Life, Work, the Toilet.

For some reason, every year I believe the story I tell myself in December, the month when everything conspires to keep one from getting anything done, that if I just get through it, January is next, and it’ll be quiet and wide open and productive. But of course January is never wide open; it’s full of all the things one couldn’t get to in December. By which I mean all the things that are not making art and that keep artists from making art.

Last week, I kind of felt like I was getting through the list—re-orienting myself in my book (the scale of it is constantly daunting to me, and after a few days, let alone a month, away from it, it can take days for me to figure out what’s going on), applying for two residencies later in the year, getting the Y’all Xmas record online for streaming (every December I’m reminded that people want it and it’s out of print and unavailable, so this year I vowed to take care of it in January), planning a 10-day Midwest research trip for the spring—and then on Thursday our shower faucet broke, and what was a drip became a steady stream. Whatever sense of equilibrium I thought I had came crashing down, taking my disposition with it.

The maintenance department in our co-op is sometimes helpful, sometimes a clown show, sometimes a Kafkaesque nightmare; this time they wouldn’t touch it, so I watched a bunch of Youtube videos and decided I could fix the faucet myself. But then, with visions seeping into my head of being sued by every resident on the floors below us for flooding their apartments, I chickened out at the last minute. I called a plumber, and five days and a few hundred dollars later our shower works.

I keep saying that being able to write is as much or more an issue of focus and sustained concentration than a simple question of how one fills the 24 hours available in a day. But is it? I know some artists who can use the 20 minutes between a phone call and an errand productively. For me, it’s challenging to get anything done on a day when I have a dentist appointment in the morning and the rest of the day free. There are artists who are crazy driven, have boundless energy and never lose focus, work constantly and fast, and there are artists who are sluggish, tentative, roundabout, fearful. I have my moments in the former category (mostly in collaborative situations), but temperamentally I’m somewhere closer to the latter.

I tend to put everything in two columns: making art and not making art, and often resenting the whole latter category. But the not making art column doesn’t only include plumbing and such; it’s also full of things I want and need in my life: seeing friends, watching a movie with my husband, having my nephew for dinner, getting some exercise, sleeping, that sub-category of things one does to stay healthy physically, emotionally, spiritually.

It’s insanely difficult to discern the line between taking care of yourself and letting yourself off the hook (believe me, I know this). It’s taken years, but I have a glint of self-awareness about it now, and I find myself constantly interrogating my work ethic. Is this moment of just sitting here like a bump on a log a moment of fruitful daydreaming, a moment of opening up my mind to see the problem from a new angle or in a different light? Is this productive? Or am I just fucking lazy and afraid right now? Or do I need to get more exercise so I sleep better and have more energy in the morning?

This morning at 6, Chan flushed the toilet and it didn’t stop flushing. We have tankless toilets in our building. They flush hard and fast so they don’t seem to ever clog, and there’s no tank which is nice when you have a 20 sq. foot bathroom. And I hate toilet tanks. They’re gross. But when our toilet won’t stop flushing, it’s sending gallons of water per second down the sewer. The maintenance office doesn’t open until 8, so our toilet flushed continuously for almost two hours. Needless to say I haven’t done much this morning.

Is This Where We Are?

This piece caught my eye this morning, mostly because I couldn’t have had a more exactly opposite response to the film. But this take is still interesting to me because so many gay men seem to have felt the same way.

The setup—two beautiful, damaged urban gay men struggling to connect—and the tender, moving performances of Andrew Scott (who is always great) and Paul Mescal—made me inclined to forgive an often obvious, and sometimes outright maudlin story. But gradually my mind drifted far away from the characters to mostly trying to solve the puzzle of the plot. By about halfway through, I was just frustrated and irritable. Instead of contemplating the real problems I thought the story was about—how gay people are always on the outside of their families, the essential loneliness of being gay—I left the theater trying to figure out whether it was a dream, or the guy was schizophrenic, or was it a fable or a horror story, and what the hell was that blurry mass of flesh on the bed at the end? I enjoy the former; the latter makes me angry. It’s not that being tricked by a movie is necessarily a bad thing (“I see dead people” was fun), but not this time. If you stripped away all the gimmickry, there is a beautifully written and acted and powerfully moving story of two men yearning to be together despite everything in modern life that wants to prevent that from happening. It posited interesting questions about gay life, implicitly, and directly in the conversations between the two main characters. (I learned later that the film was made by guy who also did the HBO series Looking, which I loved partly because it dealt with similar questions.)

