The Running of the Gays

“They can’t help the way they are. If they tried to reject their gay needs, it would be just like when Lindsay Wagner’s body was rejecting her Ebonics. I have noticed that the men ones clean real good and make yummy cobbler. And they seem to love Dorothy Garland. I am very excited for the Running of the Gays this sunday, but I hope no one is too badly gored.”

Dina Martina, Entertainer

My favorite response to the question, “What Do You Think of the Gays?” from the really refreshing, irreverant, and mixed set of essays for Gay Pride in The Stranger.

And that’s all I’ll bother to say about Gay Pride festivities, except this: yes it’s wonderful and uplifting and important that we still assert our inclusion in society and blah, blah, blah, but I still hate too much disco and crowds and carefully marketed sponsorship and muscleboy narcissism so I’ll pass and keep doing it my own way each and every day, thanks.

The Monkey on My Back

swanky New X-MenI blame Beau, although to be fair it all started out innocently enough. We were having lunch and we strayed onto the topic of comic books and how I love them but I fear them. I stopped collecting long ago (too expensive, too hard to keep up with), but they’ve remained a dangerous temptation — I’m a Friend of Stan L.

As we talked I was telling Beau how excited I was to see what Grant Morrison would do once he started writing for The X-Men, considering how much I went bananas for The Invisibles once I stumbled across them. Whatever. It was just a brief flare-up of nerdiness at the time, and I went back to work.

The Ass-Kicking AuthorityLater on in the week I saw that Beau had gotten the new issue, and I suddenly became obsessed with getting a copy for myself. I went to Forbidden Planet, but they were out of stock. I was crushed, but the fever was in me, and I was in a comic book store with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket, and all sorts of things that I had to have, like the new Authority and a kooky issue of Wonder Woman (in which she’s interviewed by Lois Lane) and some other X-men titles to tide me over. Of course, I also had to pick up the trade paperback of Earth X because I’d been coveting it for so long, and I love those Alex Ross covers so much. There was no turning back.

The next day, I finally found the X-Men book I was looking for at a much bigger place near my office, and I was so elated that I also splurged on one of the Planetary and Invisibles books I’d been curious about. Great scores all around, which left with me hours of reading. I was pleased as punch, despite feeling a little bad about going on such a bender.

I know that some think it’s really old-skool, but I’m a sucker for the whole superhero genre in comics. I know that comics are a great medium for telling all kinds of stories, but the superhero stuff still excites me in a very primal way. I’ve read them my whole life, making up characters and stories of my own and soaking in as much of the varied universes of superhero stories as I could. It’s easy to look back now and see that I have a real soft spot for a lot of stuff from my youth that wasn’t especially sophisticated, but it’s also very exciting to see that a lot of comics have grown with me. A lot of them are still just slugfests, and I often get exasperated at how bloated some of the more popular mythologies have become. Luckily, there are books like The Authority and The Invisibles and Planetary that play with the myths that nurtured me: they challenge them, contradict them, turn them inside out, and even show affection for them. It’s very po-mo now, very meta. And that’s good. There are a lot of people making comics who are up to the challenge of keeping the medium vital without losing the spark of wonder that sucked me in to begin with. Thank god for that.

Homo Schlock

A must for any proud queerI beg to differ. In fact, I’d say that a god-damned rainbow mirrorball is enough of a hypercaricature to be the sole indicator of someone so desperate to have an identity that he’d buy one lock, stock, and barrel from a catalogue of homosexual schlock. (It could be a she. I don’t want to suggest that lesbians are immune to this sort of tragic kitsch.) Jesus, decades of fighting for public acceptance gets us this? Doesn’t anyone see that this is as bad as a Catholic with a life-size velvet painting of the Pope?

You wanna show your pride? You wanna be out of the closet? Hold a guy’s hand in public. Tell the fella in the mailroom he’s got a hot ass. Ask if your boyfriend can be covered under your health insurance. Just be yourself — I bet you’re not as truly straight-acting as you think you are. And that’s not a problem at all.

This Story Is About Musicals

I was expecting to hate it, or at least think it was a pretty but unsatisfying bauble like Romeo + Juliet, but I totally loved Moulin Rouge. It was definitely the visual delight I expected, even turning out to be more lush and grandiose than I would have guessed. The typography and graphic design alone was enough to make my head spin. I thought I would pass out during the ending credits, they were done so beautifully. (I’m a type geek. sue me.)

