Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Waiting for Battlestar Galactica...and Razor

So Razor, a side story in the BSG saga will be broadcast on Friday after a long hiatus. When I got hooked on BSG it had been a long time since I had been so captured by a television show that I had to be home to see it when it was on cause I just couldn't wait. It had been a long time since I was hooked by a science fiction TV show (and we're going back to the original season of Star Trek). So when I read the review in today's Time Out for Razor I was filled with trepidation:

Caine press-ganged civilians and had disobedient officers executed in front of the crew, while her prisoners were subject to institutionalized rape and torture. Caine, we learn here, is a lesbian...but she isn't judged for her sexuality — Razor definitively proves that BSG is set in a society where sexual preference is a nonissue.

Well. I am relieved. Ahem. Sorry, but when the only queer character in 3 years of episodes is evil, well, maybe the world of the colonies doesn't judge sexuality, but television viewers in 21st Century America do. And based on what I read in Time Out, Caine is yet another version of the evil queer stereotype. I await the broadcast Friday with teeth gritted.

Mr. Whipple and Senator Larry Craig...

An advertising icon has passed...and is noted on any number of queer blogs (JMG to start) because of the queer subtext of the character. Mr. Whipple was undeniably queer, a Franklin Pangborn of fussiness who was hated roundly as annoying by not only the general public, but by his own creators at Benton and Bowles, as told in the classic on how to create good adveritising "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This:"

"I was assigned to assassinate Mr. Whipple. Some of New York's best hit teams before me had tried and failed. The agency that created him was determined to kill him."

Nevertheless, the campaign ran for 21 years because "Charmin may not have been popular advertising, but it was number one in sales." Which goes back to a discussion yesterday on JMG about the advertising for British Tourism in Belgium. But I digress....so what's the connection between Whipple and Senator Craig? The analysis is right there in the NY Times obituary:

"In hundreds of maligned but effective television commercials, running from 1964 to 1985, the punch line was the Mr. Whipple himself secretly squeezed the product..."

Just like a closeted Republican with homosexual desires, Whipple told other people what not to do, then guiltily did it himself. And got caught again and again. It's a pattern we are all familiar with, though many people close there eyes to it and live in denial. Culturally Whipple blows the whistle: we all know.

On another note, the nature of a "queer" ad spokesman selling soft toilet paper has the less than conscious communication that who better to tell you what's good to put against your butthole than a gay man? 

Of course, the actor who played Whipple was straight. But the character? We all know. It's the open secret out there for all to see on Capitol HIll.

How a gay boy lost his heart to India: From Sajid Khan to the Ramayana and Bhangra in Bryant

When I was fifteen years old there was a TV show that starred Jay North, the kid who played Dennis the Menace in the early 60s. The premise of the show was that North was searching for his lost father in India, traveling on the back of an elephant with his Indian friend, who was played by a young Indian actor named Sajid Khan. Jay North could be in one of Richard Lamparski’s "Whatever Became Of" books, but Khan went on to become one of India’s top actors and heart throbs. And when I was 15, he was my heart-throb, one more piece of evidence helping me to realize that I was a gay boy.

It was not the first time I was captivated by a young Indian. To this day
one of my favorite movies is the 1940 version of The Thief of Baghdad,
starring Sabu, who was indeed the son of an elephant driver. This film puts the Disney cartoon to shame and its special effects still hold up after all these years. But what makes this film truly great is its Huck and Jim friendship between the deposed king of Baghdad and Abu (played by Sabu) the thief. It is a deeply spiritual movie, that is also a grand adventure, a love story and fantasy. It compares more to The Lord of the Rings than to the Disneyfied remake. And like Huck at the end of his story, Sabu as Abu lights out for the territories. It was the first time in my life I’d heard of the city of Basra. And every time I hear news of this city today I am
filled with sadness. (Let’s ignore for the moment that Iraq and India are completely different cultures and the people only look alike to those who have no experience of the world and it’s many peoples.)

Sabu went on to make a number of films in the US, including the high camp
Cobra Woman, and the classic Black Narcissus which demonstrated that he was really a fine actor. But his career stalled because Hollywood couldn’t see him as anything other than the exotic elephant boy. He suffered the fate of so many actors who don’t fit the homogenized white bread image sold by the studios of the day.

Unlike so many actors with an ethnic background, a name
change wasn’t going to change Sabu’s heritage. He died young and frustrated, restricted by the racial blinders of the time. He might have done better to light out for the territories.

