But you're just sitting there waiting for Joan Crawford to put on her black cowboy shirt again
I spent last night in Providence with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast and humglum; returned early this afternoon for a doctor's appointment and for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks' birthday observed, which was celebrated primarily with a chocolate cake frosted with blue roses which gaudior had procured from Lyndell's, watching Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's The Celluloid Closet (1995), ordering takeout from Mary Chung's, and meeting spatch to spend the remainder of the evening at the speakeasy arcade behind Roxy's Grilled Cheese. I played pinball, skeeball, and Tetris, drank something which was too sweet for my tastes but had a flower and a paper umbrella in it, and have an even longer list of movies with queer content to watch than I started the day with, plus a couple, inevitably, to avoid with tongs. I ate suan la chow show with shrimp. I watched both of my partners play Guitar Hero. I turn out not to be terrible at Tetris. I am extraordinarily tired, but this was a good note for August to go out on. Maybe September (hah) will include sleep.
greygirlbeast and humglum; returned early this afternoon for a doctor's appointment and for rushthatspeaks' birthday observed, which was celebrated primarily with a chocolate cake frosted with blue roses which gaudior had procured from Lyndell's, watching Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's The Celluloid Closet (1995), ordering takeout from Mary Chung's, and meeting spatch to spend the remainder of the evening at the speakeasy arcade behind Roxy's Grilled Cheese. I played pinball, skeeball, and Tetris, drank something which was too sweet for my tastes but had a flower and a paper umbrella in it, and have an even longer list of movies with queer content to watch than I started the day with, plus a couple, inevitably, to avoid with tongs. I ate suan la chow show with shrimp. I watched both of my partners play Guitar Hero. I turn out not to be terrible at Tetris. I am extraordinarily tired, but this was a good note for August to go out on. Maybe September (hah) will include sleep.
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It was a very good birthday observed, and I am glad we could do it.
Love you so.
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It delights me that while I was you were playing Ms. Pac-Man and I was holding your drink, a total stranger asked me what on earth it was and, when I told him it was the Land Shark, promptly went off and ordered one. I saw him with it later.
I didn't even know they made Dixie cups you can serve a tall drink in.
I am so glad you had a good time. Love you so.
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I really enjoyed it! I had seen or at least read about a number of its movies, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, but not all of them and some of the surprises were glorious—the gun-handling scene between Montgomery Clift and John Ireland in Red River (1948) convinced me that I need to watch that thing stat. ("Ever had a good Swiss watch?") There are places I think the films or the times could be more nuanced than the documentary suggests; there are movies or people I would have highlighted which it doesn't mention; it was the first comprehensive look of its kind, it had an urgent political point to make and an hour and a half to assemble it out of a festival's worth of material, I'm not going to dock it points for leaving out Billy Haines. Nothing in its general argument was surprising to me. Many of the later details, sheerly from not having seen the movies, were new to me. (It became apparent as the narrative moved into the '80's that spending my childhood under a zeitgeist rock actually shielded me from some of the overwhelming homophobia of American pop culture. I knew it existed: I saw it, read it, had it applied to me. But the punch line montage mentioned to
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the gun-handling scene between Montgomery Clift and John Ireland in Red River (1948) convinced me that I need to watch that thing stat
I first encountered talk about that scene in the readings for my Westerns class some years ago; many movies have been sold to me as stunningly homoerotic, many of which I think are not so, so at first I dismissed it as critics making homoeroticism out of nothing - and then I saw it. It really is amazingly homoerotic. Also, a really lovely film. Also stars John Wayne and Walter Brennan, directed by Howard Hawks, a genuinely delightful film that I would consider among my all time favourites.
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I thought I would. It's not a fault in the movie that I sort of wound up coming at the same material in a roundabout fashion on my own time, but I think it speaks well of the movie that it was still an enjoyable, thought-provoking, occasionally scarring experience full of clips I hadn't seen and quotations I hadn't heard: it holds up. (I know Vito Russo had died by the time the film was made, but I'm really glad they got Quentin Crisp.) What I really want now is a kind of sequel looking at queer representation in film since 1995 and I would not mind, either, a similar look at queer representation explicitly by queer filmmakers, since in The Celluloid Closet what they're looking at is the studio system and most queer creators were as much between the lines as their characters. These books and/or documentaries may exist! I just haven't done any research since last night.
I first saw it in the 90s on the local multicultural channel, when I was avoiding homework, and it opened up a whole new world for me.
I think if I'd seen it in the '90's it would have changed my brain.
so at first I dismissed it as critics making homoeroticism out of nothing - and then I saw it. It really is amazingly homoerotic. Also, a really lovely film. Also stars John Wayne and Walter Brennan, directed by Howard Hawks, a genuinely delightful film that I would consider among my all time favourites.
