Seen on the corner of Fordham Road and Morris Avenue. It’s not every day you see an Alice Walker quote spraypainted on the side of a building!

Anno Dracula is one of my all-time favorite novels. It’s an “alternate history” of Bram Stoker’s Dracula universe, in which the vampire count’s plans for global conquest were NOT foiled by the fearless vampire killers of Stoker’s novel, am. It’s been out of print for a long time…

And now it’s being re-published!!

Seriously, if you like:

• Vampires
• Sex
• Violence
• Victorian fiction
• Jack the Ripper
• Steampunk
• Tons of obscure literary references
• Tons of obscure historical references

… this book is totally worth checking out. Or pre-ordering on Amazon. In fact, the whole series is worth checking out. Word is they’ll be reissuing the rest of the series soon.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee…………

Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.

Avatar: The Last Airbender. Season 2, episode 9. “Bitter Work.”

Face/Off turned out to be a surprisingly good show, with a really high caliber of craft - some really excellent and creepy make-up on display…

… I was rooting for Gage from the beginning, at first just cuz he was gay, and I need to support my peeps, and it’s sadly still surprisingly rare to see out gay guys as contestants on reality shows, and plus he was really rocking that punk-rock-grown-up-Eddie-Munster thing, but he was really talented, and while he was just sort of in the middle for most of the show he totally killed the last few challenges, and he made it to the finale, and his witch make-up for an industrial re-imagining of Hansel and Gretel was terrifying and impressive.

But he didn’t win. And it sucks. The guy who did win is definitely talented, but plays it so safe and unimaginative that he really just needs to find a nice effects studio and be a drone on the factory floor.

Ah well. I can always follow Gage on Twitter. Oh wait - I’m not on Twitter. At least after this kind of exposure of his talent, I’m sure he’ll get tons of work. I’ll be watching his IMDb page - and the opening credits of every horror film I see now.

Late summer; we’re out to dinner on St Mark’s, some former squat or head shop or shooting gallery gentrified into a ritzy Chinese restaurant. One of our friends is a musician, his musical career roughly analogous to my literary one, meaning we’re making beautiful things that reach very small audiences, neither of us anywhere near being able to make a living from our art even though we work on it absolutely all the time (and of course we’re both insanely talented and very handsome and certain to conquer the world).

Halfway through dinner he leans across the table and aims a fork in my direction. “I need to ask you a serious question. What do you think of Jonathan Franzen?”

I laugh because JF is ubiquitous that week or month, and our friends and parents all want to talk about him, and  so every writer has had to think about what they think of him. And because it IS a serious question. Because art is serious, it’s life and it’s death, and artists take it very seriously. And sometimes we get a little bit mad about the big success stories.

My friend continues. “I ask because he’s on the cover of Time and everybody makes such a huge deal out of him, but I just feel absolutely no impulse to pick up anything by him.”

Which is pretty much exactly how I feel. I’ve only read some of his essays, in How To Be Alone, which a friend gave me as a gift, and which left me utterly unchanged and left my head in a matter of weeks.

“I get the sense that it’s really just middle class white people and their problems and their dysfunctions,” he continues. “And I just have zero interest in that.”

I tell him the truth, which is that I have no idea if this is accurate, but it’s absolutely my sense of Jonathan Franzen. Like a lot of the “literary fiction” (meaning, I guess, non-genre?), I see it in the bookstore and roll my eyes, thinking, do I really need to be told, again, how soul-killing suburban life can be? How put-upon the Heterosexual American Caucasoid male is?

[Aside: because I know he has billions of devoted fans and because I get enough nastiness in my life already I want to repeat that I have no real experience of reading the man - I'm owning my ignorance. Everyone has stuff that leaves them totally cold - lots of folks feel totally turned off by science fiction, and I can only pity them for all the awesome sh*t they're missing out on. So by all means, Franzenfans, pity me]

So then it’s my turn to lean across the table and ask a serious question. “What do you think of the Hold Steady?”

Now *he* laughed. “They don’t do much for me. They sound like so many other things.”

I asked because they seem analogous to Franzen - a BFD (Big Frakking Deal) to tons of people; eerily familiar, comforting but fresh, doing what they do really well.

