I Got A New Phone...

And it takes better pictures than my old one!

The Play's The Thing

Over the weekend, one of my coworkers and invited me to go see the play The Little Dog Laughed at a local theater with her and her husband. I initially was unenthusiastic about it -- by initially, I mean when I first read the title -- until I read the description of the play:

Diane is a Hollywood superagent who likes to order her Cobb Salad with everything on the side, but finds it a wee bit harder to control the accompaniments that flavor the life of her #1 actor client. While she struggles to transform her budding leading man into the next Orlando Bloom, she encounters one small problem. He may well be falling hard for the cute male escort who recently visited his hotel room in New York.

Interesting enough subject matter. Plus, the description of the play on the website is also accompanied by this warning:

Contains Strong Language, Adult Content and Male Nudity

Male nudity?? That's my favorite kind of nudity!

(The nekkid parts, so to speak, were very brief, and I found myself concentrating on their faces intently during that part. It's a skill I honed when I had to pick my grandmother up from the bathroom floor numerous times in the late 90s.)

The description sort of made it sound like a Noel Coward sex comedy, or maybe something by Joe Orton. And that is a good thing. Plus, I hadn't been to any sort of live theater in a very, very long time, possibly since I last went to the Shaw Festival in Ontario. (Hopefully I'll get to go again this season. I need to see more plays.)

The play was very good: watching it, it seemed a little old fashioned, although it does involve a major pet peeve of mine -- the idea that only straight men seem are allowed to play gay characters in TV and films. Not just straight men, but vociferously straight men. What's up with that? They can't find any gay actors in Hollywood? Pardon me if I remain skeptical.

The audience was an interesting mix: about 2/3 older, obviously straight couples, people who I guessed had a subscription for tickets at this theater, and 1/3 of the the audience were groups of gay men. A fair number of seats were empty, and I wasn't sure whether this was a normal thing, or if this was due to the nature of the material. And a few people did not return after the intermission. One guy even left during the first act, which honestly made me feel bad for the actors who had to keep acting as he walked right out of the performance, even if it apparently is not an isolated incident.

Anyways, during the play, I did notice something peculiar -- namely, my discomfort when the gay characters did, well, gay things. Not because I don't want to see them -- anytime I can see some sort of representation of who I am, I appreciate it -- but because I'm conscious of the straight people with me, and what they think. I'm conscious of when they sigh and look at their watches halfway through the first act. I'm conscious of their tenseness. I had a similar experience when I visited Provincetown with my brother, his girlfriend, and my parents: I was extremely conscious that my mom was looking at a Tom of Finland poster in a shop window. And also the time in AmeriCorps when Dave and I went to see Brokeback Mountain in the theater, and we got to the part of the movie that featured the two leads having angry, desperate, unpleasant-seeming sex in the tent.

Apparently I view myself as some gay diplomatic representative in the lives of the straight people around me, responsible for their feelings and beliefs about gay people, a feeling that has only gotten more pronounced since I've moved to Virginia. Which is odd, since I have a lot more interaction with gay folks here than I ever did in West Palm Beach.

I wonder whether I'm the only person that feels this sort of thing? It's a defensive reaction, and one that drives me nuts. Why can't I just enjoy the play, and to hell with whether anybody else does? Their acceptance of me as a person is not contingent on whether they like the play or not. (The consensus seemed to be that they liked the second half better than the first, although my coworker lamented the "sad" ending.) Neither this play, nor Tom of Finland, really represents my experience as a gay man.

I don't really know what I'm trying to say. It's just been on my mind since I've seen it.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the play. I found, in the first act, when most of the interaction was between the two male actors, I tended to be very conscious of the artificiality of the language; during the second act, when the two female actors interacted with the men, it seemed to flow a lot better. I don't really know if this was due to my hyper-consciousness in the first half, although one of the coworkers mentioned something similar.

The second part also tended to be very "meta", with the action being described in theatrical language even as its happening, which was a neat trick, and something I don't see very often. And it also manages to make the traditional, Hollywood-happy-ending, seem melancholy and compromised, hence my co-worker's comment about the sad ending.

Overall, in spite of my discomfort, it was a good experience, and I would be interested in seeing more productions at the Barksdale Theater.

