4 posts tagged “homosexuality”

It's ten minutes, but it's a good ten minutes.

When asked recently why I wasn't attending last month's San Diego Comic-Con, my response was that I had no interest, and want nothing to do with most of the people who share my love of comic books.

And this would be why.

I'm glad that Dorian at postmodernbarney.com has done the work for me, because a masochist I may be (I love me some conservative talk radio), but I would not be able to wade through these message boards without, as they say, killing a bitch.

"I don't want to meet anyone with my interests. I hate my interests."
Steve Buscemi, in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World.

In other news, this week I found myself at the Knitting Factory to see Scott Barkan's band, Fortress of Attitude. It was a good show, and I got to catch up with Scott, which was bitchin'. I found out that he works for Pandora up in San Francisco, organizing and classifying their music, which seems like it might be the coolest job. Especially because they let him take months off and go on tour.

The point being that I cannot recommend Pandora Internet Radio enough. The conceit is that you type in what music you like, and it recommends things for you based not on the interests of other users (i.e. Amazon.com or Netflix.com), or even on narrow genre definitions, but based on real musical content that people like Scott analyze. Instrumentation, arrangements, time signatures, and vocal quality all come into play.

What I love about it is that it is always wrong. I only have a few stations set up, with one to which I add lots of disparate stuff. That way, I can watch Pandora try to find connections between Mos Def and The Vince Guaraldi Trio, and then try to relate that to the song "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down" by Hank Williams Jr. I like to keep the machines on their toes.

More often than not, though, it's easy to see which artist Pandora is trying to emulate. If you create a station with, say, Donovan and Grandmaster Flash, half of the tracks will be hippy-dippy folk and half will be old sKool hip-hop. It doesn't synthesize the two and play that late 1980's folk-hop artist, Thug Elf.

But Pandora, like any creature, is beautiful because of its flaws. For example, if I create a radio station based around the work of Randy Newman, the first song it plays is a Randy Newman song. Actually, in this case, it a Bonnie Raitt track from the Randy Newman penned Faust. But no matter.

The second track it plays is "Wrapped Up In Books" by Belle & Sebastian. OK, alright.

The third track it plays is "Weatherman" by Delbert McClinton, also well known as the opening track to the film Groundhog Day.

"If you don't believe me, take me by the hand. Can't you feel you're warming up? Yeah I'm your

WEATHERMAN!"

It's the kind of unapologetic cock rock that, at this point, most people can only listen to ironically. It may be as "hard" as The Hold Steady, but I would never recommend it for someone who enjoys them. By the way, I'm really really excited that The Hold Steady has a new album coming out. If you're not yet a convert, please check out "Cattle And The Creeping Things" off of their album Seperation Sunday. Holla!

Anyway, the conclusion comes when Pandora, based on what I don't know, recommends tracks from the album All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats. I have not heard of these Mountain Goats, but I like what I hear, and I buy the album, and I love it. And everyone wins.

Thanks, Pandora. I love you too.

What fucking century are we living in?

I'll try to keep this short, if only because I have no illusions about the extent of my readership. Of all the abominable (like the snowman) things that this administration has foisted upon the people of this country, including an impossible war on terror (unwinnable war, wasn't that in 1984, which everyone read in tenth grade?), a cavalier disregard for the underprivileged (especially when they're under water), and economic policies that favor the rich, this has consistently been the issue that gets under my skin the most. The Republican Party's touting of the defense of marriage is their most cowardly and sickeningly transparent issue, and the fact that the country grapples with this at all makes me ill.

You can read the text of George W. Bush's June 3rd radio address here. I couldn't get through the whole thing, as it makes me (say it with me now) ill. Let's begin with this; all of this is based on the logical fallacy that letting dudes who like to kiss other dudes marry the dudes they like to kiss will undermine heterosexual marriage. This is not true. Straight marriage does a fine job of undermining itself.

Why not outlaw the most direct attack on the sanctity of marriage: divorce? If we follow Bush's logic to its conclusion, that's where we arrive. But Ronald Reagan was divorced. Newt Gingrich is divorced. Rush Limbaugh and his wife Marta have six marriages between them. Why are we going after gay people who want to be monogamous and not Britney Spears, who was married for exactly fifty-five hours in 2003? That, I'd say, does a lot more damage to the sanctity of marriage than hot woman-on-woman monogamy.

So why does marriage need protection from people who want to lend the perpetually faltering institution the credibility it could use? Is it because gay people are scary? If you're scared of gay people, let them get married. File them away into long-term monogamy, and then you don't have to worry about them coming to recruit your Shakira-loving son. It can't be because they make poor parents. That position is ridiculous, and the time that was spent debunking it was wasted, because what moron would think that?

Damn this sarcasm.

The Republicans like to couch this debate in one on activist judges. That's bullshit, plain and simple. The judiciary is supposed to operate independent of the executive. That's called checks-and-balances, and I done learned about it in first grade. They say that the will of the people mandates that marriage be protected. Because the Bush administration is so concerned with the will of the people all of a sudden. Bigoted conservatives know that if it comes down to a debate about individual gay people and their civil rights, they will lose, as they've lost before.

Pundits also like to cite human/animal unions and quote obscure Nordic marriage statistics, as if they prove anything. Not only are they reported in a misleading fashion (says Media Matters, births out of wedlock have been on the rise since 1995 in the Netherlands, six years prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage), but who cares? They are obscure Nordic marriage statistics. Do they have the power to annul the basic tenants of freedom to which we say we subscribe? The O'Reilly's and Hannity's that so eschew foreign input when it comes to American imperialism are suddenly touting European statistics? And we all know that Sweden, Norway, etc, are crazy, and have no right sharing a planet with us.

