Le chemin de l'amour

Did you know "anti-Semitic" means not just anti-Jew (as many Americans in our pro-Israel country think) but also "anti-Arab"? An Arab friend of mine pointed that out to me recently, and he got me, because I only hear about the Jewish side of things, never the Arab side.

I just watched a movie called "The Road To Love" (Le chemin de l'amour en francais, dir. Remi Lange) about a French-Algerian "straight" guy who sets out to make a documentary on gay Muslims in the modern Maghreb region of North Africa. My first impression was that its production values were harrowingly low, the entire thing being shot with a shaky-hand home video camera. But knowing from first-hand experience how much inspiration and motivation it takes to realize even a short film when you're operating in a very independent, no-budget, making-it-up-as-you-go-along context, I shelved my initial impression and watched the entire film. It makes up in sweetness and novelty what it lacks in sophistication. I learned some things, too, particularly about the Siwa Oasis of Egypt, which in ancient times had a reputation for being what we would now call very "gay friendly," acknowledging marriages between men, and with its chieftain/pharaoh/whathaveyou keeping harems of boys for his pleasure. Towards the end the two main boys, Farid and Karim, make a pilgrimage to the grave of Jean Genet. (The film is in French.) There's also a segment where they go to Marrakech (Morocco) in search of gay bars which they don't find; instead of organized establishments exonerating and enshrining homosexuality like we have stateside, they happen upon covert roaming bands of homo people who acknowledge one another with subtle (or not so) cues. It's all quite fascinating to see how other (religiously biased) cultures deal with this issue that we've more or less come to accept in our secular capitalistic way.

I remember a friend of mine back in PDX telling me about going to the big market called the Medina in Marrakech and how it's like a labyrinth that can be scary because if you've never been in it before you can become trapped and frightened, and gangs of gypsy children will offer to show you the way out for money, but if you refuse them, they'll help make it a nightmare for you that you won't soon forget.

Hmm. I might have to go with a seasoned guide, if I do go.

ALSO, the new issue of OUT has a page on the reissue of the 1980s "Brideshead Revisited" miniseries, as though pointedly spitting in the face of my verbose love for the film version that came out last year. They give one indirect and dismissive mention of Jarrold's film, only to assure us there's no way to match the way Jeremy Irons and...whatsisname, who played Sebastian Flyte..."languorously inhabit" the characters from Waugh's novel.

Well, I just moved the DVDs of the miniseries to the top of my queue on Netflix. I'll be seeing them soon. I already have a good idea of what I'll think. I'll probably find it intoxicating, addictive, lots of fun, sexy in a restrained way, etc etc, and of course a more faithful and in-depth treatment of the book.

But that's not going to make me love the film version any less. I like its bold revisionism.

And only the film version has Ben.

But I will withhold judgment until I've given the hallowed 1981 series its due.

Waterboarding: not just for illegally detained prisoners any more

Just now on Keith Olbermann: a conservative radio host (I believe the nickname is "Mancow") who volunteered to be waterboarded to prove it isn't torture caved after 6 seconds, admitting that it was "absolutely torture" and that he would admit anything under such duress.

Excellent. Now let's get Dirty Dick Cheney on the board. That I want to see.

Art: it's on your plate and in your yard

I'm relieved/pleasantly surprised to be seeing rooms in the Mission / Castro / Upper Market area of the City that I should be able to afford. I was originally aiming for N. Oakland/Berkeley area, but if I can live right in the City, why not? Of course, it'll be a room, not an apartment, but that's fine to start until I get my college-grad job and can move on up.

My conception of the boundaries of art and creativity has been expanding lately, as a result of living here, and seeing Cousin's landscaping work, the way he's built an empire of real estate here in this tropical paradise, the way he takes flowers from the yard and arranges them into beautiful living indoor sculptures. Five acres of land are a giant green canvas to him. Although I have been painting, I'm beginning to look beyond the edges of a canvas and thinking of new forms of creativity. I'm starting to understand Warhol's statement that "business is the best art." I made an experimental stir fry last night out of things left in the crisper and it came out good, and I thought "this is art, and it's art you can eat." It's more useful than a painting on a wall, although of course, it also has a much shorter shelf life, so there's the trade-off, I suppose. The little tree Cuz trimmed into a martini (complete with pimento-stuffed olive on a giant toothpick) at the Hana house is art, on a larger scale than I've thought of before.

