James Franco has more going for him than his status as one of Hollywood's leading heartthrobs. He's currently enrolled at two of the country's most prestigious graduate schools -- NYU and Columbia -- where he's getting his MFAs in filmmaking and creative writing. The actor recently combined his two artistic loves when he wrote and directed his first student film, The Feast Of Stephen, which screened at CineVegaas 2009. An adaptation of the poem of the same name by queer poet Anthony Hecht, the movie finds Franco, once again, tackling queer subject matter.
The short film stars Remy Germinario, in his screen debut, as Stephen, a teenager watching a pick-up basketball game in New York City. According to Movieline.com,
"The only score Stephen is keeping is the number of shirtless hunks
dribbling, sweating and writhing on the court. One mop-topped stud in
particular has all the moves, nudging Stephen’s daydream into the more
erotic realm of naked boys playing hoops -- in slow-motion, natch, and
suddenly transported to a wooded glen where society’s referees won’t
blow a whistle on their hard fouls."
From there, Stephen finds himself in a park where the basketball players are engaged in pummeling him and he meets "the sustained brutality of fists, elbows, knees and blood." Franco pulls this off "with chests,
thighs and asses pressed tight in various permutations, infusing the
violence with the poem’s more visceral sense of ecstasy." The film ends with Stephen's face smeared with feces and Movieline.com claims "however demeaning and/or gang-rapey it might be ... the literally
shit-eating grin he shares with the audience at the end suggests that
even the most horrendous intimacy is better than none at all." Having done Milk, this film, and gearing up to star as queer poet Allan Ginsberg in the near future, if we didn't know better we'd say Franco is trying to tell us something.
A long time ago in a tiny town far, far away there were a few things that redeemed my particularly angsty teenage years: hearing Bikini Kill on college radio, consuming Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and discovering the work of Francesca Lia Block. These were the things that, in ways obvious and less so, taught me that as trapped and bored and persecuted I felt by the usual demons that haunt tiny towns far, far away, there was a big, beautiful world out there for the taking; and moreover, that sometimes feeling trapped and bored and persecuted was the best way to access the big, beautiful things that made life in it worthwhile.
Today, from my hard-won, comfortable bubble of urban adulthood, I'm guilty of assuming that the Internet has rescued kids in small towns who feel different or want more. It’s easy to forget how oppressive adolescent life can be with or without the web; how vital and formative culture really is; and how even in the era of HDTV and pocket computers there are still people who would burn books.
(l-r) Elliot Villar, William Youmans, Jayne Houdyshell, January LaVoy, David Greenspan and Francis Jue in a scene from MCC Theater’s Coraline
Neil Gaiman’s cultish children’s book, Coraline, a dark but lighthearted story about a curious girl and her struggle with a sinister force, gets a kind of pop music make over in its latest adaptation. The featured music is original works created by none other than the maudlin mastermind Stephin Merritt, the man behind the indie rock band The Magnetic Fields. Directed by Leigh Silverman, and adapted for the MCC Theater by award winning actor and playwright David Greenspan -- who also plays the role of the bizarre Other Mother -- Merritt and company have taken traditional musical theater and turned it into something cool.
Coraline has already made its way to a Hollywood adaptation -- with Terri Hatcher and Dakota Fanning lending their voices. But some say there’s no better way to tell a story than through a song. And fans of both Stephin Merritt and the Gaiman story will not be disappointed. The story is intact, stripped down but lit up with poppy tunes of love and lore, and the solemnity of what could be. The music is played on traditional, prepared (read: altered), and toy pianos, and sung by people, mice, rats and cats. The songs go from giddy to morose and then back again, all with the clever turns of phrase that one would expect Merritt to deliver.
The Lambda Literary Awards turned 21 this week, “a twink no more,” quipped host Scott Nevins at the ceremony in New York Thursday night. An audience of 300 at the CUNY Graduate Center whooped for its favorite writers -- the poets and their admirers were by far the most vocal bunch -- as their names were called out by presenters.
Speaking of poets, the gay poetry category provided one of the evening’s highlights: One of the two tied winners, James Alan Hall, skipped across the stage to pick up the award for Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press). The other winner that night was Hall’s former teacher, Mark Doty, who won for his collection Fire to Fire (Harper).
