Fun Home on Broadway

Yesterday, one week before the Broadway run closes for good, and thanks to the sweet generosity of a dear friend, I saw the musical Fun Home at Circle in the Square. It. Blew. Me. Away. By which I mean, to be more specific, it left me a sodden soggy wrung-out distraught overwrought wreck. How great is that? This is what art ought to do. Shake us. Make us think.

I'd of course read Alison Bechdel's acclaimed book Fun Home soon after it was published in 2007. Strangely, though I liked it I didn't love it. It's strange because I never did manage to put my finger on what I didn't-love about it when just about the whole world was loving on it so hard, and when I've always loved, adored, her long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For, read and loved every installment, every collection, since DTWOF first started running in the 1980s. I still can't account for why I was relatively unmoved by Fun Home the book; I'd even say I've felt vaguely ashamed of myself for what must be a readerly failure on my part.

Well, never mind all that. I was swept away by Fun Home the innovative, exquisite, gut-wrenching masterpiece of musical theater. It is at once a very fine piece of political art--deeply relevant social commentary of the sort you rarely see in the theater anymore, certainly not on Broadway where the big-money profit-takers' lock on things is now pretty much complete--and a powerhouse of a tragic, gut-wrenching personal story. All presented by a brilliantly talented cast performing a stunningly written book and score by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori.

Tesori was also the composer for another breathtakingly creative, howlingly painful, and cracklingly political Broadway musical, Caroline, or Change, which had a criminally short run on Broadway in 2004. I lucked into free tickets for this show and can never forget its devastating impact, or that of its unbelievable powerhouse of a star, Tonya Pinkins. As it did for Caroline whose book and lyrics were by Tony Kushner, Tesori's music for Fun Home meshes soaringly with the sometimes startling, sometimes funny, sometimes sardonic, mostly searing, profoundly affecting lyrics. You know I'm a words gal, but even more than that I'm a sucker for words when they're sung straight into my heart. Caroline, or Change's did that, shatteringly. Now Fun Home's have too.

QUEENS BOOK FESTIVAL! & OUTWRITE!

As a little known writer of an obscure novel published by a small press, it's always a delightful surprise when somebody wants to hear anything from me. So I'm still a little shocked to say that I'll get a chance to say a few words about books, writing, and my take on it all at two separate important literary events on the weekend of August 6-7.

First, I'll be in D.C. for the annual OutWrite LGBT Book Festival. It's a weekend-long extravaganza of books, writers, readings, talks, panels, that is as far as I know the most inclusive, interesting, multifaceted gathering of LGBTQ writers and readers that ever takes place in this country. I'll be reading from my novel Vera's Will, and also taking part in panels on historical fiction and literary activism, all on Saturday August 6.

I'll rush back home to Queens, NY, on the train that same night, because the next day I get to be a part of the first Queens Book Festival. This is truly exciting--both the daylong event, and the fact that I get to be part of the inaugural edition of what promises to be an excellent annual literary gathering. The New York City borough of Queens, my home for 22 years now, is the most multinational locale on earth, and naturally as home to people from all over the globe it's also the site of a burgeoning literary and arts scene that gives voice especially to working-class and oppressed poets, writers and artists who have for so long been shut out from access to the bourgeois-corporate literary-artistic marketplace (for want of a better word, well actually it's a perfect word). I'll be part of a 4 p.m. panel on LGBTQ Representation in the Literary World. But I plan to be at the festival most of the day, because there's a stunning lineup of writers whose voices I want to hear.

To tell the truth I'm more than a little stunned at the cohort alongside whom I'll be presenting at the panels and readings I'm taking part in at both the D.C. OutWrite conference and the Queens Book Festival. These are names I've known, artists I've admired, for a long time. It'll be an honor to share some time, some space, some thoughts with them. A surprising honor.

PEN's latest odious offense

I'm no fan of PEN America, an organization of the U.S. corporate publishing establishment that purports to champion literary liberty but actually operates for the most part as a  bourgeois-liberal mouthpiece of U.S. imperialism. Wielding its heartiest denunciations against socialist countries. Aligning itself with vile racist anti-Muslim journalism. Generally letting U.S. and allied political imprisonment off the hook. I've written about this several times in earlier years on this blog. Most recently here, and here, in 2013, when misogynist extraordinaire Philip Roth was awarded for his aid to counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia.

So count me as unsurprised, though nonetheless appalled, at PEN's latest offense. The organization lists the Embassy of Israel as one of the "champions"--a level of sponsorship, no doubt financial--of the upcoming 2016 incarnation of its annual World Voices Festival. The apartheid state's embassy appears on the festival program a second time as "sponsor" of one of the author panels.

This outrage--featuring as a sponsor, which is in effect a promotion or advertisement, the U.S. representative of a government whose hallmarks are racism, torture, political imprisonment, denial of all basic human rights to the indigenous Palestinian nation, an apartheid settler state, a government that is in its very essense everything this fake-pro-freedom organization claims to oppose--has been noted. A few days ago a letter headlined "Don't Partner with the Israeli Government: Israeli Government Is No 'Champion' of Freedom of Expression" was sent to the PEN American Center. The letter calls on PEN to "reject support from the Embassy of Israel," and goes on to list some of the Zionist state's offenses.
 
Besides Alice Walker, long a strong supporter of the Palestinian struggle, signers include acclaimed Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa, Junot Diaz, Angela Davis, Max Blumenthal, Hari Kunzru, Sarah Schulman, China Mieville, Kamila Shamsie, Randa Jarrar, Richard Ford, Marilyn Hacker and many other writers and poets. More names are being added daily. I signed. Writers: add your name as well. Here's the letter, with info about signing on.
 

I wish I could have heard Ethel sing

June 19, 2013, is the 60th anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes of the U.S. government, which has committed many many heinous crimes: the execution of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg, two communist workers who were the victims of a monstrous mendacious frame-up. They were wholly innocent of the concocted charge of providing the "secret of the atomic bomb" to the Soviet Union. But they were friends to the USSR, and to all people worldwide fighting for socialism, and they did what they could to aid in this fight. For that, their courageous acts of internationalist solidarity; for their lifelong devotion to the cause of justice, liberation, anti-racism, and working-class struggle; and of course for their noble refusal to submit and "confess," to betray their beliefs or their comrades, to lie, to sell out, even at the cost of their own lives—the Rosenbergs will always be remembered as true heroes. I believe that in the pantheon of heroes of the ages, heroes of the world's workers and oppressed, a pantheon made up not of imaginary supernatural beings but of merely human beings, people who did their best to their last breath, there will always be a place of honor for the Rosenbergs.

