Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Film Review: Liberace bio “Behind the Candelabra”

Here’s the bottom line: The only emotion that the HBO film “Behind the Candelabra” provoked in me was annoyance. There was no character I cared about and not a scrap of nuance to tickle my mind. A bio of Liberace – Liberace! – that doesn’t squeeze even a single tear from my usually responsive eyes has problems.

I  just don’t get it. I don’t get the casting and I don’t get the acting and I don’t get the resulting adulation. I haven’t read the reviews, but I certainly have heard the hype. “Behind the Candelabra” focuses on the relationship of young “chauffeur” Scott Thorson and Liberace, the over-the-top glittery piano player who headlined in Las Vegas for many years and who had his own TV show. During the 50s, 60s, and 70s he was the world’s highest-paid entertainer – and he liked to spend his money in very visible ways – from a piano-shaped swimming pool to mink capes.

If you have to settle on one word to describe Liberace, it won’t be eccentric, imperious, or excessive: it would be “fabulous!” He was a fabulous queen who established the template for Elvis, Elton, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. However strong Michael Douglas’ acting chops are, and no matter how many kilo of sequins and bling the wardrobe department gives him, Michael Douglas is not fabulous. Not the way I mean it when I’m talking about Liberace. Not the way that Freddy Mercury was fabulous (now, HE could’ve played Liberace). Not the way k d lang is fabulous (SHE probably could have as well).

And Matt Damon? He plays Scott Thorson, Liberace’s young partner, like a startled deer in the headlights. Not just the first night. Not just the first month. Not just the first year. He’s supposed to be an innocent, manipulated pudgy blond who is bewildered by the furs and the cars and the jewels that he is sucking up like a voracious vacuum cleaner. He’s foolish and bland. His delivery is flat – very, very flat. His sudden outbursts are out of character and out of tune, but he quickly subsides back into mush. Does he give a crap about Liberace or not during the five years they were together? It’s never clear. His sexuality is subsumed into his parasitism. And strangely enough, the movie is based on a book by Scott Thorson, that is, from Thorson’s point of view.

And don’t get me started about Rob Lowe, camping it up with peculiar discomfort as the plastic surgeon Jack Startz. The sleazy surgeon’s job it is to make Liberace look young and make Scott look like Liberace, but he only succeeds in making Scott look like he has perpetually bruised cheekbones. If I were Liberace, I’d ask for my money back.

These straight actors (Douglas, Damon, Lowe, etc) seem to be thrilled to play queers. Nowadays, playing gay is utterly safe and adds some additional street cred points to their resumes. However, I found them incapable of providing anything beyond the most superficially one-dimensional stereotypes, punctuated with occasional bursts of hysteria.

One actor is to be thoroughly congratulated. Debbie Reynolds, as Liberace’s mother Frances, is funny, appealing, and believable. She was given very little to do, unfortunately, and she was the only woman in the film.

There are a ton of big names involved in the making of this film. Steven Soderbergh directed to a script by Richard LaGravenese, and Marvin Hamlisch did the music. The actors are all big guns. The relationship at the heart of this story was truly bizarre and intense. But because the main actors fail to realistically inhabit their characters, we are left with a lot of promise and very little delivery.

Here's the trailer:

 

Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum

The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is a Baltimore treasure housing the art of self-taught artists – many of them working class, some with histories of mental health breakdowns, of exile and genocide, of poverty and exclusion. This is outsider art that leaves you gasping with awe at the dazzling work people can create out of matchsticks or crocheted yarn remnants or broken dishes. Many of the exhibited pieces are sparkly and intricate and wrenching and extreme. This museum honors, among many others, the intuitive art of an American truck driver, a Ukrainian farmer, a Turkish baker, and an English laborer. These artists are not Fine Arts graduates: they are plain, often troubled, folks whose talents plow through the obstacles in their lives.

       The photos are by Dan Meyers and courtesy of AVAM.

Recovery by Anonymous

Stanley Wright constructs from telephone wire a nude life-size self-portrait illustrating the first time he heard and danced to music at age 54. Vanessa German uses found objects to celebrate Minstrel Blood for her Menstrual Show. One well-known AVAM piece is a self-portrait figure whittled from a single apple tree trunk by a British mental asylum patient. His deeply concave tubercular chest and the way his hip bones protrude produce a troubled feeling in the viewer. This anonymous sculptor committed suicide just two years after having been released by the hospital.

