Violet Vixen

Good, Solid Theater

2012-01-20T23:31:00.000-08:00

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Dir. Phylicia Rashad. The Ebony Repertory Theatre at The Kirk Douglas Theatre. 1/20/12.

This is really an excellent production of an excellent classic play. Everyone involved should be congratulated. The story of the Younger family fighting for opportunities to climb out of working poverty feels relevant and contemporary and political, despite the fact that it's a fairly traditional performance of a play that's 50 years old.

The most notable thing about this play is how real all of the characters feel. Even though Walter Lee's wounded masculinity dominates and terrorizes a houseful of strong, hard-working women, he often appears as the sympathetic center of the play in a way that feels human and realistic. This play makes strong political arguments while providing emotional insight into a range of characters. Their struggle is both high-stakes and absolutely ordinary. All of this is delivered powerfully by strong, sensitive actors in a really good-looking production. It's a fabulous ensemble of talented performers working with great material.

It's always nice to see CTG doing work that isn't by and about middle-aged, middle-class white men. A Raisin in the Sun is a breath of fresh air; I really must congratulate them for doing this partnership with Ebony Rep and for producing this and Fela and Clybourne Park all at the same time. I'm actually seeing new, non-white faces in the audience in addition to the excellent talent onstage.

Not about Sisters

2011-09-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

Sun Sisters by Vasanti Saxena. Company of Angels at The Alexandria Hotel. 9/2/11.

It's been years since I've seen something at Company of Angels. They're one of those companies I trust to do solid, interesting new work that I never quite get myself there to see. I am so glad I made it out there last night! I knew Sun Sisters had some kind of queer content, but I had somehow failed to get the message of how interesting and relevant and personal it would feel to me. I went expecting an Asian-American family drama, which it was, but not the intensely personal story of lesbian and queer identities across time that it turned out to be. Even writing about it, I'm totally ambivalent because the thing I want to tell my own friends and community about the play and why it is relevant to them may or may not spoil a dramatic revelation that is central to the plot. I suppose since it closes tonight, I don't have to worry to much about ruining it, but if you have a chance to see it, you should, especially my lesbian, queer, and trans friends.

So instead of describing the plot, I will tell you that the performances are truly excellent. This is a play in which all of the main characters are Asian-American women, and the actors show their skills brilliantly. Momo Yashima as mother and Andrea Lwin as daughter had a beautifully contentious, loving but painful relationship that felt so familiar to me from some of my interactions with my mother, and from my mom's interactions with her mother.

The play takes place now (or maybe the '90s), but also in flashbacks to the 1960s. It explores the mother's hidden past and a lost love played by Jully Lee. I want to go into all the details of gender identity and queer politics that this performance and this story evokes, but perhaps I shouldn't. Suffice it to say, while I would have cast a more butch actor, Lee played it quite sensitively and convincingly. While the queer politics may not be perfect, they feel personal and real in a way that is still unusual in many plays I see. And I loved seeing the overlapping communities within the audience respond to different parts of the story. There were those laughing with recognition at the 1000 Year Egg joke, and those laughing with recognition at the queer jokes. And, to me at least, they both felt lovely and authentic.

So where does the "Sun Sisters" come in if it's not a play about sisters, you ask? Well, it's a reference to a folk tale and multiple possible interpretations of what the story teaches us. I would have liked to see a little more made of this tale, visually, in the production. It's a lovely lens through which to view the show, but maybe it should have been told or alluded to early in the performance as a framing device. Instead, there's an architecture lecture that opens the show and recurs throughout that is quite important but not exactly a compelling hook.

Anyway, if you're looking for a good queer Asian-American play, I highly recommend this one. I'm definitely interested in seeing what Vasanti Saxena does next. If you have a chance to see this production tonight, you should go, but otherwise, I'd like to see this particular play have more of a life. And I'll have to be more vigilant about keeping Company of Angels on my radar.

A Surprisingly Good Musical about Group Therapy

2011-06-24T12:14:00.001-07:00

Group: A Musical. Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble. Stella Adler Theatre. 6/23/11.

I must admit, I wasn't too excited about going to a new musical about group therapy. In fact, the only reason I went was because friends of mine had met the playwright, Adam Emperor Southard, at Hollywood Fringe events and thought he was a cool guy. My skepticism, however, was clearly and dramatically proven wrong. The musical wasn't perfect, really, and it's not a concept I inherently like at all, but I was laughing in the beginning and crying by the end, so I seem to have bought in completely despite myself.

There's something so sweet and honest about this little musical, with its dark humor and modest setting, that I couldn't help but appreciate it. It has some rough moments, particularly in the beginning, and particularly with the coming out storyline, which hit closest to home for me and therefore felt the most awkward when the reactions or emotions (or the rhymes) didn't ring quite true to my own experience. There's a little bit of a tendency toward reductive pop psychology, but honestly much less than I would have expected. Mostly, the concept of group therapy is a plausible and compelling backdrop for people to talk about their problems and forge difficult friendships and as such, it really works.

The LA Theatre Ensemble actors, who worked on a run of this show in January and returned to remount it for the Fringe Festival, all gave excellent, heartfelt performances dealing with some rough emotional subjects without feeling heavy at all. Their singing wasn't always spectacular, but there were some beautiful notes and moments that made up for the bits that were a little off. I really need to go see more LATE stuff. They clearly do good work.

Overall, you should absolutely go see this musical at its last two fringe performances this weekend. And I really hope this show has legs to get more productions, maybe a bit more workshopping and refining. This is the sort of musical that could be done anywhere, as it takes place in one small room, but needs and showcases some exceptional acting and singing talent (and 3 extremely skilled onstage musicians). It's a very good small-scale, raw, personal musical that could be perfect for small theaters and second stage spaces all over.

More than Company

2011-06-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a screening in a movie theater of Stephen Sondheim's Company performed by the New York Philharmonic and starring Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby. Somehow, this production was a revelation in a way that I haven't experienced with previous versions. The production itself was magnificent, with its lush orchestral sounds, star-studded cast and spectacular precision, but it was more than that. The performances were tight and nuanced and thoughtful in ways that made me think about and feel the meaning of the play in ways I hadn't before.

Perhaps it's where I am in my life now that shifted the meaning of the show for me. Being over thirty and having friends who are married and having children, and more importantly having long conversations over many beers with friends evaluating and agonizing over desires to or not to get married and have children, certainly made me think differently and more personally about the relationships and life choices depicted in the musical. But I think there were details of this production and the truly skilled acting of Neil Patrick Harris in particular that made me rethink the show as well. I have always loved and appreciated Company, but this time I felt it and it felt true and right and honest and scary in ways that it never has before.

The show was completely sexy (mmm... Neil Patrick Harris and Christina Hendricks in bed together) and completely cynical (although Elaine Stritch still beats Patti LuPone in my mind for sheer joyous drunken cynicism) and yet managed to communicate a deeper, more reflective meditation on marriage than I have ever felt. My own personal philosophies about building a community of friendships rather than focusing on the individual or couple was both reflected and challenged as I watched the performances onscreen, and the beloved friend who had been meditating, Bobby-like, on marriage realized that his own individual agonies were more common, perhaps universal, than he thought. Part of me smiled ironically when I watched "Side by Side by Side" and reflected on it as a depiction of a bunch of heterosexual married couples who relied on the unappreciated and unreciprocated labor of the queer person excluded from the institution of marriage (Harris, not Bobby) to keep the institution of marriage going. Though I could have used more of "Being Alive" at the end, with Harris's heartbreaking high notes, the end of the play is beautiful and bittersweet in a way that reconciles my own personal cynicism about marriage with possibilities of Bobby's personal transformation and leaves me happy and hopeful. It's an unbelieveably lovely, detailed, tight production filled with consummate professional performers. I highly recommend it and I will be rushing to buy it if and when it comes to DVD.

See This Fringe Show: Headscarf and the Angry Bitch

2011-06-20T00:57:00.000-07:00

Headscarf and the Angry Bitch by Zehra Fazal. Theatre Asylum. Hollywood Fringe Festival. 6/19/11.

Zehra Fazal's one woman show about growing up and coming out as a Pakistani-American Muslim is a witty romp through family, sex and post-9-11 politics. Under the guise of a community-outreach lecture series on Muslim American culture, Fazal's combination of monologue and music were refreshing with just the right amount of sharp-tongued personal detail. The show was more friendly and approachable than stridently political and mostly demonstrated Fazal's excellent performance skills. I highly recommend you see this show.

Headscarf is performing next Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Get there; it truly deserves a loud, adoring audience!

Seriously Wacky Clowning

2011-05-28T02:21:00.000-07:00

Four Clowns. Sacred Fools Theater. Los Angeles. 5/27/11.

Whenever a friend says to me, "Hey, want to see a show?," my default response is "Sure! Why not?" Tonight, like many other nights, that resulted in a late night trip to Sacred Fools.

I didn't really love Four Clowns, but I was impressed by the hard work and zany skills of four very talented performers. The show really blossomed when the actors were off script, either improvising with audience suggestions or just clowning around between scenes.

The piece revolves around the 4 types of clowns, the angry clown, the nervous clown, the mischievous clown, and the sad clown, so I was expecting a demonstration of these different comedic archetypes. However, what Four Clowns really does is provide each of these clowns with a backstory and follows them through 4 stages of life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood/work, and death). At first, I pretty much hated this pop psychology approach to clowning and was more offended than amused by the depictions of childhood abuse and neglect. As it moved past childhood, though, the play grew on me, and grew increasingly humorous. When the clowns hit their stride, I really did find myself laughing, and really, what else do I want from clowns?

From a gender and sexuality perspective, this isn't exactly the best play ever. Alexis Jones as the Sad Clown was the only woman in the cast, and as such she portrayed some pretty terrible mothers in addition to her own abject state as victim of emotional abuse. However, she absolutely held her own in the physicality of the clowning and had some really great moments of dancing and movement that I loved. Similarly, Amir Levi as the Nervous Clown started out portraying some gay cliches (and a truly awful abusive mother), but moved beyond them to depict a sweet and then heartbreaking first date with Angry Clown Raymond Lee.

The best moments of the play were absolutely the moments without words and the moments when the clowns were freest to improvise. The use of nonsense and gobbledygook to replace dialogue created truly wonderful moments. When two clowns playing teenage bullies carried on an entire conversation using only words "dude" and "bro," I was absolutely delighted by the creativity and expressiveness of their dialogue. This is one of the few shows I can honestly say the less dialogue the better; the mumbles and silences showcased the physicality and creativity that are absolutely the strengths of this show.

While I didn't love this piece, I absolutely respect it. If you're interested in some seriously dark, sometimes offensive explorations of what clowning can communicate, this is totally the show for you. And during the Fringe Festival, the same actors will be doing something titled Four Clowns: Romeo and Juliet, which I think just might be awesome. Since for me the script was the difficult point of this production, I think I just might love them when they're using Shakespeare's plot instead.

Lesbian Comedy Marathon

2010-11-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

This weekend! (and the following two weekends Nov. 5-21)! Fabulous lesbian stand-up comedy/performance art. Local Los Angeles chicana lesbiana performance artist Adelina Anthony is presenting her whole Hocicona trilogy in sequence and I for one am super excited to be seeing all three pieces. In fact, I'm a little worried for my face, because when I have come from Anthony's shows in the past, the muscles in my face have been sore from laughing so much. I'm not sure I can take the 3 days in a row workout, but I'll be there to try.

I've seen the first of Anthony's pieces, "La Angry Xicana", several times already, so I can attest that it's delightful and hilarious. In it, Anthony discusses politics, Hollywood, and whatever else is on her mind or makes her angry. Every time I see it, it feels fresh and new.

In "La Sad Girl," which I have seen in early workshops but not in a finalized form, Anthony dons kinky goth-ish clothing and discusses break-ups, BDSM, and other subjects of a personal (fictional) nature. The refrain "Que Sad!" echos throughout the piece, but only becomes funnier each time.

The third piece, "La Chismosa," I have only seen in excerpts. Anthony adopts the persona of a knocked-up gossip to discuss politics and popular culture, using live facebook posts to share chisme about her audience. Last time I saw parts of it, it had some very serious professors rolling in the aisles.

What is a 'hocicona,' you ask? Well a moment of googling seems to suggest that it means "snout" or "long-nosed" when associated with various animals (ie the longnosed stingray is called the raya hocicona and the snouted chinchbug is the chinche hocicona), but associated with humans, the word most commonly means "big-mouthed" or "foul-mouthed." This interview with Anthony defines it as "a shameless, big-mouthed backtalker." Indeed, Anthony is wonderfully shameless in her comedy and she definitely gets the last word.

I can personally attest that all 3 pieces are on their own hilarious and brilliantly critical. I can't wait to see them all together. So brush up on your Spanglish and prepare some of your sexiest outfits, because Anthony's audiences are pretty darn hot. Just don't walk in late or leave your cell phone on, because Anthony is known to ridicule mercilessly any audience member that catches her attention. Don't say I didn't warn you!

In The Political Wake

2010-04-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Wake. Lisa Kron. dir. Leigh Silverman. Kirk Douglas Theater. 4/15/10.

Lisa Kron's new play, The Wake might be a truly great play. I don't think it's quite there yet. I wasn't completely seduced. But I'm totally interested in a second date.

The Wake is a soaring attempt to map the political on the personal, to discuss the politics of the last ten years from a point of view that is both embraces and indicts American liberalism and exactly the people Kron expects to find in her theater audiences. I don't completely buy it, but there are some absolutely stunning, true, painful moments along the way.

The story focuses (too much, if you ask me) on Ellen, played by Heidi Schreck, who was both the center point and the weak point in the play (probably through no fault of the actor's, who handled a ton of complicated dialogue with aplomb, if not charm). I just spent way too much of the play hating how utterly solipsistic she was. I think her privileged self-centeredness is an important point, but that it needs to be revealed more slowly; her astounding lack of awareness of anyone around her should only be completely understood in Act II, and before then she needs to show some redeeming qualities rather than just an egomaniacal tendency to lecture. As an audience member who believed immediately that Ellen was intended to be a representative of the play's audience, I wanted at least some sense of the good to entice me into accepting Kron's more difficult assessments.

Where the play really sings is in the group scenes. The ensemble of this play is truly excellent, and when all the characters get talking, they all have such great depth and humanity and differentiation to their interactions that I don't know how anyone could help but fall in love with them. Carson Elrod as Ellen's partner, Danny, and Andrea Frankle as his lesbian sister, Kayla were absolutely delightful, real, wonderful characters and Dierdre O'Connell as Judy as an older, acerbic, out-of-place houseguest and worldly foreign aid worker brightened the play up considerably and counteracted Ellen delightfully. I would have loved them to be more clearly developed in relationship to the play's political allegory. Why can't they all be developed as equal representations of failures and blind spots in the American character?

Where the play falls apart for me is in the burden it places on Ellen and the parallels it makes between the personal and the political for her. She spends far too much time talking directly to the audience, explaining revelations that should be made in conversations between characters. If I were in charge, I would eliminate all of these monologues except maybe the very first and trim all of Ellen's text. She's supposed to be talky, but I think that can be communicated more clearly and efficiently than it is. Some of these rants are smart, but none of them are entirely necessary. The play spends way too much time telling us that Ellen is smart and complicated when far too often what we see of her is one-note and simplistic, though verbose. I can accept intellectually that that is the point, but I find it profoundly unpleasant to have to sit through it. I would take away some of that, but spend a little more time working up the relationships between the political current events timeline and the personal events in the play. I liked very much in the end how Ellen in conversation with Judy jumped back and forth between relationships and politics, and I would have liked to see more hints of that during the rest of the play. The politics were generally represented by news clips and projections, which were very good, but didn't always work as well as I wanted them to as representations of the personal relationships. Perhaps they needed to be juxtaposed more closely, but I didn't always see which parallels the play wanted me to make. This is especially true in discussing the projection of American politics in the long term, which was actually smart and yet didn't clearly map to the personal/political allegory of the characters. Basically, it felt like Ellen was too static of a character and didn't really grow or change even in what should have been powerful revelations about herself and her belief. That may be true about us as a country, but it's pretty difficult for telling a story.

While it isn't by any means a perfect play and I definitely feel that it needs some cuts, The Wake is an unqualified success in that I left the theater thinking and talking about the play, and the politics. It reflects beautifully, if pessimistically, on where we are now, although the answers about what to do about it are disturbingly absent. I'm excited to hear about how it will grow and change at Berkeley Rep and the Public Theater. I'm so glad I got to see it first, and I hope that CTG will offer more exciting new plays (especially those by women!) like this.

Not-So-Noir New Musical

2010-04-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

Nightmare Alley. The Geffen Playhouse. 4/12/10.

I feel guilty reviewing the shows I see at the Geffen, since I ended up with tickets for the first preview (hey, it's all I can afford) and at that stage, the productions often show signs of being not quite ready for prime time with flubbed lines and occasional acting failures. The cast of Nightmare Alley, however, seemed well-prepared and professional and deserves nothing but applause for their performances. The worst side-effect of the preview that I noticed was that the actors were over-mic'd so that their powerful voices were loud enough to be cringe-worthy from where I was in the back of the balcony. This show was excellently cast with talented performers who had lovely voices and handled the music beautifully. In fact, I loved the cast and most of the music. Larry Cedar was especially charming as Pete, the surprisingly spry drunken old carny who haunts the main character (Stan, played forcefully by James Barbour).

While the performances were great and the music enjoyable, the plot of the show decidedly needs work. The musical departs significantly from the 1947 Tyrone Power film, but I haven't read the book, so perhaps it remains true to that plot. Unfortunately, several of the plot points don't work particularly well as they stand in the musical at the moment. That gritty, dark nightmare sensibility is desperately missing in a show that otherwise has a lot of potential.

I like the choice to emphasize the carnival as being in the 1930s dust bowl and the sense of desperation and poverty barely contrasted with the hustle and artifice of a dingy sideshow provide a lot of evocative opportunity, of which the production fails to take full advantage. The carnival needs to be established early on (preferably with a strong opening production number, which this show lacked) as a combination of nightmare and promise. As an audience member, I need to feel the desperation and cynicism and fascination of the carnival as a "Nightmare Alley." Instead, the show opens with Zeena the fortune-teller (played by Mary Gordon Murray) moralizing about fate and choosing your path in a way that seems to shut down rather than compel the audience's engagement and imagination.

There was also an odd sense of referencing the Wizard of Oz, with Cedar as very Ray Bolger-esque, Glendening first appearing in the funnel hat of the the tin man, and Michael McCarty having some of the vaudeville spirit of the Bert Lahr's cowardly lion, but I thought these references did a disservice to the show, because the last thing we need from our leading man, who should be charming and ambitious and manipulative, is an association with the wide-eyed innocence of Judy Garland's Dorothy Gale. Stan should be at home in the carnival from the first, not as disoriented as Dorothy arriving in Oz, and while the moment of recognition of the allusions was fun, it took me out of the spirit of the show.

The show makes several similar unfortunate choices that imply the need for a bit of a re-write, but this is a musical that I want to fix, not dismiss. It has a lot of potential, but it doesn't yet capture the grittiness and desperation that it needs to make it work. Go see it for the music by Jonathan Brielle and some really strong performances, particularly by Sarah Glendening as the spirited ingenue and Cedar in several roles. Cedar's duet with Mary Gordon Murray, "I Get By," was my favorite number in the show by far. I was also happy to run across Melody Butiu, a local actress who I've seen in many excellent performances, as one of four severely underutilized chorusgirls/backup singers who need a more compelling role in the show. While I'm not an expert, their costumes suggested 1940s pinup rather than 1930s carnival worker to me and I would have rather seen them more clearly integrated into the scenes in which they performed. With a stronger opening and some plot and character revisions, this could be a really fun, dark musical, but it's not quite there yet.

On My Radar

2010-04-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

It's been forever since I've done this, but here are some events the internet should know more about:

The Wake, by Lisa Kron: Lisa Kron, one of the 5 Lesbian Brothers, though perhaps more famous for her Tony-nominated play, The Well, is back with a new work about politics, elections, and a burgeoning lesbian relationship. That's all I really know, except all the news and reviews are excellent. It's at the Kirk Douglas through April 18 and I MUST GO.

Circle X is currently doing Sheila Callaghan's Lascivious Something at Inside the Ford. It's set in Greece in the Reagan '80s and I'm totally curious. The title is wonderfully decadent. Plus, support woman playwrights!

Exploring Metaculture with Devil Bunny
Thursday, April 8, 2010
6:00 pm - 10:00 pm, Dodd Hall - Room 147

Join Devil Bunny in Bondage, AKA Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, for an evening of performance, writing and video works, featuring a diverse cast of characters such as extraterrestrial, feminist heroes, cinematic gorillas in pink-ray, ethnotopic inverted minstrels, and supernatural mestizas that exist along various points of the time-space-culture continuum. The evening will end with an artist talk and Q & A.

And if I were in San Francisco:

PERFORMING in S.F.
3 NIGHTS ONLY!!
APRIL 23rd-25th

intersection for the arts

Adelina Anthony writes: I'm excited to be one of the performers in "La Semilla Caminante/The Traveling Seed: A Multimedia Performance Work." It is a journey where indigenous myth resurfaces through contemporary story-telling. It is a story of travel, crossing river and ocean, and coming home to where we started. Created by ground-breaking artist activists Celia Hererra-Rodriguez, Cherríe Moraga & Alleluia Panis. (Tix $5-$15)

Where's the Justice?

2010-03-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

RFK: Journey to Justice. LA Theatre Works. 3/18/10.

First and foremost, let me say that I'm generally in favor of L.A. Theater Works, The Play's the Thing on NPR, the commissioning of new plays, and even historical docudrama as a genre. However, RFK: The Journey to Justice, is a pretty terrible example of all of these things. The actors were fine, in fact, many of them were excellent voice talent, but, the play itself was problematic at best.

First of all, I honestly believe that in this day and age, it is decidedly unacceptable and uninteresting to write a play that features 8 men in suits and one woman playing mostly wives and secretaries. I don't care if this is a play about a famous man. Surely he met and had interesting and historically relevant interactions with women at some point between 1958 and 1968. If we don't consistently, repeatedly, vocally tell the world that this is absurd, apparently the world will keep commissioning and producing plays that perpetuate the myth that women only exist as a footnote to history.

OK, after the feminist rant, let's talk about the play itself. It's a weird play. It supposedly depicts Bobby Kennedy's slow realization of the importance of civil rights and his growing political conscience at a time when the world was changing. This could be a fascinating subject, but in this particular context, it really wasn't. Part of this was because the play was a docudrama and thus kept itself mostly to events that were on the historical record, which meant that there were many excerpts from speeches and even the off the record private conversations felt like speeches. Nothing in the play felt intimate or personal at all. The arc of the play didn't even really build properly to give weight to RFK's commitment to civil rights as the turning point of the play. It depicted a slow process of being forced to action by political circumstances that more undermined than celebrated RFK's civil rights record, and then all of a sudden in Act II, it seemed like he really cared. In telling RFK's story, the play didn't really show anything that couldn't be seen on a timeline.

But worst of all for me, the play was spectacularly infuriating, depressing, and perhaps even cynical. Because of the way the story was framed, the whole show was a march toward three assassinations. You knew they were coming from the very beginning, because you know your history, so you get the feeling that the whole play and by extension the civil rights movement is kind of futile and hopeless, both because of how much racism and poverty and injustice there still is in the world and because the play perpetuates an idea that history (or hope, or change) is the story of the great works of great men, all of whom are brutally murdered.

I don't know how anyone can watch this play and not think about how low the percentage of enrollment of African-American students is at universities (2% at UCLA in 2006, though up a bit since then), or how the combination of economic downturn and budget shortfalls are decimating services to the poor, or the current healthcare fight. I know perfectly well that most of the audience wasn't sitting there like I was listening to all the play's rhetoric about equality and justice and being furious that no one is standing up and saying the same things about LGBT rights. On a day when Lt. Dan Choi chained himself to the white house fence because HE IS BEING FIRED FOR BEING GAY, it was hard to watch a play about a white guy's valuable if occasionally paternalistic and politically motivated interest in civil rights without feeling both furious and cynical about the possibility of anyone paying attention to the current civil rights struggles. Usually, I would give a play the benefit of the doubt in relation to current events, but this particular play made very clear that it was NOT about gay rights. There were a couple of mean-spirited J. Edgar Hoover gay jokes and a lot of emphasis on the equal rights of MEN that basically built connections between the characters and with the audience through the celebration of heterosexual masculinity. Yes, of course, this is a representation of a different time and different attitudes, but the past is always filtered through the present and in this particular version, the patriarchal masculinity and homophobia are being perpetuated rather than critiqued. Historical docudrama should be an opportunity to revisit and reevaluate history through the lens of drama and distance; this production didn't provide the drama, or the reevaluation that this story need and deserves.

Curiouser and Queerer

2010-02-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

Project Wonderland. Bootleg Theater. 2/14/10.

Bootleg Theater's Project Wonderland is a wild and wonderful live version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland complete with excellent puppetry and delightfully strange musical numbers.

The production tells the Alice in Wonderland story as you know it, but also includes a depiction of Charles Dodgson (whose pen name was Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell as a framing story. Lon Haber plays Dodgson, but also steps into the role of Alice when she crosses into Wonderland (when Dodgson goes into an opium-induced dream), so that this production allows the modern assumption of Dodgson's attraction to Alice but also offers a more poignant (and less creepy) possibility of Dodgson identifying with Alice and wanting to be her rather than be with her. Haber makes a surprisingly engaging Alice leading a truly fabulous ensemble cast, including a chorus of five other Alices that sadly disappeared into other roles after a few scenes.

Everyone in the show gave skilled performances, but I was particularly impressed with Matthew Patrick Davis as the Mad Hatter among other roles. In addition to being a giant (6'8" according to his website) with excellent physical comedy skills, he's also adorable and managed to be astonishingly earnest even in clown makeup when he had a brief appearance as Duckworth, a friend of Dodgson's. He's prone to mugging and thereby looking almost exactly like a young Jim Carey, which I enjoy less than some of the other things he does, but he's definitely one to watch and I will gladly follow any future theater endeavors. The mad tea party scene went on a little long, but watching Davis cavort in crazy striped pants and a top hat helped prevent boredom even when the scene dragged.

I also very much enjoyed Jessica Hanna as the White Rabbit (with an excellent signing voice) and Jabez Zuniga as the Queen of Hearts (and as the March Hare, but the Queen of Hearts was way more fabulous). The entire ensemble did a highly entertaining job with music by Indira Stefanianna (and a few classic rock standards) and dance numbers choreographed by Ken Roht (the mad genius behind the 99-cent store extravaganzas that usually inhabit the evidence room/bootleg around Christmas).