Overall, the movie does a tricky maneuver for which I may be the target audience. It starts off as a zingy, MTV-ish pastiche of movie-musical clichés, recklessly making fun of them with a dash of affection and a lot of flash to impress modern audiences, but it switches along the way into a totally earnest musical that uses the film medium to say a few things about the nature of the theatre. It masquerades as a parody of hokey love stories, but actually tells one with a certain amount of depth. (It helps an awful lot that the two leads are good enough actors and capable enough singers to pull it off.) I had the distinct impression that to really get into the movie, you have to love musicals and appreciate the artifice of the whole genre, but still be jaded and media-savvy enough to know how goofy they are. Bingo! Nice to meet ya, I’m Sparky.

Ok, the good stuff:

  1. The music kicks major ass. It’s funny, mixing in snippets from all over, forcing you to play name that tune throughout the movie. It’s also takes goofy sentiment and makes it terribly poingnant, which is a nice touch. The pastiche is pretty clever, that way. If you’re just po-mo pop music fan, you’ll get a kick out of the camp arrangments of pop and rock classics, but if you can handle musical theater you’ll be amazed at how well the pop songs used work when they’re handled just right.

    Ewan Mcgregor, who jumps back to the top of my fantasy boyfriend list, is actually a great singer, even if he’s a bit of a belter. His gimmick in the movie of suddenly bursting (and I mean bursting) into song whenever he gets tongue-tied is funny, but again it totally makes sense as an element of a musical, whether you see it as parody or homage.

  2. Catherine Martin‘s costume and production design. Please god, throw a few awards this woman’s way. Totally lush.

  3. Balcony with sacre CoeurCGI Paris. Goofy, yes, but a pretty way of making a 3-D version of a painted backdrop that would have made MGM proud. Also, I it made me all sentimentalto see Montmarte showed like that, since I stayed right at the foot of the hill, down the block from the real Moulin Rouge (a horribly tacky tourist trap), when I was in Paris last February. Also, cheers to the Man in the Moon who lurked in the background now and then.

  4. Retro fin-de-siecle typography. Totally gorge. I can’t stress this enough. Maybe this has to do with my recent obsession with collecting wood type, but the design really made my mouth water.

  5. Knowing when enough is enough and too much isn’t enough. This is, trust me, a campy, campy movie, even if it’s being so with a coy, smart, post-modern wink. It lays on the cinematic drag really heavy, but then moves off into something a little more sincere, more restrained just when your head is about ready to explode. And just when the sincere melodrama is getting a bit too heavy, in comes some other slapstick or kooky musical number. Pacing, baby, pacing.

And the requisite irritating stuff.

  1. John Leguizamo could not possibly have been more annoying. Unlike the rest of the cast, he never becomes anything more than a cartoon. Bleah.

  2. MTV-damaged approach to editing. sometimes those quick cuts are punchy and exciting, usually they keep you from being able to actually soak in what’s good in a scene. With stuff that pretty to see, you want a chance to enjoy it. sometimes with the music, too, the tendency to throw different stuff in, fast and furiously, makes you want to slow things the hell down. (I dunno, maybe I’m just getting old.)

OK, enough raving for raving for now. The real test will be if I like it this much after a second viewing.

Does this remind you of Leyendecker or singer sargent?

Terrified of the Heartland

I am such a city kid. Really, I’m just beyond hope. I’ve always lived in big cities: I grew up in New York Fuckin’ City, and spent eight years in Boston, which seemed like a charming hamlet by comparison, but an overwhelming urban nightmare to people who’d come there from the sticks. It’s the only way of life I know, really. Everything else just seems like…well, television.

A friend/former squeeze of mine has been forced by circumstance to take a break from the big city for a while and go back to stay with his folks in Nebraska for a bit. He sent me a postcard from his hometown of Billings, Montana, where he went for a brief visit last week. The image on the card — downtown Billings surrounded by vast, hilly open space — is a curious, alien landscape to me. Weird, open, desolate, sleepy. I shudder to think of it. A teeny little burg surrounded by emptiness like that just gives me chills. Of course, when I get e-mails like this I know that my reliance on city life is cheating me from some of the truly American, rock-n-roll experiences that can be found out in the heartland:

I forget that the Montana highways make up for a lot of the other faults with this state. Nothing really beats the escape of slipping into leather pants, a muscle tee, aviators, a cowboy hat, and a pick-up truck and hitting the highway. Heavy metal is the only choice for music [well maybe some sleater-Kinney is ok]. You kind of forget where you are, who you are. Is it the speed? You can drive so fast here…but I think it’s the truck.

That just sounds so cathartic to me. Maybe I should get that driver’s license once and for all. (I say this willfully ignoring the horror I felt the one time I did a road trip to the Midwest and was confronted for the first time with a completely blank horizon, devoid of mountains, skyscrapers, or oceans and filled with more corn and soy than I care to remember.)

