This lovely little spot for queer pride celebrations in Zurich is produced by TBWA. Not that it's stereotypical in suggesting that gay men want to dress like showgirls...or that it's problematic for straight men who feel threatened by their own inner feminine side and don't know how to relate to it (or for gay men who have the same problem actually). I have some real problems with this spot. Except that I still just happen to like it. What do you think?
As the Scarecrow said to Dorothy, "Of course, some people do go both ways."
So here we are on the 17th Day: Tiferet of Tiferet, the heart of compassion. And once again, what better image to call up than Avalokiteshvara / Kuan Yin.
Well, I guess most Jews would disagree, given that this is, after all, a graven image!
But I am more concerned with the principle, the meaning, not the statue itself.
Previously I mentioned the fact that in the movement of Buddhism from India further east to China and Japan, the boddhisattva transformed from male to female.
Some see this as Compassion That Transcends Duality. And that feels like the right energy for this day in the Omer count.
This is a compassion that calls us out of our old patterns, to free us from the slavery of creating enemies. Nice work if you can get it. But as Gershwin wrote, you can get it if you try.
Easy now fuzzy little man peach, Old Greg is in the house.
This is beyond description. If you've never seen The Might Boosh, or this particular episode, The Legend of Old Greg, you're in for a very wild ride that combines British music hall tradition comedy, rock & roll chaos comedy, the divine feminine and glitter rock plus funk and hallucinogenic insanity meeting the dark comedy of folktales. There, that was suitably incoherent. But I am not about to get into a scholarly deconstruction of something I love so much, it would only be vivisection, and Old Greg wouldn't like that at all.
It's all here, and very very funny. I am only including parts 2-4. You can find it all on youtube of course, where you can also see a live version of the "hit single" from this episode, Love Games. Trust me, you want to see all three videos below. It will change your life forever.
You have only two opportunities to see a film about the most politically subversive and influential drag queen in living history (if not all history). Don't miss it — "Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story" will be part of the 18th Annual Jewish Film Festival, at the Walter Reade Theater on January 29th.
Uys is best known in the guise of his alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, the Most Famous White Woman in South Africa. During the later apartheid years, as Evita, Uys appeared regularly on television and in clubs satirizing the evil of the apartheid government. When people who spoke out and challenged the government directly were imprisoned or worse, Uys managed to speak truth to power without finding himself disappeared. Nelson Mandela himself has said that Uys is one if his heroes.
Allow me a tangential discussion of the Mattachine Society here, which Harry Hay named in honor of medieval buskers who appeared in masks and whose performances were often satirical jabs at the ruling classes. Jesters if you will, who have always had the ability to couch the truth humorously, for the most part without penalty. Clearly Uys is a living example of this tradition. And while the horrors of apartheid are over, as Evita Bezuidenhout, Uys continues to perform in schools throughout South Africa, teaching children about how to protect themselves from AIDS, something the ANC government, with an HIV denialist health minister, has most strenuously not done.
This documentary film follows Uys as he goes from school to school. It gives something of his life story (we learn half way through, just as Uys only learned as an adult, that his mother was a Jewish refugee from Berlin).
In some ways, the making of this documentary is also an amazing story. The director, Julian Shaw, a
native New Zealander, saw Uys perform on a trip to South Africa when he was 15 years old. He went up to Uys after the performance and said he was coming back to make a documentary film about him. Uys was nice to him, but didn’t think he’d ever see the boy again. Except that two years later, Shaw showed up, camera in hand. For the next two years he shadowed him, capturing footage in schools, performances and at home. Another couple of years of editing later, and the finished film has won honors at documentary film festivals in Australia.
Truth be told (though I am not in drag and you wouldn't want to see it) the film is far from perfect. But the story of Uys is compelling, as is the story of Shaw deciding to film him. I wish there had been more about Uys in the apartheid days, and more about Shaw’s life and his need to make this movie.
Quibbles. This film is a must see — and a mirror to what the gender clowns (this is meant very respectfully) in New York should aspire to. The closest we have is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose true charity work is masked by the drag clowning and whose serious challenge to organized religion is made more acceptable by the fact that men have feminized themselves.
There are all kinds of questions I have: does drag take away a man’s power and thus make it safe for him to speak the truth. Or is it the taking on the the feminine power that enables them to speak the truth? What do you think?