I was born a year after they were killed, and I can see now what I couldn't know then as a little kid in the 1950s. How along with the obvious anti-worker, anti-communist, anti-union, anti-struggle McCarthyite message it was meant to send, the Rosenbergs' execution also cast a specifically anti-Semitic chill that I believe partly explains the sense of siege, of threat, that my parents gave me to understand hovered over our Jewish household in suburban Detroit 10 years and more after the defeat of Nazism in Europe. I'll never know, but I wonder whether the fear engendered by the Rosenberg case didn't play a role in my mother's eventual rightward shift over the years. As for me, I didn't learn about the case until I was in high school, probably 1969 or 1970, a time of protest and rebellion that was bringing me to political consciousness. From then on I've always had a deep feeling of awe, love and respect for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. For the sacrifice they made. For the good comrades they were. As millions of others worldwide felt, and feel, and will continue to feel.

And so this past Sunday evening I was thrilled to be at Town Hall for a wonderful event sponsored by the Rosenberg Fund for Children to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the execution, celebrate today's families of resistance, and raise funds (which I hope it did!) for the RFC's good work of supporting and aiding political activists, especially imprisoned activists, and their families. It was called Carry It Forward: Celebrate the Children of Resistance. I'd attended a similar event 10 years ago on the 50th anniversary. That night I was pretty weepy the whole time. This night not so much, hooray! Yes there were tearful moments, primarily when actors Eve Ensler and Cotter Smith read from Ethel and Julius's prison letters to their children Robby and Michael, letters full of love, full of life, full of hope not for themselves but for the world. But overall it was a joyous evening, an evening of affirmation, of defiance and solidarity and music, and I left feeling strengthened and buoyed.

If Ethel and Julius had lived, I might very well have known them, for I travel in the same circles they did. Perhaps I would have had the chance to hear Ethel sing--she was by all accounts a lovely singer--at some rally or movement program. Wouldn't that have been something.

The Town Hall program the other night ended with a rousing rendition of the great Bob Marley/Peter Tosh song "Get Up Stand Up," performed by Latino hip hoppers Rebel Diaz with folk duo Mike & Ruthy. Gathered onstage singing along were the evening's narrator Angela Davis, the Rosenberg sons Michael and Robby Meeropol, Carry It Forward writer Ellen Meeropol, Ethel and Julius's granddaughter Jenn Meeropol who's the new head of the RFC, and all the actors and performers who had brought the evening to life with their portrayals of activist targets of government repression who have been RFC beneficiaries. 
We the audience, including many elders who were the Rosenbergs' contemporaries, who marched for them, who wept at their deaths, who still know which side they're on, and the rest of us, we got up, we stood up, we sang too, and at the risk of sounding mawkish I think we all of us felt an echo of Ethel and Julius singing along with us, our martyrs whose voices have never been stilled.

On the town

Last week my best friend was in town visiting so I got to take in some culture. Including:

1. Teresa, Rosemary and I saw the play Venus in Fur, written by David Ives and starring the extraordinary Nina Arianda. Amazing. This is one of those rare instances when I agree with all the raves even though they emanate from bourgeois sources. Well, not quite, for I've discovered, since seeing it and upon delving further into the critical commentary, that while the adoration of Arianda is unanimous opinion is more divided on the play itself, and furthermore that there are, it seems, varied interpretations of what it all means, what it's about, most of all what's up with that ending. Hmm. So methinks the bourgeois sources have screwed up here after all. Arianda in all her glory aside, the play itself is, yuk yuk inside joke you'll only get if you've seen it, divine. Brilliant writing that had me on the edge of my seat straining to catch every word only to be whipsawed about this way and that by them up to the very last moment, and that moment is breathtakingly perfect. Hilarious too, as well as discomfiting in a good way.

Playwriting strikes me, every time I get to see a production, as a mysterious art. I always come out wishing I could do it but convinced that I haven't a clue about how to try. Bravo to David Ives and, yes, to the mighty Aphrodite herself, Nina Arianda.

2. Spent an hour or so later that evening at a grand old Village gay dive piano bar with a grand old name, Marie's Crisis Café. Fun, except for our chagrin at the group of young men who seemed to know only tunes from Disney musicals. Egads! This was the first time I've ever been there when I couldn't join in on the singing, for Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Sondheim, Bernstein, Gershwin, Porter and all that lot were, sadly, not in the house.

3. I took Rosemary to the Queens Museum for a perambulation around the Panorama of the City of New York. It is a glorious thing. And she permitted me to be in my glory, pointing here and there orienting her, showing off my fabulous town.

4. We went to the Brooklyn Museum, where we were very satisfied with the new exhibit Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. AKA The Gay Show. Really interesting on many levels.

Now my sister- and brother-in-law are in town from Texas and after they come from Radio City Musical Hall where they're seeing the Rockettes do their holiday thing, we're meeting for a sushi dinner at one of the best Japanese restaurants in the city. Phew! Ain't I got fun?

I don't have a Twitter account ...

... but if I did this is what I'd tweet after having paid money to watch this awful reactionary mess last night:

OMG Tree of Life worst movie ever! Endless boring pretentious backward religio-mystico claptrap!

That's few enough characters, right?

The cultural front

I'm popping in here mostly with links because I'm in the midst of a writing project that's taking a lot of time and concentration, and will for quite a while to come. So. For now:

I suggest that you head over to author Carleen Brice's always interesting and informative site White Readers Meet Black Authors for this list of upcoming new books by writers of color. I see quite a few that I'm adding to my to-read list.

One book on the list, Martha Southgate's new novel The Taste of Salt, reminded me to post her piece for Entertainment Weekly on The Help. There is a lot of hard-hitting truth-telling commentary on both the book and movie written by African Americans, and I'd encourage readers to seek out and read it. Ms. Southgate's is particularly pithy. Also check out Color Online's post, which includes a link to the first chapter of The Taste of Salt.

Speaking of movies, and turning from the untruthful, inauthentic, reprehensible to several that seem to be more up our alley, author Zetta Elliott recommends two that sound really worth seeing: Gun Hill Road and Attack the Block.