Now when I look at paintbrushes and palettes I'm starting to see garden shears, sickles and weed-eaters instead.

Auntie Mame!

Saturday is our eagerly anticipated Auntie Mame party out here on Maui, and we're decorating the house, and I'm hot-glueing flowers to my dress for my transformation. I'm going to start out as little Patrick Dennis (above, from the original film, precociously mixing cocktails), Mame's unwitting nephew, then halfway through the party, become something much more glamorous. Wish you were here!

xo

glam aka tony

Bright Star Ben

So, in case you didn't know it, I'm totally gay for Ben Whishaw. His new film "Bright Star" (directed by Jane Campion) recently premiered at Cannes and is an early favorite for the Palm d'or. Here's a link to a video clip from the Guardian UK with Ben talking about what he relates to in Keats (the English romantic poet who died at age 25 that he portrays in the film). You can tell how articulate and sensitive and intelligent he is. Doesn't it just make ya swoon? The rest of the world can have Robert Pattinson. I'll take Ben. (Although I am looking forward to "Little Ashes," as well.)

Great Britain gets even greater

I heard same-sex marriage is legal in Britain (the country I should have been born in) now. Does that mean I can meet a nice English boy over the internet, we can romance over the telephone, and I can then move to England and attain citizenship by marrying him?

'Cause, uh, I think I want to do that.

Have you seen Chelsea, lately?

My cousin has gotten me into Chelsea Handler, whose entertaining gossipfest airs nightly on the E! Network. She's sort of like a blonde Parker Posey. I wasn't sure at first, 'cause it struck me as more shrill, brittle, bitchy celebrity gossip, a la Perez Hilton, and don't we have enough of that already? But unless I'm mistaken, I think Chelsea and her co-commentators are a cut above. I think it's because even though it's still shallow celebrity gossip, it somehow avoids being as mean-spirited and juvenile as Hilton and others of his ilk. It's a little more mature and sophisticated, and even though they ARE being bitchy and dishy and dissecting the minutiae of famous peoples' lives (a parasitic occupation if ever there was one), you sense that beneath the shallowness they're really just having a good time and not taking any of it too seriously. Or maybe I'm deluding myself, and there's really not much difference, in which case I'll just have to add "Chelsea Lately" to my ever-present list of guilty pleasures.

Crawford's End

Yesterday as a little break from cleaning, housework, yardwork etc. I put on "Trog," Joan Crawford's hilariously campy antepenultimate, made-for-TV film from 1970, in which her male co-star is a superhumanly powerful neanderthal unlocked from ice in which he'd been preserved. It reminded me a bit of the SNL skit "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" from the 80s (we miss you, Phil). It's really sort of "King Kong" with a smaller budget and made for a smaller screen. It is both sad and funny to see the imperious Joan cling to her last remaining shreds of dignity as she explains to the dense male authority figures that Trog has the mind of a child and only she can reason with him. There is such a look of tightly controlled anguish and despair and tenseness in her face and eyes. I understand that after "Trog," Crawford appeared in two other TV movies, started drinking a quart of vodka a day and then died of cancer in 1977.

One striking scene involves Trog on a rampage in a butcher shop, hanging the butcher on a meathook. Four years before Texas Chain Saw Massacre (one of my lifelong obsessions). Innnnnnteresting.