A huge amount of credit must go to director Robert A. Prior who also adapted the show. It makes me wonder why Prior and his Fabulous Monsters Performance Group isn't on my radar. I definitely want to see and know about whatever Prior does in the future; I was seriously intrigued. It was a clever production, subtly suggesting issues of queer (gay and/or transgender) identity and identification, but also emphasizing how we raise and educate children and indoctrinate them into adult social forms. This production gave the distinct impression that the grown-up world of schools and tea parties and croquet and court rooms is the source of all nonsense, and that the process of growing up is memorizing absurd words and social forms that never come out quite right. I thought that this was a brilliant combination of themes and that the production emphasized this element of Carroll's book quite well, especially in the caterpillar (played by Michael Bonnabel) scene with its poetry recitation and discussion of transformation.

Most of all, though, the stand-out aspects of this production were the costumes by Teresa Shea and the puppets by Lynn Jeffries. Infinitely inventive, this show was a visual delight. Jeffries' shadow puppets were particularly clever and astonishing. They did an excellent job visualizing the crazy wonderland world of this production, from giant and miniature Alices to dancing starfish and lobsters. The Queen of Hearts' sequined cone bra totally stole the show.

Overall, it's a fun show though it does run a little long (1 hr 45 min with no intermission), and maybe one or two scenes were longer than they needed to be. It's a good homage to both Carroll's book and the film versions I recall fondly from my childhood. I'm sorry I went to the last performance, so recommending it doesn't achieve much, but I really did enjoy the show with all its visual spectacle. It inspired me to think differently about a familiar story, and that in itself is an impressive achievement.

Really cool event!

2010-02-12T14:16:00.001-08:00

This shows just how nerdy I am, but I think this is a totally awesome sounding event and I seriously wish I were in the Bay Area to enjoy it. If you know anyone up there, please tell them about this. How cool is it that David Henry Hwang is going back to his alma mater to stage the play that started it all and to celebrate the student theater group he founded?!?

Please join the Stanford Asian Pacific American Alumni Club
in welcoming...

David Henry Hwang '79
Hope Nakamura '82
Nancy Takahashi Hatamiya '81
and
Lisa Pan '81

...back to campus for

the Asian American Theater Project's
30th anniversary re-staging of
David Henry Hwang's Obie Award-winning Play:

FOB

The play that started it all, "FOB" was written by David Henry Hwang while
he was an undergraduate at Stanford. He and his friends founded the Asian
American Theater Project in order to produce the play for the first time
at Stanford's Asian American theme dorm in 1979. Hwang's career-launching
play would go on to premier Off-Broadway and win an Obie Award.

Showtimes
Thursday, 2/18 @ 7pm ($5)
Friday, 2/19 @ 7pm ($5)
* Saturday, 2/20 @ 3pm ($10) *

at the Nitery Theater in Old Union

Special Events Following Saturday Show
featuring playwright David Henry Hwang '79 and original cast and crew
members Hope Nakamura '82, Nancy Takahashi Hatamiya '81, and Lisa Pan '81

FOB Alumni Panel @ 5pm, Nitery Theater
Immediately follows Saturday show, included in ticket price.

FOB Reception @ 6 pm, A3C Ballroom
FREE. Refreshments provided.

Reserve Your Play Tickets Now
visit bit.ly/fob2010

SAPAAC members, contact Cynthia Liao '09
(cynliao@stanford.edu) for discount

David Henry Hwang is the author of M. Butterfly and Yellowface among many
others. He was born in Los Angeles, California and graduated from Stanford
University as well as Yale School of Drama. Hwang was twenty-one and had
just graduated from Stanford when his first play, FOB, was accepted for
production in at the National Playwrights Conference. The very next year,
FOB won an Obie Award as the best new play of the season. Hwang holds
honorary degrees from Columbia College in Chicago and The American
Conservatory Theatre. He lives in New York City with his wife, actress
Kathryn Layng, and their children, Noah David and Eva Veanne.
This is the Stanford Asian Pacific American Alumni Club (SAPAAC) e-mail
list, hosted by the Stanford Alumni Association.

Military Intelligence and Sex Wars

2010-02-11T02:05:00.000-08:00

North Atlantic. The Wooster Group. The REDCAT. 2/10/10.

North Atlantic is a Wooster Group deconstruction of military and gender politics, set more or less during the Cold War. South Pacific it ain't. It offers a wonderfully disturbing, problematic exploration of sex as war and sex in war, exploiting and exploding mid-century gender roles and the conventions of war movies. This piece differs from the Wooster Group productions I have seen in the past because it isn't an explicit deconstruction of one or two significant texts, but rather a critical response to an entire genre (or three).

First and foremost, North Atlantic is a piece about military culture and the military in popular culture. The action takes place on an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic (although you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you read it in the program) and begins with a wonderfully gruff young officer (Roscoe Chizzum, I believe was his character name) spouting military intelligence cliches at two enlisted men. His rapid-fire delivery of utter nonsense was one of many high points of the production for me.

The production comes into focus when Wooster Group veteran Kate Valk appears as Ann Pussey, serving as madam for a team of secretaries. The women offer a series of bawdy sexual comments about competing in an upcoming wet uniform contest as they fiddle manically with reel-to-reel tape and rotary phones, separated from the downstage playing area of the men by a long table on a raked platform stretching upstage at a steep angle. Although all of the women were excellent, I found Maura Tierney with her shaved head and short shorts particularly compelling and I wish the character had explored that shockingly butch first impression more. Seriously. I would love to see a Maura Tierney play butch for real. *Swoon*

Lurking behind the explicit sexuality depicted in the play lies the threat of homosexuality. Implicitly, North Atlantic suggests that extreme performances of heterosexual voraciousness are necessary in the military to disprove the threat of queerness. When an outside officer, Ned Ludd, arrives on the carrier, Captain Roscoe first challenges his heterosexuality and later dismisses him as an 'egghead,' suggesting a critique of the military's homophobia and anti-intellectualism as intertwined. The constant low-level threat of homosexuality culminated in a dance scene at an after-hours social event in which three couples danced awkwardly together, with the heterosexual couple in the center, two men dancing together on one side and two women on the other. This scene created a beautiful tableau of the possibilities and impossibilities of romance and intimacy within military culture.

Occasional song-and-dance numbers livened and lightened up the production, providing another layer of interpretation by linking the military setting with cowboy images of Americana. At a few points in the show, the action stopped while everyone broke out into slightly skewed versions of familiar songs such as "Yankee Doodle" and "I Ride an Old Paint." Though I believe these songs have existed since the show's beginnings in 1983/4, they felt particularly pertinent in evoking the George W. Bush's cowboy militarism of the most recent wars. These songs speak to the central images of how the U.S. views itself and represents itself as a military powerhouse that valorizes individuality and independence even when they are destructive or impossible. In the stark technology of the stage/battleship, these songs offer a nostalgic depiction of rural romanticism and longing for a Wyoming that seems impossibly distant, while being corrupted by the raunchy worldliness of the plays characters (particularly the women).

The play also deals with issues of interrogation and torture in a comical but disturbing way. Overall, North Atlantic explores and exaggerates the cliches of military culture and how the military is represented to civilian audiences in a strange, disturbing, thoughtful way. Like all Wooster Group productions, there are more questions than answers, but sometimes that in itself can be compelling and productive if the questions are asked in the right way. I have criticized the Wooster Group in the past for depicting problematic political and cultural images (most notably blackface in Route 1 & 9) without clear critical commentary. In this piece, while their position wasn't necessarily unambiguous, it at least gives me a hook on which to hang my own critical hat, suggesting satirical commentary on a culture of sexism and sexual exploitation within the military and criticism of the popular reconfiguration of rigid gender roles and sexual opportunism into film narratives of romance. These aren't necessarily the Wooster Group's or director Elizabeth LeCompte's positions, but they are the ideas that the performance inspired me to think about, and I think for this production, that is critical interpretation enough.

NOTE: Please excuse the fact that I haven't linked actor names to the roles. The program only offers the list of ensemble members, so all I know is that the cast includes Ari Fliakos, Frances McDormand, Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk, and special guest artists Steve Cuiffo, Koosil-ja Hwang, Paul Lazar, Zachary Oberzan, Jenny Seastone-Stern and Maura Tierney and they were all absolutely excellent in a demanding ensemble performance. If I can find more information, I will try to amend the text at a later date to reflect proper actor and character names.

Zinn Mourning

2010-01-29T04:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not big on mourning or obituaries, particularly for public figures, but the death of Howard Zinn has made me reflective. The New York Times obituary is a solid if uninspired discussion of his life and career (and now I really want to read those plays he wrote!), but A People's History of the United States had a formative impact on the person and the scholar I am today.

I was fortunate enough, in the conservative suburb in which I was raised, to be taught entirely by socialist history teachers in high school. In the summer between my junior and senior years, everyone in my class was required to read one real, scholarly history book. From long list of possibilities, I chose (on the teacher's recommendation) A People's History of the United States. This book taught me, at a very impressionable age, that scholarship can be entertaining and engaging, that history can (and always does) have a perspective and an opinion, and to question the power structures that shape the world. This, perhaps more than anything else I read in high school, prepared me for college and academia and has stayed with me. I've carried this book with me every place I've lived, and seeing a copy on a bookshelf has helped me identify many a kindred spirit.

Zinn's ideas and opinions, and more than that the strength of his convictions, is inspiring to me. Reading obituaries has been even more inspirational, because it reminds me at a period in which I have no purchase, no power, and no real existence in academia that more is possible and that this tiny world isn't all that important compared to the global and ideological struggles in which we are engaged. Zinn's work takes me back to my own core beliefs, but also inspires me to question and think critically about everything. All I can really say is: Thank you, Howard Zinn. I hope his works continue to be read well into the future.

Tiki Space Cocktails

2010-01-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

Here are the best tiki party-meets-outer-space themed cocktail recipes that I've found. So many obscure ingredients! If you know any more, I'd love some suggestions.

Astronaut

8-10 ice cubes, cracked
1/2 measure white rum
1/2 measure vodka
1/2 measure fresh lemon juice
1 dash passion fruit juice
lemon wedge, to decorate

Put half of the cracked ice into a cocktail shaker and add the rum, vodka and juices. Shake until a frost forms. Strain it into an old-fashioned glass filled with the remaining ice. Decorate with a lemon wedge.

Blue Moon

Ice
2 ounces dry gin, such as Tanqueray
½ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ ounce creme de violette

Fill a mixing glass two-thirds full with ice. Add the gin, lemon juice and creme de violette. Shake vigorously and strain into a cocktail (martini) glass.

Blue Hawaiian

1 oz Light Rum
1 oz Blue Curacao
1 part Crème de Coconut
2 parts Pineapple Juice
1 Cup Ice

Combine ingredients in a blender or mix well and enjoy on the rocks. Garnish with a cherry and pineapple. Don’t forget the paper umbrella!

Jet Fuel

2 oz Whiskey
3/4 oz Dry Sack Sherry
2 dashes Bitters
Squeeze orange slice into glass

Space Monkey

1 part milk
4 parts rum
4 parts banana liquor
ice

Mix well

Lost In Space Martini

2 oz citrus vodka
1 oz triple sec
1 oz Tang® orange drink
Rim a cocktail glass with powdered Tang®. Shake ingredients in an ice filled shaker and strain into glass.

Rocket Fuel

3/4 oz 151-proof rum
1/2 oz vodka
1/2 oz blue curacao

Pour ingredients, in order listed, into a shot glass or rocks glass. Serve.

Fuzzy Astronaut

1 1/2 oz vodka
3/4 oz peach schnapps
Tang® orange drink to balance

Build over ice in a Collins glass. Stir, sip and enjoy the shuttle launch!

Tiki Girl

1 1/2 oz rum
1 oz amaretto
Orange Juice
Pineapple juice
splash grenadine

Pour all ingredients except grenadine into a large glass filled with ice. Shake well and drizzle in grenadine.

Barbarella

2 oz Cointreau
1 oz Sambuca

Blade Runner

3 parts Apricot Brandy
5 parts Bourbon
1 part Grenadine
2 parts Lemon Juice

Darth Vader

½ oz. vodka
½ oz. gin
½ oz. tequila
½ oz. rum
½ oz. triple sec
½ oz. Jaegermeister

Pineapple Mai Tai

4 ounce orange juice
4 ounce pineapple juice
1 ounce lime juice
1 ounce dark rum
1 ounce light rum
1 ounce triple sec
1/2 ounce grenadine

Mix all ingredients, shake with ice, and strain into a glass. Garnish with a cherry and a pineapple wedge.

Ambrosia (a la Battlestar Galactica)

6 oz Midori
4 oz Blue Curacao
2 oz lime juice

Mix over ice.

Pan Galatic Gargle Blaster

1/2 ounce Vodka
1/2 ounce Triple Sec
1/2 ounce Yukon Jack liqueur
1/2 ounce Peach Schnapps
1/2 ounce Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce cranberry juice
Fill with lemon-lime soda

Build in an ice-filled Collins glass, filling it with the soda. Stir with a long straw. Garnish with an orange if desired.

Culture Clash and Aristophanes, an Irreverent Mix

2009-09-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

Peace. Culture Clash. The Getty Villa. 9/18/09.

In Peace at the Getty Villa, some of the greats of Southern California theater come together to create a ridiculous romp through ancient comedy and contemporary commentary. The show features Culture Clash, the irreverent Chicano/Latino sketch comedy-meets-performance art-meets-teatro theater troupe with their brilliant combination of site-specific localism and global commentary wrapped up in dick jokes. In this production, they are joined by the equally fabulous John Fleck (of Star Trek: Enterprise and the NEA 4, and a delightful local gay actor/performance artist) and Amy Hill (most recognizable as Margaret Cho's grandmother on All American Girl, and incredibly multi-talented in her own right). This amazing cast is brought together by Bill Rauch, who recently left us bereft here in SoCal to become the Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He is joined by the mad genius Ken Roht as choreographer and playwright and dramaturg John Glore as co-adapter of the play. And then, of course, there's Aristophanes, who is perhaps a perfect match for Culture Clash in the combination of fast-paced absurd romp, incredibly current social and political criticism, and dirty jokes.

Peace is a strange play, but its wackiness can be wonderful. The puppetry and costumes are fabulous and the actors themselves are hilarious, high-spirited professionals that make the show a delight. There are moments when the show doesn't work. Some of the jokes fall flat or go on too long and some of the choices don't make a lot of sense, but overall this contemporary-meets-classic story of a hippy pot farmer (Fleck as Trygaeus, aka Ty-Dye), a cranky Malibu housewife meets showtune-singing chorus leader (Hill), and three Guatemalan gardeners/Salvedoreño sh*t-slaves/Greek Gods (Culture Clash, of course) who set out to save the goddess Peace who has been imprisoned by War makes for a delightfully fun evening of theatrical magic. The political message (essentially 'make love, not war') is in no way heavy-handed or clichéd, and despite being thousands of years old, the play feels like a fresh and contemporary take on an old theme. Personally, I was shocked and delighted by the heavy-handed phallus humor and particularly John Fleck's fabulous tribute song to masturbation that became a chorus "dance" number. Overall, I highly recommend this show to anyone who can see it (an who can handle the adult content). I was absolutely gleeful throughout.

Hitchcock goes Slapstick

2009-08-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

The 39 Steps. La Jolla Playhouse. 8/30/09.

The 39 Steps is a delightful comic romp through the plot of a Hitchcock thriller. It's an infinitely entertaining example of suburb comic timing and high quality clowning. I found the play incredibly enjoyable and I highly recommend it. The production exhibited wonderful theatricality in its execution of a whole film's worth of characters, scenes, and stunts with a minimalist set and a cast of four. Ted Deasy playing the male lead ran and leapt and chased and sweated across the stage for the length of the play without much of a break besides intermission and did it all with an air of self-possessed English charm. Eric Hissom and Scott Parkinson played every other male character (and some of the women). Their physical comedy, including quick swapping between character and carrying on conversations with themselves kept the play running at a breakneck pace and continually surprised and delighted me. I laughed through the whole show and enjoyed every minute of it.

What The 39 Steps isn't, however, is a theater version of Hitchcock. What got lost in all of the postmodern self-referential slapstick was the thrill of the thriller. Even though the production recreated every scene in the film, the idea of a spy thriller got lost entirely. So I left the play wondering if it mattered? This play is wonderful, but why is it The 39 Steps? Would it be receiving as much attention if it were just a spoof of the spy thriller genre? Why tie it to Hitchcock? What does it have to say about our relationship to film history? I don't have any answers, just questions, but I really did enjoy the play and I do highly recommend it.

CTG just announced that the touring production of The 39 Steps will come to the Ahmanson next spring and will be included in the Taper season. It's a solid, fun show and I expect anyone who sees it will enjoy it, but I'm not necessarily in a hurry to see it again.

Season Tickets

2009-08-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

I just bought season tickets to the Geffen Playhouse. The funny thing about this is that I was thinking about getting tickets for the Kirk Douglas season since they (for once) managed to program two plays by women, and I will definitely have to see "A New Play By Lisa Kron." I let myself be talked into tickets to the Geffen instead because I knew I wanted to see Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas with some friends (it sounds delightfully silly) and Nightmare Alley could be fabulous, or at least intellectually interesting as a film adaptation. So I allowed myself to be convinced that even though I think Female of the Species might be horribly anti-feminist, it's probably worth seeing to find out, or to see what Annette Bening does with the wacky feminist role. The funny thing is, I've seen several truly awful, boring plays at both the Geffen and the Douglas, and yet I keep letting myself be lured back. I very much like having season tickets, but I wish I could be more proud of the theaters to which I'm subscribing. I should be supporting a season of risky, feminist or queer, not entirely narrative work, not grasping at straws whenever one of the major companies manages to program one or two plays by women. I'd love to get season tickets to the UCLA Live International Theater Festival, but the prices are nowhere near affordable for me. I might consider picking up a subscription to the Boston Court when they announce their new season (I probably would have liked their current season). Even though I usually scoff at the Geffen, or the Taper, or the Douglas, I find myself the eternal optimist when a new season is announced. I wish I could subscribe to everything. I love having theater on my calendar, knowing that I have to go because I've already bought the tickets, and challenging myself to see things that I might not have picked if I were buying single tickets. So, what would you subscribe to if you could? What do you recommend for me?

CTG and Experimental Theater

2009-08-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

The LA Times reports today that CTG just received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop "experimental" theater by LA-based artists. I wonder if this is at least partially an expansion of the "Douglas Plus" program that was so poorly executed at the last minute last year.

They claim they intend to devote the grant to LA-based artists, and yet the only project they're ready to discuss is bringing in Phil Soltanoff from mad dog experimental theatre company to work with LA actors. While I think it would be great to have more experimental NY artists coming out to LA to do their work or show it, I definitely don't think CTG has the creative vision for this, and once again they're giving lip service to local artists while really fetishizing New York and pretending toward diversity while really only supporting (usually straight, white) men.

While this grant could be an amazing opportunity to see and develop exciting new work, I fear that it will only be another poor excuse to produce work by the same old people, but now with fewer words and more flashy projections and "technology." I would much rather have actually seen the production of Heddatron that they promised and cancelled this year than have this vague promise of new work in the future.

Outdoor Shakespeare

2009-08-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

Twelfth Night. Classical Theatre Lab. Kings Road Park, West Hollywood. 8/9/09.

Summer wouldn't be complete without some good, old-fashioned outdoor Shakespeare. While New Yorkers could see a star-studded Twelfth Night in Central Park earlier this season, we here in West Hollywood have our own modest version of the same play. It's a solid production with good spirit and a few really strong performances.

Most notably, the production maintained quite good pacing, managing to keep my attention without feeling rushed and always making sense out of the language. The actors were combatting airplanes and street noise, and occasional bits of dialogue were lost entirely, and yet I didn't ever feel as if I'd missed anything.

Particularly notable in this production were the comic characters, led by Will Badgett as Feste and Michael Matthys as Sir Toby Belch. They were a lot of fun onstage and made more sense out of the comic bits than I generally experience, and I found myself wishing for more songs.

While this production was far from perfect, it's a good, fun outdoor Shakespeare performance, and not bad for the free show down the street from my house. Director Armin Shimerman did a good job forging a solid, faithful production of a fun play in a lovely outdoor setting.

My favorite Twelfth Night is still the 1998 Lincoln Center/PBS version I saw in high school starring Helen Hunt and Kyra Sedgwick (I really wish this were available on DVD!), but this was a nice pleasant afternoon of theater.

Housekeeping

2009-08-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

I just began restoring the links that vanished when I changed the design of this blog many months ago, so please take a look at the side column and let me know what's missing. If you read or link to me and would like to be listed, or if you have any recommendations for blogs I should be reading or linking (particularly those at any intersection of theater, academics, Los Angeles, and gender), I would be quite grateful for any suggestions.

Crushable Women

2009-08-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

Julie and Julia. The Grove. 8/10/09.

I saw Julie and Julia last night, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but this post is really just as much inspired by this Daily Beast article and the Jezebel response to it that I just happened upon. Mostly, I want to point out that these articles are appropriating terms of romance to describe professional relationships and envy, which are strange usages of terms like "lust" and "crush." Female-female relationships can slip between homosexuality and homosociality, but it seems to me that both of these articles de-eroticize the "girl crush" in really unfortunate ways. For me at least, there is a difference between the women I admire because I want to be like them and the women I admire and might want to sleep with, even if that difference might occasionally be slippery, too. Both of these articles make me wonder if and where attraction might be in the relationships and whether the use of terms like "crush" might have something to say about the paucity of models for female friendship and mentorship.

Which brings me to Julie and Julia. I'm only talking about the film here, not the book or the blog, and certainly not the person, but one thing that I found particularly striking about the film was its portrayal of female relationships. At one point (and this isn't an exact quote), Julie asks, 'aren't you supposed to like your friends'? Julie's relationships in the film with other people, particularly other women, were distant, strained, impoverished. There were those three condescending women she had lunch with, whose relationship was never even explained. I guess they were supposed to be friends, but they didn't seem to even like each other.

In contrast, there was Julie's relationship with Julia Child, which bordered on the obsessive. Was this a "girl crush?" Probably not in the way Doree Shafrir describes it and probably not in a romantic way, and yet the relationship in Julie's head was the only well-defined female-female relationship in Julie's part of the movie. She had some dinner guests, a mother in the form of answering machine voice, and a woman she occasionally high-fived across cubicle walls. There were occasional scenes with friend to whom she vented, but there wasn't much a sense of friendship or support. Julia had female collaborators, a pen-pal, a sister, even a female nemesis of sorts and all of those characters felt much more rich than any of the women in Julie's life.

This might be a reflection of contemporary life, in which we've lost a sense of the possibilities of female friendships that aren't superficial, obligatory, or competitive, or it might just be a part of the failure of the film to develop the character of Julie Powell with the depth and complexity and vibrancy that Meryl Streep's portrayal of Julia Child had, both of which I believe are problems.

Let me be clear that I really did enjoy the film Julie and Julia, but I also felt that it suffered from a generation gap. Amy Adams' Powell seems as so much less interesting than Julia Child, but that is at least partially because I don't think writer/director Nora Ephron really understood (or liked) the character. Powell is given long, boring scenes about what a blog is and how to start one that may be necessary if your intended audience is over sixty, but that seem incredibly simplistic and alienating to an audience of Julie's contemporaries. I find this LA Times article particularly illuminating in its discussion toward the end of the article about how Ephron had trouble "creating tension within Powell's narrative"; that failure is apparent onscreen in the difficulty I had liking or identifying with the character. I feel that there must be a way to have made Julie's quirkiness and affectations endearing, but the film portrayed her as self-centered and helpless instead. Again, I wonder if this is a reflection on the images and possibilities for contemporary women, or just a slight misstep. Any thoughts or insight would be welcome.

Either way, I very much recommend the film, but with the caveat that the portrayals of Julie Powell or contemporary female relationships are not why I recommend it. Go for the food, the cooking, and Meryl as Julia. Go for the fact that it's a movie about women, for once. I definitely enjoyed the film, and left the theater discussing dessert recipes with friends, and that in itself is a wonderful thing. Perhaps, even if this isn't a film that portrays non-competitive contemporary female relationships, it can be a film that helps build some.

Chico's Chica's

2009-07-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

Chico's Angels 2: Love Boat Chicas. The Cavern Club Celebrity Theater. 7/12/09.

Chico's Angels is probably the best show you'll ever see in the basement of a Mexican Restaurant, and the current installment, Love Boat Chicas exceeds my previous experiences with the show so much that I was blown away! There were more songs, more dances, more lesbianism, and the plot even made more sense! This was by far the best Angels yet! This Charlie's Angels meets the Loveboat crossover episode has all the '70s nostalgia you could possibly desire and all the campy drag and sexual innuendo you can stand.

Even better, this episode seems to have finally mastered the balance in campiness in combining drag queens and bio-girls. Cher Ferreyra and Nora Miller really brought the bio-girl camp and managed to gve the drag queens a run for their money rather than feeling like they were in a different show. It brought the whole production together in an explosion of fabulousness.

Of course, Oscar Quintero as the scene-stealing Kay Sedia is always the star of the show and didn't disappoint as a Charo impersonator in this episode, but the subplots with Danny Casillas' portrayal of Frieda Lay's budding lesbian experimentation and the forbidden love between Ray Garcia as Chita Parol and Alejandro Patino as Bossman were excellent enhancements to the plot and played extremely well. Overall, this was the strongest Chico's Angels I've seen so far and I highly recommend it.

If you can't make it to the theater to see the show (extended through August 2!), they're starting a web series, so be sure to check it out on their website!

It Came from Chicago

2009-07-11T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hannah Free. Outfest. 7/10/2009.

Outfest 2009 has begun. On the spur of the moment, I joined a friend at a this evening at a screening of Hannah Free, a film about an older butch lesbian dealing with aging and recalling the love of her life. It was a lovely film with beautiful cinematography by Gretchen Warthen and the performances, particularly by Sharon Gless (the mother from Queer as Folk and Burn Notice. She makes a great lesbian.

There were some really refreshing things about this film, particularly that there were actual images of butch women and also older lesbians, both of which are rarely seen in mainstream films. The performances were truly excellent. Sharon Gless was, of course, fabulous, but so was the rest of the cast. Jacqui Jackson was charming and adorable as a young woman who adopts Hannah as a lesbian elder and Kelli Strickland as the baby butch version Hannah was seriously crush-worthy.

