Steven Colbert just gets more amazing every week. He went to Iraq and stood before a cheering crowd of soldiers as he made fun of Don't Ask Don't Tell — proof positive that the troops on the ground are more than ready to end this shameful charade perpetrated by successive administrations, Obama included.
And last night, he had as a guest on his show (after mercilessly hitting Obama for cowardice and duplicity in "stonewalling" the lgbt community) Jim Fouratt, veteran of GLF, GAA, former proprietor of Danceteria - the great 80s disco. (This Danceteria bit made Colbert's comment on surviving the Disco Inferno all the funnier, though if 5% of the audience understood the reference I'd be amazed)
Colbert usually interrupts his guests and they rarely get a chance to really deliver their message. That didn't happen last night, and Fouratt got a chance to tell the story of the Stonewall Uprising as it actually happened (as opposed to the mythology of the event) to a national TV audience (even if it's cable!). Colbert isn't mere satire, he is queering the news. Here is the interview:
It is customary in Thailand for a young man to enter a monastery for some time. It brings honor on the family, and it's considered good training for the mind. Of course, like any society, the custom can devolve and become meaningless form. Just look at the vast majority of bar mitzvah parties in the United States. However, the issue has reached the media's attention in Thailand, as novices who in their secular lives are gay or transgendered, don't leave their sexuality, like their shoes, at the temple door.
The Bangkok Post reports that a "guide to proper behavior" is being promulgated to counter:
"reports of unconventional behaviour by monks in public, including using
cosmetics, carrying pink bags and readjusting their robes for a
fashionable look.
Some allegedly even had sex in their sleeping quarters, a severe sin under the code of conduct which incurs forced defrockment.
The
course will be taught as a prototype at the Triam Sammanen school - the
country's first Buddhist missionary school, located in the compound of
Wat Krueng Tai in Chiang Rai's Chiang Khong district."
When a monk or novice takes the precepts, celibacy is one of the agreements. A young novice joins a monastery for three months. Similarly, when one becomes a monk, the hair is shaved, and one takes the robes — it involves an erasing of a kind of individuality as a way of learning humility and to tame the ego. This is the practice.
Makeup. Fashion. Sexual expression. That's for outside. Inside, it's time for inner exploration and taming the mind's wildness, taming the ego's sense that it is all there is.
There have also been some rather scandalous goings on — abbots having affairs for example. Of course, this is nothing new anywhere in the world. Clerics are, after all, human. Great teachers from Krishnamurti to Trungpa Rinpoche are known to have suffered from these failings, not to mention the more hypocritical among them, the Haggards and his ilk.
When hyprocrisy is the order and boundaries are violated, it is a serious issue. But we all struggle, and no one can judge.
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.
The Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo has been doing their amazing parody of Swan Lake for years. Did you ever think you would see the concept adapted for a Super Bowl tv commercial, complete with NFL players in the role of swans? In the background, much like the Trocks, the players are in tutus. After years of homophobic ads broadcast to subconsciously defuse the homo-eroticism of the games, this spot is a welcome departure, if a shameless rip-off.
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.
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?
This TV spot from Grey in Tel Aviv uses the classic technique of misdirection: it leads the viewer to believe/expect the ad is about one thing and it turns out to be something else entirely. What's nice is that the use of the transexual character in this spot is both appropriate and respectful. The character is not a joke, in fact the joke is on the viewer.
Oh, and a welcome to all the students in Professor McGinnis' class at Wayne State! Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to comment.
This charming little TV commercial from Thailand is a combination of several things I am very interested in — folk tales and traditions from around the world, queer representation in media, and advertising. Thanks to friend Ray over at weatherpattern.com:
