Category: personal

Personal: a very big adventure

It’s almost the end of January, and it’s time for something of a personal post, mainly because it’s cold in the house right now and I’m having a hard time getting started this morning, but also because I feel like I should mention this somewhere other than Tumblr.

I’m about to go on a trip. A really big trip. A sixteen-leg trip taking 50 days and involving nine countries and six airlines, if all goes according to plan. Most of that is for work, but some of it is me taking advantage of regional airfares while working, and nine days of it are about visiting Patty in India, who will be there now for longer than we originally expected.

Despite having always been surrounded by travelers, the type of people who get itchy to leave on adventures, I’m not really much of one myself. Sure, I like going to B&Bs with Patty, and I like seeing new places when traveling farther afield; and over the last couple of years I’ve sort of even fallen in love with the sanctity of airport time — whatever you want from me, I can’t give it to you while I’m dealing with luggage or customs, and I am so grateful for that.

But I’m not a traveler, by nature. Being away from home stresses me out, and I’m a creature who tends to want familiar comforts: my bed, my cats, the awesome burrito place across the street and the fabulous bar down the street. When a trip is winding down, I am always more than ready to be home, and nothing makes me feel like myself so much as New York, even if I sometimes wish I could be an LA person (I also sometimes wish I could be a dog person, but I’m just not).

At any rate, today I got my visa approval for Vietnam. On Wednesday, I go to put in my visa application for India. Then I need to make an appointment to get a lot of immunizations. Meanwhile, I have plane changes in Toronto, London, Warsaw and Bangkok. I’m hoping to see Berlin while I’m in Zurich and Kuala Lumpur while I’m in Hanoi, and actually get to Bangkok for a weekend so I’m not just like “Oh hey, I’m in an airport in Thailand.”

The whole thing is complicated, scary, and really, really unimaginable. I’m out of my depth, my celiac disease complicates everything, and my mother thinks I should bring a suitcase full of tinned tuna with me (that would be no).

What I’m counting on, oddly, about this trip, is that it will involve so much constant change that I won’t actually feel jet-lagged or behind. Instead, I’ll exist in my own self-regulating time zone and somehow manage to show up where people tell me, when people tell me, with a bit of charm and a relatively functioning brain, because I have to and because I have a whole life back here to be running while this is going on — I’m not kidding when I say 2012 is looking to be a very nice year for me in terms of words like projects and contracts.

I don’t leave for a few weeks yet, and I have a trip to Los Angeles in the middle of that. But as my friend and collaborator Kali has already noted in email, it’s probably time to change the salutation from “How are you?” to “Where are you?” and possibly even to “When are you?”

Hopefully, on most occasions, I’ll actually know.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: Ambition and the desire to disappear

Since I had a friend in town this weekend (and that was sort of chaotic, since he wasn’t staying with me and I got sucked into bad work stuff and the amount of time we got to hang out outside of shows we went to see was super minimal), I wound up seeing How to Succeed… again. Yes, that’s an excuse. I would have done it anyway. But that’s also not the point.

The point is that since the show remains slight and still drags in the middle and all the other things I tend to think are wrong with it structurally, I had to stretch a little to find something to hold my attention for the two and a half hours in question (Darren Criss: cute, but not that cute).

On the surface How to Succeed… is a show about ambition: Finch wants to climb the corporate ladder; Rosemary wants to escape the life of a secretary and marry a rich executive; Heddy wants to be a star at whatever she does. Even Bud Frump wants to be important, and the head of the mail room is proud of his promotion to shipping.

There’s just one problem. How to Succeed… might actually be a show about people who want to disappear: If Finch has a self, not only does the audience arguably never see it, but Finch probably hasn’t seen it in a long, long time either; Rosemary fantasizes about having the perfect man who will look right through her as she wears the “wifely uniform”; Heddy drinks and plays the bimbo with little goal-oriented intent, while Bud Frump’s ambition doesn’t involve distinguishing himself in the slightest; meanwhile, the head of the mail room’s entire strategy for success is never being noticed. Through a certain lens, what all these people are striving for seems to be an absence.

