violence, Ethics & Representation class – and I think I laid the foundation for this on day one by introducing pain theory before introducing anything else – is that we spend a lot of time talking about victims of violence in the class.

I have spent most of my study of violence considering how violence works as a trope, trying to parse out the ideological functions of fictional violence, but playwrights and filmmakers don't make representations of violence in order to achieve ideological effects. They make films and write plays, for the most part, because they want us to pay attention to those who are victimized by violence.

I have been writing about Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain (1980) for the last, oh, four years, coming back to it every once in a while and rethinking my position. I presented a talk about the play – and the male-rape that is the centerpiece to act one – at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference this past August in Chicago. And when I did I completely rethought my criticisms of the play, changing the tactic so that I was talking about the play's erotic elements and the qualities of eroticism that were components of the theatrical rape.

Anyway, I revisited the play again this Fall because I taught the play in my Violence, Ethics & Representation class. (The kids did not care for the play, I should note.) But I was struck this time by how much the play is actually about mourning. I don't think I ever really believed paid too much attention to what Brenton said about the play before, but when he says:

The greatest difficulty I had when trying to write the play is a weighty matter. It was what to do about a sense of overwhelming sorrow, a grief for the nameless dead, with which the material of the play is drenched. This is, itself, difficult to express. It was what Blake expressed in the terrifying "Proverb from Hell" – "Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead." If you do not you will go mad with grief. But cruelty is hard to dramatize. What you must never do is pretend, by stagecraft sleight of hand, that cruelty is not as bad as it is. [...] You must not sell human suffering short.

The Romans in Britain is a herculean effort that for me is an attempt to express this grief for the dead, the immeasurable sorrow that the playwright feels for all those who have been destroyed through violence throughout history. And the play has, for me, become a play about mourning now. It is still, of course, about violence. With all of its brutality how can it not be? But I think the work of the play is the work of mourning for the dead, of processing or incorporating the incomprehensible losses of history.

Dreaming Backward toward Twilight

2011-09-26T02:14:00.000-04:00

Twilight where you live is different from twilight where I live.

The gloom of the onset of night hangs over the trees and the marshes, here, like a net, something tangible, like a felt blanket of almost-night or a shawl.

Where you are, where I imagine you to be, the sun sinks behind a ridge of towering mountains in blazes of pink and orange and heartbreaking lavender.

It disappears from view defeated by itself, tired of the day, perhaps, but still so willing to give so much of itself, like my mother must've done, weary from hours of crying or bickering or the need need need for attention with which children approach adults.

And there my mother is, dreaming of quiet, of, perhaps, some moments alone, or the feel of my father's hand on the nape of her neck, patiently reading to me before I fall asleep.

I might have invented the memory of my mother, willed it up, an object of fantasy, unicorn-like.

And I might be imagining the sunset in your hometown; I only ever drove through it once or twice, after all, but you, you are not imaginary.

No. I imagine you as well.

You are my invention, fabricated by longing, by age, by the eye of my desire for someone just like you.

I dreamed – I am sure of it – long before you ever appeared, of exactly this smile, this devious but innocent twinkle in the green of your eyes, the rough touch of your left hand as it slips into my right, awkwardly at first, and then snugly fitting.

--from 30 July 2011.

The Romantic in Me

2011-09-26T01:54:00.000-04:00

Bennett Miller's Moneyball is just superb. It will be one of my favorite films of the year. It would be easy to say that Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian's script is really the showcase here, but that is simply not the case. The script is, without question, excellent. No debate there. It's smart writing that constantly reminds us that baseball is nothing we should be romanticizing. It's a numbers game, and everything behind the scenes is numbers. Romance, the film says, is for the fans.

Except that the film also allows us to romanticize baseball... and how can we not? That amazing crack as the bat hits the ball. It's just electrifying. And the film reminds us that not everything is numbers. Sure, a lot of it can be numbers, but some of it is just heart, pouring everything you have into something you care about. I bought this stuff hook, line, and sinker. But, then, maybe I'm just a romantic.

