Category: 1 - markclindsey.com

Goo Goo Ga Ga 03/23/2012

Madonna has just released her 12th studio album, "MDNA" (get it?) and I am happy to announce that it is in most ways a return to form. Dance-y, electric, bitchy, personal and silly, it has it all. Her last record ”Hard Candy” could have been made by just about anyone with the same producers. It isn’t that it did not have its moments (to quote Bridget Jones “she is nothing if not professional”) but it lacked, well, her. But what is “her”? What has Madonna meant as an artist – and is it worth paying attention to anymore?

In this decade the new mainstream street urchin is certainly Lady Gaga. If the zeitgeist then was the New York East Village Scene, the theme of the 2000s (I will not say aughts) is the robot. Not the festive dance craze of the 70s, but people as automatons, vis-à-vis glazed sexuality and autotune. Lady Gaga, especially in her first incarnation, brought this concept to a mass audience just as Madonna brought the New York dance scene to us in the 80s. Of course I am old now so Gaga resonated zero with me – it seemed silly. This is how I know that I’ve matured past the sell-by date of current diva pop. But I would not say that I was unaware.

There have been the inevitable comparisons to Madge. Cold sexuality? Check. Grandstanding? Check. Faux outrageous acts? Check and check. Madonna, however, has always sourced black and gay for her inspirations. Gaga, by comparison, sources aliens and (at least lately) Elton John as her style references. I have considered this for a while; just as Gaga coerced her gay and tweenie fans with Eurotrash she certainly pulls equally from rock n roll (at least today). Her primary difference, in the end, is that she has what Madonna lacks: a full, rich and powerful voice.

Ergo the endless remarks that Gaga is “talented” and that Madonna is not. Well, people, how many Madonna tunes can you hum right now? A lot! She co-wrote them all. She depends on collaborators! you say. Wow- what astute choices, I say. I am here to suggest that not only is Madonna talented but prodigiously so. Love her or leave her she makes one strong record after another, including a bona fide original (her first album “Madonna”). There is her rock solid instinct in choosing her songs and collaborators, fine tuning them so that they stick, and keeping her style just edgy and modern enough to keep her current. This talent has been attributed to her business savvy, which is not quite accurate: it is more like an animal instinct. Bowie had it as well in his day.

I know she is desperate and probably unfriendly but Madonna captured lightning in a bottle for so much of the 80s and 90s crowd. I also know it is the same for the fans of Gaga, a genre-defying fame junkie just like her. But I would say the comparison stops there. The answer to my question is yes: Madonna rules. And the bitch is back.

Exhale 02/15/2012

So Whitney Houston (1963-2012) has passed away. If you are not under a rock I am sure you have been flooded with images of her, flashing across television screens all over, old Whitney, Bodyguard Whitney, young and dewy fresh Whitney (“You Give Good Love”). It is hard not to have some sort of response if you are over 30. She was with us as a media presence for a long time, even as her life was cut short.

I was at dinner with my partner and friends – we had just been sat. As I returned from the restroom everyone had their Smartphone out and stunned looks on their faces. It is the kind of news you have to tell, and they did. My stomach fell. I didn't know why this affected me so much; is it because she had been with us for so long? I can personally attest that “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” inspired sensations of murder in me – they played that thing relentlessly. It was goody-goody and hard driving at once. I cannot have been alone in this. Still I was deeply affected at her passing.

She had actually already lost the voice – that beautiful voice – years earlier. For her last “comeback” record (I Look To You, 2009) she could sadly no longer hit the 2nd and 3rd registers of her famous 3 octave range. Maybe this was when it set in that I missed her, not because I had loved her so much in the 80s (I remember how sparkling her first single sounded as a teen driving to the beach, but let’s be honest, most of it was cheesy to me), but because someone great had left the room. Just like Michael Jackson, it is very easy to take a gift for granted when it is delivered so effortlessly and with such command. Whitney, even at the end, never sang a song she did not positively own. She was a pro.

I think that her best period, her prime, is The Bodyguard /Waiting To Exhale period. I have read and heard a lot of interesting discussion on just what Houston did to the style of music after 1985 (and the many successive acolytes starting with Mariah Carey). Basically she made polite ballads popular again. Songs of love and longing, never lust, and certainly not revenge. That is why they were corny to a teenage me. By the time of The Bodyguard her style had matured and became smokier. The songs were at once more demanding (“I Have Nothing”) and less fussy (“I Will Always Love You”). It began a period of more stripped down material that let to one of her finest moments, “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)”, a winding and conversational moment for her. It was clearly the work of an adult, a mature woman, and an artist in her prime. It shows no production, there are no fingerprints on it, it is just her. I had always imagined she produced it herself.

