Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

School bullying / Anti gay bullying and advertising:

I've been watching this Chrysler Town and Country commercial for months and every time I see it I am disturbed. It's clear the spot was directed so that the boy who jumps in his mother's van is running from a gang of boys who want to beat him up.

The voiceover suggests it's just a race home, though even in this challenge there is a note of menace.

You can see from the face of "Parker," the boy they are chasing, that he is running in fear.

What was the agency that made this thinking? It's bad enough that school teachers across the country turn a blind eye (or even participate) to bullying behavior. But for an ad agency, in this case, I believe it's Fallon since they're the agency of record for Chrysler, to run an ad which uses the situation to get attention (and entertain and sell) in the today's climate is irresponsible. Because while it's true this behavior is widespread, showing it in a commercial in this way normatizes it. Condones it, even as Parker manages to get away because of the hero product, and his clueless mom driving the Town and Country.

Chrysler should stop running this ad immediately. And both Chrysler and Fallon should be contributing serious money to organizations that combat the scourge of bullying and organizations that protect lgbt youth and youth at risk of bullying.

There has been enough written about this online for me to know now that I'm not the only person who sees this storyline. And some say that the voiceover track was changed from a more overt bullying situation. I wouldn't be surprised given the way the spot is directed. I would guess that the agency presented this to the client as an inexpensive fix to a bad mistake. Sorry guys, doesn't work. You ought to eat the cost, and reshoot a new spot. And pay for your mistake with support for bullied youth.

Take a look at the spot: do you see this the way I see it? And where the hell is GLAAD? After last week's awards to agencies for the good they do, why haven't they raised this as an issue?

 

Facebook, Gay Rights, Advertising, Political Organizing and Free Speech.

There are hundreds of Facebook groups organized around political principles and action. I belong to some of them. A couple of weeks ago there was another Facebook firestorm when the Boycott BP page lost admin privileges. Facebook said it was a glitch and the page privileges were restored. Not so for the Target boycott page — and the paper with the business scoop behind it is Washington D.C.’s MetroWeekly: Facebook will be selling gift cards in Target stores this fall holiday season, so enabling a boycott through their platform directly goes against their business interests. And lets not forget that Facebook is a business.

 The details were reported in USA Today:

 The social-network giant is getting into the gift card business, starting Sunday, with Facebook Credits cards. The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target's 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months. This will be the first time Facebook has had any presence in a retail store. Facebook already has an arrangement with online-payment services PayPal and MOL to purchase Facebook Credits.

How big a business is this? In today's New York Times,  it is estimated that this year alone the  market in Facebook credits will reach $835 million.  

So it’s no surprise Facebook has disabled the administrative functions of groups that are organizing a boycott of Target in response to Target’s contributions to anti-gay politicians.

 The Internet is a friend of the corporate oligarchy.

 Facebook isn’t some non-profit service to the world community. Like Google, it is an advertising platform. Their value is in the private information they collect and use to help advertisers target prospects and customers.

 In the world of advertising, when an advertiser asks for personal information from a prospect or customer there is always something called a value exchange. The customer gives up some personal information in return for an offer, a discount, something useful. Think of it as a trade.

 Facebook is just such a trade — it has enabled half a billion people around the world to communicate in groups in ways that have never been possible. Of course, along the way, Facebook has collected enough personal information on all these people to make the secret police in any state quiver with desire. The Stasi would be envious of their info gathering ability.

Even without giving up specific information an MIT study last year demonstrated that Facebook friend connections could be used to determine with a strong degree of accuracy whether a man is gay even if he is in the closet.

An Unprecedented Level of Personal Information Given Freely Can Lead To Less Freedom

I am under no illusions when I use Facebook. Or Google for that matter. Just as I have given out information on this blog that could be used by a totalitarian government as evidence to imprison me for thought crimes and/or political beliefs, sexual practices, etc., my actions on Facebook and Google give corporations the information they need to imprison me in the net of the corporate oligarchy.

Remember, I’m an advertising executive. I like advertising. I believe it has a positive social role. I think the internet makes finding stuff I want amazingly easy — just last week I bought a book of Nepalese folktales from a publisher half a world away from their site. But search engines, or Facebook for that matter, like any tool, it can be used for ill. A hammer can be used to build a house or bash a head. And when you hold a hammer, you understand it’s possibility to do both those things.

 When you use Facebook, you may not think about how it can be used against you. Many young people have learned already that posting photos of drunken student antics have ruined employment possibilities. That’s because today, human resources departments don’t need to seek references — they can simply Google your name and see whatever might be online. This is not news. What was news the other weeks was when Google head Eric Schmidt joked about it suggesting people change their names legally if they wanted to hide their past internet indiscretions.

