If the New York Times is going to pretend the newly dead actor Van Johnson was heterosexual, how can I believe what they write about anything else?
(As a bonus, here’s a link to an old magazine cover with Johnson looking not unlike Cynthia Nixon’s partner.)
Disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s hair has been troubling me for years now, but I’ve never had a reason to post about it — until today, when his corruption became a national news story. As a St. Louisan, I’ve seen Blagojevich on the local news almost nightly for many years now (once they’ve covered all the day’s shootings in St. Louis and shown a few mugshots of the latest meth addicts to be busted for violently robbing old people or beating their kids to death, all that’s really left to talk about are massive lay-offs, the Rams sucking, and the latest political intrigue in Illinois), and the only thing about him that is more eyebrow-raising than his shadiness has always been that huge helmet hair of his.
The man’s style icon — not just when it comes to his ridiculous hair, but often in matters of casual dress as well — is Treat Williams circa Prince of the City. Think about that for a second. The governor of Illinois was modeling his image on a corrupt cop (albeit one who later turned informant) from a movie that came out in 1981 and was set in the ’70s. Rod Blagojevich’s hair told the story of his downfall, in a sense. Things were never going to end well for him; his destiny always involved being led off in handcuffs and having that awful coif mussed by a gruff FBI agent as he was pushed into the back of a dark sedan.
Neither did an evil fetus, if you thought that was a possibility. I’ve just been busy lately, as everyone is this time of year, and unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately, depending on how you look at it) it has kept me from posting all manner of nonsense here.
You can imagine the mental anguish this caused when, the week before last, I read that Miranda Richardson — who still hasn’t called me, I’m sad to report — apparently expressed her desire to play a Calamity Jane type role in a Western-themed hypothetical fifth season of Blackadder. (If you guessed my response was going to involve some kind of speculation that Richardson might have sung “Secret Love” to an audience of pillows in her bedroom once or twice during her formative years, you know me all too well.)
Or the way my fingers have itched to write, enthusiastically and at great length, horrible things about Mike Huckabee every time he opens his yap about “the gays” and violence and our terrible oppression of Christians and whatnot. (If you guessed my response was going to involve some kind of link to this photo of his family, you — well, you know the rest.) It has been exasperating to me that I haven’t had time for any of that.
Hopefully I’ll be back to making all of you roll your eyes and murmur, “Christ, what an idiot,” within the next few days. Until then, I leave you with one of the greatest clips in the history of movies. Nary a week goes by that I don’t find the opportunity to work “Is this the Cocksucker residence?” or “Listen to your filthy mouth, you fucking whore!” into a conversation. Preferably with my grandma.
The title of this post is, of course, a quote from Hamlet. I think the whole thing goes:
Parades or killer fetuses, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The murderous unborn in films produced by Roger Corman,
Or to watch a giant inflatable Snoopy take over the streets of New York
Both are almost equally pointless, and will make you want to die, to sleep.
william crankspeare
(That last part might be off by a few words. It’s been a while since I last read Hamlet.)
Yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the United States, and it’s a day that’s always been “meh” for me, perhaps because I don’t like turkey or football — or maybe because I don’t need to be reminded to be thankful for all the good things in my life.
For me, Thanksgiving means there are marathons of horrible shows on cable all day and there’s no mail service. Is that really worth celebrating? Then there’s the family togetherness concept, which always sounds so warm and fuzzy in theory and ends up being more like a bad Fassbinder film in practice, but without the very things that make bad Fassbinder films bearable: English subtitles and sodomy. (Oh, and without the Hanna Schygulla. Can’t forget the Hanna Schygulla.)
Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wonders why there are no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. (For my part, I wondered why Mark Caro was asking such a silly question until I saw the accompanying promotional still from Milk.) There aren’t any openly gay leading ladies in Hollywood, either, but never mind that; the answer to Caro’s question is simple — the entertainment industry is full of cowards, the media is full of cowards, and the public is full of idiots.
I threw in the “sorta” because, let’s be honest, a lot of this brief interview Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir conducted with Boys in the Band director William Friedkin is simply O’Hehir (also known as O’Hewho, because Stephanie Zacharek is the only Salon critic anyone reads now that Charles Taylor is gone) kissing Friedkin’s ass.