Of course, all of this is creepiest with Finch, who generally gets played as innocent and lucky, or charmingly (and mostly, but not entirely, non-maliciously) conniving. But if I really start thinking about Finch, I frankly start getting entirely creeped out.

I noticed it a little bit the first time I saw the show, in that I just couldn’t get a handle on what was going on with Finch’s sexuality. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in Rosemary, only realizing he’s in love with her to avoid another woman’s advances. Then he installs her as his secretary so that they can’t have a personal relationship until they marry, when, based on the songs Rosemary sings, they stop interacting again except for the occasional entertaining the neighbors and enough obligatory sex to produce a child. But all of that nonsense is in keeping with the public face of the period, especially in satire, and I sort of blew it off as another oddity of an odd show.

But then I saw it again. And Criss’s performance was a lot weirder and a little darker.

So I started asking myself, who is Finch when he’s at home? What does he do? Does he have hobbies? Friends? Does he ever pop into the local bar? What does he fantasize about? Is he crazily breaking into libraries to research the Old Ivy fight song in the middle of the night? Or is he sitting on his couch, staring at a blank wall and being empty until it’s time to go into work and find the next executive to push off a metaphorical cliff?

Between that thought process (and I do think Finch sits in his miserable little apartment and stares blankly at a wall practicing his self-erasure) and a performance that seemed to deliver a Finch who is terrified of female sexuality and only marginally more comfortable with male sexuality yet seemingly equally uninterested in it, I was suddenly a lot more engaged with this odder than I had previously realized show.

By the time Finch sang, “I Believe in You,” the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up, because whenever I tried to picture what Finch was seeing in that mirror, the only thing I was sure of was that it wasn’t his own face. I wondered if the moment was for him any different than the moment when the show starts and he’s peering in at the world he wants to conquer through window glass. Whoever and wherever Finch is, there doesn’t seem to be any there, there. Ever. And the creepiest part is that he seems to be aware of this only about half the time.

How to Succeed… remains an uneven show burdened with workplace culture history that’s too recent for us to really distance ourselves from no matter who is in it. But I don’t regret braving it more than once now, if only because my restless brain was apparently impelled to turn it into a horror narrative.

Certainly, I’ll now be chewing over the idea that ambition is an act of wishing to disappear rather than wishing to be seen for a long time to come.

Glee: The ferryman always takes a toll

“These next six [episodes] are designed to be fun, fun, fun. They’re big, glossy, star-studded. Then the last six will be very heartbreaking.” – Ryan Murphy in Entertainment Weekly

I was in the airport when fandom found this and got understandably anxious. Me? I just got excited. Like, tapping my feet, fidgeting, get-me-off-this-plane, I have stuff to write, excited. Not because I like tragedy, but because I like stories, conclusions, and victories that are earned. And it occurred to me, reading Murphy’s rather Persephonean remark and thinking about some of the ongoing discussion of “Yes/No,” that I think we have to expect that no one gets out of William McKinley High School without paying a price. No one gets to have everything they want, especially before this story is over, and it’s probably time to start getting ready to pay.

Sadly, I think, the character many of us would like to be most immune to this debt, is the one most susceptible to it to it: Kurt Hummel, who has the show’s closest relationship with death, and often serves as its mediator.

Kurt still opens the drawers of an old dresser to catch his dead mother’s scent; he worked to call his father back from the dead (and not with the help of any god, it should be noted in the face of Kurt’s atheism, which in no way diminishes the otherworldly themes with which he is surrounded). He’s the boy who got death threats, who arranged Sue’s sister’s funeral, who was able to walk in and back out of the faerie kingdom of Dalton, and the one who has a dead animal trophy motif in his wardrobe from fox tails to hippo heads.

He is also the boy who struggled the most with the idea of sexuality and losing his virginity and then took the most ownership of it (big death, little death, spiritual union, Kurt Hummel has got this death and associated metaphors thing covered). I’ve written about it before: Kurt is a magician and a creature who lives between many worlds, including, but not limited to, two schools, a blended family, his gender presentation.

