Category: Film

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Back in Town for a Bit

The scenes from New Orleans are out of a post-apocalyptic film, people firing on helicopters, bodies floating down the street–while our president eats cake. I read yesterday that it was going to take 4 days for certain supply ships to arrive. 4 days. We could capture a foreign capital in that time. I watched Laurent Cantet’s Les Sanguinaires last night, a tiny gem of a film about a group of friends trying to get away from all the pre-Millenium hysteria by spending the week on a remote island, only to discover that they can’t get away from each other, or human nature. D and I saw Junebug earlier in the day, a totally delightful film about what binds a family together and how oblivious people can be to what’s in front of them. It’s a very complex film with amazing little details and perfomances, presented in a very simple narrative. I think that I prefer to lose myself in films these days. They end.

I had a wonderful time in Florida. The hurricane made it a bit windier, and there were actual waves at the beach, but the Tampa Bay area remained just out of Katrina’s path. Karl, my dad’s cousin from the old country, came down from his adopted home of Canada for the week. He had recently visited the town in Slovenia that my dad’s side of the family is from, and shared pictures of people who all looked like my brothers and sisters, as well as photos that my grandmother took when she returned to the family home in the 50’s (she emigrated to the US while in her late teens), and pictures of my great great grandmother and her family. I also discovered that another of my dad’s cousins was part of the naval team that captured the German submarine that led to the solving of the German “enigma” by Alan Turing and hastened the end of WWII–an actual war hero in the family. I thought we were all active pacifists. And I also learned that our hero’s family is from East Moline, as the name would suggest, a town just east of Moline, the town where my boyfriend Big Chrissy’s family lives, and where I visit all the time! I’m sure that the next thing I’m going to discover is that Chris and I are cousins and that our love is rooted in a genetic twist of Freud’s ideas about narcissism.

I’m leaving for Alabama next Wednesday to spend some time with Mom and Dad and my sweeter than sweet tea southern buddies.

Pictures and stories ahead…

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The Paths Chosen

I forgot to mention that during my lunch the other day with Arnie, who is hovering somewhere around 70, he mentioned that he is now the object of affection of a certain former Hollywood Golden Boy’s son, who is now in his late 50’s or so, and who was chasing after me when I was 28. I applauded the extreme diversity of attraction of Arnie’s suitor, and then shared my dating stories and how, at the time, I seemed to know more about his father than he. And then I turned green. I could have marrried into Hollywood royalty instead of literary Bohemia. PLUS this guy has the new printer that I’ve been looking at, and gave Arnie a glorious ink-jet print (I thought it was gelatin silver, even on close inspection) of the filmmaker son of a certain French impressionist who could have been sitting in my kichen! What was I thinking??????

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It’s Here, It’s Here, It’s Finally Here

Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung. My heart is beating so fast. The new Wong Kar-Wai film opens today, like the ice-cream truck has finally returned to town.

Last night I saw Happy Endings with D. Earlier we bumped into Nanocub, whose partner just passed away, at StarBears, and asked him to join us. Scott seems to be doing real well with coping and getting the support that he needs, while I was ready to fall apart at any moment. (I’m a projectile empath.) D was an excellent Momma Bear, cradling Nano like a little cub in his vast comforting D-ness. We ate dinner at 2223 afterward. I had the tomato tower, a signature dish that appears seasonally on their menu, but was disappointed that all the pyrotechnics served to mask the true stars, the heirloom tomatoes, hidden under layers of cheeses, grilled eggplant, peppers, crostini, etc… Drizzle a tiny bit of olive oil on a good tomato, a little salt and pepper, and I’m a happy bunny. Oh the movie–in D’s words, “It was good.” Actually it was remarkably similar to The Opposite of Sex, the director’s previous film, with the same sexually voracious ingenue and troubled relation to homosexuality and relationships in general, but somehow maybe more mature in its depiction of less-charicatured characters. Lisa Kudrow’s range as an actress is amazing, and Maggie Gyllenhaal was a treat to watch. Oh my god, and Laura Dern! She should be in every movie. Does Tom Arnold pluck his eyebrows?

