Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

The Museum as a Temple, the Artist as a Bodhisattva

Today is the final day of The Artist is Present at MOMA. Yesterday I went with my friend Frank and arrived just moments before, as it turned out, our friend Jensen was to take his seat before the Artist. It felt like a moment of grace to be able to bear witness to him as he was received and totally seen, completely taken in, by Marina Abramovic in the performance piece that seemed to me to be more an encounter with holiness.

The charged square space filled with the emptiness of presence gave it a sense of the Holy of Holies. In her white dress, Abramovic seemed like the Shekhina herself. Or Quan Yin, Kannon, Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, bearing all the pain and heart of all those who entered her space.

And all this before I went upstairs to discover her other pieces. From the Memento Mori of the model below the skeleton, to passing between the Scylla and Charybdis of the two models in the doorway, to the crucifixion without nails that is Luminosity, it was an experience of the museum as a cathedral, a meditation space to participate in, rather than simply consume.

The press and discussions that I had heard all dwelled on the titillation of the event. Or perhaps I just did not bother to read deeper into the articles I saw. Because there have been few shows more powerful. And I am only sorry today is the last day, and that I didn't take advantage of the time earlier to enter that charged space myself and sit before the artist.

My friend Jensen, in the photo above, entered the space at 2:40 on Sunday afternoon. He had joined to line to do this at 1:30am the night before. He was in that seat for less than 15 minutes, but watching him go through all the emotions that arose it was clear each second there was experienced with the complete naked intimacy.

And all I can think of are the words of the Kadosh prayer:

Holy. Holy. Holy. All of creation is filled with the glory and presence of the Divine. (And in this case, the Divine Feminine)

NewFest 2010 — Go-Go Reject (With Cute Go-Go Boys) Should Be One of Your Selections

The LGBT Film Festival in New York has a program of shorts under the theme Singing, Dancing, Waiting. Who loves short shorts? I certainly do. Especially if there’s a film about cute go-go boys.

Okay, so this fun little film is about the heavy subjects of body image, body fascism and fantasy  in the gay male community. Except that it’s sweet, funny and filled with self knowledge and compassion. Not to mention hot go go dancing boys: See the trailer below.

Another film on the program is one I wrote about last year: EZ Heeb, from Ali Coterill, star and director of Fagette, which I loved when it screened at NewFest a couple of years back. It's pure queer Jewish fun. Buddhist I don't know. But queer Jewish? Yup.

There aren’t a lot of places you can see films like this with an appreciative audience, and a chance to meet the filmmakers, who are often there. Ali Coterill will be that's for sure.

The Singing, Dancing, Waiting program plays on Sunday June 5th at 2:30pm. You can buy your tickets at the LGBT Community Center on 13th Street, at the SVA Theater on 23rd Street, or online at NewFest.org.

NewFest 2010 — On The Down-Low With A Ghost in The Undertow at the NYC LGBT Film Festival

A picturesque Peruvian fishing village.  Turquoise waters and white beaches. Sexy men. And one of them, a local married fisherman, Miguel, has been having a secret affair with a wealthy gay photographer and artist, Santiago, who lives in a vacation beach house ostracized by the working class conservative community.

It’s hard to keep a secret in a small town like this, where prying eyes and gossip are help keep people in line with the local traditions.

Then there is an accident, and the Santiago is caught in an undertow and drowns. No one knows what has happened, since he was on his own at the time. But he comes to Miguel, his married lover as a ghost only Miguel can see.

Finally Miguel can openly love Santiago, because no one can see him. He can walk down the street holding the hand of his wife — and the ghost of the man he loved.

However, Santiago has a final request to make of Miguel that will touch the lives of everyone in the village. And Miguel must face the truth, and the choice that true love places before everyone.

This is a mysteriously eerie yet beautifully realized film, filled with transcendently joyous love scenes on the beach and the claustrophobic fear and narrowness of small town life.  It’s about a love that lasts beyond death. It is a beautiful elegy that restores the living with a full sense of the preciousness of love.

Winner of the Sundance World Cinema Award, The Undertow will be the opening film at NewFest on Thursday, June 3rd at 8pm at the SVA theater on West 23rd Street in Chelsea. Admission includes the opening night after party. 

South Park Meets Chelsea In Violet Tendencies, Giving Mindy Cohn a Hilarious & Politically Incorrect Star Turn

Remember Mindy Cohn from The Facts of Life? Well, director Casper Andreas did, and gave her a part that she goes to town with in Violet Tendencies.