At this point you may be wondering if I’ve been to any SALGA dances. Or HABIBI for that matter. What I can tell you is that the other night on my way home from work I passed through Bryant Park to discover the Incredible India ad campaign was sponsoring performances of traditional Indian music and dance on a fanciful stage, and as I passed by I could see in the distance what was very clearly a performance of an episode from the Ramayana, one of the world's greatest stories. I was hooked, and was in the park in a flash. The next group of performers were Bhangra dancers. That’s right. You may know Bhangra as music, but this is how the term has changed in this generation and in the West. Its origin is as a dance style from Punjab, and there was a group of young men who demonstrated this athletic rhythmic movement with such obvious pleasure it was completely infectious. It’s amazing the whole crowd wasn’t on their feet along with them. One of the dancers moved with such sensual grace that my old memories of Sajid Khan and Sabu were reawakened.

Accuse me of sentimental orientalism if you like. Or fetishism. But a youthful attraction to these men is what opened my eyes to a wider world. Sabu was my sexual fantasy psychopomp who led my soul -- and my body all the way to Asia, where I worked for 7 years and traveled widely. (And where I discovered that I too could be objectified and made the object of a fetish for my then still red hair.)  This curious passion is what led me to discover, study and respect the beauty and value of other cultures, languages and spiritual paths. Which is no surprise really, since in both Maya and The Thief of Baghdad these handsome young men took on the role of guide to other characters through (under)worlds they did not know. It may be a cultural and artistic stereotype, but it led me to a place where those stereotypes dissolve, and then reform newly informed.

So have you had some teen crush that led you out of the closet, and out of your own culture? 

Jack Wild, Elijah Wood and Psychedelic Children's Entertainment

Here it is Saturday morning, the time of the week for kids' show. It's when I would get up to watch HR Pufnstuf when I was a kid...well a little more than a kid, a young teen really, because I had a crush on the teen star Jack Wild who made his reputation as the Artful Dodger in the film version of Oliver. Pufnstuf was very weird, and to this day people laugh at the drug references and major trippiness of the show.

Over at the queer pagan blog, the eponymous Michael Mahler has posted a video of a similarly odd bit of children's entertainment from today that also features a sexy young man who many of us fancy — Elijah Wood — and there he is dancing with, well, I am not sure what to say he's dancing with. People in odd costumes not unlike the characters on Pufnstuf. However, while this show is trippy in it's own way, it doesn't really have the pagan animist sensibility of Pufnstuf, and sensibility that Mahler might well appreciate. Even if Witchiepoo is the villian.

Next week would have been Jack Wild's 55th birthday by the way. When he died two years ago I was stunned by how affected I was by his death. I probably hadn't thought about him in years. Except that we were born a week apart — and the thought that this sweet cute young man had grown old and died of cancer of the mouth from his inability to stop smoking pierced my heart — and reminded me of my own mortality.

Tony Soprano lived, but as for Harry Potter? Don't bet on it...

The bookies didn't call the Soprano ending very well. And now, tot only are the bookmakers putting the odds on the side of Harry buying the farm, they have stopped all betting on that side now since they believe he'll die so surely that they don't want to lose any money on it. So it seems that since Harry is inextricably linked to VM, the only way for Harry to defeat him is to die with him, so that VM is all gone. So it seems to me. But I'm not a fanatic, so I cede all expertise...

Opinions? Desires? Fantasies? Will Harry date Meadow? Is Tony a Death Eater? Maybe I'm confused...

Bob Barker and the Price of Everything

So Bob Barker is retiring. Not exactly like one of Japan's "Living National Treasures," but in the degraded popular culture that TV offers Americans, sadly, he comes close. And the show he is best known for, The Price Is Right, captures our fixation on consumerism as the national religion. St. Oscar of Reading Gaol once said that the cynic is the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I cannot claim to know what Bob Barker's values are, and certainly, as an ad exec, I can't make claims to being exactly free from consumerism myself. But I can't believe that we are better as a nation or as a people for all these years of The Price is Right.

Blogging the NewFest: The Curiosity of Chance & The Lair

After last night's opening (and way late night out followed by a full day in the office) I arrived rather tired at the AMC Theater on 34th street tonight. But the first film I saw this evening perked me right up. The Curiosity of Chance is an homage to the John Hughes style teen films of the 80s, except with a queer twist. So of course, it's cotton candy. Fluff. But oh what fun fluff it was. Delightfully written, smartly art directed and filled with period music that kept the mood up it was the kind of film I'd have loved to have seen when I was in high school. All I got to see was Lindsay Anderson's If... (which I will be writing about very soon). Tad Hilgenbrinck's sulks were a pleasure to watch. And given that his resume includes much Shakespeare I hope I have the pleasure of seeing him on stage in NY someday. And let's be clear about just how much of a fantasy this film was: in the film's climactic "Battle of the Bands" contest, the hero's band is introduced by a bevy of drag queens from the local bar, who have invaded the high school to support their youngest sister in training. That said, I was completely willing to suspend all disbelief because it was such sweet fun.