Subway Scoping

Riding the subway has a way of screwing up normal boundaries. See, there’s this really sexy guy I usually see on the L train in the mornings — blond crew cut, pale blue eyes little chin strap beard, thin and wiry, hipsterish — who I’ve developed a wee crush on. Nothing serious, just the kind of fascination that can be provoked by an interesting, unavailable straight boy one sees often enough to make an impression. Today, he was standing by the door as I got on, with one of the few available handholds right in front of him. As the train continued further toward Manhattan, he and I kept getting pushed closer together as the train filled up. Even though I kept my head down, reading my Palm Pilot, I was fully aware of his proximity. Especially since it’s warm today, and he was wearing an old t-shirt instead of the usual bulky Carhartt jacket, and his little round bicep dangled in front of my forehead. It was odd, the way we stood there facing each other, standing closer than we would even if we were on a date, me making myself look down, him looking down the car — uncomfortably intimate proximity with a stranger forcing each of us to pretend no one was there at all.

Eulogy

Gina Brandt-FallI found out this morning that a very dear friend died yesterday. Although Gina had been having an ugly, all-out battle with breast cancer for the last two years, and knew her days were running out, I don’t think she was prepared for the sudden liver failure that claimed her yesterday morning. I know I wasn’t. Gina, who I worked with for years, moved to California a few months ago, planning to start a new life in the wake of the cancer that she fought so aggressively. Her doctors discovered more cancer, though, burrowed further into her chest and lungs where they couldn’t get to it without major surgery that would have left Gina in excruciating pain for her last months. She opted for more chemotherapy instead, so she could have a few good weeks out of each of those last months — time to enjoy the sun, to be with her friends, to be able to pull together the fragments of the wonderful book she had been working on for so long. Even during her illness, Gina was incredibly vibrant, emotionally and intellectually engaged, empathic, thoughtful, insightful. Gone, just like that.

Gina and I took to one another immediately went I first interviewed with her for some freelance typesetting work four-and-a-half years ago. From the very first day, I was taken by her enthusiasm, humor, and quick mind as our conversation went from typesetting to typography to books to literature to life. I learned an incredible amount of new things from her, and I was actively encouraged by her to take those new ideas to new levels, and to always leave myself the energy to do what I love. And I laughed with her. God, how we laughed when we were together! Even when we started out bitching and moaning about the workplace and the larger world, we were able to put things in perspective and mix joy in with the righteous indignation. She was not only a friend and a colleague and a teacher, but also an inspiration. that’s cliché, I know, but true: I aspire to her level of passionate interest in life.

There are so many stories to tell about the many chapters of Gina’s incredible life, but I don’t think I can reminisce just now. I’m tired, my feelings are spent. I just want to wash away the sting in my eyes from all the crying.

Gettin’ a Groove On

I forgot how good it feels to just dance for a while. I mean, I know in my head that I have fun when I go out and shake a tail feather, but my body tends to forget after a while. I’ve been so tense lately, like a tightly coiled spring, so it was becoming something of a medical necessity that I unwind a bit. I coaxed Tom into going with me to Body & Soul, which is still my favorite party, still kicking after all this time. It’s the right thing at the right time: a good vibe on sunday afternoons, a spectacular way to unwind before the work week kicks in again.

The point is, though, that it worked tonight. The activity, the sweat, the pounding noise all helped me shake the tension out of my shoulders and rattle my head back into some semblance of order for a little while. It gave me a way to just give in to the stimulus and pull myself out of my own crap for a bit. Afterward, I took advantage of a nice night to walk all the way back to 14th street and just…be. I even had me some ice cream.

Don’t Rock the Boat

Ah, so this is that queasiness I was warned about. It’s hitting me a couple of days later than I was led to believe, and I can’t quite say it’s a welcome relief. Riding a crowded subway car in the morning is bad enough without feeling like you’re going to either pass out or puke. I hope this evens out before too long.

Going Postal

So it’s not just my imagination — the Post Offices in Brooklyn really are worse than the ones in Manhattan. I think about this all the time: it’s one of the downsides of living in the ‘hood. My neighbor and I were commiserating last night about how awful it is to see one of those yellow notices in our mailbox, telling us we have to trudge down to the grimy local Post Office to wait on line for a half hour while surly troglodytes scream at us through an inch of plexiglass. Just yesterday morning she earned valuable brownie points by chasing after the mailman so he didn’t disappear with a package of mine, saving me from a saturday morning trip to hell.

This morning, as I was dropping off some of the eBay packages (by the way, I keep finding more old treasures to auction, so keep checking that out), the very friendly woman at the very efficient Post Office at 34th between Park and Lex was surprised that I had carried the boxes in from Brooklyn, but then confessed (across the open desk when we conducted our transaction) that she’s heard nothing but awful stories abut the conditions there. I told her about my fear of seeing the dreaded yellow slip, and she agreed sympathetically.