I'm really glad I saw this partially because it emerged from the Chicago theater scene. It was written by Claudia Allen, who is a lesbian playwright in Chicago at the Victory Gardens Theater. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know anything about her work prior to this (although I think I did see someone give a paper about her play Xena Lives!), so I'm really glad that this brought this work to my attention.

The film wasn't perfect; there were some cringe-worthy moments of awkwardness, particularly some really unnatural-sounding exposition at the beginning of the film. Some of the folks I was with complained that it felt a little stagey at points, although either I didn't notice or I'm interpreting the same moments as unnatural awkwardness that they consider theatrical. Overall, the film was just sweet and refreshing. It was also a bit of a tearjerker; I was crying from about 10 or 15 minutes into the film, but there were so many beautiful, funny, honest scenes between the ones that made me cry that I found the whole thing charming and really enjoyable rather than sappy.

Overall, Outfest is off to a great start for me.

Definitely a Children's Musical

2009-07-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Orange County Performing Arts Center. 7/8/09.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a cute musical for kids, but for me as an adult it lacked the sense of effortless wonder that would have made me enjoy the show. The production's emphasis on spectacle over sense diminishes rather than enhances the show's whimsey, and while the sets and costumes were lovely, they felt like the star of the show rather than an enhancement to the singing and dancing.

This was the first time I have ever thought seriously about orchestration in a musical, but I think in this case the orchestration significantly harmed the production. This was a score that could have benefited from a full orchestra and instead the pared-down pit orchestra meant that there was far too much musical emphasis on drums and tuba (and a few reeds). As a result, far too many of the songs sounded like marches and everything about the singing and dancing seemed labored rather than effortless.

The cast itself performed well, particularly the kids, Jeremy Lipton as Jeremy and Aly Brier as Jemima, who had beautiful voices. I enjoyed Dirk Lumbard and Scott Cote as the comic henchmen quite a bit and wish they actually had more to do. The plot doesn't serve them at all, but the actors themselves had a good deal of potential as a comic team. Steve Wilson in the lead role of Caractacus Potts worked hard to carry the show, but he just doesn't have the huge personality and range of an actor like Dick Van Dyke (who originated the role in the film) or Tommy Tune. I wonder what Raúl Esparza, who originated the role on Broadway, was like?

Mostly, though, this show is pure children's theater. While I was bored that every song had an encore, the little kids behind me were singing along and seemed to be having a great time. While I was puzzled by events that happened offstage or that seemed unnecessary, they were delighted. While I thought the Baron and Baroness characters were weird and disturbing, they seemed to understand them as villains. Overall, I was kind of mystified by the show as a whole and why anyone would want a live action version of the movie, but the kids seemed to really enjoy it.

This show is for you if you have children under the age of 12 who would enjoy some silly musical theater, or if you're particularly nostalgic for the 1968 film version but don't remember it well enough to be a purist (my mom loved the show).

Skip it if you're in the slightest bit cynical or critical or prefer your musicals to make sense.

A Good Tribute to Great Music

2009-07-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra. Laguna Playhouse. 7/7/09.

My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra features a quartet of good singers singing the best songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, so it's an evening of excellent music delivered in pleasant, if not brilliant or revolutionary, manner. It's a good show and the performers do an admirable job singing all of Frank's hits. Go to this show if you want a nice concert of Sinatra music. The cast members have great voices, particularly John Fredo as Man #1 who displays the spirit and vocal quality of Sinatra, and though his dancing wasn't particularly Sinatra-esque, it was fun to watch. I also enjoyed the work of Casey Erin Clark, even though she's terribly miscast as Woman #1 who should by all rights be older considering the songs she sings.

Beyond the songs and the singing, which are good, this production isn't anything to write home about. When confronted with the understated cool of Sinatra, the conventions of the musical revue seem far too staid and artificial. The old familiar format of two guys and two girls in formalwear singing in mixed couples makes a lot of sense for the songs of Sondheim or Noel Coward, both of which I have seen to good effect, but it doesn't make sense for Sinatra, whose voice and personality are as important as the songs themselves. The four people all dressed up and hanging out singing feels particularly inappropriate as performances of or about Sinatra. Though the performers are consummate singers, they're not necessarily the ideal actors for paying tribute to Sinatra's persona. Karen M. Jeffreys as Woman #2 in particular overperformed, with dramatic arm gesturing, facial mugging and hip wiggling that detracted from rather than enhanced the songs. Between sets of dubiously grouped songs, the patter of Frank Sinatra quotes and anecdotes addressed directly at the audience were a little awkward and at the end of the show they got maudlin in trying to pay tribute to Sinatra and his legacy. The emphasis on tribute was heavy-handed to the point that it detracted from the strong sense of life that the music itself conveyed.

Overall, the show was a nice concert of Sinatra music, but it had little of the spirit of Sinatra to it. The sense of Sinatra as the Chairman, his homosocial Rat Pack cool, even his way with the ladies was missing from this particular production. If you're looking for a better sense of the man and the myth of Sinatra, this isn't the show for you, but if you just want to enjoy the music, these kids put on a pretty good concert.

A Star is Born meets Vegas

2009-06-26T01:42:00.000-07:00

Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara. The Geffen Playhouse. 6/25/2009.

Everyone in the world may already know this, since it's seriously late in the show's run, but Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara is a wildly entertaining, incredibly performed romp through Vegas in the '50s and '60s and I absolutely loved it. It's a sweet little cabaret show about the intertwined career and romance shared by bandleader Louis Prima and singer Keely Smith. The complexities of a real life romance and marriage are shoved into the plot of A Star is Born, but like the songs onstage, old familiar standards get a new life through truly inspired performances.

Jake Broder as Louis Prima and Vanessa Claire Smith as Keely Smith are also listed as co-creators and their unique talents and personalities absolutely bring the show to life. Broder as Prima sings and swings and sweats through an hour and 40 minutes onstage without respite. His performance emphasizes Prima's hard-working manic energy and dedication his performance and his audience. The real delight of the show is Smith's Keely; she brings a charm and delight that brightens the stage and defines the show. She plays Keely with a combination of naivety and brashness that make her a fascinating character. The performances in this show define the piece and make it unmissable.

Other delights of the show include Frank Sinatra (played by Nick Cagle) as the villian, who apparently wasn't in the original production at Sacred Fools and Brian Wallis and Michael Lanahan who I've seen often enough recently in Magnum Opus and Serial Killers at Sacred Fools that they feel like old friends. This is another show where I should have brought a musicologist to talk to me about the music, but it seemed like a lot of fun to me.

In terms of gender, I like that Keely was a strong character, but I think that the show put too much emphasis on Prima discovering, teaching and "creating" Smith. It was a bit too much a show about Prima and his art and ego when Smith should have been the star. That was in its way appropriate to the ideas of the show and the spirit of '50s Vegas, but still not something that I like. It's also not how Keely herself tells the story, at least according to the 2000 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. I also think that setting the beginning and end of the show with Prima's death dragged down an otherwise buoyant show and made the beginning a bit rough; this was, first and foremost a love story and idea of looking back on a life didn't add much for me. But despite a few intellectual quibbles, this is a truly fabulous, perfectly entertaining show and I highly recommend it to anyone; my parents loved it!

This show is excellent, and totally worth seeing. They just extended the run until August 2, so get your tickets now!

Space Opera

2009-06-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Wooster Group. La Didone. REDCAT. 6/16/09.

I find the Wooster Group's work so intellectually and visually stimulating that it nearly overwhelms me. La Didone combines the opera by Francesco Cavalli and Giovanni Busenello from 1641 with Planet of the Vampires, a 1965 Italian horror/scifi film. It's an amazing, surprising combination that explores ideas of gender, technology, and art.

The two pieces resonate together beautifully to implicitly equate love with parasitic alien possession and I'm pretty sure in the climactic sex scene there were giant glowing green penises onscreen onstage. It also deals with the fragmentation of the body through the use of filmic closeups, particularly focusing on hands and arms as characters pass from live to screen in order to interact with the 1960s scifi technology.

As for gender, there were great female characters and a lot of interesting commentary (particularly from the opera) about women as weak, emotional, and faithless in a way that seemed really funny, but was also reinforced by both plots. The sexism seemed intended to be so blatant that it was absurd, particularly when Dido was the center of the entire show.

My thoughts on this piece are yet mushy and unformed. The Wooster Group's work generally takes me a lot of time to absorb and contemplate. There are so many loose threads of ideas to pull on that I don't yet have a full picture of what the piece means to me, but one of my first reactions is that this feels a lot more like a direct mash-up, putting two pieces together to create something new and beautiful in the resonances between the pieces, than a deconstruction and commentary in the way that earlier Wooster Group pieces were. I could be wrong about that, and it's certainly not a negative judgement in any way, but I wonder what other people think.

Anyway, this piece is beautiful and weird and amazing and I wish I had brought some musicologists with me to have a discussion on the relationships between Baroque Opera, '60s scifi and contemporary reality. I've always been a little skeptical of the Wooster Group (even though they're in my dissertation) because they're not nearly as queer and feminist as I am or as I think they should be, but this piece definitely reminded me that they are so intellectually stimulating that perhaps it doesn't matter if I agree with their politics. If you have a chance, please do see this; it will blow your mind in a good way.

127 Easy Steps

2009-06-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite performers (and friends) happens to be performing at Highways this weekend and I'm super excited. Scott Turner Schofield's Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps is a new show that hasn't yet been performed in LA and it's an ariel acrobatic choose-your-own adventure romp through multiple genders and identities as Schofield explores what it means to become a man in terms of both gender and maturity. I've read parts of the piece in Schofield's Lambda Award-nominated book, Two Truths and a Lie but I haven't seen the show itself, plus, it's different every time. Schofield allows the audience to choose the stories he tells each night. Schofield's performances are always smart and funny and wonderfully charming and I've thoroughly enjoyed them in the past. You should totally be there!

Voice Lessons

2009-05-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

Justin Tanner. Voice Lessons. Starring Laurie Metcalf and French Stewart. Zephyr Theatre. 5/22/09.

Voice Lessons is billed as a romantic comedy of sorts. Perhaps it is, but it's real strength is as a showcase for amazing talent in acting and writing. Tanner's weird, pathetic characters are brought to vibrant, disturbing life by three incredibly talented actors and anyone fortunate enough to sit in that tiny theater for 65 minutes to watch the show unfold is fortunate indeed. The run has been extended until June 28, so if you can, I highly recommend that you rush out and see it while you can.

The show itself is a strange little piece about a troubled woman (Metcalf) who appeals to a local voice teacher (Stewart) to turn her from a community theater bit player into a rock star. Her unorthodox behavior and lack of talent soon result in more talking than singing as both characters become unravelled and quickly surmount normal social boundaries.

The piece isn't particularly queer and is only sort of campy, but it showcases excellent acting and characterization. It takes an everyday situation and exaggerates it to the extremes in a way that is fabulously compelling to witness. It definitely made me want to see more of Tanner's work (I missed Oklohomo a couple of years ago and I've been regretting it ever since). I already knew Metcalf and French were fabulous, and I would gladly go see them anywhere in anything, so this was just an extra special treat watching them demonstrate their craft masterfully.

New Fun at Sacred Fools!

2009-05-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

I should go see these:

Madness in Valencia
MAY 22 - JUNE 28, 2009
Fridays & Saturdays at 8pm
plus Sunday Matinees May 24 & June 28 at 2pm
PREVIEW: Thursday, May 21 at 8pm - $12.50

TICKETS: $25
Call 310-281-8337 or Buy Tickets Online

Lust, love, madness, nobles, peasants, high and low humor, and mistaken identities abound in this delightfully earthy play. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega's hilarious play is for anyone who’s fallen in love at the wrong time - and asks, aren’t love and madness really the same thing?

Starring Juliette Angeli, Joseph Beck, Jay Bogdanowitsch,
Wil Bowers, Paul Byrne, Craig Calman, Brandon Clark,
Matthew Garland, Michael Holmes, Vivian Kerr,
JJ Mayes, Laura Napoli & Tyler Tanner

Understudies: Jennifer Fenten & Paul Plunkett

AND COMING NEXT WEEKEND...

the return of MAGNUM OPUS THEATRE: "Abi's Choice"
Fridays @ 11pm, May 29 - June 26

and the start of the SERIAL KILLERS PLAYOFFS!
Saturdays @ 11pm, May 30 - June 27
and Saturday, July 11 @ 8pm
Playoff shows include "A Cat Wrote this Play" and "Seamen! The Musical!" which are awesome and "Vatos in Space!" which sounds fabulous

Fools! Infidels!

2009-05-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

Teenagers from Outer Space, "Toast to Our Brother," and "Island Sunrise." Outfest Legacy Project Screening Series. UCLA Film & Television Archive. Hammer Museum. 5/17/09.

The Outfest Legacy Project's tribute to Tom Graeff was awesome! I totally expected there to be huge crowd of '50s scifi fans with lobsters and Rocky Horror-like responses. Instead he audience was a couple dozen queer film enthusiasts (including some cute girls! yay!). The whole event was fabulously entertaining and educational and you (in a vague, general sense) are all fools for missing it!

The thing I found most notable about this screening of Teenagers from Outer Space was the large amount of Gargon action. There were totally more giant lobsters than I remember in previous viewings of the film.

The fabulous Gargon

I learned lots of things at this screening, including the fact that David Love, star of Teenagers from Outer Space, aka Chuck Roberts was Graeff's boyfriend at the time of filming; he disappeared completely in 1959. Ooh! Mystery!

David Love, star and boyfriend to the director

In addition to Teenagers, which is totally better on the big screen, we also watched Graeff's short film about fraternity life, "Toast to Our Brother," which wasn't as homoerotic and campy as I had hoped, but it was still pretty entertaining. It was fun to watch footage filmed on the UCLA campus in the '50s. The short "Island Sunrise" was even more educational; it was intended to be a showcase of the talents of Chuck Roberts and it was strange and depressing short supposed to be about eternal love. It was apparently set to the song "Ebb Tide" but this particular screening was done to Erasure's version of the song, which I suspect gave the whole thing a very different feel.

But the most exciting tidbit that I learned at this film screening was that the last film Graeff worked on was Wizard of Mars, a 1965 scifi version of the Wizard of Oz. According to IMDB the tagline for the film is "Three EARTHMEN and a GIRL encounter the horrors of MARS!" Doesn't that sound awesome!?! We definitely need this for bad scifi night! Of course, it could be as dull as Robinson Crusoe on Mars but I think it's worth checking out.

The Mission Inn

2009-05-18T18:17:00.000-07:00

Wow! The Mission Inn is like a cross between the Winchester House and The Madonna Inn!

Tim Miller on Meat and Marriage

2009-05-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

Tim Miller. Lay of the Land. Highways Performance Space. 5/16/09.

Tim Miller is good at what he does. What he does is perform political performance art that melds the personal with the political. Lay of the Land is his meditation on the current state of his own civil rights, primarily in relation to marriage. It feels as if it should be performed at protest rallies in front of huge crowds rather than at Highways surrounded by rich supporters (we went to Highways' 20th Anniversary Benefit performance, so the audience was full of Miller's and Highways' friends and family). This show will be great at college campuses and for audiences where everyone doesn't already know Miller and his work. In this case he was preaching to the converted, but it's still a good show to watch. Miller displays excellent skill weaving stories together and advocating for civil rights.

What I was impressed with in this particular performance was an awareness of race that I don't remember from Miller's earlier performances (I could be wrong). Some of this was problematic because it implicitly (if not explicitly) compares Don't Ask, Don't Tell and marriage rights to slavery, Japanese internment, and the genocide of Native Americans. I can understand that this is important in establishing a history of oppression and unequal citizenship, but sometimes I wonder if such comparisons help or hurt in making a case for our civil rights. But overall, I'm glad Miller is at least talking about race and marking his own whiteness, which he did.

Overall, Lay of the Land is a strong piece advocating for marriage rights using Miller's own queer body as the site of the story and the state of the union. Bring anyone and everyone who isn't sure about marriage rights.

How we remember our past tells us who we are

2009-05-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

SITI Company. Antiogne. The Getty Villa Malibu. Villa Theater Lab. 5/15/09.

The SITI Company does amazing work. Any chance you get to see them is worthwhile. I'm sure when it's finished, Antigone will be fabulous, but right now it has its good points and its bad points. Tonight's show was a work in progress, basically a staged reading showing what they had been working on while in residence at the Villa. Right now, it needs editing; the script was wordy and awkward and the whole thing ran a bit too long.

Despite some trouble with the script, the show itself promises to be striking when it's ready. The performers are good at what they do and make an excellent ensemble with fascinating physical control and aesthetic choices.

In the script as it now stands, they've adapted Sophocles' Antigone to focus on contemporary politics surrounding warfare and personal versus civic duties. I find that this minimizes the emphasis on the relationship between Antigone and Ismene, which I think is just as important as the conflict between Antigone and Creon or Antigone's relationship with Haemon. I'd like to see more emphasis on the relationship of the sisters in this particular production, and less time spent on the history of the curse on Oedipus' house.

Overall, I think this show will be lovely in the future and I look forward to the final result.

On My Calendar

2009-05-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Looking ahead, I have a crazy schedule of shows to see, and I'd thought I'd share my wacky plans. Let me know if you want to join me. I already have tickets for/plans to see:

The SITI Company doing Antigone at the Getty Villa

Tim Miller's new piece, Lay of the Land at Highways Performance Space

Laurie Metcalf and French Stewart in Voice Lessons by Justin Tanner at the Zephyr

A big queer tribute to Tom Graeff, director of Teenagers from Outer Space at the Hammer.

Plus, I'm trying to figure out when to see:

Our Town at The Actors' Gang

Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara at the Geffen

Serial Killers playoffs at Sacred Fools

Plus, in June there's:

The Wooster Group in La Didone at the REDCAT - opera + scifi = awesome!

Scott Turner Schofield at Highways June 12-13

a new Magnum Opus at Sacred Fools

and Pride (June 12-14) and Outfest (July 9-19), of course.

Lydia

2009-05-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

Octavio Solis. Lydia. Mark Taper Forum. 4/28/2009.

I didn't go in expecting much from Lydia. The advertising for the production was pretty terrible; it just suggested the show was a family drama set in Texas on the U.S./Mexican border. I was glad CTG was doing something that wasn't by and about white people, but I didn't have much hope for the show itself. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised.

Lydia tells the story of a Mexican-American family that has been devastated by a car crash that left its youngest member brain damaged and helpless. When a beautiful young woman joins the family to care for the injured daughter, all of the family's secrets and pains are slowly revealed. All of that sounds fairly mundane, but what makes this play exciting is that it gives voice to the disabled daughter and addresses all sorts of issues of sexuality. Its portrayals of sexuality are risky and disturbing so that they challenged me as an audience member. I'm still unsure how I feel about the gender roles in the play; they were far from perfect with Celia as the damaged and idealized daughter and Lydia as the beautiful young woman who brings change. The girls act as foils for each other surrounded by angry, repressed, violent men. My reaction to the play was complex and conflicted; it made me want to think and didn't supply me with easy answers about how I felt about it. I found the fact that this play challenged me to think about it particularly refreshing; I admire the play very much for that.

There were things I didn't love; Celia's sing-song voice irritated me and I found some of the dream/memory scenes problematic, but overall the play was more complex and interesting than I expected, and I found myself recommending it to people. If you have time to catch it before it closes this weekend (May 17th) it's definitely worth seeing and thinking about. I'd love to know what other people thought.

CTG Cancels Another Show!

2009-04-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

I was disappointed and enraged to discover that CTG had cancelled Heddatron. This was the second show they cancelled this season for which I had tickets already. I am, once again, extremely disappointed in them. This was the show in which I was most interested and now it's not happening, and I have ANOTHER "credit" to get tickets for a show that isn't the show I wanted to see in the first place. They won't even refund the money! I am really furious and disappointed.

Bruising for Besos - extended!

2009-03-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

Adelina Anthony. Bruising for Besos. LA Gay and Lesbian Center. 3/13/09.

Adelina Anthony's Bruising for Besos has been extended until April 19, so now that you can still see it, perhaps you should. It is a lovely, melancholy piece about love and emotional and physical abuse, which means it is extremely difficult to watch. I was at first reluctant to write about it, because I love Anthony's work and commitment in general, but I had some mixed feelings about the piece. I was thoroughly impressed by Anthony's skill at weaving in and out of various characters to make this a one-woman show with many roles and many voices. Her skill as an actress is beautifully demonstrated in Bruising for Besos; watching her deftly switch between characters could be reason enough to go see it while you can.

It's an intensely personal play, however, and sometimes that sense of the personal is too heavy-handed. At points, the piece seems overwritten, as if it were trying too hard to be literary and therefore felt self-conscious. Sometimes it felt as if there weren't enough distance between Anthony as playwright, Anthony as actor, and Yoli as character.

The play takes place on a beautiful, haunting set depicting a broken down car on the side of the road outside San Antonio and that in itself spoke to me. The set is so powerful that I wish I were more inspired by the play's sense of space and time. Something about it as a memory play didn't work for me, even though it should have. I wonder if perhaps I am just temporarily frustrated with solo work and would have preferred this to be a play with multiple actors playing the multiple characters. I may wish for more theatrical magic and less monologue, but what Anthony does, she does well.

Despite my mixed feelings, I think this play is absolutely worth seeing and thinking about and discussing. It is lovely and contemplative and at times stunningly well-acted. It's a powerful departure from Anthony's previous work and as such, deserves recognition and celebration. I'm so glad it's getting the audience to extend (twice!) and if you haven't seen it, you should go.

Fabulous Things To Do

2009-03-20T01:05:00.000-07:00

I went to the Charles Phoenix show tonight night and it was awesome, but more on that later. First of all, a friend of mine and I are working on a list of kitchy, touristy, retro, or otherwise fabulous things we have to do in Southern California. Help us list!

Movies:
Angel City Drive-in - drive-in movie on the top of a parking lot!
Vineland Drive-in
Cinespia cemetery screenings
Dinner and a movie at cinespace

bars:
Medusa Lounge
The Edison Bar
Saints and Sinners Lounge
The Dresden
The Derby - I think the Los Feliz location still exists, but it's unclear what's going on there now or if it's worth visiting

coffee shops/diners/restaurants:
Dinah's Family Restaurant - on Sepulveda in Culver City. Since 1959.
Bob's Big Boy (Burbank)
Pie 'n Burger
Encounter restaurant at LAX
The Pantry
Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles
Oki Dog
El Coyote
The Gardens of Taxco
Carny's - in a train!
Pink's Hot Dogs
House of Pies
Japanese curry - Hurry Curry?
Tommy's
The Apple Pan
A&W Rootbeer - Norwalk and Buena Park
Angelo's Drive-in - Anaheim - an actual drive-in!
Musso and Frank
Phillipe's - the original French Dip! - absolutely magnificent. Perfect texture, very tasty!
Cafe Jack - Sushi and coffee in a Titanic-themed restaurant shaped like a boat! The sushi was good, but the beverages were a bit overpriced. The pizza cutlet was weird (breaded chicken cutlet with cheese, tomato sauce, and veggies on top).
Coles (Pacific Electric Buffet) - the sandwich wasn't quite as perfect as Phillipe's, but it did come with jus for dipping. Plus, the atmosphere was way more snazzy.
Swingers Diner - great milkshakes and lots of vegetarian options. Great for late-night food.
Pann's Restaurant and Coffee Shop - Built 1958. The food was good in this original 1950s diner.

Donuts
Dale's Donuts - Atlantic Ave. and Alondra Blvd. in Compton
Bellflower Bagels - 17025 Bellflower Blvd.
Randy's Donuts - by the airport!
Kindle's Donuts - The giant "do-nut" was bigger than I even imagined! And the donuts were tasty, too.
The Donut Hole - La Puente- you drive through the donuts! It was super yummy and generally awesome, but not as cheap as Randy's or Kindle's.
Donut King II - Cheap and yummy.
Doughn-t Hut - Magnolia and Buena Vista, Burbank
Frittelli's - high end donuts in Beverly Hills
Earl's - Chatsworth
Donut Man - Fresh fruit seasonal donuts, along Route 66 in Glendora
Primo's Westdale Doughnuts - "Best Donuts in LA since 1956," on Sawtelle
Stan's - Wow! This is right next to UCLA and I never went in!
Bob's Coffee and Doughnuts - Los Angeles Farmers' Market
Nickel Diner - Bacon donuts?
Angel Food Donuts -3860 Long Beach Blvd and 3657 Santa Fe Ave, Long Beach, mini giant donut
The Daily Grind Espresso - Long Beach, giant donut, possibly pink glazed?
Carl's Do-nuts and Burgers - 784 W Holt Ave, Pomona

tourist attractions:
The Gamble House - Greene & Greene Architecture, 1908
Cabazon Dinosaurs
Barnsdall Art Park/Hollyhock House - Frank Lloyd Wright (1921)
Chinatown - not as cool as other Chinatowns. We tried various odd pastries, which were weird and awesome. Lots of vaguely interesting "chinese-y" architecture including a way overdone Bank of America (we decided chinoiserie was too fancy a word for what we saw)
Watts Towers
The Hollywood Bowl
Hearst Castle
The Magic Castle
Moonlight Rollerway
Hollywood Adventist Church - (1961)
The Mission Inn

museums:
Museum of Neon Art
Museum of Jurassic Technology
cake lady mini cake museum

shows::
Burlesque at El Cid
Serial Killers and Magnum Opus at Sacred Fools
Something wacky at the Steve Allen Theater

New for summer! Ice cream, gelato and milkshakes:
Scoops - the best, hands down, in my opinion. Always new and interesting flavors!
Mashti Malone's - long time favorite! Interesting flavors like Rosewater Saffron.
Carmela Ice Cream - Hollywood and Culver City farmers' markets
Gelato Bar - 4342 ½ Tujunga Avenue, Studio City
Silky Smooth Ultra Creamery - "microcreamery" in the Beverly Center
Delicieuse - 2503 Artesia Blvd Redondo Beach, goat milk ice cream flavors
Fosselman's - 1824 W. Main St., Alhambra
Glacier Ice Cream - 1605 Sepulveda in Manhattan Beach
Gelato Bar - 4342 ½ Tujunga Avenue, Studio City
Saffron Spot - 18744 Pioneer Boulevard, Artesia

Fringes-Margins-Borders

2009-03-07T11:58:00.001-08:00

Fringes-Margins-Borders. Highways Performance Space. 3/6/09.

I promised a report, but only have time for a quickie. The show was overall quite strong. Sean Dorsey and Scott Turner Schofield both performed pieces I'd seen multiple times before, but they were so well done that I found myself laughing and delighted anyway. Rumor has it Dorsey is looking for a bigger dance space to bring a full length show to Southern California, so someone should jump on that. Schofield will be performing his new piece, Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps at Highways in June! Be sure to go!

Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, aka devil bunny, performed a piece about the expectations of femininity called "Big Pink." I like the concept a lot, but the text was really dense and rant-y. I want to see it again and think about it more.

Deadlee surprised me by linking the two songs he performed with a funny and intense personal monologue so that his performance was more than hip-hop, which was nice.

Stephanie Cooper, who performs as Thisway/Thatway, did some interesting work that was kind of a burlesque performance related to minstrelsy and set to contemporary rap/hip-hop. The costumes were fabulous and the piece had something to say, but it was a difficult thing to be an audience for in this context. I think it probably works well in a show with a lot of other burlesque numbers but it was a strange intervention for this particular context.

Saleem seems to still be working out what he has to say.

Ian MacKinnon did a piece that was for gay men. It was over the top and campy and fabulous and the audience was really laughing and enjoying it, but it wasn't for me.

That was, overall I think the problem with the evening. There wasn't a good clear establishment of tone. I suspect a lot of the artists would be happier with a loud, boisterous, supportive audience and we all loved it but were for the most part quiet and reflective. The show wasn't sold out, so come tonight and be loud! The show is definitely worth it (and if you ask real nicely, they will probably still give you Pay What You Can tickets, so don't let the money stop you. Go! It's a rare chance to see good artists who don't perform in LA nearly often enough.

To Do List

2009-03-06T13:15:00.001-08:00

A la David Cote's dance card, I thought I'd let you know what theater I'm planning to see in the next few weeks.

First of all, I will be going to Highways all weekend this weekend for Fringes-Margins-Borders: Queer Arts Exchange. Sean Dorsey and Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa rarely perform in LA and are not to be missed, and I've been a booster for Scott Turner Schofield for years. I'm seeing all three performances with three different groups of friends and I'd love to see more friendly faces. Tune back in late tonight for my thoughts!

I was also planning on attending the Forrest J Ackerman Tribute Double Feature of Famous Monster: Forrest J Ackerman and The Time Travelers at the Egyptian, but it seems to be sold out. Boo! If anyone has knowledge or advice on how I might get a ticket, let me know.

Next week I'm seeing Adelina Anthony perform Bruising for Besos at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center. I should have promoted this here earlier. It looks to be much more serious and intimate than Adelina's work that I've seen in the past and I'm excited to see what she does with it. It's getting great reviews. It closes March 15, so get yourself there ASAP!

I haven't bought tickets yet (trying to convince someone to go with me), but I'm also going to try to see The Mystery of Irma Vep at the Ark theatre sometime in the weekend of March 12-15. The play is by camp queen Charles Busch and is a hilarious spoof of murder mysteries. Two actors play several characters each and there's a lot of running back and forth and theatrical magic. I've read it many times, and always wanted to see it performed.

On Thursday, March 19th I'm planning to trek to Pasadena to see Charles Phoenix's Southern Californialand! Slideshow. I got a taste of Phoenix's work at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater tribute a couple of weeks ago, and I'm dying to see a full Charles Phoenix show, especially one focused on Southern California history! It's part of the Sidney D. Gamble Lecture Series, and I'm impressed with their taste. Phoenix is fabulous retro fun, complete with the most amazing suits I have ever seen!

Then on the 20th, I'm going to see Mike Daisey perform How Theater Failed America. My roommate assures me that this is a wonderful, inspiring show, even though I have very mixed feelings about his polemic against MFA programs, which seems at least partially to be an attack on professors. There have been responses and follow-ups all around the theater blogosphere. Anyway, I'm definitely curious to see the show, and the talkback on the state of Los Angeles and American theater afterward. I'm also going to see Daisey workshop his new show, The Last Cargo Cult. Mostly because I want to encourage the Kirk Douglas to have more $5 tickets for work in progress.

That's my theater plan for the rest of the month. Thoughts? Recommendations? Feel free to join me at any of these shows!

Movie Reviews? Ask the Internet

2009-03-05T20:29:00.000-08:00

The Rotten Tomatoes Show. current.tv

I found myself watching The Rotten Tomatoes Show, a new movie review show on current.tv. Yes, it's an internet tv show based on a website. Sounds silly, I know, and I probably wouldn't have watched it if I didn't distantly know some of the people involved and if I hadn't been able to Tivo it to watch on my TV via Time Warner Cable's deal with current. But I was actually pleasantly surprised. The show got off to a slightly awkward start - it was cute and clever but the tempo was a bit off at the beginning. Host Brett Erlich at first didn't have quite the energy for a host/announcer, but by the end of the show he had picked up and I loved him. Ellen Fox was OK at the beginning and grew on me as the episode progressed. I suspect after a few episodes, their banter and comfort levels will improve and they will be rockstars.

The real advantage of this show, in addition to harnessing the web 2.0 power of community input, was the cleverness of its segments. The haiku reviews and three sentence reviews were fun with potential for awesomeness. The Top 5 list was surprisingly clever and film literate. And some of the clips of webcam reviews by viewers were great. As they build an audience, I suspect there will be some good hilarious commentary. Mostly, however, I want to request more enthusiasm for the badness of bad movies. As a bad scifi fan, I'd love to see more commentary on the insanity of B-movies and other wackiness. You'd think commentary on Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li and video game movies would be the most opportunity for clever sarcasm, but for me this first segment disappointed. I will, however, be enthusiastically Tivoing this show in the future. It feels young, clever, and entertaining.

Do I want to consider this as the future of criticism? Well, I don't think crowdsourcing is a substitute for my favorite NPR film critics (or local newspaper film and theater coverage), but I haven't watched entertainment news on TV in many years, and this has definitely gotten my attention, and I suspect it will only get better.

Wacky Late Night Theater Antics!

2009-03-01T01:35:00.000-08:00

Serial Killers! Sacred Fools Theater. 2/28/2009.

Almost randomly, my roommate and I found ourselves at Sacred Fools Theater tonight for Serial Killers, a late night theater smackdown in which a plethora of actors perform five ten(ish)-minute plays in a madcap fashion, and then the audience votes which 3 serials continue in the next installment. There was a wide range of skill and style in both the plays themselves and the actors performing them, but there was a ton of wacky fun regardless of petty notions like "quality" and "logic." There were inside jokes, crazy nicknames, outlandish concepts, and musical numbers! What more could you ask for in a night of theater?

As an audience, we witnessed:

"Hi Hun, I'm Home!" by Anna Baardsen and Ari Radousky, a sitcom in which Attila the Hun seems to be the patriarch and Mr. Mom of a contemporary American family. It's a fabulous concept, and I totally would have loved to see more, but the episode we watched felt like a conclusion and the audience voted it out.

"The Pembridge Place Panic: A True Story" by Sean Sweeney, a campy horror story about a couple moving into a haunted house, then hiring a TV show host and his crew to investigate the mysterious phenomena. As far as I was concerned, this show starred Michael Holmes' (I think, I wasn't so clear on which character and actor were which) eyebrows, which were awesome.

"The Nitro Hour" by JJ Mayes, a variety show hosted by incompetent hosts. It didn't have much of a plot and seemed mostly to be inside jokes. But Chairman Barnes' announcer voice was awesome! This will not be making it to episode two.

"A Cat Wrote This Play!" by Padriac Duffy, an absurdist romp through a cat's stream of consciousness as imagined by a human playing a cat. This made no sense whatsoever, but it was both charming and hilarious nonetheless. It will be continuing on to episode 6, and deservedly so.

"Seamen! The Musical!" by Joe Jordan, a musical about men on a ship who just happen to like to dance. This was by far my favorite, even though nothing really happened and it may have just been an excuse to make gay jokes. This show was delightfully retro (sort of On the Town meets The Village People) and will continue on to episode 5!

The next installment isn't until March 28, and I may be tempted to go again. And apparently they're doing a playoff between the longest running serials of the year in May and June, which sounds fabulous! Anyway, I totally recommend Serial Killers as rousing theatrical good times where nothing matters as much as a good (usually dirty) joke. This is one of those shows that reminds me why I love theater and theater folks so much, and it's definitely worth the ($7) price of admission.

Now, all I need is a queer version of this. Basically, I wish I could be in New York to see Room for Cream at La MaMa. It sounds awesome.

Delightful Deaf West Production of Pippin

2009-02-25T00:18:00.000-08:00

Pippin. The Mark Taper Forum. 2/24/09.

Deaf West Theatre and CTG have produced a truly magical production of Pippin. An extraordinary cast and a thorough reworking of Stephen Schwartz's 1972 musical make this show captivating and refreshing. They streamlined the show's book, cut some songs, did the whole thing in sign language, and made me fall in love with this musical all over again.

Most striking in this production were the actors playing Pippin: Michael Arden (singing) and Tyrone Giordano (signing). By doubling the character, these two actors made Pippin into a much more compelling character than he often appears. For the first time, I didn't find Pippin vapid and self-centered as a character, and I wasn't bored during his long, solipsistic solos. Arden's voice was strikingly beautiful and incredibly expressive while Giordano's signing and acting allowed the character to emote with his body at the same time. Usually, Pippin is the least interesting thing about Pippin, and in this production, that wasn't the case. The decision to bifurcate the character was a stroke of genius, and while I'm not entirely convinced by the decision to have the two versions of Pippin interact at the climax of the play, watching the two Pippins enlivened the whole production.

The revised book, including the added song "Back Home Again" solved many of the problems with Pippin's pacing. They did the whole thing straight through without an intermission, which is the way it should be (otherwise Act II drags - a lot). Unfortunately, this means they cut "Extraordinary," which is a fairly important song to express Pippin's character, and which is echoed frequently in the show's book. I think they'd be better off keeping at least one verse of the song to help develop Pippin's character.

Visually, director Jeff Calhoun's production emphasizes magic, literally, rather than the spectacular theatricality that generally frames the show. Instead of actor/dancers, the the Leading Player (played by Ty Taylor) is costumed as a magician with some of the players as magicians' assistants. While the production does its best to emphasize this idea of magic through recurring stage tricks, shortchanging the theatricality undermines the sense of the ensemble as a theater company and the sense of group bonding and character that Pippin usually has. The players are usually a lot more compelling than Pippin, and that certainly isn't the case here. The ensemble, like the Leading Player, are less seductively threatening than usual in this production. Although Taylor's performance was fine and his voice strong and sexy, I just didn't find myself compelled to watch him. This may have been because the staging placed him front and center while my seat was off to the side of the 3/4 round thrust stage. Because this show was originally a Fosse show, replacing the dancing with signing makes for a few disappointments. Without the dancing, "Magic to Do" and "War is a Science" are a lot less fun than they could be, although "On the Right Track" had just the right mix of choreography and sign language to be a joy to watch.

My major concern with the production was that the emphasis on magic casts the female players as magicians' assistants. Pippin is already not a very feminist show (although the show-stopping star turn for Pippin's earthy grandmother, played in this production by Harriet Harris, is always fabulous); reducing the female ensemble from a group of sexy Fosse dancers to four girls who flourish a lot with their hands is extremely disappointing. This LA Times blog article emphasizes how the production replaces dancing with hands, and that first moment in which hands emerge from the stage is indeed a pure moment of theatrical magic, but I think the production overuses this gimmick at the expense of fragmenting the women's bodies, reducing them to just hands and arms rather than whole people. The girls were fine, but I felt like they were just there to make 'ta-da' gestures and fill out the orgy scene. Similarly, the much-needed trimming of the second act reduces the role of Catherine (played by Melissa van der Schyff). Portraying and costuming her as a country-western star was an extremely clever decision that showcased van der Schyff's voice well, but the role as ordinary housewife and love interest is still only moderately developed and serves as a marker to frame Pippin's story. From a feminist perspective, the women in this play almost might as well not be there, and this production exacerbated rather than ameliorated their irrelevance.

Despite some minor complaints, however, I give this show a hearty recommendation. I thoroughly loved the performance and I'm delighted by Deaf West's innovative theatricality.

Shameless Promotion: Fringes-Margins-Borders LGBT show at Highways

2009-02-20T02:21:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm going to post the press release, but I want you to know that I personally stand behind this show and proudly, vociferously encourage you to attend. It's a great collection of artists, and I have seen performances by Scott Turner Schofield, Sean Dorsey, and Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa (aka Devil Bunny in Bondage); they are charismatic, intelligent performers who will make this show truly fantastic. If you don't believe me, Schofield and Otálvaro-Hormillosa have great video clips on their websites.

They're even offering tickets at a “pay what you can price” if you make reservations by Friday, February 27 by calling the reservation line – 310-315-1459 and saying “pay what you can.” So hurry and reserve your tickets now before they sell out!

Highways Performance Space Presents
Fringes-Margins-Borders, a Radical New Works Performance Project Designed to Initiate Community Across Artificially and Socially Constructed Identity Divides
Friday and Saturday, March 6 + 7, 2009 at 8:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.
Highways Performance Space
at the 18th Street Arts Center
1651 18th Street; Santa Monica, CA 90404

Highways Performance Space Presents the Los Angeles leg of a four-city tour of Fringes-Margins-Borders, an exchange of Queer Artists from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. The show will feature LA artists Deadlee, Ian MacKinnon, Saleem, Scott Turner Schofield and San Francisco Artists: Stephanie Cooper, Sean Dorsey Dance, and Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa. Fringes-Margins-Borders is a multidisciplinary performance project of new works drawn from personal narratives designed to initiate community across artificially and socially constructed identity divides. For the tour, Highways is partnering with San Francisco’s Queer Cultural Center and San Diego’s Sushi Performance and Visual Art.

L.A. Artists:
Deadlee is a wordsmith, actor, activist, and entrepreneur. Deadlee quickly earned a position as a key player in music's latest underground movement, gay rap/hip hop. His involvement in the first ever regional tour of GLBT hip hop artists sparked mentions in the press from the New York Daily News, Rolling Stone, Wired Magazine, XXL Magazine, The Advocate, L.A. Weekly, Philadelphia Gay News, Urb, Instinct, and Variety. He was interviewed not once but twice by CNN regarding homophobia and hip hop and the launch of the HomoRevolution Tour 2007. He was also one of the 18 gay hip hop artists featured in the landmark documentary film on gays in hip hop called Pick up the Mic which was picked up by the LOGO network after making the festival circuit. He has performed in several movies including Vengeance and Dead Men Walking, and just completed his first starring role as “Lazy” in the just released film Hoochie Mamma Drama.

Ian MacKinnon is a gay centered performance artist and curator of queer theater events in Los Angeles. He was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for "Best Off Off Broadway Performance" for his piece, SPANKED! at the New York International Fringe Festival, which he also toured to The New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. MacKinnon appeared in the premier episode of the TV show, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and in the short film, "Heart: A Karaoke Fantasia" (Outfest). MacKinnon's musical performance collective The Discount Cruise to Hell was named "#1 Best Indescribable Artist in LA" in Frontiers magazine and "Most Outrageous" at UCLA's 2006 Carnival at The Fowler Museum.

Saleem is an award wining Middle Eastern performance artist, best known for his GLAAD award wining play Salam Shalom A Tale Of Passion, a love story between an Arab man and a Jewish man based on his own biography, the work is being developed as a film. As a dancer, he has developed his own dancing style, which incorporates Middle Eastern dance, gypsy movements, flamenco, and jazz. This mélange produces what he terms “free style belly dancing.” Also equipped with a masters in business administration from Colorado State University, he manages and runs his own events promotion company "club La Zeez " which promotes world music and Mediterranean beats.

Scott Turner Schofield is a man who was a woman, a lesbian turned straight guy who is often called a fag. Since 2001, Schofield's three major works, Underground Transit, Debutante Balls, and Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps - as well as readings from his book, Two Truths and a Lie - have entertained feminists and fratboys, season subscribers and people who “don't like theater” in big cities and small towns across the US. His performance work spreads empathy and education about gender identity and sexual orientation with shows that are as hilarious as they are touching, thought provoking, and beautifully performed. Almost entirely grassroots supported and the recipient of major mainstream honors, Schofield's is a simple complexity: one that must be engaged to be fully understood.

San Francisco Artists:
Sean Dorsey is an award-winning San Francisco-based choreographer and dancer. Recognized as the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey has blazed a new trail for transgender and queer bodies and stories onstage. Dorsey has been awarded two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and the Goldie Award for Performance. He was recently named Best Dance/Performance Company by the SF Weekly, and has also been named one of the Top Ten in Bay Area dance by both the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Bay Area Reporter. BalletTanz, Europe’s leading dance magazine, named Dorsey one of the international dance scene’s most promising choreographers. Dorsey is the subject of a recent PBS ‘Spark’ episode. Dorsey is also founder and Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions, the nation’s first organization that creates and presents year-round transgender arts programs. Fresh Meat’s programs include the outrageously popular Fresh Meat Festival of transgender and queer performance, Sean Dorsey Dance, visual arts exhibitions and co-presenting the annual Tranny Fest film festival.

The consummate candy-fag, Thisway/Thatway (aka Stephanie Cooper) is an intermedia performance artist who enjoys the messy collision of glitter and theory. They launched into performance with the finest of Washington, DC's drag king and burlesque scene before wandering to the Bay area. The child of Black-Panamanian immigrants, their work explores the perils and possibilities of interstitial spaces through voice, video, and movement. Thisway/Thatway has performed with the National Queer Arts Festival, SF Fringe Festival, Climate Theater, Counterpulse, Voice Factory, Garage Artspace, Femme Conference, Toronto Pride, Great Big,and International Drag King Extravaganza. Thisway/Thatway is currently preparing Laye(red), a show commissioned through the Queer Cultural Center set to debut in the 2009 NQAF. When not on stage, they can be seen as "smarty-pants student" at Mills College pursuing a bachelor's degree in Ethnic Studies. Cooper will continue in the Performance Studies doctoral program at UC Davis this fall.

Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, also known as the Devil Bunny in Bondage, is a San Francisco based interdisciplinary performance artist, video artist, cultural activist, curator and percussionist of Filipino and Colombian descent. She is originally from Miami, Florida and received her B.A. from Brown University where she created an independent concentration entitled "Hybridity and Performance." She has worked with non-profit arts organizations and HIV prevention service agencies such as the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida, New Langton Arts, Galería de la Raza, the Queer Cultural Center, Asian American Theater Company and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center. She has worked on various artistic collaborations under the mentorship and direction of performing artists such as Pearl Ubungen, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Elia Arce and Afia Walking Tree. Her work in performance, video and writing has been presented nationally and internationally. She has received grants from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2000-2001), the San Francisco Art Commission Cultural Equity Grants Program, the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize and the Zellerbach Family Fund.

Highways Performance Space presents the Los Angeles dates of the tour Friday + Saturday, March 6 + 7 at 8:30pm and Sunday, March 8 at 3:00pm.

“I find that in our LGBTQ community we tend to isolate from the other,” Highways’ artistic director Leo Garcia says. “We find comfort in being with those who are like us. Fringes-Margins-Borders is a new kind of Highways’ performing arts program designed to initiate a creative community-building public dialogue. It’s our ongoing effort to promote understanding and mutual respect across artificially and socially constructed identity divides. The production’s artistic goal is to express and reflect California’s new multicultural social paradigm by commissioning 8 individual artists to create coherent, intelligent and insightful narratives rooted in their observations, complaints, experiences and discoveries. We’re touring four cities with this project, San Francisco, L.A., Claremont and San Diego. We couldn’t do it without the support of the Irvine Foundation and the National Performance Network.”

Fringes-Margins-Borders reflects the contradictory opinions and values generated by California’s profound demographic changes of the past forty years. The artists attempt to capture this complex moment in California’s history, when the state’s social fabric and its cultural landscape are being transformed into something entirely different than they were before the Millennium. Because people of color comprise the majority of California’s population and because the state’s LGBT residents are equally distributed across all demographic groups, the art being created on what were formerly regarded as California’s “margins” is now moving to center stage.

Highways Performance Space is in its 20th year as Southern California’s boldest center for new performance, promoting the development of contemporary, socially involved artists and art forms from diverse local, national and international communities. Artistic Director Leo Garcia continues to affirm Highways mission of developing and presenting innovative performance. For more information, photos or interviews, please contact Leo Garcia, Artistic Director @ 310-453-1755.

The project is sponsored in part by the James Irvine Foundation and is a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project.

Reviews: Bad Scifi Night

2009-02-18T17:41:00.000-08:00

So every week or two, a handful of musicologists and I get together and watch old scifi movies. Most of them are truly awful. They are generally chosen with no criteria whatsoever, although a scandalous title or provocative cover art tend to attract our attention. I tend to gravitate toward movies from the '50s or ones with female characters, one of my friends prefers movies set in space. Barbarella and Teenagers from Outer Space have been our favorite choices so far. I can't promise reviews of all our viewings, since I am frequently not paying full critical attention while watching, and many of these films defy all attempts at comprehension, but I thought I would share my experiences when I can.

She Wolves of the Wasteland (1988). aka Phoenix Rising: The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which all of the men are dead. A tribe of evil bounty hunters ruled by a creepy Reverend Mother pursue a pair of leggy blondes, one of whom happens to be illicitly impregnated with stolen sperm that will produce a male child. The bounty hunters are delightfully dyke-y in their fashion choices (that's how you know they're bad), while our renegade heroes wear bikini tops and loincloths while they fight to preserve the heterosexual family. The main point of this film is its scenes of girl-on-girl fighting and topless waterfall frolicking. There is a tragic lack of lesbian relationships considering a world without men, but if you're into post-apocalyptic sexploitation films and girls with guns, this one's for you!

Assignment: Outer Space (1960) aka Space Men. In this film, Rik Van Nutter plays Ray Peterson, a self-centered reporter who is assigned to report on a space station mission, immediately clashes with the station captain and finds himself entangled in a disaster that threatens to destroy the earth. Although there are several bases and colonies on other planets, apparently the destruction of Earth implies the end of civilization and thus several people must risk their lives to save the planet. The convolutions the plot takes to get the characters into high-risk situations make no sense whatsoever and for some reason everything is much slower than it should be. There is exactly one African-American in the movie who is kindly, wise, and self-sacrificing and one woman for whom the men risk their lives. This film was a little too slow for me and the special effects were absurdly low-budget and hard to follow. Why in the world couldn't they set fire to the models to show the ships being destroyed? At one point we took to counting how many times the same shot of the spaceship taking off was used. This is not a particularly good movie, and the hilarious terribleness of the special effects is diminished by the plodding pacing.

So those are my responses for this week's scifi selections. I'll take recommendations if there's anything out there you'd like to suggest for reviewing, but all final screening decisions are reached by consensus. As usual, my reviews will tend to come from a queer/feminist perspective, so if you don't want to hear how this movie could be made better by more female characters or explicit homoeroticism, look elsewhere for your recommendations.

Another Season at the Ahmanson

2009-02-13T16:56:00.001-08:00

CTG announced the new season at the Ahmanson, and I don't even really have the energy to complain about it. It's boring, but fine. Nothing new, nothing interesting, just transfers of shows that got a lot of attention on Broadway: Spamalot, August: Osage County, Mary Poppins, South Pacific, and, as a "bonus" not included with the season, An Evening with Patty LuPone and Mandy Patinkin. If the tickets are cheap enough, I might actually consider seeing some of these shows (South Pacific is dissertation related), but they feel like giving up. The Ahmanson is telling us they have no interest in producing new work or programming interesting, quirky, or offbeat productions, they have no interest in making L.A. anything but a second or third stop for Broadway shows before they go on full national tours. Fine. I think the Ritchie quote in the Times summarizes it perfectly: "What's not to love?" Ritchie said. "You look at that season and there isn't anyone who doesn't say: 'I want to see those five shows.'" Even he isn't arguing that these are good choices or a good season; they're just the things people have heard about. He sounds like a slightly more eloquent George W. Bush - self-satisfied and unintelligent.

Saying that, my real point is, what's up with this season programming? They're announcing the Ahmanson season now and it begins in June, but I just this week subscribed to the current season at the Taper that starts now and goes through next October. WTF? Couldn't they at least be consistent across one organization about when the year starts and stops? Plus, as an academic, I really wish they could either follow the the academic year - it's really hard for me to commit to shows for next October.

Depression and Theater Economics

2009-02-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

Minksy's. Ahmanson Theatre. 2/11/09.

First and foremost, Minsky's is a fun show. I laughed out loud, really. It's cute, entertaining fare and I wouldn't hesitate to take my parents. It may not be as good as Kiss Me Kate or Guys and Dolls, but wants to be a cross between the two in the tradition of the backstage musical with a genuine love for the theater and a happy little romance plot. Everyone who I've talked to has good things to say about it. It's intended to follow Curtains and The Drowsy Chaperone in transferring to Broadway and it will probably do just fine there.

However, I can't say that means I'm an unequivocal fan. The show had some charming moments, and the closing number, "Nothing Lasts Forever," was truly delightful, but much of the show was rough going, especially at the beginning. The first two numbers, both "rehearsal" scenes at Minsky's Burlesque Palace, did a terrible job at establishing the characters or making me feel sympathetic toward our leading man. It really took far too long for either of the leads to interest me at all. By the end I was fan, and Christopher Fitzgerald did an excellent job as Billy Minsky, but he needed much better character development earlier in the show. In fact, most of the characters could use more development early on - just because they're recognizable types doesn't mean I'll care about them. Overall, the show was deliberately filled with tired jokes and routines, hoping that the comfort of the familiar will make the old feel new again.

As a theater historian, I find the show's representation of burlesque fascinating but problematic. Rather than being either entertaining or provocative, Minsky's starts out just stripping the girls almost naked and starting from there. From everything I know about burlesque, it may not be classy, but the point is at least partially the humor and the tease, not just the fact that the girls aren't wearing very much. While I liked the clever humor of "Keep it Clean" in which the girls spend most of the number just barely covering themselves with towels as they bathe, several of the other "burlesque" numbers seem to miss the point of burlesque altogether. The show plays fast and loose with both the source material and the historical background in order to create a setting that feels more contemporary, but the attempt to be relevant feels heavy-handed and personally, I think both the historical facts and the film version seem more interesting.

Minsky's is trying to be all-too-contemporary in its discussion of the economic downturn (read: Great Depression) and culture wars, but it seems to be doing so without quite enough self-awareness to feel contemporary. The message seems to be that some good, old-fashioned entertainment is the solution to all economic problems, as evidenced by the number "You Gotta Get Up When You're Down," but the show doesn't really establish that the Depression is really the problem. They keep mentioning it, but it would be nice to see the economic hardship actually performed (perhaps in an opening musical number?). Instead, the show starts with rehearsal and then psychiatrists, which, while hilarious, seem like a luxury in times of economic hardship. The message of the show, as evidenced in the title of the NY Times review: What's the Cure for those Depression Blues? Hoofing in Your Scanties. The idea that theater is part of the cure for economic and psychological depression is a good one, though not at all well developed in Minsky's - the show just served to remind me of my underemployed status and how I should go to cheaper theater than the Broadway-bound show (even though I didn't pay for the ticket). I just kept feeling that I would have more fun and excitement and less guilt if I saw smaller, cheaper theater. I don't think that's really the message the Ahmanson wants so send right now.