But in many ways, it’s not that Kurt’s a Persephone, cycling in and out of the realms of Hell, not now that his bullying isn’t so terribly plot central and dangerous. Rather, it’s that he’s an Orpheus who didn’t look back when he left Dalton (remember that when Blaine sang “Somewhere Only We Know”, they had their “I’m never letting you go” moment, but then Blaine looked back while Kurt, surrounded by his friends, did not), and so got to keep his Eurydice.

For now.

If we argue that William McKinley High School is Hell, or a realm of it — and I think that’s a pretty easy argument to make, not just because it’s awful, but because of the heightened reality of Glee, and because of the themes of Ryan Murphy’s work (all his stuff is arguably set in different realms of Hell, sometimes explicitly so) — we sort of also have to assume that Death may be the least inclined to grant favors of escape to his most cherished servants.

Because Death’s been kind to them in a way, and wouldn’t want to see them go. More than anyone, Death’s given Kurt a place, and a very specific function in the world of Glee in which his otherness is less a role and more a symptom of this unique purpose. For that matter, Death gave Kurt Blaine when Pavoratti died; as such, Death might be inclined to have some demands, if Kurt is going to leave.

This suggests to me that if Kurt gets into NYADA and chooses to go (and I believe, deeply, that Kurt will get into NYADA, but that he may possibly choose not to go, sacrificing that dream for Blaine or his father), either he will then break up with Blaine or his father will die. That’s the price to cross the river (Manhattan is, after all, an island): NYADA, romantic life, or family; Kurt can only choose two.

Rachel will also have a price to pay on her graduation journey, but I suspect (and let’s be frank, this is what I would do if I were writing the show) it may be a less obvious, but not less significant, toll. If Rachel gets into NYADA and goes (and I can’t see a way towards a moment where she chooses not to), I believe she will also, as recompense, agree to marry Finn, and take him to a New York where he will not be happy.

Many fans, of course, will yell and scream at the end of season 3 if and when this happens, especially if Kurt and Blaine have broken up (which I suspect they will), but, again, to quote the same Leonard Cohen line twice in a week, love is not a victory march.

What we’ll be seeing won’t be Rachel getting a happy ending and the gay boys getting screwed by network TV homophobia. I promise you. Because Glee loves mirrors. For a pair of friends who are getting out of Lima to both pay the debt to do so with their hearts, in ways that seem to be polar opposites of each other, is the type of elegance that Glee does well, and makes the show worth watching despite all the other places in which it gets lost while trying to play its long game.

So I suspect Rachel will get to New York without having really escaped; and Kurt will arrive as less than what he has always been meant to be by denying his nature — that is, that he is a boy from Lima, and his heart is tied to that place and to Blaine, no matter how far he goes and no matter how true his dreams become. Season 4, in turn, will then be about renegotiating the prices of their escapes.

These inevitable tolls to cross out of WMHS and Lima aren’t limited, of course, to Kurt and Rachel. The other seniors will surely have things dear to them taken too. Quinn, for example, probably won’t get out of Lima, but in exchange, will get to retain a connection to Beth. Santana will likely have a choice that involves Brittany, her family, and possibly a Lima escape. Mercedes, I suspect, may be dancing back and forth between Shane and Sam for the rest of the season, simply because the show hasn’t really given her another dilemma. Finn’s going to have to choose being a big fish in a small pond (and taking over Burt’s garage) or getting over his conception of being a man (Finn’s not leadership material, and you don’t have to be a leader to be a man, but that’s going to be hard leap for him to make).

None of these choices will be easy to make for any of the characters; all of them will hurt, and many of them will be the wrong ones.

My gut tells me Kurt will get into NYADA around episode 3.17 and then break up with Blaine in the second to last episode, although in that final episode they’ll probably have a small moment where there’s a kiss goodbye or some other gutting sign of hope (Note to the powers that be: all I want for early Christmas is Kurt and Blaine singing Mika’s “Happy Ending” to each other as everything falls apart because they are still in love).