When James Harold Jennings’ nerves “went bust” on his tobacco farm, he began constructing complicated large whirligigs from the bits and pieces of machinery laying around. Although his witty work got media attention in 1976, he still lives on the land with no electricity or running water.

Minstrel Blood by Vanessa German

Perched over the main wall in the permanent collection is a quote from Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” But Mary Proctor had a bit of both. When three family members burned to death because of doors that wouldn’t open, she began creating auto-biographical artworks using the doors as canvas, her grandmother’s broken plates as paint, and her grandmother’s wisdom as content.

Emily Duffy’s Bra Ball is a collaborative effort. 18,085 women sent in their bras – and their stories – and she wrapped them around each other to create a ball that is five feet round and weighs 1,500 pounds. If she proved one thing, it is that women hate bras. But then we knew that already.

A “Truth and Reconciliation” project supported by Desmond Tutu gave illiterate women a chance to record their personal testimonies of “the worst day of their lives under Apartheid” via the needle and thread. Quilted, embroidered panels relate potent factual narratives. One self-taught artist who has gained a serious reputation, Ted Gordon, is the headliner in a room entitled OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). A California mental health worker until his retirement, Gordon works with pen and pencil, drawing obsessively detailed self-portraits, his only subject.

Divine by Andrew Logan

The campus of the American Visionary Art Museum is itself a work of art. The exterior is wrapped in a mosaic of broken mirrors and in front of the entrance stands a matching bus, a big piece of mechanical confetti that sparkles and entices you to love it. Inside is the lovely restaurant/bar called Mr. Rain’s Fun House and a museum store, Sideshow Shop, packed with bric-a-brac and shiny objects. Outside is a wild flower garden and a barn of oversized camp pieces, including a 10-foot statue of the actor Divine by her friend Andrew Logan, and a 15-foot fluffy pink poodle. Altogether the mix of outsider aesthetics with playful decorative arts and profound emotional exposures makes AVAM a museum that delivers a magnificent and unique impact.

The photos are by Dan Meyers and courtesy of AVAM.

http://www.avam.org/
American Visionary Art Museum
800 Key Highway
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
P: 410-244-1900

Exercising Solution

Note from Sue: This was sent to me by a student in her 80s with the title "Exercise for Old People." But as I have been teaching elder fitness for a very long time and know plenty of older people who could whup the butts of their juniors, I changed the title to something more general.

Begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side.

With a 5-lb potato bag in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax..

Each day you'll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer. After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-lb potato bags, followed eventually by 50-lb potato bags. Finally, try to lift a 100-lb potato bag in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute. (I'm at this level.)

After you feel confident at that level.....put a potato in each bag.

Preventative Mastectomy: Do You Trust the Medical Establishment?

Let me start by saying that I know nothing whatsoever about medicine other than what I have picked up from living 65 years. So this is my gut reaction to the issues Angelina Jolie’s NY Times article have raised.

I don’t often take up advice that the medical establishment offers, because I’m old enough to have seen almost all of it reversed. Don’t eat the yellows of eggs: no, do. Use margarine instead of butter, no don’t. Sweet & Low is a great substitute for sugar; oops. Buy pure bottled water; oh dear, it’s just water with a label and a price. Wine? Chocolate? Have a pap smear every single year; no, don’t bother. Mammograms? Who knows. Fosamax, taken by women with osteoporosis for decades to strengthen bones, can cause them to break. The latest reversal I’ve noticed relates to the “evils” of salt.

I give you this long introduction as a way of explaining that I just don’t buy any of it. I did my MA thesis back in the mid-80s on “The Lie of Gender” in which I showed how the absolutist “scientific” declarations of the medical establishment about gender differences (such as brain size) were a pile of hogwash, and how they were all reversed in various ways. Science has yet to find a fool-proof, universal method of establishing gender – perhaps because they think there’re only two. I have observed that science is a tool of the changing needs of the ruling classes. But I digress.

So now they’ve’ve learned about all of these genes– some of them actually OWNED by people and institutions. I mean genes – human genes – that are patented. The science-industrial complex gone completely wacky. But that too is another story.