I actually don’t think very much of this can be chalked up to jealousy. Maybe a teeny bit of resentment, the same as any artist who feels like they’re making something wonderful and toiling in obscurity and resents very popular work. Most fans of either one probably won’t think the equation of Jonathan Franzen and the Hold Steady is a pejorative. I’m sure both of them worked very hard to get where they are.

Last month, I posted about a vigil I attended, for an incredible young queer woman who was active with Picture the Homeless and many other organizations, who had taken her own life. Shortly after that vigil, I first saw her short film “Keisha Knows,” a truly amazing work that she co-produced and in which she played the lead role. Which just made me sadder, to think of what talent she had, what light she could have brought into this dark world. Produced with the amazing Global Action Project, who recently got an award from Ed Norton on behalf of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

This Saturday, PTH will be hosting a “Youth in the Struggle SPEAK OUT,” and we’ll be screening “Keisha Knows.” You can watch the film here, but it’ll be a great experience to see it on a big screen with a bunch of awesome youth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc0bX_xSIvo

Full details about the event are HERE, for Facebookers. And because I always forget that some folks aren’t into the Facebooks, it’s at the Rebel Diaz Art Collective, 478 Austin Place, Bronx, NY.

(Mosey is on the left, with PTH Youth Organizer Divad Durant at a “Youth in the Struggle” event that she MC’d in the South Bronx on September 18, 2010)

KEISHA KNOWS, 9 min, 2010
A SupaFriends Production
Produced by Global Action Project

Inspired by lesbian pulp fiction novels of the 1950s and the film noir genre, Keisha Knows addresses heteronormativity through not just any love story — but one that explores what is at stake when a community is divided.

The SupaFriends took a trip to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the Spring and learned about lesbian pulp fictions novels, which inspired the group’s choice in film genre in the pre-production process. Learn more about the Lesbian Herstory Archives: lesbianherstoryarchives.org/

For more information about Global Action Project or to order a DVD copy of this film, please contact GAP: global-action.org

If you’ve enjoyed watching this film or would like to support our youth programs please consider making a secure online donation via Guidestar: partners.guidestar.org/controller/searchResults.gs?action_donateReport=1&partner=networkforgood&ein=11-3425000

Media Educators:
Jai Dulani
J. Macchiarelli

Ab Fab might return.

Mary McDonnell is in the new Scream movie.

Grizzly bears chasing bison.

Giant otter emperors.

When I learned last week that Caprica had been canceled, I thought to myself “Gee… that sucks… BUT it was pretty weak and slow and uncompelling, and I was getting very bored with those characters and their teeny-tiny ranges… now if it had only been more like Rubicon, where so much was at stake, where they didn’t hold back on the big beats, where the characters keep you guessing and keep surprising you in great ways… MAYBE it would have had a chance.”

And now I find out that Rubicon is canceled.

whatEVER. Just more confirmation that I know absolutely nothing about what audiences or executives value.

I realize now that it’s gone that I really did love this show. I mean, I knew I loved it before, but I was too caught up in nit-picking and the heat of the moment to realize just how unique it was among current television programs.

The silver lining is - that’s two more hours per week that I won’t be spending glued to the television, which might make me a little more able to keep my promise to blog and write more often. Maybe.

As I’ve blogged on more than one occasion, the film version of The Last Airbender was the most traumatic thing to happen to me in the summer of 2010 (which I suppose says something good about my life at that point). This horrific affront to one of the television shows that’s most dear to my heart spurred me and J. to watch the whole original series again, starting from the beginning. Pretty much every episode has some astonishing gem of  wisdom or aesthetic grace, and as they move me I’ll be blogging them.

Episode 18, Season 1: The Waterbending Master.

There’s a lot to love about this episode - all the lovely waterbending, the look and feel of the Northern Water Tribe stronghold, Sokka’s nascent love for Yue, Iroh singing, Iroh being sneaky, Zhao seeing Zuko’s broadswords and realizing he’s the Blue Spirit… but the most exciting thing about it for me was the gender politics.

In the Northern Water Tribe, women can’t learn water-bending. Master Pakku won’t teach Katara, and when Aang tries to pass his training on to her, Pakku flips out.

But it’s deeper than just bending. This is clearly a deeply patriarchal tribe, where women have no choice in matters of marriage - if they don’t want to marry the man their father picks out, they have to leave town altogether. Which is what Katara’s grandmother did.