Brad Pitt is excellent, as usual, and probably deserves an Oscar nomination for the movie. And the supporting cast is uniformly good, including a toned-down Jonah Hill who demonstrates excellent timing. The big supporting standout for me is Parks & Recreation's Chris Pratt, who plays a first-baseman who's scared of the ball. I loved his performance. He has this innocent, nervous quality that just shines. He's wonderful.

And then there's the direction. Miller's work here is just outstanding. He has the ability to make scenes in offices and cubicles just as compelling as what happens out on the field, and he does this thing where he lets our imaginations run away, letting us get fully invested into the game, praying that everything works out. Then he'll remind us that what we've just watched was just a game, no big deal at all. I've never seen a film this in love with baseball and also this able to take a detached look at baseball. It's just an excellent film. One of my favorites of the year, for sure, and it's only September!

Anyway, go.

So Foreign

2011-09-25T09:57:00.004-04:00

Last year I didn't manage to see all five films that were nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This happens not infrequently, obviously, as many films don't find a release in the United States even if they do manage to snag an Academy Award nomination. So, last night I finally saw the last of the five and I thought I would cover these films briefly.

I rated Biuitiful my favorite film of 2010. I found it deeply moving, with a central performance by Javier Bardem that is simply incredible. This is another of 2010's films about parenting, and like the others (The Kids Are All Right, The Illusionist, Mother and Child) I felt like Biuitiful really connected to me in terms of where I see myself right now. Biutiful is very similar in tone and style to Alejandro González Iñárritu's other films, but where those films don't quite work all the way, Biutiful works in every way. It has a sense of the mystical about it, the interconnectedness of things on a spiritual plane, but even more importantly – though both part of Iñárritu's project – a sense of the global, that the small choices we make can affect profoundly the lives of others. Biutiful manages to be about Chinese migrant workers and Senegalese migrant workers at the same time as it is about dying of cancer, discovering one's relationship to one's father. It does all of this extremely well. I have heard that this film is hard to sit through for some. I had precisely the opposite experience. I found the entire thing exhilarating.

I am not sure what Dogtooth is about any more than you will be if you get to watch it. It's incredibly violent, but it's also, well, frankly, bizarre. I found it very, very interesting. And if it didn't quite make sense to me in terms of plot or theme or whatever other so-called Aristotelian aspects a narrative is supposed to have, Dogtooth made for compelling viewing and I would definitely watch this again before watching, say, The King's Speech again. I've written more about this movie here, so I'll shut up about it now.

Hors la Loi is a movie by Rachid Bouchareb starring his usual trio of Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem, and Jamel Debbouze. I don't think I'm ever going to be very interested in Jamel Debbouze (I guess I'll never get his performance in Amélie out of my head), but Roschdy Zem is great in this and I am a little obsessed with Sami Bouajila. I think he is just brilliant. Hors la Loi is about the fight for Algerian independence on French soil. I didn't know this before the film, but during the Algerian struggle for independence from France, an Algerian party also planned and executed many terrorist attacks on French soil itself. This is what Hors la Loi covers. The trouble is... Bouchareb can't help but make everything sentimental. The movie spends long periods of time attempting to pluck at the heartstrings instead of simply trying to tell the story. The movie wants to be a kind of neo-noir gangster film at many points, and it is here where Hors la Loi works best. But Bouchareb is constantly distracted by a desire to also make an inspiring historical epic that has a giant emotional impact. So he romanticizes and sentimentalizes and by the end of the film I was mostly just frustrated at all of the emotional manipulation the film manages to do. The men creating the revolution aren't sentimental, so why must Bouchareb continually look at them with a sentimental eye?

I thought Incendies was a bit of a fail, as well. It is well acted, and I was with the film for about its first hour. The movie jumps back and forth between Lebanon in the 1970s and Canada in 2009, when a pair of twins is trying to figure out what happened to their mother a quarter of a century earlier. Incendies is based on a novel that I haven't read, but my main thought about this film is that it misses the story of the mother because of its need to include the story of the children. Every bit of the mother's story in Lebanon in the 1970s is utterly fascinating. Every bit of it. And every time the film jumped back to the twenty-first century I felt myself fidget in my seat. Villeneuve also makes the film into a mystery. We do not know what happened, so we must figure it out. But mysteries only work if you hide what happened well enough. Because the film jumps back and forth, we frequently know what happened before the onscreen detectives figure it out. This simply does not work, and I couldn't help but think that there was a really interesting story in here somewhere if only the novel had been adapted differently.

