Be a Bust!

Poets David Trinidad, Jeffery Conway, and Lynn Crosbie collaborated on Phoebe 2002, an epic exploring All About Eve (the 1950 movie starring Bette Davis). At nearly 650 pages, including notes, it's a commitment, but full of Hollywood detail. Wizard comes in for a mention:

In the film The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy defeats

(read: drops her house on) the Wicked Witch, the Munchkins

celebrate her by singing, ‘You will be a bust, be a bust, be a bust

in the Hall of Fame.’

*

I remember the line. But I don’t remember understanding what the Munchkin was really saying. Maybe it was that I didn’t hear the words clearly. I often have trouble picking the words out of sung lyrics. Besides, the Munchkins’ singing voices are tweaked a little higher than normal, or sped up slightly? But once I did get the words, they didn’t mean much. After all, there’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Baseball Hall of Fame … why wouldn’t there be an Oz Hall of Fame? 

The poets of Phoebe 2002 help us out:

[T]he first [Hall of Fame] was located

in the Bronx and originally belonged to New York University. Its official

name was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The Hall opened in 1901

with 29 inductees, among them the first and only unanimously elected member,

George Washington. Others that first year included Benjamin Franklin,

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee,

David Glasgow Farragut, Gilbert Charles Stewart, Peter Cooper,

Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Washington Irving, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall,

Ulysses S. Grant, John James Audubon, and Eli Whitney.

That group illustrated the range of professions acknowledged

and also brought the first but enduring charges that the electors

were elitists. No women, Americans of color, or sports figures

were included, a lapse soon remedied by a few token additions,

for all but sports heroes. The last year of elections to the Hall

was 1976, after which the program was abandoned for want

of funds and, probably, interest. That explains why the Hall is

unknown to so many … especially those under 50. 

Even now, bronze busts of four of the 102 honorees are not

in place, there having been no money for the sculptures.

*

Who are David Glasgow Farragut, Gilbert Charles Stewart, and Peter Cooper? Never heard of ‘em. Perhaps the poet didn’t know them either, so grouped the obscurities together. Fame is fickle. 

source: Phoebe 2002: an essay in verse

Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie, David Trinidad

2003. Turtle Point Press, New York

Torch Song Trilogy, the movie

from the book log (2/12/89):

Torch Song Trilogy
written by & starring Harvey Fierstein, based on his play(s)
1988. a movie I saw in the theater

Saw this a couple days ago. Films about gay people, even with their faults, seem to me more real than the usual hetero fare. But Torch Song Trilogy is good anyway (should I say, besides). Fierstein plays Arnold Becker, a female impersonator (his profession), who isn’t particularly effeminate when not performing. The story charts his life from when he meets and falls in love with a bisexual man. The relationship is too secretive for Arnold’s tastes. Eventually the affair ends & Arnold is pursued by a lovely young man who wants a longterm lover. This young man (David?), played by Matt Broderick is killed by gaybashers in NYC.

About a third the way through the film I noticed that it was slightly out of focus. While this has happened to other movies I’ve seen at UAs I couldn’t help wondering if it was subtle sabotage by the projectionist. I dint go out & complain as I didn’t wish to miss any of the film. If I see the film again tho’ I shan’t hesitate.

Torch Song Trilogy did not ultimately have a depressing ending, but it did leave me sad the rest of the day.

I read the play (or, rather, trio of plays) a year previous. I wrote about that 8 years ago on DIR. Sort of. Actually, mostly not. My entire review of the book version, as noted in my diary: “Quite good.” Faced with that paucity of comment, I spent more time in the 2007 DIR post talking about how out of focus the screening of the movie version was. We like our clear lines.

Fanny and Alexander

from the book log (1/25/89):

Fanny and Alexander.
A film by Ingmar Bergman. 1983. 3 hours 10 min. Watched on TV.

Emilie loses her husband (heart attack?), marries The Bishop who is an ogre and treats her children, Fanny and Alexander, terribly. Emilie finally flees him back to her dead husband’s family.

That’s the extremely condensed version. Quite strange and hypnotic at places, especially when Alexander wanders through Uncle Isak’s house and meets Ishmael. Fanny’s place in the title is her biggest role, tho’ she’s a cute little dickens. Dickens … the story rather reminded me of Dickens. Ghosts and evil grown-ups and big family gatherings. I loved the grandmother and Uncle Isak, just like I was supposed to.

Ingmar Bergman is a giant of world cinema. So by now I should have seen more than one of his films, right? If only for my cinematic literacy. Somehow I’ve never gotten around to it.