Three Dancing Slaves

Last night, after a tasty dinner of corned beef, asparagus and mashed potatoes (You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take...) we watched a movie I'd just got from Netflix, "Three Dancing Slaves" ("Le Clan" en Francais directed by Gaël Morel, who also made "Wild Reeds"). It falls in the apparently burgeoning subgenre of Intensely Homoerotic French Indie Films. (Damn, I was hoping that would make a nice acronym.) It was a strange, sexy film, about three HOT brothers whose mother dies while they still live at home (although two of them look like they're in their late 20s at least) with their workaholic, distant father. The entire cast is made up of beautiful young men, in fact I swear there wasn't a single female in the entire movie. If that wasn't enough, they worked in a meat-packing plant (!) A certain someone (who speaks from experience) said, "I didn't think there were that many attractive bodies in all of France." The film was very homoerotically charged and at the same time very much about the bond between brothers, which gave it a borderline incestuous quality that was very provocative and un-American (but maybe that's not fair...there are American directors who push the limits of taboo that way too, like Todd Solondz). It reminded me of discussions in a class I took at PSU a year or two ago, "Same-Sex Desire in Renaissance England," in which we discussed an article by Eve Sedgwick on how there is a schizophrenic break in the continuum of homosocial desire with men in American culture, but not so much with women. (Basically means that women are allowed to hold hands and be more affectionate with one another than men; male-bonding is not allowed to have overt erotic elements in our culture.) As with so many French movies I've seen, there were weird moments I still don't understand (what was up in the scene where a couple thugs forced the bald brother to throw his dog over the cliff and kill it?) In the film's last 20 minutes it broke out into full-fledged homoeroticism with an EXTREMELY hot (albeit brief) sex scene between the youngest brother Olivier (Olive) and his, uh, buddy which includes the line "Rape me, but don't hurt me."

A line like that could get you out of a speeding ticket, I'm guessing.

Cinco de Mayonnaise

Today is the celebration of the miraculous victory of Mexican forces against the French (not Spanish!) infantry at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. I celebrated by making island-style fish tacos with ono (a type of mackerel; means "tasty" or "delicious" in Hawaiian) for the whole household, thus tying in Hawaiian cuisine with an observation of the Mexican holiday. Despite the fact that none of us is remotely Mexican (well, unless you count me and Cuz's smidgeons of Native American blood...which I do like to count). I'm sure this means we are misappropriating numerous cultures, and duly apologize to anyone offended. But I'm still going to finish my margarita.

Also, I had a job interview today - my first real interview in the month or so I've been job-hunting here - and it went really well. We talked for a full 45 minutes, longer than any interview I ever had in Portland. I'd say it's 50/50. I'll know by Friday.

We go to Hana tomorrow for a few nights. I'm excited. We'll be working, but there will be relaxation time, too, and I know from my brief taste before that Hana is the most enchanting place on Maui. Probably one of the most sensuously enchanting places in the world.

Aloha y feliz Cinco de Mayo


glam aka tony

An open letter to Animal Planet

Dear Animal Planet/Discovery Channel,

I am writing a letter of concern after watching the program "Killer Squid" on Animal Planet a couple nights ago. (I didn't see that program in the list so I just picked the first one.) I was disturbed by the treatment of the squid as depicted in this program, especially given that the majority of your viewers are impressionable young people. The program gave the impression that it is OK to barbarically kill predatory squid because they have been known to attack human beings. The divers went deep underwater and entered the squids' domain - the place where they live, and hunt - and then wonder why they were attacked? Then they proudly showed off a brutal lure made of many small hooks to catch the squid and haul it to the surface to die. Not only was this presented as acceptable, but as something the squid-hunters were excited about. I watch quite a bit of Animal Planet, and am frequently disturbed by how sensational and tabloid-like a lot of your programming is. This teaches kids to view animals as something to fear and that it's OK for us to kill them when they defend themselves from OUR advances. This is the attitude that resulted in grizzly bears, wolves, etc. nearly being wiped out in the frontier days. What about showing a documentary like "Sharkwater" that presents another view of animals that are constantly presented as monsters on your network? I would like to see Animal Planet move in the direction of more mature, balanced, and intelligent programming in the future.

Thank you for reading this comment