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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
01/27/2003
painted actors and yet more angst
It has been unseasonably hot. Daffodils are blooming, loquats are filled with developing fruit, sedums and other plants are pushing through the soil, and bees are going to town with all the flowers in the neighbors cherry trees.
It would be hard to reconcile a moody depression with nature working in excess, yet I somehow have managed to do so. In the last entry I wrote that I had been in a funk for a while and I still am. I think I am doing better, but even so, chipper is not exactly the best of adjective for me at the moment.
If anyone else out there is old enough to remember biorhythms, my life has felt as if all those wavy lines were simultaneously hitting bottom. I've been in a very January/midwinter blues kind of a mood. Even though nature isn't acting as if it was still winter, I am.
Well, at least I was. I am improving. I think I am anyway. Given a choice between torpor, or actually leaving the house, I'm still ending up on the couch watching tv more often than not, but at least I have left the house a few times.
Unfortunately, when it comes to a choice between anger and action, or quiet resignation over everything going on the world, I'm still lying on the couch. The supposed liberal media pushing a pro war agenda down the nations throat has barely gotten a yawn out of me. News that a former company of cheyney's is going to make huge sums of money off the army and war, has made me want to nap.
News that Mr. "Legacy Admission to Yale" bush has put the power of the presidency firmly against even feeble attempts at affirmative action because it would be "unfair," managed to ignite momentarily anger. Anger which quickly turned to bitter resignation. Resignation which has left me feeling drained.
Drained was also how I felt when I read that Morris Kight had died. An important pioneer in the gay rights movement in Los Angeles, and barely a mention of his death in the mass media. Not too many people seem to care.
After reading all this, it may seem strange to say that my mood is improving, but trust me, it is.
Anyway, like the previous few weeks, the past week was one of vacuous media overload. I didn't watch the superbowl, I didn't watch any of the overly gay counter programing (E! does Rock Hudson?), but I did watch more episodes of Space 1999.
Since I first saw these things as a kid, watching them again as an adult leads to a weird sense of deja vu. A feeling which helps with the over all oddness of the program. I saw an episode where Voyager Returns. Unlike the first star trek movie where this is a bad thing because the voyager probe "evolved" into a superbeing, in this (earlier?) story, the return of voyager is not a good thing since it accidentally killed a few planets resulting in a bunch of pissed off aliens. All of which doesn't really matter, since the story was actually a Frankenstein variant, where a scientist has to pay for his arrogance with his life. Except that the scientist seemed more sad and depressed than arrogant. I also watched Black Sun, where the moon apparently falls into a black hole. Instead of being crushed to death, the Alphans have an odd acid trip and talk to god. Which was a lot more interesting than Missing Link. I'm not even sure what happened in that story. It did have super evolved aliens, who you knew were super evolved aliens because the actors were painted gold. It could possibly be a version of the tempest, except a version where other than the Prospero alien wearing an astoundingly ugly hat, nothing happens.
I also watched Kissing Jessica Stein for the first time. Not much to say about that, other than the obvious question. Just why would anyone want to be involved with someone that whinny and neurotic anyway?
Not all of my week was spent wasting time in front of the tv. John and I went to see Living Out by Lisa Loomer at the Mark Taper. According to the promo material, it is a play where two women, a west side lawyer mom and an illegal resident mom, deal and learn from each other when the second woman works as a nanny for the first. It was a very heavily L.A. play, with lots of references to local cities and institutions.
Riding the escalator down to the parking garage afterwards, some people in front of me were talking about how the first act was good (the humorous setting up situation section), while the second act wasn't (the situation comes to dramatic, not so humorous conclusion section). One of the women in front of me also loudly said that she was tired of the entire working mom worried about her kids at home thing. It was old, and "besides aren't we over that yet?"
Considering that we live in a society where it is almost unheard of for the employer to provide day care exactly so that working parents can work without having to worry about their kids, I thought the answer would be self evident. Then again, what do I know?
The play doesn't concern itself with why the lawyer mom's job has no day care. It doesn't deal with the question of why the nanny's were all illegal residents. It doesn't mention how the yuppie families gardeners, and probably a host of other "nonskilled" workers around the city were probably not legal residents either. It doesn't examine the details of how our economy is dependent on exploitable, nonunionizing, fearful, illegal residents for cheap labor.
However, it did spend a lot of time dealing with the angst and problems faced by working parents. I liked the play, but at the same time, it did seem somewhat timid, as if it were limiting itself. I don't know if this was because the author wanted to focus the story, or if she didn't want to piss off her potentially largely white audience. Then again, the likely answer is that I am totally off base here.
Besides the play, the other 'arty' thing I did was see Talk to her, or Habla con ella, if you prefer. An Almodovar film with two men, both in love two women in comas. The reviews I've read about the movie talk about a gay man in love with a woman he has never met awake and how the two men learn from each other. This was not quite the movie that I saw.
The "gay" man is a male nurse who is in love to point of obsession with his charge, a young woman who has been in a coma for the past four years. He's shy and unassuming, but gay? I don't know. Maybe. The character is so emotionally stunted that he could be a repressed homosexual, then again, repressed heterosexual could be just as accurate. Falling in love with women, after all usually conflicts with the gay label. But apparently for the reviewers I've read, not being exactly "straight" must make someone gay.
Of course none of this is really relevant to the film. This is all my hang up about the idea of a gay identity not being the same thing as being a homosexual. My problems with the reviews aside, this was a very interesting film.
more later,
nico
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