“Law & Order” is often my white noise when I’m doing the dishes or eating a meal. Apparently the re-runs assume an audience of my age peers, because the ads are usually for memory boosters or arthritis dampers.
Today a commercial break begins with a grimacing man naked under his robe, his foot up on the bathroom sink, and his arm reaching back into his crotch. Suddenly, a woman’s voice and person pops up saying, “Guys, we need to talk about your hairy balls.” This very phenomenon ("trimming balls") is news to me, although I admit my balls expertise is limited. The word, repeated multiple times, is jarring to hear on TV. But who is demanding bald balls?
Got one minute to learn about ball shaving?
As if that weren’t sufficiently surreal, another crotch-focused ad followed immediately. This one for pussy deodorant. Companies have been trying for decades to turn women’s crotches into swampy, smelly cesspools, and according to a completely random survey of my besties, they have never succeeded. But if they can afford an ad on “Law & Order,” they must be moving a lot of this misogynist product.
Wanna see their nasty-assed ad?
The anti-sex, body-shaming message of both these ads is that however you exist naturally, it simply ain’t good enough. More than that, your body is disgusting. Trim this, stifle that – otherwise your life will suck.
In fact, I find these ads so offensive that I’m hoping to once again hear about cancer meds, the meaning of “a1c” levels, and life insurance for $9.99 a month.
PS: A friend thought these must be Saturday Night Live skits. But no, I did really really see these ads during an afternoon “Law & Order.”
I was disappointed to realize that Leonard Cohen isn’t the star of this film.
His song Hallelujah is the subject. We hear from a long string of musicians who more or less made their careers covering this song. We learn little new about Cohen himself, a conflicted, complicated artist. Instead, it’s all about the song’s journey as so many others reconfigured Hallelujah to suit their own needs. The ending was quite moving, when Cohen returns, broke, to the stage. And we get to hear KD Lang’s brilliant rendition of Hallelujah.
I'm staying on a lake in mid-Maine with sweet friends. It is another world for me – but a staple of New England culture. I am a stranger in a strange land, but I put aside the irony of celebrating “independence day” in a country built on the theft by white men of everyone else’s independence. As white men shoot up the world, steal our bodies and our wealth, and face little effective opposition to their increasing fascistic success, I am learning of a part of American culture that is rather new to me.
Yesterday morning we were part of a festive July 4th parade of residents' boats - pontoons (especially ours full of varied queers waving rainbow flags, wearing sequins, and blaring Whitney Houston), row boats full of kids being pulled by parents on a jet ski, speed boats, a big boat captained by a loud Santa Claus, and two dozen more lake-worthy vehicles.
In the afternoon, we were invited to a BBQ with our pontoon posse, at their “camp.” A camp is a lakeside cottage suitable for summer holidays. Many of these were built by grandparents or great-grandparents, originally without electricity or plumbing. Usually they were located fairly close to the family home. Subsequent generations added power, dug a well, or built on a bathroom. Many are remodeled with great charm, while only a few have been sold to people who turned them into McMansions. These camps are not connected to a water or sewage grid, so the water in the sink and shower is directly from the lake and people who don’t have a well, bring in their drinking water.
Between one’s camp and the water, everyone has a dock with a boat or three, a deck with lots of chairs, and a fire pit. The homes have a sun porch with screens and maybe windows, often just yards from the water. My friends also have a hammock and a little motorboat from the 50s that is a wonderful ride, as long as the wind isn’t churning up the lake. Late spring and dusk and nighttime are plagued with mosquitoes, but that’s what the sun porches are for – escaping these ravenous creatures.
With the addition of Wifi around the lake, families were reunited during Covid, as it was the perfect spot to build a small, safe community, and live a life – at least during the warm half of year. Most camps have no heat beyond a wood stove and the unpaved road is not plowed. But when the camps were opened, adult children returned and life went on.
On the evening of July 4th, individuals around the lake set off fireworks, which Maine has apparently legalized after a history of neighboring New Hampshire dominating the market. It was hard to stay awake for the sky to darken, after such an eventful day, but soon impressive fireworks began in three different private spots around the lake. I insisted we go outside to the water to watch them, but after a couple of snapshots I faced the reality that the mosquitos owned the nighttime outdoors, reducing me to the status of their dinner. I retreated with the hope that I am more easily persuaded to surrender to mosquitos than I am to fascists.