And then there’s Maestro—in the end I just really loved it, it was so beautiful so watch. Big and gorgeous, unabashedly stylized, cinematic. The way it was edited gave me exactly what I miss in so many contemporary films that look like they were edited by 3-year-olds with ADHD. I’m a sucker for a lingering camera, a whole scene in one long uncut static shot you can relax and let your eyes and mind really take in, slowly, every inch of it. And the tracking shots, especially the one near the end, of Bernstein conducting and the camera moves around him. The virtuosity of his performance and of really everything—just rapturous. It seemed to me that everyone involved in this film was working at the highest level of excellence, and that in and of itself is moving.

But there’s something strange at the heart of it. It’s billed as a biopic, but it’s not. It’s a story of a very unconventional marriage, Bernstein’s wife Felicia is the protagonist, and Bernstein’s inner life is kept hidden, except in some scenes where Felicia shares her take on it. I don’t think this is necessarily unintentional. “Leonard Bernstein” is a performance, his life had the quality of myth, unsurprisingly, because it was constructed, by him, by the media, by his admirers and fans. 

Which gets me to what’s on my mind. That idea of such a constructed performance is often a story about celebrity, but it’s also, and more salient here, a story about queer people, a story about the closet. Every “self” is an act of performing and concealing, but the stakes are usually higher and more explicit for queer people. Bernstein was famously “out,” in that he didn’t hide his attraction to men and his affairs. But the public at that time, and in many ways still, didn’t know what to do with a gay man so unless you were in that circle you wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t like “out gay conductor, Leonard Bernstein” in the New York Times.

Bradley Cooper’s performance, intentionally or not, had the feel of something meta, a performance of a performance—interestingly, not unlike Cate Blanchett’s in Tár—which was exactly right for Bernstein, but without seeing its cracks, and we never do, the film fell short of revealing anything very deep or complex about the man. (Felicia was the only truly complex character.) That in itself is moving, the portrayal of a personality so diminished by the closet; but just sad, not tragedy. Tragedy would be seeing what was lost.

So … there’s another film to be made there, and I look forward to it, when (if?) straight people ever come to terms with how they treat queer people, the lives they force us to live so that we don’t make them uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing I don’t have time to really puzzle out this morning: I feel like both these movies are movies about gay men but made for straight people. (All Of Us Strangers was made, I think, by a gay man. The actors, as far as I know, are straight and it’s loosely based on a story about a straight couple. I could be wrong about any of that, if those things even matter.) I think maybe that’s just where we are, in terms of how popular culture deals with queerness now, and that’s not at all a bad thing. Maybe?

Mom Liked Tommy Best.

My memory (which is probably about 60% reliable at this point) tells me that the cable network, TV Land, when it launched in the early 90s, ran the whole season of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and that’s where Jay and I studied their act and began to emulate it. Jay was Tommy, and I was Dick.

I don’t know if that was before or after we started getting compared to them in the press, but it shaped what we did in a huge way. They were the unrivaled masters of a particular mid-century genre of duo comedy, often but not always with singing: George and Gracie Allen, Sonny and Cher, etc., and Jay and I wanted to be everything they were: hilarious, musically legit, old-fashioned enough for your Southern grandmother, subversive enough for the East Village, sweet, political but unthreatening, always the most entertaining act on the bill. We studied how they made each other funny and we wanted to do that.

The Smothers Brothers were one of those culture-changing acts who most people don’t remember now or know who they were, which is sad, but you can see their influence in so much of what came after. Kind of like Y’all (or I like to think so anyway).

New York theatergoing 2023.

I know we see a lot of theater, but I’ve never actually counted before. We saw 20 plays this year! I don’t think that’s more than usual, in fact maybe less since it was a very busy year otherwise, too. There were lots of truly great nights at the theater, a lot of fine but unmemorable ones, and a handful of best forgotten. Pretty good record. If you want to catch the great stuff, you have to risk seeing some not so great. And a few this year were not just highlights of this year but plays and performances and productions for the ages.

