Sharing thoughts about a new film tonight, and I hope it won't seem tedious. I know, I know . . . mine is not a film blog. But I'm entranced and delighted and I want to stop people on the streets and share the good word about this remarkable story about passion, to shepherd my brothers and sisters away from their sad lacking of Man on Wire. All of my random thoughts are floating away from a central iconic image from this film: I even dreamt last night of green hillocks in France marked off with cables, the hillocks giving way to a grassy, rock-strewn path lining a wide brook. As I walked along the brook, I imagined myself slipping but I never hit the water. I knew, though, that what I imagined was both a fall to grace and a fall into the void.
Man on Wire
A film by James Marsh
2008 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Winner, World Cinema/Documentary,
and Audience Award, World Cinema/Documentary
http://www.manonwire.com/
Wire-walker Philippe Petit, an expatriate Frenchman-in-New York, is high-strung, even when he's not tripping the light-line fantastic. His expressions are intense, but his movements are never jerky. He is a disciplined athlete, an Atlas among his cadre of street performers. He is focused, though he prefers "tenacious"--no problem with English as a second language here. His screen personality is a mélange of poetry and showmanship. He talks like an anarchist, motivated by breaking rules. He dares gravity to pull him netherwards: he is a fool, tricking us (and himself) into thinking that gravity won't take him for a ride. He is also a philosopher.
Petit's most famous lark on a wire was six years in the making. On 7 August 1974, while the finishing touches were still being put on the World Trade Center complex in New York, Petit and his crew strung a tightrope between the twin towers and Petit made history by dancing on air. The gathering crowd in the streets below held its collective breath for three quarters of an hour while Petit performed and played a comical game of keepaway from the policemen who had also gathered on the top of each building to arrest him.
Petit's famous stunt was 34 years ago and his story is by now a tightly told one. For Man on Wire, director James Marsh draws on a stash of home movies and then spins out more of the tale with period stills, contemporary interviews, and cleverly-staged reenactments. Oddly, Marsh does not contextualize this film with the destruction of the twin towers, though the prospect of a dramatic plummet hangs over this film in a surreal, psychic echo.
Marsh seems to be more interested in what Petit's existential romp meant to those who helped him pull it off, and so Marsh turns the lens on Petit's friends and sundry recruits. The poignance of their lingering awe and sense of loss is hard to bear. Petit's girlfriend Annie Allix and his co-conspirator, Jean-Louis Blondeau, both knew that they were as likely to be enabling suicide as success, and watching a loved one gleefully dance with mortality certainly took its toll. And though they may not have lost Petit to the void, they lost him, nonetheless, because celebrity corrupts immediately and absolutely.
Now a late-50-something artist-in-residence at St John the Divine Cathedral, Petit relishes the new wave of attention to his dramatic pas de deux with gravity. And though Marsh might hold that the devastation of the twin towers is outside the realm of Petit's story, Petit disagrees and freely discusses his opinions on the subject: "I think they should be rebuilt exactly the same, or maybe even a little bit higher—as a rebellion against doom."
08 August 2008
07 July 2008
WILL THAT FIT IN A BROWN PAPER BAG?
I don't even want to list all of the different dictionaries I have on my shelf. They snuck up on me over the years. One at a time, they'd just show up and stake out a few square inches of real estate among my unorganized collections. Maybe they came to hang out just for a weekend and ended up staying a while. Ça m'est égal. Pretty soon, I'm a slut for reference books--and what's more, I'm a dame that's got no regrets.
My latest find is oddly both electronic (hallelujah-- no dusting!) and low-tech. No more than a list of words on a screen with page-turning arrows. Ah, but the words, the words. For lexophiliacs, this website is more porny than porn. It'll help you tell the difference between amour fou and amor sui. Between fly-jockey and flying saucer. And might puzzle some of us with such way-back phrases as "punishing the harlequin." Oh, you'll try to act cool. But soon enough, you'll be jotting a phrase or two and finding poetry in "benrus queen."
Few dictionaries compel a page-turning frenzy like www.sex-lexis.com. Read it. Add tags to your porn collection. Feel all worldly.
Ms Romance, a.k.a. the amorist, says: "When in doubt, look it up!"