In fact, the whole thing made me want to go to some actual burlesque, which isn't as dead as the musical wants me to think.

Good News/Bad News

2009-02-10T22:15:00.000-08:00

Last week, The LA Times reported that CTG is planning a series of minimally staged new works at the Kirk Douglas Theater. Any return to supporting new work is a good thing, but this is a far cry from the commitment to diversity and emerging artists that CTG used to offer. It's a good thing that they're willing to program things that might not entice an audience through the subscription model, but I want to note that the shows they announced sound like more of the same boys' club that Ritchie programs at the Douglas and the Taper. Here's the lineup:

--"Darwin," March 14 only, 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.

--Mike Daisey's "How Theater Failed America," directed by Jean-Michele Gregory. March 18-21, 8 p.m.

--Workshop performance of Daisey's newest work, "The Last Cargo Cult," March 22, 3 p.m.

--World premiere of "The Projectionist," by L.A. playwright Michael Sargent, directed by Bart DeLorenzo, March 26-28, 8 p.m.; April 2-3, 8 p.m.; April 4, 7:30 and 9 p.m.

--Staged public workshops of the hip-hop musical "Venice," by Matt Sax and Eric Rosen ("Clay"), April 15-18, 8 p.m.

First of all, note that ALL of the shows are by men. In fact, as a far as I can tell from the descriptions, all of the shows are by and/or about straight and/or white men. If that's not more of the same, I don't know what is. Is it really that hard to program even one show by a woman? One of the shows is by L.A. artists, which is good and I highly approve of the choice of Bart DeLorenzo as a director, but otherwise, it seems to me that this programming isn't particularly different from the rest of Richie's programming.

These shows are clearly trying too hard to be "young" and "edgy" and trying to appeal to a young audience. But really, Richie seems overly enamored with the gimmicky aspects of hip-hop theater, and Darwin's "electroluminescent dinosaur." They're not even really particularly cheap, even through they're promoting lower ticket prices as appealing to younger crowds. The $20 ticket price is the same discount price they're offering on their expanded HotTix program for all CTG shows. If you were actually interested in seeing all of these works, it would be $100, which isn't exactly affordable for a young audience. They might succeed in some one-off new attendees who already happen to be fans of these particular artists or have heard of but not seen their work, but this doesn't seem like it will manage to really build a new audience for CTG programming or even for the artists they're supporting.

Thanks to Frank's Wild Lunch for pointing me to the article.

Returning to Old Habits

2009-02-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

I won't say I'm back, because that sounds a little like overpromising when I haven't updated this blog in half a year, but if anyone is listening or stumbling across, I apologize for my silence. It has accompanied a difficult period in which I finished my dissertation and found myself both overworked and underemployed. Adjunct teaching and applying for jobs doesn't lend itself to stimulating blog discourse, unfortunately, and I admit that I've probably been pretty depressed. I also hadn't been attending much theater, which was the point of this thing after all. So I've poked around under the hood to give the place a new look, and an updated list of links to things which actually exist (yay!) and hopefully I will have a more exciting life worthy of report and analysis.

I am also returning to old habits, many of which have been sorely neglected in the past year or so. I'm having friends over regularly for communal TV-viewing (Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl, Top Chef, and Big Love are the current favorites) and getting together with friends for Bad Sci-Fi film viewings, which are fabulous. After much soul searching, I renewed my subscription to the Mark Taper Forum even though I feel like their programing is still too white, middle-class, and heterosexual. Having the season ticket gets me to go out and see theater that I wouldn't necessarily choose for myself, and that's probably a good thing, even if I'm terribly nostalgic for the days when Gordon Davidson programed theater worth caring about; I still really hate Michael Ritchie's taste. I've also started opening up my RSS reader again, so I'm getting caught up on friends' blogs, local events, and the voices that have been absent from my life for the past year or so. I'm doing some research on local history here in Los Angeles and working on revising a dissertation chapter into an article, and hopefully those projects will help inspire new ideas to share with the world. So, maybe I'm back to blogging as well. It's a good time for new starts.

Adventures in Retro LA

2009-02-09T23:11:00.000-08:00

I had the most amazing weekend exploring the fabulousness of Los Angeles history. Almost by coincidence, I found myself visiting some of the sites of the city's popular history, places the exemplify the layers of the urban past in all their commercial glory and whimsical exuberance.

It began on Friday with a trip to Disneyland in the rain. Because of the rain there were almost no lines, so we explored all of the rides I usually don't bother with, including several of the attractions that date back to opening day: The Jungle Cruise, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Snow White's Scary Adventures, the Storybook Land Canal Boats, and Peter Pan's Flight. We even went into the Main Street Cinema and watched "Plane Crazy" and "Steamboat Willie." I went with people who know Disneyworld and see Disneyland as a quaint cousin of the larger park, but for me it represents both childhood memories and the embodiment of the local myth of Southern California as a place of wild dreams and playful innovation.

On Saturday, I had tickets with a friend to "Something to Crow About" at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in celebration of Baker's 85th birthday. I knew it was shameful that I had lived in L.A. for so long without attending the Marionette Theater, and this was a delightful opportunity to learn about it. There was short film about the history of Baker's work, which is amazing, and then Baker and host Charles Phoenix (Who is fabulous! His voice and his suits make me swoon!) presented a short slideshow of Baker's personal history as puppeteer to the studios and the stars. Following an intermission featuring free wine and/or fruit punch, the puppeteers of Baker's studio presented "Something to Crow About," a marionette show originally performed in 1959. The performance combined the classic humor of a mid-century vaudeville or variety act with a surprising liveliness that skillful puppeteers gave to the marionettes (and one of the puppeteers was totally a cute girl with a pixie haircut, yay!). The show culminated in Baker himself manipulating a marionette of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson demonstrating tap steps. It was very impressive! The whole evening was truly a delight.

Before the show, we ate dinner at Clifton's Cafeteria, where the food was ok, but the decor was fabulous. The interior is decorated as a woodland wonderland, complete with waterfall and strange stuffed animals (and wandering Mariachi singer - isn't that what you expect in the forest?). This location has been serving Los Angeles since 1935!

We finished our evening at Tiki Ti, the last of the great LA tiki bars, founded in 1961. We enjoyed potent rum-based cocktails at the very crowded (and mysteriously populated predominently by straight men) bar, amusing ourselves with the video menu's descriptions and taglines for all the drinks (all of which are hilarious, and many of which I hope to try at some point).

I know that people from back east and other countries scoff at a city where a bar founded in the 1960s is considered an icon of urban history, but each of the locations I visited this weekend is a tribute to the magic and artifice of local culture in the booming mid-century. I have visited the missions, ranchos and pueblos of earlier California history, but there's something about L.A. that evokes elaborate architecture of 20th century modernism. It is in many ways a city of the 1950s and visiting the shrines to mid-century Southern California culture feels like finding the soul of the city to me. I am absolutely delighted by my weekend of local exploration, and I think the retro-fabulousness of these locations, while evoking kitsch and nostalgia, also feels appropriate for this city of the Golden West.

Marriage Day

2008-06-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

Gay marriage has never been a top priority to me. In addition to the fact that I'm perpetually single, I also happen to believe that the LGBT community should be working to assure that men and women are treated equally under the law regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation, or perceived gender identity. Marriage could then follow logically, but never seemed to me a necessary first step. But today, I must admit, I'm very proud to be queer in California and to feel that for the first time, the State Supreme Court declared me equal under the law and realized that this was an issue of equal protection and nothing less. That is a beautiful thing.

Even more beautiful are the lives that changed today. I've been reading stories and looking at pictures and I can't help but cry to see all of the gay and lesbian couples, with their parents and siblings and children watching, who have cemented their relationships with the full sanction of the state today. The images in the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle are truly inspiring.

I must say, I wish I saw more women in tuxes, or any men in dresses. At least in these two major media outlets, the images are mostly of good looking matched couples in suits or white wedding dresses. I do love these guys' outfits. The relatively palatable imagery is a deliberate campaign to avoid providing fodder for the hatred of the other side, as reported here in the LA Times. Of course, this just makes the conventional imagery even more odious to me. I'd much rather see people also getting married in plaid jackets or punk rock gear or leather and drag queens in bridal gown glory and everything else that makes the queer community beautiful and diverse and distinct. In the months between now and November (and hopefully long after) I hope people will get the chance to have all the beautiful, outrageous, queer weddings that they want. And for now, matching suits or bridal gowns are pretty beautiful, too.

Oh, and in closing, one of the many things that made me cry today was this lovely blog post by (heterosexual) sci-fi writer John Scalzi, who happens to share his anniversary with this historic day. This is truly how to be a friend and ally.

Time to Play

2008-06-03T23:45:00.000-07:00

Finding myself with some free time for the first time in a very long time, I'm feeling a strange compulsion to play games. Now, I am by no stretch of the imagination a gamer. I don't play many video games (although I do have a Nintendo DS), computer games, or board games, but many of my closest friends do all of these things. I have friends who are huge fans of Settlers of Catan. When Bioshock and Portal came out, I heard everything about them even though I've never played either. I even have friends who play a regular D&D game, but I'm not one of them. I've lost many friends to World of Warcraft. I'm a big fan of Apples to Apples at parties, but in general I am at best a casual gamer who will occasionally play a game of Babble or other solitary games.

However, gaming has come up in my life a lot recently. Not just because my brilliant best friend studies and designs games, although that doesn't hurt. He'll be running around New York as part of the Come Out and Play festival this weekend. I also, completely randomly, found myself playing dice with friends outside of a coffeehouse yesterday.

Finding myself craving some gaming recently, I downloaded the new Penny Arcade game, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One. I found the whole thing highly amusing, though overpriced for its length. The situations are hilarious and I found the aesthetic entertaining. The turn-based action was a bit annoying, but overall the game itself was fun and made me laugh. I enjoyed it quite a bit, except that it was over too quickly. I will probably play the next episode, but I hope it's cheaper.

I've said for a year and a half that once I finished my dissertation I could get a Wii, and now that I've filed, I'm hoping that my parents will give it to me as a graduation gift, but considering that there still aren't any on store shelves, I'm not particularly optimistic that my parents will come through.

In other gaming news, I watched Jane McGonigal's talk, "Saving the World Through Game Design" from the 2008 New Yorker Conference on their website. It's a fairly familiar but quite interesting and simple explanation of what's going on in gaming and how it helps us see and deal with our lives differently. Prophboy sent me this link about how GTA IV changes the way players experience New York City. And at GigaOm, Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit Labs tries to define social gaming by distinguishing between synchronous and asynchronus games.

None of these things, however, has satisfied my craving for gaming. So I ask the internet, what games should I be playing? What am I missing out on? Should I try to organize a game night with my friends to play board and card games? Invest in a console? Try to convince my Wii and XBox-owning friends to invite me over to play? Or just read some more gaming news and theory?

Stealing the Spotlight

2008-06-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

Spotlight Stealerz. Highways Performance Space. 5/31/08.

D'Lo, Adelina Anthony, and Alison M. De La Cruz teamed up for this hilarious show at Highways, and while each (well, I can attest to D'Lo and Adelina) are amazing solo performers, they also make a wonderful team. The evening was a collection of sketches and skits, and while some scenes missed the mark or were overly serious for an evening of comedy, altogether they put on a great show.

I was amazed by each artist's work developing characters; they ranged from butch to femme to male to female to young to old to skunk and each character was clearly established through costume and mannerism as well as script. Each artist was brave in exploring both their own established identity positions and crossing the boundaries to perform outside their own identities. While Adelina as a 20-year-old boy was impressive, D'Lo in drag as a femme bank cashier was truly astonishing both because of how well it was done and how unexpected it was.

The throughline of the piece, which I found quite compelling, featured De La Cruz as a baby butch (recently converted from femme) exploring butch identity through conversation with an elderly butch/femme couple in a nursing home. Several of the other characters fit into this storyline, though that only became clear in retrospect. The establishment of this plot was extremely cleverly arranged, but I would have liked to see even more of these characters, and perhaps have seen them established earlier. I would have loved to see what the butch character (Frankie) was like as a femme (rather than being told several times) and what Frankie was like on dates. Perhaps we even could have seen the elderly couple when they were young. Several of the issues discussed between these three characters were fascinating and could have been fleshed out more, but this is only a minor consideration.

Overall, the evening was hilarious and showcased some very talented artists who have great chemistry together. I hope I get to see these three work together again soon. In the meantime, I've marked my calendar to see D'Lo in Ramble-Ations: A One D'Lo Show at Highways June 27-28.

How do you choose internet talent?

2008-05-22T03:30:00.000-07:00

Another super geeky post. At least it's not ranting about the failures of MLA citation formats. Because I could go on for quite a while about that right now.

So there's this video podcast called Mahalo Daily. It used to be hosted by Veronica Belmont, and she was fabulous. She was so fabulous, that I watched even though the vast majority of the episodes were about things I didn't care about. They do 5 minute daily segments about businesses and events and activities, mostly based here in LA, and while I was totally amused when she visited a cupcake shop or flew a plane, they weren't things I would normally have chosen to watch if they didn't involve such an interesting, smart, cool host. The best episodes were when her geekier side came out, like when she visited the Star Trek set. But Veronica left to host Tekzilla instead. I think it's super awesome that she wanted a geekier, more tech-heavy show, but what will Mahalo be without her?

I would have automatically stopped watching, since the subject doesn't particularly interest me, except for the fact that the one already announced cohost is Lon Harris. He's smart and funny and I know this from personal experience because I went to high school with him (he was a couple of years ahead of me, but still, I feel like if someone I know and more or less liked is doing something cool, I should watch it).

Now, they are trying to replace Veronica, and the way they are doing that I find fascinating. They chose Lon from inside their ranks - he was apparently already working at Mahalo, they asked him to do a couple of episodes while Veronica was still there, he did them well, so he gets more airtime. This makes sense. But they don't want Lon to host alone. They may want more variety, or it may be because they think a pretty girl will drive more internet traffic, or they may just be trying to recreate the fabulousness that is Veronica's on camera personality. So they're doing a reality-TV-style competition to choose Lon's cohost.

They're down to 6 finalists, and you should totally watch their videos and vote here.

There are some great choices and I'm sure any of them would be excellent hosts. Lon does a great rundown of each contestant's strengths on his blog. And for another female voice (besides mine, not Lon's), TheFemGeek offers her opinions.

Personally, I think both Sarah and Leah had a great blend of professionalism and quirky/geeky feel. Personally, I voted for Leah, but Sarah really has the tech cred. Her blog is @w00d's nerdtainment, which is fabulously geeky.

Andrea is really cute, but doesn't strike me as geeky as I'd like her to be. I felt like she was flirting more than hosting.

Part of me really would like to see Kristina win because of her fabulous hair and the geekiness of choosing a sound guy for her interview, but something felt awkward about her segment. She has the least experience, and it's possible that with a little practice she could be great.

Michelle has an edge of toughness that I really like (plus actual web design experience!), but in the end she didn't stand out for me.

Nadine looked great, but I don't think I learned anything or cared much about her segment. I may not be the right audience for cage fighting. She's very natural on camera, though.

So that's my opinion on the contestants, but I also want to weigh in on the overall format of this selection process. The reality TV parody bits are great, but I really want to know more about the contestants. I need to know their geek street cred. I want to know how smart they really are, not just whether they look good on camera. I want to get more of a sense of them as people. I want to see them interact with Lon more.

Especially in the first round, it felt like the judges were selecting contestants entirely based on looks and I'm really not OK with that. And why couldn't they have a female judge? I seriously hated the judges. I understand why looks are a factor (although I'm not saying that's ok), but please, ask them some questions about themselves and consider some qualifications other than looking pretty.

The best demonstations of contestants' personalities are the post-audition interviews, but one of the finalists doesn't have one, one doesn't have sound, and one of them is much longer and with Lon whereas the other three are shorter and with a different guy, so it's not exactly a balanced representation.

So, what I've learned from this process is that on the internet, men have all the power and are probably the target audience as well. And men can succeed based on talent and skill and a great sense of humor, but women have to have looks in addition to skills (though humor isn't as essential). Life lessons in a microcosm.

I'm a sucker for booklists

2008-05-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

From Thinking By Writing:

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - hard to carry around, but hopefully once the diss is done!
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - I actually dropped a college class because I couldn't handle The Canturbury Tales at 8am
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - I definitely read this in high school, but I can't quite remember whether or not it was required. It wasn't in an English class.
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

According to this list, I haven't read anything pre-20th century that wasn't written by Jane Austen, which is a little worrisome. Clearly, I'm a sci-fi fan, and yet there are some major sci-fi books on this list that I haven't managed to read. Cryptonomicon, Doctor Strange and Mr. Norrell, and Anansi Boys are all on my bookshelf taunting me.

How I Geek

2008-05-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

I just joined Twitter. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, but I did it in order to play the game prophboy is working on. This social networking/messaging site has been uberpopular for the last year in geeky/tech-savvy/silicon valley social circles. Which clearly does not include me.

I am not an early adopter. It takes a lot to convince me to let a new technology into my life. I seriously consider if there's a good reason why I absolutely need a new gadget or if it will just be a distraction. I always doubt that there's really any advantage to joining a particular social network. It is only when information that I can't get any other way seems useful, advantageous, or indispensible to my life that I turn to technology to augment my existence. Even then, I am reluctant to spend money on new devices (I'm a grad student, I'm broke!). My TiVo and my Nintendo DS are both hand-me-downs and I only got an iPod when I convinced my parents to give me one for Christmas this year.

Of course, once I finally accept a new technology, I love it and become easily addicted/dependent (less so with social networking software). I'm seriously in love with podcasts on my iPod. I've basically used the iPod to program my own radio station, which I play in the background when I'm driving or walking somewhere or waiting in lines or other times that would otherwise be mental downtime. I mostly listen to NPR and several tech podcasts (Buzz Out Loud from CNet is my favorite). I love the fact that I can be more intellectually engaged and listen to social and cultural commentary at times that would otherwise be wasted. My original assessment that this doesn't exactly change my life holds true, but I love and appreciate it nonetheless.

The fact that I have chosen to listen to several technology and scifi podcasts reflects my really strange relationship to technology. I don't have or even necessarily understand most of the technology discussed in some of these podcasts, but I like that I know little details of technology culture and I always want to learn more. I find myself reading and watching a lot of science fiction when I have the downtime to read for fun (rare these days as I frantically work on my dissertation). I'm fascinated by the intersection of technology and gender/identity theory and I frequently complain when tech commentators are all guys. I tend to listen mostly to the fabulous women out there talking about tech and I'd love to know more. I pay attention to Annalee Newitz, Veronica Belmont, Molly Wood, and violet blue and I check in on Xeni Jardin when I can. I read most of what Charlie Anders posts on io9. Who else am I missing?

Part of me wishes I had tended more this way academically - I like talking to the people I know who study performance and technology, but only some of the work out there about it speaks to me. I think there tend to be people who know things about performance, people who know things about gender/sexuality, and people who know things about technology and they aren't really talking to each other very well.

So, basically, I have no geek street cred. I can't design or program anything and I'm not in any way obsessed with gadgets or code. I whine about the relative scarcity of women and feminism in geek culture, but I don't know enough to help remedy it. But there's something in me that leans that way and wants to follow the conversations about science and technology culture even if I'm not exactly a participant.

Sci Fi Theater

2008-04-02T12:15:00.000-07:00

I've queried the lack of Science Fiction in theater before, but this Guardian blog post bemoaning the lack of SciFi theater was picked up by sci-fi blog io9, leading to two dramatically different conversations about the place of science fiction in theater.

The Guardian post inspired several theater fans to list some of their favorite and most notable science fiction theater pieces. The commenters are of course right that the term "robot" was actually coined in a theater piece and there are notable ways that theater does do science fiction. While there have been theatrical adaptations of several good scifi/fantasy books (The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials; I remember seeing a clunky performance of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles when I was in high school) You see science fiction done more often in small theaters and in small ways. Theater does well when it exploits campy and b-movie aspects of science fiction, such as Little Shop of Horrors or Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens or when it offers a visions of potential futures, such as Sarah Kane's Cleansed. Of course, there are other exceptions, like Heddatron, and I must say that the Siti Company's War of the Worlds is one of the most impressive things I have seen in a long time.

On io9, the sci-fi fans for the most part accept the premise that sci-fi and theater aren't necessarily suited for each other. Some commenters seem to think that theater itself is dated and not a viable medium for talking about the future. Some ponder the technical constraints of the live theatrical event. It's true that the aesthetics and relationship to technology are inherently different in theater than they are in film or books or comics. But that can be as productive and inspiring as it can be challenging, especially when done well. The suspension of disbelief in theater is different than in other media and the engagement of the imagination is done differently when you are confronted with live bodies in front of you. Theater can make use of those challenges, but we have a strong tradition of "realism" in the theater - of trying to talk about the way things are rather than what could or should happen. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but it tends to lead to expressions other than those that would be classified as science fiction.

So, after reading these two different sets of responses to the relationship between theater and science fiction, I'm actually much more encouraged and enthusiastic about science fiction theater. There's some good stuff out there, and there's a lot of potential for more good science fiction theater. I'll just have to keep my eyes open and go to these shows when I have the opportunity. I'd love to see more cyberpunk and steampunk aesthetics onstage. So, have you seen any good science fiction theater? What scifi lends itself to the stage and what doesn't? Or if it doesn't work, why is that?

The future and the academy

2008-03-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

This article is fascinating. Prophboy send me the link, and I'm intriegued and terrified. There are, of course, some inherent flaws to the article, but its argument about the possible impending doom of the entire educational system due to technology may or may not be accurate.

It's interesting to think about academia, which still feels quite often like a holdover from the 13th century actually being challenged and changing due to technology. I'm not talking about technology in the classroom (ie powerpoint), per se, but rather the ways technology changes the way people's minds work. I just finished TAing for a lecture class in which the Professor gave lectures, containing tons of names and dates and titles, from his head every day. The students were expected to take notes, and then had open-note quizzes and a closed-note final exam based on how well they recorded and recalled all of this data. There were papers, too, and as the TA I graded those based mostly on critical thinking and building an argument. But the fact that large portions of students' grades were determined entirely by how well they memorized facts is almost a foreign concept to me. This is the argument that prophboy, if not entirely Cringely, was making: that evaluating people based on their knowlege, as opposed to their ability to find and process knowledge, is more or less a thing of the past and is made completely outdated by the presence of the internet at our fingertips.

The other issue about this that Cringely raises is: what is the value of presence in educational process? If we follow Auslander, we don't necessarily believe in the unmediated performance. But do we believe that there's a value in sitting in a classroom and learning from a teacher? How is that different from an online course in which we're sitting in a chatroom learning from a teacher? Especially if the students in the classroom are texting or instant messaging instead of listening anyway? As I've been applying for jobs, there have been several (mostly community colleges) that have asked me about my experience teaching online courses. My standard response is that, while this isn't something I've done before, I'm sure I could do it, I'm generally proficient with computers, am familiar with educational software, etc. But honestly, I'm scared of the concept if not the technology. Sure, students can read instead of listening to a lecture or write blog post/comment responses instead of discussing in class, but isn't something of the experience of education lost in that process? And if so, what? Would I want to be a teacher in that kind of system?

And now, my major concern about the Cringely article is that it seems to think it's discussing the whole range of education from k-12 through MIT in one article and one concept, and that doesn't work at all. First of all, what you learn in kindergarten is how to talk to people and play with blocks as much as anything else - it's very tactile and I don't think technology will change that any time soon. Similarly with most of elementary school, being in the classroom and learning to socialize is a relevant (if often unpleasant) part of the education. And most of the things that are taught are basic skills (reading, spelling, arithmatic) that I think that people do need to learn, no matter what comes next. Also, it seems that in elementary school, teachers do have enough authority and a managable student-teacher ratio (although my mom is at 34:1 which seems fairly absurd) that they can prevent the students from texting in class or otherwise using technology as a distraction instead of a tool. They also use technology enough (typing, word processing, occasional computer games) that I think that it's not likely to get away from them.

When it comes to high school, this may be the crux of where things need to adapt and focus more on critical thinking and less on memorizing. The technology can be embraced more. But what technology? There was one teacher in my high school that notoriously insisted on everyone doing group powerpoint presentations. It forced them to confront and learn about the technology, but I'm not sure it made their presentations any better. Texting? How does one incorporate that into the classroom? Is there any way to accept that if you let your students use laptops in class, they will inherently use them to look at gossip sites on the internet and IM their friends rather than listening or participating? Is it possible for teachers to adapt to that?

What we do need to teach, and what seeems obvious to me but seems to elude my students, is how to do research on the internet beyond google and wikipedia. Someone needs to teach them that any online encyclopedia is not a valid academic source for a research paper. There are many great online resources that they can and should use, but they need to see that a private website from some guy is not the same kind of source as an academic journal. This kind of critical thinking in relation to technology should be inherent, but somehow it isn't, and it seems like high school might be the place to teach it. So perhaps they don't need to learn the data itself, but they do need to know where to find it, and how to evaluate it and its source once they have found it.

Personally, I think that the educational system is adaptive enough to integrate technology in productive ways, but there will always be battles about keeping some uses of technology out of the classroom (I heard someone the other day say that before IMing, there were always students reading books or doodling in the back of class, and that is, of course, perfectly true). The issues of presence and what is the value of a college education is a larger question, and one that will continue to haunt us, though I certainly hope it won't bring down the educational system as Cringely suggests it might.

Academia and the Suburbs

2008-03-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago, I listened to Karen Tongson from USC give a presentation ("listening party") on music and the suburbs. Last night, I attended a talk in which Alan Hess discussed the architecture of suburban Southern California. As a child of the suburbs and a student of 1950s culture, I found both talks fascinating.

The suburbs, like the 1950s in which they flourished, seem to be traditionally discussed with a mixture of derision and nostalgia. When you think about the suburbs, you think about white, middle-class, nuclear families living uniform lives in straight little rows. Of course, the minute you begin to look critically, that image dissolves, but it generally persists in the myths we tell ourselves anyway. This is perhaps what makes the discussion of suburban culture, particularly Southern Californian suburban culture, interesting. Art and design are a fascinating set of discussions because they have been so invisible. One assumes there is no design in the suburbs, that the houses all look the same. While there is an element of truth to this, Hess effectively argued for the virtuosity and variety of those planning the surburbs and their ranch houses in Southern California in the '50s. The Googie coffee shops and Cliff May ranch houses were precisely designed to fit a lifestyle and a mindset that were new and exciting in the 1950s, and not so different than what a lot of people still wish for today.