Sometimes it pays to quit when you're ahead. This is the roulette wheel of the film festival. Here! TV premiered its new TV series about "a coven of gay vampire witches," The Lair, showing the first three episodes. The writing was hideous, the acting, well, hard to fault the actors with such truly stupid lines unbelievable plotlines. And I don't mean that a coven of gay vampires run out of a sex club is unbelievable. No, the actions and sheer idiocy of the characters is what made it unbelievable. As someone said in the row behind me after the second episode, "It's not going to get any better." It failed as soft core porn as well, though there certainly were long loving camera shots of cute David Moretti in the shower, and vampire orgy scenes. The level of the dialog and acting was a hair above porn acting. In fact, there were porn actors in the show. If there had been any conscious irony to it perhaps it would have worked. But it didn't even have the charm of the terrible but campy vampire TV classic, Dark Shadows. Where is Jonathan Frid now that we need him? No surprise...like all cult TV heroes he will be appearing at a Dark Shadows convention in Tarrytown NY in August of this year.

I could get all psychological and write about the ongoing fascination of connecting gay men and vampires, and dark sex clubs with black magic and the shadow, but it's been written about in depth elsewhere and quite frankly, The Lair is no great addition to this tradition. And with that, back tomorrow afternoon for the animation program. That's always fun.

Random Drag In Advertising and the Archaeology of Links

Checking the industry blogs this morning I came across a truly odd bit of local TV advertising from Detroit for a cross-dressing exterminator on Adfreak. Now there have been many local spots that feature the business owner. Here in New York, Tom Carvel’s hard as gravel voice was the perfect foil for his soft ice cream. Mrs. Potamkin in her furs just dripped nouveau riche as she, and the family, appeared in spots for their Cadillac dealership (speaking of Cadillac, Republic of T has a recent post on their advertising that while lengthy, is quite interesting even if as an ad exec I don't believe it captures either the reality or the true madness of the business).

In any case, here we have the distinct pleasure of Mr. Harris, owner of this pest control service, selling his services while appearing in drag. In a way that appears completely random. No connection to the sell at all. And no connection to the call to action at the end of the spot. That said, here I am not only writing about it, but linking to it, which is something any advertiser wants — free additional publicity that stems from paid advertising. Of course, the problem for Mr. Harris is that I don’t believe I have any readers in Detroit. And since I live in NYC I  cannot avail myself of his services or his fashion advice. 

As I mentioned, I came across this spot on Adfreak, which is a blog I check regularly as a creative advertising professional. But Adfreak found the spot on Consumerist (a site I ought to be looking at regularly) which in turn found it on YouTube (of course). Such is the archaeology of this particular link. A sort of 6 degrees of link separation on the web can connect you to anyone on the planet now. This continues to amaze me on a daily basis regardless of how commonplace it is. My reaction is probably a function of my generational cohort, which is a euphemistic way of saying I’m old.

The Peculiar Nexus of Don Imus, Politically Incorrect Humor & the Brits on Gay Flight Attendants

The marvelously funny commercial below would never be aired in the United States. If it were I'm sure it would cause a firestorm of protest. Of course, I don't believe for a moment that this commercial is at all mean-spirited, which is what got Imus in trouble, he clearly meant to be hurtful. But this spot captures something of the British humor lost with the recent death of  John Inman — affectionate play off of stereotypes. Mind you, this spot seems to take its inspiration from another (unfortunately short-lived) Britcom — The High Life — which starred the very out and proud Alan Cumming, among others. Of course, all this begs the question, why are so many flight attendants gay?

What do you see when he gets out of bed? Its got a mind of its own, eh?

The motto of the ancient British Order of the Garter is "Honi soit qui mal y pense" which is sometimes translated as "Shame on he who thinks evil" and sometimes as "Evil is he who thinks evil [of what he sees]" What do you see when the boy gets out of bed?  What do you think when his third arm is standing straight up? Or when you hear the lyrics that "he likes them big and juicy?"

Just what is the hunger we're talking about here?

Reverend Bill would have a field day with this. Conflating sexual desire and hunger (for food, things) is what advertising does. And you know the agency had lots of fun with this. I just wish I could have been in the meetings when the creative team first presented this work to the account team -- and when the agency presented the work to the client. As an ad man, I love this work. As a gay man, I think it's both funny and filled with interesting moments for psycho-social analysis. As a Buddhist, I find the grasping hand connected to personified Hunger a scary image of the Hungry Ghost. Interesting on so many levels.