ampers & ampers

The dregs.

[andampers]

Gays go to Slytherin

I saw the Cursed Child on Broadway last week and can with a full throat recommend it for its technical achievements. From a story perspective I am not as enthusiastic. I'm pointlessly puritanical about the books so I never got too hyped on the Harry Potter movies, either. For the magical effects, and even for that more ephemeral magic of the theatre, I think anyone who goes to see the production will enjoy it. One component stuck out to me as particular in the context of JK Rowling wrestling characters written ten plus years ago, living twenty plus years ago, into the present day and its politics. (I won't concede Rowling's control of the canon on this, though I should point out the play's credited writer is Jack Thorne. Hers is the spirit, not the letter.) The two teen leads, Scorpius Malfoy and Albus Potter, have a relationship that in all but words is romantic. They're outsiders and don't quite understand why. They negotiate intimate physical contact - just hugs! - for the first time in that awkward, teenage, effortful way. Paternal denial, familiar from gay movies and gay nightmares and too often, gay lives, separates the boys. They long for each other from atop parallel staircases, like the leads on the poster for Sleepless in Seattle. The tension is too obvious to call subtext, and the gay content is hardly sublimated - it's just undiscussed. Why? Money, I'd wager. Box office would be compromised if the leads - 14 years old, in the action of the play - confessed their love, gay and undying, for each other. By coding their actions with the level of difficulty of a cereal box, Rowling can have it both ways: that queer sense of danger conferred by hiding love away; and a veritable mint in the newly renovated Lyric Theatre. One curious result of barely submerging the iceberg of gayness cis, white and male (the nation's favorite deviant sexuality): we find out, all gays go to Slytherin. There's some low hanging fruit in the association. Snakes are phallic (which the gays love), snakes are sibilant (which the gays are). The association goes deeper. Slytherin is where the play's boys are sorted. It's where Albus is kept from, when he and Scorpius are forcibly separated, and that late in life conversion does nothing to repair the relationship with Albus's father. Slytherin's is the iconography of intrigue, deception, lapsarian excess - aka, primordial two-pitched ~*~*~*~drama*~*~*~. Slytherin is the house of society removed, of petty cruelty, of cruel beauty. Slytherin is the house of blood anxiety. Harry Potter's most famous gay character, of course, is Albus Dumbledore. He wasn't in Slytherin. He was a Gryffindor. But Dumbledore came of age when sexual attraction between men wasn't an identity, it was an action. He's over a hundred when he dies in 1997. There was a burgeoning academic understanding of sexuality as identity when Dumbledore was sorted at 11. Even were the Sorting Hat aware of this, it did not approach our modern understanding that seems taken for granted now: who you sleep with determines who you are. Whatever Dumbledore got up to in his four poster can't have determined his house. After all, Hogwarts is a boarding school. There's not room enough for all of Hogwarts in Slytherin alone. Back then, being gay wasn't who you were, it was something you did. For better or worse, that's changed now, for us, and for this new Albus. We've accepted that sexuality is one of the ways we establish who we are. So what can we make of this assignment, of gays to Slytherin? It doesn't mean Rowling thinks gays are bad. One of the less successful projects of the books was to establish that being in Slytherin didn't mean you were a dark wizard. Peter Pettigrew was a Gryffindor and a traitor. Severus Snape, as the play reminds us, was a Slytherin and a hero. Rowling doesn't consign a quarter of the juvenile wizarding population to shady deals in Knockturn Alley. The connotation persists. Slytherin are sinister. Gays are deviant. And maybe that is the connection: gays and Slytherins suffer from unfair stigma. It's prosaic, but it's real, and fits the Harry Potter universe's larger lessons about the ugliness of prejudice. Harry is different from his son, and while that difference might define them, it needn't separate them. So the gays get their own little club, like they always wanted. Outsider queens, who transfigure their operative difference from shame to pride. What would be the point in being normal? Sheep go to heaven. Gays go to Slytherin.

[andampers]

