Band of Thebes

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros 2

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's  greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., Days of Heaven for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Still of the Night, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate.

For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films. He describes the challenges and innovations of working with directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide which colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night, he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He also shot ads for Calvin Klein and Armani. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

Office Spinoff Song: "You Look Gay... Hope You Get Killed..."

Kelly and Erin, two of the more appealing characters from The Office, have formed a band called Subtle Sexuality and today released their first single, "Male Prima Donna." Though the subject is ripe to skewer, the lyrics are unfortunate. The lead-up to the second chorus ends:

You look gay in your skinny tie!
I hope you get killed in a drive-by!

Not to be humorless the day the after the hate crimes bill was signed into law, but NBC would never allow the juxtaposition of any other minority group [e.g. You look Jewish / Tamil Hindu / Irish / etc.] with the wish "I hope you get killed." Evidently, everyone involved thought this version was appropriate and funny. Kelly is played by Mindy Kaling, Dartmouth '01, who directed the video and writes many Office scripts. Erin is played by Ellie Kemper, Princeton '02, who writes for The Onion and McSweeney's.

A.S. Byatt at the Strand

Last night at the Strand, A.S. Byatt read from her novel The Children's Book and spoke about her evolution as a novelist. Whereas she used to write "twenty or thirty drafts" when she was younger, she writes "one draft now," after strenuous concentration. She said she "might think for a week about one chapter even though I know most of what will happen." She developed her Russian doll style of text within text while writing her Booker Prize winning Possession because she was "at a period in my life when I couldn't go on with straight realism." It was her way of saying, "Look, this isn't the only way of telling a story. There are myriad ways." 

She said again that one of the seeds of this novel was her thinking about how many great writers of that golden age of young people's fiction raised children who eventually committed suicide. She remarked that two of her ruling metaphors this time were gold & silver and going underground. The name Wellwood, she admitted, was "the surgeon who saved my life."

She said using her initials rather than her given name was "more dignified and more private." She agreed with T.S. Eliot that "the writer should be impersonal."

Answering a question about whether or not her novels are pagan, she replied, "I think my novels are slightly anti-Christian, which I suppose one shouldn't say." Explaining that ever since childhood she was always more interested in the Norse gods, she said she was "not a believing pagan. In fact, I'm an unbeliever. I'm a reasonable person."

Revisiting her dust-up about adults who exclusively read Harry Potter, she said she thought J.K. Rowling was a good writer for children and her "own addiction, and it's just that, an addiction, is Terry Pratchett."

Mild spoiler alert: I asked her about Julian's shift from his obsessive attraction to other boys to his proposing to a woman. This led us to a longish discussion of Lytton Strachey, his letters, and how "they were all gay, and they all got married." She didn't feel Julian had gone straight. Coming back to it a moment later, she said, "And I think Julian still thinks he's gay."

Proving that even brilliant writers can be fallible, The Children's Book was originally titled The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare. Her next two books are a retelling of Ragnarok, the Scandinavian myth of the end of the world, and a novel about the Surrealists and the psychoanalysts.

(I love this photo by Ozier Muhammad/NYT. Last night photography was prohibited, a shame because she wore comfy red slip-on shoes.)

Scholastic Book Fairs Reverse Ban of Book with Lesbian Moms

Last week, the Scholastic school book fairs banned Lauren Myracle's Luv Ya Bunches for one of its four schoolgirl protagonists having two moms. The author agreed to clean up language such as "geez," "sucks," and "oh my god," but she refused to heterosexualize the lesbian mothers into a straight couple. Scholastic announced they would not sell the title at their book fairs because it failed "to meet the norms of the various communities that host the fairs," according to spokeswoman Kyle Good.

Myracle said, "A child having same-sex parents is not offensive, in my mind, and shouldn't be 'cleaned up. I find that appalling. I understand why they would want to avoid complaint letters — no one likes getting hated on — but shouldn't they be willing to evaluate the quality of the complaint? What, exactly, are children being protected against here?"

Well, Change.org took up the cause and in 48 hours collected more than 4,000 signatures demanding that Scholastic reverse their draconian policy. Yesterday, the company announced the book will appear in their spring book fairs.

