Animal rights activists threaten those they disagree with

I am an animal lover, and I've never really worn fur, except some really old things of my cousin's that he ordered off some antique collectibles site, and that was for about two minutes. But I eat meat and I wear leather, so who am I to dictate to others how to conduct themselves? When I read an article like this - in which Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir decides to take the tufts of fox fur off his costume in order to appease activists who wanted to intimidate him into obeying them - I start to feel that animal rights activists have become the thugs in this scenario. They threaten with violence those who disagree with them or who do not follow their rules. I part company with PETA and its ilk at this point. Live according to your own self-righteous rules, but DON'T try to forcibly impose them on others. Other human beings are not required to follow your regulations, however benign or altruistic they may be.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Last night while waiting for the split peas to mushify themselves into soup we started watching Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I'd seen the film version of Edward Albee's play several years ago at my apartment in Portland (back when I lived on the same block as Holocene!), but my new flatmate, who is a history teacher, pumped me up with a discussion of all of its historical, political, psychological themes and references (George and Martha Washington, the Cold War, fear of communism, Freudian elements, the war between the sexes, etc.) which had largely gone over my head before. Movies, like poems, you sometimes have to go over twice before you glean their meaning - the first time they just kind of wash over you. After seeing it for the second time last night I can definitely add it to my list of favorite movies.

I first read some of Albee's play back in college while going through my hardcore Virginia Woolf / Bloomsbury phase. (When I finally make it to England, I'll definitely be making pilgrimmages to Woolf /Stephen sites such as the River Ouse, Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, Hogarth House, Charleston, etc.) Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it actually has absolutely nothing to do with Woolf! In fact the title seems to be meaningless, although I was thinking about it and came up with a theory - Woolf was childless her entire life and often felt she wasn't a fully successful woman because she'd never created a life. Since the movie is filled with references to babies and children (who are never seen, only talked about), it seems the choice of title may be a sly reference to Martha and George's predicament, with the weird theme of their imaginary "son" who dominates much of the dialogue in the second and third acts without ever actually solidfying into a flesh-and-blood being.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is filmed in gorgeous, high-contrast black and white that bathes everything in a silvery, gelatin-plate luminescence. The cinematographer (Haskell Wexler) uses an extreme wide-angle lens in many of the close-up shots that adds a grotesque, funhouse-mirror effect that accentuates the dramatic tension of the action. It's a brilliant, drunken trainwreck of a movie. Fun for the whole family! My flatmate says, "This was Albee's attempt to lift the veil on American family life and show the ugly truth beneath it." Interesting, because that's the same premise of some of my other favorite films as well, such as Blue Velvet and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Strange bedfellows?

I love the way Liz Taylor plays Martha, but Sandy Dennis as Honey aggravates me. I want to take her weak little wrists and just break them. Interesting how when someone takes vulnerability to an extreme, it brings out your sadistic impulses - you want to hurt them, because they seem to be calling for that response from you. I tend to admire strength in women and vulnerability in men. Although sometimes the opposite in both cases, as well.

I think I want to write a play in a similar style about the Castro District, where I was job-hunting yesterday. About its evolution / transformation over the years from working class neighborhood (named after one of the Spanish missionaries, lots of Irish immigrants) to gay ghetto beginning in the 60s, and finally into its current sad state of utterly gentrified yuppiegaiety.

I'd still work there, though.

Five Happinesses are better than one!

Riding home from the waterfront yesterday (after a long walk and a visit to the farmer's market), I passed the Five Happiness Mandarin Restaurant. Asian restaurant names rule.

Also, according to two new shows I just watched on Discovery, sasquatch probably does exist, and the Loch Ness Monster probably doesn't. You have to take each paranormal phenomenon on a case-by-case basis, just like with conspiracy theories.

Golden Oreos

Isn't it curious that Oreos have chosen this moment - with Obama in the White House - to go golden?

2010: Year of the Tiger!

So it is, according to the Chinese zodiac. Naturally, this sounds promising for me, even though my Chinese zodiac sign is the dragon. Specifically a FIRE dragon, since I was born between Jan. 31 1976 and Feb. 17 1977.

I had really nice flying dreams last night for the first time in a long time. I consider this a good omen for the new chapter of my life I've embarked on now that I've moved out of Oakland and into a beautiful Edwardian flat in Central Richmond (between the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park). In the dream I felt that the ground level was dangerous and I wanted to soar carefree above it. I was doing quite well last night. Interesting how within the dream it's a matter of confidence and focus: if I lose focus or start thinking too much about what I'm doing, I start to lose altitude and sink toward ground.