Oops, I completely forgot to blog about my inclusion in a stunningly talented line-up for the Queer Cabarets, produced by Peter DiMuro. What a great way to celebrate Pride and of course everyone is welcome.
This will be a fabulous Queer Cabaret - singing, dancing, drag queens, comedians - and me (!). I perform on Friday June 17 and Saturday June 18 (6:00 and again 8:30 both nights). It's not too late for you to get tickets for the Central Square Theater.
The shows will feature area and national LGBTQ+ community members, ages 20’s to 70’s and from all points on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Expect wonderful performances - can we say high-heeled pole-dancing meets Cole Porter? - along with the funny and often poignant reflections on gay to queer lives over the span of 100 years.
Yesterday I went to a matinee in a movie house for the first time in well over two years. Luckily, there were only three other people inside the theatre, which required masking. I went to see Pedro Almodóvar’s riveting “Parallel Mothers” starring the radiant Penélope Cruz.
As always, Almodóvar shows a deep understanding of women’s lives and loves. Janis (Cruz) and teenager Ana (Milena Smit) meet across generations and across the room in a maternity hospital. Their labor and birthings happen at the same time and the bond they mold is both enduring and multi-faceted.
Israel Elejalde, as Arturo, is satisfyingly handsome and sincere as Janis’ lover, and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, as Ana’s mother Teresa, rings true as a conflicted parent who wants only to explore her acting career.
I have long been a fan of Almodóvar – whose queer sensibility is underpinned by more than a dollop of intelligence and a bountiful serving of empathy. His films are never boring.
This film’s framework is the search for truth about the Franco rule of fascism. Spain is a country which is fast forgetting its own history – so recent that I myself remember visiting Spain during the Franco regime. Franco only died in 1975, but already the younger generations are being deprived of their own past by a national denial.
Sorrows, secrets, sexualities, and passion mark “Parallel Mothers” – as they do all Almodóvar films. What better way to break yet another Covid barrier – in-person film viewing – than to see the work of this beloved director.
The year I was born, 1947, Rachel Carson wrote a 23-page piece for the USA Department of Interior titled Parker River: A National Wildlife Refuge. You can access it here.
The first line reads: “The Parker River Wildlife Refuge is New England’s most important contribution to the national effort to save the water fowl of North America.” During my recent visit to the Refuge, nature proved Carson’s point. And as we drove down the main route, a flock of huge black birds suddenly occupied the leafless branches of the trees around us. A birder passing by identified them for us as crows. Crows apparently are not shy and were happy to be photographed. Later we saw blue birds and red birds and other migrating birds on their wise way to warmer climates.
The Refuge makes up much of Plum Island, which is 11 miles (4,662 acres) of barrier island north of Massachusetts’ Cape Ann. Conservation became a priority in 1679 when settlers’ livestock were stopped from ranging free on the island, eating up all the vegetation. The first house was built in 1752, but a bridge over the estuary separating it from the mainland was established in the early 1800s, mainly to service the new hotel. There is no longer a hotel on Plum Island, but the level of construction is slightly insane.
It used to be a neighborhood of beach cottages and as the years passed people added a room or a second floor or a big porch. Today, there is an alarming proliferation of McMansions, the more recent ones built on stilts, most of them massive and ugly, some of them four stories high. But the kicker is that many are built on the edge of the marsh, cutting off the view of the traditional cottages, throwing unwelcome shadows over multiple houses.
However, Parker River Refuge is the Island’s jewel and, in my opinion, should be considered one of the wonders of the world. Its undulating dunes, dramatic beaches, four rivers, bog, swamps, and the magnificent Great Marsh sit under a Big Sky. I first encountered a Big Sky when I was in Kenya in about 1996. Of all visual and physical experiences I have had while traveling, the Big Sky over Kenya’s Masai Mara ranks as my most euphoric. Likewise, here at the Refuge, the great expanse of over 3,000 acres of salt marsh with its waving grasses, crisscrossed with tidal pools, met the changing sky in an exhilarating view. I realized with a start that I was downright happy. I was breathless with a visceral joy that contrasted with my feelings these last years in which I’ve been living in basically one room watching the world suffer.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has done a sublime job in making this huge Marsh and the acres of dunes accessible. They have built many handsome boardwalks, the majority with explicit accessibility, but all with smooth faux-wooden paths elevated above the marsh and the dunes. Some of the boardwalks climbed over the dunes and descended to the sea. Some wound through the high grasslands, with creeks underneath turning into puddles, and black water nourishing reeds. All of these boardwalks are beautifully done and took me to places I would never otherwise consider climbing up or scrabbling over. Even the observation tower was only three flights of steps and I was easily able to mount it.
