Band of Thebes

"A Vocal Surprise:" Julie Andrews at B&N

After standing listlessly, stuporishly for more than half an hour among a massive throng of fans of all ages who did not get lucky yellow wristbands, I perked up when the B&N events coordinator approached the podium to make some announcements.

1. Only people with yellow wristbands could get books signed. Only yellow wristbands, not green wristbands. Only books, not movie memorabilia.  Only signed, not inscribed. Only two.

2. All you people in the back with no wristbands, I'm sorry. No standby lines, no additional signing.

3. Julie Andrews will not read from the book.

4. Julie Andrews will not answer questions.

5. Julie Andrews will not be interviewed on stage.

6. Julie Andrews will not address the public in any way.

7. Julie Andrews will only sign copies of the book, then leave. She's on a very tight schedule.

8. Julie Andrews has asked that there be NO PHOTOGRAPHY.

In response, the people around me had some announcements of their own.

"As a fan, a former fan--"

"--the stupid book, anyway--"

"If she doesn't sign it, I'll return it. I'll return it!"

"I'm gonna write them a letter!"

"I'll buy it someplace else."

"--sue B&N--"

"She's lucky she's wealthy."

"I might just 'forget' to pay!"

"You'll go to jail."

At that point it was 6:40, twenty minutes until her appearance. No one budged. Several voiced their belief that the events coordinator must be wrong and that she would sign more books.

7:00 No Julie Andrews.

7:10 Still no Julie Andrews. People begin to announce to one another, "She's late."

7:15 Mr. Announcements returns to the podium to say Julie Andrews is "on her way."

7:20 No. Julie. Andrews.

7:26 If you've ever been at Lourdes when the Virgin Mary appeared, in person, to give autographs, then you don't need me to describe what comes next.

Applause breaks out in the back, rolling wave-like through the crowd. OMG JULIE ANDREWS!!!! She strides briskly, smiling, amid a small pack of B&N security and publishing staff. Approx. eight million flashbulbs go off. She waves. Cheers of "We love you, Julie!" Followed by, "Sign Our Books!"

She makes her way to the front where a very, very smiley B&N girl grins and beams from the podium. Blessedly brief non-introduction and Julie Andrews takes the stage and walks to the podium. (She's going to break Rule #6! See, she really is as impetuous and free and anti-authority as Maria!)

Meltingly charming, she avoids any sugary gushing over the crowd and immediately speaks about the book. She found she couldn't write it and tried to give her advance back to Hyperion. Then she found she couldn't break her contract and buckled down to try to give some impression of what it was like in the days of British vaudeville theater and her early years in general.

A new man reminds the crowd that they really do request No Flash Photography, at which Julie Andrews smiles tightly and says, "Too late!" That smile says, They've already taken my vocal chords, why not my retina too?

The maniacal smiler reappears to say she would now ask Dame Julie four questions submitted earlier from fans. (Doublekill, breaking Rule #5 and Rule #4.)

1. Which event from the book is your favorite memory?

[Elegant stalling,] then says "too many" and emphasizes how lucky she's been, how blessed, fortunate. She mentions only one film by name, Victor/Victoria and the crowd cheers loudly.

2. What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir?

Time. "Because I do have a day job." So much researching, the war, once she found certain dates or facts those would prompt so many other memories.

3. What image comes to mind when you say the word home? [book's title]

[Quickly swallowing her dismay that evidently all questions will be insipid,] Family. We have five children and seven grandchildren. Cites different meanings of home in the book, especially the theater.

4. What do you want readers to take away from your book?

"Well, I do hope they will enjoy it. That would be wonderful." And she hopes it conveys "what it feels like on a stage, or to learn to sing." "Even if you think you're not worth very much, as I did, if you just put one foot in front of the other" you can make something of yourself.

She moves to the signing table and the permanently smiling girl pops up again to say, "Now, Dame Julie, we have a surprise for you!"

At which my blood turns to ice water.

The girl says, "But it's just a Vocal Surprise!"

At which my blood turns to solid ice. My heart slows and I die a little. Because it sounds for all the world like the B&N staff has arranged for something that involves singing to Julie Andrews, a legendary singer who can no longer sing because bad doctors botched the operation on her nodes.

Not good.