My latest find is oddly both electronic (hallelujah-- no dusting!) and low-tech. No more than a list of words on a screen with page-turning arrows. Ah, but the words, the words. For lexophiliacs, this website is more porny than porn. It'll help you tell the difference between amour fou and amor sui. Between fly-jockey and flying saucer. And might puzzle some of us with such way-back phrases as "punishing the harlequin." Oh, you'll try to act cool. But soon enough, you'll be jotting a phrase or two and finding poetry in "benrus queen."
Few dictionaries compel a page-turning frenzy like www.sex-lexis.com. Read it. Add tags to your porn collection. Feel all worldly.
Ms Romance, a.k.a. the amorist, says: "When in doubt, look it up!"
09 June 2008
Evocative Plates (title cred to Beast)
This record keeps skipping on the part where everyone is raving about how sexy food is—hell, even literary grande dame Margaret Atwood likens recipe books to porn. (What happens in her kitchen stays in her kitchen, apparently.)
I don’t often get to enjoy leisurely meals with friends. In fact, it’s all too common for me to dine al desko morning, noon, and night: most of these are unsexy, cold-cream-on-your-face kinds of meals. And yes I realize how L7 that sounds. If it’s too sad, skip to the next paragraph and just be glad it’s not you.
Last night, one of my favorite riot grrrrrls in the whole world threw open a dollhouse-sized window of opportunity to share a cheese-and-wine outing. I gleefully squeezed through the bars of my workaholic cage to join her.
Once we’d made our choices, the waiter—looking for all the world, disconcertingly, like a young and way-too-eager-to-please version of Hugh Laurie—brought us the cheese course.
The food before me, ‘le plat,’ comme on dit, was summer itself, to my mind.
Who says there isn’t time travel? Because I’m telling you truly that when I bit into the perfectly textured French bread, piled high with bleu cheese and grape halves, I was transported to the age 16.
No sommelier can convince me that the rush I felt was all about the perfect pairing of two kinds of controlled mold.
Anyway, who cares about what strange chemistry was happening on my tongue? I was awash in flirty teenage glances, blustery cycling trips between the forest and the sea, and in not giving a fuck about what my teachers thought of my drinking and smoking and shaving boys’ legs. In short, I was enjoying the kind of experience that made me the mole on the belly of an exquisite whore. I am happily not the same person I was at the age of 16, and I wouldn’t want to go back to my past and relive it any more than memory permits, but I’m fortunate to still be enjoying such pleasure in my life, such good friends and good meals.
So join me in a toast and lemme get back to work, willya?
--Misc. Romance says “vite, vite, vite—santé!”
I don’t often get to enjoy leisurely meals with friends. In fact, it’s all too common for me to dine al desko morning, noon, and night: most of these are unsexy, cold-cream-on-your-face kinds of meals. And yes I realize how L7 that sounds. If it’s too sad, skip to the next paragraph and just be glad it’s not you.
Last night, one of my favorite riot grrrrrls in the whole world threw open a dollhouse-sized window of opportunity to share a cheese-and-wine outing. I gleefully squeezed through the bars of my workaholic cage to join her.
Once we’d made our choices, the waiter—looking for all the world, disconcertingly, like a young and way-too-eager-to-please version of Hugh Laurie—brought us the cheese course.
The food before me, ‘le plat,’ comme on dit, was summer itself, to my mind.
Who says there isn’t time travel? Because I’m telling you truly that when I bit into the perfectly textured French bread, piled high with bleu cheese and grape halves, I was transported to the age 16.
No sommelier can convince me that the rush I felt was all about the perfect pairing of two kinds of controlled mold.
Anyway, who cares about what strange chemistry was happening on my tongue? I was awash in flirty teenage glances, blustery cycling trips between the forest and the sea, and in not giving a fuck about what my teachers thought of my drinking and smoking and shaving boys’ legs. In short, I was enjoying the kind of experience that made me the mole on the belly of an exquisite whore. I am happily not the same person I was at the age of 16, and I wouldn’t want to go back to my past and relive it any more than memory permits, but I’m fortunate to still be enjoying such pleasure in my life, such good friends and good meals.
So join me in a toast and lemme get back to work, willya?
