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The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
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The Stanley Kubrick movie on TCM now is dazzling. It's called Killer's Kiss, made in 1956. It appears to have been filmed as a silent with all the sound and dialogue dubbed and foleyed in later. So low budget they couldn't make it as a synch sound talkie. Man, it works though. The images of the New York City streets, rooftops, cheap apartments and warehouse interiors are cool beyond cool. What's the trick to the hyper-clear, high resolution? How'd he do that, why didn't anybody else? He must have used a non-standard movie camera, something none of the studios were using for principal photography. So maybe it wasn't the budget that forced the dubbed in sound, maybe Kubrick had to do that to get the look he wanted, and the camera he used wasn't built for synch audio. Am I right? Gimme a prize. Am I wrong? Keep it to yourself.
I don't know a face in the cast, but every one of them is Garbo when they're on the screen. Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, Irene Kane: If you could only be in one movie, you sure picked the right one to be in.
I'm trying not to watch. This movie deserves your full attention from beginning to end, so I'm going to turn way from it, since I can't take my eyes off it.
This must be what Scorsese has been trying to replicate for the past 30 years.
Update: I had to know if I was right, so after I posted this I looked up the TCM article on Killer's Kiss which described the dubbed audio as strictly a no budget necessity.
But Mark Wickens sent along a couple googled snips that make it clear that it was more complicated than that. Anyway, gimme half a prize. Where's my trophy pedestal? My Nobel Prize sans the cash?
The TCM backgrounder does reveal this truly fascinating fact:
With the exception of Frank Silvera, the cast of Killer's Kiss was largely non-professional. Irene Kane, who plays Gloria, is actually the stage name for Chris Chase, a well-known journalist.
I used to read Chase's journalism all the time. If I remember it right, she was regularly featured in New York Magazine when I subscribed to it as a kid, desperate for a little Manhattan excitement. Or did she do her mostly inside Hollywood features for the NYT's Arts and Leisure section, my other lifeline to the glamor my junior high school just wasn't providing? I believe she writes about her weird, semi-show business life in the book How to Be a Movie Star: Or, a Terrible Beauty Is Born, but I can't be sure since it's out of print and google didn't find me any reviews or a good synopsis.
Also from the TCM backgrounder:
Killer's Kiss evolved from an original story Kubrick developed with Howard O. Sackler entitled Kiss Me, Kill Me and featured a New York boxer as the central character.
(Damn, they shoulda kept that original title.)
Kubrick shot the film in twelve to fourteen weeks, a long schedule for a low-budget production. 'Everything we did cost so little that there was no pressure on us - an advantage I was never to encounter again.
...New York City streets became Kubrick's set, even though he had done nothing to get permission to shoot there. Everything was shot quickly and on the cuff like the sequence where the camera follows the two conventioneers down Broadway during the stolen scarf chase (Kubrick achieved the panning shot by riding along the curb in a truck with a concealed camera).
....Though Killer's Kiss was mostly ignored by critics at the time, Kubrick viewed it as a personal success. He later told biographer Alexander Walker, "To the best of my belief, no one at the time had ever made a feature film in such amateur circumstances and then obtained worldwide distribution for it."
(Damn, he shoulda kept making no budget guerilla thrillas.)
What Wicken's found:
... Unable to record the film's dialogue on-set due to technical problems, Kubrick was forced to post-sync all of this film's dialogue and sound effects. Veteran soundman Nat Boxer was hired to record sound. But, after his boom mic and pole created many shadows, the inexperienced Kubrick was forced to fire Boxer and his sound crew. Actress Irene Kane was unavailable to add her dialogue later, so the voice of another actress was used.
...Many scenes were photographed with a springwound Eyemo camera, which holds 100 foot loads of film. The Eyemo was borrowed from friend Max Glenn and was subsequently stolen from Kubrick's car! For many tracking shots, Kubrick and company used the back of a pickup truck in place of a dolly. Kubrick was on welfare during the making of this film. DIRECTOR'S TRADEMARK: Kubrick uses a brief shot of a negative image during Davey's nightmare, which instantly evinces scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is where Ars Poetica bumps into Ars Mechanica. They knock each other down on their respective arses, and when the get up they walk way with each other's umbrella. Which they don't even realize until the next time it rains. Even though Poetica's umbrella was blue and Mechanica's was black. They hit the ground hard.