Tongson's work on race in the suburbs is particularly interesting, because I know I grew up with the image of the suburbs as depicted in A Raisin in the Sun: all white with the whole neighborhood getting disrupted by (gasp!) black people moving in. By the time I grew up in the suburbs, Southern California was pretty racially diverse and I grew up with friends who were Chinese and Taiwanese (I knew the difference!) and Japanese and Korean and Filipino and Indian. Nearby suburbs had large Chicano, Latino, and Middle-Eastern populations. While I haven't done any historical research to back this up, I rather suspect that even in the 1950s, Southern California had a very racially diverse population, and while I'm sure there was a great deal of neighborhood segregation, I wonder if the suburbs were ever as lily-white as we like to imagine them.

Tongson's talk on music in the suburbs was primarily focused on the late '80s and early '90s. She talked a lot about pop music, but it's also easy to imagine pop, punk, grunge, and other movements as the response of disaffected teenagers to the confines of growing up somewhere "safe" with nothing to do and nowhere to go in the evenings. But what were the suburbs like musically in the 1950s? We imagine teenagers listening to Elvis and other early Rock 'n' Roll and forming bands to play at high school dances a la Back to the Future, but how much of this image of accurate and how much of it is created by nostalgia? I know that my dad growing up was listening to The Beach Boys and my mom was listening to Mitch Miller and her parents' music from the '40s and '30s much like I grew up on music from the 1950s and '60s.

My mind, of course, turns to the theater. I can know exactly what people were watching on TV and in the movie theaters in the 1950s in Southern California, but were they seeing live performance? Was there theater to see? They were presumably buying the cast albums of Broadway musicals and seeing the stars appear on the Ed Sullivan show and doing shows in high schools. Were there even theaters for live shows in LA in the '50s? I know that the LA Music Center opened in 1964 and Gordon Davidson began working at the Taper in 1967. What comes before that? The Shrine Auditorium opened in 1926. Did it ever host anything besides awards shows and USC basketball? The Pantages Theater was opened in 1930 and originally hosted Vaudeville acts and movie screenings, but didn't do live theater until 1977. Did people from the suburbs come into LA to see shows? Did mid-level Hollywood stars appear in stage shows in LA as they occasionally do today? What is the theater of the suburbs? Is it Death of a Salesman and Our Town? National tours of Broadway musicals? Community theater?

March Performance Art Madness

2008-02-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

Looking at my schedule, there are all sorts of great performances and events coming up in March!

March 1 Transgiving. It's their annual Valentine-ish/Love show (ok, last year it was a sex show, but it rocked!) I have no idea who's performing, but it should be worth checking out. This one seems to involve friends/loved ones/allies performing - I hope it's good.

March 4 Karen Tongson will be hosting a Listening Party at LACE (curated by Josh Kun)

March 5 Holly Hughes performs a "Sapphic Sampler Platter" at the REDCAT

March 6: EASTSIDE STORIES: Queer Latino/a Art and Activism in East L.A..The Butchlalis, Luis Alfaro, and Hector Silva in conversation at USC. Sadly, I won't be able to make this one because I teach Thurs. 'til 6 and the event starts at 6:30.

March 8 and 9 Nao Bustamante will be one of the artists presenting at the REDCAT Open Studio

March 13 Adelina Anthony will be performing Mastering Sex and Tortillas at USC. I've seen this show or parts of it 3 times now, and yet I'm seriously considering going again.

March 15 Katastrophe and Jenna Riot as the Ice Cream Socialites performing in Long Beach.

Oh, and Sweeney Todd at the Ahmanson and Culture Clash's Culture Clash in AmeriCCa at South Coast Rep.

And I've marked my calendar for the butchlalis' The Barber of East LA April 11 and 12

Random discovery

2008-02-28T18:57:00.000-08:00

You know what I learned today? Harry Dodge is surprisingly cute in person. Not that ze isn't great and charming in By Hook or By Crook, but ze is delightfully handsome in real life.

What's a girl to do?

2008-02-01T20:27:00.000-08:00

What do you do when a friend writes to say that there's a fabulous queer femme performance artist you don't know about who wants to perform in LA?

It's so frustrating to me that after 4 years in LA, I have no way to make a performance happen when the opportunity arises. While I don't want to spend my life as an event planner (I can't handle the stress), I want to have the time and access to be able to point cool queer performance artists to cool queer venues to do their thing. I want there to be theaters (or bars, or coffee houses) that will open their doors on off hours or off days to random performance artists. And I just don't know who or where these things are. I don't know who to talk to to make a show happen.

It seems like it's been a while since I've been to a night of queer femme performance. Certainly LA must be due for such a thing. But the who and the when and the where are so hard to make happen. I know perfectly well that if I wait for someone else to organize the events I want to see, they'll never happen, but I'm far too far behind on my school work to take on anything else. Who out there is doing this kind of work? It's so frustrating that I can think of events and locations and organizations appropriate to this kind of thing in San Francisco, and yet in LA, I'm drawing a blank.

Sex Worker's Art Show?

2008-01-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

I just received random notification that the Sex Worker's Art Show is in town today! It's my birthday, so I have other plans, but if you don't you should totally go. It's always a fabulous, delightfully queer, sexy show. This venue seems to be a change from planned performances that got cancelled (or censored?). I'm sorry I wasn't on top of this ahead of time.

Wednesday, January 23rd
Mountain Bar
Chinatown, Los Angeles
8pm $10

The show is a combo of over the top drag, spoken word, performance art, burlesque and shenanigans
featuring:
Annie Oakley
World Famous *Bob*
Dirty Martini
Kirk Read
Krylon Superstar
Erin Markey
Mistress Keva
Loralie Lee
Chris Kraus

Industry town

2008-01-17T09:22:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles is a strange place. We are, decidedly, a town that lives and dies by film, television, and automobiles. It's a decidedly entertainment industry town. I've lived other places (5 years in the Bay Area, brief stints in New York and Oxford) and never felt compelled to own a TV. But here in Southern California (including my suburban hometown), I couldn't imagine life without cable. As a result, I am fascinated by the writer's strike. I'm following it avidly. I've started reading the LA Times "Showtracker" blog for official news and I love Wired Magazine's Underwire blog which, among all the other things it covers, includes strike updates with writers' propaganda videos attached to the end of strike-related posts. And I must say, I've enjoyed several of the strike videos very much.

When the Daily Show and the Colbert Report came back on the air without their writers, I was profoundly disappointed that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would cross picket lines, even though I was desperately craving their election coverage. I understand their predicament and that they might not have had much of a choice, and it was very clear that Stewart would have much preferred to make a deal with the writers giving them all their demands. I'm still very torn, but I'm watching both shows, and I have to say that I don't think they're doing too badly. The initial reviews were pretty scathing, but I must say that there's something charming about watching John Stewart trying his best and trying to have fun up there. He's a fascinating, smart interviewer and I very much enjoy him talking to authors and intellectuals - I don't miss the stars at all.

Now that the director's guild has settled, there's obviously a lot of pressure on the writers to make a deal before the Oscars, but there's a part of me that wants this strike to keep going. I want the strike to continue mostly because I think the writers are completely right, that the internet is clearly the future of television, and that the producers are trying to screw everyone else out of a fair share of the profits from the new medium. But part of me also wants to see what happens if the strike continues. Because I think there's a lot of hope out there for striking writers to change the face of the industry by working around and without the producers. There have been all sorts of rumors about writers starting their own projects, perhaps for internet distribution and it would be fascinating to see if it would be possible for some big name writers to transfer their TV and filmwriting talent to writing a high quality scripted internet content. How would it look different than TV or film content? Would it be shorter? Lower production values? What are the advantages of these formats?

I'm also fascinated by the other questions the strike raises. When the only new content on TV is reality programming, will people stop watching? Will people be cancelling cable subscriptions? Will the networks and/or the cable companies suffer? Moving Showtime content to network TV (Dexter will air on CBS in February) is a fascinating step. What else will the networks bring out of the vaults? Will we see old movies and premium cable programing in primetime? Will there be innovation, or just more of the same old reality shows? It will be a year or more until we feel the effects of the strike on films, but television will be suffering for quite a while, since already there are no pilots for next year's programming.

Of course, since this is an industry town, I know several screenwriters and aspiring screenwriters who are striking, and whose lives are profoundly interrupted as a result. For their sake, I hope business resumes soon so that they can pay their bills and so the local economy doesn't suffer more than it already has. But the strike makes very visible how the industry is changing, and I find that important and exciting.

Wacky pop culture intellectualism

2008-01-11T13:48:00.000-08:00

Am I back? I don't know. Is this thing on? Does it matter?

I've been MIA for quite a while, from both my blog and my life. Working 3 jobs in academia last quarter led right into family holidays, a chosen family wedding (maybe thoughts on that later), and then the inevitable exhaustion and illness that comes from too much work and not enough sleep. I was in New York when the Butchlalis performed Dickwhipped at Highways, so I was sad to miss the show and even sadder that I was too sick to be doing fun fabulous queer and/or theater things in NYC while I was there. I am perhaps not yet hardy enough to live in New York - the cold weather and my flu-like symptoms made me want to sleep and watch movies and play Wii and never leave Brooklyn, so I did.

Looking forward, there are some pretty exciting public intellectualism kinds of events going on in the near future here in LA and in blogworld.

As you may or may not know, I've spent a bit of time in the last five years hanging out with musicologists, who are suprisingly fabulous and interesting people. A few pretty cool musicologist friends of mine are keeping a group blog called Musicology/Matters which, so far, is a fascinatingly idiosyncratic collection of ruminations on music-related issues ranging from what's up with this week's column in the New Yorker? to the tension between academic interest and guilty pleasures. They're smart folks, and I'm interested to see what they have to say to each other and the world.

Speaking of group music/culture blogs, apparently the fabulous Karen Tongson of USC is collaborating with some other smart folks (Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vazquez) across the country to blog about pop music, culture, and taste, and whatever else comes to mind at Oh! Industry. For their mission statement, start here. Though the blog seems to be well underway and going strong, they're throwing a launch party here in LA on January 17.

And if you're looking for some good live discussion of popular music, head to the REDCAT on January 22 for Listen Again in which a bunch of scholars and journalists get together and talk pop. The LA academic community is well-represented by Alice Echols, Bob Fink, Josh Kun, Judith Halberstam, and Karen Tongson, several of whom aren't strictly music scholars, so there will be a particularly fun, approachable, interdisciplinary vibe to the event. I can't speak for the many journalists who will also be participating in the event, but the scholars are smart and cool and interesting to hear talk. Plus, it's only $8 ($4 for students), so it's finally an event at the REDCAT I can afford!

Speaking of events at the REDCAT that I can't afford, The Wooster Group will be performing their Hamlet there at the end of the month. This will sell out. It will be weird and brilliant and deconstructed. Kate Valk will be playing both Ophelia and Gertrude. I need to see it. Anyone care to join me?

The Beatless and generational history

2007-12-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

Across the Universe. Dir. Julie Taymore. 2007.

I watched Across the Universe recently, not expecting to like it much. I had heard that the critics were split, that the plot devolved into chaos at some point, and in general that it was too sentimental and nostalgic. It is, indeed, an excercise in baby boomer musical nostalgia with some serious issues, but all honesty, I enjoyed it very much.

Based on what I had heard, I expected the plot to completely fall apart at some point, but really it carried through pretty well. There were moments that didn't make much logical sense, but that's OK sometimes. In this case it rather worked, though it was a little annoying. There were serious problems with the plot of Across the Universe, but I don't think there was a lack of plot. It was really about the wrong emphasis and audience investment in the characters. The film spent a lot of time assembling a large group of characters into an East Villiage apartment (a la Rent), but it didn't do anything with them as a group. There was no investment in these characters apart from their historical analogs. While I could recognize that these were John and Paul, Janis and Jimi and Yoko, I didn't know why I should care. If the film had spent some time establishing their relationship and their group dynamic, the rest of the plot would have had its climaxes and tragedies with some meaning.

In this case, it feels as if the film is relying on history to make the points and provide the investment inherently. Which is a problem for any audience member who isn't a baby boomer Beatles fanatic. I grew up with the Beatles as occasional background music - my parents weren't huge fans, but we listened occasionally. I had a couple of greatest hits albums on CD, but certainly wasn't invested in the Beatles history or tracking down their more obscure songs. As a result, all of the clever allusions and carefully thought-out historical analogies are lost on me, and presumably a large percentage of the audience.

I blame the editing, and a few small directorial decisions. There were many brilliant things about this film, but they weren't put together quite right. A little more plot/character development/explanation, and it might all have been delightful. Apparently, there was some dispute about the editing between Taymor and the producer; I would definitely like to see whichever versions did not end up being the final cut to see if some of these problems were fixed in a shorter or longer version.

I did, however, very much enjoy this film as a movie musical. By taking songs that are so familiar and reworking them, often simplifying them, I was forced to listen to the Beatles music again and to think about something that had been nothing more than background soundtrack to my life. In the songs where the reworking was successful, particularly toward the beginning of the film, it was an amazing experience. Similarly, the visuals to the songs included some amazing Taymor artistry. Production numbers in an Ivy League college and an army induction center were sheer delight, and I would have liked to see Evan Rachel Wood as Lucy have some similar big production numbers establishing her character. The initial reveal of John Sturgess as Jude with his giant Paul McCartney eyes at the beginning of the film was breathtaking, but its impact was ruined by being used in the trailer. The film definitely had moments in which Taymor's genius read loud and clear, but the overall product was problematic. I loved it anyway, though. I appreciate it for what it could have been, what it wanted to be, and what in its best moment it was: an affectionate, creative, visually stunning movie musical, in which the songs of the Beatles were (sometimes cleverly) recontextualized and reconceptualized.

Theater as Historiography

2007-11-27T18:33:00.000-08:00

The History Boys. The Ahmanson Theater. 11/20/07.

Ideologically, I should have hated The History Boys. It is the story of white working-class British boys struggling to get into Oxford and Cambridge (there is one black and one Muslim character, but they only have a couple of lines each). While it deals with issues of sexuality, it portrays its most overtly queer characters as repressed, tragic and/or unsuccessful. It also portrays a postmodern approach to history as ideologically suspect and opposed to an idealised "truth" and knowledge for its own sake.

It is a testament to playwright Alan Bennett's skill and insight, then, that I loved the play despite all of my theoretical objections. It is a beautiful, sensitive portrayal of characters wrestling with ideas of maturity, sexuality, and knowledge, questioning which knowledge is considered valuable and why. While I object to the portrayal of Irwin, the history teacher (played by Peter Paige), as advocating a deliberately provokative and intellectually suspect approch to history in the guise of postmodern skepticism of traditional histories, overall the characters and particularly the queer characters were interesting, complex, and actively engaged in a debate over what we value in education. I may not agree with Hector's (played by Dakin Matthews) methodologies as an English teacher, stressing memorization and appreciation without analysis and transcendent ideas of "truth" and "art," but I love the way the play established these ideas and displayed his truly entertaining pedagogy. It was all the more interesting against a the classroom backdrop of postmodern collage combining images from art history and pop culture. The actors playing the boys were all charming, especially Alex Brightman as Posner with his sweet voice and youthful innocence. I was also intrigued by Brett Ryback as Scripps, who often took a narrator role in the play and whose characterization as the religous one of the boys could have used more explanation/development.

The best moment by far intellecually was when Charlotte Cornwell as Mrs. Lintott, the more traditional history teacher and the only woman in the play, goes on a diatribe about history being 5000 years of men's mistakes and the women cleaning up after them who don't get mentioned. It's a great speech and a fun introduction to feminist historiography. Unfortunately, she doesn't get an opportunity to model this as pedagogy the way the men do. This speech gestures toward the way postmodern approaches to history can be done right, but Lintott remains outside the main discourse of the play nonetheless.

Overall, it was an entertaining and mildly intellectually engaging play. I enjoyed it very much, and it is rare that play manages to disarm me enough that my intellectual and ideological objections fly out the window so that I can sit back and enjoy the play uncritically as a solid, engaging, well-crafted piece of art.

Go See Bear in San Francisco

2007-11-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

The fabulous author and performance artist S. Bear Bergman is teaching workshops in San Francisco this weekend. I wish I could be there instead of grading quizzes and applying for jobs! Even the descriptions make me giggle.

All workshops take place at the Center For Sex And Culture in their new space at 1519 Mission. Please feel free to forward to repost as appropriate. All classes are pay-what-you-can.

Saturday, 1 Dec, 4pm-6pm
A Re-Introduction To The Only-Mostly-Dead Art Of Chivalry
(Now! With 200% More Feminism!)

Everyone's heard the stories: men who get kneed in the balls for holding open a door, youngsters who sprawl on bus seats while elders stand, the myth of the handkerchief-carrying gentleman, and all the rest. What, exactly, do girls women people want in the world of chivalry? How can a modern gentleperson be courteous without being sexist or a suckup? And while we're at it - who goes through the door first, again? Talk a little about the principles, and then learn a lot about the mechanics of walking in public (v. walking in private, natch), and a whole lot more.

Sunday, 2 Dec, 2pm-4pm
Writing With and About Gender

A 2hr. workshop designed to get writers thinking about the language of gender, its vernacular and lexicon and ways of making itself heard in writing, and then figuring out personal, useful ways to turn that to their advantage. This workshop is appropriate for any one who can form a sentence, regardless of hir experience as a writer: from novelists writing transgendered characters to transfolk writing about their experiences to academics tackling queer theory to people still
exploring the nature of their gender and sexuality in private writing to absolutely anyone else. Feedback opportunities will be provided but not required.

Sunday, 2 Dec, 7pm-10pm
Theater Skills For Better Sex

People with improvisational theater training know three things you don't about how to make a scene out of nothing, and/or keep one going if it gets away from you. Excellent for eager newbies and jaded ancients, the straightest of couples and the queerest alike will learn how to seamlessly become new characters, take old standbys in new directions, and incorporate new ideas, handy props, and changes of scene on the fly without missing a beat. Inventive, snappy, and lots of fun - even if you've never stepped on a stage in your life! Participation required.

Dolan on Wasserstein, again

2007-11-08T07:25:00.000-08:00

Jill Dolan writes an extended critique on Wendy Wasserstein's Third, which she saw here in LA at the Geffen Playhouse. Go read her description and analysis of the play - she does it more thoroughly and better than I will.

The production is part of a season of the Geffen doing plays about women, only half of which are written by women. Two out of the three plays written by women criticize feminism, particulary academic feminism, and Third decidedly falls into that category. It's an intensely problematic play, Wasserstein's answer to King Lear reducing its female protagonist to begging forgiveness of a student in a dorm room and leaving academia. But while in Lear you witness the king's downfall and desperation as tragic, the play sets up Professor Laurie Jameson's humiliation as deserved and just, a victory over a too-rigid feminism. The play constructs this desertion of academia and feminism as a gesture of "hope" and a rejection of "irony" which is really intellectual critique.

In terms of the Geffen's production, I know several people who thought it was awful. Personally, I found it serviceable but in no way inspired. It presented without helping a problematic text. I was less disturbed than Dolan by the awkward blackouts and scene changes and transition music. I was, however, furious at Matt Czuchry's portrayal of Woodson Bull III. He came across as an overgrown frat boy completely without the insight and intelligence the character supposedly should have. He was awkward and arrogant. You'd think that my complete lack of sympathy for him would help me to identify with Christine Lahti's portrayal of Laurie Jameson, but honestly I spent a lot of time thinking about how her floral skirts and heels were completely inappropriate for New England in the winter and why in the world she was outside without a jacket. Because Bull was so utterly unsympathetic, there was nothing at the center of the play. If he is encouraging hope at the end, he has to offer some, but instead his moralism seems vapid. He doesn't offer a vision of a new kind of student with a critical awareness of privilege and lack of privilege but a resurgence of the Old Guard in a new skin, and that's where this play fails. It tears down feminism (without offering any sense of what feminism actually is), but offers nothing but a vacuum in its place. The "feminist" professors must be humilated, prostrated, and removed from the university, but what is left? Where is the "hope" the play espouses when no one is left? Everyone is removed from the university, but the institution stands, presumably in the hands of the old white men who were there first, but even this isn't seen as a tragedy in the play - it's almost seen as the way things should be .

Elvis was an Ass Man

2007-10-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

I've been watching Elvis movies recently (for research purposes, of course) and I'm amazed at how often the entire focus of scenes is on Elvis' female costars' rear ends in tight pants and short shorts. This is most obvious in Viva Las Vegas where Ann Margaret's bottom is really the star of the film. I'm amazed at how blatently these women are portrayed based entirely on closeups of their behinds. In Fun in Acapulco, the blond girl who Elvis likes better is differentiated from the female matador who is also pursuing him by the fact that her pants are much tighter and her bottom gets much more screen time. That's how you know Elvis likes her.

The Busy Week

2007-10-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

This next week starting yesterday is comletely insane. Yesterday after class stopped in the conference on the American Musical at UCLA (where I spotted The Playgoer in person and it took me reading his bio to figure out why I recognized the name). I ducked out of there early hoping to have time to buy a costume for my party tonight, but didn't manage that before I had to be back to UCLA to see Bill T. Jones "Blind Date" which was awe-inspiring. It was a brilliant anti-war piece that felt nuanced rather than strident. I felt like it asked what it means to be patriotic when capitalism and government combine to make patriotism a bad thing. Even the images of death and destruction were beautiful and haunting. Today I have to find my costume and dress for Backyard Drag, which could easily take all day itself, but I hope to drop in on the musicals conference again for a panel on gender and sexuality. DA Miller's paper on the subject yesterday was fascinating and contentious and I would be glad to see more of the response it provokes. That makes a perfect theoretical frame for dressing up for a musicals sing-along in my friends' backyard. I'm still not sure whether I'm going to just wear underwear and be someone from Cabaret (I have to find a bowler hat somehow) or if I'm going to buy a shiny gold lame dress that I have my eye on and be a backup singer from Dreamgirls/Little Shop of Horrors (racial issues notwithstanding). I also have the perfect dress to be a Shark girl from West Side Story, but West Side didn't make the sing-along. And I'm not sure I have the right shoes for any of these outfits. I'm just going to put my whole wardrobe in my car and hope for the best.

Doing Judy

2007-09-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

Rufus Wainwright. Hollywood Bowl. 9/23/07.

Last night, Rufus Wainwright performed his last concert in a series that started over a year ago when he did a tribute to Judy Garland's performance at Carnegie Hall. The series began with two performances at Carnegie Hall on June 14 and 15, 2006 and ended at the Hollywood Bowl. He recreated both Garland's set list and even his gestures evoked Garland's performance style. He also performed the concert at venues in which Garland gave famous performances (the London Palladium, L'Olympia in Paris, and the Hollywood Bowl). A friend of mine commented that performing Judy's songs, re-creating her performance, is an awfully ambitious project. It's true, and it could have gone horribly wrong, but Rufus made it a beautiful tribute to an amazing performer.

The concert was quite fabulous, and fascinating to think about as an artistic tribute to Judy Garland as a performer and as a symbol of queer identification. First and foremost, it was a good show. Wainwright's voice is well-suited to Garland's music. He's the kind of singer I would gladly hear recreate standards and old favorites in his own style anytime. And this was a lovely mix of Wainwright's distintive voice and Garland's dramatic performativity. He made the songs his own, but used her arrangements. While he was by no means impersonating Garland, he used his hands and elbows in a way that suggested without mimicking Garland's expressive theatricality.

The highlight of the show for me was "The Man That Got Away," in which Wainwright captured the smokey darkness of Garland's voice and the strength and fragility of the song itself. The second half featured appearances by Lorna Luft in a fabulous bright pink gown, Rufus' mother, Kate McGarrigle, playing piano for "Over the Rainbow," and an absolutely beautiful rendition of "Stormy Weather" by Rufus' sister, Martha Wainwright. Rufus also sang one song, ("Do it Again," I think) in Garland's original key. His falsetto was strange and haunting and somewhat painful.

The closest Wainwright got to impersonation was in the encore, in which he sang "Get Happy" in an imitation of Judy's iconic outfit, a costume that was almost drag on her but certainly was on him in stockings and heels. But even then, he was performing himself, not her; he wasn't trying to pass as Judy or become her - he was citing her as an inspiration, a symbol, a patron saint, a diva, and perhaps a goddess. He was still very much Rufus under that hat, not a boy in a halloween costume or a drag queen camping for an audience.

The fascinating thing about the show was the way in which the crowd was behind it. So that it didn't matter when Rufus' voice cracked and failed toward the end of the show, or when "Putting on the Ritz" felt just a little off tempo to me. It didn't matter that while Wainwright took full possession of the big, tragic numbers, some of the smaller and quieter pieces got lost in the hugeness of the venue and the undertaking. What mattered is how much the audience wanted to love Rufus and love Judy and love them together. The fact that this was happening was more important than the exact details of how it was happening. The whole audience was caught up in the process of identification and celebration of an event that happened 45 years ago, and it was wonderful. I'm sad that the DVD of the performance at the London Palladium and the CD of the show won't be available until December - I want to take them home and relive this performance now. I've been playing the Judy Garland CD, but I'd like to have them both.

For a full accounting of the concert, read this very detailed Yahoo Music review or Harp Magazine's detailed description of the Carnegie Hall show. There's something off about the LA Times coverage of the concert - halfway through, the reviewer gets caught up in being condescending about drag rather than talking about Rufus and Judy. What the LA Times reviewer missed, and I probably won't be able to explain well, was that this both was and wasn't a camp performance. The show claims and embraces a culture that has claimed and embraced drag performances of Judy Garland as loving tribute and mocking mimickry at the same time. But this was about the music, and about a single performance that has been called "the greatest night in show business history". It was a challenge and a performance accomplishment and a tribute. It was a heartfelt embrace of Garland and queerness and the ways in which they go together.