--Misc. Romance says “vite, vite, vite—santé!”
08 June 2008
Poser. (Catching up: 10 January 2008)
Some are born to geekdom, some have it foisted upon them. Still others have to work at it.
BACK IN THE DAY
I should’ve been a shoo-in for geekdom. I had a mathematician for a father—a mathematician who worked at NASA, no less, a place where slide rules ruled because they actually put people in space and lobbed astronauts over to the moon and back. I also have the odd distinction of the Star Trek premier being my first memory. It all should have come so naturally, right, given both of those points of entry to the geek oeuvre? But looking back on pictures of my one appearance at any science fiction fan convention, or “con” in the vernacular, I’m the only one not in costume, which might suggest to the outsider that my heart wasn’t in it.
(Fun fact: in those days I looked like the love child of Siouxie Sioux and that chick Maya from Space: 1999 without even trying, so I arguably fit in pretty well without the costume.)
In truth, from the start, I was all heart and no gooey geek center. I had to work for geek cred. Hard. I was so sure I could pass eventually. For a while, I sought out friends who were all “hit points” this and “elven armor” that. I took math courses for fun, though I almost flunked out of calculus one quarter and had to put some serious sweat equity into recovering my geek poise. I tried to hone my chess skills enough to play in the club, but I faced a hard truth that has eroded only slightly over the years: I will never be any more than a recreational user of chess, able to snort a bishop here and there, but never, ever will I rob a convenience store to pay chess club dues.
I was a geek wannabe in a world of geeks. I was, in short, a poser. And everyone knew it.
I had to make a clean break, for a while, with my aspirations to geekability.
In college I pronounced that I would stop caring about numbers and start caring about (1) nuclear annihilation, (2) punk rock, and (3) getting laid (no matter what he tells you, Prince did not come up with the concept of “party like it’s 1999” all by himself).
The story of why I cared about nuclear apocalypse is an interesting one, but that’s not why we’re here today.
I gravitated to punk because it let me explore anger in a (mostly) culturally-appropriate way—and I was angry as hell. One of the sources of my angst was because I was such an eff’n outcast that I didn’t even fit in with geeks.
Why ‘punk’ and not mere vandalism and other criminal frippery? You should know by now: punk’s higher level of comfort for gender bending, of course. You see, as progressive as some of the geek subculture could be, glam hadn’t really gilded the geek world yet—it would be more than a decade before Star Trek narratives would incorporate hermaphrodism. Finding a home with skanky boys, bois, grrrrls, and girlyboys, gave me sweet satisfaction because another part of my soul was finally sated. My new life also gave me delusions of superiority over the geeks who I thought had jilted me.
Q: So in college, what did I do, besides shave my head and nuzzle up to as many mohawks as possible?
A: Well, I settled on academic study of girly geekdom, beginning with studying the research and inventions of Hypatia, Shi Dun, Dorotea Bucca, Maria Sybilla Merian, and Marie Curie. I examined pedagogical gender studies that uncovered the vastly different treatment of boys and girls in science and math classes. Forget “girls gone wild”—think more “girls gone invisible!” Dear readers, I must say this last did not come as a surprise.
HUG A GEEK TODAY
These days, geekiness is in, even for girls.
Unfortunately, the cornerstone of geek nature, intelligence, isn’t in vogue. Witness the ridiculous and easily disproven assertion that smart = elitist. We’re in the midst of an anti-science backlash, neck-deep in politicians who cynically exploit scientific uncertainty so that public policy continues to serve powerful, wealthy polluters.
In his book Happiness, Richard Layard reminds us that societies need goals aimed at improving lives even if sometimes their purposes and payoffs are a matter of debate. “Society cannot flourish without some sense of shared purpose,” he writes.
Well, hell, yes. Public service: not just for everyone else anymore.
In Europe, science cafés are social clubs that have become quite the phenom. (Not sure what kind of victory this is. Imagine anything involving a pub in Europe not being compulsively embraced. You can’t, can you?)
Perhaps American science cafés could help us hip up science and find laudable public enterprises to tie our fortunes to. Combine science café with intellidating and you’ve got yourself a new American classic.