And at the height of her beauty, talent and fame she met and married Bobby Brown. This is what haunts us still, the fact that she sullied a perfectly constructed image, first as America’s sweetheart, then our favorite soul diva. I had always been aware of the other Whitney, a fiercely combative interviewee, with a very haughty and testy persona. There was always confrontation and danger in those eyes, no? She had the haughtier of a queen. The marriage and drug abuse only exaggerated what we already knew. It made her fall from grace seem like a natural devolution. I have heard her say that she never felt like a real person until she met Bobby Brown – because he wanted her so directly. In so defined a person this was bound to create two versions- good Whitney and bad Whitney, the public and the private. Our fascination at her passing is in this dichotomy: we cannot believe that something so young and fresh had changed, and then passed. It is the American way that we push our heroes to the brink.

As there are no accidents, perhaps she was waiting to exhale and she actually did want to dance with somebody who loved her. It is sad that it led her down such a long and destructive path. But it is worthy of her that we must now piece it all back together: old Whitney, young Whitney, crack head Whitney, and that impossibly fresh smiling lovely young girl who enchanted us all. As the story unfolds for us one thing is certain: those “cheesy” safe ballads have more than stood the test of time. In their very accessibility they had hidden an absolute master of American song.

Wide Awake, Still Dreaming 01/10/2012

Michael: Harold, don't you have any other music , you know, from this century?
Harold: There is no other music, not in my house.
Michael: There's been a lot of terrific music in the last ten years.
Harold: Like what?

Television is a drag when you work nights – there is rarely anything on when you stumble in after 11pm. But Friday I came home to find a treat of sorts: New York 55 was running The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983). I had not seen it in many years, and I cannot for the life of me remember screening it the first time, which is unusual. I know that I was in Charleston SC, a senior in high school, and deep into movies.

What I do remember is immediately accepting every character in the warmest way – all of them youngish, rich and interesting, but not teenagers. Nine characters gather at a funeral to say goodbye to Alex, a bright light from college. We know he was special because they are all morose as they attend, and we know their heyday from the soundtrack, a highly effective Top 20 playlist from the mid to late 60s. As Jobeth Williams plays The Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on the organ while the casket is being removed, we know they are edgy and kooky, too.

The scene is a beautiful coastal town in the South. Alex is gone (a famously cut Kevin Costner), so we have a weekend sleepover with resident yuppies Harold and Sarah (Kevin Kline and Glenn Close), Nick the drug dealer/washout (a very seminal William Hurt), lawyer and potential inseminate Meg (a memorable Mary Kay Place), cynic, opportunist and “People” writer Michael (a pre-pumped Jeff Goldblum), Chloe, the young girlfriend Alex left behind (the odd and wonderful Meg Tilly), and finally the triangular set Karen, husband Richard and hot TV actor Sam (the very good JoBeth Williams, straight-laced Don Galloway, and superhunk Tom Berenger, in very fine form). Karen and Richard are rich suburbanites, Richard leaves early in the film but has important scenes, and Sam holds a flame for Karen. Our nine characters are left to put together the pieces of their lives and relationships in one short weekend.

The film still had a magic for me as I watched them all play set pieces with one another. This is a very canny product – deliberately written and cut, all of the jokes judiciously placed, and the vibe set to both the 60s (soundtrack) and the 80s (aging hipsters making dough). What is remarkable to consider was that as a young man in my teens and as an older man in my 40s my reaction was the same: the movie has a perfectly evoked sense of nostalgia, comfort food, and good jokes. Yes some of the lines read as if right off of a page (before he leaves lawyer Richard has a particularly wooden scene where he questions the whole hippy-dippy group and the dead friend Alex while he makes a midnight snack). What I slowly realized re-watching the movie was that the crucial ingredient here is the most obvious: these aren’t Yuppies, they’re Boomers. I had never even connected the two because I am a Gen X’er. The slick comfort the movie effuses is from one of the most coddled, loved, free and protected group of souls that America has ever produced. Their problems aren’t problems, they are developments, and their trysts are movie perfect because they are all as safe as houses, well, just like the big mansion they cavort in. Our poorest character, the drug addled Nick, drives a Porsche! Many scenes are set around eating, sleeping or shopping. This is the Baby Boom edition of America: beautiful, safe and white. No wonder it was and is so easy to plug into: these are very easy lives.