I remember watching Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert review Fanny and Alexander on their TV show; what was their show called by that time? At the Movies … Siskel & Ebert & the Movies … ? They loved Fanny and Alexander. Loved it! For some reason a clip they showed of the family playing at a party, especially a man chasing a woman around the dinner table, flickers in my memory. I can’t dredge up anything else. Still, I do remember enjoying the movie, and that it held up throughout its 3+ hours. I can even feel a twinge of anger at the cruelty of the stepfather, though perhaps that’s more from reading an overview of the plot than anything else.

The Criterion Collection makes available the 5 hour version that showed on Swedish television, for those who want to see Bergman’s “vision … expressed at its fullest.”

Pumpkinhead

from the book log (1/20/89):

Pumpkinhead
This is a monster movie. A fairly well-made old fashioned monster movie mercifully shorn of gobbledygook.

You have the minimal characterization — stock characters — the horror of justice and injustice, the teenagers, the ugly monster. You see, this group of youngsters goes to country to ride their motorbikes — a little boy gets run over by one. The daddy gets very pissed and asks the wicked old witch of the forest to sic Pumpkinhead on the bad old kids. Pumpkinhead does a pretty good job but every time he kills Daddy goes all funny inside. Daddy decides he’s done bad, rushes to save remaining kids. As a change of pace I thought Pumpkinhead might kill the “good girl,” the good girl has been surviving too many of these [horror] movies. Let’s have a slut come out on top.

Pumpkinhead had decent special effects, enough corniness to make you feel good & a few scary parts — generally above average for the genre. Unfortunately, I should prob’ly say, it is likely well above average.

Maybe give it a B+. Your basic scary fairytale ghost story.

I met my brother in Santa Rosa to see Pumpkinhead. David was riding his motorcycle, wearing the Christmas present Mom gave him, a helmet! We both enjoy a good monster movie. I no longer say I like horror movies. The genre got hijacked by the serial killer. In a monster movie the monster is out of this world, supernatural or extraterrestrial, and the humans unite against it. In serial killer movies the monster is too human. That’s no fun.

There’s a character in the Oz series named Jack Pumpkinhead. Jack is a somewhat flimsily constructed wooden man with a carved pumpkin for a head. Though Jack’s character is sweet and innocent, he is tall and that jaggedly carved grin is a little scary. I was hoping the monster in the movie would be a little bit inspired by Jack Pumpkinhead. Sadly (or fortunately) I must say there is no resemblance.

The Lair of the White Worm

from the book log (1/17/89):

The Lair of the White Worm, produced & directed by Ken Russell, based on the novel by Bram Stoker.

Went to the Plaza tonight with Rodney Aho. This was a fun movie. Lots of weird goings on but nobody was quite as seriously absurd as in the usual horror/monster flick; no, they were serious sometimes and absurd sometimes. Lots of little (and not so little) sexual innuendos throughout. A sexy villainess with great vamp costumes. A film for the jaded — it even had some scary parts. Lots of evil going on. The silly explanations were kept to a minimum and only a few rubbery special effects. A worm/slash/dragon lives in the big cave on the hill and the mysterious woman periodically sacrifices folks to it. Until she is outwitted by our wily hero(es) and she & dragon meet their doom. Pretty much.

This is Dare I Read post #1000.

Bagdad Cafe

from the book log (1/3/89)

Bagdad Cafe, a movie

Neat-o movie. It was playing in London while I was there, but I held off seeing it cuz there were other movies I thought were less likely to get around here. So here it is at the Plaza [in Petaluma]. And was it good? Oh, we liked it! This German couple fight at the beginning of the movie. Woman (Jasmin) nabs suitcase from car and stalks off down the road to the Bagdad Cafe, service station and motel. Jasmin moves in, cleans up, and teaches Brenda, the proprietress, and her family, magic. And the whole place becomes magic. A great ending, too.

*

I haven’t seen Bagdad Cafe all the way through since the Plaza showing, but if I were shown an unidentified 60 second snip I could probably name it. Bagdad Cafe was distinctive in look and feel. Images stick in my head. The chubby Jasmin dragging her suitcase down the road. The exasperation of Brenda, the proprietress. Whenever I saw CCH Pounder in something I knew I’d seen her first in Bagdad Cafe.

The movie was covered in the gay press for the female friendship of the leads. Were they lovers? Could they have been? I remember being disappointed a bit in that. Perhaps it was “gay vague” before the term was coined? However, the review I wrote shortly after seeing Bagdad Cafe betrays no reservations. Now I’m curious to see it again.