My inner geeklette seems willing still to put her hand up, go to the chalkboard, and take a stab at answering the burning question of the moment. For that I must be off to the pub.
--Misc. Romance says sharpen your pencils.
BACK IN THE DAY
I should’ve been a shoo-in for geekdom. I had a mathematician for a father—a mathematician who worked at NASA, no less, a place where slide rules ruled because they actually put people in space and lobbed astronauts over to the moon and back. I also have the odd distinction of the Star Trek premier being my first memory. It all should have come so naturally, right, given both of those points of entry to the geek oeuvre? But looking back on pictures of my one appearance at any science fiction fan convention, or “con” in the vernacular, I’m the only one not in costume, which might suggest to the outsider that my heart wasn’t in it.
(Fun fact: in those days I looked like the love child of Siouxie Sioux and that chick Maya from Space: 1999 without even trying, so I arguably fit in pretty well without the costume.)
In truth, from the start, I was all heart and no gooey geek center. I had to work for geek cred. Hard. I was so sure I could pass eventually. For a while, I sought out friends who were all “hit points” this and “elven armor” that. I took math courses for fun, though I almost flunked out of calculus one quarter and had to put some serious sweat equity into recovering my geek poise. I tried to hone my chess skills enough to play in the club, but I faced a hard truth that has eroded only slightly over the years: I will never be any more than a recreational user of chess, able to snort a bishop here and there, but never, ever will I rob a convenience store to pay chess club dues.
I was a geek wannabe in a world of geeks. I was, in short, a poser. And everyone knew it.
I had to make a clean break, for a while, with my aspirations to geekability.
In college I pronounced that I would stop caring about numbers and start caring about (1) nuclear annihilation, (2) punk rock, and (3) getting laid (no matter what he tells you, Prince did not come up with the concept of “party like it’s 1999” all by himself).
The story of why I cared about nuclear apocalypse is an interesting one, but that’s not why we’re here today.
I gravitated to punk because it let me explore anger in a (mostly) culturally-appropriate way—and I was angry as hell. One of the sources of my angst was because I was such an eff’n outcast that I didn’t even fit in with geeks.
Why ‘punk’ and not mere vandalism and other criminal frippery? You should know by now: punk’s higher level of comfort for gender bending, of course. You see, as progressive as some of the geek subculture could be, glam hadn’t really gilded the geek world yet—it would be more than a decade before Star Trek narratives would incorporate hermaphrodism. Finding a home with skanky boys, bois, grrrrls, and girlyboys, gave me sweet satisfaction because another part of my soul was finally sated. My new life also gave me delusions of superiority over the geeks who I thought had jilted me.
Q: So in college, what did I do, besides shave my head and nuzzle up to as many mohawks as possible?
A: Well, I settled on academic study of girly geekdom, beginning with studying the research and inventions of Hypatia, Shi Dun, Dorotea Bucca, Maria Sybilla Merian, and Marie Curie. I examined pedagogical gender studies that uncovered the vastly different treatment of boys and girls in science and math classes. Forget “girls gone wild”—think more “girls gone invisible!” Dear readers, I must say this last did not come as a surprise.
HUG A GEEK TODAY
These days, geekiness is in, even for girls.
Unfortunately, the cornerstone of geek nature, intelligence, isn’t in vogue. Witness the ridiculous and easily disproven assertion that smart = elitist. We’re in the midst of an anti-science backlash, neck-deep in politicians who cynically exploit scientific uncertainty so that public policy continues to serve powerful, wealthy polluters.
In his book Happiness, Richard Layard reminds us that societies need goals aimed at improving lives even if sometimes their purposes and payoffs are a matter of debate. “Society cannot flourish without some sense of shared purpose,” he writes.
Well, hell, yes. Public service: not just for everyone else anymore.
In Europe, science cafés are social clubs that have become quite the phenom. (Not sure what kind of victory this is. Imagine anything involving a pub in Europe not being compulsively embraced. You can’t, can you?)
Perhaps American science cafés could help us hip up science and find laudable public enterprises to tie our fortunes to. Combine science café with intellidating and you’ve got yourself a new American classic.
My inner geeklette seems willing still to put her hand up, go to the chalkboard, and take a stab at answering the burning question of the moment. For that I must be off to the pub.