So I go to Alltheweb.com, the search engine I visit every now and then just to keep Google in line. I notice a feature which might be new or which maybe I just never noticed before. On my search results page I see a link that says see our last ten queries. I clicks it. I clicks it good.
Then I click it again and again. With every refresh there's new drama, new adventure, new meaning, new values. So I save them. And edit them according to these instantly devised, and now immutable, rules:
Every page (i.e. 10 results) is the source of one stanza.
You may eliminate any results you choose.
But you may not alter the order of the results--- removing is allowed, but moving is not.
The poem ends when you say it does. You've found the structure in the chaos, the statue in the stone, and so you declare it finished. But you may not look at a page and decide then not to include any results from that page. You may not, in any other words, declare a poem finished just because you don't like the material available from a page. Any page opened must contribute lines to the work.
When you decide it's complete, you refresh one last time. This final page contains the title of your poem.
Listen, I know found poetry is old as Montparnasse dirt, but I think this system works better than most. Like that Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld kneeslapper Slate served up a few weeks back. Total crap. Rumsfeld's an entertaining speaker, his words arranged as free verse didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know.
The Nixon Poems from many years back were much better. Nixon was a constricted speaker, infamously guarded and uncomfortable. His words recast as poems did reveal something new.
Alltheweb.com is an even greater poet than Nixon.
There, I said it.
My god the compression.
john o'mahony irish republic bonds for sale
excelerated reading program
probate lawyers philadelphia
the hun's yellow pages
maintenance imprimante jet d'encre
chicago pneumatic linear sander
maintenance imprimante couleur
matrix theme song
fertility and menstrual cycles
aborto
limonium ferulaceum seeds
forever and always
actualites placements financier
visual phonics symbols
nocturnal sleep related eating disorder
tabte breve
executivejetcharter
herbert spencer
rubber rollers
california outline
new hampshire highland games
agence interim
incontinencia
principal divisions of earth
vietavie
maps + germany
Very wise list of new school year resolutions by a 15 (?) year old girl blogger. My own resolutions at 15 would have looked similar in several respects. That boy-crush daydreaming really cuts into your teenage productivity. But then again, the memories of those garcon reveries can fuel quite a bit of creativity later on. Even if the creativity is only further daydreaming about those daydreams.
So make the resolution, but break it in case of emergency---say, study hall and pep rallies.
Then there is this recalled moment of stark terror. The inner life of your adored one revealed:
15. I will not start clubs without reason. The only true reason I started the book club last year was for the "horse". It never worked out because he was the only other member and his idea of a good book was Tom Robbin's Jitterbug Perfume which disgusted me so that I still have nightmares.
It occurs to me that the French word for boy is among the worst in any language.
A most informative, scary, and maybe hopeful NYT's piece on Rufus Wainwright. Rufus comes clean about his several dozen crystal meth misplaced weekends. I was sad to read it and happy to see he's come through it, but not too surprised. As a retrospective psychic of immense powers, I can attest that he did seem subtly wasted whenever I read or watched him interviewed and the one time I saw him perform live. Nothing too extreme, just unraveling slowly and buzzing lowly.
He is insightful (and courageous) when he analyzes the allure, and the effects, of crystal meth (not sure about the gay racial memory lead in, though):
For years, and I mean thousands of years, the gay man's mind has been treated as perverted, clandestine and dirty," he went on, "and speed reinforces and glamorizes that as an ideal. And with drugs, what's more dangerous is more sexually exciting. On that drug I had really horrible thoughts that turned me on. I had a few of those real gay lost weekends,
where everything goes out the window, where you want to make pornos or you want to have sex with children. I mean, your mind is just completely ravaged."
My general field theory of drug use is that you're only tempted if the world is too much, or not enough, for you. The world has always been sufficient for my purposes, so I've never been a drug user--just attracted to them. And alcoholics. I can understand the pull of a two specific drugs: LSD, and now, crystal meth. I'm not in pain, so I don't care about the opiates' sweet embrace. And as for all the others, I don't want the world to speed up or slow down or go sideways. I don't want to feel mellow, or invincible, or passive, or powerful, or fucked up, or like an ocean of free floating tenderness and bliss. Anymore than usual, that is.