The rub is that it is still so interesting to watch. It cannot help its roots (our writer/director Kasdan and all of the main actors involved here were born from 1947-1950, excluding Meg Tilly) and it doesn’t try. In many ways the picture plays out like a therapy session, yet there is an edge to the scenarios - I think there is a deeper questioning in the film. What sells The Big Chill is the Boomer soft soap opera that unspools; what saves it is a deeper question of the world these people live in. Our cynic and “People” writer Michael (Jeff Goldblum) is “tired of his best work being read in the can”, Nick (Hurt) questions every character’s glib and easy life, Meg (Mary Kay Place) wonders how she ended up as the wrong kind of lawyer, Karen (Jobeth Williams) rages for a fully passionate sex life, Sam (Berenger) knows television is hollow (as he drinks his way to the funeral), and Sarah and Harold (Close and Kline) have a perfectly safe marriage. We know this because Sarah can only let loose her feelings in the shower, and Harold can only make jokes. Then there is Chloe, and she is the astringent for the whole film. Young and in her 20s, with none of the established ties and sureties of our main group, her very presence questions and undermines every scene. Whether she stares serenely out at the camera or misses every easy reference to the past her presence questions the very ground upon which they all tread. Our group is in 'therapy' trying to find Alex, absorb the meaning of his failed life, and modify their own lives in the process. Meanwhile Chloe (Tilly) is nearly in her own movie, laughing at all of the wrong spots, and never relating. She surely adds a contrast and depth to the film that it would not have had otherwise.

One of the surest arguments for the relevance of The Big Chill is the use of the video camera as a device. Years before Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) there are many scenes where the camera is actually a character. Nick (Hurt) picks up a video camera and films a mock self-interview (and Chloe first connects to him listening close by), and soon they are all filming one another. (Michael the cynic has a wonderful moment where instead of simply picking the thing up he studies the manual.) There are scenes where the characters are simply watching their own characters. This is very subtly woven into the movie, and I would suggest that it takes naval gazing into something like prescience: before we were watching The Kardashians (and ourselves) do everything on camera, The Big Chill was slyly watching itself. I think Kasdan knew where these people were going, which was exactly nowhere. Karen sleeps with Sam, but goes right back to boring Richard. No one changes a scintilla. What actually happens is that time has become frozen for these aging Boomers just as it is still frozen today. We have plenty of technology but we still live the Boomtown dream: watching ourselves do what we do, asking questions that don’t require answers, and risking very little. The salient question The Big Chill seemed to ask was where do we go from here? I don’t believe it could answer that question, and I believe we are asking it still. What is revelatory (and satisfying) is that these are adults trying to connect to their young selves, not adults trying to be their young selves. Imagine that.

But whatever dude. Pass me the doobie. I wanna watch it again!

*

For an addendum to this blog read Kurt Anderson’s interesting article You Say You Want a Devolution about cultural stagnation in last month’s issue of Vanity Fair.

Unmarried 10/20/2011

   My stepfather Tom passed away Sunday evening. Although he had been very sick with cancer that call is never less than shocking (as my partner says there is never a “good” time for this news). I listened as my mother cried and simultaneously delivered the bad news. Her voice was tired but there was a lot of dignity in it, and I did my best to be normal, but a death will always drop the floor from beneath you.   Normal is the least of what you feel.

After that first round of phone calls I found myself nervously looking for something to do. I started polishing my silver bracelets - first the one from Mexico, then the one from St. Croix, and then moving on to a tarnished picture frame. I needed to do something with my hands; somehow this felt more solid. I popped some popcorn and started trolling the on-demand selections for a late night movie. I wasn’t having much luck – I’ve seen so many that I am starting to believe I might be full. Then I came across Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman” (1978) and even though I had seen it before I selected it. I needed something beautiful and comfortable to watch. Something me.

The first thing that I love about this movie is the look of it: a free trip to 70s New York, artists still safely in their SoHo lofts, the 80s still around the corner (presaged by Jill Clayburgh’s husband’s Wall Street job and expensive running shoes), parts of the city looking boldly pornographic and dirty, all of it so carefully shot. It is a classic women’s picture (a genre sorely absent today apart from gooey romances): pictures that allow you to empathize with a woman’s full range of emotions. Although she resented it publicly, Erica is surely Clayburgh’s best role and performance. Sensitively written about a seemingly happy marriage that collapses, she flickers between a cool, delighted amusement to the deeper notes of exasperation, dreaminess, the ridiculous, and sorrow. Hers was a questioning face. I am afraid that today’s version of the smart woman on screen is either all man or all jokes – there is no new Jill Clayburgh. Perhaps it was the 70s alone that allowed her to exist – so “me”, so messy, so new to relaxed clothes and the social awareness that the sexual revolution allowed the normal person.

Some of my favorite scenes are her post-divorce sessions with her therapist Tanya in a very ‘Village’ apartment. Wonderfully portrayed by real life therapist Penelope Russianoff, they rap while sitting on the floor propped up by cushions, pointedly post-Freudian, eye to eye, the stray lone teardrop rolling down Clayburgh’s beautiful Waspy face. I love that Mazursky leaves in the grit of the stray potted plants outside of badly painted pre-war windows, a beautiful afternoon light pouring in as the two women just talk. It is very comforting to watch these scenes.