Le week-end

So I drove to my brother's place in North Carolina over the weekend; my brother had possibly been going into surgery -- or something -- for a narrow esophagus, and my parents were there, with the dog. So, in order to demonstrate solidarity with my brother, and in order to see the dog, I packed some stuff in my suitcase and hoofed it to Durham after work on Friday. It's only a three hour trip, and my parents offered to pay for my gas.

It turned out that all the doctors did was dope him up and shove a camera down his throat. They found some scarring on his throat that was somehow allergy-related -- don't ask me, my mother was saying this stuff like it makes sense, because she herself is a nurse -- but evidently nothing really required intervention. But that was on Friday, so when I first saw him that night, he was hungover from the medication. Therefore, not much fun.

On Saturday, we went on a tour of local organic farms, because my brother is a hippie who went to University of Michigan and is all environmental and stuff. I wasn't particularly thrilled about the farms, but it ended up being more fun than I expected. One of the farms, Celebrity Dairy, had the cutest freakin' goats imaginable. One of the little (goat-)kids started chewing on my jeans, which, while it should have been annoying, was way to cute to be annoying. I took eleventy-thousand pictures of those goatlings -- so many, in fact, that I actually wore out the batteries in the camera. Unfortunately, the camera wasn't even mine, it was my parents, so I can't even share those with you! Just trust me on this: baby goats are adorable. Also, I have become fascinated by goat eyes, with their horizontal pupil. That's just cool! Plus, my parents bought me some of the goat cheese they had for sale, which is absolutely delicious.

We also went to a vineyard and winery, Horizon Cellars Winery, on the tour, and took part in a wine tasting. I'm not a big fan of wine, but I'm told the wine wasn't half bad, and my dad ended up buying a case of it. They even bought me a bottle of Chardonnay, because I said I liked that best. Well, it was the least wine-like.

Yesterday my brother took us to his place of employment, and then out to one of the sites he works on. It was an abandoned farmhouse, with some evidence of squatters living there, and a vulture living in the attic. I probably have ticks living on me now, giving me lyme disease, and it's all my brother's fault! We take sibling our rivalry seriously. Then, largely thanks to my incessant needling, the four of us went to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Which, seriously, was hilarious, and I think I may be in love with Jason Segel now. We all liked it a lot, and I think I laughed the hardest in the theater. I seriously had tears in my eyes as I was walking out of the theater, just from laughing so hard.

After that, we went to a sushi place to have the best sushi and the worst service I've had in a long, long time. Seriously, a party of ten folks was seated after us, and they had eaten and left by the time we got our dinner. It was ridiculous. And afterwards, with a belly full of raw salmon, I drove home. I had a lot of fun this weekend, even if I was just hanging around my family.

Dreaming Is Free

I had a dream the other night that I was recruiting elementary school students into the Army to fight in Iraq. I was in the parking lot behind the A&P, near where I grew up, and I was giving these 8 year olds these big plastic notebooks with big, bright buttons on them: they had to input their information into these toy-like things in order to be recruited. Then I corralled these kids into a helicopter which flew them off to Iraq. Who knew that my sub-conscious was such a wily satirist?

The next night I had a dream that I was at a carnival on some Pacific island. A woman -- actually, Mo Gaffney, whom I recognize mostly from her work on "Absolutely Fabulous" -- was doing tarot readings on a bed. I was trying to get my tarot read, but somebody cut in front of me, and was yelling at Mo. Eventually the yeller took off, and Mo said, "Let me see what card most accurately represents you." She drew a card, looked at it, and showed it to me. It depicted a nondescript man with a mountain in the background, with the text just saying, "TRANSLATOR".

I also had a dream that my dead grandparents came back from the dead to join me at Christmas. But for me, that's not a particularly uncommon theme.

I Made You A Muxtape!

Click pic to listen!



(Good heavens, this takes me back!)

Via. And via, too.

K for Kentucky

I had a long weekend this past weekend, so I drove (eight hours!) to Lexington, Kentucky to see my friend Casey. We had a good time, hanging out, catching up with "Lost", eating sushi, visiting the two (!) comic book stores that are within walking distance of his house. Color me jealous. The above photo was taken from the parking lot of his apartment building as I was leaving: you can't quite get a sense of just how pink the sky really was that morning. It was glorious.