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Not Much of an Angry Young Man

Les treated me to a classic San Francisco Cordon Blue dinner and a preview of Secuestro Express at the Lumiere tonight. We were those people who bypassed the long line and got to sit smack dab in the middle of the theater in the seats marked “RESERVED FOR THE PRESS.” Les reviewed his press packet while I prepared to say things like “I’m with Mr. Wright,” in case I was asked for credentials. Anyway, the movie was interesting, very testosterone-driven, with heavy nods to Robert Rodrigues and Baz Luhrman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Ultimately, though, it left me wanting to escape to the Female Planet and drink herb tea and bake pies. A few boyfriends ago, I went out with this guy who took testosterone injections. Conversely, he was the most Stepford-like of my paramours, with highly developed nesting and cooking skills, but he’d flip birds at helpless soccer moms in Tower Market who cut in line at the deli counter, or curse people who didn’t recycle. Aggressivity makes me nervous, although when vacationing, I love to travel with aggressive people. Last night E. came over to watch Room at the Top. She’s taking testosterone, too. We’re taking a trip together in a few months and I can’t wait to let her chase cabs and open doors for me. The film features a knockout and subtle performance by Simone Signoret, as an older (35!) year old woman who falls in love with a younger man intent on marrying the daughter of the richest woman in the village. It’s almost Shakespearean: his desire to marry into a higher class his tragic flaw. She contains her desire marvelously, behind a cool facade of experience. At work today, the Boss and I were talking about intimacy, and his feeling that there is no real intimacy in the gay community. I mean longer than an evening’s worth. I took an opposite, but really agreeable stance, that there is indeed intimacy, only twisted into perverse and highly organized new depths through the medium of the internet with either no physical contact at all, or maximum physical contact with the least bit of extraneous emotional exertion. I guess I need to start a book group, or get a dog.

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Ascension and Contempt

Tonight I watched Godard’s Contempt with Davide. It’s the kind of film that benefits from repeat viewings, there are so many ideas and references. Davide seemed a bit overwhelmed by them all, sensitive fellow that he is. Earlier today I worked on editing my video, and after seeing that extraordinary first nude scene with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, am eager to get back into the editing room. The project I’ve been working on is not yet titled, but it’s of D walking up my stairs. Not just abstract D, but big hairy identifiably human D. Part of my challenge is balancing his prominent bulkiness with the lovely abstract shots of his hairy expansiveness heaving gently as he breathes. I filmed him walking towards the camera, a step at a time, as we both moved up the stairs, and am cross-fading these shots into each other. A second group of images is of the previously mentioned closeups of his moving hair, and a third from the camera panning across and around his body, also very abstract. There’s a fourth group of the stairs and front door, but I’ll use them only if I veer towards narrative. The abstractions are just lovely–seductive and other-worldly landscapes, but the figurative imagery, in contrast, is almost frightening in its legibility. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the recognizable footage, as I’m concerned that the piece may become too much about the tension between how this body is perceived and how I want it to be experienced, rather than just about how I want it to be perceived.

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Stuck, or Play

The lovely and talented Les is back in town, and thus a-lunching was in order yesterday. Several things came up while discussing our respective life changes (his relocation and new career, my different relation to youth and lack of aesthetic obsession), and back at home I jotted them all down in gruesome detail, but lucky for you all, I forgot to save and, while tandemly designing the next Marjorie Wood Gallery show and finishing up Megan’s website, I experienced my first OSX non-stop spinning ball thingy. Well, I was probably just repeating myself anyway, so lucky for you, short attention span baby gays.

I have about 20 pounds of Italian prune plums that I plucked from my tree yesterday. Organic, Coco-grown AAA. If you’d like some, come on over before this weekend when it will all become plum jam–or come on over late this weekend and pick up some plum jam.

Philip came over last night, all in black and sporting his matching très chic soft sculpture black cast, raising the bar for ruptured plantar fascia fashionisiti. I made a Bolognese meat sauce, substituting ground calamari for more sentient fellow earth creatures, and we watched Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love. It is one of the few films that I will call a masterpiece. Every frame is like a Vermeer painting, meticulously framed and designed. He slows down the action of Maggie Cheung descending a staircase, and weds the slow motion with a moving orchestral arrangement, amplifying and letting us savor the brief visual experience of her beauty.

It would seem I am in a rut. First I was obsessed with the Pole, then all the rest of Bear-landia, and now that’s all behind me and I just don’t know what to do next. My New York show is pretty much ready, except for little details that aren’t very time-consuming, and now I can start to think about the next thing. Because I’ve experienced such a major shift in relation to culture, youth, and my own process, I feel a completely different relation to my former subject matter, and am a little unsure about how to approach it, or even what I want to say about it. I told Philip and Les that I want this period to be about play, to just play around with a lot of ideas in the studio and see what happens. I’ve been doing this for a while actually, only now I’m going to call it play.