Wainwright says "I've thought a lot about this, and I think the secret" to Garland's effect on listeners decades after her death, said Mr. Wainwright, "is that, when she sings, she is beautiful without being actually beautiful." In this TONY article, Rufus imagines Judy as an alternative to a Frank Sinatra swinging masculinity: "There’s nobody being the flip side of that, which is the hungry, lonely, desperate, crazy-person singer. So I wanted to pick up that mantle and try to be a little less cool." I think that these quotes, and his performance, demonstrate a wonderful, respectful appreciation of Garland, her music, and her life. Recreating that iconic performance and making it his own was a brilliant tribute, as well as a the ulitimate performance of gay male identity.

computer problems

2007-09-20T19:59:00.001-07:00

Forgive me if my posting is light for a while. My computer isn't feeling well, and has thus been sent in for service. As a result, I'm temporarily using my mother's geriatric powerbook. Apparently, the version of Safari it runs doesn't get along with blogger. As in, I can write entries but not post them. I discovered this after losing a long post on feminism and theater that I may or may not feel inspired to recreate. This means that I can only blog on Firefox, and must log out of my email to do so (GRRR! I HATE this about blogger). Blogging becomes much more of a hassle and I'm much less inclined to do it. Hopefully my real computer will be back soon.

McCarthyism Now

2007-09-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

I'm in the middle of watching The McCarthy Years, footage of Edward R. Murrow's See It Now episodes relating to McCarthyism (much of which was portrayed in Good Night and Good Luck. It's amazing how contemporary so much of the footage feels.

There's a point at which McCarthy questions State Department employee Reed Harris about a book he wrote in 1932 about higher education. Apparently, in that book, Harris suggested that professors should have the right to teach that marriage "should be cast out of our civilization as antiquated and stupid religious phenomena" if that's their educated and considered opinion. This, apparently, made Harris a communist.

It's interesting that even at the height of McCarthyism, the president (Eisenhower) defended due process of law and the right of defendants to face their occusers. If we could even have that much committment to liberty and democracy now, I'd be impressed.

I was personally amazed that McCarthy accused the left wing media of unfairly persecuting him. I thought that the accusation of liberal bias in the media was a recent fallacy, but apparently happened in the 1950s.

It all feels very familiar.

Irreverent or Reactionary?

2007-09-13T00:52:00.000-07:00

Invasion! The Musical. Hudson Backstage Theatre. 9/9/07.

Invasion! The Musical is, as one might suspect, a musical (very loosely) based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. More than that, however, it is an evening of dirty jokes and foul language that are sometimes hilarious and sometimes completely nonsensical. As potty humor isn't exactly my style, I found myself cringing as often as laughing, but I feel that the musical is perfect for perhaps slightly immature frat boys. The production seems to have originated as a project among USC undergrads and recent graduates; most of whom are quite talented and seem to be having a lot of fun with the show, but I definitely felt too old and too queer/feminist to be the ideal audience. Variety calls the show "the latenight handiwork of a team of drunken frat boys trying to top each other's nominatiosn for Ultimate Grossout between extended bong hits" and I think that's about right. It's also the intended audience.

While the show was dirty fun, where it fell disappointingly short was as a satire. The program claims the show will be "innovative material that is going to challenge contemporary social constructs." It fails, however, to set up those terms clearly so that when it tries to claim that it's ridiculing ideological extremism of all sorts, it ends up feeling just plain reactionary. It feels like conservatives trying to be campy, which strikes a sour note for me. At all points, the writers seemed to avoid plot development, character development, satire, and logical consistency in favor of disgusting or unpleasant side notes.

The production fails to use the sci-fi genre or the 1950s setting to develop its ideas. If it employed the 1950s small town setting as a shorthand for conservative values, racism, hypocracy or sexual repression and established that at the beginning, then the ending would feel less reactionary to me, but as it is, the ending is just plain offensive and I find myself agreeing with the show when one of the characters jokes that it's not well-written. I guess I'm disappointed because the production has a lot of potential to be clever and interesting as well as just funny, and it at every point turns away from being intelligent as well as humorous.

For such an aesthetically heterosexual show, there was a good deal of queer content, including Emily Pennington as Spencer Brewster, a possibly transgender-identified 10-year-old-boy with a crush on his babysitter. Pennington as Spencer was adorable and he and his babysitter, Steve Thompson (played by Cory Bretsch) were the two characters I would have been happy to see more of in the show.

My feelings about the butch/femme lesbian couple, newscaster Gloria Parish (played by Jenny Weaver) and her girlfriend/camerawoman, Janelle (Danielle Faitelson) were much more mixed. Janelle was portrayed as "a butch dyke with no future" content to follow around (and be mildly abused by) the high-powered femme newscaster. Their relationship was loving but dysfunctional, which unfortunately can sometimes ring true for lesbians and they did get a roll in the hay at the climax of the show. Unfortunately, butch seemed to be defined by a tool belt, flannel, a bad wig and large fake eyebrows. They were distinctly out of period, which is odd since the '50s is often considered the height of butch-femme bar culture. These two have their moments, but personally I would find it more entertaining if the point of the jokes surrounding them went beyond "she's a butch dyke with no future" and perhaps implied that someone in the cast had actually met a butch lesbian rather than just heard of them.

I did, however, actually like the random side plot of two National Guardsmen (Ben Giroux and Al Rahn) who arrived randomly, and did nothing, but had a lovely moment of Don't Ask-Don't Tell discovery of their love. The lack of queer sensibilty in this relationship made sense, and even though there was absolutely no need for these characters in the plot, I rather enjoyed their appearance.

I actually enjoyed writer/director Aaron Matijasic's appearance in the play as a nerdy scientist, but I wish the character had something better to do than sing about Toxic Shock Syndrome and get the girl. Will Harris as Sherrif Brewster actually managed to amuse me while singing an offensive anti-feminist hoe-down song. And Ian Littleworth, Carl Petrillo, Al Rahn, and Gabriel Oliva made a wonderful barbershop quartet who were tragically underused.

Basically, there were some good people and good moments in a show that desperately needs to be rewritten with more attention to a humor that goes beyond gross-out jokes. The best word to describe the show is sophmoric, but there's a lot of potential for something better. At the moment, there's no point to this play at all, and its vapid attempt to be postmodern and irreverant makes it, at best, offensive and reactionary.

A Perfect Night

2007-09-10T00:55:00.000-07:00

Cohn, Rachel and David Levithan. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. New York: Random House, 2006.

This is a book about two people meeting cute, then spending a delirious night doing and saying all the wrong things. Over the course of a single evening, they learn and change and grow and fall in love in a way that's full of youth and hope and passion. It's sweet and beautiful and perfect. I loved it. I loved it so much that I immediately sent it to my gay best friend (who doesn't have time to read blogs anymore, so he won't know 'til it shows up on his doorstep). I thought about sending it to two other boys I know and love, but I'm not sure I could get past their skepticism to get either of them to read it. Anyway, it was one of those books that's so simple and evokative that I just want to hand out copies to everyone I know.

Now, I love David Levithan and I have since Boy Meets Boy made me laugh and cry and kept me from screaming while I was stuck in Vegas overnight during the most miserable travel experience of my life more than two years ago now. I love him so much that I almost think he's wasted writing straight teenage boy characters when he tells queer stories so incredibly beautifully. But if I thought that, he proved me wrong with Nick and Norah because they are fabulous, awkward, realistically confused, endearing characters.

I don't know what it's like to be a teenager reading this book, but with my cynical adult perspective the book feels bittersweet both for how honest it is with the disconnections and miscommunications and bad decisions and for how hopeful it is. Because I want, with all my heart, for Nick and Norah to be together and stay together and never break each other's hearts. Because this book is just the beginning of their story, one perfect night with the future purposefully blank so that they never have to break up, grow up, change or move away. Even as I'm applauding their bliss, though I'm also mourning an inevitable loss that is beyond the scope of the book but looming nonetheless. It's a good thing when I worry about the future of fictional characters. It means that in the few hours when I was savoring the book (and it wasn't very long - it's a quick read), they felt like real people to me. I like that.

It's also a book that made me think about the people I've spent a perfect night (or perfect afternoon with). It made me treasure all over again the nights staying up late in cars and coffee houses in the suburbs with Prophecyboy just talking, not yet understanding that my love for him wasn't attraction. Or dancing to Madonna in a dorm room with a girl to whom I didn't understand that I was attracted. Or that trip to Santa Cruz with my first girlfriend where we got lost and flirted and ended the night with that first awkward kiss that changed my life. Or the afternoon I spent running errands with a performance artist I barely knew but with whom I talk so easily. Or those coffee dates that lingered for hours all last spring. Each of these moments is perfect unto themselves, whatever the future brought. They are moments of genuine connection with people who are in one way or another kindred spirits and any book that reminds me to appreciate them is genius in its own special way. And I want to give that book to each of them, and to everyone else who matters in my life. That's the kind of book this is.

If I lived elsewhere (or had time and money to fly)

2007-09-09T12:18:00.000-07:00

There are two very exciting shows that I want anyone who happens to be reading this in New York or Seattle to know about. If I could afford to, I would be booking plane flights for both of these shows.

New York:
Wolves in the Walls
New Victory Theater
Oct. 5-21

This is the Improbable Theatre Company (who did Shockheaded Peter) and the National Theater of Scotland collaborating to adapt a children's book by Neil Gaiman. The story is verys simple, but I suspect the theatrical adaptation will be fabulous.

Seattle:
Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps
Capitol Hill Arts Center
Oct. 26-27

The Pat Graney Company and the National Performance Network present the world premier of Scott Turner Schofield's Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps. This piece is going to be amazing. Turner is my favorite transgender performance artist. He's a delightful human being, a true gentleman, and a fabulous storyteller. I've had the extreme privilege of reading an early text for this show and I'm super excited about it. Excited to the point that I've cleared my schedule just in case I can find a last minute cheap ticket to Seattle to go see it. If you happen to be in the area, you must go and report back to me. I insist.

So, if anyone out there feels like flying me all over the country to see shows (and review them, stage manage them, whatever), these are two that I'm dying to see. If they happen to be local for you, there's really no excuse to miss them.

Go to ...Hell

2007-09-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

Zorro in Hell. Ricardo Montalbán Theatre. 9/6/07.

Culture Clash's Zorro in Hell is part folklore, part history lesson, part political rant, and part stand-up comedy, but it's all extremely entertaining. It draws on traditions of Chicano agit-prop theater (I particularly enjoyed the reference to The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa) in order to dissect pop culture iconography. Plus, it was a love song to old California with its checkered history of exploitation, oppression, and revolution. While not every line was perfect, the fast-paced wit ensured that I laughed so much my face was sore.

Zorro in Hell is the story of a writer (Richard Montoya) who finds himself in a hotel that serves as a museum of old California with a proprietress (Sharon Lockwood) who claims to have seduced and inspired historical and liteary greats from Joaquin Murrieta to Jack Keroac. She and a cast of very queer characters seek to teach the writer the story of Zorro, taking him from a cynical aspiring screenwirter to a revolutionary in the Zorro mold.

Of course, this plot is only an occasional accessory to witty one-liners and a postmodern exploration of California histoy and Zorro mythology. Culture Clash places Zorro in a geneology of tricksters, thieves, and freedom fighters. While they assert that he's directly descended from the Scarlet Pimpernel and an inspiration for Batman, they also implicitly or explicitly link him to Robin Hood, Joaquin Murrieta, and Hannibal Lecter, and perhaps even Br'er Rabbit. The play explores the character's inauthenticity from pulp fiction roots through children's memorobilia. Zorro represents a long history of white and nonwhite children alike nostalgic for a California history that never really existed, but Zorro in Hell comes to the conclusion that Zorro is a character worth emulating despite his problematic history, because first and foremost, he stands up for the people against an exploitative and authoritarian Gobernador. He's a graffiti artist and a one-man rebellion, a terrorist in the most necessary way. Refreshingly, this play embraced the bi-cultural, the alliance between white, Native American, and Mexican as the basis for chicanismo and as the source of potentially revolutionary alliance. It wasn't a piece about how Zorro wasn't authentic enough but rather about how authenticity becomes irrelevant in the face of oppression.

The play is wonderful and I love it and highly recommend it, but no review of mine would be complete without an analysis of gender issues, and this production had some weird ones. First there was the 200-Year-Old-Woman, who was kind of awesome, really. This weird muse/succubus figure isn't exactly a representation of the female experience (she's more symbol than character), but she was a lusty and fiesty old woman (with an occasional inexplicable Irish accent) and as such was kind of fabulous. Of course, she only had one bit, so it got old by the second act, but that's OK really. The real issue wasn't Culture Clash's problems depicting women (for once) but with homosexuality as the foil to masculinity. Our writer-hero was, until he became Zorro, constantly in danger of being sexually victimized. He was kissed by a gay cowboy (and boy can those Culture Clash guys REALLY not do gay right) and raped by Kyle, his bear therapist (the big furry kind, no the big furry kind that lives in the woods). I know that part of this was a humorous take on the tradition of Zorro (and the Scarlet Pimpernel) masquerading as an effete rich boy to hide his secret identity and a performed resistance to the demasculinization and infintalization of any non-white men, but it was also a disturbing depiction of homophobia as the source of all humor. In this world, only Zorro is really a man and everyone else is lesser, as demonstrated by potential homosexuality.

With that being said, the play is overall much stronger than its homophobia and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It just got extended until September 30th and it is very much worth a trip out to Hollywood to see this wonderful exploration of California mythology lovingly and irreverently exploded on stage. Director Tony Taccone and Culture Clashers Richard Montoya, Herbert Sigüenza, and Ric Salinas have a lot to be proud of in this one, and they're working hard up there on stage. The lease you can do is go see it.

P.S. The show also had the best intermission and post-show soundtracks I ever heard. Seriously. I laughed. I sung along. They were all wonderfully appropriate to the show.

Lesbian Theater and Queer Performance Art

2007-09-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

I recently read a myspace bulletin from Curve Magazine in which they asked for lesbian theater critics or actresses involved in lesbian theater. If you happen to be either, please respond to them.

But the posting made me consider whether I would call myself a lesbian theater critic or not. It's a loaded question, regardless of the identity issues. I write about queer performance art, and as a result, I see quite a bit of performance by lesbians and other queer women, but it's been a long time since I've seen anything that could strictly be called be called lesbian theater. I tend to know things about lesbian performance art, music, spoken word, film, and sometimes even burlesque, but what exactly qualifies as a lesbian play? And have I been ignoring them in favor of other forms of performance?

Is there lesbian theater here in LA that I'm missing? I tend to skip a lot of the performances at the Celebration Theater and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center as too expensive and usually gay male focused. Theatre Out is a newish gay theater in Orange County that I have yet to check out and Rude Guerilla also in Orange County often has interesting gay [male] programming while not strictly a gay theater. The LA Women's Shakespeare Company is a theater company that may be of interest to lesbians, but isn't strictly lesbian theater as far as I know.

And that made me think about gay and lesbian theaters elsewhere. I'm certainly familiar with Theatre Rhinoceros and Brava! Theater Center in San Francisco and the WOW Cafe in New York (Shakespeare in the Nude on Sept. 8 sounds awesome!) as likely places to find lesbian theater, but I can't say I've spent much time at any of these. Are ther other lesbian or gay and lesbian theaters I don't know about? What makes lesbian theater?

For those in NY

2007-09-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

For any New Yorkers among my readers, I highly recommend that you check out Mastering Sex and Tortillas by Adelina Anthony. It's a hilarious piece in which Anthony performs butch and femme gender roles, discussing lesbian sexuality in a rowdy, irreverant solo performance. The intended audience is clearly Chicana lesbians, but the piece is delightfully entertaining all around.

MASTERING SEX & TORTILLAS!
Sept. 5th-29th (Wed-Sat @ 8 pm)
Teatro LA TEA
Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center
107 Suffolk Street, 2nd floor
(between Delancy & Rivington Streets)
Tickets: $15

Fall Lineup

2007-08-27T23:54:00.000-07:00

I finally decided to splurge and plan ahead by purchasing tickets to several of those shows I know I should see this fall and that I was far too likely to put off buying tickets until they were sold out or I was too busy. So now I have all sorts of exciting shows to see this fall. Yay!

First of all, I succombed to pressure and renewed my tickets for The Mark Taper Forum. I know this is hypocritical, since I've been complaining loudly about how atrocious and boring almost everything I saw there last season was. But I was determined to see Sweeny Todd and it was cheap and easy to add on tickets to Avenue Q. The History Boys should also be fun. Yes, I'm totally a sucker for musicals. Of course, the seats will all be atrocious, and I'm a bit worried that I'll have moved somewhere before The House of Blue Leaves and School of Night happen, but I'm a sucker for a good Christopher Marlowe story. I find this a crazy season, and still really really white and heterosexual and male-dominated, but I subscribed anyway. Sometimes I fail to live up to my own ideals, but I think it's better to err on the side of seeing more theater rather than less.

More interstingly, I also ordered tickets for a few events at UCLA Live before the cheap student tickets sold out. So I'll be seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company doing both The Seagull and King Lear. I'll be seeing Ian McKellen as King Lear but William Gaunt as Sorin in the Seagull because that was the way it worked with my schedule and ticket availability. I'll also be seeing Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Blind Date. So I'll be getting a little bit of culture this fall.

I also purchased a ticket to Culture Clash's Zorro in Hell, which I totally put off to the last minute.

And finally, I'm going to see Invasion! The Musical, which I'm totally excited about. Maybe I can put it in my dissertation.

Speaking of dissertation, there's one more dissertation-relevant performance that I want to see: Rufus Wainwright performing Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall Show at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 23. My problem is that I haven't yet found someone to go with me to this one, and the Hollywood Bowl is one of the few places I'd feel really weird attending on my own. So my dilemma is, do I buy a ticket anyway and be alone and proud, buy two tickets and hope I can convince someone to come with me later, or put it off until I can find company. This is my eternal question, to attend theater alone or not, and it's often a reason why I put off seeing things. I tend to be reluctant to buy just one ticket, and hope that later I'll be able to find someone to go with me. So if there's anyone out there who knows me and is interested in Rufus doing Judy, I'd love company.

State of LA Theater

2007-08-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

Frank's Wild Lunch points to this article in the LA Times in which Charles McNulty describes the problem with LA theater as a lack of directors and the general decline of the director as auteur. It's an interesting and in some ways incredibly insightful observation of the LA theater scene, from a man who admittedly has seen a lot more theater in LA in the past year than I have (hey, if I were getting paid to do it, I'd be there). But, while I think he's dead on in describing the LA theater as intensly (perhaps overly) actor-driven, I'm not sure the auteur-director is the solution. I think that there is a problem with a general lack of intelligent vision in theater here in LA. And I think McNulty does a pretty good job at pinpointing the major directors that we know to follow (Bart DeLorenzo, Jessica Kubzansky) and a few less well-known ones to watch. But in crediting the director, McNulty ignores the ensemble, which produces some of the better LA theater in my personal opinion. A creative ensemble can produce amazing work, while the vast majority of director-auteurs, brilliant or not, tend to be straight white men speaking from a position of ultimate power. While it's good to have someone intelligent making the decisions, instead of all of the actors' vanity projects running around LA, I think our local theater scene is designed around companies that need good playwrights, good directors, good actors, and good artistic directors working together. The problem for me is a lack of cooperation around a shared vision, rather than a lack of one person with a dominant vision. We need smarter, more dedicated, more visionary theater people of all stripes, but subsuming everone else to a dominant vision is not the answer. I agree that we have a lot of actors doing a lot of not-so-good productions here, which would be helped by more and better direction, but I think it's better to get more good people committed to a good project, rather than just skillfully but mindlessly following the vision of a leader. Theater in LA needs more passion from everyone, not just good directing.

I totally have to see this

2007-08-20T12:59:00.001-07:00

OK, I've been hiding my head from the LA theater scene recently. I have absolutely no excuse for the fact that I haven't yet seen Zorro in Hell. I haven't even reallly been following the listings or reviews for local theater. But today, I checked the list of shows opening last week, and I was delighted to discover Invasion! The Musical. It's even set in the '50s!

Invasion! The Musical, with book and lyrics by Aaron Matijasic and music by Billy Thompson, is a provocative satire reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Show, with a dash of “South Park” and a spritz of Mel Brooks thrown in. On a hot summer night in 1952, the residents of Tucker County, New Mexico are at a moral crossroads. Suddenly, aliens attack! Faced with their impending doom, the townsfolk seize the opportunity to do and say all the things they’ve been keeping bottled up inside. As one would expect, all hell breaks loose. Themes of discrimination, social immorality and political hypocrisy are skewered without mercy.

Just as I was wondering about sci-fi theater, along comes a sci-fi play just for me. I must see it. But maybe I should watch the 1950s Invasion of the Body Snatchers first.

Science Fiction Everywhere

2007-08-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

I didn't know Frederic Jameson wrote a book about science fiction. Clearly I must read it. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Postmoderninsm, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It's not because Postmodernism isn't brilliant; it is. It just seems to me (in my admittedly brief and superficial reading of his work) that Jameson really wants to claim that James Joyce is the epitome of all culture and everything after moderism is just a poor imitation. His aesthetics and biases seem very privileged straight white male to me. I could be wrong; this isn't really my subject. I wonder if his opinions on sci-fi are equally biased. But anyway, yay for academics writing about sci-fi.

Speaking of sci-fi, I just finished reading The Last Days, Scott Westerfeld's sequel to Peeps. I need to talk about it because I have a very conflicted reaction to Westerfeld's books in general, and Peeps in particular. I find them both brilliantly provokative and terribly unsatisfying. First, I must congratulate Westerfeld for writing female characters who are important to the plot and demonstrate skills and confidence in their chosen fields of endeavor. Peeps was dominated by the voice of Cal, the geeky male protagonist, and that might have been part of my problem. Also, the concept behind Peeps and The Last Days is excellent; it's about vampires but recasting vampirism as a parasite, so the book talks interestingly about vectors and infection rates. It's a mythology that I'd love to see in queer hands with echos of HIV and lesbian vampires. But while the idea is great, the book itself didn't always keep me engaged. It seemed like it would be great for geeky teenage boys, but not always for me.

The Last Days is set in the same world as Peeps, but it focuses on several teenagers forming a band as the infection comes to a head in New York City. And I also found it frustrating, but for different reasons. It focuses on the members of the band, with the world seemingly coming to crisis behind them, but the potential end of civilization was not quite threatening enough for me. While it's probably brilliantly accurate in describing how purposefully ignorant people can be about the crumbling of an empire or a civilization, I wanted the bigger picture. I wanted to see the loss of infrastructure and feel the world fearing that this really was the last days of the U.S. or technology or the world. I wanted the characters to experience what it would be like if cell phones and power grids and the internet were unreliable. I wanted to feel the power and hope and terror of teenagers facing the crisis by playing weird new music, or just going to clubs and hearing weird new music. Again Westerfeld's concept and world are excellent, but the story itself is not enough for me. I want more. I want a bigger picture.

I've also been watching Masters of Science Fiction on ABC, and I must say, I'm rather enjoying it. These one-hour TV sci-fi mini-movies remind me of The Twilight Zone, which is awesome. So far, I think they're a little too obsessed with being contemporary and politically relevant and risk making the storytelling secondary as a result, but overall I'm very much enjoying them and glad such things are making it to TV.

Plus, I watched the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a friend the other night. I have thoughts on this, but I'm going to hold them until I've seen the 1950s version. I don't hear good things about Invasion, but I am curious.

Thinking about sci-fi across all of these genres and time periods makes me want to talk about theater. But I can't think of a lot of sci-fi theater that I've seen recently. Or at all, really. I remember in high school we did a project that adapted some Twilight Zone scripts for the stage. And I think I saw a stage version of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles also when I was in high school. And in college we did R.U.R. But I can't think of any professional theatrical sci-fi. Unless you count Evil Dead: The Musical. So, theater folks and sci fi geeks out there, do you know of any good sci fi on stage? Or have any theories about why we don't see it as much? Is it because of the fear of being cheesy? Lack of special effects? Some other demand of the genre? Is it really out there and I have just failed to see it? Does it happen places other than LA? What do you think?

Things to do

2007-08-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

There are a couple fun events on my calendar, so I thought I'd encourage others to check them out.

Tomorrow (Saturday 8/18) El Vez, my very favorite queer Chicano punk rock Elvis impersonator, is doing a free show downtown at California Plaza. It's part of that whole revitalizing (and gentrifying) downtown project, but free shows are pretty cool anyway and El Vez rocks. Yay!

And then next Saturday, there's a night of queer performance about queer female sexuality. From myspace:

She/Ze Sex: the varying degrees of gender identiy and sexuality"
Saturday, August 25th
LA Gay and Lesbian Center's Village at Ed Gould Plaza
1125 N. McCadden Place Los Angeles, CA 90038
7:30 pm
$10 event
What is feminine sexuality? Our show will explore feminine sexuality (or not) through enjoying the work of high femmes, butches, FTM's and MTF's artists/performers. Join us won't you?

With emcee D'lo.

Lineup:
Gabriela Garcia Medina
Adelina Anthony
Ryka Aoki de la Cruz
Miracle Whips
Nova Jade
DJ Claw-d
Trannysaurussex (from SFO)

They're also screening a couple of short films and have vendors selling queer-friendly clothing. It should be a great show!

The Gay Debate

2007-08-12T02:14:00.000-07:00

I just watched the Logo/HRC Presidential Forum. Yes, I'm a couple of days late.

I liked the structure of the event, with each candidate getting a short interview on a very specific topic. What the candidates actually said, however, was not particularly novel or suprising.

Since it was the HRC, the focus of the whole thing was heavily weighted toward marriage, which means that all of the major candidates (Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Clinton) spent a lot of time trying to explain that they were for fully equal civil unions complete with all the rights and benefits of marriage, as long as we don't call it marriage. Which is an inherently stupid and essentially indefensible position.

Personally, I thought Obama did it best, convincing me that he actually understood that this was a civil rights and equality issue. He said that the focus should be on legal rights under the law and not the word marriage, which I happen to agree with (even though I also firmly believe that separate but equal is not equal).

Edwards started his interview pretty badly, seeming stiff and uncomfortable, but he warmed up by the end. He did his best to dodge the marriage question by saying that he sees why the word marriage is an issue for gay people, but he's still not for it. I was impressed by his closing statement, in which he brought up immigration issues and antidiscrimination.

Kucinich was awesome. Total hippy. Actually in favor of gay marriage. Gravel was also in favor of gay marriage. They both talked about love and equality. Good for them!

Richardson was the loser in this 'debate.' He said more or less the same things as everyone else about marriage, but looked uncomfortable and unsupportive while doing it. And then, he got asked "is it a choice?" Which I personally think is a stupid question to ask a candidate. How would he know, really? Is there a good way to answer this? But he didn't deal with it well, said it was a choice and then mumbled something about science. Basically sounded dumb.

A lot of people apparently liked Clinton at this event. I wasn't particularly impressed. While she was in favor of civil unions and equal rights, she seemed to think it's OK to leave marriage up to the states rather than actually legislating for equality, which is honestly unconscionable when you have states like Ohio that keep working to take away rights for queer folks whenever possible.