Cohn plays, to use the language of the film, “the oldest living fag hag.” Which means she has sacrificed her own love life to live through the loves and lives of her younger gay friends. She doesn’t seem to mind until she finds herself as the last fag hag standing when another female friend of the friends of Dorothy gets married.

What happens next? Well amidst the swirl of Chelsea boys who haven’t grown up and don’t seem like they will ever reach emotional maturity, Cohn’s character Violet starts seriously looking for love in other places. Problem is, she has so much fun with the gay boys that the straight men pale in comparison.

Sounds serious huh? All I can tell you is I sat with a group of gay men watching this film and we all literally screamed with laughter. And occasional horror at how politically incorrect it truly is — think South Park meets Chelsea. 

There will be moments that make you cringe with embarrassment that you are actually laughing at this, but laugh you will. Out loud. The dialog is sharp and the cast is pure pro. You’ll recognize soap stars Marcus Patrick and Samuel Whitten among others. Mindy Cohn gets to be center stage and matches comic timing and delivery without holding back on the central emotional isolation she feels. She may be neurotic, but she is a fully developed character: I wish I could say the same for any of the gay men in this film. They are horrifically shallow. But if I think about the film as a live action cartoon in the mold of Family Guy, well then, it’s brilliant.

It’s the closing night film at NewFest 2010 this year, and there will be a party after the screening with much of the cast since this is a pure New York City production. It promises to be a wild night, so get your tickets for Violet Tendencies here; don’t miss it.

Music, memory, Match boxes and coffee: An appreciation of Tokyo's La Scala-za Café

While rummaging through a drawer recently I came across a box of matches I’d been saving since 1987. It was from La Scala-za, a café in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and one of the most memorable café’s in Tokyo at a time when these businesses thrived on competition to be the most individual, eccentric and creative (all the more astounding in a culture that denied this urge in the citizenry).

What made La Scala-za an experience was visible even  before you entered: vines clung to walls that looked as though they were built of stone. There was a turret, and the roof along the side street was crenellated.  There was a tall and narrow stained glass window in front that ran from the first through third floors. The effect was of a decrepit castle. 

Inside there were overdone crystal chandeliers, curiosity cabinets filled with odd knick knacks, a suit of armor standing in a stairwell, and antimacassars on the red velvet chairs. Today’s Goths would feel totally at home there, or perhaps today’s vampire fans. However, I think the intention was to capture the 19th Romantic European sense of beauty. And in fact, the decorative metalwork in front of the second floor window looks like the image on their match-box cover.  

When you consider that the place opened in 1954, only two years after the end of Japan’s occupation by the Allied Powers, in an only partially rebuilt Tokyo where, La Scala-za must have stood as a monument to a fantasy escape from the privations of post-war Japan. But that escape was only partially fueled by the architecture (and caffeine). No, what made La Scala-za so special, and what had people going there regularly was that they played Western classical music non-stop at a time when buying records must have also seemed an incredible luxury.

In fact, Scala-za published a schedule of what they would be playing in advance. A program of sorts. So if you wanted to come and hear Verdi, or Chopin (since it was not only opera, despite the name) you knew just when to show up. Though you couldn’t be guaranteed a seat, since regulars seemed to almost live there.

Students would be there hunched over books, smoking furiously and discussing important issues in art at politics. And young lovers made La Scala-za a meeting place for decorously romantic coffee dates.   I know, because my boyfriend Hiroshi took me there for the first time when we had just started going out in 1982. So finding that box of matches was a moment of romantic memories and nostalgia for Tokyo in the go-go 80s, so different a time from La Scala’s beginning.

The image on the match-box cover, a sort of 19^th Century Romeo and Juliet on the  balcony, with a dash of My Fair Lady meets Dracula, captures the recherché spirit of the place.

La Scala-za closed after a 48-year run on December 31^st,  2002, a victim of the real estate boom. People lined up outside to say goodbye. But recently, it has re-appeared in a new incarnation, though in the basement of a modern building and so without the feel of the old place.

This is the story of cities, and life. I remember going up 6th Avenue in Manhattan with my father when I was a boy and listening to him complain about how it had been ruined by all the new glass and steel buildings. Now, I can’t walk through the city without being surrounded by ghosts of people and places past.

