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The Twenty Club

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From Eternity To Here

Happy belated Thanksgiving. I had quite an interesting holiday. I decided to join my gay outdoors group upstate for the day, and got about 3/4 of the way there, when the train announced it could go no further : - ). We were then put on buses, after a half an hour standing in freezing rain, by drivers who looked like they'd just been woken up. These crowded, standing-room-only buses dropped us off at Wassaic Station an hour late to mass confusion of people meeting people, and I couldn't recognize anyone from my group. Nor did I know the address and phone number of the lodge hosting the dinner - just the town. With my cel phone battery dead and no train back, I had to think fast. Luckily, I found an empty cab - apparently the only one in fifty miles. Well, empty of passengers, there was a driver. Which is fortunate since I'm not quite sure where Millerton is and was in no mood to drive. He was Hispanic, and spent the entire half-hour ride to Millerton explaining to cel phone callers, in Spanish, that they were out of luck because the train disaster resulted in no free cab in fifty miles.

I got out on Main Street in Millerton, and the only way I remembered to the lodge was a 3/4 mile hike along a rails-to-trails path through the woods, on thankfully powdery snow that did not soak my very unseasonal brown shoes. I've never been so glad to arrive anywhere, sore throat and all. Thirty lovely people, and the most delicious Thanksgiving dinner I've ever had. I began with about eight well-needed cups of hot apple cider with cloves, cinnamon, and tangelo slices. There was this hot soup with ginger, pumpkin, and carrot - the ginger really gave it a kick. Cranberry sauce from scartch with tangerines added to the cranberries, and yet more ginger. Deliciously stuffed turkey (though not quite as wonderful as Bart's turkey & stuffing from two weeks ago). It was a really lovely day. I felt much better after eating six helpings of everything, which, incidentally, precluded any notion of having dessert, and there were seven different pies. In fact, my throat was fine until.... this morning... ugh. and I have to do a presentation for work today... But , I will also watch some more movie classics, such as the one pictured here...

Sigh...

Brilliant ambition, unique vision, reaching for the sky and... Hard to decide which is more impressive, the new, expanded version of "Donnie Darko," or the performance and great beauty of its extremely talented star, Jake Gyllenhaal. I am proud to have loved this 2001 genre-splicing deeply-felt mind-bender of a film at first sight, in a Pasadena movie house with Brian in the eerie weeks that followed 9/11. Slightly flawed brilliance is always far preferable to perfectly realized mediocrity. I could ruminate on "Donnie" at great length, and probably will. But for now, approaching Turkey Day, I shall call it a night (yes, I sometimes write these posts the night before...

Challenging But Exhilirating

Knock Yourself Out

This weekend I saw Robert DeNiro literally act his guts out in 'Raging Bull', Martin Scorsese's landmark 1980 film centered on the angry, paranoiac, failed figure that was middleweight champion boxer Jake La Motta. De Niro, who staged 8 intense fight scenes with no double (so intense you're surprised to learn their total running time is 10 minutes). He also, famously, gained 65 lbs for the film's final third, which chronicles La Motta's over-the-hill going-to-seed period, reduced to performing a stand-up routine based on his notoreity, Lola Montes with boxing gloves. He received a well-deserved Oscar for his trouble.

Full Disclosure: I find boxing appalling, cruel, masochistic, and often sickening. Does it fill a societal need, and vicariously discharge the latent violence of The Young and The Over-Testosteroned? It's certainly a throw-back to our animalistic past, or inner selves.

Moreover, I don't like particularly like pathologically violent and jealous wife-beating ignoramus types either. That's why I could never truly embrace The Sopranos, which I perused for a season. That program has wit, insight, and edge, but I just didn't choose to spend a hundred hours with such boorish people. I prefered the company of Six Feet Under's Fisher family, equally dsyfunctional, yes, but closer to my own temperment and sensibilities.

Final note: In one scene, La Motta, married to a platinum-blonde, low-brow abused wife, battles and knocks out France's Marcel Cedran to win the middleweight champion - Cedran's own woman was also no stranger to the streets, but was of far higher cultural value and impact - none other than Edith Piaf! (see the lovely film Edith & Marcel...). Cedran died in a plane crash the following year...

Bang A Gong, Get It On

This just in from my friend Emerson in Sao Paolo, Brazil:

"Last night was our Gay Short Film Festival. It's great fun every year and it's always hosted by a famous Brazilian actress, this year Marisa Orth (pictured left). But the best part is the outrageous jury, composed of famous drag queens, porno movies stars, and the like. Filmmakers present their videos, which we watch them for at least 30 seconds and if it is bad (the majority is) then we shout "gonga, gonga" and the hostess bangs the gong and we stop watching it... It's a literal three-ring circus, with much going on simultaneously.

Well, surprise, surprise...Our friend Eduardo Mattos's film won!!!!!! Again! He also won a few years back with an earlier film...This year my boyfriend Milton acted in his film...Actually, he acted in the earlier winning film, but this time his role was major. I'll send you, shortly, the link to a site where you can see the films.." (Editor's Note: I met Eduardo Mattos, by sheer coincidence, almost 10 years ago in Paris when I was a finalist at a film history contest sponsored by Air France and the French Government. Small world, huh?)