The rolling dunes were decorated with thickets of beach plum (thus Plum Island!) and grasses. Between the dunes are black pines and eastern red cedar trees, which reminded me of eucalyptus trees with their shedding bark. The brilliance of the walkways is that they allow visitors to be closer and deeper in the dunes and marsh than one anticipates, without any damage to the environment.
On the other hand, the Joppa Flats Education Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, apparently operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, offered an unpaved road and heaps of garbage at its entrance. We turned around and went back into the Refuge instead of visiting it.
Another absolute treat was staying at the comfortable, luxurious Airbnb which the owner titled “My Dream house with views of the marsh and sunset.” I am a literal person and that is also literally my dream view. The apartment did not disappoint. It was a bit too cold to use the marsh-facing porch, but when sitting in the living room chairs, I looked straight out the sliding glass doors to the marsh and its sunsets. These are so stunning that car after car of locals pulled up to watch the sunset before going on their way.
A late November trip was just what the doctor ordered. There were few folks around. Even more important, we avoided the infamous summer greenhead flies. We didn’t have to deal with ticks, mosquitos, or poison ivy, all of which flourish in the summer. Plum Island is known as a gorgeous beach destination and becomes heavily congested, I was told. I’m not a big beach lass, but now I can’t live without the Great Marsh. So let the others stretch out on the exquisite plum sand. I’ll be visiting when I have these wonderlands more or less to myself.
Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon, were not the right people to make the lengthy documentary on Muhammed Ali for PBS. I felt the long series had a subtly hostile tone to Ali and a more explicit hostility to boxing. Despite having the resources to access piles of stunning archival footage and despite having a massive eight hours of airtime, the entire work was devoid of emotion. Muhammed Ali was a passionate, emotional figure, but this was not reflected in the deadpan commentary, not the least by the guy they presented as the biographer of Ali, who seemed barely conscious.
This is not to minimize the insights of the brilliant writer and Ali fan Walter Moseley, the inside view of Ali’s brother Rahman, and the expert blow-by-blow from former boxer (and now actor) Michael Bentt. In fact, if it weren’t for Bentt, the series would have been stumbling around the ring helplessly.
If you have been a fan of Ali, as I have been most of my life, then there isn’t much new in this chronological series – other than wonderful clips and images. I appreciated that Burns allowed the women in Ali’s life to talk about his obsessive cheating and need for conquest after conquest, while they provided a home, a haven, and a family. But I was irritated that Burns acted like he had single-handedly discovered that people get hurt boxing and that Ali could be mean during a fight. Burns brought no real insight into Ali’s relationship to Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam. We see his involvement, we see his betrayal of Malcolm X (which he regretted his whole life), and we see that his connection with the group’s leader was a bit of a roller coaster. But Burns provided no depth, no clarity, no understanding of Ali’s experience of Islam. And then there was the way Burns twisted Ali’s unique charisma into some sort of manipulation, when in fact Muhammed Ali widely inspired love. I adored him myself.
The most profound deficit was a total lack of appreciation of boxing throughout the series. We were shown the worst moments of every fight, the blood, the broken noses, the pain. Thankfully, we were also shown some of the spectacular conditioning and training the pros went through. But the filmmakers seemed to have only the most rudimentary grasp of the degree to which Ali brought rhythm, motion, and dancing to the fight. No one ever moved in the ring the way he did. Before Ali, no one ever imagined the sweet beauty a fighter could bring to such a brutal sport. Before Ali, no other boxer floated like a butterfly.
