Popular wisdom

Inscriptions found today on the radiator inside a fourth-floor carrel in the University of Michigan's graduate library:

Thousands found dead in AREA CEMETERY!!

Don't date 15 year-olds.

This is not symbolic.

Carrier pigeons make the best pets.

Men and women can't be friends.

Obama time!

And, my personal favorite, penciled next to the door,

The bottom of this door handle is very sexy like Pamela.

Bad neologism alert

From the April '08 issue of Wired:

Reporting from opposite sides of the Pond, The Daily Show's John Oliver and fellow Brit Andy Zaitzman host this absolutely hysatirical weekly "audio newspaper for a visual world" from The Times Online.

Pushing at the corners of the English language is one thing, but the neo-gonzo DIY slang trend seems to be getting out of hand. Maybe it's Wired's way of proving it's keeping up with the collective vernacular inventiveness encouraged by Web 2.0. That's my hypotothesisnuse, anyway.

Tjenare kungen

One of my very favorite films, Tjenare Kungen (that's God Save the King in Swedish) now has several clips up on YouTube. I happened to write a kind of capsule summary of it last year for a zine that never ran (though it still might), so see what you think. If you don't know Swedish, don't worry, it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on in the clips regardless. I continue to nurse a massive crush on Abra that shows no signs of shrinking. It may look slick, but this is no Josie and the Pussycats--Malmros gets it right, and if it's not exactly Show Me Love with guitars, either, it's still got plenty of girl punk grit and authenticity.

Tjenare Kungen (English title: ‘God Save the King,’ Ulf Malmros, 2005)

Place: Gothenburg, Sweden
Heroines: Abra and Millan

Synopsis:
It’s 1984. Punk is over—hell, postpunk is pretty much over—but teenage Abra keeps the ’77 spirit alive in the face of new wave poseurs, dino-rock misogynists and disapproving family members. When she meets the like-minded Millan after a show the two become best friends, roommates and bandmates, working together at a sausage factory by day and searching for a drummer and bassist by night.

Music content:
Abra and Millan’s band, which they call Tjenare Kungen, is ferociously punk and thrilling to watch. Roxy Music, the Vapors, the Pretenders, Blondie and Swede faves Ebba Gron round out the soundtrack.

Queer quotient: 3/10
An early scene in which strangers beat up a mohawked, not-skinny, boyish Abra reads like a queer bashing as much as a punk bashing. Millan humors a dopey boyfriend and Abra eventually sleeps with a pretty-boy student, but the real love story belongs to the two women and the thrill they find making music together.

Overall Rating: 10/10






P.S. This film also contains a still that visually summarizes my entire adolescence.

Ich bin nicht verrücht

This is practically begging to have a subaltern/queer studies thesis written about it. He's going to be reenacting Ali: Fear Eats the Soul this summer, so it sounds like there's only going to be more material for comparison as time goes on.

This is a video installation by ming wong [sic] developed as part of a personal, self-designed German language and cultural immersion programme, as he was preparing to relocate to Berlin in August 2007.

Believing that one of the best ways to get insight into a foreign culture is through the films of that country, the artist has adopted one of his favourite German films as his guide, "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1972) by Fassbinder, about a successful but arrogant fashion designer in her mid-thirties, who falls into despair when she loses the woman she loves.

Putting himself in the mould of German actress Margit Carstensen in the role of Petra Von Kant - for which she won several awards - the artist attempts to articulate himself through as wide a range of emotions as displayed by the actress in the climactic scene from the film, where our tragic lovesick anti-heroine goes through a hysterical disintegration.

With this work the artist rehearses going through the motions and emotions and articulating the words for situations that he believes he may encounter when he moves to Berlin as a post-35-year-old, single, gay, ethnic-minority mid-career artist - i.e. feeling bitter, desperate, or washed up. ("Ich bin im Arsch")

With these tools, he will be armed with the right words and modes of expressions to communicate his feelings effectively to his potential German compatriots.

Ripped up and blissed out

Jon and Pants and I went to see Simon Reynolds speak at the Spark Festival yesterday. It was kind of stunning--he laid out the progression from jungle to drum and bass to speed garage to grime to dubstep, with musical examples of each and lots of London social history in between, over the course of about two hours. I started fantasizing about what it might be like if he did a lecture for different popular music scenes and genres from the late nineteenth century to the present. It would be like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, only without quite as much faith in linear narrative and humanism, and much less Eurocentrism. Instead of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment he would do ragtime, blues, rockabilly, house, baile funk, J-Pop, bhangra, hyphy--you name it. If anybody's up to the task, it's him. His brain is like an organic music encylopedia.