Yes, I can see the Freudian aspect of this. But it can't be simply phallic, can it? Women have flying dreams too. I've always associated it more with healing, serenity, a healthy state of mind, positivity and kinetic energy. A good note to start a new year on.

Grizzlies vs. wolves! Killer whales vs. great white sharks!

I ignored the Golden Globes last night to flip between the Discovery Channel, which was airing a new 2-hour episode of its Planet Earth series (which is really the best, most beautifully filmed nature series I've ever seen), and channel 9 (public broadcasting) which had a new episode of Nature called Clash: Grizzly Bear and Wolf Encounters. The interactions of these two top predators of Yellowstone certainly make for fascinating viewing. Sometimes the wolves keep the carcass, sometimes the bear (when it's big enough, or hungry enough) takes it away from them, and the wolves simply wait patiently until the bear is finished. As for the Planet Earth footage, have you seen the images of the so-called "chandelier ballroom" of Lechuguilla Cave? (A secret cave whose exact location is not available to the public, and which the Planet Earth crew had to negotiate for two years to get to film.) Fucking incredible. There are lifeforms there that live by eating the rock itself. Scientists say that cave, which was completely sealed off from the rest of the planet for millions of years, and contains some of the purest water on earth (completely free of pollutants), is similar to what might be found in subterranean caverns on the moon.

Then this morning I caught a National Geographic episode called The Whale That Ate Jaws, documenting the first-ever eyewitness account of a killer whale attacking and killing a great white shark not far outside of San Francisco Bay in 1997. It was a really fascinating program! Orcas are so smart (as one might expect, being basically giant dolphins) they know how to turn the shark upside down to place it into what's known as "tonic immobility," meaning that it goes into a trance, its brain floods with serotonin and it's basically helpless at that point. Even more amazing, once one great white is killed, it releases a chemical into the water that alerts all the other great whites in the area and they all flee en masse hundreds of miles away to escape further predation. Absolutely astounding.

This raised a fascinating question for me, though, which wasn't addressed in the segment. If scientists can re-create the shark's death chemical and use it to make sharks flee with lightning speed even in the middle of a feeding frenzy, as was demonstrated in the show, couldn't that chemical be sold to human swimmers and used as a fail-proof shark repellant in waters inhabited by great whites? Surely someone else must have thought of that by now...

Johnny Be Good!

Yesterday flipping through TV channels I noticed that the men's free skate was on NBC, airing live from Spokane - the competition that decides who goes to the Olympics in Vancouver next month! I immediately called my mother, who before I could say anything said, "I was hoping you'd call so I could tell you Johnny Weir is about to skate!" I said, "I know, that's why I called you!"

Johnny looked nervous and his performance was subdued compared to the more flamboyant things he's done in the past - it looked like he was playing it safe, and doing as many spins and jumps as he could to rack up points to make up for ones he'd previously lost. His costume was typically sparkly and fey, with tufts of white fox-fur lining the shoulders and along the arms. I understand he designs them himself. I love the unapologetic way he embraces the effeminacy of male figure skating rather than trying to butch it up. As he said in an interview,

I wear pink. I have no problem where my sport is as far as our fan base. Figure skating is theatrical, artistic; it’s elegant, it’s extremely athletic. There’s a very specific audience for that. I can say I don’t watch football games, so I don’t understand why a football fan would come to watch figure skating.

You go, boy! I'll even forgive you your Lady GaGa obsession. (I'm Just Not That Into Her.) And I'm definitely looking forward to watching what transpires on the ice in Vancouver in February. Chin up! You're a star, AND a champion.

I got the Weir quote above from this nice article from today's New York Times.

ALSO, Johnny's new program Be Good Johnny Weir premieres TONIGHT on the Sundance Channel at 10:30pm! Read more here.

Incidentally, my Mom's favorite sports to watch are figure skating and bull riding. How funny is that?

Whishaw as 'Ariel' in Tempest

Ben Whishaw is going to play "Ariel" in the new all-star film version of The Tempest! A role which, according to Wikipedia, was played by women from the 1600s up through the 1930s, when men reclaimed it.

Also, here is an update on "Kill Your Darlings," the movie about the Beats that Ben is supposed to have a role in, playing Lucien Carr, who murdered the older man that Allen Ginsberg was having a relationship with during his college days at Columbia University. A noir-ish account of a murder involving the Beats (with Jesse Eisenberg as Ginsberg and Chris Pine as Jack Kerouac)? Could be a groaner, but...I'll watch it, if it ever gets made. (Ben doesn't sound too hopeful of that happening in this interview clip.)