I also love that in a movie so feminine (I could easily compose another essay entirely devoted to her three beautifully realized female friends, especially the fabulous Kelly Bishop playing Elaine, a severe depressive on the mend) that men are fully represented – horny, willful, obtuse, engaged and equally as dreamy as their counterparts. I cannot imagine similar depictions today; men have been so silenced and changed by feminism and political correctness it is astounding to see them in full color.   Watching the movie one doesn’t root for Erica at her husband Martin’s absolute expense, or despise the Romeo Charlie who takes her to bed, or then dismiss the bearded Alan Bates’ Saul as macho. Every character appears to move through the story as fluidly as fish in an aquarium. Even Lisa Lucas playing Patti, Erica’s precocious, mouthy 15 year-old daughter (the most hackneyed stereotype from late 70s films) has moments of blank defiance of the norm, showing frankness and childishness in equal measure.

As the movie closes lover and artist Bates is leaving and Erica is walking behind the framework of a huge color field painting (her farewell gift, so large it has been lowered from a window). “How in the hell am I going to get it home?” she asks. “Take a taxi” he laughs as he drives off. As Clayburgh navigates the painting down some crowded part of lower Manhattan, the metaphor seems clear. She is strong, the artwork is strong, and the wind is strong, all at once. How she gets it home is a mystery – the credits are rolling. Unable as I was to summon a full response to a death in the family, I chose instead to give myself over to this team of artists from another time and place. Did I have catharsis? Well - not quite.   Life is not always so timely, or as perfect, as this.

Slob 08/25/2011

    If I began this year with an essay entitled “Slow” I can now conclude that things in our actual lives often contradict our noblest thoughts. For no sooner than I had decided to take it easy than I began, at 46, my busiest year yet: full time job, new paintings, and designing Faces New York – The Book, a retrospective of sorts, and an obsessive grind unparalleled in my life. Not to gripe - excitement has been high, and I have loved the project. But Lord, Lord it has left me with time for little else. From the moment my eyes flutter open (and after I have hit the brew button on the coffee maker) I am designing the book on the computer.

As a result I have apparently lost the will or the inclination to clean - my personal effects are scattered everywhere. I will have to admit that I have never been exactly regular in this department. I am more the type that goes through guilty scrubathons throughout the year. My pet theory is that there are only two types of people in this world: the clean and the tidy. As long as nobody is looking, the clean keep the kitchen and bathroom in order, usually smell nice, and let their clothes make a pyramid (politely ignored) at the foot of the bed. I am in the “clean” category.   The tidy, whether the world sees or not, keep their surfaces pristine and the clutter whisked away. They are not scrubbers; peek into any corner and you will find their mounds of dustbunnies cleverly hidden. The tidy person’s obsession is only what the naked eye can discern. If there is a third “clean and tidy” category, well, trust me, I don’t know any of those.

I am approaching hoarding by now. New York apartments are famously tiny anyway, and any slippage is promptly rewarded with stacks of paper, coat hangers, dusty cough drops, multiple plastic to-go containers, old bottles of mustard, relish, soy sauce, and olives stacked in the fridge, abandoned computers, books books books (read and unread) and let’s not even talk about the clothes. My closet bulges. Laundry becomes a Sudoku exercise – where do they go after I have folded them? It might be safe to say that it would be easier at this juncture to move than to completely organize my apartment.

Not to over exaggerate; it is not like I am living like The Beale sisters and feeding raccoons or anything. But I have let things slip. Maybe I have always wanted to, like the slightly chubby person who just goes whole hog and gets fat. The seeds are there…all you have to do is give it a tiny bit of encouragement and presto you are a fat slob! It is all a matter of time and economics. Trust me it could happen to anybody. So I have built up these small paths I traverse through to get to the bathroom and kitchen, gingerly avoiding and delaying my housekeeping duties, and occasionally making my bed to convince myself that I am on top of things. Staying hard at work I only rarely look around and suddenly think that I should shake out the rug under the coffee table. But then I think nah, that rug has shoes on top of it, and they are under the coffee table. And I continue to sip my coffee and work on the computer.

My book, however, has just been completed, so the jig may be up. It may be time to confront my deep fear of picking things up and moving them around (if those things are yours this becomes a mini psychotherapy session each time) and just go ahead and get my house in order. Maybe I will see the light. Maybe I will move into the “tidy” category. This must be easier than having a monthly freakout and breathing in clouds of Comet cleanser. Or maybe, just maybe, I will grow up, get a bigger apartment, and hire a damn maid to help me.


Yes. Maybe I will do that.

