in the hall of mirrors

Feeling

Last night I watched Weekend, the 2011 film of an encounter between two guys who clearly need each other. Fairly heartbreaking, and very, very well done indeed – writing, acting, all of it. They go through the usual chaotic mistakes of a hasty encounter between strangers, then as they realize they want to spend more time together try to connect more honestly – but with a time limit. The best things in the script are the amazing moments where they hit something very deep – glancingly, exposing themselves almost by accident, as things they mull over in the private back stages of their minds come out into the unexpected intimacy of meeting somebody you like (and have sex with).

I was thinking of a poem by Mark Doty that I first read just a few weeks ago – it startled me, conjuring up some of the more heartbreaking encounters of the 1980s and 1990s (well, for me, mostly between 1977 and 1997):

 

Theory of Beauty (Tony)

 

Somebody who worked in the jail house kitchen

cooked up some grease, burnt it black, scraped

the carbon from the griddle. Somebody made a needle

from the shaft of a filched Bic, ballpoint replaced

 

with a staple beaten flat; then the men received,

one at a time, faces of Christ looking up through

streams of blood from a thorny crown,

or death’s heads looming over x’s of bones.

 

But Tony chose, for his left shoulder, a sign language

glyph, a simple shape, though hard to read;

he had to tell me what it meant. He flicked

his lighter and spilled flecks of dope on the towel

 

across his lap, brushed his bare stomach as though

he might have set himself aflame. He said,

It stands for Love. Then what seemed indifferently

drawn, hardly a sketch, became a blazon

 

that both lifted and exposed the man who wore it,

as he fumbled with the lighter, too stoned to fire

the pipe he held, using it to point to the character

on his arm, making plain the art of what was written there.

Sherlocks

Two Sherlocks in one week: the first episode of the second season of the brilliant BBC television series, and the second Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie film. Interesting as narrative that the film jumps to such a late place in the SH canon (Moriarty over the falls! that was originally the ending of everything), while the television version seems to be setting up a longer, more tangled line of work. Both have very different ways of making Sherlock Holmes post-[hyper]-modern, both direct the skill and energy in different directions –

but they do have something distinctive in common: much more than any previous version, or for that matter than most spy or speculative fictions, rather than emphasizing the complexity of the solution to the problem (which is present of course, but happens rapidly as though taken for granted, at least by SH himself) they emphasize the speed required to solve the problem, and the complex anticipatory and multiply directed actions required to survive the tangle of events.

This is sort of like the impressions that cyberpunk created; and of course it is the post-[hyper?]-modern world. I used to think that increasing transparency of government and corporate actions enforced by rapid information retrieval would lead to less public evil or repression becoming possible; instead we have a weirder world where we know perfectly well that extraordinarily illegal or immoral things are being done by people in charge, because we can see the tail ends of their actions, but we can't quite stop them. Except, of course, occasionally.

As though the attraction of these hyper-Sherlocks is not that they can resolve everything acceptably, but that they can create for us a fighting chance with evils – that they can catch some things, that they can raise the tension, that they can make life at least very difficult for the sociopath, for the greedy, for the selfishly controlling.

And maybe they can even make the whole game so difficult that some of the 'enemy' simply gives up in frustration...

Well: one can hope.

Writing and hearing

Working on a presentation about Derek Jarman's last films, for Wednesday. After much procrastination, aided by the calm, dull backwaters of the Easter holiday. 

And, amid brief frustrations as to exact dates, processes unrecorded, I realize I am enjoying myself: while making dinner in the kitchen, I say aloud to no one: But this is fun.

Strange, too, because my work on AIDS artworks often seems exhaustingly sad; but once I break through the resistance to the dark past, there is such vivid life in the emotions, in the art works. And probably the innate pleasure of making, which I forget most days.

But now I must also get ready for tomorrow morning's lecture; since I already know what I need to talk about, this consists of just re-hearing my class CD of examples. And I discover that they are, also, enjoyable (especially Jody Diamond's In That Bright World for voices and gamelan, always a huge favorite of mine; but they all seem interesting).

Which suggests that my boredom with my own work, my resistance to starting, has nothing to do with the pleasure of actually doing it...

Ah, the complexes and irrational patterns of one's own weaknesses.

Ocean's... twelve

A calm, efficient, bustling day: cleaning, haircut, picked up the exams to mark, managed the first session of the year of the HIV patient group presentations, shopping, lunch. Not in that order; but things tended to happen neatly, quickly, and all slightly too fast to plan ahead and think about – which is actually good; I suppose this is the kind of day that efficient people have all the time, but it's nice to just get a slew of things done (including some pleasant surprises) without much forethought or consideration.