Despite this happy ending, the overall principles guiding the book fairs seem confused. They still won't include the gay penguin picture book And Tango Makes Three, but they released a statement saying "we are committed to a review process that considers all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents." Luv Ya Bunches was always available in the Scholastic Book Club catalog, and Tango is available on Scholastic's website.

The hair-trigger touchiness is evident at the school level, too. Last year, a Vancouver, Washington school district discontinued the book fairs after one parent complained The Golden Compass was anti-Christian.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Her finest achievement since Angels & Insects and Possession, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book begins in 1895 in the V&A museum where its first spoken words are, "I said I'd show you a mystery." Although the novel overflows with perplexing objects, that first mystery is a runaway urchin, Philip Warren, who lives hiding in the museum in order to sketch its treasures. The speaker is Julian Cain, the son of the museum's director, who shows his discovery to Tom Wellwood, whose fertile mother Olive is a successful writer of children's books. How their three sprawling families interact, intermarry, and rebel, over the next twenty-five years with one another and with the Fludds, strange potters to whom Philip is apprenticed, forms the bulk of this ravishing 675-page novel. Its major themes of parenthood and childhood, the cost of storytelling and the loss of innocence, both personally and globally, inevitably culminate on WWI battlefields.

Easily traversing all class lines, in settings from London and Kent to Paris and Munich, Byatt immerses the reader in every sensation of the era. Her three dozen (!) main characters are Fabianists, capitalists, anarchists, artists, suffragists, servants, and soldiers; her historical figures include Emma Goldman, Sarah Bernhardt, J.M. Barrie, and gay icons Edward Carpenter, Rupert Brooke, and Oscar Wilde. Among her chief areas of expertise here are fairy tales, pottery, puppetry, poetry, jewelry, theater, commerce, the emancipation of women, and the primal importance of work. And the sex lives of teenagers. When vagabond Philip has a bed all to himself for the first time in his life, "He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy." Julian at 15 frankly assesses the sexual merits of Tom at 13, and still lusts after him well into college. After a long description: "He was the sort of beautiful boy, quite unconscious of his beauty, who was much discussed and courted both in Julian's prep school, and at Marlowe. Julian had asked himself whether Tom was pretty, or a possible object of passion, and had seen that, in theory, he certainly was. Pretty boys at school became rapidly self-conscious... Tom expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was." Girls' desires are treated just as naturally.

Byatt's compulsive layering of detail is excessive, yet always brilliant. Not content to dazzle readers merely with her own output, she can't stop herself from including selections of works by her characters. But it's essential to see how Olive's fairy tales steal from her children's lives. Or how the intricate narratives of the German puppet shows are pregnant with meaning in the book's broader plot. Julian's wartime poems are so good that one of them, Trench Names, was published in The New Yorker last April.

The Children's Book is an instant favorite. Treat yourself.

Walt Whitman Is the New Brooke Shields / Miley Cyrus

Not being a television user, I had no idea Walt Whitman has become a jeans spokesperson. Yes, that's his rich voice reading "America." Everything that's wonderful about his delivery above is absent below in a didactic interpretation of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" Nevertheless, a good day for bare chested gay poetry "...full of manly pride and friendship."

Gay Neo-Nazis Top Rome's Film Festival Prizes

Former fashion photographer Nicolo Donato, 35, has won the Rome Film Festival's top prize for his first feature, Brotherhood, about two Danish anti-gay neo-Nazis who fall in love. The jury, headed by Milos Forman, honored the gay drama which had its world premiere at the festival:

"Lars leaves the army and joins a group of neo-Nazis, which organises ruthless raids against Arabs and homosexuals. Apprenticeship to the 'brotherhood' is tough and Lars is supported by Jimmy, who acts as his mentor, charged with testing his trustworthiness and the preparation of fundamentalist far right texts in the style of 'Mein Kampf'. Unforeseeably, a passionate affair ensues between the two men. A love lived in secret, until the group's racist and violent rules end up forcing the pair to face the inevitable quandary: to betray their ideological 'brothers' or betray their lover other and their own feelings. Whatever the choice, it will lead to violence one way or another, whether physical or mental."