I loved this movie. In Another World is a Danish film by Susanne Bier (she has made at least one English-language movie now), and, like her other films, this film packs a huge emotional wallop. The movie is about violence in Africa and in Denmark both. In Denmark, the film follows the violence of adolescents as they try to figure out how to seek revenge or end a chain of violence. The film asks all kinds of interesting ethical questions about how we train our children, how important it is to be "strong" in front of them, and how best to respond to violence committed against us. This is a film about parenting, too, of course (there I go again), but even more importantly it is a movie about being a responsible citizen of the world - in the same way that Biutiful is, really. In Another World is a real achievement; it's compelling from start to finish; and it manages to unpack all sorts of questions about domestic terrorism, violent impulses, and revenge. Definitely worth seeing.

Puppy Love with a Tongue Hanging Out

2011-09-21T16:06:00.000-04:00

He brings me his former lovers,
Those who have had crushes on him.

Not as baggage, though,
He doesn't want me to carry them.

No. He brings them like a dog might,
To prove his worth,
Show me that he has been wanted,
That he has been loved in the past,
Is worthy of it again. By me,

If I'm paying attention. Am I
Paying attention? Am I listening?

Derek crushed on him
And this guy with a C name.
There's a J, too, and another J,
I think, and a girl with a T name.

And the exes – not as many of those.
And another two
Or three who regularly proposition him
In the clever ways the internet provides
For propositions.

All of these are presented to me,
Paraded, really, so that I will come around.

So that I will look on him
And love him.

But he is already too late;
Not one of these men matters. Because I

As it happens, am already falling.

—From 2 August 2011.

Famous

2011-09-21T00:39:00.004-04:00

A favorite quote of mine from Joan Nestle's Not Just Passing Through:

Every lesbian is worthy of inclusion in history. If you have the courage to touch another woman, then you are a very famous person.

If I Had a Hammer...

2011-09-20T01:56:00.001-04:00

Everyone, it seems, is talking about Drive, the film that was released this week from director Nicolas Winding Refn. People are loving it and hating it. I meant to see this movie on Friday, but then I went to a release party for a collection of poetry written by my friend Greg. This book, in fact. So I didn't get to the movie in time, but my roommate and our friend George both went to see Drive knowing nothing about it. They both loved it.

When I saw it on Sunday I was less enthusiastic, but I have been rather inarticulate about it so far. Anyway, I figured that I would post a conversation Greg and I had about Drive since it was his fault I missed the movie on Friday in the first place.

Me: Drive.
Greg: Did you love it?
Me: No. I liked it though.
Greg: Sad face.
Me: Hahaha. Oh. I didn't know I was supposed to love it. I loved all the violence, of course. And the scene with the hammer is amazing.
Greg: YES. I thought the elevator scene was the most beautiful moment I've seen in a theater in a while.
Me: Oh yeah. That was a great scene too. I am frustrated with slow-motion shots, though. They create a real pacing problem, I think.
Greg: Normally I would agree.
Me: I don't have a problem with the director showing his hand (slomo shots do that, I think), but I get frustrated with the importance slomo places on certain things. The kiss worked. But there is a lot of slomo in this movie.
Greg: I am in love with Ryan Gosling.
Me: Oh I am too. Why else did you like it?
Greg: The soundtrack, the slow pace, the opening sequence; it didn't give in. Albert Brooks. I believed that all of it happened. I wanna make someone swallow a bullet. Everyone was emotionally vulnerable.
Me: I liked all of these things as well. And I loved Bryan Cranston. And Oscar Isaac.
Greg: Yes.