The final errand was the usual one of putting Pills In Bags. This is something that's been a feature of my life for probably more than fifteen years – a large number of small plastic bags (the last ones bought at a head shop in Los Angeles – when I saw the quality I bought a lot of them, they should last a decade or so), trash can and scissors, boxes and bottles of medications, vitamins, enzymes. A highly formalized ritual that takes place over the Parsons table I bought in Hong Kong – or was it San Francisco perhaps? – in any case a table that has been with me forever, and which remains clean, neat, graceful and only slightly dented in spots. Because all the pills have to go into the bags for a month's planned dispersal....

And, of course, the only way to do this chore without going completely mad is by doing it in front of the television. Ocean's Twelve was playing – the not-so-successful sequel to Ocean's Eleven, and prequel to Ocean's Thirteen – and, like many people, I'd been slightly disappointed in the relatively quiet tone and cool, European flavor of the middle film in comparison with the brash fun of the first and last ones. But watching it a second time, I found myself enjoying it – even more, being proud of it: it is indeed very European, the wit has a narrower focus, and the sense that the entire plot vanishes up its own, well you may name any orifice you like, has a certain Calvino-like playfulness.

Note a few tracks of music that are especially sexy, such as the one called 'Lifting the Building', or the chaotic bouzouki-esque rush of noises towards the end. And the whole range of things that it plays with – little rooms in Amsterdam, piazzas in Italy, the villas, the intricate amusements created by the two female stars – especially Julia Roberts playing someone pretending to be, well, Julia Roberts – it really is a lovely movie, and the final party with its blithe Continental elegance is a real pleasure.

Indeed, in these days when the US is looking particularly clumsy and overbearing, when the sheer stupidity of the hysterical right wing (claiming the earthquake in Haiti is a judgement from God? fighting sensible health plans that might actually, oh horrors, take care of its citizens?) seems still so present (yes, thank God they aren't in charge, but they're still very vocal) – although I remain an American living in a provincial northern corner of Europa, I feel distinctly comfortable with that.

Small streets in Amsterdam, cafés in Paris; I'll visit Hans-Rainer in Berlin in the next few months, make plans with our partners in Copenhagen and Parma... yes: I should go ahead and put in that application for EU citizenship. How could I not want such a thing?...

Palermo Shooting

The title of Wim Wenders' 2008 film. Not very successful, widely regarded as pretentious and self-indulgent; and it's true that the script isn't subtle or surprising (who would have thought Death would be so talkative and sententious?).

But this isn't a review... for real film people, it may be a failure; but for me it's enjoyable. Watching a tall, good-looking man with an expressive face and tattoos wander around Düsseldorf and (especially) Palermo and through his own dreams, taking photographs and being existentially depressed... it's actually fun. Moody and relaxing.

Of course, as I am I, although I can easily fall in with the mood of aimless self-examination and the circular, tangled obsessions with death and time, I can't help being annoyed by the fact that the protagonist is also very rich and successful. (You should see his studio – insanely spacious, a vast ultramodern German building with many computers and innovative windows and, well, a few expensive but tasteful shelves – the kind you put a lemon and a Hasselblad on, just to show that they're shelves.) As is Andreas Frege, the ex-punk star who plays him. As is Wenders.

So... frankly... I think I'd enjoy being disaffected, having a (late-ish) midlife crisis, being moody and unsure, much more – if I knew that my financial future was secure...

Then I'd go to Palermo. Probably without a camera: but, admittedly, with a lined notebook.

Je t'aime je t'aime

After a rather extreme version of the usual winter irresponsible incoherent dead-time day and night, I watched this 1968 film by Resnais – perhaps not the best choice for someone thinking about depression and the incoherence of his life. Or, perhaps, the best possible choice.

No, let me explain, briefly, or you'll think this is all stranger or more dramatic than it is. After reaching a certain point in Jung's autobiography (and being unwilling to read further into the relationship with Freud and its unhappy conflicts), and thinking about my own problems and concerns (winter depression, short and silent days, etc.), I'd downloaded a vast Internet collection of segments of Two and a Half Men, up to the present episode. A silly comedy, of course: which has, of course, gotten edgier over the past two years (has no one else noticed that Sheen looks markedly unhealthy in the past year, perhaps a bit too much like his alcoholic character?); which is about addiction and an incoherent life (but, unlike mine, a wealthy and pleasure-drenched version of an incoherent life, one embedded in my long-missed California). So when I found myself watching episode after episode, in order, up until the latest one which started on my computer at 9 am on a Sunday morning....

and then I went to bed, wondering about different kinds of addictive behavior and avoidance. At three in the afternoon David R. rang my doorbell, unannounced, to talk; I sent him away, unusually, and went back to bed; and then this evening saw this strange Resnais film about suicide, despair, time, fragmented time, memory, and les temps morts. It has a rather frightening premise: time travel limited to re-experiencing moments from one's own life – gone awry, where the moments are uncontrolled and out of order.