Little earthquake

Why do DMVs have to always be absolutely the most depressing, sepulchral institutional buildings known to humankind? Doesn't everyone have to get a driver's license, even fancy rich people? Yet all I see when I go there, generally speaking, are the most down-and-out, unwashed people all corraled together as though selected for some sort of government population-culling program. This was certainly true of the San Francisco DMV between Fell and Divisadero which I visited a few weeks ago in an attempt to get the state ID I lost after being mugged a while back - only to be bluntly turned away after waiting in line (and having some crackhead cut in line in front of me) for a good bit of time, because I didn't have a certified copy of my birth certificate. Don't get me started on why I didn't have my birth certificate...it's such a ridiculous and infuriating catch-22.

Anyway, I found a loophole out of the catch-22 and did recently - at long last - receive a copy of my birth certificate. On Friday I walked a good way and then took two buses to the DMV in Oakland on Claremont, only to find the doors barred in my face - it's inexplicably closed the first, second, and third Friday of every month! Yes, I know I should've called before I went in, but I had only recently looked up their hours on the web, and I swear it said they were open 8am-5pm Monday through Friday! (In other words, normal DMV hours.) Maybe this is some new 2010 bullshit due to budget cuts that just started this month? I was pissed, but hope wasn't lost: on the bus ride in I'd noticed a pho house on Telegraph Ave just blocks from the DMV. It had seemingly materialized in response to my desire, because I'd been craving pho on the way in, but the disciplined part of my mind was going to make me wait until I'd completed my grim errand to the always-depressing DMV before I rewarded myself with a big delicious bowl of Vietnamese beef noodle soup trimmed with lime, fresh basil, cilantro, bean sprouts, jalapeno peppers, sweet plum and red hot chili pepper sauce. (There are certain foods I get cravings for sometimes that are almost overpowering: sometimes I want a good burger, sometimes I crave Mexican food with beans and rice, sometimes I would give anything for a nice slice of cheesecake, other times I would gnaw off a limb for a good bowl of pho.)

I ordered a large and the waitress brought out a bathtub full of pho, with even a little side-dish of kim chi, something I've never had before with pho. I spent a delicious hour slowly absorbing every flavor, in every combination, that the pho had to offer. So that alone made the trip worthwhile.

Then I walked to the MacArthur BART station, a matter of blocks away. I got on and noticed the train wasn't moving. Eventually the conductor came on the PA system and announced, "Folks, we've just had word of a 3.8-magnitude earthquake near Milpitas. Hopefully we'll be moving shortly."

I hadn't felt anything. And in a little bit the train did start moving. But I can already say I've been through my first Bay-Area earthquake.

Bright Star DVD release

Out on DVD on Jan. 26th here in the states is Bright Star, Jane Campion's beautiful and heartbreaking cinematic rendering of the brief and star-crossed love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, starring Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish. I saw it in the theater, and left a little misty-eyed. I can't handle movies this achingly romantic and sad very often, but every once in a while, you've got to, just to remind yourself you're human. Of course, I will see (and own) every movie that Ben Whishaw appears in, but I have to say, if there's one performance in Bright Star that cries out for an Oscar nod, it's that of Abbie Cornish. She makes Fanny Brawne the sort of independent, creative soul you really care about, admire and feel for.

Godzilla On My Mind

I recently checked Godzilla On My Mind: 50 Years of the King of Monsters by William Tsutsui, a Japanese-American from Texas, out of the library. It's exactly the kind of book I yearned for as a kid going through my Japanese monster movies phase: a full-length text by a lifelong, devoted fan of the genre who knows all sorts of geeky trivia. Well, I'm enjoying it just as much now, since my Godzilla film obsession (particularly those of the Showa era, the ones following from the original serious 1954 Gojira and eventually descending into camp and self-parody) has recently made a significant comeback. (I'm collecting the films one by one off E-bay in chronological order; Godzilla's Revenge is next on the list.) There's a funny photo in the book of Tsutsui as a grade-school kid wearing a homemade Godzilla costume that he coerced his mother into making him for Halloween.

I have always found fascinating the sort of pop-cultural exchange program that's gone on for decades now between American and Japan (with a similar one between America and England). The makers of Godzilla were admittedly influenced by American movies like King Kong and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The original Godzilla has even been referred to as a thinly veiled Japanese remake of the latter film, which came out only a year before. But in Tsutsui's words, "Compared to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (or even, if I may be sacrilegious, to the great Kong), the message of the original Godzilla film is so much more nuanced, the special effects so different, and the emotions stirred so much more profound that any charges of cinematic plagiarism seem all but irrelevant."