Spike of Bensonhurst

from the book log (1/3/89):

Spike of Bensonhurst, a movie

The only actor I knew was Ernest Borgnine. Geez. Funny movie. As in, strange. Crime pays, criminals as good guys, the mafia makes good. Criminals as “jes folks.” It was funny in the other sense, too, and not predictable. The guy who plays Spike is gorgeous and you get to look at him a lot. Although Spike gets two girls pregnant (one of whom is a real cute Puerto Rican dyke-type) there is no (as in zero) kissy-kissy. Spike’s mother is living with her lesbian lover while his dad does time, having taken the rap for Borgnine, the neighborhood mafia boss. Almost no conventional morality in this movie. I liked it. It’s different. Spike is a boxer; normally this would really turn me off, but the boxing is at a minimum and it’s definitely not a fight movie. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

*

I haven’t seen Spike of Bensonhurst since. I remember nothing about it. Looking at sites that track reviews, like the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes, I don’t see much activity, though what is there isn’t approving. On the other hand, malibutrash’s comment at imdb agrees with my opinion of the lead: “Sasha Mitchell was so gorgeous … it really hurt to look at him.”

Spike of Bensonhurst is not a book, clearly. But at the beginning I was extra ambitious with the log and made note of movies and record albums and individual issues of comic book series.

Details, details

In 1977 I turned twelve. My parents had divorced when i was three, but Dad came to visit a few times despite the distance - my mother and brother and I lived in California, Dad in Alaska. Dad remarried, choosing a woman with two sons roughly the ages of my brother and me. Then he had another child, a daughter. For two years running Dad sent me and my brother tickets to join him and his new(er) family for a vacation in Hawaii. I have fond memories of the experience, even if my stepbrothers and I didn’t always get along; the little sister was five years younger, if I remember right, and a charming bundle of energy.

Lately I’ve been reading Barack Obama: the story, which is less a biography of Barack Obama than it is a collage of details, all sorts of people and places, with Obama (and his ancestors) weaving through them. Obama was born in Hawaii and spent most of his childhood there. He attended an elite school on Oahu called Punahou. This passage about the graduation ceremony connected with a couple of my own life’s details:

[S]eniors had to sing for their diploma. Since the end of April there had been six weeks of rehearsal for the entire class, mandatory … Classmates had written some of the songs and chosen the others. … One of the contemporary songs they performed was “This Day Belongs to Me” by Seals and Crofts, from the soundtrack of One on One, a Robbie [sic] Benson movie about Barry Obama’s favorite sport.

One on One was shown on the plane to (or from) Hawaii. I remember not wanting to see it because it was about sports, the sort of thing I hated at school and was quickly bored by as a spectator. A whole movie about basketball? Ugh. Plus wasn’t Robby Benson kind of funny-looking? But I remember liking the movie all right. I just looked up the song “This Day Belongs to Me” and it doesn’t sound familiar but it’s a pleasant ditty. I would have liked it as a kid, probably more than now. I bet it sounded just fine coming out of teen throats at Barry’s graduation.



Robby Benson is better looking than I remembered, but this scene I found on youtube makes me uncomfortable now with its calculated bullying by the authority figures and I’m sure it enraged me at the time. Surely Robby got his revenge?

source of quote: Barak Obama: the story by David Maraniss

Lemmings

Chris Palmer has been involved in producing nature documentaries since the early 80s. In his history of the genre Disney’s wildlife films come in for praise and criticism. I know I saw Disney stuff growing up, some of the movies staples of the classroom. My mother’s criticism: Disney cuted up the animals, making up stories and putting words in the animals’ mouths. Palmer agrees with that. He also discusses instances where the Disney filmmakers forced or tricked animals into performing for the camera.

The most infamous example of misleading information in a Disney film involves that scene from White Wilderness in which the lemmings jump off a cliff en masse – or so it appears. … So memorable were these images that even today many people believe that lemmings engage in blindly self-destructive behavior. But the whole scene was fabricated. A 1982 investigation by reporter Brian Vallee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revealed that Disney filmmakers had forced a few dozen lemmings to run on a snow-covered turntable and even threw some into the sea to create the dramatic scene. … Some species of lemmings do become overpopulated, do migrate in swarms, and sometimes do drown crossing streams, but they never jump off cliffs suicidally.

Lemmings. The narrator of White Wilderness claims that there has long been a legend of suicidal lemmings. Having read the debunking of the Disney version of the “truth,” I wonder how ancient this legend is. Did the Disney filmmakers create it out of whole cloth?

The Urban Dictionary includes a very contemporary definition of lemming, “A lemming refers to a purchase/wished-for-item which results from reading an enthusiastic post about a new fabulous product. Overcome by compulsion, readers follow like lemmings diving off a cliff.”

That gibes with other definitions. Lemmings are creatures who, without thought for themselves, will follow a leader right over the cliff. It ain’t true?

There’s also a Snopes article on White Wilderness, which backs up Chris Palmer and adds a few details. The film’s narration claims the rodents are swimming out to sea, for instance. Snopes says no, the footage was grabbed “in Alberta, Canada, which … has no outlet to the sea. Lemmings were imported …” The water the poor wee critters are bobbing in? A river.