What’s even more interesting to me as an advertising copywriter is Uys appearance in a recent commercial for Nando’s, a fast food chain in South Africa. In this clever spot, Uys as Evita delivers a sell for a special meal deal, while setting up a very pointed political barb that comes as a stinger at the end of the spot. While such a jab at the current government (Uys is an equal opportunity satirist) is no surprise coming from Evita, I am amazed that the advertiser was willing to chance government disapproval. Certainly no advertiser in the U.S. would make such an obviously negative statement about either the Democrats or Republicans in a commercial. The spot runs below:
Dating and the pursuit of the perfect partner — it's the Holy Grail of modern urban life, straight or gay. It's why there are so many organized meet-uo dating events out there. Deeper Dating is one of the best. Because it takes people beyond the snap judgement of appearance to a really deeper place. But in the ad for a British online dating site below, it gets down to the depth of Jungian psychology and archetype: The image is of two people sliced together brings to mind the image of the Divine Androgyne (or for those less psychologically inclined, the half man/half woman carnival attractions of yore) found in alchemical texts. These texts were coded instructions to opening up to the inner feminine in order to experience divine unity within. Shel Silverstein made the point in his brilliant little book for adults and children alike, The Missing Piece, that one doesn't find completion in a partner, but within. And the mystic's path in many traditions, has emphasized this search for the Lost Princess that can only be found in one's own heart. Heterosexual men seek this in the project of their inner feminine on the women they love. Gay men may take in their inner feminine and be open to a spirtuality that takes them deep quickly. But since our culture denigrates the feminine, divine and human, it is equally easy for a gay man to manifest the Demonic feminine, or celebrate it (hence the love of Joan Crawford). Or just as a straight man does, a gay man may project his inner feminine out and in order to integrate it, find himself attracted to men who are fey. Or there is the inner homophobia and misogyny that leads men to an almost Spartan celebration of the masculine to the obliteration of feminine qualities.
Then there is the whole issue of drag as a spiritual path that celebrates the inner feminine -- and drag as misogyny where performance of comedic femininity reinforces division rather than unity. I will write about this dynamic later this week in the review of a new film about the most politically astute and influential drag queen of the last 100 years.
See what happens when a gay Jungian Jewish Buddhist advertising copywriter sees an ad for a dating service in a British newspaper. Now if I could only get a date.
Okay, perhaps that's a little dramatic, but then, this ad, from MixBrasil, the lgbt film festival in Sao Paolo features a hot gay couple poolside, staring at a woman that is clearly not human. Now this could perhaps be seen as homosexual gynophobia projected out visually. But the campaign speaks to the sense many queer folk have of being seen as alien, other. Thus, the theme line: What is weird for you? Obviously, to those of us who live very queer lives, suburban soccer moms can seem weird. It is all in who is doing the looking. And while that may be the point of the ad campaign, I am not sure how it works to get people to go to this film festival — or whether they are seeking an audience above and beyond the usual lgbt film fest crew. Perhaps some alients. Don't know. Or maybe Grace Jones, since I have to admit, the woman in this ad looks like Grace Jones to me, and I've always suspected she wasn't quite human. You can see the rest of this odd campaign at adsoftheworld.
Today's New York Times had an ad for a new collection of shoes from Saks: the Ruby Slipper Collection. Yes, you can see one of the original pair of pumps that graced St. Judy's feet in The Wizard of Oz — they're on
display tomorrow through Sunday, September 14th.
And you can buy modern "reinterpretations" of this classic by a number of
big name fashion folks (see Jimmy Choo's right). I don't think clicking your heels in them will get you anywhere. Well, they won't get you to Kansas, but then, who wants to go there anyway? They might get you onstage at Comix, where last night, along with an excellent set by Keith Price there was a less than excellent set by Hedda Lettuce (drag and volume is not enough, but maybe some red shoes to go with the green dress might have helped, then again, maybe not).
Which leads me to the question, will there be more gay men buying shoes at this show than straight women?
Judaism is a non-dual religion. However, many people believe that the deity of the Hebrew Bible is masculine rather than beyond gender — inclusive of both male and female and thus both and neither. Rabbi Mark Sameth is advancing an interesting theory about the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew 4 letter name of God that is never spoken.
Rabbi Sameth says that the four-letter Hebrew name for God should actually be
read in reverse. When the four letters are turned around he says, the new
name makes the sounds of the Hebrew words for "he" and "she."
This makes God a dual-gendered deity. And after all, if as the myth says, we are made in God's image, and "male and female created he them," then clearly God is male and female even if Hebrew, as a gendered language, is incapable of expressing that directly.
Katherine Kurs, a religion scholar who teaches at New School University, who edited the amazing "Searching for Your Soul"
and who is an associate minister at West-Park (Presbyterian) Church in
Manhattan, was interviewed by LoHud.com, where this story first broke. And she captured it perfectly when she said: "This God is not a male or even a female but a male-female or
female-male, a God that holds tension and paradox, a full-spectrum
bandwidth God."
To look at it another traditionally mystic way, the divine Ayn Sof is boundless, boundaryless and thus includes all. This is not your grandfather's hairy thunderer in the sky.
Rabbi Irwin Kula wrote once that at a dinner party when challenged by an atheist about that rather punishing parental god, he said "I don't believe in the God you don't believe in either."
But a deity that transcends, includes and unifies? Beyond gender and personality? That's an expression of the divine worthy of prayer — and for me, prayer is simply singing love songs to the divine, filled with gratitude for creation. And while not a psalm, there are no finer words to express this for me than e.e cummings poem:
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything wich is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