Memories and impermanence. The evanescence of existence — the blossom falls. The beautiful sadness of things. So lets keep dancing. In this moment now — because really, that’s all there is Peggy.  

NewFest 2010: How DADT Affected Over 100 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Alumni of The US Naval Academy.

Out of Annapolis gives the LGBT alumni of the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, the chance to tell their stories after serving their country in silence as Navy and Marine Corps officers.

These brave citizens speak candidly about difficult circumstances that some service people have found more stressful than battle.

As DADT lumbers slowly towards repeal, you might think this film will be just another bit of history — documenting the past. However, what makes this film a moving portrait of LGBT Americans is how it captures the strong bond they feel towards the Naval Academy. And how it shows the many positive ways the Naval Academy shaped their character.

Out of Annapolis will be showing at NewFest on Saturday, June 12^th at 2:30. Tickets are on sale now at the NewFest website.

It will be shown with Silent Partners, documenting how DADT affects the lives of the partners of 3  deployed service members and the screening is sponsored the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

Gregg Araki wins the first Queer Palm at Cannes

Gregg Araki's new film has won the first prize ever awarded at Cannes for Queer Film. The new movie, Kaboom, is a teen comedy with a sci-fi/supernatural twist features explicit scenes of gay, lesbian and bisexual sex. Perfect for an LGBT film festival, no? Take a look at the Kaboom trailer on youtube.

NewFest 2010: Topp Twins called "The Lesbian Carol Burnett Show"

The Topp Twins were interviewed this week in the Toronto Star, where their brand of sketch comedy was compared to Carol Burnett's comedy. Well, if Carol Burnett were channeling Murray Hill and Lily Tomlin perhaps.

I loved learning that they are not only out and proud lesbian, but they are very politically involved at home:

...the movie... shows how the Topp Twins have been agents of political change in their homeland, campaigning against nuclear power and for Maori land rights, gay and lesbian rights and demanding the 1981 tour of New Zealand by the South African football club the Springboks, be halted

....“It’s so subversive when you think about it,” says singer Billy Bragg in the film of the twins’ cross-cultural appeal. “Of all the forms, to choose county and western (music) is the most redneck, the most gender-specific of all popular culture. To use that as a way of pushing forward gay rights, it’s so subversive.”

Untouchable Girls: The Topp Twins will play at NewFest on Thursday, June 10th at 7:30pm. Get your tickets here.

Queer Shamanic Transcendental Cabaret: Taylor Mac at Joe's Pub.

Seeing Taylor Mac is a spiritual experience of deep joy. He is enchanting and erudite at the same time. I'm not going to write about the experience of this concert because I was fortunate enough to be there with Frank Grimaldi, whose writes about concerts he attends on his blog, Concert Log.  As an out and proud singer/songwriter who knows his stuff, he will capture it better than I could. What I will say is that as a fan of both David Bowie and Tiny Tim, the evening was profoundly beautiful, and very seriously silly. He read a Shakespeare sonnet and an excerpt from Lady Chatterly's Lover. And it all made supreme sense.

I came late to Taylor Mac, who has been on the downtown scene for at least a decade, but I saw The Lily's Revenge last November, and it is one of the top five theatrical experiences of my life. It's no surprise he won an Obie Award this week. After tonight, well, I'll go see him do anything, anywhere.

Cannes Film Festival: Who will win the first award for gay film at this premier festival?

So the Cannes Film Festival has decided to give an award for queer film: and Xavier Dolan, whose I Killed My Mother won more than 30 awards last year (and it will be at NewFest 2010 in NYC in June) has a new queer film at Canned this year. Yes, he's back and cuter than ever.

This heart-throb's new films is called Heartbeats, and it's a situation many of us recall from our youth: falling in love with a guy who is unattainable. The wrinkle here is that his friend, a young woman, is also in love with the unattainable guy. He's beautiful and beyond both their reach. It seems.

He's 21. And he's up against the old man in queer film. Gregg Araki. Never thought you'd see that sentence anywhere did you? Time is relentless, and there's always a new generation behind you. And there's also a film about Grace Slick, the lead singer for the Jefferson Airplane, that involves her in a lesbian relationship. 

Who's going to win? I have no idea — but I certainly hope all three of these movies will be at NewFest, NYC's lgbt film festival next year. Meanwhile, there's more than 100 films from 20 countries that you can see from June 3rd to 13th. Like Dolan's much lauded film from last year at Cannes. It's at NewFest 2010. Get your tickets now.