Unfortunately, because everyone was asked to defend their position on marriage, there was very little discussion of other issues. They all seemed to be in favor of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act (although Hillary was rather defensive of both, but I guess she'd have to be because they're Bill's laws). Everyone seemed to be in favor of an Employment Non Descrimination Act that includes sexuality (what about gender and/or gender presentation?) Obama was asked about homophobia in the black community, and I think he answered that beautifully, saying that it's important to talk about gay issues not just in front of a gay audience but in all his speechs. Edwards got asked about whether or not he supports transgendered people, but in a way that he couldn't have said anything but yes. I think there could have been a much better transgender question*. I would have liked to hear everyone talk about immigration laws and health care and how to combat homophobia. What about asylum for people who are persecuted for sexuality in other countries? What about adoption?

Overall, I think the candidates did OK, and I'm still generally positive toward Obama, Edwards, and Clinton even though Kucinich and Gravel were the only ones with decent positions on gay marriage. I wish Biden were there - I would have liked to see where he fell. But I just keep asking, why the hell can't Obama, Edwards, and/or Clinton just come out and say, "I believe that men and women and straight people and gay people are equal, and must be treated equally under the law." Why, in 2007, is that still a position that is too revolutionary for a mainstream candidate? Why don't they support equality and civil rights for everyone, without exception? I don't even like gay marriage as an issue, but I do believe in equality and I don't think there should be a single presidential candidate (even Republicans) who should be able to get up in front of the nation and say that any law should treat people differently based on race, religion, gender, or sexuality. If men and women are truly equal (which they aren't yet) then why does it matter which one you marry? And since men and women aren't equal yet, how in the world can we go forward until they are? Why isn't this everyone's issue? Why aren't we talking about it in those terms?

UPDATE: Read this post at Pam's House Blend on trans issues and the debate!

Summer Movies

2007-08-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

I saw Transformers this week. Honestly, I actually quite enjoyed it. it was pretty much what a summer movie should be. It had a serviceable but not particularly intelligent plot, but exciting battle scenes and lots of explosions. I feel like perhaps it got a little more attention than it actually deserves, but that's OK, it was fun. Annalee Newitz says it's ok to just enjoy the movie at face value, so I'll go ahead and do that. At least it gestured toward having a kickass female sidekick (Megan Fox) who knew something about cars, even though she didn't actually do much except look hot.

Speaking of summer movies, I'm super excited for Startdust, which opens tomorrow and looks like it will be a fabulous action-packed fairy tale film with witches and sky pirates and a fallen star and all sorts of fun things. I'm predisposed to love this movie because I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan and I absolutely loved the book. It's sweet and clever and fun and I highly recommend the Charles Vess graphic novel version to anyone who's interested. The movie opens on Friday, and Neil himself is encouraging people to attend the opening weekend, since that's so important with films.

As appropriate for a summer movie, I attended Transformers on a date, and I must say that I was dissapointed that the parts where Transformers dragged didn't involve more date-related activities to keep me entertained. Stardust, however, seems like the perfect movie to attend with a date. It's got nice cuddly romance as well as fun action and adventure. Now, if only I could find the right girl (or boy) to take me.

On Genres and Media Recommendations

2007-08-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

I read a lot of fiction. More fiction than is strictly justifiable for a grad student working on a dissertation and therefore morally compelled to spend vast quantities of time reading history, theory, and other non-fiction works. But I find solace in fiction, and I'm frequently reading several fun books at once. I read sci-fi and fantasy, queer literature, occasionally mysteries, graphic novels, young adult lit and, in the summer, chick lit. I tend to plow through these books pretty quickly and generally gravitate toward things that are fun and lightweight.

But at the moment, I'm in the mood for something different. I wouldn't say I'm interested in something heavy, exactly, but none of my usual standbys or the things in the "to be read" pile is really calling to me and I'm not sure what I want to read. I might want to read something more literary than my normal genres. Probably something by and/or about a woman. Maybe with some serious emotion. Perhaps I could use a tearjerker, I'm not sure. So, if anyone is out there reading this, tell me about your favorite novels. Can you recommend classics that I've missed in my education? Books with drama or romance or heartbreak? Amazing female protagonists? What should I read?

Where you should be tomorrow (even though I won't)

2007-07-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

Peggy Shaw in LA! Menopausal Gentleman at the Hammer Museum.

Peggy Shaw is the master of butch performance art. She's brilliant and campy and sexy all at the same time. And she very rarely makes it out to the West Coast to perform. So imagine my devistation when I discovered that she's performing at the Hammer Museum tomorrow, Wednesday, July 25th, at exactly the time I'll be on a plane flying over the midwest. I'm going to miss this show, even though it is clearly a must-see for me, but I expect a full report from anyone who does manage to go.

Notes from a Border Skirmish

2007-07-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Gendercator. Catherine Crouch. Outfest. 7/21/07.

I attended a screening of the short film, The Gendercator here in LA this weekend. The film caused quite a lot of controversy within the LGBT community and was pulled from the Frameline film festival in San Francisco after transpeople and their allies protested it as a hateful and transphobic piece. Outfest, instead of pulling the piece entirely, removed it from the catalog and rescheduled it to a screening followed by a panel discussion. First and foremost, I believe that censorship is never the right solution and that Outfest handled the situation rather well by facilitating discussion about the piece. I didn't necessarily feel the discussion itself reached any major breakthroughs of understanding, but I'm glad it happened nonetheless.

The real controversy surrounding the piece is the director's statement:

Director’s Note - Things are getting very strange for women these days. More and more often we see young heterosexual women carving their bodies into porno Barbie dolls and lesbian women altering themselves into transmen. Our distorted cultural norms are making women feel compelled to use medical advances to change themselves, instead of working to change the world. This is one story, showing one possible scary future. I am hopeful that this movie will foster discussion about female body modification and medical ethics.

While this statement is offensive, it's also misleading about the film. Nowhere in the film does anyone seem to be pressured to present themselves as more feminine. The film doesn't really attack gender norms or medical ethics. I encourage you to read Crouch's explanation and defense of the statement on her website, which doesn't necessarily get less offensive.

The film itself is slightly less offensive than the director's statement, if viewed charitably. It is the story of Sally, a 1970s lesbian feminist (but a kind of dumb one) who wakes up in 2048. The future Crouch depicts involves mandatory heterosexuality and gender normativity. Because Sally is vaguely butch, she is referred to "The Gendercator" to be evaluated and recommended for sex reassignment. The Gendercator is a trans man (though I believe all of the trans male characters in the film are played by people who were born male, I could be wrong about this) and tries to convince Sally that she would be happier as a guy. When she doesn't consent to surgery, it is performed against her will.

The problems in the film itself arise because, though the director claims it is a film about Sally and the pressures she feels to be gender normative, Sally herself isn't a particularly compelling character. She says very little throughout the film, seems drugged most of the time, and the most articulate statement she can make about her gender identity is "I just want to do my own thing." As a result, The Gendercator and the world Crouch creates are much more interesting than Sally.

I just want to say here that Crouch seems to think she's made a film in which a butch woman just wants to be butch, not trans. There's nothing wrong with that. I like butch women (a lot). I'm very happy about the existance butch women and don't think anyone should transition unless it's something they're absolutely sure is right for them. I will gladly go see films about butch women who consider but decided not to transition. I will see films that compassionately articulate issues surrounding butch women feeling pressure to be trans. But lesbians and/or butch women don't have to be threatened by trans men, and a film that has to make trans men the enemy doesn't really achieve any sort of actual understanding of gender issues. The problem with the film is not that Sally is not trans and doesn't want to be trans, it's the fact that trans men are in the film portrayed as the enemy and wrong. Transition is portrayed as this horrible thing forced on lesbians by the medical establishment, religious conservatives, and transmen. This is, clearly, an ignorant position. It is possible for butch lesbians to exist without making transmen the enemy, and this film fails to understand that. As a result, it comes across as closer to hate speech against transmen than an articulate portrayal of not being trans.

So, mostly, I'm disappointed by this film. It fails to actually provoke discussion about the real tensions and concerns about being masculine and female and instead repeats an old and uninformed argument allying transgendered people with the religious right and patriarchy, asserting that they are oppressing or betraying lesbians who just want to be butch. I think that there are good things to be said about not being trans, but this film doesn't say them. I also think that there's an interesting undercurrent in this film about the heritage of 1970s lesbian feminism and contemporary issues, and it would be nice to see more dialogue between lesbians who came of age as separatists in the 1970s and younger trans and genderqueer folks. I can't help but wonder what would happen if this film were redone with Crouch working in conjunction with a trans filmmaker to articulate the issues in a way that actually raises intelligent conversation between butch women and trans men. This, sadly, was not it.

As for the discussion, Outfest didn't promote the screening very much, so the audience was mostly trans activists and allies who were upset by the film and the director's statements. They mostly wanted the director to understand why and how they found the film hateful and transphobic, and she didn't seem to be able to hear and understand that. She, understandably, seemed to be very defensive. The audience just wanted to be heard, and as a result, not a lot of real discussion occurred. The panel didn't really get a chance to frame the discussion in the way I would have liked to have seen.

Queer Fossils

2007-07-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

Queer Fossilization, Or, A Tour Through the Museum of Gay Unnatural Herstories. Outfest. 7/14/07.

This fascinating program of queer shorts is actually, shamefully, the first Outfest screening I've attended in the four years I've lived in LA. Professor Jose Muñoz and performance artist Nao Bustamante curated this program and I found their overall concept and sensibility the strongest part of the evening.

The program began with a live performance by My Barbarian, who performed excerpts from some pieces they recently did in Amsterdam. Their spectactular and irreverent performance style combined with intelligent social/political commentary make them a delight to watch.

The first film of the evening was Nelson & Christina directed by Robert Coddington. It featured footage from 1989 filmed by video artist Nelson Sullivan. It was a compelling document of life and art in the Lower East Side in the 1980s and personally I found this piece exceptionally fascinating. There were appearances by Ethyl Eichelberger and Jayne County and in general the piece captured the feeling of '80s New York as a locus of queer art and performance history, bridging gaps between filmmaking, performance art, and life.

Several of the pieces in the evening, particularly Artist Statement by Daniel Barrow, Dynasty Handbag: The Quiet Storm by Jibz Cameron and Hedia Maron, and Bra Burn by Marget Long, played with the film genre, particularly the relationships between image and text or sound. In these I didn't feel the emphasis on history and archive that was the theme of the evening quite as strongly but they did play with different ideas and uses of technology and the concept of film.

In contrast, Mata Hari directed by Alexis Del Lago felt extremely historical with a 1930s silent film Marlene Dietrich aesthetic.

The final film of the evening was an excerpt from A Family Finds Entertainment by Ryan Trecartin and it was absolutely insane with bright colors and crazy makeup and an innovative spirit. The piece was a only barely decipherable explosion of playful anarchy. It had a chaotic spirit reminiscent of the downtown queer art of the 1970s and 1980s that linked nicely with Nelson & Christina and with the My Barbarian live performance to show a continuity of queer creative spirit and subversion. This piece, though a bit bewildering, was my favorite of the films, but I'm not sure if it would have been if not the context and the reminder of its place in queer herstory. All together, Muñoz and Bustamante put together an exciting program and I very much enjoyed my first Outfest experience. It was delightfully queer in an experimental, nonlinear, creative way.

Perchance to Dream

2007-07-15T00:54:00.000-07:00

Dreams have been a recurring theme in my life recently. As in, I've been having really intense dreams that articulate the issues worrying me right now (you know, relationships and work, generally). The kind of dreams that wake me up at 4am. But also, I've apparently been appearing in other people's dreams as well. In the past week, a friend has mentioned that I appeared in his dream - it was one of those random dreams that occurs every once in a while. Totally normal. But the more suprising one was that I got a call out of the blue from an ex-girlfriend saying that she dreamed that she was having my baby. That was disturbing. I have no idea why she would be dreaming about me or about babies. Weird.

Amorphous Number of Questions

2007-07-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

So apparently this started by asking the internet 8 questions, but has morphed into random ponderings. I don't usually play such games on this blog, but I don't have much to say right now, so when my beloved roommate tagged me, I figured I might as well. Unfortunately, it's summer and the things I'm pondering at the moment are exceedingly prosaic.

In fact, the major question on my mind at the moment is what I should get a friend for her birthday. She's a friend from college whose birthday is on Wednesday. I've known her since I was 18, had a crush on her before I came out of the closet, and lived with her at various points of my life. She has introduced me to various wonderful things, including the joys of dark chocolate, Sandman comics, and good red wine, but her taste has always been more advanced than mine. She's in the middle of studying for the bar exam, so I never get to see her. And I'm always lousy at getting her presents. She, however, is amazing. For my 21st birthday, she presented me with a young adult novel that went on to become one of my favorite books ever because it so clearly represented her, what she means to me, and conceptions of home and family and Los Angeles that are both exciting and comforting. I still return to that book whenever I'm lonely or homesick and I've given it as a gift to several other people. Last year, she gave me the most adorable tiny, shiny red evening bag that is perfect for the femme that I want to be. How can she understand me so well, and yet I can never think of the perfect thing for her? So, what is the perfect gift for this genius goth-girl-turned-lawyer who means so much to me?

Vying for the top of my list of current concerns is a very messy romantic entanglement that recently blossomed from minor flirtation to downright disaster. I don't need to tell the internet the details, but BB knows all about it and I am pondering it obsessively. Should I do the honorable thing or the thing I want to do? Should I tease? Can I turn away?

Here and away. I should have been done with my dissertation by now. Two of my classmates have finished and walked and I have chosen to remain behind for another year. I'm still within a perfectly reasonable timeframe for finishing, and I have drafts of 3 of 4 body chapters, so I'm not in horrible shape, but I wonder if I made the right decision. As my best friend left last year, and my beloved roommate is packing to leave now, is it productive for me to be staying in the same place? Am I being left behind and alone? Who will I tell my problems to now? Am I a bit of a failure to be very steadfastly single and underemployed at this point in my life and will these things ever change? Will I be able to finish and get a job? Will I be able to withstand moving alone to a new place?

Retro-fabulous. Is retro-affectation something that's really happening or something that I just see because I'm looking? Are we living in the 50s? Did Cold War politics every really go away? Do I really have something to say about this? Is it worthwhile to be looking? And do I like to wear 50s style dresses because of my research or is that something that evolved independently? Is it just me? How does it relate to queerness? What does that say about me?

Theater. Why am I feeling uninterested and unispired by LA theater right now? Is there really nothing good going on or is it me? Where are the exciting queer things I should be seeing? Is it because it's summer?

Reading. My roommate doesn't read fiction, except for the occasional trashy novel he picks up in the airport for plane flights. Me, I read fiction constantly, obsessively sometimes. I just reread Harry Potter 5 (to prepare for the movie). I read sci-fi and queer lit and mystery novels and young adult novels and all sorts of other things. And I love it. If a friend is reading something I've ever considered reading, I will often pick it up so I can discuss it with them. Is this bad for me? Should I be spending my time reading dissertation-related non-fiction instead? Why can't I convince myself when I want to settle down with a good book that something academic is just as interesting as the trashy things that I end up reading instead? Why do all the non-fiction books I buy because they sound interesting and fun sit on my shelves unread or used only as reference when I'll read and reread novels that I like?

OK, that feels like a good number of ponderings thrown out into the universe. If there are any brilliant thoughts or answers or reciprocal ponderings out there, I'd love to hear them, but I don't really feel the need to tag anyone.

Rats in the Kitchen

2007-07-02T23:32:00.000-07:00

Ratatouille. Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios. 7/2/07.

Spoilers in this one: Read a proper review instead if you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know what happens; they're all pretty much glowing.

Ratatouille may be the most complex, detailed, visually stimulating animated movie I have ever seen. Throughout the film I was intellectually and critically engaged, while marvelling at the beautiful visual imagery and the amazing detail of every scene. As I'm sure you know, Ratatouille is the story of a rat who wants to be a chef, so he teams up with a clumsy kitchen underling who is "good at looking human" to be his beard. Remy, the rat, provides the artistic genius while human Alfredo Linguini provides the manual labor. Reviews offerBrad Bird extensive and well-deserved praise as the creative genius behind this film about artistic creation.

First and foremost, this movie is sensory delight. Action sequences feature amazing clarity and exhilarating sense of motion, while the details of the individual characters, human and rat, are rendered in impecable specificity. Color and texture delight the eye, while the depiction of tastes and scents through sight and sound translate the pleasures of the kitchen into the pleasures of spectatorship.

Besides taking joy in art of all kinds, Ratatouille takes a firm stand about relationships to food and the importance of cooking, with the evil producer and marketer of frozen food as the unmitigated villian of the piece. The film emphatically and repeatedly states "anyone can cook," implying that everyone should, despite the fact that Remy's cooking skills are at least partially the result of an innate gift (his sense of smell). This tension between cooking as inherent genius and as an art that everyone should practice paralells the tension between the inherent snootiness of haute cuisine in a Parisian restaurant and the conception of cooking as tasting fresh, simple foods and putting them together. Even the signature ratatouille of the film is a simple vegetable dish evokative of peasant fare and home cooking. While the film aims to be accessible, it does ultimately preach that everyone (even rats) can and should appreciate the finest of cuisine.

Ratatouille even featured small bits of feminism in the form of the only real female character, Colette. Voiced by Janeane Garofalo, Colette calls attention to the inequality of the professional kitchen in which she has to work twice as hard and be tough as nails. Besides, who doesn't love a girl with purple hair and sharp knives?

As an aspiring critic myself, I found the film's approach to criticism provokative. The food critic character Anton Ego initally appears stuffy and evil, shut off from the world in his coffin-shaped room, as emphasized in Stephanie Zacharek's salon.com review and this over the top portrayal initially made me dismiss the character. He delights in giving restaurants negative reviews and glories in his power to destroy careers and reputations. But Ego also receives something close to the final word in the movie as he gives an extended glowing review, transformed by the power of excellent food. Of course, he's also transformed from food critic to investor, but I'd like to believe that the movie offers the opportunity for the interpretation that it is possible for a critic to support the arts and influence the field positively by praising skill and talent wherever it is found. Of course, this is reading a bit against the grain of the film, which vaguely suggests that anyone who isn't a great artist isn't really living. But really, as my brilliant roommate pointed out on the ride home from the movie theater, what other children's movie offers any kind of commentary on the role of the critic in modern society? Even if it's skeptical, Ratatouille asks important questions about the role of criticism in art that every critic should ponder on occasion.

Overall, the movie was wonderfully complex and layered, engaging me critically as often as it made me laugh aloud. I'm not sure I entirely agree with its ideology, which characterizes humanity as superiour beings because they make things. While it's possible for a rat to be upwardly-mobile, only an extremely gifted rat can do so; to be a rat is still to be a thief wallowing in garbage, a literal underclass lacking in gustatory sensibilities (though they do listen to music apparently). I'm immediately suspicious of this sense of the inherently superior young man (or rat) who is destined for great things.

On femme lit

2007-06-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

Like Son. Felicia Luna Lemus. New York: Akashic Books, 2007.

I feel a little behind the times talking about T. Cooper and Felicia Luna Lemus. Even though I purchased both Lipschitz Six and Like Son months ago, I just got around to them now as the summer reading bug hit me. In the meantime, both authors of this literary power couple have achieved a little bit of well-deserved notariety, exemplified by this interview on Queeerty and a photo spread in Curve Magazine. All of which served to demonstrate to me that these two are one hot couple. Seriously. I want to pin up the Curve photos of them in my room so I can drool. But for all their hotness as a couple, their books each deserve individual attention and not much good is served by comparing them, so I will try to talk about Like Son on its own.

And, independent of all other thoughts and issues, Like Son kept my attention and made me want to keep reading. While it may not be the perfect book, it made me happy because it captured an attitude toward feminity that resonated with me. I didn't exactly love or identify with the main character, who is a disaffected punk transguy. I believe the character is interesting and well-crafted, but somehow he didn't feel right to me. He wasn't the heart and soul of the novel, even though he was the main character, and that in itself is a fascinating literary choice. The power and excitement in Like Son lies in its female characters, the mysterious historical figure of Nahui Olin, a bohemian artist and poet from Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s and the equally mysterious figure of Nathalie, the protagonist's beautifully femme girlfriend.

For me, the utterly brilliant scene that exemplifies this book at its best occurs when the protagonist, Frank, first meets Nathalie. Within the story, "meeting Nathalie was like being hit by a force of nature" (98), but that held true for me as well. Lemus' depiction of this unique, flawed, creatively glamorous woman seduced me from the first hint of her appearance, foreshadowed by the narrator's revelation that "I can't tell you how many times I later wished I could go back to warn my naive self: Yes, she will be complicated. And yes, it'll be hot. But seriously, fool, brace yourself. Loving her will be the hardest thing you'll ever know"(32). From her first appearance, Nathalie is all colors and scents and textures and layers of femninity: "I smelled her breath as she laughed. Bergamot and peppermint and just a hint of expensive vodka. She had on this wrinkeld vintage Ginger Rogers copper-orange ballroom gown, teetering faux-leopard fur open-toe platform heels, and a rust-colored rabbit fur jacket -- an outfit that would have looked like costumed ridiculous on anybody else, but on her was just right. Her flyaway auburn hair was a tangled mess of a Vargas girl updo. Her perfume was incredibly sweet, almost too sweet, like rice milk about to turn" (99). As the relationship between Frank and Nathalie develops, she somehow remains distant and mysterious, her actions inexplicable but alluring. Thoughout the book, I want to know more about her, understand her motivations, hear the story from her perspective. In many ways, though I don't really identify with Frank on a personal level, I am drawn into his fascination with this woman and placed in his position and that is a beautiful experience.

The thing is, I don't want to be Frank. I want to be Nathalie. Like Son is one of a few books that fosters and inspires my own femininity. As I was reading it, I felt more and more inspired to play up and play with my own femininity. I find myself wearing more skirts and dresses, putting on more makeup for going out, lusting after new clothes. It's the kind of book that inspires me to enjoy femininity, layering on too much glitter and gold nail polish and wacky accessories. Reading this book made me want to be more femme.

The character of Nathalie, with Nahui Olin as her historical referent, is a magnificent femme captured in a way that I rarely find in novels, and I'm sad that it's Frank that gets to do all the talking about her. I'd love to hear her voice more. It makes me want to think, though, about books I've read in the past. It seems that there would be many great novels in which a man (or woman, really) meets and is mesmerized by a woman so that she becomes the center of the novel, though without a voice of her own. But I can't necessarily think of examples. Perhaps Lolita? And are there novels with femme voices? When do you get to hear the perspective of women consciously cultivating feminity? What other books might make me feel femme? Or does writing about femininity instantly devolve into chick lit obsessed with men and shopping? Can a powerful femme character be the center of the novel, or does she become something else when the story is told from her perspective and she can no longer be mysterious? Are there queer femme fiction writers out there I should be reading?

Anyway, I may be missing the point of the book, since it really is also a beautiful and engaging story of a queer masculine protagonist fighting toward maturity and learning to leave his personal and imagined history behind. I loved Like Son and I'm decidedly inspired to find more queer femme writing if I can. I will immediately be reading Lemus' first book, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, even though I'm highly skeptical about the phrase "dyke princess" which appears in several of the blurbs about the book. But I'll gladly take recommendations of other femme writing. I'd love to find more books that feel as beautiful and resonant and inspiring in queer ways as this one did.

Another good year of Fresh Meat

2007-06-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

Fresh Meat. ODC Theater. 6/15/07.

Fresh Meat once again delivers a fabulous collection of performances by transgender artists. The show was well organized (except for the obnoxious bit where they sold out, had a huge line, and started the show about 15 minutes late) and, for once, didn't feel too long. It was heavily dance-focused with performance of Afro-Colombian dance by Columbian Soul, aerial acrobatics by Michael Chernus-Goldstein, and hip hop by Freeplay Dance Crew in addition to an extensive new piece entitled "Bully" by the festival's artistic director, Sean Dorsey. In the realm of music, the fabulous Shawna Virago performed delightfully provokative rock 'n' roll and Triple Threat Taiko were adorable and extremely powerful. But I'll focus on the performance art/theater type pieces, since that's what I know best.

I was impressed by Imani's Henry's performance of single monologue that was an excerpt from a larger work about slavery. I believe it's a scene from "Living in the Light" but I seem to have misplaced my program during the trip home from San Francisco, so the information I have is less accurate than it should be. The piece Henry performed was beautifully self-contained and coherent, while opening up to and suggesting the longer work. In it, he referenced himself as trans briefly by talking about himself as a young black girl, but that was in no way the focus of the performance. The excerpt was intellectually dense and engaging and definitely made me want to see the Henry's whole show.

ryka aoki de la cruz debuted a new piece of performance art called "≤1" (less than or equal to one). It was a piece that I look forward to seeing ryka perform again - it was intensly emotional and complex and funny at times and I think it will evolve in performance in good ways.

Sean Dorsey's "Bully" may have been the highlight of the evening for me. It's a lovely, poignant new work about bullying and queer friendship that will eventually be performed as part of a longer work called Untold Stories. Dorsey performs this piece with two other men, which I found interesting because I had only seen him partnering with women before. His work continues to employ lifts and mirroring to eloquently express the ways that people interact. The bullying felt most violent and violating to me in one moment that the dancer playing the bully character touched Dorsey's chest and hips, drawing attention to the feminine parts of Dorsey's masculine body. While the narrative of the piece describes much more dangerous violence, it was this move early in the performance that emphasized the sense of physical violation created by bullying for me. Dorsey's combination of music, choreography, and narrative continues to impress and engage me and I highly recommend this powerful work.

Overall, I had a highly entertaining evening at Fresh Meat, and I'm very glad I attended. Look for more great work by all of these artists throughout the year.

Family parts

2007-06-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Cooper, T. Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes

"Some parts are true, others are made up. Still others are made up, but from entirely true events" (429)

It took me a long time to fall in love with this book. The first 300 pages are a fascinating historical fiction family saga, reminiscent of Ragtime. The blurbs compared it to Middlesex;, though that wasn't necessarily the first thing I thought of while reading it. What didn't immediately come to mind was T. Cooper's first novel, Some of the Parts. Some of the Parts was a beautiful, angry, frustrated novel that I loved and admired even when it was painful. Lipschitz Six has all of that amazing craft and persona in it, but it has something else as well. It's extremely literary and feels more mature than the conflicted angst of Some of the Parts. It builds an entire story of family history and intricately flawed characters before introducing the queer craziness of the T. Cooper literary persona.