Julie Andrews is 72 years old. She's been awake since at least 4:00am or 5:00am because she was on a morning talk show; she's been rushed from one media event to another all day, being asked the same questions, trying to provide fresh and engaging answers; and now she's facing a room of 700 fans, of whom the 550 wristbandless have just proved themselves to be astonishingly fickle. (Does all stardom and hero worship hang by so fragile a thread? Poor Marilyn. Poor Kurt.) And these people are peering very closely, as television cameras have been all day, to see how she's aged, and naturally she has aged. It must be tiring. Does she really deserve to be sung at?

But the bookstore girl has horrendous vocabulary skillz, thank god. She meant a verbal surprise. She announces that Home is #5 on B&N's national bestseller list. She smiles. 

And Julie Andrews prepares to face the adoration and scrutiny of 150 lucky yellow wristbanders, and to sign her name 300 times very quickly because she is late for her next event.

---

Reviews have been great: The Times of London called Home "magic," and the NYTBR said it was "painfully shrewd and written with real delicacy and pathos." 

The PEN/Faulkner Award 2008

Yesterday, the judges of PEN/Faulkner Award announced that David Leavitt was a finalist for this year's prize for his novel The Indian Clerk. This makes Leavitt one of the few writers to have been nominated twice, his first nod coming in 1985 for his debut book, the story collection Family Dancing. Just as rare is the number of gay writers honored by the prestigious foundation: Peter Cameron was a finalist in 2003 for City of Your Final Destination, Michael Cunningham won in 1999 for The Hours, Allan Gurganus for White People and Paul Gervais for Extraordinary People were finalists in 1992, and John Kennedy Toole was a finalist in the prize's first year, 1981.

This year's PEN/Faulkner winner is the wonderful Kate Christensen for her fourth novel, The Great Man. If you haven't read her second novel, Jeremy Thrane, about a gay underachiever who works for a closeted movie star, give it a try.

Cedric Klapisch's Paris

    

And you think Hollywood is out of ideas. Following last year's French movie in which Romain Duris played a depressed guy who never leaves his apartment, called In Paris, comes the new film from his longtime collaborator Cedric Klapisch in which Romain Duris plays a depressed guy who never leaves his apartment, called Paris. I like Klapisch's movies and I like him. He attended the screening and spoke modestly and charmingly ("Thank you to be curious") about his days at NYU Film School twenty-five years ago and how much New York and Paris have in common even if our two countries don't always get along.

The movie starts well, with a very elegant title sequence in which the names remain ghosted on screen as new names float in, a visual preparation for its multitudinous plot: An Altman-like number of storylines occasionally overlap to form a portrait of Paris present and past. It's clunky (the past is served up via a history professor doing a tv series) and obvious (the big epiphany is 'cherish every moment') and embarrassing (the history professor has a midlife crisis and an affair with a gorgeous female student), but it does manage to cover a wide terrain: women and men, white and black, Europe and Africa, old and young, ancient and modern, sick and healthy, powerful and helpless, straight and straight. That's right, in the gigantic diversity of the city, no one is gay. There's not so much as a same-sex couple strolling the neighborhood or dancing together in the party scene. Even that other movie, Paris, Je T'aime, had an all gay episode and another vignette starring the ghost of Oscar Wilde. If you're really an avid cineaste, your problem with this movie will be ghosts of the recent past. To hear Romain Duris talk about his heart again and again will remind you of his performance in the phenomenal The Beat My Heart Just Skipped, and to see people anxiously awaiting a heart donor for a transplant will make you think of the very best Almodovar, All About my Mother. The comparisons leave Paris looking like Provo, the whitest, straightest place on earth.

Irène Némirovsky's David Golder

It's 2008, so if it's not entirely preposterous to begin thinking about the Best of the Decade lists then certainly one of the top novels will be Irène Némirovsky's masterpiece Suite Francaise. (You'll recall, she wrote the book as she was fleeing the Nazis and didn't finish it because she was murdered in Auschwitz, but the manuscript was only discovered by her aged daughter a few years ago and was not published until 2005.)  Understandably, that novel's popularity has sparked an interest in her earlier work, and although Knopf heavily promoted last fall's thin Fire in the Blood, they've been much quieter about releasing David Golder via their Everyman imprint. Being accustomed to rabidly anti-gay closet cases, we all know minorities sometimes attack their own kind from a misguided mix of self-loathing and self-preservation, yet it's still a shock to see a Jewish novelist of such breadth and humanity succumb to the worst cliches of antisemitism. Not only does the narration continually hurl hateful anti-Jewish comments, the Jewish characters are made to say awful things about each other. The story of an aging, ill Jewish businessman,  his grasping wife, and a spoiled, greedy "slut" of a daughter, the book's antisemitism is surpassed by its misogyny. So, when two straight men discuss the gorgeous gigolo's being gay, the reader reflexively braces for the vilest homophobia. Instead, they are surprisingly blasé:

Fischl indicated Alec with a sullen shrug. "They say he prefers men. Is it true?"
"Not for the moment, in any case," murmured Hoyos. He stared at Joyce and Alec with a sardonic look on his face. "He's so young, people don't know what they like at that age."