My favorites were Eddie Izzard’s Great Expectations (she’s absolutely sui generis, riveting), the Lincoln Center revival of Camelot (everything I want in a musical, and the score sounded glorious), Fat Ham, Wicked (took our niece, she was thrilled, I’d never seen it before and I loved it), the revival of Sweeney Todd (wow), I Can Get It For You Wholesale at CSC, Stereophonic (one of the best plays I’ve ever seen, for real), Appropriate (so exciting to see an honest-to-god great new American play in its Broadway premiere—if there’s any way, don’t miss this one).

Here’s the whole list:

Great Expectations (Eddie Izzard)
Between Riverside and Crazy
Pictures from Home
The Wanderers
Cornelia Street (new musical)
Camelot
Fat Ham
Wicked
Sweeney Todd
Primary Trust
A Simulacrum
Some Like It Hot
Harry Potter and the rest of it whatever it’s called
I Can Get It For You Wholesale
The Refuge Plays
Stereophonic
Witness for the Prosecution (in London)
Spain
Appropriate
I Need That

Fellow Travelers.

So back to Fellow Travelers, now that it’s done — I thought it was kind of amazing.

At first I was really struck by the idea, and successful execution, of a suspenseful and sexy melodrama set in that repressive and often terrifying time and milieu, to use the repression itself to drive the plot and make it sexy. I didn’t expect it to become such a history lesson, which seemed to start around the third episode. I resisted it at first — the exposition of the politics and homophobia of the era felt clumsy and dry at times — but I got used to it, and soon it didn’t bother me at all. I think that to tell a story so dependent on the culture and politics of a specific moment in history, you either have to not explain it and accept a very small audience of those who have that knowledge, or, if you want a mass audience, you need to catch them up quickly.

People barely remember McCarthy and the HUAAC hearings now (shameful, for such a broadly consequential moment in recent history) let alone the “lavender scare,” and I realize more and more that even the most liberal accepting straight people I know usually have little knowledge of gay history and how very recently attitudes, and more importantly laws, persecuting queer people have relaxed, to the extent that they (and not just straight people but often younger queer people) will look at and judge gay life and same-sex relationships from 20, 30, 70 years ago through a lens of how things are now. True also, and maybe even more so, of the early 1980s AIDS years. Even a lot of gay men who were around then don’t remember the timeline very well. So, I was on board for the Wikipedia-ish nature of some of the dialogue.

What I think was new, at least in a TV series made for a general audience, is how this series set out to and mostly succeeded in dramatizing what “the closet” means, how holding such a deep secret, with the stakes of disclosure so severe, the terror of that, how the necessity of that secrecy corrodes everything around it, over generations, relationships, careers, families, including the integrity of our own souls. And how holding that secret together shaped our communities, shaped how we interacted, not only, but crucially, sexually.

Overall, I thought the series was ambitious (and unique in what it set out to do) and mostly lived up to its ambition, beautifully made, and very compelling start to finish. And, I don’t even know, there’s something about Matt Bomer, I’ve always found him almost uncomfortably sexy, like I feel like even if I just look at him too long I’ll do something wrong.

I asked for the book for Christmas. I wonder how it will compare.

Yes, but.

I wrote an application this week for a musical theater development grant. My musical “Jack” has been on the back burner for a few months while I’ve worked on my book, so I was happy to have this grant application draw me back into it. I need money and institutional support to keep it going, so I’m applying for grants. After the reading of the first draft last year, when I found it was way too long and wooly, I pulled it apart, left 2/3 of it on the table, and put the rest back together, streamlined to tell the story more directly.

I’ve fussed with this piece for so long that I’ve ended up with several orphan songs, songs I cut for one reason or another, usually because the character who sang it was cut. There are several. Some of them are very good. What should I do with them? If I were 25, I’d record them myself and release an album on cassette, get a few nice reviews, no sales, and move on. Or maybe try to get a few gigs where singer-songwriters sing,

I get asked fairly often, well, not often like every day, but with enough regularity that it’s a question I should be prepared for and I’m not. The answer is yes, I miss it a lot, but I always find myself saying yes and then babbling for a while about why it’s not likely to happen. There are lots of ways to plot one’s aging; one way is to see it as an accretion of things you miss.