And now I shall go to bed, again, but at a more normal time, and tomorrow shall have a real and semi-normal day.

And yes, I know: what we're looking at here is simply a common experience: when passive television/film experiences can saturate a person, hypnotize a person, it can eat up their entire life – this is a familiar thing in Los Angeles, especially, but ever since the advent of videotapes it has been common everywhere. (And even before, in those strange habitués of repertory houses: early Woody Allen bears the mark of his having done this – obsessively spending too many afternoons seeing one film after another.) And now, with computers, it is even more common.

Watching too much: it is perhaps an experience that has grounded so many films of the nouvelle vague and other avant-garde forces... and their acute awareness of how bad we really are at handling time, how much it gets away from us, how by the time we have any idea what we wanted from it it's already gone. And of course, any scientist will be just as bewildered by time and experience: how can we live our lives in the face of the vast scale of things? (Even the many versions of the  Hitchhiker's Guide makes this problem an endless object of fun.)

But it still seems resonant – the problem of dead time, of repeated time, of imagined time; and the fairly insoluble problem of whether time spent alone writing is any more interesting than time spent watching actors on a screen. Which of those is really temps morts? Are they both?

And what else is there for me to do, anyway?...

You will say: I would have been better off sitting and talking to David. Yes, I say: but – how long, each day, can I wait for such things to occur – by chance?...

Italians and circuses

Reading a Fellini biography; and watching many Fellini movies, plus other bits of Italian neorealism – it's avoidant, I know (still fallow after that long trip, must get back to work).

I've always loved a few things of Fellini – notably Satyricon – but I didn't know any of the early work; it's addictive – sentimentally charged Italian lifestyles of the 1950s; I find it startlingly easy to identify with these people.

And with their problems, as in 8-1/2: "I really don't have anything to say... but I want to say it all the same."

It is even affecting my dreams: which are now of circuses and symbols....

Asa nisi masa! Asa nisi masa!

To the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

[A grumpy letter to the festival. Perhaps I should sign myself Brigadier-General, as in those parody Monty Python letters to the Times.]

Dear LLGFF,

So the 22nd London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is on tour; and just three movies from its series will come to Newcastle, at the Tyneside Cinema, in mid-August, with about a week's notice through flyers in the cinema itself.

And there are at least three disappointments: that it was scheduled so late and casually (we didn't make the brochure this year, but are on a sticker attached to the brochure instead); Newcastle dates aren't mentioned on the LLGFF website, even today; and, most frustratingly for me, neither of the films about HIV+ men (Derek or Before I Forget) are coming here. Instead we're getting a lesbian film, a film about gay guys who act nearly straight, and a Gregg Araki film with no gay or lesbian content which has somehow weaseled into the already very skimpy programme.

As an 'aging' (51 y.o.) gay man with AIDS, who is a member of the local HIV patient group and who speaks fifteen or twenty times a year at a variety of classes and public venues about my experiences, I'm accustomed to semi-humorously dismissing the awareness of the local scene about either men or HIV. Although there are nearly six hundred HIV patients in the Northeast, and more than a third of them gay men, and probably more of those in the 'aging' category than not, I understand that the lesbian contingent tends to be more active here; and that nobody in the Northeast is ever very interested in the HIV+ community anyway.

I also understand that the Tyneside Cinema, although it has Neil Tennant as a major patron, has other things to do than pay much attention to the LLGF festival every year. It is always scheduled in August, when the fewest people are around; it always involves very few films, tucked in a corner as it were; and it is always hugely underpublicized.

I also understand, as I am myself a foreigner from California who moved here six years ago, that LGBT culture in the UK happens mostly in London and Manchester, and that nobody in London normally gives a toss about the provinces, especially the distant Northeast.

But it's still acutely disappointing. Six years in the UK provinces has made me accustomed to the mildly contemptuous disinterest of Londoners and their well-funded institutions, the uninvolvement of locals, and the avoidant boredom that the local community seems to feel at any mention of HIV; and of course it's disappointing to consider another pointless exercise by Araki that has nothing to do with anyone's personal experiences or needs up here.

But I can't help feeling that it could all be different.

Cheers,

...

[Sent also to the Tyneside Cinema, via its apparently carefully screened website e-mail, as well as to various LG figures in the Northeast.]