Back to Braque

Someone's finally pinned down exactly how I feel about the Wine-o:

Winehouse’s worrying series of relapses and collapses could simply be a trick of the light. Actors and singers were misbehaving vigorously before the advent of radio; Winehouse may seem like such a dedicated tearaway because the lens recording her movements is wider than anything a sixties celebrity would have encountered, doesn’t switch off, and continually feeds a twenty-four-hour newsstand....

...Winehouse’s delivery, though—take a little time to suss that one out. It isn’t really straight minstrelsy, because her inflections and phonemes don’t add up to any known style. Listen to the mid-tempo shuffle “You Know I’m No Good” and hear how she elongates and deforms the word “worst.” Is she channelling a little-known blues singer? Is she hammered? This mush-mouthed approach is Winehouse’s real innovation—a mangling of language that will pull you in, especially when you want to hear the words.

Androgyny as spectacle

What to do with another faux industro-goth band with disturbing emo tendencies whose singer is a dead ringer for Gerard Way? Cringe? Theorize? In the case of Tokio Hotel, perhaps both. One of their videos seems to reference Fritz Lang's Metropolis, while another features comely girl-boy lead singer Bill Kaulitz being rescued from a suicide attempt by his only marginally butch-er second self. What's interesting is that Placebo made the same video ten years ago. The concepts are identical, right down to the Midnight Vixen nail laquer. Crowds point in slow-motion and gaze heavenward, a suicidal, roof-jumping girl-boy pouts angstfully from his perch and finally summons supernatural powers for a grand finale that draws a connecting line between gender blur and an ability to transcend the body completely. Apparently, the impulse to allegorize androgyny as public spectacle is still a strong one.

If you don't have much patience for industrial emo ballads, I recommend skipping the first two-thirds of the video and jumping in right at the big Lacanian payoff, in which Kaulitz faces down his mirror reflection, walks through it and then disappears. Kelefa Sanneh is right; this man needs a stage name. Something Teutonic, but still glossy. Dietmar, maybe? Helmut? "Bill" isn't doing it.

Honest to blog

Those "Ellen Page is secretly gay" rumors? Not likely to go away any time soon.

Today is the day

Hard as it may be to believe, the following is not the finale of a PFLAG-sponsored educational film designed to inspire gay teens to come out of the closet. It's Zac Efron's solo number from High School Musical 2. It's also one of the more magnificently queer things I've ever seen. Zac struggles with his conscience, executes some killer running tuck jumps, stares angstfully into his Narcissus-like reflection in a pool of water and ultimately decides that he "will never try to live a lie again."



Did you ever get on a ride and wanna get off?
Did you ever push away the ones you should've held close?
Did you ever let go? Did you ever not know?
I'm not gonna stop--That's who I am.

Presumably, all of his future rides will allow him to get off.

Fake karaoke machine

Do you like Cadallaca? Or the Aislers Set? If you do, you might like Ann Arbor's Ghostlady.

If you like the earliest Sleater-Kinney and Gossip records, you might like Manchester's (UK) Hooker--not to be confused with half a dozen dude-rock bands with the same name. "Because of You" does a stellar job of imitating several songs off That's Not What I Heard, and "Fall to Pieces" is scarily convincing as an unreleased outtake from S-K s/t. Corin Tucker's vocal influence seems to have taken root all over the place these days. The second half of Gamine Thief's "Stereo Stereo," for instance, always makes me do an aural double take. "Wolf vs. Owl," too.

Her beautiful launderette

Megan Holmes has been posting some beautiful photo essays lately. She has an especially good eye for empty public spaces, and for the visual poetry hiding out inside places and things we've all seen a million times before, like gas stations and motel balconies and boxes of Bounce dryer sheets and used-up ketchup packets. Some pictures feel cinematic, but in a Jem Cohen sort of way. Cinema not as literal kineticism at all, but as epic stillness. These are some of my favorites:

Doing laundry
Dinner with Grandma
Going on tour
Getting stuck in an airport

Everything but Yul Brynner

Bobby Fischer, megalomaniac, world chess champion, genius and bigot, died yesterday at the age of 64. In my opinion, his greatest achievement was not defeating Boris Spassky but providing inspiration for the musical Chess, whose Act II opening song "One Night in Bangkok" went on to be covered by approximately 10,000 different artists, each determined to out-camp the last.