I don’t trust anything medical that hasn’t proven itself for a couple of decades. I am wary of the new conclusions based on the Genome project. I am wary of anything at all that predicts outcomes based purely on one’s chromosomes. “Female” chromosomes, let us not forget, were the reason (excuse) why we couldn’t run Marathons, own property, work as engineers, drive big trucks, wear pants, vote. They are still the justification in many countries for many limitations: from divorcing a mate to going to school.

Biology, I have written literally hundreds of times, is not destiny. By that I mean that it should not be destiny. Cancer is surely impacted by diet, carcinogens in the environment, access to medical care, and, frankly, we don’t know what else. Making decisions based on a genetic map seems freaky to me. Making decisions based on predicted percentages seems even freakier. Of course, considering the price of those maps, few of us will be opting for elected mastectomies. Angelina Jolie has the benefit of privilege on many levels, from economic to international reassurance of her attractiveness to having a wealthy, supportive partner to so much more. She can do whatever she wants with her body, as far as I’m concerned, and so can any other person.

But if medical science tells me I’ve got an “87 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer” – I’m going to question such precise figures 100% of the time. Science is, after all, a rather malleable practice. Remember, Pluto used to be a planet.

Sorry: I Can’t Stand Mother’s Day

Some of my chosen peeps: Verandah, daughters Emily and Oona, and granddaughter Sadie

Some of my best friends are mothers. To name a few in reverse alphabetical order, there’s Verandah, Susan, Sue, Sandy, Oona, Nicola, Miri, Judy, Flo, and Eleanor. They became mothers in wildly varying ways, circumstances, and eras. Some of their kids are in kindergarten; some of these mothers are grandmothers. My friends appear to have done a great job and right across the board these women are tight with their kids to this day.

But some mothers are crappy people. They are not all pink flowers and sparkly hearts. The annual Mother’s Day assumption that mother = angel is just a little grating for those of us with the bad luck of having been born into the arms of assholes. For the reality is that some mothers are abusive; some are violent; some are strung out; some are resentful of the demands of their offspring; some have politics that suck; some are criminally neglectful. The very fact that someone takes on the parental job does not mean they are suited to it or that they do a bang-up job. It’s easy for many people to become parents – but that doesn’t mean that they are the right people for the job.

From otherwise sensible people, I am reading Facebook comments such as “Blood is thicker than water.” Sorry, just not my experience. In fact, none of those above-mentioned women who are mothers share my DNA and yet they are all a healthier, sweeter  part of my life than my own biological mother ever was. To say the least.

The annual fetishization of mothers (albeit only once a year)  reinforces the gilded mythology surrounding this accidental relationship. Idealizing motherhood can be a way to define women by their biology and reproductive and nurturing functions. There is a reason why mom, her apple pie, and this country’s flag are connected together by nationalists. But when it’s not Mother’s Day, single mothers, poor mothers, mothers with disabilities or addictions are no longer rarefied angels – they return to be considered by these same flag-wavers to be welfare parasites and a social burden.

The related elevation of the nuclear family to something superior when compared to other ways of living annoys the hell out of me. I am well aware that parenting involves many years of hard work – just one of the many reasons why I consciously chose not to have children. But having chosen never to marry or breed does not mean that my chosen communities are lesser, paler, less reliable, or less loving. Or that I will, as I have been told all my life, die alone.

For more people than will admit it, the family was/is a dire and dangerous location and the word “mother” dredges up unpleasant  memories. Let’s not pretend that the very title bestows on the holder some sort of honor. Go ahead, praise your mother and send her flowers – if you like her and she likes you. But don’t pretend that motherhood is synonymous with goodness – or that it is by definition a higher connection than chosen commitment. Mother’s Day? Bah, humbug.

Film Review: STUD LIFE by Campbell X

“Stud Life” was one of three opening films (May 3 at Cambridge’s Brattle Theater) for the 2013 Boston LGBT Film Festival.

In one of her podcasts, the handsome butch JJ places two dildos in front of the camera. One is playfully multi-colored, nearly disguising the fact that it is an artificial cock, and the other is black with an angry red head and strong veins on the shaft. While JJ can’t get her head around the one with a spectrum of crayon colors, she also cannot understand why black dildos seem to only come in size gigantic. “Short and wide” would work better.