There's also John Sayles' new movie Amigo, which is about U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. If you read the New York Times review, a mix of praise for Sayles' artistry, caution about his politics, and, worryingly, satisfaction with his evenhandedness, you know that this film pulls its punches more than those on our side of the class struggle would wish. Indeed, a Filipina activist friend of mine saw it and judged it "only okay." I'll probably see it once it hits my TV's on-demand system because it's not as if there's a glut of films about the U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines--I'd bet most people in this country don't even know it ever happened--but of course the best source for information about this history, whether served up via fiction or nonfiction, is Filipino writers and artists. I've read several novels by Filipinos this year. I'm going to see what Filipino films I can find.

Finally, there's this. The most gag-o-rific new book on the market, winning prominent reviews throughout the bourgeois media, is the horrifyingly yet aptly titled Class Warfare, subtitled Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools by the reactionary enemy of public education Steven Brill. Pun aside, this is indeed class warfare, but Brill and his admirers aren't the least bit honest about which class they represent and which they're waging war on. They pretend they care about the public schools. Nonsense. They care about the huge flow of private profit that would begin to flow (that is already flowing to charter-school outfits) if they could only crush the teachers' unions and end government funding of public education entirely. Plow through the front-page piece by Sara Mosle in today's New York Times Book Review, all three pages of it if you can stomach it. You'll search in vain for any mention of the real, the primary cause of so-called failed schools (in itself a completely dishonest and untrustworthy category, when failure is defined as it everywhere now is by the anti-public-school, anti-teachers'-union forces in power from the Education Department on down)--that is, you won't find any reference to funding and finances. Not until nearly the end of this review, and even then the only mention goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to the disgusting federal "Race to the Top" that dangled financial reward to school districts that dismantle even the pretense of a system of equal education. Yet for any honest analyst, there can be no mystery. The scandal, the crime--indeed, The Shame of the Nation as the exemplary writer and equal-education advocate Jonathan Kozol titled his last book, which you've really got to read if you haven't already, but first read this recent interview with him--is quite simple. It's all about funding. Schools that serve a population that's poor, working-class, people of color, any or all of these, are under-funded. Drastically, outrageously, we're talking about no textbooks, no chalk, no chairs, no working toilets and worse. Schools that serve a population that's more prosperous and more white have way way more money to work with, and it shows. It's like the emperor's new clothes the way these commentators, these education "reformers" (read destroyers), harumph around analyzing why oh why this high school in, say, the South Bronx can't seem to send a better percentage of its graduates to college or even graduate a better percentage of its kids vs. why oh why this sparkly pretty clean high-tech-equipped high school in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut manages to graduate almost all its students and send them off to college, good colleges, too. Duh. What a difficult conundrum. Right.

OK, now that I've demoralized us all, let's try to pull ourselves back up with this: the new movie Precious Knowledge, which just played at the New York Latino Film Festival and will show on PBS next spring. It's about the struggle to create, and now to defend, ethnic studies classes in Tucson, Arizona. With young people and educators like those shown in this film leading the way, I feel sure that the fight to save our schools, while tough, will be won.

The cultural crap heap

In a bad start to what I hope will be a relaxing three-day weekend, Teresa and I made the terrible mistake of renting the movie Burning Palms, written and directed by Christopher Landon. Stay away from this one! It's the most offensive piece of racist, misogynist and anti-gay--that's right, this pig managed a three-fer--cinematic trash I've seen since I don't know when. I don't want to spend much time and energy on it after losing almost two hours of my life to its utterly disgusting assault (and why did I, you might justifiably ask, to which I'd answer we kept looking at each other in disbelief, saying, oh come on, he's pulling our legs, he's building up to making some point, pitiful, right, but we were in denial, we just couldn't believe it could really be as horribly Nazi-ishly bad as it was), but I just have to make the record here. Burning Palms is a big bag  of cultural fascism.

Women who love to be raped, seek out their rapists and beg for more? Oh yeah, got it. Women who become deranged after a single instance of slightly kinky sexual acts and mutilate themselves? Sure, check it out. Women who upon being confronted by nasty affronts immediately crumble and commit suicide? Yeah, you like watching dead women, self-loathing women, women begging to be raped? Hey, this is the movie for you. While you're at it, take a quick trip to West Hollywood to gawk at the cartoonishly shallow simpering self-centered idiotic gay men to which stereotype Landon manages to attach an equally cartoonish racist depiction of an African child adoptee.

Hate women, gay people, people of color? Check out Burning Palms. Otherwise, stay the hell away from this stinking pile of shit.

If more evidence were needed for how desperately we need a ramped-up movement creating and promoting progressive people's art and stomping to its death the anti-people--especially the racist, anti-woman, anti-gay--so-called art beloved of the bourgeoisie, here it is.

Even the Rain

I saw a provocative and important movie this past weekend. Even the Rain, about a year old, available, at least on my cable system, on demand for five bucks. It's about a film crew that's come to Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the year 2000 to make a movie about the arrival and subsequent actions of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish colonizers in what are now the Americas. The movie they are making has a progressive slant; it shows the horrors inflicted on the Indigenous inhabitants by the invaders; it does not portray Columbus and the rest as heroes; it highlights the efforts of Bartolome de las Casas and the now lesser-known Antonio Montesinos against these horrors. And yet, for all their good intentions, the European director/writer, producer, crew and most of the actors, from the moment they arrive for the shoot, themselves engage in the same racism, exploitation and oppression that they're supposedly committed to exposing when it's safely 500 years in the past. Ironies abound, but really irony is the wrong word because there's a bourgeois disengagement to artistic irony, a trap into which Even the Rain does not fall. Rather, I should say that this film does a great job, careful but clear, of depicting a latter-day invasion—not physically cruel, brutal or violent but nevertheless oppressive and exploitive in many ways, and clueless about its oppressiveness, utterly insensitive—an invasion in this case by a moneyed force, that is, a movie production.

Although that alone would be interesting enough, there's much more. For the film crew arrives just as the great water wars of Cochabamba are hitting a fever pitch. No one—actors, director, producer, crew—remains untouched as the Bolivian peasants and workers organize, take to the streets, shut down the city, battle street by street to defend a most basic, precious right. The fulcrum of it all, of the struggle and of the movie and of the movie within the movie, is the character of Daniel. He and his daughter have been hired for the movie, he playing the pivotal role of Hatuey, the Taino rebel who led the resistance to the invaders and was crucified for it. At the same time, Daniel is a leader of the  actual real-life struggle to block imperialism (it was the U.S. company Bechtel) from stealing the people's water and forcing them to pay for it. This struggle coincides with and interrupts the shoot, and it forces the producer and director to make hard decisions about what matters most—a movie or a struggle for justice, an investment or a human being.