Némirovsky wrote David Golder from 1926 to 1929, when it was published to widespread acclaim and became a bestseller. It's another reminder that gay life could be known, discussed, and accepted four decades before Stonewall, during a time we're often told such behavior was unheard of, unforgivable, and unspoken.

Eight Razzie Nominations for Pretend Gay Movie

Yesterday, on the eve of the Oscar nominations, the Razzie Awards for the year's worst movies announced their nominations for their 28th annual celebration of all things awful. Proving their merit, they heaped eight nominations on the pile of celluloid called I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which two NYC straight firefighters must pretend to be a gay couple in order to receive health benefits. Cue two hours of exaggerated stereotypes for comic effect, nonstop pandering to hetero discomfort, wrapped up with a plea for tolerance. Their nominations:

Worst Picture
Worst Director (Dennis Dugan)
Worst Screenplay (Barry Fanaro and Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor)
Worst Actor (Adam Sandler)
Worst Supporting Actor (Kevin James)
Worst Supporting Actor (Rob Schneider)
Worst Supporting Actress (Jessica Biel)
Worst Screen Couple (Adam & Kevin)

Here's hoping they sweep the awards, given on February 23.

Michael Pollan's Manifesto

To a massive, overflow crowd last night, Michael Pollan read from his new book, In Defense of Food, and discussed why we need his manifesto. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking the answer was "To depress us" rather than, as he says, "To return pleasure to eating."

Pollan sees two problems, the more tangible of which is the aggressive food lobby that spends nearly three billion dollars a month basically to give consumers, directly or indirectly, bad information. (He points out that the foods that are best for you, fresh vegetables and fruits, are the only foods that don't carry FDA labels.) The second problem he sees as being worse, and that's "the lens through which we look at food." He is very much against nutritionism. If we believe that nutrients are what matter most, then we necessarily lose control, having no choice but to rely on "experts" because we can't see nutrients. But he repeatedly likened today's food experts to surgeons in the 1600s and offered many examples of them contradicting their new rules about good and bad foods within a few years (e.g., saturated vs. trans fats).

Another example of how little we know: Our digestive tracts have the same number of neurons as our spinal cords; we've mapped and know each one's function on our spinal cords but we're clueless about our guts. More depressing factoids: four of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. are the result of diet, and twenty percent of all food purchased here is consumed in cars. Low fat milk becomes too watery, so dairies have to add dried milk powder to thicken it, which then requires antioxidants to counterbalance that. (A woman in the audience begged him, "Stop!") Because of refrigeration requirements, all supermarkets are laid out the same and Pollan says shop the periphery, the worst items are in the middle.

Reduced to seven words, his manifesto is "Eat food, not too much, mainly plants." (By food he means a food your great-grandmother would recognize, not "food products.") An early, short essay incarnation of the manifesto appears here, curiously suggesting a much older ancestor. When in doubt, act more French: smaller portions of richer foods, eaten together, for pleasure, community, ritual, and family. In response to feverish questions, he said he's not much taken with the raw movement, he loves slow food, and he suspects in years to come we'll all be eating algae. (For the record, the short, lively, older woman in front of me asked, "Do you have any disparaging words about algae or kelp?")

Judith Thurman on Cleopatra's Nose

Thursday night at 192 Books, Judith Thurman discussed her magnificent new collection of thirty-nine essays, thirty-eight of which have appeared in The New Yorker since June 1987 when she wrote about Nadine Gordimer. She sounded a lot like John McPhee had when he sat in the same chair seven months ago discussing the difficulties of their craft. Thurman said, "Writing has never gotten easier. Experience doesn't help. Confidence does not accrue. (You hope your surgeon doesn't feel the same.)" She also spoke about the importance of "letting the inessential go," particularly as a result of last summer's essay about tofu. Rather than reading from it, she read us some of her innumerable false starts from early drafts of the piece. She said she thought it was encouraging to young writers that even an old hand can be so bad and that she had seen many writers' first drafts and they were all terrible. I asked her about Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, whom she cites as the love of Balenciaga's life, but she said she did not have time to research him more. She added, "Balenciaga had an affair with blank but it's not my job to out blank." She told me that what made the Balenciaga piece meaningful to her was getting to the sentence, "A machine doesn't suffer from the terror of failure and exposure inherent in virtuosity." I also asked her what the fashion industry made of her and she was very funny about how far off their radar she is. Don't make the same mistake yourself. Buy Cleopatra's Nose and read every word.