Good morning... up & at 'em... I'm meeting Peter at 11 to see 'Walk The Line' at Union Square, which has gotten good, but not great reviews.

Truly Madly Darkly

Well, finished Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly," a superb dissection of a troubled family at their remote and rustic vacation home on the Swedish coast. Through incisive dialogue and searing acting, we meet a a selfish, artistically failed author, his daughter who's going in and out of mental illness, and his shy and confused son who's sexually coming of age. Daughter's husband, a doctor, stands by, longing and helpless.

It's a moody landscape, physically and emotionally, accentuated by the stark black & white cinematography. After the movie, a succint 90 minute jewel, had faded out, I watched the preview, and was stunned by its literacy, slowness, and the excess of information given (why tell the whole movie?) - I get the feeling that in 1961 American viewers had a longer attention span but that a foreign movie needed a hard sell... Finally, my interest in this film was first piqued by the Rolling Stones' choice to name their first hits album using a play on words of the film's title... "Through The Past, Darkly"

I Saw The Sign

Busy Bodies.... Getting Meaner...

That's an old Elvis Costello lyric. What a morning! : - ) I ran out to have my shoes shined (first time since May?), and was so enthralled by this New York Magazine article on open marriages and 'managed monogamy' among heterosexuals that I left my jacket there as I scurried back out into the warm weather. Happily, was able to retrieve jacket later when I realized this. The moral: Tip generously, or at least decently - you never know when you might need a karma 'booty call.'

Last night dined with Pat Stumpp at Rossini, a high-class, boisterous but intimate Italian eatery on E 38th St. We left satiated but not stuffed. In the window: a surprisingly long dedication and autograph from George Bush père and Barbara thanking Rossini profusely for an unforgettable dinner.

Finished a delightful indepedent film last night, "Me You and Everyone We Know" that is quirky and observant as it meanders back and forth between a handful of LA adults and children trying to connect with each other. The director and screenwriter is a performance artist named Miranda July, whose characters aspires both to performance art and to a connection with a frustrated shoe salesman in mid-divorce who's just set his hand on fire in protest. But it really is a sweet movie, in the end. : - )

Danny and the Giant Peach

So I invited my smart, ever-taller nephew Danny, soon to be 12, to stop by my blog from time to time. It figures, all my inspirations this morning are hopelessly abstract and hard to understand.

Gimme Something Reel

A Sunny Family Interlude To Remember

It's been a nice family weekend. I've bowled (126!) with my nephew. We had an expensive Brazilian 'rodizio' dinner, you know, the kind with waiters that keep bringing different meats by your table until you cry uncle by flipping a chip over to its red side. It was odd to here Portuguese out here in the Sonoran desert.

Last night Mom and I watched, on DVD, 'An Affair to Remember,' which I'd never seen before. I'd always thought this Cary Grant Romance was a 30s or 40s film, but it's 1957 Technicolor©®... apparently the classic 'four hanky tearjerker/weepie/chick flick.' Wonderful film, with a bonus of scenes in a medieval Riviera village with a wise old French grand-mère.. Deborah Kerr impressed me - I haven't seen much of her oeuvre - but I was bowled over by 'Black Narcissus,' at the Powell/Pressburger retrospective in NYC back in spring.

My Stinking Dinner Date : - )

Kirtle

OK, I finished "Spellbound," and it isn't dull, despite its subject. So many obscure words in our English language - what's the point of correctly spelling 'kirtle,' anyway? Actually, I did know the winning word - logorrhea - 'a stream of incoherent, excessive talkativeness.' Now how did I know that?

Today is Election Day. But I'm working 24/7, I have to replace my missing reading glasses, desperately, Ferrer will just have to lose without me.

One advantage of working 11 hour days under extreme pressure is not reading the news obsessively. It's perverse, but I'm happier not knowing, sometimes. I'd rather focus my free time on music, books, movies, friends, and dating... : - )

And, oh yeah:

kirtle noun
1 - kirtle - a long dress worn by women
2 - kirtle - a garment resembling a tunic that was worn by men in the Middle Ages

Do you feel more enlightened, now?

What Does It Spell?

My Soul and My Blog-spiration

Half-empty? Half-full? See a good movie Saturday at 11am and you'll walk out at 1pm feeling like the weekend is infinite and full of life. Take refuge in an artistic project. It's a pretty day. But then the sun sets at 4pm, and breaks your heart...

Well, at least it was an amazing movie, 'The Dying Gaul,' Craig Lucas' (center of picture) intense and suspenseful relationship triangle story that spins to unexpected places. At the center is a bereaved gay scriptwriter - the extremely cute Peter Saarsgard (right), whose script - and sex- are pursued by a bisexual producer (Campbell Scott, above) whose artsy and sad wife (Patricia Clarkson, left), is also drawn in.

This becomes very riveting, very fast, a psychological game stepped into by accident, with anonymous on-line interchanges paralleling the story. Hard to explain, but hard to forget. Go see it.

Otherwise, I'm hard at work on my ambitious musical curating project - a 90s box set, by genre, trying to get one's hands around a very diverse, fragmented, niche decade. Stay tuned...

The Ruins Of His Hometown