One of the most determined was Canadian singer Louise Robey, whose subsequent video also serves as a tidy summary of everything that was crucial in 80s music videos, and possibly the 80s as a decade: Orientalism; the ironic use of wedding dresses; day-glo; black and white checkerboard floors; erotic snake handling; floating golden orbs; the hairstyles of Joan Collins; leotards; white suits; muscle men; name-dropping Somerset Maugham; and anxiety about transsexual sex workers.



The costume design here was clearly ahead of its time. M.I.A. and Tahita Bulmer are but dowdy copycats by comparison! But don't let the fashion distract you. Even Robey's Alexis-Carrington-at-the-Copacabana ensemble can't surpass the beautiful tragedy of Tim Rice's lyrics, which include Siam's/ gonna be the witness / To the ultimate test of cerebral fitness; I'd let you watch, I would invite you / But the queens we use would not excite you (!); and I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.

If the chorus sounds a little like "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)" to your ears, it may be because it was written by Björn and Benny from ABBA. Robey's whitest of white raps also echoes Nina Hagen's in "New York, New York." Perhaps, in a post-"Rapture" world, awkward white rapping was considered the wave of the future. Or even earlier...

The fabric of a tutu / any man could get used to

It's telling that Miuccia Prada could haul out as staid, respectable and (mostly) conservative a menswear collection as she did this week and still inspire the kind of jaw-dropped astonishment that rippled through the press. Yes, there were a couple of pleated hip sash items that invoked tutus. Yes, there were skintight tops and a sort of halter and that knickers-outside-trousers business. But have we really never seen anything like this before? Gaultier, for instance? Is our stranglehold on femininity in men so invincible that we're startled when it takes even the shallowest breath? It's possible that the reaction to Prada has been more about the models than the clothes--those tutus wouldn't have looked so twinkishly suggestive on standard-issue beefcake.

I disagree with the suggestion that Prada has sex on the brain; this collection is not about sex at all, but rather the denial of sex. These clothes seem designed to be looked at, lusted after, theorized, maybe even petted a little, but nothing more than that. It would get the organza all greasy.

The prospect of feminism thumbing its nose at haute couture is marvelous nonetheless:

Speaking after Sunday’s show to Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for The International Herald Tribune, Ms. Prada quipped that the collection was revenge on men for the social and sartorial contortions they impose on women. She laughed when she said it, but she clearly wasn’t kidding around.

It is no stretch to suggest that the Prada collection read like the manifesto of a gender revanchist. The man in Ms. Prada’s current vision was domesticated and so passive as to be a neuter. One notes this not merely because the models looked abnormally robotic and were given nothing to wear outside the house.

Like a flipped version of the Unwomen in Margaret Atwood's feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly... <Read more>

Riding in cars with girls

The Portland Mercury, an alt weekly I write for now and again, started up its own music blog yesterday. You can trust these people; they realize, for instance, that the Lil' Mama remix of "Girlfriend" was better than the original. Lil' Mama offset Avril's smarminess, broke up the "Mickey" pep rally claps into beats with breathing room, and made it possible to do some pretty interesting queer readings that don't require transplanting the song's entire context into a drag bar the way the original did.

Make no mistake--an Avril Lavigne drag queen squealing I don't like your girlfriend...I think you need a new one would be great. But the remix video scraps the Preppy Avril v. Punky Avril face-off in order to concentrate on the rag-tag homoerotic misadventures of Avril and Lil' Mama. There may be boys in the back of Lil' Mama's drop top, but they barely register; they're just groping, disembodied hands reaching out of the back of the frame. Lil' Mama is the one in the driver's seat, picking up Avril and throwing an affectionate arm over her shoulder maybe a couple more times than is necessary.

Forget boys. The remix video is all about the watermelon Bonne Bell coded lesbian union of LIL' MAMA AND AVRIL LAVIGNE (as the lyric reminds us over and over again, and their vaguely romantic graffiti project attests). Doodling hearts around their joined names is optional. "Hey hey! You you! I could be your girlfriend!" Avril shouts at no one in particular, only to have Lil' Mama reply enthusiastically, " I'll be your girl, Lil' Mama be your girlfriend!" Who, exactly, is being girlfriends with whom here? Any kind of explicit boy love object is so missing from the video, it's tempting to elide him altogether.

