Man, I love how you love you a man

At the pre-Berlin cast and crew screening of THE OWLS Friday night, I was talking with my friend, fellow filmmaker and Pitzer professor, Silas Howard, who has recently transitioned, and reports that he often now successfully passes. I asked him for some secrets he has learned as a newly-male among men, and his most interesting find was that they are all really gay together when women are not around. Glad to have this confirmed, but it was something I already knew: a founding principle of both my early queer and feminist educations. Eve Sedgwick was my professor of women and gender studies in a college that proved the very cradle of male-homosociality (Amherst—just gone co-ed—boo-yah!) teaching us co-eds about the ways that men used women to legitimize their more abiding desire to see and love each other.

Hey, I’ve always loved men, too—straight, gay, no matter—and I’m as open to stories of men-loving-men as the next gal…I’ve written elsewhere about Fight Club and South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut as feminist films (in their radical willingness to unmoor sex from gender), but I reasoned that the misogyny (and homophobia) underwriting their dystopic worlds-of-men under-cut any feminist gains allowed. I’d say that in our current cinema, for instance, I Love You Man, feminist-influenced gender play continues (for men, who can work on their “feminine” sides: Chocolat anyone?) and the hatred even seems softer (for women who are so dull, listless, boring, and benign how could you feel anything at all for them, least of all an emotion with political chops) but is ultimately of no less concern. I actually like many of the current spate of juvenile male homosocial bonding orgies as much as any person who likes men might: their boy-men-leads prove to be hot, funny, and complexly gendered humans on sophisticated quests for sex, comraderie, family, love, and identity; too bad this is best satisfied in a movie world where men greedily colonize for themselves all that is best in women, leaving females as unnecessary, unfunny, uninteresting half-humans any sane person would choose to disregard, at least in relation to loving a man.

Video Dada

I drove out to UC Irvine with the kids to catch the Video Dada show (“dealing with intersections of video, art, and the internet.”) Martha Gever, the show’s curator, was kind enough to also drive out and chat with me after. The show puts into action and on to the wall many of the concerns I’ve been expressing here about video art on YouTube by transforming curating into the “real” (video) art practice and allowing YouTube work to become art by surrounding its 300 unruly videos with to-be-expected large-screen, flat, chic monitors. Importantly, Gever also provides thrift store couches and also on to the wall, big, scrawled messy handwritten quotations from media/cultural theorists as varied as Marcel Proust, Geert Lovink, and Virginia Heffernan. Without their raucous, ugly YouTube pages to frame them (ads, other videos, comments, tags) the projected videos looked pretty, like nothing other than honest to goodness video art in all its varied polyphony: cut-up, hand-painted, home-video-like, music-video-inflected, found-ads, and so on. It was that frame that did it, making art out of madness: slick screen, black box, curator’s stamp of approval. The wall demands respect, as does the hushed room with guard. And, unlike YouTube, the quotes create context.

Gever formally enacts many of the contradictions of video art on YouTube through the fitting design of her show. The Dada reference marks the play between art production and popular/capitalist consumption as definitive of YouTube video as it was of some urinals. Furthermore, Dada suitably organizes the cacophony and distraction of undifferentiated material–”all the objects in the [YouTube] archive have equal weight…They are de-contextualized and flattened” proclaims Robert Gehl, written on the wall–that defines both YouTube and the show (there are 300 videos playing, almost randomly, on something like ten monitors with nothing but typed lists of titles and authors to anchor them: you never really know or care what you are seeing). Gever was quick to note that while the order of the videos was not important, she had carefully and rigorously selected all of them (as “artful: carefully constructed, inventive, mindful of technique, and infused by sophisticated cultural intelligence”) through a painstaking, multi-year process of looking for video art in the sea of crap that included the additional looking-labor of several TAs, as well as Gever putting the names of hundreds of contemporary artists into YouTube to see if anything might come up (it did…) Refreshingly and tellingly, I recognized only a few names from the video art pantheon. However, when I went to find things to review on YouTube, I couldn’t (like LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “A Mother to Hold,” which I watched all the way through it’s grueling home movie like interaction with the artist’s crack-whore mother, or Guthrie Lonergan’s “Office Party” or “Kids.” While I couldn’t re-find them on YouTube, Gever had located both of these YouTubers through searching from the New Museum’s  Younger Than Jesus show.)

It was important for me when I noted that I didn’t really want to watch most of the videos. Unlike on YouTube, I couldn’t fast-forward them, cut them off when bored, or jump to something else vaguely related. The myth of audience participation was completely denied here, and the work suffered from it, proving an affront to another definitive quality of YouTube video, but not in the best Dada sort of way. Gever writes: “the non-hierarchical, uncurated organization of YouTube provides a fitting venue for videos that are fleeting, provisional, rowdy, rude, epigrammatic, overtly political, or otherwise unruly in the themes that govern more disciplined precincts of art.” With this I agree which lets me see how YouTube can’t be as radical as Dada hoped to be. On leaving, my 12-year old daughter remarked that the show wasn’t really Dada enough in that it didn’t feel like much of an affront, nor did it inspire strong feelings since a lot of the video was simply fun or funny, and more so, in the end, the sheer undifferentiated totality of it quieted one, as YouTube always seems wont to do.