You can watch (or rewatch for the umpteenth time), the lemmings snippet from White Wilderness on youtube.

Let me conclude with a couple lines from a poem I wrote in high school:

Where did you go?
The edge of the world where the sea falls off and the lemmings stop to ponder their fate before plunging.

source: Shooting in the Wild: an insider’s account of making movies in the animal kingdom by Chris Palmer

Crocodilia by Philip Ridley

from the diary, Sunday, 12/11/88: “I stopped at Gay’s the Word, bought a book, Crocodilia, to read on the plane.”

Wednesday, 12/14(ish), written while in flight from London to San Francisco, having changed planes in New York: “San Francisco isn’t too far off now. An hour and a half, I think. Maybe I’ll nap. I’ve been reading Crocodilia by Philip Ridley. It’s quite good. The main characters are living in Bethnal Green.” The man with whom I spent a night not long before the end of the London trip lived on Bethnal Green Road. Reflecting on that experience I said, “My real life sex scenes more resemble, well, a little of Lisa Alther’s humor, a little of Quentin Crisp’s indifference … whatever else. [ellipsis in orig] I’m more likely to describe sex as a giggle than a transcendant ecstasy. I’m too cerebral or something. Yet still, almost a week from Thursday night I feel more complete since I spent the night cuddled with him. I’m not a great lover I have the feeling. But given the opportunity & the encouragement I can love well. Sex not really being ‘love.’ I don’t know tho’, as I’ve carried an afterglow a long time. Sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing.”

I still have Crocodilia by Philip Ridley. The back cover calls it “Ridley’s sparkling debut as a novelist.” Indeed, Ridley seems to have gone on to a career as a novelist, with at least twelve to his name. He has also written stage plays and books for children. Seems he wrote the screenplay for the movie, The Krays. I saw that. The Krays were real life identical twin brothers who led a colorful criminal life in London. One was straight, one gay. Yes, the gay one’s gayness is a marker of his being the eviler of the two, but not by much. The bit that irked me most was the reveal, the scene where we see that the warm body one brother has just been shagging was male. Oh! We’re supposed to be shocked. Otherwise the brothers treat their male & female sextoys about the same – disposably. The straight brother isn’t really the good brother. There isn’t a good brother.

the diary, 10/10/88 – 12/9/88

I last wrote about my diaries in September. Since it’s been almost a year I don’t expect DIR readers to remember where I left off. It was my semester in London. I’ve already worked through the diary for the books mentioned in it, and I copied out some anecdotes. This post goes back through the diary to check out my comments on movies, music and live theatre.

I made an effort to get conversant with the London’s small club music scene. Others could afford to do big concerts, not me.

Also searched for small theater (especially gay theater).

I tried to take advantage of the big city amenities – art galleries, ethnic restaurants, foreign cinema.

Beginning of November I started a volunteer DJ gig at the Imperial College radio station.

movies:

Pathfinder, “the first motion picture made entirely in the Lap language and filmed amidst the snow & rocks of Lapland”

Drowning By Numbers, It was my birthday “so I dragged Chris to Drowning By Numbers -- even paid for it as the poor dear has spent away all her money. … Afterward Chris teased me about moaning, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no,’ during the movie. OK, I got into it. Good flicker. Great for Halloween. Lovely weird little black comedy.”

Law of Desire, “Good movie! … very poignant and the gayness of the characters is not a theme but rather themes are duplicity and love and unrequited love and obsession and passion and so on.”

Alice, a stop-motion animation version of Alice in Wonderland, “unusual, weird, rather more slowmoving than I’d have wished, fairly faithful to the book. I wouldn’t give it a wild recommendation but if you’re in the mood—“

The Fruit Machine, “okay, if somewhat muddled”

The Curse of the Cat People, watched it on TV

Yeelen, an African movie, “very well made, a lot of lovely scenery and interesting faces in closeup; although I could follow the motion of the plot, could make out its bone structure, yet the details were not always clear. Couldn’t catch all the symbolism. Left me feeling oddly depressed.”


music (these were 7” singles I bought in used record stores):

“Running All Over the World” by Staus Quo – “the theme song for Sport Aid … Chris tells me she read in the news that Sport Aid went bankrupt”

“No Clause 28” by Boy George – a political protest song! Clause 28 was Maggie Thatcher’s no-teachee-the-gay legislation to swat school teachers.

Pop Will Eat Itself – “sorta like The Ramones, only not as good”
Living Colour – “hard rock – blecch”
Cocteau Twins – “good”

from one live show in Camden Town:

Law of Fives (live) – “bearable … they got irritable after awhile over the audience’s lukewarm reception.”