Early Glamour 05/16/2011

Didn't we all grow up in some small town version of America? It is hard to separate the life I lived from the one I imagined watching 70s entertainment. It was a medium-sized Georgia town but what difference does that make when we could all watch Roots and run back to 6th grade the next day to discuss it? Television and movies made any town you lived in seem opportune for all the stories you had just fantasized about: Danny or Sandy in Grease, Jeannie in a bottle, a member of the family in a New York block house like the one in Good Times, or even one of Charlie’s Angels, expertly solving crimes and finding hair care solutions simultaneously. Television had progressed. It was all in a blender now. HBO had premiered, expanding our adolescences further with some soft-core porn like the movie Lipstick, or better yet Midnight Express (which was responsible for the swift removal of our HBO by my mother, who went bat shit crazy spying one of the nude scenes). We were watching as politely as she must have witnessed Father Knows Best or Lucy, fresh from our baths and lying quietly on our stomachs with crossed ankles in the air. It was Americana just the same.

I always read that this much “culture” was supposed to warp your mind but it never stopped a soul. We all need something to dream on and I think my life was richer for it. I had plenty of time in college to develop taste. Back then I was just lapping it all up like all children do - it gave you something to discuss on the playground. As high school approached (8th grade to be exact) all of this changed for me. Puberty took me over mind and soul. I loved all of the same things but I could not for the life of me process them outward anymore. Boys and girls got serious. It turned into the only game in town. I had my requisition tortoise shell Goody comb shoved into the back of my brother’s “borrowed” cords (he had them in every color) but I just could not participate. The mating game was brutal. I had no interest in girls, feared the boys, and no outlet. Even as I got my very straight hair to feather I gained a bad reputation as a snob. Some gay boys protect themselves with a severe inhibition that looks like aloofness and I was one of them. There were proms but none for me really. I was not a joiner.

I understand that this is the standard cliché for every small town boy and girl: isolation, suffering, growth, and flowering later. For the gay outsiders this is undoubtedly more intense. All of your sex urges being brutally repressed, all of your real thoughts and desires kept secret, push you into an incubation that slams you into a new reality upon entering college. It may take a while but the truth comes out in hair and clothes. Maybe even more: your whole attitude explodes. We become the bohemia of whatever small environ we inhabit. In the 80s it was so easy to stick out. Shoes narrowed to a point, hair got higher, and I developed a very strict image of how I wanted to be seen by the world. It was idiosyncratic, it made no sense, and I loved it dearly. I wasn’t sleeping around but my white poplin balloon shirts were pressed and buttoned (to the top) to perfection. I wore plaids, stripes, all black. I thumbed my nose at anything macho. I even went to art school. And this delayed fashion assault became my prom. If I could not quite be who I wanted I could look like something close. Years went by, and I don’t regret a single one.

Somewhere along the way you of course attract your kind. You slowly, shyly become card-carrying social beings, sexual entities, but the attitude only becomes richer. Your fellow refugees fuel the fire. You get more detailed. You find New Wave music and even more costumes. You find the club. You perfect your stance. You have this wonderful quality made richer by the 5 years you were denied all contact, any understanding from yourself or others. It is early glamour. During this phase no one challenges you. You are not imperious but elevated. For 10 years I thought my “look” was me. When I decided to wear black penny loafers and white socks exclusively I thought about it for weeks. All of my friends took their personas just as seriously…we could discuss records and effluvia ad nauseam.

Ah but this is only what happens on the outside. I don’t remember perfecting my pose exclusively; I also remember developing my first gay friends, my first serious romp, then dates, then boyfriends. I started living in the world. I imagine that clothes in high school come second to the mating ritual – I mean, your social standing was already decided by your parents income. Those years of my own makeover the fashion, hair, and attitude were all created from the bottom up. I had to date myself before anyone else would. And this is what makes it not the norm. I took not a stitch or thought for granted. Thinking back over it in middle age I am proud of myself but saddened, too. Straight or Gay, popular or weird, I guess we all suffer the same fate: we eventually transition out of those youthful poses and into that colorless, odorless quality we call wisdom. From the halcyon highs of our 20s it is just like the adage about a good deed: early glamour rarely goes unpunished.

Straighter Than Straight 01/27/2011

I recently sat down this week to watch Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right (2010). When this came out last summer I was not drawn to it even though it looked sunny and appealing and full of good actors. I cannot say why. Her first two movies were wonderful: High Art (1998) was beautifully shot, and Laurel Canyon (2002) had it all in its careful balance of solid performances, meditation and a stylized slice of California we rarely see. There was very much a question mark over the movie. I loved it. It was very rock n roll, but sad and loose, too.