IndieWire comments:

"Same-sex relationships were a big theme in this year’s Rome lineup, though the other films were not as successful as Brotherhood in balancing the intersection of love and need for drama. Argentinean film Plan B, the feature debut of Marco Berger, comes off as an amateurishly filmed, written and acted take on the need of two token straight guys to explore their feelings for one another (think a two-dollar amateur Humpday remake as posted in not necessarily connected episodes on YouTube), while the only intermittently fiery local period drama Sea Violet by Donatella Maiorca is a Sicily-set tale of Sapphic desire that necessitates cross-dressing to set things, well, straight."

The ceremony Friday night also honored Helen Mirren as best actress for her role playing Tolstoy's wife in The Last Station. She and Donato (hatted) charm in one television clip; Meryl Streep winning a lifetime achievement award appears in another. Click through the choices.

Political Postcard from Virginia: The Coming Fall

 

Spending an otherwise glorious weekend in Rappahannock County, Virginia, I saw that political posters nearly outnumbered the autumn leaves and, sorry to say, the signs are not good. Next week, to replace their outgoing Democrat governor Virginia is going to elect by a wide margin a Republican theocrat anti-feminist homophobe. The White House and Congress will take this as a bellwether of next year's midterm elections. Recent HuffPost headlines warn "Independents Shifting Away from Obama, Democrats." Those unhappy returns in 2010 are going to terrify Democrat incumbents about their 2012 re-election prospects. While it's very hard to see how this is going to make them more liberal, it's easy to envision them becoming increasingly, desperately centrist.  In the rustling wind you can already hear the excuses that "now isn't the time" for a wedge issue like Don't Ask Don't Tell or that "the country just isn't there yet" on gay marriage. Bolstering that view will be our losing one or both marriage referendum next week. Rather than actual leadership that educates and changes views, we'll get cowardice "pragmatism." In short, the administration's most progressive days are already behind us. After the Hate Crimes Bill signing this week, a sharp fall is coming.

Amelia, Still Missing

Mira Nair's Amelia isn't half as bad as critics are saying, and it isn't a quarter as interesting as it ought to be. One of the few times Hilary Swank gives her character any subtlety is a scene suggesting Earhart's bisexuality, as she vocally admires another woman's legs in a mellow late night bar. It's also a pleasure to see out lesbian Cherry Jones play closeted lesbian Eleanor Roosevelt (though the voice is wrong and she's a either a tad bumpkinish or tipsy from champagne). The young actor playing 10 year-old Gore Vidal nicely criticizes Amelia's choice in wallpaper and wishes she would marry his father, with whom she has a long affair. Ewan McGregor, playing Gene Vidal, is the best of the primary cast, but everyone -- actors and audience alike -- suffers from Ron Bass's script. As ever, it's the most he can do to find the edge pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Interiors are beyond him. The movie grossed only $4 million in this, its first weekend.

Try one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, Susan Ware's Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism.

Gay Sex Panic, the Movie: 1950's Men Locked Up for Being Gay

Queer as Folk actor Peter Paige will direct his third feature, an indie adaptation of Neil Miller's harrowing nonfiction book Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s. No casting has been announced for the drama, which will be produced by Funny Boy Films, makers of Latter Days, Adam & Steve, and Naked Boys Singing! Paige told the Hollywood Reporter, "We're thinking of this film in the vein of 'Capote,' 'Milk' and 'Girl, Interrupted.' It's an intense, dramatic exploration of a dark period in our history."

The book recounts the mass panic in Sioux City, Iowa following the 1955 killing of an eight year old boy. Even after the murderer was caught and convicted, public hysteria was rampant. Authorities arrested twenty middle class gay men completely unconnected to the crime but were labeled "sexual psychopaths" and imprisoned in a mental asylum until "cured." They remained locked up for "prolonged periods of time," treated by the same staff who gave the actual murderer large doses of LSD to help him remember the killing.

Yes, gay history is essential. And yes this is yet another gay movie perfect for Debbie Downer date night.