But the various promises of LSD and Crystal M do resonate with me. A new world in this one, an express elevator to higher (or sub-basement) levels of consciousness, satori on the cheap, ingestible surrealism? A drug I could maybe learn from? Hey acid casualties, there but for the grace of books, music, movies and men etc.
And now crystal's powers of sexual healing. Oh, a super sex drug, hmmm yeah, that gets my attention, now they're playing to my weakness. A lot of peoples' weakness, gay guys most especially. And thus the path of destruction hurricane Christina is cutting.
Rufus gets major points for talking about it. Add these to his totals for the superb Poses record, and he is among the point leaders in the Agenda Bender Aesthetic Fantasy Football League. Rufus could very well be on his way to the A.B.A.F.F.L. championship this year. I am excited to read that he has a new record and disgusted, as always, with the music industry brilliance behind the decision to cut what should have been a double CD into two separate releases. Want One, out now (or soon) and Want Two, to be released next spring, maybe. If they're gonna do it no matter what I say (the fools) they should title the second one Want To--same joke, only better somehow. But more than that they should just die, die and die again.
(Rufus W. article via Eve Tushnet who should make her first opera enrichment program purchase Janacek's From the House of the Dead. That WaPo list sucked.)
Interesting reaction to a lesbian stage kiss from Atlanta (emphasis added):
I have never been so disappointed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. To put it bluntly, I'm mad as hell, and it makes my stomach turn to see such trash on the front of the newspaper.
How do we expect to raise a generation of children who are healthy mentally, physically and sexually with inappropriate images in every form of media there is? Will you not accept your role in helping to raise Atlanta's children?
The sad part about this is that you will write about our children and their high teen pregnancy rate, low SAT scores, children out of wedlock and the rising cases of AIDS without taking any responsibility for your role in the problem.
You need to be better than that.
DOUG JONES
Atlanta
So do you, Doug. You might want to pick better examples of the unintended consequences of lesbian smooching in your next letter of disappointment.
The editor of the AJ-C must have been chastened by Doug's sorrowful anger and persuaded by Doug's fears of low SAT, HIV positive lesbian teens conceiving more out of wedlock babies, since he caved like storm drain on a fault line:
Managing editor concedes error
We have a high standard of presentation that is in line with community sensibilities, and we have filters that work to maintain those standards. The difficulty comes when news turns ugly, horrid, profane or provocative in some other way that might offend community sensibilities.
During the war in Iraq, it happened a lot, and in the name of presenting a truthful, full account of the war, our filter got tested and stretched a lot. We ran images we otherwise might not have run. But that was war, and war was news.
The photo we ran Friday was neither, and I wish I had limited its display to the inside of the Living section.
We want the paper to be appropriate to the widest possible readership at the same time that we want it to deliver a straightforward accounting of the big news, the talk of the town, from the day before. That is sometimes a tricky balance, and we spend a lot of time seeking that balance while not being afraid of the news.
Usually, I think, we do this well. With this photo, we did not.
You know, we kid our pal Madonna for her spontaneous-as-a-Soviet-Party-Congress career maneuvers. But then we read Doug's letter and Hank's apology and we wish her well in all her sexed-up publicity stunts, no matter how exhausted and exhausting.
And, like Hank, in the name of our own high standard of presentation, we apologize to Madonna for any insinuations of incipient cannibalism that might have slipped through the editorial screening process and made it into print here in the last few days.
Our apologies also to the Irish (see below), some of whom doubtless have nothing to be ashamed of in the matter of genital sufficiency and many of whom perform their policing duties as admirably and professionally as any lesbian law enforcement officer.