So I settled down late night after work committed to maybe ½ of of a dvd viewing with a question mark of my own – I was very blasé. This is the story of a middle-aged lesbian couple, their two teen kids, and the appearance of their sperm donor dad. The movie of course charmed me all the way to the end: beautifully shot and as carefully served up as a gourmet homegrown meal. I felt so sunwashed watching it. LA looked beautiful. The film has an original tone to it. I imagined what it might be like to live there with some dough and a family. As I moved through the picture however things became further and further away…I had the unpleasant sense of watching Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in acting class together. I was very conscious that I did not remotely believe they were a couple, or even lesbians (especially Moore). I smelled this in the preview the summer before. I found myself only interested in the very straight dad character played by Mark Ruffalo and the two beautifully nuanced performances by the young teen actors. Julianne woke up around Ruffalo but went act-y around Bening in all of their scenes. Bening played it so butch and neurotic that I found myself unimmersed and annoyed every time she was onscreen (save the last she has with Ruffalo, which is dynamite). Both good actors but nervous if you ask me. Of course their tee shirts looked great. Very hip.

And this is exactly what has irked me about this much praised film – praised that is for being so cutting edge. It is a very wonderful style piece (the rhythm of the film is superb) by a wonderful director. But it ain’t gay – not even close. It is ruled by the same old scenerios – solidly straight, successful actors “stretching out”, aping gender roles (butch and femme), helplessly surrounded by all of the normal people (Ruffalo and the kids seeking a normal dad and role model) and trying to excuse themselves or defend themselves or whatever. This is the ground zero of banality. Like so many gay drag films before it (the wretchedly cast Tom Hanks in Philadelphia) I was squirming in my chair. So many of the notes the actors were trying to hit went flat; in a pivotal scene the couple has sex to gay male porn. This felt utterly false to me and completely sexless. Ah ha! Sexless. This same dvd is used as a device when their young son and his friend find it and watch it (assuming it is girl-on-girl action). The two moms interrogate him to see if he is a homo (which is of course WAY ok). The scene provoked a double response in me: the dull sitcom numbness watching a tired old scene play out (is there something you want to tell us?) and as I type this now some real outrage at what this suggests. Are lesbians not gay? Are they harmless and unthreatening? Why is the boy being questioned for finding their porn? Why are they watching male porn (because let me assure you they were not getting off on it)? I felt like this dvd, the device, was like a knife. It cut at the gayness in the film. And it pisses me off.

It is no secret that the Julianne Moore character humps Mark Ruffalo (who is seriously great in the film and will go unrewarded as the “sperm donor”). Their scenes together are absolutely alive, real and authentic. I was prepped to hate this very clichéd turning point in the film; how surprised I was to find it so real! Am I the homophobe? I don’t think so. What I think is that The Kids May Be All Right but the parents are the same old same old: dead, lifeless clichés wearing their gayness on their tee shirts. What is sad is that as usual the gay characters have no inner life and no real authenticity as a couple. The beautiful LA house they own is still a closet. The film is safe and predictable in its handling of the two most important characters. These women come alive only outside of their coupledom; gayness is thereby repudiated. The sun shines oh-so prettily. But it does not shine on them.

Slow 01/07/2011

I had so much to be thankful for in 2010: I started my website (viewed daily by handfuls of people!), published two books (if only in the smallest way), and got a lot of work done, which is unusual for me. It was the year of the grind – applied daily like grease to the wheel, pushing my way through the small calamities of getting anything of personal value done (all of the small roadblocks involved in producing things) as well as managing my personal life (relationships don’t stay healthy untended). This was the year I applied myself. For a naturalized homegrown Southern bum (iced tea and window gazing de rigueur) it was a bitch, man. At the moment I am in recovery mode.

So what does this mean for 2011? I don’t think I can keep pushing myself in quite the same way – I am not sure it would work. I think I will swing this year like a kid on the playground: a few pumps then glide. This next phase feels like it should be more natural. A dear friend once told me that I did not have “blonde ambition” (all gay men return to Madonna) but last year I may have proved him wrong. But I certainly don’t think this would do for the long term. My nature is dreamy so perhaps this year I will allow myself to ruminate a little more. It might be time to go organic (and I ain’t talking Whole Foods) and just let things develop at a more faithful, slower pace. We have most of us been blessed by the technology gods and the all of the opportunities they provided. I think, however, that something has gone neglected in me and maybe in the world as well. The slow-cured, the illogical, the fanciful, the non-linear: the dream.

One of my favorite phrases is “into the woods” (a nod to Sondheim) for what it connotes – going deep down to our native selves and possibly toward the unknown. We all have our many ancestors inside of us but how many of us take to time to listen for them? I would like for this to be the year that I let it all mellow, the year I stop measuring, anticipating and judging. I want to do my work more slowly and with more listening - even if this means fewer results. I want to see what it is I have yet to discover about myself, and all on simmer. It won’t be easy but I want to relax a little this year. I want to take it slow.