But did I mention all this before? Help! Somebody get me out of here! Maybe I should become a stock-broker?

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Enough About Me, What Do You Think of My Hair?

Day 3 of Mission Beard Re-Growth Testing Phase Alpha.

I’m still teetering on the edge of indecisiveness, but I’m letting everything on my head grow for a while, and then I’ll let my hairdresser sculpt something unique, or possibly just the same old me, out of the messy mass of dishwater gray blonde-ness. Remember how Cary Grant had the same hairdo for, like, his entire life? I want that kind of commitment to a visual identity, but I love haircuts too much. If only I had one of those buttons in my back to pull the hair back out.

Last night BC and I watched Woody Allen’s Sleeper, which put everything back in perspective for me. The orb, the tele-screen, and the orgazmatron. What more could I want?

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Edward, Liz, Marcello

I’ve been in a sort of Edward Albee-induced haze since this weekend. After The Goat, or Who is Silvia? and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I want only intensity and tragedy. That last scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf of Liz mourning the death of her son has haunted me all week, her fractured reality my own. You don’t really see abstractions of reality accompanied by such intense feelings and articulated cathartic emoting. This is the play for me. The next night or so D, Megan, and I watched Butterfield 8, her other Oscar winning performance, and I was surprised not by her acting but by the heterosexual rush that I experienced. She has a beauty that appeals to something below my gaydar, deep into something primal and formerly child-producing. In her earlier films, she’s so intensely gorgeous that she doesn’t seem real, sculptural, like Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, but in Butterfield 8 she’s filled out, plus that lovely big conch of a hairdo, and is somehow realer. Maybe it’s the tension between young girl and grown woman. Whatever, she is the Earth Mother and we are all flops.

Tonight I watched Divorce, Italian Style, with Marcello Mastroianni. It’s a really clever and witty look at an alternative to divorce in a country that doesn’t allow it–push your wife into an affair and then shoot her. No really, it’s very funny. Marcello’s charm is precisely that of a silent film star, much conveyed with little exertion. He has a sex appeal that has always astounded me, like finding a clown sexy.

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Toulouse! Toulouse!

So I’ve been watching a lot of John Huston films lately. Like, every one’s a masterpiece. Tonight, after Negulesco’s The Best of Everything, which was quite a delight in itself, and something I’ll maybe have the energy to discuss some other time, I watched Huston’s Moulin Rouge of 1953. First of all, Henri is totally my type: hairy, brilliant, and emotionally unstable. I remember seeing the film as a kid and being totally crushed out on him, recognizing something about myself that would only later find expression. I’m not talking about homosexuality. I’m talking about loving emotionally and psychologically unstable hairy people. This film, which, for the sake of my own interests, I, of course, take for a totally accurate and faithful representation of his life, deals with two loves in the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Two women love him for different reasons. The first is a bit wild, of the streets, and is drawn to the access that he provides to a world outside of her reach. He is consumed by a passion for her that is made more intense by her cruel rejection of him. The second is a woman who is drawn to Henri because they both understand what it is to love and be discarded. She actually falls in love with Henri, understanding him, but he’s too distracted by drinking himself to death and too full of self-loathing to comprehend what she sees in him. When he finally sees the depth of her love for him, it’s too late, and she leaves him to marry someone she doesn’t really love. He speeds up drinking himself to death and in the process makes some really great art.

I suppose we’ve all… wait, I shouldn’t be talking for all you people, I suppose that I’VE experienced love in a very similar way–the longing taking up most of the space between the intense interaction and muscular contractions. One thing that I think is so unusual about my relationship with BC is how, now hold onto your hats, normal it is. Normal in the sense that it’s about two people struggling with their own identities and insecurities, supporting each other’s growth, but not losing oneself in the other’s shadow. It’s very new to me, and at times, as all of you know, I don’t trust it and want to run to the familiar, to just longing, to that agitated state of pure desire. I know, it doesn’t sound very enticing, but it’s what all of my art has come out of. Perhaps this is why I haven’t been making anything lately, my relation to love has shifted to something positive and healthy. I’m not relying on this other person to provide a narrative structure to my life. With my upcoming show, it’s a good place to be in, because I’m acting more like a curator of my own experience over the past few years, rather than churning out responses to stimuli.

But what’s next?

This week BC and I are off to Moline for his niece’s graduation party, and only one big night in Chicago to dine at Alinea.