The acting in Even the Rain is very good, especially that of Juan Carlos Aduviri as Hatuey and Luis Tosar as Costa the producer. The director is Icíar Bollaín; I'm not familiar with her work but would gladly see more of her movies. The writer is Paul Laverty, who also wrote Bread and Roses about the Justice for Janitors strike in Los Angeles and the great great The Wind that Shakes the Barley about the Irish republican struggle. The movie is dedicated to Howard Zinn, a signal of the filmmakers' orientation toward truth telling.

A final note. I mused a bit after watching Even the Rain about why the filmmakers hadn't simply made a movie about the Cochabamba water wars and how the peasants and workers drove Bechtel out of Bolivia. Wouldn't that be a great, exciting, dramatic movie, and don't we desperately need movies that show the class struggle in action? So is this one more case of foregrounding European central characters (the Spanish moviemakers of the movie-within-the-movie) onto a story that is not theirs, of telling a story of Indigenous resistance through European eyes? In one way, yes it is, it's undeniable, that's what this film does. In another way, though, I think the artists behind Even the Rain deserve some leeway, some credit, even. I think they very consciously framed the story the way they did, not to provide some through-privileged-eyes surrogate viewpoint, but rather to make a particular point about how what Columbus started is still going on. How Europe (now joined by the U.S.) continues to rob the riches and resources of Latin America and the Caribbean (and Asia and Africa)—in the most pernicious, overt ways, as with Bechtel's water grab, and also in less obvious or extreme ways, as with the moviemakers-within-the-movie paying extras $2 a day, putting them through physical and psychological hardship, swooping in to spend the least possible money for the highest possible later profit, all the while trying desperately to ignore the class war swirling all around them.

I saw a misogynist movie: Black Swan

The other day I relented on my bedbug ban on NYC movie theaters and went to see Black Swan. My my what a swamp of sexist--no, I've got to go further for this film is not merely sexist, it is full-on misogynist--ideas and imagery. What wrecks, what weak sad pathetic wrecks, and not just that, what vicious competitive violent destructive self-destructive confused insane and sexually lunatic yet frigid barely human beings we gals are, according to screenwriters Mark Heyman and Andres Heinz and director Darren Aronofsky. As artists, we're not nuts in the standard way male artists are permitted to be nuts in the movies, the Agony & Ecstasy/Lust for Life/Pollock way. No, for us it's our very femaleness that predetermines our downfall. To drive the point home, they made sure to include a hot lesbian sex scene, an overwrought masturbation scene, a standard-issue monster mother, lots of blood and crazy red eyes and on and on, climaxing in attainment of artistic perfection achieved only and simultaneously with death.

This makes me tired. This endless onslaught. And reminds me why I've nearly given up on the movies. This is the best Hollywood can do. This is what passes for cinematic art in this country. Black Swan and Aronofsky are nominated for Oscars. Don't even get me started on the whole list of nominees, at least one of which, The Social Network, is a deeply sexist movie about a bunch of millionaire misogynist assholes; one of which, The Kids Are All Right, shows how all lesbians really need is a good male fuck as all it takes for a lesbian in a longterm committed relationship to lunge for heterosex is for a heterosexual male to stroll into her life; one of which, The King's Speech, asks us to empathize with the multibillionaire head of state of British imperialism; one of which, Inception, is so laughably moronic, vapid, unimaginative, derivative, flat, shallow and all-around uninteresting, that is, the exact opposite of its hype, that when I watched it with some friends a few months ago, we kept asking each other if this could possibly be the same movie about which we'd read all those rave reviews.

I was left similarly nonplused after seeing Black Swan. Could I be the only one who found this movie offensive and misogynist? I'm glad to find I'm not, having googled the title of the film and the word "misogynist" and found quite a few articles accusing it of same. I suppose there's some small comfort in that, though I'd much prefer not having to wade through this swamp in the first place.

Ah Aronofsky. I loved his first two works, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. I found The Fountain, while weirdly fascinating for its utter over-the-top madness, a stunningly hot mess of a movie, a failure in every way, and politically reprehensible to boot with its portrayal of a conquistador as a hero and its weepily Victorian female swoonily romantically dying throughout the whole long slog. The Wrestler was unoriginal, predictable, sentimental claptrap, albeit watchable since, admit it, who can turn away from what has become of Mickey Rourke's face, but that didn't save the movie. I doubt I'll ever give another Aronofsky movie a chance. He's insulted me, as a viewer, an artist and a woman, once too often.

Should a socialist indulge in schadenfreude?

Of course she should, can and does, in terms of big important events on the stage of the worldwide class struggle, for example the impending doom of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Anyone whose allegiance is with the workers, the poor, the oppressed, anyone who stands in solidarity with the fight for national sovereignty and against imperialism can't help but derive great joy from the increasing misery of the U.S.-puppet regime and the class of thieves and murderers it serves.

But hereabouts we're supposed to be about the arts. It's on not the world stage but the actual stage—the Broadway boards—that the events occasioning my question are unfolding. I'm talking about the ever unraveling travesty that is writer-director Julie Taymor's latest work of musical theater, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. As anyone who follows the theater even a little, and everyone who lives in New York where the whole mess has been front-page news for months, knows, this musical has major-league tsuris. The elaborate production design and attempts at unprecedented special effects make this the most expensive show in Broadway history. Trouble is, all the high-tech gadgetry, all the spectacle, can't compensate for an essentially lousy play. Even if they somehow could, the gizmos and doohickeys don't work. The whole months-long saga of tryouts, of rejiggering the book and music and choreography, which in this case means acrobatics more than dance, has been marked with repeated serious problems, especially mishaps with the flying contraptions including several injuries to actors, at least one very serious.