For the rest of you it is blonde ambition. Get to work! And Happy New Year.

Savannah Gardens, Part Two 11/09/2010

Late Afternoons

Near the end of my first year at SCAD 1987-88 (Savannah College Of Art and Design) I moved in with my first boyfriend into the historic district I had always admired - just a skip away from the squares, bars and cobbled streets. I loved living there. I will always remember that house, sliced up into apartments, with dark red Victorian turrets on the outside and the granite and cherry wood interiors (Rent $275). I was definitely ensconced in the dream romance of my youth; I was all sensation. Every detail of that time was important to my self image and my style. I was 22 but emotionally much younger. Walking down those streets I took in the old city for the first time (a mix of sunlight and apparitions). I was a part of it as well.

Alvin Neely was our landlord and lived a couple of blocks over in a near identical house (except that his was a complete mansion). He was a very delightful man in his 60s and a good talker. As the new addition I was invited to his place for afternoon cocktails my first weekend. Being young and impressionable afternoon cocktails sounded like something out of a movie to me. The Sunday we went over I was not disappointed – his house was full of antiques and had a grand staircase (Tara!) and as he chatted with us we were walked back toward the screened-in veranda done up in Moroccan chic (or maybe just overstuffed bamboo furniture) and he took our drink orders. “Would you like a gin and tonic?” he asked me. I took a look at his face, ostensibly an old man to me, but with the wryest look in his eye, full of humor. We looked at one another very directly and I realized that this was my first contact with a first tier homo: a seasoned and wickedly intelligent gay man. He gingerly picked up the liquor bottle to show me. “It’s Gordon's” he said with a wink. “Much cheaper and well known in England”. I jotted this down mentally: okay to drink cheap booze if you know what you are doing. A greenish cool afternoon light poured through the screens as we plopped down and chatted. Much of the conversation went around me and this was okay. I felt very pleasantly inside of something.

Alvin was my introduction to some of the history that was soon to make Savannah very famous: he was Jim William’s best friend. They were actually vicious rivals, gay arrivistes always checking on one another’s status and accomplishments. I had heard a lot of nasty rumors about Jim; the only connection I made at the time between them was money and big houses. Alvin, however, was delightful and down-to-earth. He took me and the boyfriend for a supper way out toward the ocean to have catfish at Love’s Seafood; on the drive out the sun set on a golden marsh that spread out before me. I had lived my whole life in Savannah yet there were some finer points I had missed. He showed me how to flip the fried fish over and pull the skeleton clean out of it with his nimble fingers, never pausing for a moment as he cruised every male in the place and gossiped about this or that. Alvin had style. He was an absolute imbiber of all of the lusty pleasures that life had to offer, and he opened up the city for me almost by osmosis.

There was, of course, some considerable darkness underneath this education. At the afternoon parties there was always a strange house guest at Neely’s place, a young white guy with a skinny mustache who seemed to work there. He had an animal look to his face and in his movements - my first run in with a hustler. Alvin was very blasé about keeping 'houseboys'. He made it clear that Jim kept them too. They were paid to stay in the house, do odd jobs, and service them. I was (and am still) horrified by this. I knew it was human traffic even if the exchange seemed equitable on the surface. It had the taint that subtle racism does. It smelled bad to me. His “boy” was cagey as a tiger and it showed in a very nervous twitchy demeanor, but mostly in that his straightness stuck out in this crowd of gay men. He seemed trapped. Many years later the picture would complete itself when I saw Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil in an Atlanta theater and watched Jude Law's portrayal of Danny Hansford. It is uncanny to see something pantomimed that you have lived.

Well, so to speak. The seedier aspects of Savannah were always just out of reach during those years. They were merely a backdrop while I created a persona for myself from scratch. Unless you truly became part of a very tiny and incestuous downtown scene I doubt you really counted. Instead I became just another of the students slumming around the city and drinking in the local bars for pleasure. One night in the tiny bar called Faces (my favorite and now sadly gone) my boyfriend called me over to meet someone. “Mark I would like you to meet Jim Williams” he said to me. I looked up and stood very still. Something strange ran through my blood. He was tall with jet black eyes and asked me to hold out my hand. As I did so he put two very heavy objects into my palm and asked me if I knew what it was. “Son that is solid gold” he drawled. I may have smiled but I don't think I did. I simply handed the gold back to him and removed myself to the other side of the bar. I think a door shut at that moment, looking back. The town had suddenly become very small.

Living downtown was small indeed. Why I ever thought it was bigger was a part of my growing up. I did love those late afternoons walking from one square to another (the old city being comprised of small parks laid out on a grid); there was always a fantastic low country light year round surrounding those beautiful houses, churches, and oak trees. Once I had lived there a while I slowly began to perceive something sinister right underneath: the constant stillness of a graveyard. No one ever seemed to be around you as you walked - how lonely it was! As I reminisce it isn't those days I most recall but the inky nighttime when all the city really came out to play. Those nights were solid gold.