I cut this song because, one, there are a lot of slow, melancholy songs. All I seem to want to write these days, or listen to, if I’m honest, are songs drenched in sad cello, and I have to keep reminding myself that I have a much higher than average appetite for wistful regret. But also I’m not sure what it adds. Maybe some later day I’ll figure out how it works and find a way to put it back in—maybe not. I sure love singing it, though.

HOW MUCH TRITENESS?

When people ask, “If you could be 18 (or 25, or 12, or whatever) again, would you?” — for me a panic-inducing question because it contains hundreds of questions within it — I always say, “God no!” But, buried for the last three years in the journals and letters and ephemera of my youth, I’ve kind of fallen in love with my 18-year-old self. The world was cracked wide open and I was ready for it, all of it. I was preoccupied, obsessed every moment, with clearing all the accumulated Midwest bullshit and getting on with my life as an artist. I had no patience.

One regret, I guess, that I have, though, related to the question of returning, is that back then, through college, my twenties, especially my late twenties when I started working with theater artists downtown, I had opportunities all around me — in that DIY scene, people were making theater everywhere, putting on their plays, devising performances, adapting, appropriating, experimenting, in their apartments, on the street, in tiny storefronts, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, everybody was up for something weird and new — but I didn’t initiate much of anything. I’m not saying any of it was easy to put together, but you could do it. If you had an idea there were venues, collaborators, an audience. You could try stuff. It’s not that I didn’t have ideas of my own, but they weren’t concrete theatrical ideas. They weren’t “I want to try this on a stage.” I depended on other artists to come in with the framework and then I could contribute. I had tons of ideas, but they were more theoretical than theatrical.

I’ve had, continue to have, a rich and varied career, a huge success by the standards I set for myself as a kid (luckily those standards did not include financial rewards), but something nags at me. I missed a world of opportunities. I could have pushed myself, demanded more of myself as an artist and thinker and writer to find ways to theatricalize the stuff in my head. Now that world of freedom and experimentation is gone. We all turned 30, the rent went up, we had to make more money or leave New York, every marginal, liminal, derelict space was bought up and developed decades ago. Downtown disappeared. If anything like it exists now, which I doubt, it’s not accessible to me.

So maybe I lied, maybe I do wish I could return, but not to my younger self, just to the circumstances of my young life.

Old Songs.

Nice list of great songs made over for a new time.

I was thinking along these lines when If I Loved You, from Carousel, came on during that awful gay rom-com, Red White & Royal Blue, in a cover by a singer called Vagabon (I’d never heard of her, is that because she’s obscure or because I’m old?). It was gorgeous and immediately moving. I downloaded the recording and enjoyed it, I love the airy arrangement, but I probably won’t play it much. Toward the end of the song, she alters the melody in a couple of places in ways that diminish it.

Strangely, I don’t have any trouble with Dolly Parton’s loose approach to the melody in her recording of Let It Be. I think I’d put McCartney is the same category as Richard Rodgers when it comes to just sing the tune as written, but something about the churchiness of Let It Be makes it feel okay.

Non-binary thinking.

I had a sudden insight regarding the label, “non-binary.” I’ve been irritated by it for years, didn’t really get how people were using it, I thought it was an unnecessary, and ugly, word. Some people identifying themselves as non-binary are outwardly, visibly, gender nonconforming in dress and speech, body, affect, what we used to call butch lesbians or nellie queens, bulldykes, sissies. Since to me “gay” and “lesbian” have always included a vast range of gender presentation, most of it nonconforming, I felt like “non-binary” was sort of implied. But others using the label appear conventionally male or female, sometimes even heterosexual. The latter phenomenon is still baffling to me.

I also resisted the word because it has an off-putting scientific, computery smell about it. Some people have the same issue with “homosexual” — they find it antique, clinical — but I like it. Meaning accumulates on words over time, and I think homosexual after a couple centuries has acquired a more complex resonance, warmer than it was when it first appeared in scientific literature. 