Ha Jin at the Chelsea B&N

Discussing his new novel and his career for an hour last night in Chelsea, Ha Jin gave what amounted to a crash course in the Western Canon. He talked about Homer and Dante (saying the great literary tradition was to write about exile not immigration, which is only a minor theme in world literature and primarily an American one), Willa Cather (My Antonia being a major book about the immigrant experience, and with O Pioneers, making the land a character, showing how the people who stay on the land will be fine but those who leave it may or may not survive but are likely to be sterile), Henry Roth (whose Call It Sleep provided a “technical map for how to present multiple languages in a story”), Abraham Cohen (for the immigration experience of Russian Jews in his novel The Rise of David Lewinsky), Gish Jen (for being one of his few fellow Chinese-American writers to examine this generation rather than retelling the stories of their parents and grandparents), and his heroes Joseph Conrad and Nabokov, both of whom wrote in English as a second language learned much later in life. (Conrad was Polish, born Teodor Józef Konrad Nalęcz-Korzeniowski.) Remember, Ha Jin did not come to the U.S. until 1985 when he was twenty-nine. Within five years he had published his first book of poems written in English and within eleven years he had won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first book of stories. Three years later, in 1999, he published his second novel Waiting, a masterpiece of purity that won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His 2004 novel War Trash again won the PEN/Faulkner Award. The new novel, A Free Life, is his fifth, and it is 630 pages because he wanted it to have a "heft and exuberance that reflect America’s land." I thanked him for his story "The Bridegroom" (about a closeted gay man in China) and asked if any of his novels included characters who are gay. His head shot up and froze, like a pointer, as he visibly, distantly sped through his mental rolodex of his characters. He looked worried, or maybe it was intense concentration. “Yes!” he said with absolute joy. “The new one!”

Margot at the Wedding

Ninety-three minutes of family tension and the painful, sometimes funny gap between how people see themselves and how they actually are. The gay pair in an early scene may be the best adjusted couple in the movie. A feral shirtless neighbor boy demands to know if Margot’s sensitive son—the fairly awesome first-time actor Zack Pais, above in black and brown—is “a fruity” and dissatisfied with the answer “No,” tackles him, straddles him, insists that he is a fruity, then bites his neck. The adults interact worse. Sorry to report that in the Q&A after, only Nicole Kidman proved she could answer a question helpfully, yet that came prepackaged with her obligatory praise for the director, Noah Baumbach, and the producer, Scott Rudin, as well as quotes of Rudin’s praise for her. She was worried she couldn’t play a cold, neurotic New York novelist, and had to be frequently dissuaded from hugging or touching her character’s son or sister. Her dress (ruffled hem below the knee) and shoes (silver) were knockouts, unlike her severe hair. Poor Jennifer Jason Leigh must have been tired, and who wouldn’t be, married to the director. He said three times the film was not autobiographical and that they had purposefully used old lenses without digitally correcting the film to give it the feel of old family photographs.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days won the Palm d'Or at Cannes this year, so you've been wondering whether or not you want to see it when it's released in January. Two things. One: The movie is brilliant. Shot so convincingly you can feel the grime of every despairing, gloomy corner in its Romania of 1987, it feels like a documentary, has no music, and is filled with believable, natural characters in crushing circumstances. Under communist rule, even the simplest action, early on it’s buying soap, requires a complex network of favors, borrowed money, half-truths, negotiations with black market dealers, and half lies. A scene with the main character, Otilia, riding a bus without a ticket shows both the instant willingness of strangers to help each other against the state and their miserable satisfaction in watching them suffer. That’s the other thing: The movie is absolutely brutal. It captures the automatic tyranny of the crushed, as if the characters were saying, If I have the opportunity to exploit you, obviously I must take it, otherwise how does the system work? This ranges from the prolonged cat-and- mouse game of hotel clerks who "lose" reservations then "may" be able to help get a room but ultimately don't, to the (illegal) abortionist's calm explanation that in addition to his extortionist fees he needs something more from both the pregnant young woman and her friend, Otilia. Immediately after being violated, Otilia must go to meet her boyfriend's parents for the first time, at his mother's 48th birthday party, a small, friendly, squabbling dinner of unhappy doctors and their wives, and, when they're finally alone together in his room, her boyfriend doesn't understand why she doesn't want to have sex. You may have seen suspense in a movie before, but you haven't seen a young woman alone in the dark, in an unfamiliar, menacing  neighborhood, trying to find a place to hide a fetus where neither police nor dogs will find it. The Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, says this movie is the first in his series Tales from the Golden Age.