About that—worker injury, worker endangerment—I feel nothing close to schadenfreude. I feel rage. At Taymor and at the deep-pockets producers who've sunk $65 million dollars into what from all accounts (more on that in a minute) can scarcely be termed a work of art yet who, for all their money, can't manage to make it safe for the people doing the on-stage work. I'm enraged, too, at OSHA and New York state and city worker-safety officials, who should have long since stepped in to force the profiteers to fix this thing or shut it down. And I've got, if not rage, a lot of disappointment in and questions for Actors Equity and the other stage workers' unions. The Broadway unions, like the rest of the labor movement, have been under siege for a long time, and it's hard not to see their apparent inaction here as evidence of the state of their decline. Granted, they may be working behind the scenes to push for better on-stage safety. They should have been doing much more, much more publicly--mounting picket lines, making demands, building a solidarity movement, reaching out to the huge New York population of workers, union members and theater lovers. Instead, as unions in other industries have done for the last 30 years since the UAW's original Chrysler give-back contract, they seem to see their duty as supporting the bosses' profit-taking in hopes of keeping the enterprise open and saving jobs.

As to those jobs, all of them, onstage and back: I have only sympathy, fellow-feeling for the actors, singers and dancers subjected to these conditions. Conditions—unsafe physically and debased artistically—that theater workers feel compelled to grin and bear, grateful to have any job at all. This is a terribly unstable industry for its workers. There is no joy like landing a job, whether it's a lead role, in the chorus, downstairs sewing and mending costumes, up in the rafters working the lights, or in the box office selling tickets. Once you've got a show, you want it to stay open, naturally. On Broadway as in a coal mine or any other site of wage labor, no matter how dreary, how dangerous, you need that job. Oh god, as they sang in A Chorus Line, I need this job. At what cost, though? It might not hurt a theater worker's future prospects to have Spider-Man on the resume, but there will be no prospects after a broken neck from a fall due to defective equipment. On Broadway as in the mines, the bosses will always stint on safety in favor of profits.

Here's where schadenfreude comes in. I do take pleasure from this week's round of uproariously bad reviews for the Spidey musical. I am glad that these profit-takers in artist ("pardon me, I mean artiste," as the Times' critic Ben Brantley purred) garb are being humiliated. They should be ashamed.

Now, I'm not utterly starry-eyed about Broadway. Lots of shlock has passed that way. Much, maybe most, of the musical theater is mediocre, unmemorable. Much is objectionable from my political viewpoint. Hardly any, including a lot of the old musicals that I'm still sentimentally attached to and whose music still stirs my corny old heart, meets the mark for the best of what I wish from any art. In recent decades, the whole industry has become such a pure profit monster, with ticket prices rising so out of reach of most workers, that I guess it'd be silly to hope for something true and good and beautiful, new and creative and with, god forbid, something to say about society. All that said, though, this derivative cartoon cardboard cutout stunt is a new low for the New York stage and I'm glad for whatever potshots are thrown at its perpetrators.

Earlier I referred to "all accounts" because I base my broad characterizations of the awfulness of this so-called musical on what I've read in various reviews and commentaries. I have not myself seen it (even if I wanted to I couldn't afford a ticket) yet I feel safe, and justified, in the conclusions I've drawn about this stinker. I've made a long study of reading reviews, of books, movies and stage productions. It's more art than science, I suppose, but I think I've got it down, how I take into account the source, class slant, artistic standards and so on, breaking it all down so that I'm generally able to get a pretty good sense of the piece in question and what I'd think of it. Often I conclude that a negative review is wrong or am intrigued enough to want to see for myself. Or the opposite, I read through a rave and know to stay far away. I'm sure I'm not always right but one thing I have to admit is that the mainstream critics are not always wrong either, even if they're right for the wrong reasons. Such is the case, I believe, with the Spiderman musical. I'm sorry for the workers whose jobs—and safety—depend on its success but I'm not sorry for the miscreants whose worship of commerce over art are responsible for its becoming, already, a legendary failure.

I want to say one more thing about what Broadway can do. You might think that it's so in the grips of big money and old thinkers that it's incapable of mounting any but the most conventional works of musical theater. That we must look elsewhere for innovation, particularly politically conscious work. And mostly I'd say that's true, that exciting new work, in the musical theater as in drama as in books or movies or any other art form, is doubtless being created in countless corners by impoverished unknowns, and that most of it has no chance of ever seeing the light of day, at least as long as art remains locked down under capitalism. Once in a while, though, somehow, a bright light shines through.

Such was the case with Caroline, or Change, which I was lucky enough to see in early 2004 before it closed after an all too brief run on Broadway. This musical by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori was unlike any I've ever seen. Innovative—hell yes, with talking washing machines, and scenes that conflate and compress time and space. Musically successful—OMG yes, with a near-operatic score that ranges wide and strikes deep. Artistically challenging and politically meaningful—since seeing this show I know that there is no topic that the genre of musical theater could not take on, no subject that is out of bounds, no approach that is out of reach. As I've admitted before, I'm a corny old sucker, and many's the old-school musical that reduces me to tears, but they're sentimental tears, triggered by various varieties of shtick. At the end of Caroline, or Change, by contrast, I was shaken deeply, to my core, by the important story it told, the profound issues it raised—and, not least, by the unbelievable and shamefully underappreciated brilliance of Tonya Pinkins in the starring role. I remember that as I rose and walked down the stairs from the balcony and out onto the street and over to the subway, as the minutes after the final standing ovation during which I'd sobbed my eyes out passed, as it turned into five minutes since the end, then 10, then 15, I was still trembling, I still felt undone. That it was the last thing I thought about as I fell asleep that night, and the first when I awoke next day, and for many days after that. That it haunts me still. This is what the musical theater can do.

It was 30 years ago today

So far it's been a crappy New York morning. Not one but two nasty screaming people on the trains. Not one but three trains not running or delayed or otherwise screwed up. Angry impatient crowds crowding each other. Me all the while uptight about running late because there's a new regime at work clocking my arrival to the minute. Just what I need, on top of all my ongoing complaints. I'm tired. I'm not eating right or exercising and as a consequence my body's in awful shape. I'm not getting much writing work done, I'm not doing my part in the struggle very well.

And John is dead.

No, it's not new news. Yes, he's been dead for 30 years today. Yet even after three decades, on this anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, I can still call up the feelings from that night, the awful knowledge that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play nevermore. Two years ago on this same anniversary I wrote about how I heard that night, when I got home from work after the late shift as a city bus driver in Ann Arbor. In that post I also mentioned my story "John and Yoko and Rowena and Me," published in Cream City Review. I wish it were online to link to, because I'm fond of it and would like to share it. While it's of course fictional, it does call up some of the feel of those days. Maybe I'll figure out a way to make it available, says I, as if someone other than me is clamoring for it.