The ground-breaking feature “Stud Life” by the UK filmmaker Campbell X takes place in a contemporary East London scene where fine-looking young queers are trying to sort out the place of love and sex in their lives. The film uses laugh-out-loud wit and stark emotional honesty to take a generous view of the complications of romantic commitment. The characters bring a burst of eye candy and empathy to the story. This is a film that gallops along, up and down the emotional spectrum, drawing you into the lives of wildly attractive, good-hearted friends.

I followed the making of this film on Facebook where the filmmaker Campbell X (photo at left), whom I have met several times in London and many times on FB, documented the demanding process of making an independent film by and about young queers. In an email interview, Campbell X told me, "The mainstreaming of queer movies means that we generally see images of lesbians who are feminine and white. Stud Life puts a dark-skinned masculine woman who is sexy and desirable at the centre of the frame – in a way in which people of all genders and sexualities can relate to her story."

JJ’s best friend and partner in her photography business is a white gay guy named Seb. When JJ meets the lovely Elle in a club and they get together, jealousy between Seb and Elle rules. Seb thinks Elle just isn’t right for JJ, but JJ questions his qualifications to judge considering that Seb is always trolling the internet for a spot of rough – that is, for anonymous sexual encounters with hyper-masculine types. Seb rejects the attentions of a doting long-haired drug-dealing college student.

The first time we see them in bed together, Elle is naked, but JJ is wearing boxers and a T-shirt. . JJ is a stone butch, which means that she does not like to be touched. She is unable to open herself up and let herself go enough to let another woman make love to her. Beautiful Elle asks her, “So I can never fuck you? Can I touch you here?” She lays her hand on JJ’s chest, which earlier JJ bound with an Ace bandage, squashing her breasts flat. “But I like licking labia,” the sensuous femme insists with a smile. “Can’t blame me for trying.” Contrary to the visual expectation, the femme takes a lot more sexual initiative than her butch.

Elle tempts JJ into increasingly kinky scenes, taking JJ’s hand and slapping her own face with it. JJ is taken aback, discombobulated, and we realize that in many ways she is an innocent. Her fierceness is mitigated by a kind of naiveté. Another time Elle creates a powerful scene of restraint that has the unexpected appeal of sexual power for JJ, and pushes Elle into tearful gratification.

Spoiler Alert! -- As handsome and full of swagger as JJ is, she is unprepared emotionally to learn that Elle makes her living as a professional Dominatrix. JJ tries to keep up with the variety and intensity of Elle’s desires, but she is unable to handle the news of her lover’s profession and leaves her – for awhile.

Later, in her podcast, JJ wonders why all women seem to want cock: “Either they want it in them or they want it on them.” She recognizes that, “It takes all kinds of sex to make a lesbian nation.” Campbell X explained her approach to Stud Life to me this way: “It would be so tempting to make a film that was mono-sexual – boys with boys, girls with girls – or mono-cultural. But my stories reflect London life, where it is possible for a white gay man to be bff with a stud. Where white LBGT people chat patois fluently though they have never stepped foot in Jamaica. Its mixed up and messy, but fun and sexy.”

So as we follow JJ’s work photographing queer weddings, we meet that rainbow of possibilities. A tall black cross-dressing bride, glamorously outfitted, towers over her new adoring older white husband. Her family refused to attend and he hasn’t heard from his grown children lately.

A lesbian couple who have been together for 25 years bring their lovers to their marriage ceremony. The femme kisses her girlfriend and the butch embraces her lover, a balding man who insists, “I’ve only been involved for about three months. I’m just along for the ride.” He turns out to be a transman. Seb is blown away. “Twenty five years,” he says, “It’s a different generation, innit? We just throw things out and get a new one.”

Not everything is rainbows and hormones. Real life, in the form of violent homophobic lads prowling the neighborhood, intervenes. The demands of earning an income need to come before romantic compromise. The filmmaker does not avoid facing the complexities of sex, the challenges of knowing our own needs and desires, or the dangers faced by butches on the street. Rather, she draws us into a reality that, as distant from our own lives as it might be, has the irresistible appeal of bold honesty and human truth. “Stud Life” is just what a film should be: funny, moving, full of wisdom, and gorgeous to watch.

The 29th annual Boston LGBT Film Festival will continue screening over 120 films at six venues in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge until May 12.