Facebook as a public utility rather than a business —  First Amendment rights should apply.

So Facebook has an economic interest in making sure Facebook users shop at Target. And they have an interest in making sure no one can use their service to spread information about a Target boycott.

However, when a service like Facebook becomes so ubiquitous as to have taken on the role as public square, we have to claim our role as citizens — not consumers. Facebook in fact is denying the right of free speech. Not unlike a shopping mall tries to deny political speech in mall common areas.

The public square, and the streets, as public property are protected by the First Amendment. Facebook however, is a corporation, and users give up their rights to use the service. This is the creeping danger of corporate media and the web.

Broadcasters, because they are licensed by the state to use the airwaves (how quaint a thought, airwaves) which belong to the public, must abide by certain rules — from providing community and educational programming as well as free advertising time for public service messages.

Webcasters like Facebook do not seem to have these restrictions — even though the infrastructure for the Internet was developed by the federal government. And while it has evolved far beyond that original infrastructure, the internet, like the airwaves, are a public trust. And corporate webcasters like Facebook should be subject to fairness doctrines just as broadcasters were — I saw were because if there were still a fairness doctrine Fox news would not exist. And while I don’t believe in censorship, I do believe that since Fox news is really propaganda and nothing else their license to broadcast should be revoked.  The fairness doctrine must be restored to broadcasting.

The internet, since it was developed by the government, is a public trust, and net neutrality must be maintained.

The internet, as a public trust, is also a place where the rights around public speech must hold.

These are bedrock principles we as citizens (and lets remember our role and responsibility as citizens instead of the role we have been assigned by the corporate oligarchy as mere consumers) must demand are enforced by our elected officials before they are completely bought out.

Homoerotic Ritual As An Essential Part of Societal and Spiritual Health

An Essay on the Takashi Miike film: Big Bang Love Juvenile A

The film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A starts with a monologue that is consciously filmic – it opens with a clap board and a man reading from what might be a script, yet sounds like a treatise on the physics of time, a philosophical meditation on the past and the future as waves of light seen from space at different points thus allowing the viewer to see back almost all the way to the Big Bang as well as into the future.

 

The opening “narrator” explains that this point in time/space where the past and future can be seen is also an experience of synesthesia, when the senses merge so that you can taste colors and smell shapes. And it is ultimately the experience of the Divine beyond time, the at-one-ment where/when all time is simultaneous. The “narrator” explains that it is in this place, where the veil of time has been ripped from our narrow view of reality that the story we are about to witness in this film of  “sad young men from a time that has lost something” occurs.

 

From here, Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, the deliciously homoerotic film by Takashi Miike, shifts the scene not directly to the story just described, but to another kind of prologue. We go from the opening film set to a place out of time and space — the world of men and divine masculine energy. We see only an old man and a young boy. The old man is a sage, who instructs the boy on how to encounter this divine masculine energy, take it in, make it his and become one with it, thus becoming a man himself in the process.

 

The ritual is simple, and if you have read Men, Homosexuality and the Gods by Ronald Long, you will recognize this ritual as one practice by the Sambians of Papua, New Guinea: sacred fellatio. In that culture, a pre-pubescent boy, in order to become a man, fellates post-pubescent boys until he himself is able to ejaculate. At which point then he becomes the inseminator of masculinity to those younger than himself. Among the Sambians, this practice stops for the young men once they marry a woman. Presumably they no longer have any same-gender sexual relations. In this culture, it is truly ritualized as “a stage they are going through,” and an essential ritual at that.

 

A variant of this ritual is described in the 2^nd prologue of Big Bang Love Juvenile A to a young boy who must choose a man from his village whose masculine energy he wishes to take in and emulate. You can see the man he chooses at the top of this post — and in the opening sequence the dance of this tattooed avatar (and I use this word in its truly original Hindu meaning of a deity that takes human incarnation) of masculinity you have an approximation of the power of such an act when connected to living ritual. And in his dance you may recognize the atavistic influences of this ritual on the dance floor in a gay club, where dancing men stripped of their shirts and covered in tattoos that have been stripped of true ritual meaning act out their unconscious need for homoerotic spiritual transcendence. This is in fact the dilemma of the circuit party dance floor ritual: it is a celebratory rite of manhood that has been split off from the container of true religious ritual in its finest sense. And without a ritual container, it is not wonder many in the world of the circuit party seek divine connection through the Dionysian world of drugs and sex that ultimately consumes them.