At the end of the episode, Katara shames Master Pakku into fighting her. It’s a great fight, with both of them looking very beautiful and kick-ass all at the same time.

Now, the easy, simplified, crowd-pleaser resolution to this episode would be for Katara to dazzle Pakku with her incredible skills, and THAT would be enough to get him to change his mind. Mainstream Hollywood logic is funny that way - all it takes to change someone’s mind is to show them evidence that they’re wrong. But life doesn’t work like that. Anyone who’s ever argued with someone on a political issue (for example, global warming) knows that no matter how much evidence and information you provide, they’re not going to change their mind.

People change their mind when they see how an issue affects them. People let go of prejudices when they realize that their prejudices have harmed them - have ruined relationships, have caused them to make terrible mistakes, have crippled their ability to understand the world around them.

Master Pakku is impressed with Katara’s bending abilities, but that’s not what changes his mind about teaching women. But he finds Katara’s necklace, which was the betrothal necklace he had given to her grandmother so many years ago, and remembers how shocked he was that she refused to marry him, and left.

Katara connects the dots. “Your tribe’s stupid customs” are what made her grandmother flee. It’s why he’s spent his life alone. The discrimination that he accepted as normal, as positive - because it benefited him - has actually hurt him. Because it distorted his relationships with people. His whole life has been one of crankiness and anger, as a response to the pain of being abandoned by Kanna.

Buddha said “You will not be punished for your anger. You will be punished BY your anger.” That’s the hard challenging truth that Western civilization, with its centuries-long domination by Christianity - and then by Hollywood - has distorted. You shouldn’t be good to other people because it’ll get you into heaven. You should be good to other people because it’s the only way to live a truly happy life and to really truly be celebrated by other people. Because at the end of the day, that’s all you have.

This is the kind of brilliance that makes this show move me so profoundly, which might be easy to miss while we’re wowed by the great fight scenes, elegant animation, humor, etc.

Yesterday, we went to see the Matthew Bourne production of Swan Lake, which is in NYC at City Center for just one more week. And while the production was not flawless - the dancing overall was exceedingly sloppy - I found myself really really moved, to the point where I got pretty depressed thinking about queerness and suicide and Tchaikovsky and 1890 and 2010.

I’ve always loved the music for Swan Lake. And in a way that’s hard to describe, I’ve always felt like that music - and most of Tchaikovsky’s music - is very queer. How music can be queer when it doesn’t have any words is a good question, and one I’ll be trying to articulate in a blog post later this week - so - stay tuned. But for now I’ll just say that there’s something about the beauty and the melancholy in his music that really resonates with my experience of queerness. Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful pieces have always seemed to me to be expressions of queer desire or queer identity (his brother and biographer said that “Romeo and Juliet could not have been written” without his agonizing and unrequited love for a classmate named Vladimir Gerard (thanks, Mark, for the tip on that story!)), but because of the repression and hostility of his age, they had to be written in code - translated into an achingly beautiful format that nevertheless obscured and hid away their true meaning. So it’s easy to hear and feel and love the music while missing what their composer was trying to say.

And then - in 1998 - this production comes along. I don’t know a lot about Matthew Bourne or the history or creation of this piece - whether it was all him or another unsung artist or a whole lot of awesome brilliant folks collaborating - but to me it’s something of a miracle: the time and the place and the people were finally right for this message to be deciphered, for the layers or code to be peeled back to reveal the gorgeous tragic queerness at the center of the story Tchaikovsky was trying to tell.

And whether the actual story of this production is specifically the story that Tchaikovsky wanted to tell is not the point (remember, he did not write the scenario for the original). For me, the essence of the story gets to the profound truth of Tchaikovsky’s life as a gay man who felt that he could not live openly, whose whole life was an attempt at cryptography, a way to take the real message of who he was and distort it so no one could see the truth (Leo Tolstoy said “I am very sorry for Tchaikovsky… sorry as for a man about whom something is not quite clear”). This Swan Lake is about trying to embrace who you really are, even if it kills you, because to live without embracing it will kill you too.

P.S. - The depression lasted until I was in my costume and about to head out for Halloween partying. Stay tuned for a much more upbeat blog post about that.

The Dyckman Street stop on the 1 train, which is a block from my house, has been shut down until… I don’t know… AUGUST 2011!!!!!!!!!! Which pisses off a lot of people. Including me. J. took this photograph on the uptown 1 train platform at 168th Street. It eloquently gives voice to our whole community.