***

Hmm, well, helpful and polite answers from the LLGFF and the Tyneside Cinema, which have left me pretty mollified: it appears that they are going to show seven of the nine films from the tour, including both of the ones I want to see, but in two groups (the second in September). So clearly My Demographic, such as it is, is also included in this festival.

I still think that London institutions tend to ignore the UK provinces, but it appears that this one isn't doing that.

And I am still unenchanted to see Gregg Araki pushed to the front of the queue, but I guess that's a matter of personal taste....

Mamma mia

Well, well, two summer blockbuster films in one week: quite bizarre for me.

David C. and David R. wanted to go; I argued that I didn't really want to see Mamma Mia, but they wanted to, and it sounded pleasant to spend the time with them, so I went.

Well.

I suppose there are a host of reasons why I could expect not to like much of the film, including:

1. I'm not a fan of ABBA.

2.

... well actually that's sort of it, right there.

But that's enough. I do know that one of the only false notes struck in my time in Australia, as I was lamenting being sent away from Sydney, which looked so much like the promised land at the time, was that for some unfathomable reason the natives – practically all of them, as far as I could tell – really, really like ABBA. With no irony. It was, I suppose, the canker in the apple.

Okay, well, back to the present, such as it is: Meryl Streep is excellent, she's the best thing in the film, she's the only one you believe most of the time. Her backup girls, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, are also fun to watch, although neither one does as much as their fans might have hoped. The only good musical numbers belong to the older women, when they're camping it up and making fun of themselves – everyone else is boring. Extremely boring.

Except, of course, the chorus of Greek [sic] boys. David R. liked the little one with the shaved head (who looked like a quasi-Greek version of a local Geordie lad, which is probably why he liked him – but who was actually, I'm sure, either a Broadway or a West End chorine with a trendoid look). I preferred the big one with the shoulders and the head of hair (whom I suspect was a nice Argentine lad named Juan Pablo di Pace, though it's hard to tell as the choristers rush past). In fact I kept elbowing both or either David when the studly one appeared; so it was rather wonderful when Colin Firth, in a sudden moment of rather unprepared gayness, jumps to embrace him at the end. (And isn't that one in the eye for all those British girls who swooned over Pride and Prejudice.)

Oh, and the brief, completely ridiculous choreography for the lads at the pier was funny. That was about twenty seconds' worth.

So that's another one well off the list (good thing I really don't have a Feature Film List, at least not a current one – that's the problem with buying DVDs, most movies are not worth seeing twice, or once).

But it was nice to see boys being sexy... of course since they were musical chorus boys no doubt they're all straight (ha ha)... and Meryl was actually quite good, almost throughout (although why was her big dramatic solo cut so awkwardly? must have been a lot of takes)... and it's nice to see old people (i.e. in their forties and fifties) finding love and/or sex and lots of fun on a Greek island.

Bodes well for me, I guess.

[PS: it appears that Juan Pablo di etc., a dancer/model/actor, is the same lad who was in the news for objecting to having his genitals airbrushed smaller in the Rigoletto poster. Hmm. A nice Argentine boy, with bells on....]

Too dark a knight

Today, a day of seeing the doctor, prescriptions, correcting paperwork, getting things done: a decent enough day, though there was no Writing of the Book in it. (And I can't help thinking that those are the dangerous days: when you really are busy but don't get any of the big stuff done. However, admittedly, there was less wasted time than in the past.)

Then Andrew took a bunch of us to see The Dark Knight, which was frankly hard to get in to on a Wednesday (here in the UK that's the day for 2-for-1 movies) – we were bumped from 7 o'clock to 8, then that was full, then we went to another theater. But we got in at that one.

No point in a long review: just – well, the hype is quite accurate. This is very, very good indeed, not even faintly camp, very serious, and quite violent – almost, in fact, deadly realistic, despite all the phantasmagoric elements. And yes: Heath Ledger, despite having died, despite any assumptions I (or you) might have made that all the accolades were exaggerated because he had died, does an absolutely authentic Joker – every split second real, every split second fascinating, humorous and sick-making and frightening. A grotesque that makes you shrink from it, but there are clips I'd love to see again (notably him in a wig, then the nurse's dress – utterly amazing work done in just a couple of minutes.) Even if he hadn't died, he far bypassed Nicholson on this one (and I know that sounds like heresy, but there you are – this was a considerably denser Joker than Nicholson's).

Which means we really did lose a major actor. Bummer.

I will confess, though: I was not in the mood for something that dark, that realistic – that much like a newspaper headline – although I do take away a certain appreciation of something artistic and well done. But the movie has shaken me, a bit at least (and on a day when I was thinking that the world of news and headlines and bad things happening was distracting me too much).

I hope I can clear my head and write tomorrow... though I admit that, if I can't, I've at least seen something really good.