Corpus of Corpus

I was on the opening panel for “The Corpus of Corpus: A Symposium on AIDS, Arts, and (Counter) Public Health” held at UC Riverside, Jan 22-23. Jaime Cortez, event co-organizer Keith Harris (with Ricardo Bracho), and I joined Pato Hebert (via Skype from London) to discuss the seeming-ever-to-be-waning role of art in HIV prevention and harm reduction, given the demise of CORPUS, APLA’s glossy yet messy (according to Cortez) arts publication that modeled a sex positive, “soulful communion between art and HIV” (Hebert), through a mix of voices— seasoned and developing, male and female, young and old, and of all races—dedicated to representing the sexual and emotional well being of gay men of color.

Jaime Cortez, Another Hero – Wonder Human

We talked about how the AIDS industry, public health, and social services have required didactic, directive, prohibitive communications aimed at enforcing gay men of color’s sexual health, while artists and activists (from the very beginning of the pandemic) have insisted upon complex and contradictory representations that represent “what surrounds that choice” (to use a condom), “what leads up to it” (Cortez.)

Pato Hebert, No Haters Here

While artists and activists have made representations of the multiple ways our lives have been effected by HIV—including our sexual blunders, messy desires, feelings of anger, shame, community, loss and pride—we have rarely been so well supported to do so (Corpus was funded by APLA, and 5,000 copies of each editions were distributed for free to its diverse audience of clients, educators, scholars, and artists). This we will surely miss.

Did Corpus fail because it could not last? Were dollars for art well spent given the material needs of gay men of color? Was Corpus even HIV prevention? This we debated. I suggested that while I do not think art saves lives, or even “stops AIDS,” it does make life worth living, it does mark the heart and soul of how we lived, it remembers those we lost, and it brings us together. Art makes life (worth living), as we were so gloriously reminded when the evening ended with a reading by Harris, Laurence Padua, Ramirez and Cortez.

Imagining We Care: “Supporting Our Troops” in Recent War Films

I recently watched Brothers (in a theater) and Taking Chance (at home). They tell opposing tales about Americans’ relationships to our troops—disavowal and send ‘em to the dustbin versus hero-worshipping, god-fearing sentimentalism—but they frame depictions of the Iraq War through a shared (and safe) jingoistic, family-values, misogynistic vision of America that ameliorates whatever criticism they may (or may not) be making about our illicit war.

This seems to be the tack of most of the contemporary narrative films about Iraq. While the anti-war movement (or what remains of it) has embraced the position of “supporting our troops,” as any decent, moral human being would do, this can easily slide into supporting our military, our war, and its overt agenda of corporate invasion and empire, or at minimum celebrating the beauty of macho shock and awe. I fear that this slippery slope defines most of what we’ve seen.

I was truly baffled by Taking Chance, which re-imagines American as a fantastical place where people actually care about the war in Iraq, think deeply about the lives that are being lost, and will slow down their busy lives (to convoy remains for five hours through winding mountain highways, for instance)  to honor the sacrifice of our troops. This tear-jerker belies the much sadder reality where most Americans have forgotten the war exists.

“The Camera is the Problem”: Boring Paranormal Camcorder Cinema

A YouTube hand-held jump-cut DIY sensibility masks cine-gimmicks as old as Melies and ever so much more tired given their age: doors that open and close on their own (creepy!), bumps in the night (scary!), sounds in the wings (BOOM!!), footprints in powder (an uber-faux Piercian index given our universal knowledge about the trick of manufacturing ghost-like appearances via a tripod and camera: on/off/devil hooves on powder/on again).

Granted, I saw it in a hotel room without the build up of group-think and anticipation (gaggles of girls clutching their boyfriends’ sweaty hands, swells and ebbs of building shrieks). Just as Blair Witch used its newly available consumer technology to lower the threshold of believability and scarability–hand-held horror–Paranormal banks on its homemade sensibility to stand in for documentary’s already destroyed hold on truth and believability.

I’ve written here about the paranormal phenomenon of corporate media that mocks DIY sensibilities to mark a fondness softened by ironic distance for a lost naive (filmic) purity. This film reverses that logic in a way I find confusing: people made but corporate bought and sold all the better for tapping in to the mainstream and making a tub of money…this flick just reads like a cheap bad movie to me: no irony just mediocrity. Katie tells Micah “the camera is the problem,” and she’s right. Just cause it looks homemade, and even if it was cheap to make, doesn’t forgive derivative amateurism.