John was no saint. He was at his death rich as Croesus; it's nice to think that if he'd lived he would have shared the wealth, but who knows. He was guilty, by his own admission, of violence against women. His politics were an odd amalgam of anarchism/pacifism/socialism/yippie/performance art. They're easy to dismiss as unserious. On the other hand, he was really committed to his anti-war principles--and did pay a price for that, having to wage a years-long battle against the U.S. government's efforts to deport him. He was working hard at raising his feminist consciousness. He and Yoko brought Bobby Seale onto the Mike Douglas Show, and sang their great song "Attica State" in solidarity with the prisoners who'd risen up and been slaughtered at NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's orders. There's fair cause, then, I think, for this wistful pit-of-the-stomach sadness that lingers 30 years on. It's all the what might have beens. He was a great artist. His music is magnificent, and he did contribute in his way to the struggle for peace and justice. What more might he have done?

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie The U.S. vs. John Lennon for a pretty decent introduction to all this. Plus, I like to think that you can hear my 17-year-old voice shouting during the footage from the December 10, 1971 Free John Sinclair concert.

This week

• I worked too damned hard and
• I slept too damned little and
• I started and stopped too many disappointing books and
• I wrote not one sentence and
• I contributed not one whit to the class struggle

all of which have something to do with not blogging. I'm not in a fugue state or anything, but it's just been one of those weeks when getting to work and back is pretty much all I could manage. I've been collecting stuff for this blog, though, wisps of this and wonders of that, so I should be back soon with some substantive words.

Speaking of words and what I haven't done, I believe something else happened this week. I can't quite be sure, for who knows, I may yet flare back into rage and resistance, but I think I entered the last stage of the mourning process over not getting my novel published. Acceptance, or something like it. Something finally clicked, it seems, and I recognized this is one dream, the dearest dream I've ever dared, at least on the puny level of my own little life, that's dead. I'm nearly ready to make my peace with this, it seems. I'll never know why I failed, I'll never know if it's all about the market and the industry and all the changes and so on and I would have succeeded had this book been written 10 years ago, or if it's simply not good enough for any bookshelf. No way to know. So frustrating. In my long, initially enthused and energetic and ultimately sporadic, pessimistic and doomed effort to find a route to publication for this novel into which I poured so much of my heart and soul, I mostly found firmly closed doors--but I also had enough responses of the "it's not for me but it's great and I'm sure it'll find a home" variety that I kept slogging onward, kept holding onto hope, probably much longer than I should have. If the hope, better recognized as delusion, has at last slipped out of my grip it's a good thing, I think, a relief, to finally put the sucker away and shut that drawer. Who knows, maybe I'll open it again some day after I finish the second novel I'm now writing.

That kind of week, right? And to top it off, the travesty of all travesties came last night on Project Runway when the awful, hypocritical, pinched, smug, myopic, uncreative, anti-innovation, bourgeois judges snatched victory away from the miraculous Mondo Guerra, who'd clearly earned it. This is the second season in a row that the obviously superior designer was passed over for the PR prize and the obviously superior designer was Latino. Last year it was Emilio Sosa. Nor can we forget how Korto Momolu was robbed a few seasons back. In fact, only once has a person of color won PR. In the thousands of tweets, blog entries, columns and commentaries that you can find today on the PR finale, 99 percent of them horrified laments at the outcome, quite a few characterize this and past decisions as racist. It's hard to argue with that interpretation.

Next week: next week!

Howl & how not to hear poetry

Last night I watched the movie Howl. It's still showing in theaters but cheaper to see via cable's movies on demand gizmo that also keeps me home, which is where I mostly prefer to be and which I might add is, unlike movie theaters, guaranteed (so far at least) to be bedbug-free. But I digress. Howl. James Franco was great as the young Allen Ginsberg. Much of the movie consists of Franco, as Ginsberg, talking to an unseen interviewer about poetry, about the poetic process, himself as a poet, his life and its connection to his poetry, and about his great poem Howl. I found these segments riveting. I'd have happily sat through two hours of just this. There are also courtroom scenes, from the 1957 obscenity trial in San Francisco where the state tried to ban the City Lights publication of Howl in book form. While not fascinating the way Ginsberg talking about poetry was, these segments are interesting too. Interspersed with both are scenes of Ginsberg reading the poem in, I assume, San Francisco, in 1955. I very much liked this too, Franco's bravura capture of Ginsberg's unique persona.

What I did not like one bit were the animated sequences. These are literal, if whimsical, depictions of various passages from the poem that take over the screen enacting the words that we hear in voiceover. For me, they damned near ruined the movie. I can only guess that the filmmakers worried they would not hold an audience's interest with only the scenes of Ginsberg talking, Ginsberg reading his poem, and testimony at the obscenity trial, that they had to insert some visually arresting element. Well. I think it would have worked if the visual element had been abstract, suggestive, evocative, something to simply capture the eye, perhaps hypnotize us further into the poetic dream as the words washed over us aurally. Instead what we get is an interruption, a barging in on our attention to the poem's words, rhythms, layers of meaning, a most unwelcome assault on our ability to take in the poetry. An intrusion! I wanted to scream and throw something at the screen every time the animations appeared.

The problem, for me at least--and I know this sounds odd and contradictory but it isn't really--is that literature is not a literal art form. Poetry least of all. Yet with these animations in which the "story" of Howl is acted out, Ginsberg's creation is removed from the ineffable realm of imagination and yanked back down to earth, reduced to a matter of plot and character and this and that. To me this feels like a sad disservice to a great poet and a great poem.

I've read Howl twice (and now definitely want to read it again). There's no way I came close, in either of those readings, to truly understanding it. But, as with any quality literature, poetry or fiction, reading it was an intereactive experience between the words and me, between the mind of the poet and the mind of the reader, with me, the reader, my reading brain, creating images, ideas, feelings from the words created by the writer. As any writer knows, book, story, or poem, no reader reads the same thing. The words may be the same in every edition, yet every reader's brain makes of the writer's words something else. Even with fiction, even with the most straightforward conventionally written plot-driven story or novel, the act of reading is an imaginative, creative act--what each reader sees in her mind's eye is her own translation of the writer's words. This is what I mean when I say literature is not a literal art form--although on one level there is nothing more precise than words, on another, the most meaningful level, I think, the words serve as merely a sort of gateway, opening up worlds that the reader enters and creates as she reads. This is the interactive alliance between writer and reader. This is why reading, at least when the material you're reading is at the level of art, is a thrilling and creative act.