I grew up following Ali, starting with his 1960 Olympic win when I was 13 and was just becoming aware of the civil rights movement. He was only 18 and won all four of his fights in Rome. Over the years, I kept my eye on him, as if we were growing up together. His later struggle against the war in VietNam meant everything to those of us fighting the cops in the streets to protest that vile war. His ability to connect oppressions – “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me n****r.” – was an education for us, as was his example of civil resistance to the draft. And all the time he was the most fluid, graceful fighter we had ever seen.
My exposure to the fight game began early. My parents were big on sports, almost any sport that involved our hometown Pittsburgh. Once we got a black and white TV, we would eat dinner sitting around a card table watching Studio Wrestling on Saturday nights. It originated out of Pittsburgh, and we were as familiar with Killer Kowalski and his main antagonist local boy Bruno Sammartino as we were with our relatives. My dad knew Referee Izzy Moidel, a local ex-boxer. Each of the wrestlers had a schtick and a script – it was fake fighting. Obviously. But I got a taste for the give and take of the fight from those weekly broadcasts. (And went on to become a Tae Kwon Do master for my first career, but that’s another story.)
When Muhammed Ali turned up, he had his schtick too, but he was for real. Boxing was for real. Ali gave shape and meaning to one-on-one combat, not only by being brilliant in the ring, but also by being brilliant out of it. He harnessed his charisma and his pronouncements to his beliefs and became one of the most influential athletes in history.
The Burns group seemed to think that Ali was “interesting,” a celebrity, entertaining. But I didn’t feel the love. Of course, they pointed out his athletic and political contributions, but I was left wondering if they had any feel for the depth of his influence. They stayed, it felt, on an unexcited, slightly aloof level of exposition, more interested in the count than the fervor: one, two, three – Ali won the heavyweight championship three different times.
There’s been a lot of discussion about why Burns (white/male/straight) has the total indulgence of PBS, which for 40 years has broadcast some 200 hours of his work! Meanwhile, there are generations of filmmakers who can’t get their toe in the door, not the least directors of color and women. A long-term Boston PBS tv host, the racist, reactionary Emily Rooney (yes, the daughter of –nepotism is becoming a theme in this piece), retired from her show after her disgusting dismissal of the very idea that a filmmaker of color could reach the heights of Burns. Over 300 film and TV professionals wrote a complaint letter to PBS asking “How many other ‘independent’ filmmakers have a decades-long exclusive relationship with a publicly-funded entity? Your commitment to diversity at PBS is not borne out by the evidence.” The privileged position of the Burns group impacts everything about their work – and in the case of Muhammed Ali, makes them the wrong group of people for the job.
Want to get an intimate sense of Muhammed Ali? Do yourself a huge favor and watch Billy Crystal’s hilarious, moving 14-minute tribute at Ali’s funeral. I’ve seen it a dozen times and have never failed to tear up. Eight hours of Burns’ presentation and I never felt much other than annoyance.
Ifé Franklin has produced and directed this remarkable short film entitled The Slave Narrative of Willie Mae. These moving 20 minutes represent just three out of 17 scenes of the book, of the same title, on which it is based. The depth of the collaboration among multiple talented artists is impressive. Letta Neely, who edited Franklin’s volume of historical fiction (Wild Heart Press, 2018), also wrote the script for this film. The actors are riveting, not the least Qualina Lewis as Willie Mae, the young enslaved woman whom her mother, an elder aunt, and a sister field hand are preparing for escape. The multi-talented Michael Gordon Penn provides a frightening threat as the overseer. Their cooperative work together on this film mirrors the joint efforts of these women to save the youngest amongst them from the brutalities of Lenox Tobacco Plantation in 1852.
Ifé Franklin has combined community activism and a rich and outstanding variety of artistic expressions since high school, when she began to study photography. Over the years she has added many layers to her arts education and has produced an impressive range of installations and visual arts. Watch her short film here. Her hope is to bring the full story to the screen.
I’m on a mission to check out the many small museums in this area of Massachusetts. This rainy Saturday was the perfect timing for my first visit to the Rose Art Museum. Their modern and contemporary permanent collection is extraordinary – every piece of the highest quality. Stunners from one wall to another, with women and people of color now heavily represented.