Berlin Bound!

I am really happy to announce that our film, THE OWLS, will be premiering in Berlin’s Panorama section: its home for foreign and cutting edge art films. I could imagine no better festival for our premier. We were there with The Watermelon Woman in 1996 and won the Teddy for best gay and lesbian film.

From scene to screen, THE OWLS, photo by Love

No time for queer theory writing now. None of the fun and glamour of queer  collective production…

It’s all producer’s business for the moment: promotion, marketing, prints, budgets, re-shoots?!

See you in Berlin in February.

Killer Lampshade: Happy Holidays

I teach feminist horror, women’s pornography, queer cinema, and media archives. I write on YouTube and make bad video. But regarding this, I am left merry and speechless. Enjoy!

Animating Archives (W)rap Sheet

This was one of the best conferences I ever attended. The take home message for future conference organizers is hard to replicate: 1) carefully chosen speakers 2)  given ample time (2 speakers in 1 and 1/2 hour sessions) and 3) beautifully choreographed two-day flow, where distinct areas of approach, method, discipline and theory, hit against each other to build to a crescendo. Not one dud. Here’s the rap sheet of one-liners:

Diana Taylor: Archives, repertoires, and the digital are each made from practices, things, and places (riven with power) in distinct configurations.

James Chandler: Animating archives through re-presenting holdings in translated forms itself has a history as long as modernism’s.

Sharon Daniel: Poetics and aesthetics can be written into the ethics of the archive.

Matthew Fuller: The relational archive links through a messy rhetoric of power that includes findable “flubs” like deletions and leaks.

Kelly Gates: Corporations hope to catch the face, an unmappable archive of feeling, to better find us out.

Amelie Hastie: The body’s archive of memory, desire, longing and loss fuels a search for objects that might objectify their trace.

Josh Kun: Digital music generates mobile archives of local/transnational style and taste.

Lawrence Liang: Ownership is not only a matter of capital but also of proximity and love. To own can be to owe, a matter of ethics.

Janine Marchessault: A life on-line might map the lost as it pools into a shared computer dream of all seeing.

Trevor Paglen: The military-industrial complex litters our skies with evil digital eyes, the better to see you with. So,

Lisa Parks: we must look up, not across, in a shot-reverse of accountability.

Abby Smith Rumsey: The evidence of things remains for our loving re-use. Digital things will be lost without stewardship.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Embrace the incommensurability when the local(e) gets to gather, save and organize the complex, adaptive, fluid stuff they love.

James Tobias: We engage in a history-free media-logic to the peril of the complex lineages of local practices.

A Steady Grind

Victoria Kerszi kindly sent along to me her recent documentary, A Steady Grind, a portrait of her grandmother Eloyse, a fiery fighter keeping her family’s junkyard afloat, despite tax debt, ill health, and compounded grief from the loss of two sons and a spouse.

It seems the two of us have a lot in common: Hungarian ancestry, Chester PA (the locale of Grandma’s junkyard as well as some past low-rent stomping grounds from when I taught at swanky Swarthmore, just across the Turnpike), and feminist film—Victoria curates Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens.

We also share a handmade, self-reflexive, familial aesthetic, letting the people we love say and show it all for themselves (with our hand clear): endless cigarettes, the mother-son mundane, legacies of dissatisfaction. I’d have loved to see more of the junkyard, but I was equally pleased to linger with Kereszi in her grandma’s disorderly kitchen. Domestic realness aside (place), it is also this documentary’s play with time that makes it work: it is made over many years, so Eloyse and her son (the filmmaker’s father) age before us (with no comment or cue to just what time has passed), even as we circle back to the past in both stories and photos, when Joe and the other children were alive, and Eloyse was a “happy” stay at home housewife.

Fantastic, Expensive, “People-Made” Corporate Puppets

They appear everywhere: skinny legs, perfect couture, under-acted voices.

Tiny stop-motion figures haunt my cine-dreams and regular movie-going.

Take The Fantastic Mr. Fox:

Following in the over-produced, quite-expensive, corporate-backed footsteps of phony people-made craft modeled by Be Kind Rewind, Zach and Miri Make a Porno and Paper Hearts, again we see a/our threatening world through a pseudo child-like naivete all set to represent overly-simplified pictures of comforting (post-feminist) traditional gender roles from the point of view of a lovable pre-sexual boy/man/(girl/boy: Charlene Yi). What’s up? In FMF the girlie boys will be men, macho men will be boys, Meryl Streep plays the help-meat, and so the family stays intact and we eat it up (me too). Style so bowls you over that you might miss that hand-made craft has been stolen (like so many chickens) by the crafty experts and the wild thing fantasies of naughty boy/men/girl/boys dominate, as ever, our celluloid dreams.