O’Hehir, I’ll admit, lost me before the interview even started, when he referred to Cruising, Friedkin’s second cinematic run-in with the gays, as a “powerful, intriguing and unfairly demonized picture.” Once he gets going with Friedkin, he adds, “Cruising is also out on DVD now, and also ripe for reappraisal.”
Except for the part where there’s nothing to reappraise. Cruising, which presents gayness as a deadly virus that is sexually transmitted from one cock-crazed leather enthusiast to another (Ed Gonzalez called it “an AIDS metaphor ahead of its time, except in this heterosexual fantasy of the gay world, every gay man gets it”), is a movie that only Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson could love.
That Friedkin is a skilled director does not make Cruising any less vile now than it was 28 years ago, and to call it unfairly demonized is a bit like suggesting that Gordon Willis’ Windows — the one about the psychotic lesbian who, lacking a penis of her own, hires a man to rape the woman she’s obsessed with — was misunderstood and deserves a second, more open-minded look. As the gay critic David Ehrenstein opined in a 1995 article about Cruising: “This is a horror film. And we are the monster.” Time has not, and cannot, change that.
Now, had O’Hehir called Jade unfairly maligned and questioned whether it might be a classic on par with The French Connection and The Exorcist, that would’ve been a whole different kettle of fish…
(See how crazy that sounds?)
From Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column about gay marriage (and Harvey Milk):
I e-mailed Larry Kramer, the leading activist for gay rights in the era that followed Milk’s, to get his read on Prop 8. (In 1983, I interviewed Kramer about the new scourge of AIDS, and he read me a list from a green notebook of 37 friends who had died. )
“DON’T WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS?” he e-mailed back, blessedly cantankerous. “I AM ASHAMED OF YOU THAT YOU HAD TO ASK ME THAT QUESTION.”
That’s a very good response.
Being a jerk myself (just ask anyone who knows me!), I’d have preferred something nastier — maybe a dig at Newt’s three marriages, two divorces, history of infidelity, or the way he treated his first wife when she was battling uterine cancer — but she sums things up nicely at the end when she writes:
What really worries me is that you are always willing to use LGBT Americans as political weapons to further your ambitions. That’s really so ’90s, Newt. In this day and age, it’s embarrassing to watch you talk like that. You should be more afraid of the new political climate in America, because, there is no place for you in it.
Then again, I’m pretty sure that any “new political climate in America” that has room for Michele “Krazee-Eyez Killa” Bachmann can accommodate Newt Gingrich and his enormous head (and even bigger ego) as well.
Because I feel bad about not posting anything today (in addition to not posting anything of substance yesterday, or practically any day since starting this blog), here’s a picture of a monkey crashing a party in the old Warner Brothers comedy Lady Killer.
Isn’t that awesome? The movie, one of five starring James Cagney to be released in 1933, would be pretty humdrum if not for the monkeys gone wild scene (in which Cagney adds a little too much life to Margaret Lindsay’s birthday bash with the help of a barrelful of monkeys) and the blink-and-you-miss-it kiss a naughty Cagney plants on Mae Clarke’s breast.
Part of the problem is the lack of chemistry between Cagney and Lindsay, who’d have made a more believable pair as platonic friends whose heads were both turned by Clarke. What I’m trying to say — read this next part in the voice of that office slut character Cheri Oteri played on Saturday Night Live — what I’m trying to say is that Margaret Lindsay was a giant lesbian. Like Cagney and Lacey rolled into one, if you’re looking to quantify it. I’ll grant you she wore a dress better than Hope Emerson or Marjorie Main, but she couldn’t have seemed less interested in James Cagney in Lady Killer if he’d been wearing a giant sign that said “Get Your Herpes Here.”
But it appears they still want us to keep our distance from the mother ship, and will instead be directing us to our own special gay site from which our homo cooties can’t infect all the normal, healthy heterosexual customers who are seeking opposite-sex partners for Bible-approved, procreation-oriented, missionary-positioned hookups within the miserable bounds of traditional man-woman holy matrimony over at “regular” eHarmony.
I’d type more, but I confused myself with all of that.
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