The Horseflies (live) – “from America … rockified traditional American fiddle & banjo music”

Rodney Allen (live) – “Cute little teenager … pleasant rock … in the mode of Bryan Adams”

The Jack Rubies (live) – “very good … I have two of their songs on records I bought at the used record shop”

The Blue Aeroplanes (live) – “[they] construct a wall of sound and push it over on you”

my Imperial College radio show:

“Glad to Be Gay” by Tom Robinson – a song on the Imperial College playlist that I included in my first show

“Changes” by David Bowie and “The First Atheist Tabernacle Choir” by the British satiric puppet theater Spitting Image – another student DJ was in the booth talking to me and “I couldn’t keep track of my songs and came into David Bowie’s ‘Changes’ midvoice. Very annoying.”

“Boom Boom Boom (Come Back to My Room)” by Paul Lekakis, a request I played for Dana, a girl who’d barged into the booth with the 7” demanding I play it right away. I put it on after a song by the Cocteau Twins. I found “Boom Boom Boom” appalling: “Boom boom boom / Let's go back to my room / So we can do it all night / And you can make me feel right” … Ugh. A female singer came out with an answer song: “Bam Bam Bam (I Think I’ll Stay Where I Am)”. The search I just ran didn’t produce any hits for the song, unfortunately, so I don’t know who she was.

live theater:

Venetian Heat, “Italy, WWII, farmer & wife hide 2 army deserters after the Italian army disintegrates. One [soldier] falls in love with the wife, one with the husband. The nazis (one, anyway) show up and make things nasty. The wife’s lover gets shot, dies. The other soldier [escapes] to join the partisans. Wife & husband under arrest.”

The Public, by Federico Garcia Lorca, “very strange, yet exciting, lyrical play. Filled with odd and wonderful imagery – the set design nearly matching the words. And, when the words made no sense, certainly surpassing them. I loved the horses – men with big horse heads, dressed in leotards, carrying trumpets, Juliet with a false bare chest pushing apart her negligee, a naked man hanging from a cross who is attended by a male nurse, a man dressed in bells, another in grape leaves. Rain falling between audience and stage. A huge painted eye. A giant leaf. A soft-sculpture moon. It was not really long. An hour and a half, yet so full it seemed much longer, and confusing so that the minutes stretched out as we tried to peer into them.” This was supposedly the play’s first British production.

The Bacchae “okay, but I didn’t find myself caring much about what happened to the characters except at the very end when [SPOILER ALERT] the mother of the king of Thebes discovers she has been carrying around her son’s head – felt for her, poor dear. The women of the chorus did a number of gross things to themselves during the course of the play – splashing themselves with water, painting themselves with lipstick & eyebrow pencil, wallowing in red wine and oatmeal. Simulated pagan rituals, I suppose.”

Look Back in Anger “I should call it Look At in Anger … The play was written back in the 50s and rather shows it … I thought all the characters were big dips …” I found the abusive main character a real downer, and the women who loved him were total masochists.

other:

Jack the Ripper Walking Tour – “fun but long”

“I went with Julie, Janet, Chris, Tanya, and Shawn to the BBC studios to see a radio show being recorded -- The Law Game. ‘A light-hearted look at points of law. Amusing, yet informative, with Shaw Taylor in charge of the legal quibbles, squabbles, and giggles. With special celebrity guests Alan Titch Marsh, Susan Rae, and Denise Coffey.’ Of course, we’d never heard of the celebrity guests … It was kinda fun.”

the diary, 2/25/88 – 10/9/88

The diary opens with the Spring semester at SRJC. I had just been elected president of the Gay & Lesbian Student Union. I roped a young lesbian, Donna D., into being co-president, “welcome to call herself President whenever she wishes,” because I didn’t like the idea of being called the president of anything and because we were the Gay and Lesbian Student Union and I knew seeing men running things always scares off the women.

Got my first parking ticket in March. Expired meter.

More unsatisfying dates. Which had me down. Shortly before I flew off to London for the fall semester a boy developed a big crush on me. I wish I had been into him. Maybe it was just as well. He wasn’t yet 17.

Late in the summer I got a job at McDonald’s. Not the one in Sebastopol. I didn’t want anybody to recognize me. I needed more money if I was going to London. A friend from the GLSU was working at this McD and I was looking forward to working with someone I knew and liked. She quit the day before I started. Four weeks into it I gave my two week notice. Which led to some disgruntlement from my supervisors. Who were nice enough. It was an easy job. I didn’t like the uniform but the work wasn’t bad like I’d expected. I preferred it to other jobs I’d had: dishwashing in a Sebastopol restaurant, flunky at a butcher shop (no, I didn’t do any butchering).

I’ve been quoting a lot from my London diary. Talking more about it would be repeating myself.