In its crypto-lesbo subtext, "Girlfriend" is but a step away from that masterpiece of crossover collabo dyke-baiting "Let Me Blow Ya Mind," in which Eve offers Gwen Stefani a ride on her...erm...dune buggy (note the replay of the pickup scenario from the "Girlfriend" remix...apparently, a la Thelma & Louise, demi-erotic sisterhood is all about car travel), wears a black PVC jacket, fedora and suit top and scandalizes the naffs at a swanky party with her unapologetic, deviant Eve-ness. The glares and whispers that ensue make a lot more sense when you assume Gwen and Eve are holding hands when the camera's not looking. At the end they both get arrested and jailed, naturally.

The original "Girlfriend" runs on the narcissistic double performance of its star, but it ultimately goes the way of Mariah Carey's "Heartbreaker" rather than Britney Spears' "Gimme More." The two Mariahs duking it out over Jerry O'Connell in a movie theater ladies' room was all good satirical fun, but the video it left it at that. "Gimme More" seemed to be after something...well, more. Britney I, in a blond wig, giggles at a bar with a couple of ladyfriends and watches black-haired Britney II execute a sloppy (if slightly sinister) pole dance. "I see you!" Britney II slurs, and Britney I looks up, fascinated. The entire video seems to be about getting off on watching Brit-Brit getting off on watching herself. If there's a better metonym for the Spears trauma industry, I can't think of one.

G-L-O-R-I-A

Gloria Steinem pulled a Virginia Woolf today in her New York Times op-ed, pointing out the dubious electability of a female Barack Obama:

The woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity...If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf laid out her famous Shakespeare's sister argument this way:

She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face...what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.

Steinem didn't necessarily have this specific passage in mind when she wrote her op-ed. But even if she didn't, she played the same rhetorical gambit, imagining a successful male icon's female twin in order to show how a lucky throw of the gender dice determined his success. If gifted women in the sixteenth century were doomed, their twenty-first century counterparts are still handicapped. Who, speaking of the election, better fits the bill right now of the "half witch, half wizard" chimerical marvel, "feared and mocked at," than Hillary Clinton? If she loses, will she end her days in a lonely cottage outside Chappaqua?

Best Music of 2007

Third annual Pogo wrap-up. As usual, good luck trying to find these.

SINGLES

1. Uncool White Kids, "Scrabble Night at Winston's House (Is Every Night)"
2. D.O.A. Noisenetwork, "Nike Pays My Stone Massage Bills"
3. Kay-T Tigresse feat. Baby Cheetuh, "So Sexy/So Endangered"
4. Mamie Beergarden, "Not Before You Fill This Bathtub With Courvoisier"
5. Four Pretty 21-Year-Old Boys, "Guaranteed NME Cover Story"
6. Panda Snake Wolf Cub, "Me! Your Mom! Pumpkin Pie Filling!"
7. Schopenhauer Power Hour, "Metaphysical Graffiti"
8. The Celibate Hot Topic Sales Clerks, "Waiting for Pete Wentz"
9. Sheist, "1 2 3, Corporate Synergy"
10. Lil' Woozy, "No, Seriously, I've Just Hit My Head and Need to Have a Lie-Down"

ALBUMS

1. Underrated Dining Utensil, Spork Spork Spork Spork Spork
2. About Winnipeg, Trembling Cactus, Are You My Employer?
3. Mamie Beergarden, Back to Whatever Color It Was I Started With, As Long As It Wasn't, Like, Magenta or Something
4. Funksultan Swish and the Scandalous Seven, They Said it Couldn't Be Yodeled (reissue)
5. Strip Mall Inferno, Pastel Torah
6. Stereonoggin, Take This Album. Really, Just Take It.
7. Nina Hagen's Sister's Dirty Laundry, Too Obscurely Essential For You to Have Noticed When It Came Out the First Time, You Twat (reissue)
8. Scooby Don't, Gangstamina
9. D.O.A. Noisenetwork, Weight of Platinum (In My Bank Account)
10. El Emeno Pea, Cue R.S.

The flower, not the high school massacre

The new ThunderAnt short features long-distance songwriting, Carrie Brownstein riding a motorcycle and a last-act cameo by Mr. and Mrs. Corin Tucker. Lance Bangs has superb taste in Electrelane t-shirts, and throwaway joke songs written by Carrie Brownstein are still better than 95% of songs written by people in utter seriousness. And you thought it couldn't get any better than affectionate satires of feminist bookstore culture. Chuh!



Funny though this is, Emily's Sassy Lime actually recorded a lot of their music this way. For real (wait for 0:29).