Rick Santorum is a fucking nut. I'll give him that. He's a true believer, so far-gone that he'd eat a baby fetus like that if the right ancient anthology of arbitrary folktales told him to. But George W. Bush and those like him, who are trotting out their gay whipping boys (but not actual whipping boys cause that might be gay like Vito) in an election year to fire up a base that is, get this, just as disgusted with them as the rest of the country, are cowards. They are cowards who are using prejudice against the most fabulous among us to ensure that their policies of handing dollar-sign-labeled moneybags over to the Scrooge McDucks of the world (who already have money pools!) continue.

And while we're at it, can I just say that Mary Cheney is another disgusting coward? She's doing a lot of interviews lately, promoting her damn book. It's called Now It's My Turn. Yeah. And when questioned on the reason she kept so quiet about gay rights during the 2004 presidential election, her response is invariably that she had to support her father, and that she couldn't be a "one issue voter". "There are people out there who want to kill us..." and that's why dudes shouldn't be allowed to get married.

The Democrats are wasting this opportunity. Howard Dean, in his response, defines this as a wedge issue, used to deflect attention from failed leadership. That's clearly what it is; how many politicians are talking about gay marriage now that they killed the right brown person? But Dean and his fellow Democratic partiers (byob!) are just as eager to deflect attention from the big gay elephant in the room, to never quite take a stand in favor of the gay/lesbian/and-the-rest community. There are more important issues, they say. While I agree that, to many of the American people, this is not a critical issue, it is the most important concern to the people that are having their civil rights trampled day in and day out, the people for whom citizenship in this country continues to be a series of indignities, not the ever-promised freedom for which the terrorists supposedly hate us.

If nothing else, we should be furious with Bush and his cronies for simply wasting time. Bush's Federal Marriage Amendment (the second constitutional amendment, after prohibition, that would limit civil rights, and we all know how successful prohibition was) had no chance of passing. When there are so many other vitally important things going on, Bush and Frist chose to waste the legislatures time with this dogmatist bullshit? How about rebuilding New Orleans? How about sitting at the table with Iran? How about getting in a fighter jet and taking on the aliens head-on (just like my favorite president, Bill Pullman)? Anything. Dear George W. Bush. Fucking do something. Love always, America.

What say we pitch in and buy Bill Bennet, Rick Santorum, James Dobson, and the rest of their lynch mob tickets to the Rufus Wainwright Sings Judy Garland concert? Since they believe that being gay is a choice, what better way to convert them than by sending them into the gayest lion's den since Bert Lahr was king of the forest?

I'm getting married in about a year. Its going to be totally awesome. I cannot fucking wait. But it is my sincere hope that, by that time, it will be made all the more awesome by the fact that marriage in this country will not continue to be wielded as a weapon against love, but will be an inclusive celebration of it.

I was so pleased about the very notion of this movie that it took me a few days to figure out what I'd actually seen. I mean... c'mon. Big gay cowboys in love! What better "fuck you" to the these-colors-don't-run-except-from-two-dudes-kissing America? And that's all well and good, but I also knew that this movie needed to be a lot more than just "that gay cowboy movie". If it was going to be anything but novelty, it needed to be a real live movie. We can worry about changing hearts and minds later (although the very fact that any hearts and minds need changing is fucking AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHAAAHHHAAHHHHHHHH I want to die and kill and die). But first, let's make a damn movie.

The fact is, the nature of the film's central archetypes is what's so exciting about it. Gay cowboys! Ha! Let's go see that gay cowboy movie! That's what puts butts in seats. But, as I say, what about the movie?

Heath Ledger is perfectly cast, Jake Gyllenhaal less so. But both give good performances. It seems at first that the cinematography, with its vistas and Ameri-scapes (!), is going to smother everything like an underpaid nursing home janitor, but it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is that we get to live with Ennis and Jack.

The film doesn't have many easy "forbidden love" scenes. We don't get a scene where Randy Quaid, as a hateful redneck, follows them out of the bar with a gun in his hand and hate in his eyes. In fact, there's very little "homophobia" in the film. Randy Quaid's character sure doesn't approve, and wants nothing to do with it, but that's almost the extent of it. These characters can barely define what it is they hate. They simply know what they've always known. These are not people who are currently engaged in a national dialogue about marriage rights or civil unions. We don't get any easy villains, which would be so easy for your standard gay cowboy movie. That's the most courageous thing about Brokeback Mountain, and it crystalizes with the fact that Ennis' greatest opponent is himself.

I don't want to say that they're courageous performances, because that's a cliché and at the end of the day the dudes are actors. They act. Fuck 'em. But they're good performances, especially everything on Brokeback itself. Unfortunately, there are a few distracting missteps (a heartbreaking reveal in the second act garnered belly laughs from the audience, and Anne Hathaway's hair and makeup is like a visit from a different movie).

It's after we leave Brokeback that the film starts to suffer from a certain biopicness; we live 20-plus years with these characters, and we only have time for the greatest hits of self-loathing cowboy love. Any movie that seriously follows characters over decades is already fighting an uphill battle, but Brokeback fights valiantly, and in the end it's at least a moral victory, if not a complete blowout.

The love that lies at the film's center is well drawn, and through Ennis we almost get to see love again for the first time. I guess that's the point of romance movies. What the hell do I know? I think that the film's greatest accomplishment is that the novelty wears off quickly, and you stop watching "gay cowboys in love" and start watching Ennis and Jack, who share something new and exciting and dangerous. Like all love...

Haha see what I did there?