Let’s talk first about the traveling exhibition of “POSE” which classifies it’s images by and about Frida Kahlo into these categories: “posing; composing; exposing; queering, and self-fashioning.” It includes a not inconsiderable array of photos and paintings, with captions that do an excellent job of contextualizing her courageous, if painful, life. It highlights her youthful cross-dressing, her bisexuality, and her radical politics. Available at Rose until December 19, 2021, it is sufficiently comprehensive to both introduce the uninitiated to Frida and to satisfy the hunger of her fans.
The rest of the surprisingly large exhibition halls are filled with a self-tribute on the occasion of the museum’s 60th anniversary. Although the original selection of work included only one woman six decades ago, the curators have used the juxtaposition of the best-known pieces with work by emerging artists. In their words: “Displaying well-known, iconic pieces from the Rose’s permanent collection alongside artworks created by emerging and historically underrepresented artists, this major, museum-wide exhibition recontextualizes the familiar while introducing the new. The show features a multigenerational, international cadre of stellar artists…”
The entrance floor, in particular, featured radical work by Black artists that was new to me, but blew me away. These were juxtaposed with select masterpieces by such artists as Louise Nevelson, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol, to name a few. The pedophiles among superstars were named clearly, including mention of the 14-year-old girl Gauguin called his “wife” and used as a muse.
Beauford Delaney got only a fraction of the attention received by his contemporaries Picasso and Gauguin. An admired member of the Harlem Renaissance whose mother was born into slavery, Delaney was a mentor to James Baldwin. Both were gay. I felt lucky to be able to see his jazzy, vibrant piece “Abstraction,” set aside and contrasting with Picasso’s “Reclining Nude.”
“I Gets a Thrill Too When I sees De Koo” is a big, exuberant work by Robert Colescott, a frequently satirical African-American artist who studied in Paris with one of my very favorite artists, the Cubist Fernand Léger. He returned to the States determined to put Black images into art history. Meant to mock the famous “Woman” by de Kooning, the title also contains a reference to an Arabic swear word for a woman’s vagina. Colescott had spent several years living in Egypt. His original introduction to art as a teenager was watching Diego Rivera, the muralist husband of Frida Kahlo, paint a mural in San Francisco. Which brings us full circle.
In 2009, when the Recession seemed like the end of capitalism and donations to Brandeis’ constricted, the then-President Jehuda Reinharz announced that he was going to sell off some of the 7,500-piece collection and close the Rose Museum. People associated with the University went nutters, not the least those who had donated art. Litigation halted any sale of the artwork and the Rose Museum has spent the time since then healing the wounds from that controversy.
Throughout my entire visit, I felt super-aware of the profound wealth this collection represents and how copious are the privileges of students and teachers at these elite private colleges. At a time when most higher education institutions are in a kerfuffle over reduced enrollment, dealing with Covid, keeping angry professors as “adjuncts” with little security, these universities with massive endowments are, ironically, offering us artistic delights.
If I have learned anything during the pandemic, it is that eastern Massachusetts is filled with wonderful hidden pearls, especially the many parks and ponds I have discovered during my weekly Saturday explorations. Now that I am able to go inside museums, I’m trying to identify and visit the variety of little museums in surrounding towns.
The Danforth Museum in Framingham is housed on the second floor of the arts building of Framingham State University. Among the 3,500 objects in the permanent collection are the works of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877 –1968.) Fuller was an African-American sculptor who was a protégée of Auguste Rodin and initially built her reputation in Paris. (Her self-portrait is above.) A contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, her work centers around injustice and struggle. Even her very studio is displayed at the Danforth along with about 100 pieces of her work.
There were other exhibitions to see as well. A recent acquisition by Mia Cross called “Another Girl Who Sat on the Couch Too Long” tickled me. Dana Filibert, one of the featured artists in a special exhibition called “Wonderscape,” showed many collaged pieces using repurposed objects, epoxy, carved foam, and paint (see below). Her unique art, she says, aims for “playful mischief.”
We were the only guests on a summer Saturday. Entry was $6 for seniors. The bathrooms were convenient and the air-conditioning was pumped way up (take a shirt or sweater to put on). I recommend searching out these little museums and galleries, especially if, like me, you are feeling that you have been heavily deprived of art for over a year.
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