TV:
Shoah

movies:
Hairspray
Phantasm II
Married to the Mob
Bringing Up Baby (on TV at home)
Big (on the plane to London)
I’ll Take Manhattan (in London, on the TV at friends’ flat)
3 Men and a Baby (in London)

performance:
stand-up comedy with Robin Tyler & Linda Gerard (in London)

music:
Mr. Dog (live show in Santa Rosa)
“A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)” by Momus (a song I liked on a sampler album from Creation Records; bought at Tower Records in London)
singles by Big Pig, Housemartins, which I bought from a bin at a street market in London

diary, 5/18/87 – 2/16/88

Some dating (mostly unsatisfying), a few parties.

Summer I took a swim class. I remember shivering in the pool – got my first leg cramp!

A friend attempted suicide. Pills. I phoned him at the hospital. “I don’t remember you,” he said, “but my diary says good things about you.”

Attended the Winkie Convention at Asilomar. When I asked David M if he would give a congratulatory kiss to Eric S after the “Woggle Bug” play performance – all the girls were getting kisses, the boys handshakes – David said, “He’d probably deck me.” Surely not!

Signed up for fall classes at SRJC: Review Algebra, Spanish Conversation, Critical Thinking, and American Sign Language … And got a 4.0 out of the semeseter.

Was taking driving lessons, got my learner’s permit. Paid for driver’s lessons because when it was Mom trying to teach me she would cringe or snap at me and we would end up shouting at each other. I think Mom helped pay for the lessons, though. At the end of August I got my driver’s license. I looked at cars but did not find one I liked & thought I could afford.

As documented on DIR (here, here, here, here, and here) I initiated a poster series for SRJC’s Gay & Lesbian Student Union. As always the club dwindled over the course of the semester and I pitched in to keep the club going.

movies:
Room with a View
Children of a Lesser God
Swimming to Cambodia
The Untouchables
Man Facing Southeast
Screamers
Prick Up Your Ears
Snow White
The Lost Boys
King Kong vs. Godzilla
The Living Daylights
La Bamba
Superman 4
Animation Celebration
Monster Squad
Parting Glances
Desert Hearts
Pink Triangles
Maurice
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing
Tampopo
Robocop
Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Theater:
Talking With …

TV:
The Jewel in the Crown
Miami Vice
America’s Top Ten
Star Trek: the Next Generation
Agronsky & Co

music:
Camper Van Beethoven
Madonna
Culture Club
Steeleye Span
Jimmy Cliff
The Wiz soundtrack
World Party
George Michael
Los Lobos
INXS
Blondie
“Reggae Dance Party”
Bob Dylan

Torch Song Trilogy

from the diary: “Tuesday 1/19/88

“Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein. Quite good.”

Torch Song Trilogy started out as separately written one act plays. They were gathered up. Hence “trilogy”.

The trilogy had a successful run on Broadway (it won Tonys). And Fierstein found funders to make it into a movie. He starred. As a drag queen Fierstein is not pretty. For a chanteuse he has a voice gratingly gravelly. He is, however, likable. He’s a likable presence. It doesn’t look like he pays anybody to run his myspace page. Isn’t that likable? So so likable.

Considering how recently I’d read the source material I don’t remember having an opinion on its translation to the screen. If I’ve read the book and it’s made into a movie, I have an opinion.

I saw the movie in a multiplex in Santa Rosa. It was out of focus. I didn’t rush out to the lobby and demand a competent projectionist because I didn’t want to miss anything. I am curious to see it unfuzzy. But I was kinda lukewarm on it the first time. It didn’t help that the main love story ends tragically.

Conversations with My Elders

from the diary: “Wednesday 1/6/88”

Yesterday I quoted the first part of this paragraph. The second of “my two latest reads” would be “Conversations with My Elders -- interviews with (now deceased) figures in entertainment who were gay – George Cukor, Rock Hudson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others. Conducted by Boze Hadleigh. I wonder how you pronounce his name?”

At the time I read Hadleigh’s book of interviews I didn’t really know much about his interview subjects. Have I even seen a Rock Hudson movie yet? If I have, it’s slipped my mind. So I can’t say as I know much more about the folks Hadleigh talked to. I liked reading interviews, though.

There seems to be some skepticism about the authenticity of the interviews. Are these old Hollywood hands really going to divulge details of their personal lives to a stranger, even a pretty young man who promises not to publish the interview until after the subject’s death? The entry on Hadleigh at Wikipedia addresses this gently, “Hadleigh cites powerful personal or Hollywood connections that helped him to contact the interviewees. However, his books do not feature photographs of him with his subjects nor did he have tape recordings of his interviews.”

I found two of Hadleigh’s celebrity interviews online -- one with Sal Mineo and one with Jodie Foster.