It's also why I generally feel that movies aren't the sublime art form that literature is, a view that I know opens me to all sorts of attack and that, truthfuly, I probably can't defend terribly articulately and am even willing to allow might turn out to be harebrained once someone argues me out of it. Till then, though, I can't help but feel that because movies depict everything right there on the screen, show every character's facial expressions, broadcast every character's voice, breathing, tone, tears, display brick buildings, green fields, bullets, blood, and so on--because, that is, they leave little or nothing to the viewer's imagination, they can't and don't achieve what books can. I think this is why film adaptations of books almost always disappoint. It's not just that Hollywood's crass profit-driven aesthetic sabotages any hope of capturing the depth and beauty of a great novel. It's that, just by the act of taking all those words that had been left to the reader's imagination to conjure into images and ideas each inside her own mind, taking those words, stripping them of multiple levels of meaning and alternate interpretations and transforming them into one inescapable literal depiction, the movie by definition destroys, subverts, dumbs down, dare I say erases the art from, the novel, story or poem.

To me, that's what the animation does in this movie. Otherwise, it would have been an intelligent, interesting consideration of art, the artistic process, the clash of art and commerce, censorship, gay oppression, all spiced with enough exciting readings of parts of Howl to entice viewers to read, or reread, Ginsberg's masterpiece. It's still that, but just barely, because, for this viewer at least, the animation sequences deny me entry into the heart of the poem and the mind of the poet.

Mountains That Take Wing

Here's a new movie, over a decade in the making as I understand it, coming soon to cities around the country. Mountains That Take Wing centers on a series of conversations between Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama, two women who have loomed large in the struggles of the last 40-50 years in this country, and so of course is also about those struggles. Davis is widely known in and out of the movement. Kochiyama is less so to those who haven't themselves been involved, yet she is a true hero and it's great that she's getting this spotlight now, as this wonderful sister is in failing health as she nears 90. Among other things, she held Malcolm X in her arms as he lay dying after the assassin's bullets struck him in 1965. But the reason she was there, how she came to be there, and where she went from there, this larger story is, I hope, what the movie shows.

I want to see this film.

Adaptation

Needing a break last night, I watched a movie I'd DVRd a couple weeks ago. Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. I'd loved it when it first came out in 2002, a time when I was deeply engaged in, nearly obsessed with, writing my first novel, but felt frustrated at having no other writers to discuss it with. This time--I loved it again! And I'll discuss it with you!

Briefly, because I have a busy day ahead and also because I can't claim to know anything about film as an art form; my reaction to this movie is all about one aspect, the aspect that seems to me to be central but I don't know if I'm right.

Anyway, to me this is a gloriously slant movie about creativity. About the impossible terror and horror of creating art. The story itself, all about "Charlie Kaufman"'s excruciating efforts to write a screenplay adaptation of New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's bestselling nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, all the while being driven up the wall by his doofus freeloading hack of a twin brother's concomitant effort to write his own derivative action-thriller-drivel screenplay, is hilarious and strangely touching. The scenes with Charlie berating himself in voiceovers about his failures as a writer, a few passages of which I'll share below, are priceless. I think any writer would probably react as I did, loving, recognizing, wallowing along with Charlie in the torture of art. And there's the question of how or whether to "adapt"; the movie teases out multiple meanings of that word, all of them fascinating. Ultimately, there's a brilliant turn as the plot plays out the alternative against which Charlie had struggled for the first two-thirds of the film, taking the road he wanted so desperately not to take, the road he'd tried so hard to turn away from in his quest to strike out in an original direction and find some new means of creative expression. So that the movie ends as a full-on satire of--or, you might say, a full-on ironic plunge into--all that is commercial, trite, lowest-common-denominator-shallow about Hollywood's product. With that, with Charlie and his movie becoming all he'd never wanted himself or his art to be but what Hollywood rewards with money and fame, with this adaptation to the way of the world, the movie ultimately becomes a profound meditation on what it is (and is not) to be an artist. What it means to stay true to your vision, or not.

I'll note here that I've had mixed feelings about other Charlie Kaufman movies I've seen. The other one that I loved was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has as much to say about love, and in as new a way, as Adaptation has to say about art. On the other hand, I found Being John Malkovich misogynist. And I can't even begin to list my objections to the abysmal mess that is Synecdoche, New York.

Never mind that, let me finish with this, some lines from Adaptation. All are in voiceover, from the mind of the character Charlie Kaufman as he's trying to write the screenplay. The first is as he first sits down at the keyboard to begin.

Begin. How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me, I think. I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. OK. So I need to establish the themes. Maybe banana nut. That's a good muffin. [He writes four or five sentences.] I need a break.

OMG--this is so me! Every time I sit down to write!

Later, as he stares at another blank page:

I have no understanding of anything else but my own panic and self-loathing and pathetic little existence. It's like the only thing I'm actually qualified to write about is myself.

Who hasn't felt this way? Finally, with my long, ongoing failure to get my first novel published, I can't help but relate to this.

My jaunt into the abyss brought me nothing. Well, isn't that just the risk one takes for attempting something new?

That's the spirit! That's the ticket! We carry on. As we must.

I won't be blogging again until at least late this week, possibly not till next week. I'll be on the couch eating bonbons for a couple days after taking care of a minor medical matter and then once I'm back at work it's back to the couch each evening, legs up, no computer. Till then, then, toodles.

Let's salute a survivor: I love Mondo!

It's been an intense, emotional day thinking and writing about this awful spate of suicides by LGBT young people tortured by this society. Thinking and writing in the spurts available, that is, before and after work and on my lunch hour. In fact, this was one of those days when I was glad to be on the job and have to focus on my work tasks all day, for sometimes dull and deadening can be a good thing. Anyway, as I was coming home this evening I remembered what I watched on TV last night and it felt like a bit of a balm because what I watched last night was all about one young gay man who survives, and on his own terms.

I'm talking about Mondo Guerra, the breakout designer and widely adored darling on the current season of Project Runway. Yes, I watch PR, annoying, maddening and offensive as I often find it and disgusted as I am by the industries it celebrates. So much for consistency--despite all I loathe about PR and the media, cosmetics and fashion profiteers it exists to enrich, I'm hooked on this damn show and I watch it week after week, alternately snarling and cheering.