Rachel, meanwhile, will commit to going to New York, whether or not she gets into NYADA and will bring an uncertain, plan-free Finn with her. The New York half of season four will likely feature Finn not being able to hack it and going back to Lima for a while (although not necessarily permanently); and Kurt and Blaine dating around miserably (Kurt has dinner with a myriad of boys and can’t stomach more, while Blaine’s probably going to be very busy in the back seat of cars) before he and Blaine get back together towards the end of that season.

It’s hard, of course, to want stuff like this to happen to characters and relationships we love, that keep us, frankly, company in the dark. Kurt’s been through enough, we say. But they have such great chemistry, we remind. We’ve been through so much watching these people, don’t they deserve happily ever after?

Don’t we?

But narrative, of course, thrives on conflict. And fandom and general audiences both thrive on longing. When will they kiss? Doesn’t he realize he still loves him? These are the questions we ask. These are the questions we will be asking.

Because loving fiction that is out of our hands is one of the realms of Hell too. It is a place of shades and ghosts that we can almost, but not quite, touch, and who we strive to make tangible through our desire and our grief.

But the ferryman always takes a toll, and he’ll take it at the end of this season of Glee not just from Kurt and Rachel and Finn and all the other WMHS high school seniors, but from us. That’s the price for all the love and yearning these stories give us.

The secret, of course, is that it feels good to pay that price, and to drink from the river, and forget.

New York Diaries 1609 to 2009: I was once called something else

Before I was myself on the Internet or really knew that what I wanted to be doing was writing about and making pop-culture, I named myself after a character — a surly, teen hermaphrodite with green eyes in a world where green is the color of death — from Elizabeth Hand’s Aestival Tide, and spent a lot of time documenting my life on the Internet.

It was a pressure valve more than anything else when I chose that name in 1992, but it was also an early experiment for me with ideas about branding and fame and just not being able to shut the hell up. I didn’t know how to see myself or other people at that age without telling a story, and, in truth, in many ways, I still don’t. Eventually, though, I felt neither that young, nor that self-revelatory, starting going by my real initials online instead, and became both less and more my public self.

But I was still Reive, barely, on September 11, 2001. And I wrote about it, some of it, anyway, because that’s what there was to do. Every time we’d show up at the muster sites with supplies, they were the wrong ones. I remember, standing on a corner, carrying a couple of cases of bottled water and talking business with some dominatrixes while they walked their dogs. The Twin Towers were burning, but dogs still needed walking.

A few years ago, I got a note from an online friend who also uses the name Reive as part of his online identity. An editor had contacted him, thinking he was me, to get permission to publish one of my old LiveJournal entries about that period. Eventually, the editor and I were put in touch, I signed something or other, and that was that.

Well, apparently, the book is out! I just received my copy of New York Diaries 1609 to 2009 edited by Teresa Carpenter for Modern Library, and I’m in it — absurdly, alongside people like Noel Coward and Keith Haring and Kurt Weil — with the last thing I’ll ever publish as a person I never was.

It wasn’t a good time in my life, that year. And I tend to think people mostly have unpleasant memories of who I was when I was Reive. I’m more than a little ashamed of her — of me — and of what you might think of me, or think you know about me, if you read the entry, so littered with nicknames for people, like Sir.

But it hardly matters, all the people you’ve been, when you live and write about a place like New York, full of terrible creatures and brilliant illusions. Apparently, some girl who wasn’t quite a girl and named herself Reive was once one of them. Mostly, I try to be okay with that.

From Stephen King to The Last Seduction: uncomfortable things about pop-culture, gender and desire

Since I first started saying words on the Internet, over 20 years ago (so weird), one of the things I’ve heard over and over again is some version of women write about relationships, but men write about ideas. It made me angry then, and it still makes me angry now, even if I get that it’s kind of absurd. But, as I’ve written more and more about pop-culture, what I really find myself wondering the most often is, what the hell’s the difference?

Because stories are about the relationships people have: to each other, to power, to technology; to the state, to money, to hope, to loss; to their children, their parents, to a spouse; to neighbors, to jobs; to loneliness; and, of course, to the stories themselves.