Celebrity skinned

What's this? A picture of Courtney Love looking like...herself? Which is to say, before the plastic surgery binges, failed haute couture makeovers and spastic Osbournes cameos? It's like she's bought her original face back and returned to her vaguely punk rock but still awards show-ready style template of the mid-90s. Rub some lipstick on her chin and break one of those heels and she's as close to her gloriously trashy, unapologetic, Pretty on the Inside feminist self as we're ever likely to see her again.

There is a disconnect between who I am, and how I live, and how I am perceived. I used to play up to it a bit when I was on drugs because who cares: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, waaaah! I always seem to come number two to Keith Richards in lists of greatest hell-raisers of all time. But if I was a guy, I wouldn't even be on the list! I didn't know it was such a guy's job. It's like playing football in high heels and lipstick; no wonder it smears.

Chocolat chaud

If there were a lifetime achievement award for sexually ambiguous popular song titles, after going to Morrissey it would go straight (so to speak) to Hot Chocolate, based on the strength of their singles alone. In fact, some of these could be working titles rejected by Mozza for being not quite ambiguous enough.

You Could Have Been A Lady
You'll Always Be A Friend
Disco Queen
Heaven Is In The Back Seat Of My Cadillac
Man To Man
Put Your Love In Me
Are You Getting Enough Of What Makes You Happy
What Kinda Boy You Looking For (Girl)
I Gave You My Heart (Didn't I)
Never Pretend

Panic! at the Aviary

If you happen to have given up following all the new bands with names involving wolves, snakes and kids and decided to just focus on birds, then I've written the story for you. It's nice to see somebody forging new avian territory; doves, quails, owls and swans are all well spoken for.

My Big Muff can beat up your Big Muff

Squinting in the glare of this week's music spotlight: the most powerful aural time warp since that day you heard "Please Don't Go Girl" in the express check-out line at Costco. Or at least Mil Mascaras. It's like returning to the mid-80s via time machine, only without all of that perestroika/Maggie Thatcher/rioting-at-North-London-Polytechnic unpleasantness.

Pants: Let's play a game called, What Year Was This Recorded?

Me: I like this game. It sounds, obviously, like 1984. Or, to give myself a margin for error, 1983-1987. It sounds a lot like the Jesus & Mary Chain to me. BUT! But. I am thinking there is a trick involved here, and that it was in fact recorded recently. I hope that's true. Am I right?

Pants: It's by A Place to Bury Strangers and it came out in 2007. Their MySpace page has the song that Radio K has been playing a lot lately, "To Fix the Gash in Your Head," and other songs. I like them because I like JAMC. The lead guy in that band makes his own guitar pedals.

Camera Lucida

My dear old pen pal and ace photographer Megan Holmes has a photo blog.



She is doing especially lovely work in color now. I like this snapshot of a YACHT/Thermals show in Portland best (click here for a closer view!) because it looks like a high school field trip. The posh girl in the front row has mistaken field trip day for class picture day, but has decided not to be embarrassed about it, because she really, really likes YACHT. Or is holding hands with the girl next to her. The girl with the red hair is trying to figure out how she is going to finish her science project and read all of The Scarlet Letter over the weekend. The boy with the thumb in his pocket, at this precise moment in time, has decided he wants to be in a band. The boy in the Gumbi shirt is trying to create a force field between his palms, and the kid raising his hand in the back just wants to know if it's time for lunch yet.

Megan has also been known to do miraculous things with portraits of Beth Ditto. Keep an eye out.

Sacred and Profane

Do you believe in his sweet sensation?
Do you believe in a second chance?
Do you believe in rapture, babe?

This juxtaposition flashed into my mind during Thomas Sokolowski's Andy Warhol: Camouflage Man lecture the other day. Sokolowski is director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and when he put up the still from the Warhol film it was like seeing Bernini's St. Theresa peeking out from behind Bookwalter's eyes.

For religious man, his life was sanctified because it corresponded to paradigms established by the gods in the time of origins. Eliade suggests that in the very distant past, absolutely every aspect of life, even the most basic bodily function, had a religious significance. He sees this reflected in the case of an Australian people called the Karadjeri, whose mythology provided them with a paradigm on the position to take up for urinating.

Clearly, this immersion of life in sacred values is total contrast with the experience of non-religious man, whose life has become desacralised.

As well as acquiring religious value from divine paradigms, particular aspects of the life of religious man could also take on a sacramental value. Thus in Indian tantrism, sexual union became a religious ritual.