Europe = Sex

The European Commission has created a 44-second montage to support a fund aimed at helping successful movies in one E.U. country crossover to other E.U. audiences. It's all sex. All kinds, from sweet to sweaty, all very, very quick. The fact that the clips include multiple scenes of lusty gay sex makes it even harder to imagine a U.S. film board making a similar promo reel. Apparently the Europeans know this. When they were criticized by conservatives in England, the commission replied, ”The European Union is not a Bible Belt; we believe in freedom of expression and artistic creativity.” NSFW.

Today or Tomorrow

Hurry to Jamba Juice and get a free smoothie in their two-for-one promotion through July 4. Print the coupon and go.

Bruce Willis in Time Magazine

Bruce Willis, the 52-year-old actor and vocal Republican, gave a long interview to Joel Stein at Time. Two quotes:

Which leads him to lament living in a time when Isaiah Washington is fired for calling a gay Grey's Anatomy co-star a "faggot." "I hate to think we live in a time when you can get fired from your job because of what you say," he says. "He didn't punch anyone. I think we'll think differently with hindsight."

and

"The Internet is a big dark hole. What if the Internet was the lead mugs that everyone in Rome was using that led to the end of that civilization? What if 20 years from now, the Internet led to the downfall of the world?"

Mika's Big Girls, Christina's Gay Boys

As millions of people in New York, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Seattle, and San Francisco struggle to figure out what to wear to this weekend's parades of body image issues gay pride, here are two reminders from Mika and Christina about who's beautiful.

Marianne Wiggins on The Shadow Catcher

One of the surprises of Marianne Wiggins’ bold, invigorating new novel The Shadow Catcher is that she imagines the photographer Edward S. Curtis being happiest in a longterm affair with a (fictitious) man named Enrico. This revelation, at the end of the book, is given great emotional importance yet only a few lines of narration. Maybe the brevity makes it more potent. Asked last night at a bookstore in Chelsea to elaborate on the relationship, she said she had not always known Curtis’s story would end there; she had discovered it mid-writing. It came to her from looking at a particular photo and from reading Curtis’s letters which highlight his love of a certain kind of masculinity.

Wiggins should be best known for her masterpiece, John Dollar, or her previous novel, Evidence of Things Unseen, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

She described the new novel as a “braided river” whose two strands are story of Curtis becoming a great Western photographer and the story of “Marianne Wiggins” whose discussions with Hollywood about her new novel about Edward Curtis are interrupted by hospital calls from Las Vegas where a dying, comatose man has stolen her father’s identity. The dying man is looked after by a Native American who has connections to Curtis. All stories in the novel reflect different variations on the twin themes of heading west and fathers who abandon their families.

A generous author in every aspect, she said her favorite thing is when readers begin to feel they know her characters better than she does and argue with her about the choices they make.

The Los Angeles Times ran a fine interview, which can be read here.

Metacritic is shamefully behind in their books section. They still haven’t even added Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, published May 8, or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, published May 15, so they certainly don’t yet have The Shadow Catcher, published June 5, but reviews have been very strong: here, here, and one by Jane Smiley here.

Last To Know: Harry Hewitt

 
Last weekend, two gay men relaxing at their country house in Virginia with the Washington Post’s “Book World” and a hammock were startled to discover themselves the very last people on the planet to comprehend that Prince Charles is likely not the father of Prince Harry. Tina Brown, in her new book The Diana Chronicles, on sale today, says the red-headed prince is the son of Diana’s red-headed lover at the time of his conception, James Hewitt (left). Brown reports that once when the subject of Harry’s paternity arose, Prince Charles replied, “Well, I don't know what she was doing at the time.” It can't be easy for any of them.