In the interview with Foster Hadleigh never asks outright if she’s gay, though when he first hints at the subject she insists she doesn’t talk about her “sexuality”. Curiously, “it wouldn’t make sense.” Here’s some back-and-forth at the interview’s end:

Hadleigh: Rumors … linked you romantically to Kelly McGillis, your co-star in 'The Accused.'

Foster: There are always rumors. Um, Kelly has since been married. Nowadays, people wonder which side of the fence you're on until you get married.

Hadleigh: And often afterward. In the past, gay performers, such as Rock Hudson, married straight for the sake of their screen images.

Foster: Yeah, and that goes on today. I think marriage should be based on love, but in Hollywood it's really based on what it does for your career. I also think marriage doesn't mean obtaining a contract. The length and quality of the relationship is what matters.

the diary, 10/16/86 – 5/16/87

I wanted the notebook to be for short stories as I’d had success with poetry-only notebooks. The stories stalled out. After a period of mourning I decided to switch the notebook to diary. Prose is prose.

I liked the job at the campus library. I was doing well in my classes – Spanish, Biology, Political Science in the Fall, Creative Writing, Spanish, Death & Dying in the Spring.

I was finally dating. I fell in love. Or wanted to so badly I imagined I had. It’d seemed to me all my love affairs had been one-sided (unrequited!) and here was a boy who wanted me! Or not. I got to write moony giddy diary entries about him for a few days, then philosophical fuck-him diary entries when he called it off. I also found myself the unrequiting one. Hard as it is to say no, it’s easier than being said no to. Funny thing, in two instances (or four?) I fixed up a boy who wanted me with another boy who wanted me … and these dates, I got reports, were not disasters.

Lots of new people coming into/going out of my life. Visits to Marin, SF, as well as the usual SoCo haunts. I joined efforts to create community institutions for gays & lesbians in Sonoma County, mostly because I was under 21 thus could not go to bars (the main gay meeting places) and, after I attained my majority, because bars were boring, dark, smoky, and loud. I kept up with a pen pal in Alabama and another in Oregon, having found them through Alyson Publications’ young gay penpal service.

I broke my arm for the first time. I refused to say, “I broke my arm.” I would say, “My arm got broken.” I was at a gay rollerskate night and tried to keep up in a group skate, though I knew I couldn’t, ended up being thrown off the end of the chain and, as I fell, tried to stop myself with my left arm. I guess I stopped. The bone cracked and I wore a splint for a few weeks. And in another more serious incident an old friend of my mother nearly choked to death in her kitchen. I performed the Heimlich maneuver. Have you ever done it for real? Did it work for you? Me, it just felt like I was abusing the poor woman – nothing popped out of her throat. She collapsed to the floor. When the paramedics arrived they said she had been getting enough air. She would survive.

Yes, I was getting along better with my mother. I wasn’t around the house so much, for one thing. And I could contribute a bit of money to expenses. And I wasn’t so fucking depressed. Depressed people are no fun to be around.

Now that I again had money coming in I started buying used records, even went to a couple live shows. I’m no big fan of live shows, tell the truth. They’ve got a high noise to melody ratio.

movies:
Peggy Sue Got Married
Aliens
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Blue Velvet
Nobody’s Fool
Swiss Family Robinson
Little Shop of Horrors
Personal Best
Moby Dick
Animation Celebration
Burglar
Where the River Runs Black
Walkabout

TV:
Town and Country music videos
Rocky & Bullwinkle

music:
Bronski Beat
Joan Armatrading
Talking Heads
David Bowie
Bonnie Hayes & the Wild Combo
Paul Simon
Prince
General Public
Thompson Twins
David Lindley
Depeche Mode
Pretenders
Simply Red
The Clash
Club Nouveau
Romeo Void
Bruce Cockburn
Grace Jones
Howard Jones
Culture Club
Camper Van Beethoven
REM
B-52s
Love Tractor
Limbo District
Pylon
I-World
ABBA

The diary, 6/6/86 – 10/14/86

This journal is a stenography notebook. The spiral binding is at the top of the page. Every time you turn a page you have to flip the whole book over. This makes it hard to browse. A lot fewer books mentioned in this diary.