Steve Almond, who I’m starting to share Stephen Elliott’s crush on even though I’ve never met or seen a picture of him, has an amazing article on The Rumpus that does a pretty solid job of making me feel like I can understand some of the shit I just can’t understand in political discourse these days.

I have nothing productive to add. I just wanted to repeat some gems:

“People enjoy feeling wronged. This is why Republicans refuse to believe (for instance) that Obama has cut their taxes, even when presented evidence. They need to preserve their sense of victimhood, so as to experience their aggression as self-defense.”

“The Germans… didn’t think of themselves as mass murderers. They were victims of the Jews, the Communists, the Allies. They projected their darkest impulses onto their adversaries and victims so they could feel heroic. They traded the sound of moral surety for a genuine morality.”

“Most Americans have no sense of genuine heroism. We live in a cloud of entitlement. The government provides us cheap food, clean water, electricity, medication, roads, everything. We still feel helpless. We don’t know how to fix our cars or grow food or find enduring love. We wander giant emporiums like children, full of wonder and jittery need. Corporations fleece us, then convince us to blame the government for our problems. ”

“When I ask political reporters why they write about polls and fake scandals, rather than real crises and policy solutions, they say because it’s expected of them. Ask a Wall Street trader why he flouts regulations, or a soldier why he shoots at strangers.”

“The undercurrent of violence in this election doesn’t feel political to me. It feels moral.”

“I suspect… that the very expression of such vulnerable emotions – whether hope or desire or mercy – has become somehow too painful or frightening for you to bear, and that you find it easier therefore to retreat into ancient grievances, to regard the world as a cold, hateful place, full of violent strangers with dirty bombs, or naïve nincompoops like me, who have the Communist Manifesto tattooed on our genitalia.”

So………………..

I’ve loved Nick Swardson for a while. His character on Reno 911 is one of the best, and his stand-up specials have been funny too. Even when I found out he was straight, I still liked him.

So I was super excited to see he’s got a show.

Until I watched it.

Two episodes in, I’d say the overall quality level of the skits is a 5.5 out of 10, with some as high as 7.5, but none that are amazing, and quite a few that are 2.0.

He’s said in an interview “I have this memo thing on my phone that’s packed with horrible ideas, immature jokes.”

And it feels like a lot of these came straight outta that phone memo.

I’ll keep watching, but not forever.

(in that same interview, he was asked about how come he plays gay so much, and said: “It literally just snowballed. It was just a random choice for the Reno 911 character… then Art School Confidential all of a sudden got greenlit, and I was doing Scotty Kangaroojus on The Showbiz Show—but you’ll never see him again… I don’t want to do any more gay characters. I just don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want my MySpace clips to all be like, “Heeey, guuuys!” … it’s really just a personal, creative choice. None of my characters are gay anymore…except for in Chuck and Larry, where I’ll be playing Jessica Biel’s gay brother”).

The first season of Rubicon is almost over, and I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts. I’m glad I waited, because my thoughts after three episodes were a lot less positive than my thoughts now, after ten episodes. Solid from the start, but the first few episodes were not as strong as the recent ones. Here’s my high- and low-lights…

HIGHS.

1.Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson): I’m such a sucker for a character who’s 40+ woman who is having to re-create her life. Especially when they’replayed by someone as amazing as Le Miranda.

2.Will Travers (James Badge Dale): HOT AS F*CK, in a weird way I keep trying and failing to put my finger on. I think it’s his lips. There’s something sullen and childish about them.

3. With a couple of exceptions (Grant Test (Christopher Evan Welch)), most of these characters are interesting and appealing in a broken damaged kind of way.

4. Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer): I just like this guy. I’m scared of him, but I like him.

LOWS.

1. For the first few weeks they were trying a little too hard to substitute breathy silence and meaningful stares and weird pauses for real tension… they still do it from time to time, but not as much.

2. Atlas MacDowell.  I’m sorry, but as a big evil corporation, this doesn’t cut it. We know barely anything about it. We’ve gotten no actual evidence that they’re bad… just that a bunch of roads lead back to them, but so what? They’ve got offices in Tribeca, for crying out loud. Of course they’re evil. But I need to see some more development of this.