The name Gojira itself (anglicized as Godzilla when the film hit the American market) is a combination of the words gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale) despite the fact that Godzilla resembles neither of these mammals. It is said of Nakajima Haruo, the man who played Godzilla inside the urethane foam suit, that he "could spend no more than a few minutes at a time sealed within the costume" and that "technicians regularly poured a cup of Nakajima's sweat out of the suit between takes and the actor reported losing 20 pounds of weight during the shoot." Most interesting to me is that Ifukube Akira, the composer who made the soundtrack for the film, came up with Godzilla's distinctive ear-splitting roar by "drawing a leather glove across the strings of a contrabass and manipulating the resulting sound in an echo chamber."

Fascinating stuff!

Less than a month to go...

I just confirmed via phone with my new flatmate that I am moving into his place by February 1st! The Edwardian flat I'm moving into is off Balboa Street in Central Richmond, not far from Golden Gate Park. My roommate was overjoyed when I said I'm moving in, I gather he's had a difficult time finding a suitable housemate. I can tell just from our initial conversation/interview that we'll get along just fine. He likes to cook and have people over for dinner, which is something I've been looking forward to forever (the house I currently live in doesn't have a working oven!) My room has hardwood floors, there's a nice semi-fenced backyard patio area, and adopting a cat is an option as long as I am fully responsible for its welfare. I'll be starting from scratch - no mattress yet even! - but I think it's the next step in my Bay Area adventure. It can't be less comfortable than the neighborhood I live in right now, that's for sure. Just now walking home from a taqueria in Fruitvale, in broad daylight, people driving by yelled some shit and threw a container that landed right in front of me. Startling and totally out of nowhere.

Yes, thank you, assholes, I know, and I'm leaving as soon as possible, BUH-LIEVE ME!

Sea urchins / Ann Coulter / NY resolution

This is too bad, I like Eli Roth. He's an intelligent fan and creator of horror films.

Eli Roth Stung

Why couldn't it have been SARAH PALIN STUNG BY SEA URCHINS instead. Or DICK CHENEY DEVOURED BY DRIVER ANTS. Or maybe ANN COULTER GORED BY UNICORN.

Also, I have made a belated new year's resolution: to stop exercising. It's just too hard. To quote the great Karen Walker of Will & Grace: Exercise is for fat people. Actually she never said that, but it sounds like something she might've said.

Alas, my career in hospitality has come to a scudding halt. I'm looking for a job in San Francisco. Preferably a paying one.

xo

glam

Johnny hosts NYE

Here's another New Year's Eve gig that I attended "in spirit": everyone's favorite semi-closeted gay figure skater, Johnny Weir (can't wait for those Winter Olympics next month in Vancouver!) hosted a NYE bash at Russian restaurant Mari Vanna. Hey, Johnny, let's make 2010 the year you win a gold medal AND come out of the closet. If you want to. I'm sure everyone will still love you, especially Adam Lambert.

Angels in America

"Catholics believe in forgiveness, Jews believe in guilt."

It takes me a while to get around to seeing things sometimes...for example, I just recently, through the magic of Netflix, finally watched the cable miniseries Angels in America, based on the vastly acclaimed play by Tony Kushner, and featuring an all-star cast including Al Pacino and Meryl Streep! Streep plays the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the mother of a closeted gay Mormon son, AND a liver-spotted Jewish rabbi delivering a eulogy! And PACINO...my God, what a loathsome character, but my GOD, what a brilliant personification of that loathsome character! Angels in America is full of hallucinatory vignettes that verge on the operatic - Emma Thompson tearing the roof off a sick man's bedroom and appearing in angelic form, Sarah Jessica Parker escaping the harshness of reality in her imagination's version of Antarctica (with Jeffrey Wright of Basquiat as her gum-chewin' tour guide to a Valley of the Frozen Dolls). It's a pretty grandiose conceit, and more than a little self-congratulatory, starting with the AIDS epidemic in the early '80s and ending with a hallowed vision of those same virus-stricken homosexual men as harbingers of some sort of holy work of God (if I'm understanding the ending properly), leading humankind towards a greater sense of solidarity and compassion. (It hasn't entirely worked out that way, has it? Well, to some extent it has.) I'm certainly glad I finally caught up with it, though. And I feel sorry for people who had to wait for each separate episode to be released back when it first came out!

Welcome, 2010

Happy New Year, one and all! RESISTANCE IS FERTILE!