Since the evening I met one of my more recent friends, I’ve been sort of vaguely promising to write her a blog entry about something we both know and talk about a lot: that both being a fan and being someone who writes about pop-culture can be complete a minefields for girls, whether they are 16 or 46.

As women, she and I often have a lot to prove. Namely, that our lives aren’t some big-word version of drooling over Tiger Beat; that we’re not starfuckers; and that our affection for our fannish interests is complex and mature, as if there is some terrible sin in being a twelve-year-old about some things at some times.

The boys we know in the many arms of this business don’t tend to face those particular conundrums and are not expected to self-monitor in the same way, and so there’s a game we play, early and often, called “What would people think of so-and-so if he were a girl?”

As a rule, we don’t answer those questions once we pose them. It’s too unpleasant. And besides, we both already know.

But, yet, we also know that Stephen King once told us that the best friends we’ll ever have are the ones we had when were were twelve. He’s not wrong, I don’t think; there was an absolute shimmering perfection to the relationship I had with my best friend at that age. So isn’t there some good in being a certain sort of giddy?

Isn’t it sort of absurd that in writing about pop-culture, which is something structured through the lens of commercialized teen desire even when it is not marketed to or as about teens, that one of the biggest insults and risks to the women who write about these sorts of topics with any ambition is that of being dismissed as a girl-child of that particular age?

Sadly, even as I am writing about this topic here, I am not sure I truly know how to do so comprehensively. It feels too nervous-making, too forbidden. As if there is some terrible fate in confessing that yes, I am a woman who writes about relationships, because that is what pop-culture is: stories, their construction, and how we desire entrance into them, whether it’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the train to Hogwarts, a fight to the death amongst children, or a daydream about what it’s like to be a a celebrity or, at least, be seen by one.

They’re all common enough thoughts, but to say them aloud forces acknowledgements that are largely uncomfortable all the way around. When we write about pop-culture we expose desire, wear at privacy, and betray loneliness, in ourselves and others. It’s like when Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction says “a woman loses 50 percent of her authority when people find out who she’s sleeping with.”

When you’re a woman who writes about pop-culture, about what turns your emotional, intellectual and aesthetic crank, you’re revealing a lot about who you are, what you like, and what you don’t, necessarily, have. The assumptions, because there are always assumptions (as vicious, vicious Wendy Kroy makes clear) tend to flow from there.

Being a woman in the world of entertainment and pop-culture media — or just in the world of fans who have loud opinions and big readerships — can all too easily mean that anything you say positions you as a complainer or a whore, too affectionate and too greedy. It is always different for girls here. When we love things, it is suspect; in the construction of stories the female magician is a witch (or a bitch), while the male one is Chosen; he may pay a price for those rewards, and a steep one, but at least there is an exchange. I mean, you have read Dune, haven’t you? Or Harry Potter?

But at the end of the day, whether it’s too personally revelatory, too suspect, too much about relationship and desire, or too bound up with how people interpret my body, my face and my motives, these are the stories I want to be telling: about how we love fiction, about how we love things we choose to see as truth, and about how we love them both in public and in private — not just through desire, sexuality and fondness, but also through pattern recognition, remembrance, curiosity and, the greatest gift of all storytellers, lies.

Gallifrey One: Panel news and other goodies

I’ve spent this dreary Friday doing a large number of logistics for a large number of things, and in a moment I’m going to go out and brave the grocery store. Otherwise, it’s more enchiladas from the amazing, yet odd, Mexican/Teriyaki place across the street (welcome to my bachelor lifestyle — Patty’s been in India since January 5, so I’m on my own for a few months). Anyway, the place that makes the enchiladas of my dreams also blasts Abba, often. It’s pretty awesome.

Also awesome is that, on the logistical front, I can now report that I’ll be doing two panels at Gallifrey One in Los Angeles over President’s Day Weekend: I Ship Everybody With Everyone Else in Every Fandom Ever @ 10:30pm on Friday, February 17 and Sarah Jane is My Doctor @ 2:30pm on Sunday, February 19th. I encourage you to bring your adult beverages to the Friday panel, and I am hoping I will be in the clear to announce something I have coming out that’s particularly about Sarah Jane by the (likely to be emotional) Sunday panel.