While I was there, I forced Casey to get a library card since, well, that's my job now, ya dig? So we trucked it on down to the main branch of the Lexington Public Library, which, honestly, aside from the sheer number of homeless men taking shelter from the rain in the cafe area, was pretty impressive. Well, actually, the homeless men were sort of impressive, too, but not quite as positively. It had the world's largest ceiling clock, a cafe, a little gallery. It also had a staggering amount of graphic novels; I annoyed Casey by insisting that he had to read various examples, such as, say, Watchmen.

But anyways, the gallery had a little exhibition of photographs of tea plantations in Thailand and whatnot, nice photographs, if hardly overwhelming. But we also found a pamphlet for an exhibition called Miniature Worlds: Art from India, which I decided we definitely had to go see. I am so glad we did.

I absolutely love these paintings of India. I love the stylistic flourishes, the flatness and graphic beauty of the images. These artists loved color, and knew how to use it; they also had little use for perspective, or for anatomy. The paintings tend to look a little cartoony, which, truth to tell, is part of the appeal for me. But the images are absolutely exquisite, and immaculately detailed -- enough so that you are issued a magnifying glass at the beginning of the exhibit.

Some of the graphic shorthand that is at play can be lost in translation -- it seems, for example, that any figure colored blue is either Vishnu or being associated with Vishnu in the mind of the viewer -- but the tags that accompanied each work did a lot to fill in the gaps, and I have an elementary knowledge of Hinduism, which also helped. A lot of the work, unsurprisingly, revolved around Hindu myths or legends, which was just as well; the few examples of portraiture that was exhibited were underwhelming. Part of the cartooniness of the art is the fact that the people represented are almost wholly symbolic: they are who they are by what they wear, or what they are doing, or their size in relation to other figures, or the number of arms they have. If you go by their faces, they almost all look the same; the faces are secondary and unrepresentative, similar to what you find in Egyptian art. This is also similar to what you tend to find in comic books. I love it.

As a "pendant" to this exhibition, they also had a room that featured an exhibition called THE INNER EYE: Folk Art of India. These artworks were all contemporary, and I have to say that they came as an enormous (pleasant) surprise to me. They were painted or drawn, indeed, in a simple, folky style, but the works themselves really appealed to me. They weren't as mythologically oriented as the main exhibition was, and at least one of the works dealt specifically with modern events -- specifically, the tsunami of 2004. Some of the works initially seemed to be little more than a childish drawing, with simplified figures against an abstract background, but when you look closer you see the stippling, evenly distributed dots or dashes providing tonal contrast between different objects in the drawings. This was the case with Ganesh Jogi and Teju Ben, who started drawing late in life, and their children, who elaborate on the styles their parents developed. Montu and Joba Chitrakar work in what seems to be a much more narrative, traditional style, which comes from the fact that for their caste, painting scrolls developed out of a desire to illustrate stories as they were being told. These works tended to be larger and more colorful, less personal and more epic in scope.

Honestly, all the artwork in this exhibition made me really happy.

The Empire Never Ended

This was in the parking lot when I left for lunch yesterday:



When I first saw it, I thought it was just high-schooler who defaced her car with poster paint. But then I read what it says (it accuses me of being an ignoramus!), and if that is the case, girl has some issues with paranoia.

I'm not sure I agree with the car. (I can't believe I just typed that!) A brief definition comes up as:

overthrow something: to undermine or overthrow a government or other
institution

Um, what is it subverting? The mass media seems, if anything, to encourage complacence. To overthrow is an action; the milk that flows from the media teat is all about remaining passive. This undermines our political system, but, if anything, can be used effectively by a cunning government. But I'm also interpreting it as someone who is slightly to the left; I suppose a relatively convincing argument could be made for a proponent on the right.

Coincidentally, I am also rereading (for the umpteenth time) Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, a media product that actually is very conscious of trying to be subversive -- if not of any particular government, then of the concept of identity and time itself. Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics actually discussed the book in depth, and suddenly a lot of the peculiar bits sort of fall into place. It is one of the few books that actually does aspire to be a graphic novel: reading it now, you definitely get a sense that Morrison knew how he wanted it to end. That's not to say that the trajectory was a clear one, but he always had the end in sight.

For some reason, I'm getting a lot out of it this rereading.

Holy $#!%

Someone just crashed into the building right under my window.


Let me repeat: SOMEONE JUST CRASHED INTO THE BUILDING RIGHT UNDER MY WINDOW.