Oh, wonderful. I have ordered a copy through the local library and will endeavor to report back when it arrives.
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That would be awesome. Such things may exist but I have also not stumbled upon them. I have seen discussion of the film Brokeback Mountain in a book about gay literature (but not the short story, for some reason), but mostly in the context of it being made by and effectively for straight people to talk about the perceived tragedy of queer lives (it's been a while since I've read the Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature but I pretty much agree with its thoughts on Brokeback Mountain). I may have seen a couple of books about New Queer Cinema for sale on Amazon, but I've been on a book buying drought - here's hoping I can find something similar at the library at some point.
I have ordered a copy through the local library and will endeavor to report back when it arrives.
I hope you like it!
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We have a photo somewhere of me with the ninja girl as an infant on my lap, at the computer. I look like a diligent grad student, hard at work despite child! But in fact I'm playing either tetris or "mac man," Mac computer's version of Pacman.
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Like cats into boxes. I believe it.
I had played it as a child on our toaster Mac, but never as an arcade game and either way not for more than twenty years. It is the sort of thing that could become a horrifying time sink if it weren't in an arcade and requiring money to play. I am not tracking down a version for my computer for that very reason.
I look like a diligent grad student, hard at work despite child! But in fact I'm playing either tetris or "mac man," Mac computer's version of Pacman.
That's wonderful!
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Playing games can often affect one's perceptions. At times of my life when I was playing Grand Theft Auto, I couldn't see a firetruck without an urge to steal it. Katamari Damacy made me see everything in terms of how big a ball would be required to roll it up. Most recently, The Witness makes me look for complex line patterns to trace in my environment (a tendency that the game itself acknowledges in a climactic video sequence).
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Freebie and the Bean (1974), which I had always thought was a kind of early buddy-cop comedy, turns out to involve a murderous transvestite or trans person who is shot to death by one of the heroes in a fashion which makes much of exposing the male body beneath the female clothes; for additional demonization, they are in a women's room at the time. There was also something called The Detective (1968) which I had never heard of, but which includes a closeted, self-loathing character who goes cruising and then murders the man who takes him home in a scene which was probably meant to play as the tragedy of the closeted man but instead plays like slasher horror for the man whose apartment it is, who was trying to be gentle with his visibly fidgety pickup—he tries to de-escalate, he fights back, he even tries to call the police, but gets his head bashed in first. Both of those pretty much immediately took themselves off the list of movies I would want to watch for fun. There was also a brief clip from a comedy called Night Shift (1982), which went by in the montage of casual punch-line homophobia: the nebbishy protagonist lamenting that a night in jail is the worst, most degrading thing that could happen to him, until his gym bunny cellmate unfolds a newspaper page of cut-out valentines and winks at him, at which the protagonist turns his eyes sadly to heaven: "I was wrong." That one looked like an example of a movie that could be otherwise enjoyable unless or until a knock at your particular axis of marginalization leapt out and bit you, but it would bite me. I'm also not sure I need to see Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), The Children's Hour (1961), or Walk on the Wild Side (1962), but those were more no thanks and less WTFBBQ NO.
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(I did re-watch TIL recently, and found it held up pretty well. A few problematic elements, but Peter Falk and Alan Arkin both were hilarious.)
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That's useful to hear, but also upsetting. I suspect it is a kind of comedy that did not age well.
(I did re-watch TIL recently, and found it held up pretty well. A few problematic elements, but Peter Falk and Alan Arkin both were hilarious.)
"SERPENTINE! SERPENTINE!"
(I grew up on The In-Laws.)
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It's been a long time since I've seen The Celluloid Closet; I'd forgotten about that montage. Occasionally I'll see a 1960s/70s/80s film for the first time in ages and get smacked upside the head by some virulent homophobic content that had sailed over my head when I was a kid.
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That's good to know. Mostly we saw Shirley MacLaine being dismissive of how tamely the subject was handled and then the scene in which Audrey Hepburn discovers, out of shot, that MacLaine has hung herself.
Occasionally I'll see a 1960s/70s/80s film for the first time in ages and get smacked upside the head by some virulent homophobic content that had sailed over my head when I was a kid.
There's a percentage of that which in hindsight I thankfully missed due to (see above to
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In my mind there is some overlap between that one and "Cruising" (1980)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080569/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 "Cruising" prompted a lot of protests when it was released, buy a vocal gay community. I guess my mental association was just the police detective angle.
I haven't seen any of the ones you mentioned.
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Cruising was also featured in The Celluloid Closet, along with footage of the protests. You're not the only one who made the association. My cousins tell me that it's now being reclaimed in part because it was filmed on location in actual leather bars with extras who were really part of the scene, meaning there's an accidental documentary quality to the background of the serial killer queer panic plot: I still don't know that I'll ever see it, but it does take the film out of the avoid-with-tongs category for me.