Also, in the spirit of that first panel, take note that if you’re a Glee fan who will be at Gally, make sure to find me. I may have slightly appalling trinkets for you.

See you in LA! In a while. I’ve got a ton of other crap to do first.

Details: a first fandom, a lost world, & discovering that fame has an architecture

In the 1980s, before it was what it is now, Details magazine was a style bible for New York’s downtown party scene, and it covered the social life of night clubs in dozens and dozens of pages of gossip columns about people with funny names most people had never heard of.

My mother read it religiously, sending my father out to check the newsstands for it regularly. We lived uptown, but my parents had owned an art gallery once and my mother had worn Norma Kamali before anyone had ever heard of her. And so, instead of Vogue, this was what was in our house, and as my mother read it, so did I.

I loved it. I loved its gorgeous over-saturated black and white photos, and the hint of danger and fantasia there was in scurrilous stories about people with names like Kenny Kenny and James St. James and Magenta. I was ten-, twelve-, fourteen-years-old, and I wanted to be a club kid too.

I wasn’t, not really, not ever, but it was New York in the 80s and people my age often got to do things it never should have been reasonable for us to do. I went to Area, to MARS, to the Limelight and Tunnel, the Palladium before it was an NYU dorm; I remember squirming out of the grasp of some 25-year-old med student in the bathrooms at MARS late one night when I was 13; he’d grabbed my wrist and tried to get me to touch his dick, and I ran back out into the crowd and then danced until dawn.

But mostly… mostly I just read Details in my parents’ living room, my mother insisting I just liked it for the clothes, and my father approving because it was so beautifully art directed.

After my junior year in high school, I decided I didn’t want to be in school anymore. Freshman year had been spent at the private school that had dwindled down to a class of eight, and I’d been at Stuyvesant for the following two years.

A selective, hard-to-get into public school focused on science education, Stuy had an intense party culture that overlapped with the world of Details more than any of our parents would have liked. But I was bored, felt at sea in the circle of friends I had managed to develop, and had humiliated myself epically over a boy, and I wanted out.

So I applied to an internship program through another high school. Once accepted, it meant I would work full time and write essays about the experience and then graduate, on-time, with my Stuyvesant class, without having to deal with actually being in school. It seemed perfect.

And so, I set out to become who I had always wanted to be, alternately laying on my living room floor and dancing (when I could find an excuse to be out) alone in clubs, and I called up Details magazine, and said, “I want to work for you.”

Somehow, I secured an interview. I wore this gorgeous suit I had — brown, high-waisted sailor pants with a cropped, black, asymmetrical jacket with bronze buttons. I put a flower in my lapel and geta on my feet and decided I was Oscar Wilde as I took myself off to that interview. I was 16.

And it went well! It really did. It was everything I’d ever wanted, although, to appease my parents and my internship coordinator, I also talked to the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, for which I did a ton of volunteer work in high school and college (that, by the way, is its own set of amazing and bizarre stories), as a backup plan.

And then I heard nothing.

Nothing and nothing and nothing.

And my parents said, “Well, you know, they are all gay boys over there, they probably don’t like you because you are a girl.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not like that. Same tribe. I wore the best outfit.”

Late the next night our phone rang, and I, against house rules (we screened all our calls because of the harassment and prank phone calls I would receive from peers), answered it. It was the man I had interviewed with.

Details was being sold to Conde Nast. I couldn’t tell anyone. It wasn’t public yet. He thought they all might be fired any day. He certainly couldn’t bring me into the middle of that.

And then we talked. For thirty minutes, me on the plastic Garfield phone my parents had bought me for my 13th birthday, sitting on the floor of my room in the dark, as this stranger told me to be beautiful and fabulous and fierce and just as sharp as I clearly was, and to remember that in the homes outcasts make for themselves it’s normal to still feel like an outcast.

Details announced its sale a few days later, and continued as what it had been, briefly. Eventually it was moved to Conde Nast’s Fairchild unit and publication was ceased, before it was relaunched as what it is today: a men’s magazine that anticipated the metrosexual craze and created itself by gutting its original content that was queer in both senses of the word and also ridiculously provincial to this one small corner of my beautiful New York.

I wound up working for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation for a woman who is younger than I am now, who once sent out a letter to 400 people that accidentally listed her title as “Director of Pubic Relations” (lesson: why spellcheck is not enough). She took me under her wing and showed and told me things about adult life she probably shouldn’t have, and, while grateful, in retrospect I am also embarrassed for us both.

Snippets of what Details once was can be found with some effort on the Internet. WFMU managed to preserve this random sample album of behind-the-scenes celebrity wackiness. The stunning photography of its Hidden Identities series also, thankfully, still exists. And, if you search hard enough, some of the old cover images and table of contents can also be found.

All in all, it was a lovely dream that it was probably for the best that I never achieved in any particularly concrete way. I got into quite enough trouble as a teenager in New York without ever being able to say I worked at Details. But in many ways, Details was my first fandom, my first keen media interest, the first time I sat down and said, “Fame is this constructed thing, how is it made? and what is it about beyond the things it claims to be about?”

From time to time, that magazine and the world it covered pops back to mind for me: like when the Michael Alig murder case happened (a story later made into the film Party Animal) or when the Limelight got turned into a high-end mall. I hate that it is a lost world, a queer one, that was erased by mainstream culture, but I also recognize that it met its end in poetic fashion, as narrative in the mists, and that’s satisfying, not only to who I am today, but to who I was at 16 sitting in the dark of my bedroom, listening to a journalist who, scared about his job, for thirty minutes treated some kid he didn’t know as if she was his friend.

This bit of history no one really cares about anymore brought to you by members of one of my current fandoms cooing over an article in Details as it is today.

But, oh, the things it once was.

Wrapping up 2011: Hugo, pop culture and kind magics

Greetings from scenic Ohio, where I’m spending the week between Christmas and New Year’s with my partner’s family.

While a yearly trip at this point, it’s not a place I’ve gotten used to. I’m an only child who has never needed to rely on other people to get where I’m going, at least at home in New York. But here in Ohio, we have to cadge rides from her parents, and I have to learn about the fine art of family teasing: Patty has a brother, and there’s a mode to the household humor that I often don’t get and can sometimes rub my desperate need for approval very much the wrong way.

But this is a week each year that I need in its quiet and during which I tend to catch up on random pop culture I might not otherwise seek out. This year, that’s included the second Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film, a Jeff Dunham comedy performance in an arena (and wow, does that need a post of its own; I have never so felt the truth of New York City as another country so uncomfortably), and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

It’s Hugo, of course, that really seems like the best place to wind up this blog for the year, because Hugo is about what this blog is about — the love and loss of stories, the nature of fame, and the tonality of magic. I loved it, desperately, and, towards the end of the film, when a character describes their first experience of cinema as “the kindest magic I’d ever seen,” it seemed like a balm to some of the unpleasantries of this inside/outside life that I, and many of my friends who also write about pop culture, inevitably lead.

Loving media and stories can be unkind. It is an act that does, in fact, often break our hearts: whether from within the narrative or outside of it. There’s a reason that “life ruiner” seems to be one of the most popular Tumblr tags for cute celebrity boys of the moment, no matter how much it’s meant as a joke. We measure, not just our lives in stories, but also our smiles, our bodies, and our hearts. And we measure these things not just against tales we love, but the people who create them; and so what is meant to make us feel more, can so often make us feel less.

At least, that’s what true for me and many of my friends, and none of us are snowflakes that special.

So we’ll see if I find the time to catch up with writing about some of my misadventures out here in a state that Patty insists is on the East Coast and I insist can’t be because it’s not on the coast or producing a piece on the horrors of being a girl and liking stuff that I’ve been promising my friend Rae since the night we met.