Me: My objection is that the film wants two things at once. I think. It wants us to love Ryan Gosling. For us to think he's a hero. (The soundtrack spells it out: "...and a real hero...")
Greg: He is a hero. Every hero is flawed.
Me: Well, no, Greg. He's also deeply troubled. And frankly, a bit scary.
Greg: The world forces him to be scary.
Me: Does it really?
Greg: I think so.
Me: The shot in the elevator after the kiss is, I think, intended to make us think differently. He doesn't need to smash that guy's head in.
Greg: He would've killed both of them.
Me: Yes. I understand that. It is the excess of the violence that I think we are meant to read as troubling. I read it as troubling, at any rate.
Greg: Well yeah, but that wasn't long after he gets fucked over & those guys with the shotguns. Who wouldn't snap?
Me: I hear you. I do. But he does snap.

Greg: We create these action heroes who don't use guns because we don't want to see them kill anyone, so they have whips or tie people up or kung fu them, but the reality is they are hunting him down to kill him & the people he cares about. Part of me thinks it'd be less scary if he didn't snap & kick the guy's head in.
Me: I think you are completely correct. But I want to remain ambivalent about him.
Greg: Haha. That's fair.
Me: And the film wants me to think he is heroic. I think he does what is right. Definitely. But I don't think he is a hero per se.
Greg: By making him overly violent it's easier to dismiss his death at the end.
Me: I do not dismiss his death.
Greg: It's a way for the audience to get a pass out. You know what I mean.
Me: Yeah. Drive reminded me more than anything of Animal Kingdom from last year. The David Michôd movie. Did you see it?
Greg: I didn't catch it.
Me: Drive is slicker. And I liked Drive better. But it has this same obsession with slow-motion. And empty (if you ask me) silences.
Greg: I would've liked a little more dialogue. It seemed like a cheap screenplay, if that makes sense.
Me: It does.

Greg: I am bummed. it got great reviews but audience reviews have been bad. I don't think it'll have legs.
Me: Really?
Greg: Yeah. Cinemascore was like a C-. The trailers were very misleading.
Me: Oh! Wow! Everyone I've talked to has loved it.
Greg: Because you know educated people.
Me: I don't know any educated people.

You can read more from Gregory Sherl (about Drive and John Cusack and poetry and fucking) in a delightful interview with Roxane Gay over at HTMLgiant.

Smart about Race

2011-09-15T01:57:00.001-04:00

So, on the way back from Chicago this summer, Julien, Becky and I were talking about The Help. The movie hadn't been released yet, but both Becky and I were skeptical. Julien asked about our skepticism. Do you think the movie will be racist?

The point, I said, was not that the movie would be racist. Most everything is racist. Hollywood itself, for that matter. But when I think about films, I told Julien that I think some films are smart about race and some films are stupid about race. I assumed from the trailer that The Help would be stupid about race.

I was right. The Help is actually extremely stupid about race. From its total ignorance about the state terror under which black people lived (and continue to live) in the South to its insistence on black women's love for the white children they're forced to raise to the almost total absence of black men in the film to the humorous way The Help deals with black women's fear of white men, The Help is just dumb about race.

Any film with a magic negro in it falls in the category dumb-about-race for me.

But all this got the three of us to thinking about what films are smart about race. I might need some feedback on this. I could not think of that many. These are the films I could think of:

Two films by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck: Sugar and Half Nelson. The first is about a baseball player from the Dominican Republic who comes to the U.S. and is transplanted to a midwest farm team. The second is about a teacher who is addicted to crack. Half Nelson in particular taught me about my own racist prejudices when I watch a film. That film stars Ryan Gosling and Anthony Mackie. So good.

I also recently watched the film Claudine from 1974 with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones and found it funny and moving and extremely smart about race.

I always thought Monster's Ball was pretty smart about race, too, but it's been a while since I saw it, so I can't remember that all that well.

Of the films I've seen in the last ten years:
Precious.
The Class.
The Visitor.
The Last King of Scotland.
Caché.
Junebug.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
Dirty Pretty Things.
Raising Victor Vargas.

There are probably a couple more that I am missing here. Anyhow, the point is: the list as such is not very long.

Thoughts?