What happened? I quit Day Treatment for college. A friend from DT convinced me I didn’t need to take that antidepressant anymore (though I would occasionally dip into the bottle when feeling overwhelmed). After a decent experience with the summer school class I got a job at the SRJC campus library and took on a full-time load of classes during the fall semester. I joined the campus gay club, which was quite small, and seemed always threatening to evaporate. I also began attending a gay youth group in not-very-nearby Marin; this involved long busrides &/or carpools, as I had no car. And, yes, I had nongay friends and we would hang out, play boardgames, watch movies, go for long walks. Still going to poetry workshops and Russian River Writers Guild readings. More things going on, less time to read. Plus, of course, much reading time having to go to reading for school.


movies mentioned:
Labyrinth
Piranha 2: The Spawning
Return of the Living Dead
My Beautiful Laundrette
The Fly
Return to Oz
Club Paradise
Legal Eagles

TV:
People are Talking
America’s Top Ten

Talking Animals and Other People

from the diary: “Friday 8/22/86

“Been reading a good book, Talking Animals and Other People, autobiography of animator Shamus Culhane.”

I was a big fan of animation. It seemed to me the place where you could realize things that could never be in real life. If the Oz books were made into movies I thought they should be animated movies. A gangly pumpkin-headed man built from sticks? You wouldn’t have to plump him up to make him a costume for a meat person. A sawhorse brought to life by a sprinkling of powder? No need to built a puppet to dangle in front of a blue screen. And animals talking? It looks natural.

Since the images depicted are limited only by what the artist can draw an animated world seemed the perfect place for exploring unknown regions of the mind. Such is rarely the case, of course. Typical animated films are no more interesting than your typical live action films. How much this has to do with the inelastic imaginations of the creators, how much to do with the expectations of the money men and their wish to sell the product to an audience – too weird and nobody wants to buy, right? – how much it has to do with something else I haven’t thought of, who knows?

The review in the NYT praises Culhane’s look back at his career (only a glance at his personal life, it says), “Much of what [the book] reveals is disagreeable, and one of its great merits is that it offers such an unsparing view of a world that was all too often subject to strain, squalor, brutal internal politics, harsh labor relations.” Not unlike the sweaty shops where comic books were cranked out, I suppose. I understand there’s long been an overlap between comics artists and animators. Culhane “has the knack of explaining technical matters clearly … [and] is equally concerned with esthetic issues, from the use of backgrounds inspired by Victorian illustrators to the lessons to be learned from the movie-making innovations of an Eisenstein or a Pudovkin.”

Culhane worked for Disney and claims credit for the “Heigh ho, Heigh ho” marching dwarves sequence in Snow White. “He had good reason to resent Disney's authoritarianism, and to know how unfair he could sometimes be, but he admires his dedication and his abilities too much to let fly against him.” And who knew that “toward the end of the making of Snow White … [the animators were so keyed up for a week they poured out an] avalanche of pornographic drawings in which Snow White, the dwarfs and even the old witch performed feats ‘that Krafft-Ebing would never have dreamed of.’” What private collection has those drawings?

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

from the diary: “Friday 8/8/86

“The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Rito Vusso [sic] came in from the Solano Library an’ I bin reading it tonight.”

This was the third book on gay subject matter that I had to get via interlibrary loan. Like the other two (Reflections of a Rock Lobster and One Teenager in Ten) The Celluloid Closet came from the Solano County Library. What was it about the Solano County Library? It’s not like Sonoma County’s library had no gay books. Huh. They did tend to be rather more … sociological? … than cultural. I read a lot of dense texts trying to figure out what the gay thing was.

I suspect Vito Russo’s reading of the queer killer stereotype informed the protests in San Francisco over the filming of Basic Instinct in 1991. I refused to see Basic Instinct for several years. Yes, I did succumb when I was bored and the DVD was kicking around. By that point, I figured, nobody was making money off my eyeballs.

If you want to read a review, here’s one.

The diary, 3/12/86 – 5/24/86

I can’t talk about the diary the way I talk about published books, other people’s books. When I read the diary it fires emotions that cloud what’s on the page; there is much, in other words, that is going on in my head that is not going on on paper where others can see it. I have thought about using the diary as material for a memoir or novel; I doubt that will happen. Working with the diary would be like trying to groom Sutra – he turns and bites the brush, then the claws come out.

The diary covers a lot of ground for a two month period. I got on an antidepressant, I started going to Day Treatment at Community Hospital in Santa Rosa. I made some progress toward escaping from my “mind-forged manacles” (Blake). But I also did a lot of rattling of them and moaning as the hard cuffs dug into my wrists. In my mental image of the time I rarely left the house; yet the diary records friends who drop by and parties I go to, poetry readings and town wanderings.

movies mentioned:
Pretty in Pink
Prizzi’s Honor
Mrs Delafield Wants to Get Married
The Naked Prey
Kiss of the Spider Woman
The Last Picture Show
Harold and Maude
THX 1138
Teen Wolf
Eddie and the Cruisers
Altered States
The Brother from Another Planet
Brazil

TV shows:
I Love Lucy
Donahue
Hill Street Blues
Austin City Limits
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
St Elsewhere
Washington Week in Review
Leo and Liz in Beverly Hills
The Last Precinct
Miami Vice