My immediate response, to give you that "On-the-scene" feeling:

Bill (2/24/2008 2:17:44 AM): DUDE#
Bill (2/24/2008 2:17:55 AM): SOMEONE JUST CRASHED INTO THE DOWNSTAIRS
Bill (2/24/2008 2:18:06 AM): LIKE RIGHT INTO IT!@
Eric (2/24/2008 2:18:06 AM): OH SHIT
Eric (2/24/2008 2:18:20 AM): did someone call 911
Bill (2/24/2008 2:19:14 AM): yes
Bill (2/24/2008 2:20:25 AM): holy shit. LOL

Cops are on the scene, the driver was walked to the ambulance. I am suddenly happy that I live on the second floor -- that is, until the wall caves in later tonight. Sweet dreams!

A Purloined Valentine To All My Reader(s)!

I have stolen borrowed this from Chris Sims' ISB because it's just too, too perfect:

Because some holidays can best be expressed by a brain transplanted into a robot body about to have a homosexual (?) smoocheroonie with a French-speaking gorilla revolutionary, immediately before they are both vaporized.

This is truly the love that dare not speak its name, expressed by a pun I dare not say aloud.

This is from the classic Doom Patrol #34, by Grant Morrison and Richard Case. I mean, how do you not get a little choked up about this?

Makes me want to get up and sing:

Love is in the air everywhere I look around,
Love is in the air, every sight and every sound,
And I don't know if I'm being foolish,
Don't know if I'm being wise
But it's something that I must believe in
And it's there when I look in your eyes.

Doom Patrol no. 86 cover -- the first appearance of our doomed lovers -- courtesy of the Grand Comics Database Project. Check it out!

(I still think this "holiday" is wretched, a cruel joke on those of us who happen to be single and in our mid-30s, but it's a little less wretched than last year for reasons I might one day disclose.)

Things That Make Me Happy

(I mean, besides my being employed.)

The B-52's: Funplex. I had suddenly become interested in The B-52's again after hearing the Junior Senior song "Take My Time", which features Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson -- you can see the video for it here -- the video is a little "Mesopotamia", a little Tom Tom Club. There was also a write-up about their origins in Rip it up and start again : Postpunk 1978-1984 which did a lot to raise my enthusiasm for the band. As a result, I've been rediscovering the joys of "Wild Planet," "Whammy," hell, even "Bouncing Off The Satellites" has a couple of really winning tunes on it. I knew the group was still touring, but they also haven't released a new song in a decade, so it seemed unlikely that they would be releasing much in the way of new music anytime soon. But then, yesterday, I happened to stumble on their website, and guess who has a new album coming in March? And a new single out now?

And it's actually a good song! Not their best, by any means, but good enough. It sounds a little like "Get Ready"-era New Order, but that makes sense, since it has the same producer. The slightly synthetic feel leaves Fred's vocals pretty naked when it's only him singing; to be honest, I think his vocals work better on something slightly groovier, something more like -- dare I say it? -- "Love Shack". But when the girls start harmonizing, everything falls into place, and all is right with the world. Especially when you have lyrics like this: "I'm your daytime waitress at the Taco Tiki Hut / I'm your daytime waitress Here's your stupid 7-Up." Makes me wish my local Funplex had a Taco Tiki Hut.

Yotsuba&! by Kiyohiko Azuma. I'm not normally a fan of manga outside of Osamu Tezuka, just because I tend to like my comics either four-color Pop Art superheroes beating up mutant street beatniks, or pretentiously arty and in black and white. In fact, this manga shares a lot in common with my arty comics, except it isn't even remotely pretentious. It's a slice-of-life comedy that is actually, genuinely funny. So funny that yesterday, while eating a tofu burrito at Moe's Southwest Cafe, I absolutely lost it, and damn near died for laughing. (Tofu: It Kills!) The expressions on the title character's face as she waits for a souvenir that it seems will never appear, or when she finishes lighting fireworks, or as she has a bouquet of flowers every bit as large as she is tied to her body (!), that's what make this comic a pure gem. The character is full of joy and love, and brings equal amounts joy and agitation to all who know her. It's the best comic I have read in a while, and because my library carries the first four volumes, I don't even need to buy my own copies! (They appear to be well-worn, as well, so it seems like I'm not the only one in the library that is reading them.)

and lastly:

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. Cuz teh phunny, it iz.