It's all cheering when it comes to Mondo. He's a fabulously talented designer, so far ahead of this season's pack it's practically a joke. From the evidence of the broadcast episodes, he's also a mensch. If there have been no shots of him acting evil toward his competitors and speaking badly about them behind their backs, that means he has not done any of that because if he had we'd have seen it--this is the whole juice of these shows. (A topic in itself, so-called reality TV, which I've been threatening to blog about and yet may.) The one time Mondo slipped toward such bad behavior, he quickly caught himself, apologized to the camera and to his fellow designer Michael Costello, and that episode ended with this unbearably darling moment with the two of them basking in beautiful friendship.

Last night was Mondo's shining hour, and I'm even crazier about him than I already was for what he said and did. The designers' challenge was to create a textile from scratch inspired by something from their own lives. As they got to work, the designers were surprised by the arrival of family members. For Mondo, it was his mother, who'd been flown in from Denver. In one of his talking-head segments he spoke shyly and haltingly and so obviously sincerely, about his complicated relationship with his mother, about the deep mutual love between him and his family but how mother reacted less than optimally when he came out to her. It resonated for me as it must have for how many millions, how he's obviously grappled with these issues, the love, the rejection, the mutual hurt, the finding your own way through it, finding your way to yourself, to your strength.

But all that wasn't only about being gay. Mondo also told the camera that he's HIV-positive and has been for 10 years and has never told his family. The textile he created incorporated a design based on plus signs symbolizing his HIV-positive status. Yet after he spent the day visiting with his mother, he said that he'd wanted to tell her then and there but couldn't bring himself to cause her pain during this special time together. Throughout the episode he mused on camera about all this and wrestled with himself.

Then when the designers presented their finished pieces on the runway--and, once again, his was a knockout, and for the third week in a row he won--he initially just made a cryptic remark about his design having deep personal meaning for him. Later, though, and it's hard to know the real sequence of events or how much time had passed because of the editing, he spoke up again and said he wanted to tell the judges about the meaning of his design. And he came out as HIV-positive, which he characterized as a secret he'd kept for 10 years. Afterward, he was weepy with happiness and relief, saying he felt a huge weight off his shoulders.

"I'm free," he said.

There's a weekly party in Denver where Mondo watches each episode with friends and supporters. At last night's his family was there, and according to one report, "the Guerra family rallied bravely around Mondo, exemplifying the beauty of unconditional love."

I wish every queer kid contemplating suicide could have some time with Mondo Guerra. You just know he had a tough time of it in school. If he wasn't bullied and derided, called every anti-gay epithet and then some, I'd be shocked. His family wasn't perfectly supportive, not at first. He hung in there. He had hope, I can only assume, somehow he knew it would get better. And it did. If he's not a role model for being yourself and riding it out, I don't know who is.

Artists for the Cuban 5

Danny Glover with Gerardo Hernandez last month at the federal pentientiary in Victorville, California, where the great actor visited the Cuban hero and pledged to organize actors and artists in support of the Cuban 5.

 

 

 

 

Danny Glover, a longtime friend of the Cuban Revolution and of all struggles for justice and peace, is stepping up the campaign to demand freedom for the Cuban 5. As of yesterday, Sept. 12, these five young men have been in U.S. prisons for 12 long years. They are serving sentences ranging from 15 years to double-life plus 15 years. A double life sentence with 15 years added onto that! What did they do? Murder, chop up and eat children? No. Here's what they did: infiltrate terrorist groups that operate in Florida and report to the Cuban and U.S. governments on these terrorists' plans for bombings and other violent attacks inside Cuba.

In other words, they prevented terrorist attacks on civilian targets in their country. Not only that, they provided full information on the terrorists' actions and plans to the FBI--64 files filled with all the data. So they're heroes, right? Not to the U.S. government. Instead of arresting the terrorists they arrested Gerardo and his compatriots Ramón Labañino, Rene González, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González. And have ever since subjected them to brutal treatment, including long stretches of solitary confinement, all of them held in different states, blocking family visits. To all of which these five brave brothers have reacted with strength and steadfastness. That will no doubt continue.

But it should not have to. They should be free. And so yesterday Danny Glover and his co-chairperson Ed Asner of Actors and Artists United for the Freedom of the Cuban 5 issued a call to their colleagues inviting them to add their name to a letter to President Obama urging him to issue an order of clemency to free the five. Among those who've already signed on: Jackson Browne, Ry Cooder, Susan Sarandon, Elliot Gould, Chrissie Hynde, Bonnie Raitt, Esai Morales. If you're an artist of any type, please sign on to this urgent call. If you'd rather be invited directly by Danny Glover, check out his video appeal here.

Too busy to blog links

Breaking my self-imposed rule against taking the easy route of linking instead of thinking: .

• Alexander the Great Man Lover can't show his bare tushy on a book cover in Canada.
• Levi-Strauss and "cultural capitalism." Thank you to artist Mark Vallen for pointing out that, ludicrous ad campaign notwithstanding, not everyone is a worker. A money-grubbing corporation? No, not a worker, even if it aims to co-opt images of labor to make profit.
• "Nowhere have I said that it is wrong to harm the aggressor in order to save your life or honor..." From Indian poet Satchidanandan's "A Discourse on Non-Violence," a different angle on Gandhi than we're usually fed.
• Eat Pray Love: kinder, gentler Orientalism.
• "How to Write About Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina.
• "Multicultural queer youth" don't merit books in these New Jersey libraries.
• Kindle et al be damned, used book sales are on the rise. Why?
•  An interview with Chilean poet Raúl Zurita about life, art and politics under Pinochet. Never forget the "other"--in fact, the much worse--September 11. That's the date of the 1973 U.S.-backed-and-funded fascist coup, which murdered President Salvador Allende and some 30,000 others.

That's it for now. I hope to see all you who live in the vicinity on New York City's September 11, at the demonstration in defense of the Muslim community. See post below for details.

"Confirmed bachelor"? Really, in this day & age?

Another movie from a book hits the screen, this one whimsical, and animated to boot. It's My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley, which I read many years ago and loved. I also read and loved Ackerley's novel We Think the World of You. Both are, among other things, gay classics, sad tender tales about love, longing and loneliness in a place and time--mid-20th-century England--where gay sex was very much a crime. So I had to sigh and sputter puh-leaze as I watched the trailer for the movie, released today, as the ridiculous words "confirmed bachelor" set my teeth on edge.

Still, I'd like to see this film.