First I was gay, then for many years I preferred “queer.” I liked the broader brush of “queer,” the way it included trans and bisexual, men and women. I liked how blunt and confrontational it was. I liked the way it felt to steal the power of a slur. But recently queer has come to be used in a way I don’t, to be honest, really grasp, and yet feel specifically excluded, as a homosexual man, from whatever its umbrella is meant to cover, so I mostly avoid it. I strongly dislike being called “cis.” I think originally cis had a simple technical meaning — a person whose sense of their own gender matched their biological gender — which I guess more or less describes me now, but lately I see the word used to mean something more like a person whose sense of their gender and their presentation of it in the world conform to a stereotypical, essentialist view of gender. Which doesn’t describe me. (And “cis white male” now seems to mean no more than “culprit.” It’s lazy politics and lazy thinking. It’s also snobbery, looking down on people with conventional taste and aspirations, judging certain people to be not queer enough.  My first thought when I hear or see “cis white male” is “yeah fuck you.”)

So, as a person whose life and personality gender- and sexuality-wise are a very mixed bag and more often than not misaligned with society’s expectations of how male-bodied people act, look, and behave, I am non-binary. I don’t mean that in a “this is me!” way. I’m not coming out. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I don’t see any of these words in terms of some deep characteristic of identity. They’re descriptive words. What’s immutable is my sexual attraction to men. My identity as a gay man is cultural, it’s political. We come together and assert a common identity because it gives us political power. I see non-binary as a broader category, comprising anything that rejects or confounds or debunks or flies in the face of the idea that male and female are separate and opposite, literally “not binary,” and that describes me, so I’ll embrace it. I am gay, I am biologically male, and I am non-binary.

I know that most young people, with their endless appetite for taxonomy and moral certainty, will probably disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay. I won’t say they’re wrong. But I’m not a young person.

Math.

Doug Miller taught my Algebra II class at Greencastle High School. Everything rode on my grade in his class. Everything. I hated math, despised it, but I had to get an A in that class or I would lose my 4.0 GPA, lose a lot of scholarship money, and not be able to afford to go to college out of state. Getting out of Indiana, away from everyone who knew me, to come out, felt (and I think actually was) necessary.

Mr. Miller was the coach of something, I don't know what sport, I didn't pay attention to that stuff. All my high school math teachers were coaches, as well as my Civics teacher. As a rule, the coaches were terrible teachers, and all of these teachers were, except Mr. Miller, who was kind and patient and able to explain difficult abstract concepts in a way that made them clear and obvious. Which is to say, he knew how to teach.

If I didn’t get an A on the final exam, I would get a B in the class, it was that simple, and Mr. Miller made sure I was prepared.

Usually when I think of the many remarkable teachers I've had over the course of my life, they're art or music or theater, or literature or history teachers, because those are the subjects I’ve always loved and that I naturally excelled at in school. But I'll be forever grateful to Doug Miller for the difference he made in my life at a turning point by simply being excellent at his job.

Ignore the Sourpusses. Go See Camelot.

It made me sad to read a lot of sour reviews of Camelot this morning after being so thrilled and moved by the show only 2 days ago. I feel like what most critics have forgotten, or maybe never knew, is that what makes these great 20th century musicals great is that they are open-hearted, and they are only legible if you go in with your own heart open.

I also didn’t realize until recently (in a conversation about Bartlett Sher’s last revival of a golden age show, My Fair Lady, where I expressed a preference for Alan Jay Lerner over Sondheim) that there’s such a big contingent of Lerner haters out there. I had to smile reading the Times critic (who worships Sondheim) mock Lerner for triple rhymes —he called them “show-offy.” I’ve come to love (a late, qualified love) much of Sondheim, but one thing that still irritates me in his lyrics is all those gratuitous triple, quadruple, quintuple rhymes. 

Camelot is about the power of idealism, about faith in compassion and fairness and justice, in virtue, to transform humanity. This revival with its revised book makes that theme more explicit, but it’s always been about that. Ask Jackie Kennedy. It’s about a steadfast focus on the moral arc, on the future effect of our deeds, in the face of meanness and violence and greed for power in the present. I’m sure for professional critics it’s not easy to reopen the aperture, after a few dozen musicals about teen social anxiety, wide enough to take in such a sweeping theme.