My lost year

I'm running up to the tail end of what I've been calling privately - and despite all of the positive things that I've done or had happen to me during - my lost year. It's 13 months, actually, July through July, but I'm rounding down. I got a raise and promotion in quick succession, doubled my income in the span of three months, making money I dreamed of not two years ago, or my whole life. I have more and closer friends. I went to Spain. But I also lived alone, and truly alone, for the first time when Mike moved to Spain. I gained weight when I ate out every day, often more than once, and doubled up on drinking and smoking. My apartment was burglarized, for which I cannot take blame but must mention that I'd left my front door unlocked. What they took it took me months to fully reconcile. Among them, a pair of new boots, an unused rice cooker (birthday presents sitting out the week following the date) - and my wireframe dresser. It took my by surprise, later, how much that loss in particular would disrupt my life. A more revolting moment I cannot recall than when I realized with what significance the bugs were back. My worn and stained sheets had torn, oddly, down the middle. I ripped them from the bed and watched the bugs swarm out of the daylight and onto the darker edges of the mattress. I captured one under my thumb and pushed it until it popped and watch it spray my own blood. My own blood. That stuck with me for a while, my own blood, an ugly refrain. My own blood. I wanted to cry. It's a morbid sport of mine now to pop them as I see them and with some grim unscientific satisfaction guage the age of my blood inside them. The darker brown a victory, myself congealing and hardening inside of them, unnourished and, now, dead.  I have killed more this year than ever. The bugs came back and at some point it did become my fault. I did not act fast enough, and so rapidly I lost control. "No shame to have 'em, just a shame to keep 'em" - my landlord, Frank, who cashes checks five months after remittance and celebrated his 90th last fall over 36 cans of Pepsi and an oxygen tank. The bugs came back and stayed, I think, because I never bothered to replace my dresser. The clothespin in the whole scenario. My clothes haphazardly strewn on the floor if I came home drunk or tired or forgetful and for them made keen nests. And this confluence of laziness and neglect and, I'm going to include Frank even if he is ancient, means now I'll be junking much that I care about. I'm recording this because the idea of a personal inventory has always appealed to me. It reminds me of the scene in Pale Horse, Pale Rider where the matriarch retreats to the attic, carefully removes old flowers and keepsakes from a chest to arrange on an old blanket, and cries. I've been moved to compile an inventory every time I move but, for one, that would be boring as I move annually, and two, it sounds kind of boring to read. I've done it once before, I think. But I'm junking pieces of enough significance to me now that one day I think I'd like to remember them, and rather than a catalogue of what I have, it will be record instead of what I won't. Linus was always my favorite Peanuts character (an abandoned urban fantasy had some gay ghost named after him), and I'll miss my blanket most of all. Jordan forgot it when he moved back to New York. It's a shabby piece, brown and thin, and it's been my only comforter for four years. When I first had the bugs last fall I kept the blanket in storage well into December, even though Frank hadn't turned on the heat. I didn't sleep well at night and was always cold but didn't want to get bugs on that damn blanket. I unpacked it when I thought I was bug free. But I can't trust it now and when I move it will go into the trash. My bed was Sojin's bed, one that she's fond of remarking on - and lifting from Margaret Cho - looks like a crime scene. She'll still proudly tell you the story, too, of how far from list she haggled the man down to.  She had it since she was 19 until 23, when she gave it to me as I moved from Boulder. I"ve covered it in poisons and given myself welts and droopy eyelids that take hours for the swelling to go down. I've sealed it in bug-proof covers. I've slept on it at a house and an apartment before this one. Those hours where Sojin and I would just lie on its pillowed top and try to express only how comfortable we were and I am throwing the bed away. This hideous and small (wooden) desk I type at and this (wooden) chair I sit at. I will not miss these. My knees barely fit under the desk and the chair makes me sore after 15 minutes. My mom gave them to me out of the blue my sophomore year of college, from a garage sale. They were mine and soon they won't be. There's more. Odd clothes, the end tables Sojin's brother left behind when we rented his apartment, some folding chairs. I am most afraid of what I'm keeping. I couldn't bear to part with my books.  None of them are rare, exactly, but I have the only complete Jean Genet collection I've ever seen, even in a library. The copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where Sojin mimicked my brother's inscription after my original copy was lost on loan. The Eugene O'Neill duplicates and William Carlos Williams overlaps between collections and anthologies, poetry primers and college texts I'll never read again but do remember loving. I think I should be safe with the books. My grandfather's steamer. This piece I don't think should I risk moving but can I really leave it behind? He's not in a good way, the other day got lost on the 5 minute drive from my parents' to his cottage and spent four hours. Driving. He's lost a lot since grandma moved to the home, acuity and interest and appetite. I want that steamer forever. I don't know if it's worth bugs. The game chest - I don't know what it's called, a stout cabinet, another item of my grandparents'. Their neighbor made it by hand when they lived in the Pacific Palisades, and it was the one piece I chose myself when they downsized from their house in the valley to move to the cottage where my grandfather will die. I keep my games and decks of cards in it, even though it's not quite long enough for Monopoly. I want to keep it and feel that I should be safe - I am not often near it and it's never been in my bed room, the only infested room that I know of. I have 25 more days of my lost year, 25 more days to lose blood and these chunks of my past.  I like to let my rental leases overlap to give me time to move and clean, which means in short order a new year will be starting too, 10 days or so from now. I'll buy a new bed and bedclothes and odd clothes and end tables. I won't have bugs and I will have books. I will look back in horror but again in remove. My lost year will be last year and from view will recede, like a hairline, from age.

[andampers]

I was burgled

They took my crate system, the ones I use as a dresser. My great grandmother's quilt was put in my hamper, along with the blanket I stole from Lufthansa.

I don't lock my door. I don't have much I care about. I care about my books and my clothes, because I need to undress for sleep at night. I would be bothered if someone took my computer, my phone charger, but it wouldn't be anything more than a financial loss.

I feel safe not locking my door. I live in a secure building where three other people live and I don't have much I care about.

It's a weird violation, and a weird thing to take, and I don't know who to tell. It's not my fault - I didn't make them take it - but I don't lock my door. I don't know who to tell because they're just going to call me an idiot. I guess I'll tell people soon.

They tipped the crates over. My clean clothes are all over the floor, with my dirty clothes. I don't know where I'll put my clothes now but I guess, at least, I still have them.

They didn't take my books, my computer or phone charger. I have my life and my $40 pliers.

I am half convinced Frank took them. He's the only one I know who comes in my apartment without permission. Maybe he is teaching me a lesson, like when Pop Pop took Connor's roller blades from the front lawn where they'd been left to teach him about ownership and responsibility.

I don't know where I will put my clothes now but I guess I will start locking my door.

[andampers]

To a good home

Well that's a classic pot not calling the kettle back

and

It is soup now.

[andampers]

Thibboleth

People find etymology too instructive. An origin informs but does not determine progress; the last word often has tenuous connection to the first. First and in counterpoint: the word cliché. It's an onomatopoeia, for the sound of a French printing press; words and, in sum, phrases, reproduced exactly, end on end until form persists without meaning. Cut one dye to mint a million, and keep time to the sound of the words impressing themselves upon you: cliche, cliche, cliche. The origin of this word in particular is instructive to its meaning. But more often, we find a word's root is counterfeit to our time, and currency only to the society that coined it. To be handicapped is no longer to have cap in hand; we've moved away from understanding these persons as beggars. Roots let us know where we've come from, but little to none of where we are, where we're going. The common understanding of irony bears little resemblance to its dictionary meaning. This situation isn't ironic; soon enough, it will be. The connection of hysteria to the womb, too, is mostly gone. Osmosis orphans words to birth subtext.  I can call you hysterical without gendering you. (My uncle called it "sexing the dolphin.") To attack this statement at its root - of systemic and unending devaluing of women, their emotions and their reasons - is to avoid the issue at its branch: the situation did not call for you to act this way.  The only womanly thing left to the hysterical are the so-called pregnancies. Words grow up and out, and trees into leaflets, cliche cliche cliche. And I am in love with those mythic origins, phantom roots that create new grievances in an orchard already rotting with strange, unpicked fruit. The ugliness of the picnic is, at best, contrived; herstory addresses imbalance nonsensically.  In discourses of supremacy and misogyny, we have invented ammunition for the other side, and in deed give them credit for our work. It is expropriation for export. Words mean, but not as they always have, and often with little resemblance to how they did.  For example: herein, the trees are ideas that are secretly snakes.

[andampers]

Non onsense

Trying not to be selfish. Trying not to hit on my favorite bartender.

I say favorite, but really he's the bartender who I have a crush on.

Trying not to stare at the couple down the bar. I walked in on one of them walking out of the bathroom.  They're cute, they're cute together, they laugh and lapse into silence.  Ellipsis.

Is the symbol of an ellipsis better, more powerful or effective, than the word ellipsis?

Famous teeth nightmares. Incisors, pillow biting, canines, dog and dog pound... Bad blowjobs.

Trying not to be selfish. Anything, anythin, anthin but that.

Sorry for the nonsense.

[andampers]

On grace

Before dinner, my family says grace. I don't, and I always feel strange about it. My bowed head and clasped hands and words: none.  It's not a statement, or judgment. I cannot bring myself to say the words.

I believe my family continues to say grace for a variety of reasons. I believe my older brother finds comfort in ritual, my mother in continuity, my father does as he always has; he was raised more by nuns than his parents. I think my younger brothers don't care to give it a thought, grace.

I believe my family observe my words:none without comment out of courtesy. I don't say anything and, so it goes, neither do they.

This comes to mind because of Christmas. We have been strictly messaged about our comments at work: wish them Happy Holidays, out of respect.  People who do not celebrate Christmas feel left out, and possibly resent, Christmas wishes. But good tidings are universal at the surface.

Thing is, I feel uncomfortable wishing people even a good weekend, let alone a Christmas. This year, Christmas heralds a four-day weekend: what horror. How to fathom someone else's Saturday? Kids and upkeep, versus the gay renter. I can know within myself that my time is no better spent watching movies for twelve consecutive hours than other pursuits; not so for the dependent-on.

Today, walking away from Colleen, I adhered to the strict messaging and wished her a happy holiday. She did not shoot back, but sharply, warmly, wished me a Merry Christmas. What could I do but in a weak voice on a busy street and facing away from her return the sentiment?

I thought about atheism today, and the brilliance of sin in its conception of pride. With intellectual satisfaction I can disavow knowledge of the Almighty and be met rhetorically at every turn. Quoth Christ, "You think you're so smart."

It does not feel like Christmas. It snowed, and it does not feel like Christmas. A hole in the budget where once there was Christmas - too dramatic, but I say what I feel, I hope.

Empty words. Do you recall Michael, white-hat hacker who worked - self-taught! - at a restaurant, with his dead, MT eyes? He ordered a smoothie at the Roma. He climbed shit, like an idiot. It struck me that he might kill people if I didn't sleep with him first.

He never did, and I never did with him, and my sentiments do not ring out as early warnings: he lives ignobly in rented rooms without distinction, or connection, and cut-off from the infamy he craved as an autodidact chef and champion of the Internet innocent. No one has written more than a report card about him until now. And my words then are as my words now: empty. Bowed head and clasped hands, motions in the wave pool.

Exercise. Torn muscles mend into stronger ones. Striated silence ripped and made faithful.

Unspoken words accumulate, like snow. Simple cold cold water. Aloud and they are mud. They accrue and suck and dirty; mix.  You remember your toes, lost and unrecognizable, stuck in the sucking. Not like snow, which runs and melts and leaves.  Snow is a memory and mud is a fear.

Sojin, drunk, threatens, I am going to fall asleep in the snow. Empty words, clear as mud is thick and loud. Sojin prays for no snow. I don't pray, but people have their reasons to.

[andampers]

On weight

Different feet bear different weights.

Tonight I called Annie Leibowitz Anna and the bartender congratulated me.  It's a small but important difference; if one of my friends had emceed, they would have called me out twice: once for fucking up her name, again for phonetically speaking an acronym.

The bartender was not my friend. I am not friends with bartenders. I need to be too comfortable to talk, and it is their job to be comfortable, to talk.

I used to walk a lot. I don't so much anymore. I took a fall - suffered a fall, or better yet, fell - a few months ago, and I stopped walking. Once I walked the two miles to work every day and, when asked on my commute, allowed that I would take the train when I was running late, hungover or overslept, or all three. Now I take the train. I train.

But when I walked I took on scars and strange bubbles of dead skin rubbing away, revealing raw pink foot skin underneath. The bubbles persist. Born of sweat and rub, rub, rubbing, I still see the remnants of my walking, yellow scars-healing and persisting bubbling rubbed pink foot skin. I don't walk anymore, but walking shows on the feet I use to walk to the train.

I used to walk but feet take on different weight so I see the rubbed pink only on my right foot now. In my life, the right foot has taken the most damage. There was the rollerblading accident, the bike flip, the highway, the drunk night, and now the car that hit me. How long does youth last? How many injuries can I sustain before I see error, or better, or learn?

Do I look at it the wrong way, perhaps. Is it not that my right foot is burdened, suffering, all-around dragged-down knocked-out and hot with scar tissue, sore at the ankle edges, hyphenated, called out and ruled on?  Is my left foot instead just left, crafty - stand offish and lucky?

It strikes me that exclamation points are overdone and commas spliced.  By far the most rhetorical affects are, in no particular order, the ellipsis, the question mark, and the hyphen (whether that be doubled or spaced on both sides or, I don't know, autoformatted to a particular style guide's selections.) I realize now I forgot the parenthesis & attendant familae of lunulae, which are silly as singular nouns. You never just have ), or god forbid, (. A common rhetorical device but underconsidered.

I know I lean on rhetorical effects to my own detriment. I overuse. Simple sentences don't truck with me. Different feet and different weights.

Everything seems to come back to meter, measure, feet and stress: weight. Tall fat easygoing adjusted important; the comma denotes order, priority, relationship. The comma is not in everything. It is imposed, it is rhetoric, its meaning is only mean, which is to say: discriminatory.

I learned the word "juxtapose" from the back cover of a paperback copy of The Virgin Suicides and vow not to use it again, in conversation or ever. I learned the word "juxtapose" in the eighth grade and haven't given up on it since. Chiaroscuro, stark and the word grey, too.

Rhetoric is phrase. Great ideas are disguised in awkward English sentences. From the Greek, tragedy is a goat song. In English, it is what teenagers milk to get the cheese.  See, this is what I'm saying.

Feet, weight, scars, shoes.  Eaten soles and eschewing empty antonyms. Gut punch, bruised blood sausage, pulled pork, shoe leather and unending associations. Songs on repeat.

I am, really am, am am am, sorry for so much, and regretting rounding to nothing. Soles thick with scars and shoe soles beaten with time, age, and wear, but not stronger. Bright white-yellow scars. Peeling skin. Recto verso, left and right. Feet and weight.

[andampers]

062211, 090111

June:

Sometimes I get hard thinking of how much I liked a movie. Not thinking of the movie itself, but how much I liked it. Like the act of remembering is erotic. It's notable, at the moment, because I realized I was getting hard thinking of how much I enjoyed, in quick succession, Purple Rose of Cairo (at the whorehouse), the ee cummings poem in Hannah and Her Sisters, the only scene where Allen and Landau share screentime in Crimes and Misdemeanors, and the exterior of the theater in Manhattan Murder Mystery. I'm uncomfortable when Woody Allen gives me boners. So it's noteworthy.

September:

When I find a critic who agrees that You and Me and Everyone We Know was so much rehydrated affectation, who then reccommends The Future, that is when it is soup for me. Stephen Malkmus is the protoman, the "type," his nonsensical word games and drawling, hawkish face. I am attracted to his height and his haircut, his hooking nose, and h-sounds, like heavy breathing. on East 1st and Ogden there is a statue to commemorate the Hungarian Uprising.  Man lies -likely dead, but at least frozen in time - underneath a veil.  A death shroud. His body emerges from the stone in relief. The sculptor commemorated the man's dong as much as the rest of him. The dick flops to the right. There is a plausible deniability to the thickness of the veil. If you could remove the cast iron shroud would you see his full body? So it seems, such is the way the linen is offset from the plinth tha temerges from behind it. I have only ever seen this statue in a photograph, but fully intend on seeking it out when I am in the neighborhood. Though I live only half an hour walking away it seems like th ewaste of an hour to seek out this memorial to an event which I don't understand, when it may very well not live up to what I have imagined of it here. What if his dick flops the other way? What if he is less real in person? What if more? Was his left leg lost in the uprising, or is it just behind him?  It's all very confusing. Because it looks like he's lying down. His right leg emerges from out of the shroud but his foot is lost to my vision.  is it only the veil that makes him visible to us? Gunmetal gray, like bandages on the invisible man, revealing by obscuring. Let's make savvy, synonymous as it is with the clverness of foxes, and so with canny, in our big play on words, mean foxy.  Stupid - like a can. A can being a breast or an ass, to be foxy is to be canny, let's make cognitive ability sexy. Stephen Malkmus is canny to me - is he canny to you? I uncanned those beans (meaning, I ate them), my mouth smeared with beanjuice and beanflesh stuck between my teeth and the jagged maw of the beancan  split in rictus, looking dangerous. I touched the edges with the fatty pad of my left index finger. I could feel the flesh catch, but not tear against the pinched-torn aluminum. My vocabulary on the friction of the hyphenate.  I see a lot of myself in this can. Through the wall I could hear them, joyful. Finch swanning around, barely dressed. And Sesame ... I didn't know him so well. without being able to see him I couldn't know what he was doing the way I could know Finch. I imagine, with Finch in such a state, Sesame had lost his shirt on the way to bed but still wore pants. (The reverse is too awkward to contemplate someone who is smooth, of manner and not of chest, as Sesame is, of doing.) In shorts, I imagine he is marginally more dressed. Laughter gathering like bubbles on the walls of a slowly heating pot of water - reaching, having not yet reached, a boil.  That's what it sounds like to me when they disappear into Finch's room.  It is harder to describe when they leave the house altogether but still I have a feeling for Finch, where he is and what he's doing, his state of dress. Here is the difficulty of registering their romance in words: pronouns.  English is a poor language for documenting the romance between anyone but men and women - _he_ does such and _she_ does othersuch, but when both actors are men _he_ ends up doing double duty. Names are, in best practice, appositive. Strict apportioning of subject and object becomes essential, because then at least he does things to him. (Such apportioning becomes tricky in scenes of mutual masturbation.) Rely on your reader to remember that if Finch is acting on Sesame, who is he and who is him, until, of course, control of the situation is wrested or conceded or traded or only an illusion in the first place. But when the object is an actual object - not a person like Sesame and say, instead, Sesame's shirt - so that if he gives to Sesame his, Sesame's, shirt back, the appositive is the engine of meaning-making. Imagine if he gives to Sesame his shirt back - where his is assumed to mean he (Finch), the ownership of the shirt is thrown into a whole other context and meaning.  Now Sesame has had Finch's shirt, but returned it to Finch, and now under some pressure - pressure of desire on Finch's part, to see his (Finch's) boyfriend in his (Finch's) shirt, which is universally and undeniably sexy across sexualities, and so Finch gives it back; or perhaps a pressure of gift-giving, whereupon Sesame, upon waking up in Finch's bed without his shirt, and unable to find his (Sesame's) shirt, and needing a shirt such that he might be able to leave without attracting undue notice outside (a sure result of shirtlessness), selects a shirt of Finch's, and so being reminded of Finch as he pulls on the shirt but seeing instead his face on a body that, in the shirt, resembles Finch's (insofar as the shirt goes), and being happy to be reminded of Finch with every glance in a mirror or down to his navel or lower, keeps the shirt until Finch so demands the shirt back and not until Sesame - upon giving some hint of liking to be reminded of Finch by something so small as a shirt that is recognizably his (Finch's) - and so Finch gives it back; - there is entirely new meaning that English seems woefully underprepared to provide. The documentation of same sex relationships is fraught with such confusion, and if it is your job, as it is mine, to direct understanding then such confusion leads to ambiguity, which is untenable. That Finch and Sesame had the same first name

[andampers]

In Which I am a Vain, Vain Man

6 October

What will I tell my children when they ask me where I was during Occupy Wall Street?

"You're adopted."

7 October

Did I miss a memo or something? People keep saying stevejobs are dead, but I just got one this morning.

13 October

Pavarotti in a Ferrari. It's a metaphor.

[andampers]

In Constant Contact

I hadn't texted Tom in a few days to avoid becoming the pejorative girlfriend.

Being gay I figured I already had enough going against me without being a lesbian, too.

[andampers]

On Breaking Bad

I don't want to be accused of backlash, but Breaking Bad isn't all it's cracked up to be. I really enjoy it. I'm glad I was turned onto it.  The time I've spent wondering where it's going or fretting over its characters has been, I will say categorically, good. But it wasn't until season three that I really saw its strength - plot.  And while that is a strength sorely lacking in a lot  of current television, it's not the strongest strength a show can have. People return for character or the strength of the writing (of jokes); a bad episode here or there won't compromise viewership.  Plot, however, can sour in a moment.  And to rely exclusively on plot is an untenable relationship to anything with a story. The strongest strength a show can have - I think, though I'm drunk and haven't considered it across the board - is a mix of thematic consistency and thematic resonance. I mention consistency first because it is less important.  Themes change over time, which is never truer than in a television show (but is also true for series of books, or anything else written serially). This is acceptable! But in terms of resonance, Breaking Bad falls short. The obligation falls on the viewer to remember how the series started - with Walter White as Clark Kent - and to connect it to the current status quo, with Walter White (so far as season four episode five) as the Riddler in Arkham Asylum.  There's connective tissue, but without some verbal gymnastics that tissue may as well be all wet if it's to stand in for a convincing argument. And "And then" is all wet. It may as well be like a mixed metaphor, if you'll accept the simile. Perhaps this is just me working out what I feel about a television show that isn't like a lot of other television shows I've followed. Lost, both serial and modular, had great insight into genre storytelling as it intersected with individual characters as well as overarching questions regarding free will v. fate - and how your past can inform your future. 30 Rock is unimpeachable comedy. Community bears no mention, because it has my number. The Wire was essentially political, and arguably journalistic.  And with the exception of Lost, each of these television shows have been commented on in terms of structure - and Lost's was the most ingenious! Why do we stay engaged with a work that is heavily commenting on a theme? Not because the stance on that theme is ambiguous.  One can tell from Bulgakov's opening chapter that he thinks Soviet bureaucracy is not just pointless, but headless - and hilarious. We stay engaged with a work itself so engaged with a theme because it can make us look at aspects of that theme somewhere we did not expect to see it resonate. Or somewhere we did not expect to see it at all. Or even just to explain to us why. Breaking Bad has shown us nothing new.  It has characters involved in a compelling web of mutually assured destruction and cruel ignorance, of deferred accountability and how that catches up to a person. But even if I want to say Breaking Bad is MacBeth, Breaking Bad I can't put into a box, because I refuse to believe that all it is up to is plot, and yet that's all I can glean. Plot, libertarianism and dramatic irony - none of which count as thematic content. I disbelieve that the ending is the end of a story critically.  The ending is only as important as the middle in terms of gleaning meaning. Still, this thought process is to be continued, for this season, and the 16 episodes following.

[andampers]

All Denver I Dream About Walter Matthau

Hereinsofar lies, My Denver Journal I am always the one who turns off the light in the front room. I am the only one who can reach the thing. I know no one in this city! I want to know close to no one in this city. Limit-approaching-zero no one. Transferring my employment has made clear how much of my job I was good at because I had been there so long (a lot), how much I was good at because I approach challenges with accountability (a good deal) and how much I got away with because of my relationship to the men upstairs (so much). I hate the Internet. But I have forgotten how to read. Books.

And write. ...Things. I like to say inaccrochable as if it were a word in English, which it is not.

The best time I've had so far in Denver is watching The Front Page, based on the same play as His Girl Friday but with Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau (kind of a babe?).  There are some god damn jokes in that movie that are beyond fucking reproach. Plus: It circumvents the problem of so many adaptations from the stage to the screen.  A movie like The Odd Couple (another Lemmon/Mathau joint) - from the Neil Simon play, and by Neil Simon for the film - has a seriously static camera.  The camera has no point of view. The camera doesn't act as a spotlight on the stage or as the perspective of the audience - there is no reasonable analogue for the static camera because the eye bores and takes in, what, the set, the other audience members, the wings, the program at a play, but not at a movie. The myriad things one can appreciate and deduce from what is not the action is absolutely out of reach of the film-going audience member.. The skill of the set builder to the attention of the set dresser to the mise-en-scene put-in-place by the playwright,  himself!  These are the things you can notice.

You can't draw Chekhov's gun if never you've seen it. The camera sits. Sometimes it jumps forward, if the principles get too far down the hall.  Sometimes the angle switches.  In the industry that's called coverage.  Gene Saks isn't in the industry, apparently. You can't name what you don't know. The Odd Couple is a movie I didn't finish. (I tried to give Neil Simon's cutesy, calculated writing another chance; I shouldn't've.) But I saw enough of it - three-fourths of it - to realize that that camera wouldn't move for a train. In this metaphor, the camera is a tied to the train tracks, and so more gets run over than can be truly said to move. All of these problems are tangential to my point!  Those tangents began from this thought: that The Front Page is a superior movie to The Odd Couple (indubitable). Because the god damn camera moves.  Well over half of this lengthy movie, basically everything important except its awkwardly paced slapstick sequences but including its backwards, twenties-cum-seventies politics, takes place in the same room and is not the worse for it because the god damn camera moves all around the room. Out the window. Over to the desk. Back to the window. Across the desk and to the door.  To the phone on the other side of the door. Back to the window! It's thrilling.  It really is. Especially in comparison to The Odd Couple.  What a joke. (The Odd Couple.) And not a funny one.

[andampers]

Dear my tumblr

I don't want to be in the business of content aggregation. I want to be in the business of content creation.

[andampers]

White Flag

Per the New York Times, the rainbow flag, as a symbol for the diversity of LGBT peoples, was originally conceived as having eight stripes, each with special significance prescribed by its designer, as follows: "hot pink (for sexuality), red (for life), orange (for healing), yellow (for sunlight), green (for nature), blue (for art), indigo (for harmony) and violet (for the human spirit)." This is why artists should stay mum about their intentions, unless that artist is Flannery O'Connor or similarly inducted into a tradition of mystery.  Some of this is so prosaic is verges on the inane - i.e., yellow, green - and some just sounds powerfully made up. (I am talking about the color orange.) Anyone who has seen a Pride flag recently knows that the stripes have since been reduced to six, the casualties being hot pink and indigo.  One might argue that the most important part of the LGBT community - the primary mode of difference - has been eliminated from the Pride flag, that being hot pink's prescribed meaning, sexuality. Taken as a whole, the rainbow is an apt if on the nose metaphor for diversity, as well as triumph over adversity (the sunshine [yellow] after the rainstorm [gray?]). It is also hugely tacky, but that's for another time. However, reduced to individual stripes, the flag makes a statement for life, healing, sunlight, nature, art and the human spirit, which is not a statement regarding LGBT identity so much as it is the philosophy of a New Mexican lesbian desert sculptor giving you "insight" into her "process."  Bland, vague, but verging on the spiritual just enough to give it the illusion of meaning: is this the genesis for a lasting symbol, or a merchandising opportunity? The old Pride flag represents prosody, a sanitized, common-denominator approach to identity. Please discard all connotations of your old Pride flags and adopt these new ones, which are far superior, as I have invented them, as follows and in no particular order: Red (for blood, shed for justice and that which communicates disease), orange (for solipsistic fruits), green (for 420 friendly), blue (for loneliness), violet (for dancing). Oh, and yellow. For sunlight. To tan.

[andampers]

On Sodomy

I was trying to recommend Funeral Rites to a friend the other day. Naturally, she asked what it was about. I paused. "It's semiautobiographical," I said. "Jean Genet sodomizes a young boy who's part of the Resistance in Paris. The boy is killed by a Nazi, whom Genet falls in love with." She didn't want to read it. It's been a long time since I've read Funeral Rites. I don't remember if Erik - the Nazi - actually killed Eric, the boy (16), or if Erik was only complicit in his death, complicity being perhaps the major motif of Holocaust literature, as well as the works of Jean Genet. (Another major motif in Genet, the double, manifests spectacularly in the play of Erik/Eric, a novel-length moment that I may have made up and don't care to confirm. The important difference that Erik/Eric represents is, to me, the difference between German and French, as a language and as peoples.) Because it's been so long since I read Funeral Rites I don't think I gave the summary justice, but one does not read Jean Genet for the plot, and my description did nothing to sell Kathy on Genet's strengths. The decrepit grandeur of a city garret, say, the bottomed-out evocation of filthy, dirty beauty, the sexual frankness wrapped up in a metaphysics of sexuality... But the real failure of my summary was my use of the word "sodomizes." Sodomy is a term first moral, then legal, then clinical. I was using it clinically, a gesture to objectivity when describing Genet, thirty-ish to forty, engaging sexually with Eric, sixteen. I used it to be accurate (when clearly accuracy is not a concern of mine) but to displace blame, as well. I didn't want to make their relationship romantic and at the same time omitted the erotic, and, by proxy, that it was forbidden. That Jean Genet was a pederast, in action as well as interest, is only of note because I use the word pederast instead of pedophile. Pederast is European for pedophile, continental and so above reproach. I abhor pedophiles, but adore Jean Genet. His life in words, and so my life in his books, is wildly erotic, rich with fundament and so fundamentally debauched. The morality of his books is not inside-out but outside. Completely separate, relationally divorced from bourgeois codes, so debased it is elevated to the blameless moral hierarchy of the aristocracy. Genet exists in that rarefied class of cake-eating, cousin-kissing, moreless genteels, above the aspirations of the working class because they are above the working class. Genet exists in this strata without cash, which is why he was a criminal. Had he been born with a silver spoon in his mouth instead of his hand he would the subject of novel biography, like Nero, rather than Sartre's Saint Genet. Lacking legal tender, Genet trafficks in tenderness. So why use "sodomy"? When I say this word it is funny; when you say it, it is at best offensive and at least gross. Why work in such a low valence of the word sodomy, especially if the word still stinks of morality and is not at odds with its legal use? It is an unresponsible use. One should speak of Genet with evocation, if not with reference (Funeral Rites, "the Ars Poetica of evil") than in reverence.  It is a word that means too precisely. The shades of meaning overlap too fully. One cannot separate the morality of sodomy from the legality of sodomy, as each refers to the clinical definition of sodomy. There are two anecdotes about Genet which I adore. The first, Alberto Giacometti's fascination with Genet's bald head, for he thought that hair was a lie. (This is more of an anecdote about Giacometti, as Genet is only incidental to the story, but would I have known about Giacometti's bizarre value judgment re: hair without Genet?) The second is when Sartre, along with other Parisien cognoscenti (for the defense: Jean Cocteau), defended Genet at criminal trial. "Jean Genet," Sartre said, translated from the French with generous paraphrase, "is the next Rimbaud. One does not imprison a Rimbaud." These anecdotes, the language with which I gesture - not even to what kind of author Genet is or who he was, but how I care to remember him, without fact-checking or reflection - speak to a mythology of Jean Genet which is not so much useful talking about him as it is talking about me. (I am transitioning from a tall glass to a tall glass of water.) To whit: Last night I was trying to summarize Our Lady of the Flowers to another friend, to whom I thought I had lent the book. What was it about? she asked. I paused. "Gay dudes in pre-War Paris," I said. What a failure I am. A summary which excludes totally the erotic resonance of the book, the bodies, the farts, the poverty, the prison, the murder, the luxury and even the eponymous character. I revealed nothing of the character of the book. What a success Genet is. I cannot remember the book, only the erection I had reading it. Truly, as Audre Lorde said, What we need is an erotics of art.

[andampers]

Gay Shame

[T]he subject who emerges as the subject of gay shame is often a white and male self whose shame in part emerges from the experience of being denied access to privilege. . . . [S]hame for women and shame for people of color plays out in different ways and creates different modes of abjection, marginalizations and self-abnegation; it also leads to very different political strategies. . . . While female shame can be countered by feminism and racialized shame can be countered by what Rod Ferguson calls "queer of color critique," it is white gay male shame that has proposed "pride" as the appropriate remedy and that focuses its libidinal and other energies on simply rebuilding the self that shame dismantled rather than taking apart the social processes that project shame onto queer subjects in the first place.

- Judith Halberstam