8:26 PM
Sunday, August 31, 2003
A Memory of Not Seeing Arnold
Matt Welch is cataloguing the LA Times anti-gaybaiting of Conan the Parliamentarian. He's all over the meta-story like a bunch of roided-out gymbos octagonal teaming some solid gold easy action. Arnold's use of the word "fags" in the 1977 Oui magazine interview has been played up by writers at the Bustamante boosting LAT's (hey Arnold, lats!) as some sort of fourth dimensional gay bashing. One columnist decorously (and hilariously) refrained from even touch typing the shattering word:
Elsewhere in the interview he said … that he had no "hang-ups" about homosexuals, whom he nonetheless described with a vulgar epithet.
Rough stuff.
Welch points out the Times hasn't been so squeamish and protective of their pressmen and paper boys' innocent eyes in the past. I'm betting you could add to Welch's amusing examples of allowable style book uses of fag, Dick Armey's ear delicious coinage "Barney Fag". Somehow I think the Times must have found the ink to print Armey's real slur when it was at the center of a news story. Arnold gets tagged with a making a grosser slur by misdirection and by that rhetorical technique beloved of pompous frauds: important silence. If you were told someone used a vulgar epithet for homosexual and then the teller shook his head and sighed a final "rough stuff", would you ever think the word was anything less than, say, "cocksucker"? And wouldn't you feel like hitting the teller about the face and shoulders for not saying the fucking word, whatever it was?
I have an almost Arnold memory from the year before the Oui interview. I was living in New York and going to movies all day (holy and squalid Elgin, blessed and cheap Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall Cinemas, streamlined and well-endowed MoMA) and CBGB's most nights. It was my attempt to help alleviate the problem of overcrowded classrooms at Columbia University. I was always up for the odd art event too, and the Whitney usually had the oddest. So I was half-planning to go to something the Whitney was calling Articulate Muscle:The Body As ART. It was billed as the first appearance by bodybuilders as works of art. Arnold was the star attraction. I ended up not going, both because I couldn't (and still can't) get excited about professional muscle dudes and because the gay vibe coming off the event was too overwhelming even for me.
That didn't keep Arnold away though. He braved the vibe and, from what I remember hearing, delighted everyone. And by everyone I mean the couple thousand giddy muscle queens and extra-horny culture vultures who showed up. Prolly an Arthur Bell column about the night stashed away in the Village Voice Archives awaiting rediscovery by some opposition research nightcrawler. The show was Wed. Feb 25, 1976, so you'll want to look for the issue of the Voice that hit the street the Wednesday after that. Though god only knows what you'd do with whatever might be there when and if you found it.
Google revealed only two mentions of this mostly forgotten event. First Arnold's brief recollection of the night in a press junket interview for Commando:
One of the ways to make them understand is to speak from the point of view of art; that some people create a sculpture from marble or wood, whatever it may be, clay… and the bodybuilder does it with his own body. That made people think, “That’s true.” It’s amazing. Then, different people started writing about because they got the hook. You throw these ideas out to the journalists; they get an idea and then they elaborate on it, and all of a sudden we had the first art exhibition of live bodies where Ed Korney, Frank Zane and I posed in the Whitney Museum in 1976 or ’77. In the Whitney Museum they compared it to Greek art, Roman art and stuff like that.
And this fan page, which is apparently an on-this-day-in-Arnold-history site, has a reproduction of the poster for the event (scroll down), and a picture from what would appear to be a junior high class trip to the The Body as Art show. Or maybe the Playland hustlers pooled their change and rented a bus. It was the 70's, so the odds are about equal. In either case, note the lascivious, men-crazy boys. I told you it was a desperate crowd.
Oh yeah, and check out the top Arnold flashback on the page as well. More ammo for the LA Times. Arnold made a vulgar comparison between a certain piece of audio equipment and a certain male appendage at a muscle-head awards ceremony in 1983.
Rough stuff.
OK, this isn't the LA Times. A mic and a dick.
Not to be confused with a mick and a dyke. (I'm not running for anything.)
What's the difference between a mick and a dyke, by the way?
Dykes have bigger dicks. (I'm not running for anything in Massachusetts).
And make better cops. (Not this year, anyway)
(Note to M. Kaus: Probably more unintentional roughage to be found if you want to click through the fan's obsessive collation of Arnold events. )
(Note to readers: I like this format. Keep checking back for more memories of non-encounters with the celebrated.)
6:40 PM