-"Understanding the Sacred"

Critical mass

Leave it to Todd Haynes to get America to admit that drag is hot.

Slate
Cate Blanchett is Bob Dylan: Could there be a sexier above-the-title tagline?...Before, I thought of Cate Blanchett as a beautiful and gifted actress. After this crush-inducing performance, I'm seriously considering flying to Australia to stalk her.

Salon
And, mightiest of all, is Cate Blanchett's Jude Quinn, a quivering, neurotic, sexually alluring elfin presence, a changeling, a bundle of receptors half-open to the world and half-guarded from it...Her way of walking is a jittery amble; onstage, her movements have the precision, the meticulous grace, of a Balinese shadow puppet.

Rolling Stone
She burns through Haynes' head-trip odyssey like an illuminating torch. Blanchett's soon-to-be-legendary performance is not a stunt, it's some kind of miracle. Playing the skinny, androgynous Dylan in his electric years — when his hair stood on end to match his fried nerves — Blanchett extends the possibilities of acting. You won't see a better example of interpretive art this year by man or woman.

PopMatters
And then Cate Blanchett arrives. To call her work here magnificent is too undeserving an understatement. She is regal, almost unrecognizable...Blanchett is so callous and cool we can feel the vibe resonating off the screen.

And that's just a rivulet of the tidal wave of praise she's getting.

When was the last time America was this in love with an actress in drag? Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry does not count; that was a P.C. head-pat and a whispered, "How brave!" This is different. This is a sweaty, lustful, heart-doodling critical swoon. Jude Quinn has been declared hot. And that's remarkable, given both the seriousness of the gender bluff involved (Madonna in a vest he is not) and Jude's distance from conventional, pretty boy-girliness.

Women impersonating men on film are usually seen as more unsettling than crush-worthy because they point back to their real-life counterparts, who show us that male privilege isn't non-negotiable and that our gendered division of power is unstable. But Haynes has made his medicine so sweet and so tasty we never realize it's actually a big spoonful of queer theory. "I'm the only one with any balls," Jude says, and we never doubt him for a second, even with Haynes winking at us through the subtext. We just rush to join the fan club.

The Philly City Paper got it right when it said that "Jude's defense of the politics of personal transformation echoes Haynes' own journey from ACT UP activist to engaged auteur, one who realizes that queering the canon can be as powerful as shouting slogans." Haynes is queering the Dylan canon; he's just doing it with such a light touch that nobody else has said it in so many words yet. It seems to me he's also suggested what Jonathan Weinberg said about Duane Michals back in 1996:

Things are queer, not only because the world cannot be known, and all representations are fallible, but because of the transforming process of art itself. In Michals's beautiful photographs, queerness becomes an ideal; the circularity of the series suggests that the image is inexhaustible and unknowable. But in the end, art's pleasures, its humor and mystery, do help us know the world in all its queerness.

As in Michals's photo series, so in I'm Not There. All representations are fallible--so why not pile them on? Why not six Dylans instead of one? You can't exhaust or understand the man, so why not choose a film style (collage) that exaggerates his circularity, his multiplicity and his unknowability, rather than disguises them?

I was really more after the strangeness of what he had become as a man at that moment. How he was androgynous, but not in the way David Bowie would be androgynous a few years later, in the early '70s. It was almost more the way Patti Smith was androgynous. He was just this otherworldly creature. This otherness had crept into him completely by that point... On a purely superficial level, I just wanted a woman's body to occupy that place, so that this strangeness could come back.

-Haynes, Salon interview

Gobble gobble

Thanksgiving! A time of rest and reflection. Of rosemary trees and cinnamon brooms. Of being condescendingly quizzed by your relatives on sports current events they are well aware you have no interest in, or knowledge about. I have been trying to come up with the reverse equivalent of this, and I've decided it would be if I were to go around saying, "Wow, Uncle Budward, you sure must be excited about the My Bloody Valentine reunion! And how about that farewell ESG show?!" Or even better, "Gee whiz, Uncie Kegger, I'll bet you've been up all night contemplating Butler's notion of performativity as it applies to the problematics of third wave feminist individualism!" After being told my tofurkey looked like a giant burnt potato and ordered to explain what I plan to be doing with my life in ten years, I felt an urge to slip away and quietly reassert my identity, perhaps by bathing, Scrooge McDuck-style, in a swimming pool filled with gay porn and Au Pairs records.

In lieu of said pool, I recommend the following: