Why all the conservative gay-hate for Hillary?

Okay, this is off-topic, but it is something I've been wondering about, and it does at least partly concern the larger culture: why do Internet queens Andrew Sullivan (right) and Matt Drudge (below) hate, hate, hate Hillary Clinton quite so much, much, much? I leaned toward Hillary over Obama (although I'm happy to vote for him) because - can we be honest? - Obama is so obviously a blank slate, and in his short career he's never made much of an impression, except on the political pulpit. In fact, somehow I sense from him a certain disinterest in even getting things done in principle. Those imagining this paleoliberal messiah will be able to usher in a post-polarized paradise I think may be in for a very unpleasant surprise. But hey, I could be wrong - and after all, just because the Clintons ran the government supremely well once before, why the hell should we invite them back? I mean, that would mean facing the threat of oral sex in the Oval Office!

But oh yeah, what I wanted to write about - the general hatred of the press for Hillary, and the intriguing fact that this is best channeled by two conservative homosexuals on the Net. I know, I know, Drudge is supposed to be closeted, but please - I don't see why we have to play along with his private psychological drama here. So my question is: are these two representative of gay conservatism in general, and is gay conservatism actually representative of something in the culture at large?

I guess the nub of this admittedly amorphous query is American sexism, and how the Hillary-Obama match-up seems to hint what many have suspected but never articulated: that this country is more deeply sexist than it is racist. Rush Limbaugh can openly call Hillary a 'bitch' or a 'feminazi,' but he wouldn't dare trade in racial stereotypes with Obama. Or will he, eventually? Will racism, in the end, turn out to be just as virulent as the sexism that's apparent now?

That's entirely possible, but just this minute I'm intrigued by our sexism, and how it's being reflected in these gay commentators. There's a general perception that gay men and straight women share some sort of Sex-in-the-City-like sisterhood, but it isn't really true; in the end, gay men are men, not women, and there's a surprisingly nasty sexism that often surfaces out of our gossip and conversation. There's also often a lingering animosity between gay men and lesbians (who have reportedly been prominent in Hillary's circles). Yes, gay sexism exists, and it could certainly manifest itself against Ms. Clinton.

Still, making this simple case against Drudge and Sullivan (Sullivudge? Drullivan?) is tough, because both are such slippery customers. Drudge, of course, is hard to analyze because he doesn't really write that much, and his eponymous Report is a wacky, pack-rat mosaic in which space aliens and bat boy schmooze with Putin and Bush. Drudge's background is in McDonald's and 7-11 management, and it shows. It's easy to view him - via the lens of affectionate patronization - as more a trailer park eccentric than some envious Internet queen.

As for Sullivan - well, like the rest of the cream of Oxbridge and Harvard, he can push out a rich chunk of rhetoric from the old mental sphincter faster than just about anyone. But at the same time, even his fans I think would admit he's batshit-crazy; indeed, that's part of the fun of reading him: he's got the intriguing charisma that comes from being very fucked up, and his edge of hysteric, indignant offense is always pushing against the polished surface of his prose. Then there's the simple outline of his personal history: the promiscuous gay bottom who demands the right to marry within the Church, the conservative who claims he was pro-Gore (though he generally eviscerated Gore), then cheered on Bush before turning on him, too, all while insisting that Catholicism can be reconciled with libertarianism - really, the list of contradictions is just too long and too weird. I mean not many village sluts would have the cojones to demand a white wedding from the Pope, but Sullivan's up to the challenge. And this is, interestingly, what makes him so American; he often rhapsodizes about his love for our country, and I believe him, because we're insane in exactly the same way he is: we, too, are piously pseudo-religious, and believe fervently, if incoherently, in our right to perpetually, indignantly re-invent ourselves.

Some, of course, might ponder Sullivan's hatred of Hillary as actually a kind of endorsement (after all, he said of Gore things like: "fundamentally a political coward . . . a corpulent Cassandra . . . weaselly . . . one of the most naked opportunists in American politics"). And Sullivan's often driven by personal vendetta under the cover of principle (his long campaign against Howell Raines, who reportedly fired him from the Times, is one example). So maybe the current vitriol is just payback from the nineties. And is Drudge, meanwhile, still in some sort of psychological battle with his liberal, Jewish parents? Perhaps. Still, it's worth pondering the meaning of the curious correspondence between these two gay scourges.

Good-bye to all that

When Alfred Brendel (at left) took the stage last Friday night at Symphony Hall, in the Boston stop of his farewell tour (under the aegis of Celebrity Series), the atmosphere couldn't have afforded a greater contrast to a similar appearance from the Guarneri Quartet a week prior. The Guarneri had essentially partnered with a younger quartet, the Johannes, to give the uplifting impression that their legacy would continue after their own disappearance from the stage. But with Brendel, there was no sense of time's wheel, only of its scythe. The mood was elegiac, not just for the pianist personally, but for a kind of musical intellectual that he had come to represent: the literary pianist, let's say, who attempts to distill an individual classicism from the "texts" of the great composers. Today, the concert hall has begun to evolve into a market of musical niches, in which scholarly novelty is highly prized, with performers specializing in periods or schools, as well as the mastery of instruments designed to reflect earlier tastes and modes. Brendel, on the other hand, has always been more synthetic in his aims, searching for something like a linking thread of thought between what today are considered more and more disparate genres.

The trouble was that Brendel's farewell didn't make all that convincing a case for this approach. He programmed conservatively (not unusual for a late-career pianist), focusing on works from the great Germanic-Austrian tradition (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert). There were no showboat warhorses, and few demanding leaps or runs across the keyboard; Brendel's choices tended to be idiosyncratic (though not actually obscure), selected with an eye toward internal development rather than the easy pleasures of melody or ornament. Even an indifferent listener could sense that to Brendel, there were consonances and formal parallels between these choices that reflected some kind of Borges-like inner garden/labyrinth; however, his playing often turned a bit blurry, and in general felt ingrown; one sometimes felt one was listening to the memory of a great performance rather than the thing itself (at a meta level, a rather Borgesian experience indeed).

Put simply, Brendel's Haydn sounded rather like his Mozart, which actually even sounded quite a bit like his Beethoven, without much emotional force behind these similarities other than intellectual nostalgia. These days we expect to hear brilliant analyses of the differences between these titans; to hear them yoked so closely, I think, inevitably leads one to desire some novel synthesis, rather than a familiar one. Thankfully, Brendel seemed to break free from his inner restraints with Schubert's B-flat Sonata, Op. 960 (perhaps tellingly, Schubert's own farewell to the form), in which his attention to structure and musical "space" provided a lustrous underpinning to, rather than an overdetermination of, the composer's wandering, melancholic song. There were some lovely moments in his encores, too, but then again his Bach (and even his Liszt!) sounded rather like his other old masters. After his final, poignant bow, I'm unhappy to confess I wasn't all that sorry to say good-bye to all that.

Take a deep breath . . .

And just enjoy "My Paper Mind," a lovely 'stratastencil' short (that means it's all made of layers of cut paper) by Javan Ivey. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

The Exhibitionist Pie Chart

Geoff Edgers makes a strange kind of apology for his work on The Exhibitionist today. He essentially claims that his posting methodology is driven by the numbers - by attempting to generate ad revenue, to be precise. With that in mind, I thought I'd look over the recent posts from Edgers to see if I could discern said methodology, or whether his site had become, as I said some time earlier, "a train wreck." This morning his blog listed the past twenty posts:

1. Mikko Nissinen Award - Boston Ballet
2. Why Newspapers are Failing
3. The Kinks, 1973
4. New Rep Season
5. Friday Reads
6. Response, Ban Chiang Controversy - MFA
7. New York City Check-In
8. Ban Chiang Controversy - MFA
9. President's Day
10. Thai Antiquities - MFA
11. Ray Davies Review
12. Ray Davies's Producer
13. Museum Dead Bodies Redux - Body Worlds
14. Shakespeare on the Common, Updated
15. Breaking: Shakespeare on the Common
16. Roger Voisin, 89 - BSO
17. Vadim Repin - BSO
18. Christoph Büchel's Rep
19. Police Officer, Young Ruffians
20. Birth of ASCAP

A quick analysis:

Posts about events or organizations based outside Boston: 55%
Posts about the BSO, MFA, CitiCenter, or Boston Ballet: 40%
Posts about Ray Davies and/or the Kinks: 15%
Posts about local arts events: 15%
Posts about smaller organizations: 5%

I'm sorry, but I feel somewhat vindicated; it's hard for even me to believe, for instance, that posts about Boston were slightly in the minority at The Exhibitionist (if you count the Body Worlds ref, you could make a case for 50/50, which still pretty much sucks). And notice Edgers found time to post exactly once in the last two weeks about a small arts organization - the New Rep; yet he posted three posts about a favorite pop musician of his, including, of course, links to his print review of same (a little self-exhibitionism there, I suppose).

Now maybe this mix is designed to drive traffic (although that, too, is a little hard to believe). But should that really be the defining goal of an arts blog on the Globe? I mean, the Globe can publish anything it wants, of course, but if it wants to publish Perez Hilton, it should publish Perez Hilton, and not pretend it's a blog about the Boston arts community. And would a genuine arts blog have to necessarily fall in the debit column for the Globe? I don't see why. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for instance, has a fantastic blog on the local visual arts scene. With like ads and everything. Maybe Geoff should check it out.

There will be boredom

Daniel Day-Lewis and Dillon Freasier in the best shot in There Will Be Blood.

I don't, as a rule, pay much attention to the Oscars, except when they're a particularly wild travesty (as when Crash was handed the statuette over Brokeback, for instance). This year "travesty" seems impossible, although if No Country for Old Men falls to some spoiler, yes, a minor injustice will have been done. Not that No Country is such a great film - but for long stretches it's engrossing and has a few moments of genuine resonance: it's like an improved version of Fargo (and didn't that win? I think so). This hasn't been a particularly good year for movies - the fact that both Michael Clayton and Juno could be in the running for Best Picture tells you as much - and I sometimes wonder if we really need to have an Academy Award ceremony every single year. I mean, isn't it a bit odd that films like The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia should share the same honor as Driving Miss Daisy and Braveheart, while such classics as Cabaret and Chinatown were cheated of statuettes? Can't we just skip the damn thing some years, and play catch up? It seems the only decent thing to do.

But back to the spoiler problem. This year's potential spoiler looks to be There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's mildly absorbing account of a ruthless oil baron coming to no good in turn-of-the-(last)-century California. I found it, like all of Anderson's movies, intermittently interesting but somehow incoherent at a deep level - to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there's no "there" there in Anderson's movies, no original artistic personality. For a while he was imitating Altman, to some positive effect, but There Will Be Blood is, in effect, a crazy quilt of sights and sounds borrowed from older, better movies. It's basically an Upton Sinclair potboiler dressed up in a Stanley Kubrick soundtrack and Terrence Malick photography, with Daniel Day-Lewis imitating Robert DeNiro in the lead. Now does that sound like it makes any sense to you? No, it didn't to me, either.

Yet our film critics have been doing cartwheels over this strange, quietly lumbering film. It seems I've seen the phrase "a work of genius" written more than once about it. ("A work of genius(es)" might be more like it.) That kind of tripe is easy to dismiss - what's weirder is Ty Burr's valentine to the pic in today's Globe, with such choice phrases as "the Gordian knot of . . . (a) contrarian epic . . . the arid glories of the setting, the cavernous hatreds of the hero . . . brilliant cinema . . . scenes of quiet grandeur . . . etc., etc., etc."

And to think I almost nodded off! To be fair, the "Gordian knot" of There Will Be Blood has one original and intriguing strand - the ongoing duel between Day-Lewis's "Daniel Plainview" and his smarmily pious doppelganger, Paul Dano's "Paul Sunday" (at left), a preacher as much on the make as the oil baron. Anderson always seems about to nail some brilliant point about the synergy of fundamentalism and capitalism - only he never quite does; still, the scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano have a resonance nothing else in the movie has, and sometimes crackle with a sense of satire rare in Anderson's work. But beyond this, most of There Will Be Blood is pretty bloodless. Day-Lewis, as usual, constructs a thorough physicalization, and we can feel his own intelligence constantly moving within his performance; we're also somehow aware that he has willed his own somewhat-shy disposition to daring feats of derring-do. Yet if an actor is to be judged by how well he builds a sense of personality, and sympathy for that personality, onscreen, then Day-Lewis fails utterly. He has become what DeNiro became long ago - a kind of anti-naturalistic actor, who uses the tropes of the method to form a carapace that conceals, rather than reveals, his character. Perhaps this is because any such revelation could be seen as vulgar; or perhaps it's that, in the end, Day-Lewis simply has no inner resources to match the personae of such matchless screen presences as Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn. Whatever the reason, Day-Lewis's performances always seem peerless, yet somehow empty; as with Anderson, there's no "there" there.

Day-Lewis is done few favors, however, by Anderson's script, which I gather streamlines the novel, but does so without any sense of growing momentum or rising stakes. Put bluntly, Anderson doesn't seem to know how to develop the Paul Sunday subplot, and he flubs almost every key moment in Plainview's tale: the moment when Plainview abandons his adopted son, the moment when he realizes his "brother" is a poseur - these turning points and more are oddly underwritten and underplayed, and hence don't have the impact they should. By the time of the notoriously bizarre denouement, in which at last there's blood between Sunday and Plainview, we've checked out of the story emotionally, and can only roll our eyes at what plays like a bad outtake from The Shining. And Burr is at his least convincing trying to justify this misstep: "There Will Be Blood commits the cardinal sin," he explains, "of breaking its narrative spell and announcing, along with its hero, that it's finished, done, over - go home already." So the final scene 'works' by revealing that the movie should already be over? That has to be the most screwball piece of logic I've read in a review in a long time - but perhaps in its foolishness it distills the essence of the critical response to the movie.

Still, one gropes for an explication for this madness. Is it that Anderson is still perceived as Altman's heir? Is it that he manages to make movies of some seriousness, admittedly, within the Hollywood system (no small feat)? Or is it that he seems, like Quentin Tarantino, to be at least as much a film critic as a filmmaker himself? Or is the chorus of approval for There Will Be Blood simply another symptom of this once-great popular art form's seemingly unstoppable decline? Maybe a friend of mine put it best as the lights rose in the theatre after the credits: "Well, that was no movie for old men."

Vandalizing vandalism

Some prime "splashed" street art in New York.

It so had to happen. Someone - a mysterious figure known as "The Splasher" - has begun vandalizing New York's artsy graffiti, throwing wads of housepaint over "street art" that was being leveraged into gallery shows and advertising contracts, often leaving behind a witty, crazed manifesto about "euthanizing your bourgeois fad." And the howls from Soho and Chelsea are just beginning. Hmmm. Maybe the revolution won't be televised - and somebody warn Banksy and Pixnit!

DeLillo on the down-low

In her review of Don DeLillo's Love-Lies-Bleeding, the Boston Globe's Louise Kennedy makes the following rather oblique statement:

On the smaller of two stages at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, a young fringe company is presenting the regional premiere of Don DeLillo's "Love-Lies-Bleeding" . . . This is a strange commentary on the state of our large local theater companies, if you consider that two earlier DeLillo plays were commissioned and premiered by the American Repertory Theatre.

A "strange commentary," indeed. One wonders why Kennedy can't simply say aloud what I've been saying for some time: Boston's major theatres are failing to bring us the news from our playwrights. The A.R.T. continues to pretend that directors are more important than writers, while the Huntington has become focused on developing talents in-house - which means, unfortunately, that said talents are often genuine but minor. Meanwhile, we've had to turn to the Lyric Stage to see Albee's The Goat, Boston Theatreworks to see Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, Zeitgeist Stage to see The Kentucky Cycle, and Company One to see Mr. Marmalade. I know I'm the meme engine around here, but isn't it time for even the cautious Louise Kennedy and Carolyn Clay to risk pointing out that this situation is precisely backwards? Even though two major academic institutions have standing theatre companies here, we're offered the boldest new theatre essentially below the mainstream radar, on the down-low, as it were. In a way, of course, this situation is a bonanza for small theatres, which can pick from the latest in challenging texts. On the other hand, it's a little frustrating for the rest of us, since our smaller theatres often don't have the resources to fully realize these demanding visions.


Brett Marks, Eliza Lay and W. Kirk Avery in Love-Lies-Bleeding.

And that's the case, I'm afraid, with Love-Lies-Bleeding, a laudable attempt by Way Theatre Artists at bringing off an intriguing, but flawed, experiment from DeLillo. The piece is, on its surface, a contemplation of euthanasia and its moral paradoxes, in which Alex, an aging, once-vital artist "locked in," as the doctors say, by two successive strokes, mutely waits - and perhaps listens - as his stump of an "extended family" circles his helpless body with a life-ending load of morphine.

But DeLillo is not solely interested in concocting some high-end counterpoint to Whose Life Is It Anyway? As usual, he's most concerned with the limits of knowledge, and the meaning of action within those limits. In such epics as Libra, White Noise, and Underworld, the interstices he reveals in American culture hint at conspiracy and unknown threat - in Love-Lies-Bleeding, by way of contrast, the threat circling the "hero" isn't fraught with epistemological doubt, but his actual current state is. So DeLillo proceeds to break his play up into allusive fragments - fragments which often frustrate any through-line reading, and are intended to keep us pondering precisely what we know about this moral dilemma and what we can know.

But the Way Theatre production, under the direction of Greg Maraio, sticks with a naturalistic approach throughout, so the constant narrative dislocations seem like shocks to the play's system rather than a positive structural element. To be fair to Maraio, DeLillo's structure is hardly a triumph - he slides uneasily out of philosophical speculation and into somewhat-wooden melodrama, so Maraio's approach is at least half-right. Still, some sense of alienated distance from the appearance of what's going on is clearly called for, but never delivered (or even attempted).

Despite these failings, there are at least two performances to savor here. Eliza Lay, though not as commanding as she was in The Eight, is still generally convincing as the wife of the stricken Alex, and delivers a moving, if conflicted, eulogy near the play's end. Jeff Gill, however, is the stand-out as the maverick artist (played poignantly in extremis by W. Kirk Avery), conveying an appealing energy in the character's younger days as well as a thoughtful, utterly unsentimental evocation of his travails after his first stroke. What's more, Gill alone seems to understand DeLillo's buried themes. Whether he's pondering hollowing out a cavern in a mountain to hold his art (a rather obvious metaphor for his own later state), or simply speculating on the identity of a remembered face, Gill poignantly illuminates the doubt that permeates the play. After all, perhaps Alex really has disintegrated within his skull (Gill's final moments hint that may be the case). Perhaps the family has hastened his death - but then again perhaps they haven't (questions of human efficacy haunt DeLillo). Perhaps Alex's art-filled cavern would mean immortality - but perhaps it would mean absurdity. And perhaps the Way Theatre production misses this piercing edge of ambiguity, but there's no doubt they should be applauded for staging Don DeLillo's latest.