These midcentury shows spoke to and about, not just aging vaudevillians or ambivalent urbanites, but all of us. That’s why they were so popular. We need to constantly re-visit them not just because they are great works of art but because they do something the form has mostly forgotten how to do: ask big social questions which boil down to one question: how do we live together in the world? Maybe critics now, in our contentious, defensive, solipsistic age, don’t think that question is answerable. That conclusion feels so, so bleak to me. “One brief shining moment” indeed.

Thread.

I was putting away some clean clothes in Chan’s closet early this week when I saw a white thread dangling from one of his sweaters on a shelf, and I pulled it. I kept pulling, it was very long, and it turned out to be elastic thread, so it stretched even longer. I realized that as I pulled the thread it was unwinding from a spool on an upper shelf in a small plastic set of drawers that Mom had kept her sewing thread in — one of the few objects of Mom’s, along with her sewing machine, that I claimed after her death. I don’t know what to do with it, but I can’t imagine not keeping it.

To get to the spool and rewind the elastic thread, I had to take the whole unit down, set it on the bed, and remove the duct tape my father had put across the drawers to keep them shut when I shipped it here from Indiana. There are dozens of little drawers in the unit holding at least a hundred spools of thread of all colors, each of them partly used. When I took the tape off, the drawer containing the elastic thread slid out, dumping the spool on the bed. Also in that drawer and also landing on the bed was a small spool of bright peacock-colored thread.

One of my first Christmases after moving to New York — not the very first one because I didn’t go home to Indiana that year — I did all my Christmas shopping at Pearl River. For Mom, I bought 2 or 3 yards of a heavy peacock-colored silk with a pattern of a bird embroidered in gold. She loved the fabric. She made a beautiful, very dressy vest out of it that she wore on special occasions for many years. The thread that popped out onto my bed in front of me was the exact color of the fabric, and I have no doubt she bought the thread to sew the vest.

I think Mom would find it silly that I’ve kept this drawer full of spools of thread. She was not sentimental about objects. (There were exceptions — also among the few things of hers I kept is a tiny Saint Teresa medal on a delicate silver chain that she’d had since she was a girl. Mom hated organized religion and she used to scoff at her Catholic school upbringing — but she kept the little Saint Teresa medal on a silver chain. I also have no fondness for the Catholic Church, but that medal she wore against her skin feels charged with her presence.)

Trudging On.

I’ve been rewriting my musical, Jack — the one that turned out to be 4-1/2 hours long when we read it last May at LaMama — for months now. The task was straightforward at first, but then became less and less so as I got into the weeds. I’ve cycled through 4 or 5 schemes, controlling ideas, each of which worked and then didn’t, but then early this year the thing sort of took some shape in my mind. Paradoxically, as I began to relax and loosen up about what the piece could be, it started to cohere. The amount of sheer labor, cutting huge swaths of it and then pushing it back together, has been huge, and even up until last week I felt unable to solve some big, big problems. And on and off all day every day I despaired of even being capable of the job.

But I've kind of figured it out.

Starting before Xmas when I found a musical theater grant I hadn’t known about, I was working to a deadline, the application due mid-March, if for no other reason than to keep myself focused and motivated through the hard patches. The amount of work I needed to accomplish for the application was daunting but I was hacking through it and feeling better and better. I had two weeks till the deadline, and if I really buckled down I could get it done.

An hour or so ago, I went to the grant-giving foundation’s website to verify something about one of the application questions, and there in big red letters on the home page it said, “UPDATE* Due to overwhelming response, the Submission window is now CLOSED.”

Now that I think about it, this application deadline was mainly important because it gave me a sense that someone was interested in the work, was waiting for it. Someone was actually going to read 30 pages of my libretto and listen to 5 songs and form an opinion about the quality and potential of this brand new musical. After the twists and turns of my life and career in the last 30 years, I find myself now unconnected to a community of artist peers. The kind of theater I made in the late 80s and 90s, the period of LIZZIE’s inception, was always a room full of people making a show. And the Y’all years were a constant treadmill of writing and performing and performing and show after show after show.