--Misc. Romance says sharpen your pencils.
07 June 2008
Catching up: 27 December 2007
NOT THIS CLOSE TO HALLOWEEN
It must be said: much as I love the TG aesthetic, I can live without the wigs.
Wigs SHOUT drag to me. My days as a makeup artist gave me quite a taste for sequin-strewn drag culture—bitchy, million-decibal, one-upping, sexy-sexy-sexy, theatre-on-steroids, show-girl culture. But nothing replaces the real thing. Especially in the heat of passion, when only pinching at real skin or pulling a tangled fistful of locks will do.
I SECOND THAT SLOW-MOTION
Andres and I had such a nice, slow-burn time. It became an interesting dance for a while. Well, interesting to me because it was novel: I liked not being clouded by chemicals. She’s certainly like no one I’d met in a long time, both temperamentally and physically. A beautiful Persian shemale, Andres is totally happy as a pre-op MTF transgendered person. She’s only been transitioned for a few years, but she has her own style, is comfortable in her gorgeous skin, and is totally at ease presenting as a women. Andres also speaks several languages. Why has no one ever listed Farsi as an aphrodisiac? A tragic oversight by the language police.
A champion college athlete, and a dedicated athlete still, Andres doesn’t smoke (not too surprising) or drink alcohol, so food and sex—she winks when she says this—are her only vices. I like it when she winks. And laughs. She eats healthy, but she eats real food (hallelujah) and occasionally even orders desserts. Has a bit of a sweet-tooth, my girlyboy.
Due to her travel schedule and the inconvenience of my needing to keep my day-job, we could never get beyond sharing the occasional very nice meal. (And—let’s face it, this is what “spark” is for—we never really craved each other.)
Biggest thrill for us? Occasionally scandalizing stodgy, gawking retirees who would stare, whisper or openly jaw-drop as their brains tried to wrap around the whole issue of a guy dressed as a girl who’s with a girl. The fact that it’s actually none of their business and that we would not normally foist our lifestyle or our clever conversation on anyone is completely lost on them. When the zombie-people would just stare at us, I had to fight the words trying to fly out of my brain, gumball-like: “Hey grandma, you’re gonna drop those teeth with all that obvious rudeness.” I mostly kept my spunk to myself because Andres didn’t like to be directly confrontational or more accurately she didn’t like to stand up for herself. Once, though, when seated next to some freaked-out heterofascists, Andres decided to go for a little passive-aggressive fun and laid it on a bit thick for grandma and grandpa by loudly foisting our lifestyle onto their earshot (subject: Phoenix’s mild-child ranking in the world of Fetish Ball). But we never made a move toward other thrills. Goodbye to Andres, it seems.
THIS IS (NOT) ENGLAND
You’re not always going to see continuity in posts, but I couldn’t let a chance go by to follow up on this film because it did not get a wide release and you’re not likely to hear about it except from the likes of cranky cinephiles such as yours truly.
Shane Meadows has written and directed a masterpiece. I guess, since it’s memoir, that means he once lived a masterpiece.
This is England is a disturbing but surprisingly affirming story, too. The composition and editing and costuming and performances and dialogue and authenticity are all perfect. I could have done without the one lame audience member who, during the festival q & a, waxed incredibly stupid about how he’d never been to England but once read one book about Thatcherite England and “gathered that there was once such a problem with the welfare state,” and came away wondering wasn’t it stupid for societies to make people lazy and shiftless on principle.
Yo, buddy, England had a very complicated reaction to World War II, which lingered on there for much longer than anywhere else, due to the devastation of London, jobs migrating abroad, food rationing well into the 1950s, and the reverse colonial migration they began experiencing in waves. People are racist and stupid everywhere, unfortunately, regardless of whether their government offers health care and financial assistance to poor people. Several people at the screening (yay, Lefty Hollywood Types) shouted him back under the rock he crawled from.
A friend who attended the festival with me noted that the National Front neo-fascists in the film were eerily like the Arizona Minutemen – vigilantes who apparently are hell-bent on hating hating hating people who clean hotels and pick lettuce (if they’re brown, that is). England’s National Front would do well in modern day America, which is a sobering thought that, because it crossed my mind, is now crossing yours.
--Misc. Romance has no humble opinions: they are all grand.
It must be said: much as I love the TG aesthetic, I can live without the wigs.
Wigs SHOUT drag to me. My days as a makeup artist gave me quite a taste for sequin-strewn drag culture—bitchy, million-decibal, one-upping, sexy-sexy-sexy, theatre-on-steroids, show-girl culture. But nothing replaces the real thing. Especially in the heat of passion, when only pinching at real skin or pulling a tangled fistful of locks will do.
I SECOND THAT SLOW-MOTION
Andres and I had such a nice, slow-burn time. It became an interesting dance for a while. Well, interesting to me because it was novel: I liked not being clouded by chemicals. She’s certainly like no one I’d met in a long time, both temperamentally and physically. A beautiful Persian shemale, Andres is totally happy as a pre-op MTF transgendered person. She’s only been transitioned for a few years, but she has her own style, is comfortable in her gorgeous skin, and is totally at ease presenting as a women. Andres also speaks several languages. Why has no one ever listed Farsi as an aphrodisiac? A tragic oversight by the language police.
A champion college athlete, and a dedicated athlete still, Andres doesn’t smoke (not too surprising) or drink alcohol, so food and sex—she winks when she says this—are her only vices. I like it when she winks. And laughs. She eats healthy, but she eats real food (hallelujah) and occasionally even orders desserts. Has a bit of a sweet-tooth, my girlyboy.
Due to her travel schedule and the inconvenience of my needing to keep my day-job, we could never get beyond sharing the occasional very nice meal. (And—let’s face it, this is what “spark” is for—we never really craved each other.)
Biggest thrill for us? Occasionally scandalizing stodgy, gawking retirees who would stare, whisper or openly jaw-drop as their brains tried to wrap around the whole issue of a guy dressed as a girl who’s with a girl. The fact that it’s actually none of their business and that we would not normally foist our lifestyle or our clever conversation on anyone is completely lost on them. When the zombie-people would just stare at us, I had to fight the words trying to fly out of my brain, gumball-like: “Hey grandma, you’re gonna drop those teeth with all that obvious rudeness.” I mostly kept my spunk to myself because Andres didn’t like to be directly confrontational or more accurately she didn’t like to stand up for herself. Once, though, when seated next to some freaked-out heterofascists, Andres decided to go for a little passive-aggressive fun and laid it on a bit thick for grandma and grandpa by loudly foisting our lifestyle onto their earshot (subject: Phoenix’s mild-child ranking in the world of Fetish Ball). But we never made a move toward other thrills. Goodbye to Andres, it seems.
THIS IS (NOT) ENGLAND
You’re not always going to see continuity in posts, but I couldn’t let a chance go by to follow up on this film because it did not get a wide release and you’re not likely to hear about it except from the likes of cranky cinephiles such as yours truly.
Shane Meadows has written and directed a masterpiece. I guess, since it’s memoir, that means he once lived a masterpiece.
This is England is a disturbing but surprisingly affirming story, too. The composition and editing and costuming and performances and dialogue and authenticity are all perfect. I could have done without the one lame audience member who, during the festival q & a, waxed incredibly stupid about how he’d never been to England but once read one book about Thatcherite England and “gathered that there was once such a problem with the welfare state,” and came away wondering wasn’t it stupid for societies to make people lazy and shiftless on principle.
Yo, buddy, England had a very complicated reaction to World War II, which lingered on there for much longer than anywhere else, due to the devastation of London, jobs migrating abroad, food rationing well into the 1950s, and the reverse colonial migration they began experiencing in waves. People are racist and stupid everywhere, unfortunately, regardless of whether their government offers health care and financial assistance to poor people. Several people at the screening (yay, Lefty Hollywood Types) shouted him back under the rock he crawled from.
A friend who attended the festival with me noted that the National Front neo-fascists in the film were eerily like the Arizona Minutemen – vigilantes who apparently are hell-bent on hating hating hating people who clean hotels and pick lettuce (if they’re brown, that is). England’s National Front would do well in modern day America, which is a sobering thought that, because it crossed my mind, is now crossing yours.
--Misc. Romance has no humble opinions: they are all grand.
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