Savannah Gardens, Part One 10/28/2010

Art School In The Eighties

This essay was originally published in the Winter 2004 edition of Spunk Magazine.

The Smiths, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Oscar Wilde, David Wojnarowicz, The NEA, gay bars and gay boys, the threat of AIDS and the culture of resistance: these were some of the ingredients for the stew that was The Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, Ga.) my freshman year in 1987. This was also the year of my coming out at 22, the year of the best gay bar of my life (The Who's Who, which eventually burned down) and the year I discovered that the sleepy coastal town I was born into was not the one I was about to re-enter at all. Growing up most of my life on the east side of town right outside of a low-income housing project called Savannah Gardens (which my friends called “Savannah Garbage”) I rarely had the chance to go downtown. Here were the famous squares with their colonial homes, moss riddled trees, River Street and the Telfair Museum. These would have been special occasions, moments for the genteel, the picturesque. Perhaps walking along these streets gave me another sense as well: darker forces operating within the city, ghosts and skeletons, a town where history was once made. If it did this feeling proved elusive. Savannah was as regular as rain. Seasons came and went. Every spring the azaleas would bloom as usual in a rich riot of colors all around the city. I was always surprised to find on closer inspection that they were such ugly flowers.

Was it spring when I first entered the low Victorian doorway of The Who's Who? I was so afraid I had to be dragged there kicking and screaming by my friend Paul. I thought I had a reputation to maintain but secretly I understood that I was ashamed and nervous and really green. (It is true that the bar stood wide open on Bay Street at the edge of downtown for all to see. It was a test of your mettle to open the door.) When I walked in to the strains of Madonna's “Open Your Heart” (the bar maybe a third full) all eyes turned to us. Maybe this was the first night I saw J, the bartender upon which all others should be modeled (a version of Fassbinder's Querelle), or Mother, a heavy middle aged man in drag who would greet everyone at the door with a fem “hey doll” (Mother knew absolutely everyone). As I approached a lit up 70s style dance floor blinking in near pitch black darkness I knew nothing would ever again be the same for me. I danced skittishly with boys; eventually I slept with them. Soon I was inside those forbidding old houses where the students rented rooms. My senses opened to the look and smell of mahogany, granite and marble, dark rooms with vaulted ceilings, and to the bohemian spirit with which these students inhabited them. I met painters, actors, drag queens and dilettantes, most of whom created their homes with a mattress and a boombox. It was wonderful to see these young gay boys take the town, one by one, its history and spaces, and make it over for themselves. Suddenly the alleyways, carriage houses and cobbled streets of the brochures had become a space for liberation. With this freedom came a new responsibility: a slow creeping sense of the political.

After my entrance into the bar I enrolled at SCAD. Everything was downtown – the school had bought up nine historic buildings for its campus. Inside these once formidable buildings I took my foundations courses: Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, Janson's History Of Art, and Johannes Itten's The Elements Of Color. I remember taking my first stabs at developing a sensibility: ciphering out the baby scratches of Cy Twombly, finding something deep in Warhol, and the electric thrill of Lautrec's cartoons. I will never forget the first rush of becoming fully involved in the process of making art, the energy and completeness of total immersion, and wincing as these works were discussed in a class critique. I remember the city, this new vision of the city, the disco, and the constant media coverage of the AIDS epidemic. I remember requesting Mapplethorpe's banned photography book at the library (studying what most people would still consider pornography) thrilled to the bone. I remember ACT UP. I remember the living death of artist David Wojnarowicz through his brilliant images and writings and his account of what was happening to us in the world at large. I remember The Smiths and The Pet Shop Boys and memorizing all of the lyrics (the first accurate mental picture I ever had of gay life). I remember reading Wilde for the first time: The Critic As Artist. Covered by a great green canopy of oak and Spanish moss, by good manners, by booze and hangovers, these were my first attempts to grasp the world. I was one of the true inhabitants of the streets of that city in that time, of dark nights and dark leanings of the heart. More than anything SCAD gave me a reason to be where I was. I pretended I would end up an artist, and I did, but not in the way I expected. In the era of WHAM! and Ronald Reagan mine was probably a sentimental education, and these experiences still inform the artwork I do today. But I think it was the gay bar, the place of everything illicit and forbidden, which informed me the most. It took me to art school and behind those pretty facades from a long past antebellum South. Those wonderful old houses provided a stage for me and all the boys back then. We were all visionaries, we were all secret sharers, we were all the future. We did a lot of it in the dark, where I am sure our forebears had done it before and I hope they are doing it now. From that little southern portal, a big world.