 

The ritual of sacred oral sex in this film stops just short of the sexual act itself. Though the old man described to the young boy exactly what will happen:

 

“He will teach you what to do…and finally he will aim for your throat, releasing his manhood. For ages we have become men in this manner. Handing down manly vigor to our descendants.”

 

From this scene we are rocketed into yet another timeless place that is simultaneously recognizable as a classic B movie situation: the prison drama. And the young boy and young man from the previous ritual scene now seem to be re-incarnated as two young men entering prison together, both for separate crimes of murder. Tattoos appear and reappear. Walls and bars that demarcate the prison are both solid and merely indicated by chalk on the floor from scene to scene to indicate the existential nature of the subject matter at hand.

 

The film is also takes the film conventions of the “police procedural” mystery as two detectives try to solve a murder that takes place in the prison. Like most of Takashi Miike’s films, Big Bang Love Juvenile A is filled with disturbing violence. While in the story, ultimately the true murderer is exposed, the film does not answer the many philosophical questions it raises — because to answer those questions would be to do violence to the quest each young man must face in his rite of passage as he confronts the divine masculine and assimilates its energy into his life.

 

As a gay man, experiencing the divine masculine through the sacred and shamanic traditions of same-gender love is an important subject for me. Because love — emotional and spiritual love when experienced together in physical expression with the beloved — is one gateway to heaven. When these three are split off from each other, and their connection is denied by society — when there is no social and ritual container that recognizes the (w)holiness of this expression — those who step into this space without a guide may find instead a gate to the hell of compulsive sex. (Of course, both heaven and hell are expressions of divine energy, just as Brahma and Shiva are twin poles of creation and destruction. And both are ultimately expressions of Brahman, the infinite and eternal oneness. Or the Ayn Sof as the Kabbalists would call it.)

 

In the act of love — the “small bang” — we seek to experience that oneness of the moment before the Big Bang.

 

(Italo Calvino, in “All At One Point” his Cosmicomics short story of the moment just before the Big Bang there is still separateness, a universe full of diverse characters described as “packed like sardines.”)

 

I seem to digress. But those who read this blog with any irregular regularity (given my irregular postings) are used to this.

 

Big Bang Love Juvenile A brings together all these strands of meaning for me — wrapped up in my love of Japanese culture (and Japanese men). And to be certain, it also raises questions about the divine feminine and how men relate to it. It looks at the penetrative spirit of warrior culture and its relationship to men who enjoy the receptive role. I highly recommend this film for any gay man who thinks about the questions raised here. As I also recommend reading Men, Homosexuality and the Gods by Ronald Long.

 

Below you can see the entire 9 minute opening sequence — from the clap board monologue through the ritual and dance to the prison murder —or you can follow it as a link to youtube where you can see it full screen.

A Buddhist Blessing in honor of Harvey Milk as mindful protest.

Blogging the NewFest, Day 3: David's Birthday

The Italian film, Il Cumpleano, in English called David's Birthday was today's stunning hit at the festival. Musically rich, dramatically layered and nuanced relationships played like a symphony with each motif reflecting with a jewel like intensity the central passionate relationship of the film.

The plot in short: two straight couples rent a house at the shore together. After a time, the 18 year old son of one couple arrives from his studies in the U.S. The other man hasn't seen the boy since he was 18. They see each other again and the first thing David, the young man says is "You used to hold me in your arms." And looking at Tyago Alves, the actor, well, anyone would want to do that now. But forget his beauty — because while stunning, beauty alone does not make a great film. This movie has everything. And runs across the full ranges of emotions.

It will repeat again Sunday due to popular demand: at NewFest Sunday June 6th at 3pm. Go see it. You'll be glad you did.

Blogging NewFest 2010: Opening Night — Contracorriente aka Undertow

Last night the New York LGBT Film Festival opened with Contracorriente, a beautifully made Peruvian film that captured the struggle for love and integrity faced by a fisherman in a small village when he is caught between the wife he loves and the man he loves (and won’t admit he loves).

 

It was a good film to open with, since it was high quality in every way — which is why it won the Audience Award at Sundance. It clearly moved the audience at the SVA Theater last night, since the sniffles were audible towards the film’s end. There was a hushed feeling afterwards: it wasn’t a downer, it was the quiet of respect for a film that could move everyone in a way that didn’t feel manipulative, but a reflection of the real complicated and messy issues people deal with in love.

 

The director was there to answer questions, and he was as charming as the film was. Afterwards, there was an opening night party at the Chelsea Art Museum that was fueled by Belvedere Vodka. I didn’t leave till 1am, and would have stayed later but for a client briefing this morning at 9:30.

 

Tonight? Beautiful Darling and Leo’s Room. See you there.

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.

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.