In the mean time, if you have any love of the sentimentality I can never seem to avoid when talking about pop culture, do yourself a favor and see Hugo. But be sure to follow it up with the 2000 film, Shadow of the Vampire, which is its own strange tribute to the silent era and really represents us all when the vampire grasps at the light from a projector that displays his long-forgotten the sun.

Because who here hasn’t touched the screen or held hand to heart in response to a story or a movie or a moment or a smile that moves us? We are all, I think, greedy and waiting in the dark, even when the kindest magic is also sometimes made of sorrow.

As ever, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Happy New Year.

Sing Out, Raise Hope: unabashed swooning over Whiffenpoofs ahead

Last night Patty and I went to the “Sing Out, Raise Hope” benefit for The Trevor Project and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which featured the Yale Whiffenpoofs (and yeah, yeah, Darren Criss, we’ll get to that later) and a capella groups from Harvard and Princeton.

It was a bit of a strange experience because of how many different constituencies were present with their own inside jokes and knowledge. The Yale people were doing their Yale thing. The fandom people were doing their fandom thing. Every performer had to explain something to the audience that part of the audience already knew very, very well, while the rest of the audience remained completely boggled even after an explanation. And while that was sort of awkward, it also made the whole thing sort of chill and casual and feeling very family for something in a big venue.

That said, it’s hard provide a single hook review of a set of things that didn’t always fit together well. And then there’s the fact that the Whiffenpoofs are just this epic step above the very pleasant but nothing to write home about groups from Princeton (the Nassoons) and Harvard (the Krokodillos), and I pretty much felt bad for everyone who had to share the stage with them over the course of the event.

By their second song of the night, all I wanted for rest of the evening was to bask in the pure awesome that was John Yi. He and his fabulous hair need to actually be “On Broadway” immediately. Of course, since the Whiffenpoofs website informs us that he’s also an economics major, one imagines he’ll either be saving the world or destroying it at any moment instead. Alas.

Also, alas, there were a lot of other things on the evening’s program, including Allison Williams, who had the deeply unenviable task of being the only female performer on the stage. She, and the jazz trio she did most of her songs with, were quite good and I’d love to hear them in a more intimate environment, but the arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” she did with the Whiffenpoofs really put me off, and I had trouble getting back on board. Somehow, it managed to strip the bite from the song, which, I’ll confess, I’ve always preferred as a masculine narrative and the occasion seemed an odd one to switch that up at.

When Darren Criss joined the show after intermission, it was, expectedly to “Teenage Dream.” Now, here’s a thing — I love what Glee did with the song (that arrangement, and the backing vocals, by the way, are from the Tufts Beelzebubs); I love what Darren Criss does with the song at his solo shows (I find it gutting, and love that it plays on multiple levels); and I have now fallen hard the Whiffenpoofs. But trying to smush all those things together live with an awkward backing track and not exactly anything resembling a full rehearsal? Terrible, terrible plan, and the less said the better.

That said, Criss’s voice sounded stronger than it has recently and we got to hear a few things live (like “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as a comedy duet with surprise guest Brad Ellis) that I’m sure none of us in the audience expected. The performance he did with his brother (Chuck Criss of Freelance Whales) of Bob Dylan’s “New Morning” was gorgeous and I liked it better than the recording (which, btw, is on Chimes of Freedom, a Dylan tribute album to benefit Amnesty International).

We also got treated to Criss’s between song banter, which rambled more than usual and felt weird in a space where it was pretty much certain large chunks of the audience were not predisposed to be charmed by it. Also, seriously? The only other performer I’ve ever seen forget lyrics while reading them off a piece of paper or screen right in front of him? Nick Cave. Talk about comparisons I never thought I would make. On the other hand, who can blame the guy? Apparently he’d just gotten off a plane and certainly sleeps even less than I do.

Anyway, fun thing. Good causes. Videos of the whole affair are all over Tumblr and YouTube for the curious (if anyone got the Whiffenpoofs doing “Midnight Train to Georgia,” please let me know). Me? Totally making a point to see more Whiffenpoofs gigs.