I have nothing to complain about. I have the luxury now to sit in a room alone and write what I want to write, and I’m confident of my talent. But back in the day, when I wrote something, more often than not someone, maybe me, was going to sing it or say it on a stage in front of an audience within a few weeks. Now I’m a lonely writer in a room putting stuff on paper and tape, hoping I might have the opportunity to hand it to someone who is always more likely than not to be uninterested.

I’m surprised to say this, but I don’t feel defeated today. The last few days I’ve felt more confident about the work than I have in months. I’ve solved some big problems in the structure and the story, and that’s put some wind in my sails despite knowing that my neat solutions require a ton of work: a new character, a new scene, a new song, and then all the rippling revisions that those big changes necessitate throughout the rest of it. Last week this news would probably have been a body blow.

Raquel Welch.

When I was around 10 or 11, the name Raquel Welch had a sort of talismanic power with other boys, just uttering the name would charge the air. I had no idea who she was, had seen no photos of her, no movies she was in, but eventually I realized it was her breasts the boys were concerned with, that her name meant breasts, or I guess meant the things boys think about when they think about breasts. Hm. I was beginning to think I wasn’t like the other boys, or, more precisely, not having those feelings boys had about breasts, I started to question whether or not I was a boy. Not that I wasn’t similarly preoccupied with body parts. Was the Six Million Dollar Man about anything but Lee Majors’s hairy chest? Not that I remember. But I had no inkling that my feelings and theirs were the same thing — theirs being a group activity and mine being somehow monstrous and shameful and definitely not to be shared with anyone.

Avatar.

We went to see Avatar last night. We got 'er done.

First, if you are reluctant, like I was, see it at Alamo Drafthouse. It’s painless. I’ve said it a million times but, if you want to watch a big Hollywood movie like Avatar, Alamo is the only place. You can have a beer or two, eat a very good burger, and you never have to worry that some asshole sitting behind you is going to be yapping on his phone so that you want to murder him.

I didn’t see the first one. I was thinking it was in the 90s it seems so long ago, but it was 2009. You don’t need to, to understand the sequel. They kind of catch you up at the beginning, but it’s not necessary. There are a couple unexplained things, but I think they’re just mysteries. (I love Edie Falco, but it’s a weird character. And there’s a kind of gay Richard Dreyfuss character who flies around on a boat and I never really knew who he was, but he’s entertaining.)

For a movie that sometimes feels like it’s flapping its morality in your face for three hours, I found it in the end to be strangely amoral or even immoral. Or maybe just pro-war. It’s set within a war, and the last hour is pretty much non-stop combat, which is portrayed, of course, as not just valorous but thrilling, fun, beautiful. There are huge operatic massacres a-plenty, as well as dozens of beautifully rendered zooms-in at the various exciting ways individual are killed. For all its anti-colonialism messaging, you’d have a hard time arguing that this movie does not glorify war.

I’m being a bit of a smart-ass, but I did enjoy it. It’s often visually astonishing, and the underwater sequences are breathtaking — and they are long, and you are thankful because above water the characters are as insufferable as you can imagine, and the story makes you want to throw things — the family and gender politics are so reactionary in such a tired way you wonder if it’s satire (I’m pretty sure it’s not), and it’s very Second-Amendmenty. It’s disappointing that in a movie so imaginative about the future and about the possibilities of the universe, it couldn’t spend a moment or a dime imagining a world that doesn’t revolve around a man killing people to “protect his family.” There are a couple of characters obviously meant to be the “strong women characters” and they are strong, but they never threaten the nuclear family structure or the strong man at its apex.

But if guns and battles aren’t your thing, there’s lots of nudity, which is unsettling. It’s alien nudity mostly, and it’s blue, but it’s clearly ass. There is lots of ass in this movie. And there’s a shipwreck, there are several shipwrecks. Lots of ships sinking, sliding into the sea. But one big spectacular one, so if you liked Titanic, go. I’m not being snarky, he does a good shipwreck.

Seriously, how did I not know it was a war movie? Was the first one a war movie? I feel like the first one got criticized a lot for being lefty environmentalism. I can’t speak for the first one, but this one was like John Wayne on a horse.