Another memorable moment was the presentation of the Pioneer awards to trans writer Leslie Feinberg, and to each of the three surviving members of Violet Quill writers’ group: Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White. Although the group can’t agree the last time they were all gathered in one place, they did concur that initially they were more interested in the desserts they brought to those meetings than they were in writing. And they shared the virtue of taking their work more seriously than themselves: “We really have become The Golden Girls,” Holleran told me when the award was first announced a few weeks ago.
A number of speakers referred to grim news from the world of publishing and bookselling, and the Legacy Award was presented to the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, which closed in March, not long after 42 years of operation. Owner Kim Brinster said that while it “devastating” to shut down the store, she said she was confident that “our stories will find their way to those who want them, and those who need them.”
Every day a new slew of packages gets tossed onto my desk from publicists and artists asking us to promote their projects. CDs, books, trailers for upcoming movies, premiere episodes of next season's sitcoms -- if it's new and needs some buzz it usually ends up here at some point.
The only problem is that half of the time the projects aren't remotely aimed at gay audiences. Seeing as we're operating in a mainly post-gay world (I'm referring to popular culture here -- obviously events like yesterday's California Supreme Court ruling constantly remind us that we have a long way to go before our sexuality is no big deal), Popnography isn't just looking for queer artists or straight performers with a gay project coming up -- we're looking for high quality stuff that our readers will want to know about.
And still, I'm constantly amazed by the random ass pitches I get. Like, for example, a new book by country singer LeAnn Rimes entitled What I Cannot Change. It didn't really seem like something we'd normally cover, but I decided to flip through it just to see if there was anything worthwhile lurking behind the Chicken Soup for the Country Fan's Soul-looking cover.
The book is broken into chapters like "Sobriety" and "Growth" and features confessions related to each theme. At first I absentmindedly thumbed through the pages while checking emails, but I soon found myself totally engrossed in LeAnn's train wreck of a life. And what a train wreck it is! Her 26 years on this planet have been, without a doubt, the messiest 26 years I had ever read about. Here's LeAnn admitting that she was sexually abused as a child. There's LeAnn admitting that she's recovering from a meth addiction. LeAnn's husband just died in Iraq. LeAnn is still traumatized by the abortion she had years ago. The only thing more shocking than the sheer volume of nightmarish things this poor girl has endured is that fact that I had never heard about any of this stuff! How has she kept it under wraps all these years? And here I thought she was just the chick who sang that catchy little number from the Coyote Ugly soundtrack!
The surprise
star of this year’s Publishing Triangle awards ceremony was veteran novelist
Christopher Bram (Gods and Monsters), who may have a second career as the
Bruce Vilanch scripter of gay awards ceremonies. When the nominees for the
Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction were introduced, the presenters got so
many audience yucks for comparing Alison Bechdel’s winning The Essential
Dykes to Watch Out For to Victorian novels like The Way We Live Now or a
lesbian War and Peace, Bram was credited with the line -- and several others.
Bechdel was on hand to accept the award and said she’d never thought of
the ongoing episodes of her cartoon strip, which span more than 25
years, as a novel. “If nothing else, a novel ends,” she said. Her decision
to end the series last year, while difficult, she said, may have had
the silver lining of finally turning the project into fiction.
Lifetime achievement award winner, historian and prolific writer in many
genres Martin Duberman gently criticized the “assimilationist thirst” of
the modern LGBT movement for expending “far too much energy….in joing
up rather than challenging mainstream institutions.” But he did say
a gracious “thank you” for the award. For a full list of nominees
and winners click here.
Diva of all trades and friend of all gays Dolly Parton has been busy writing songs for the Broadway adaptation of 9 to 5 -- but not too busy to also write a children's book which comes out next week. Called I Am a Rainbow, it's an educational story about how fabulous it is to ... have feelings. "It's about moods -- pink for shy, red for angry, green for jealous,"
she says. "It teaches children that we all have these moods; it's about
what you do with them."
Now that you've put down that copy of Watchmen, and your appetite for comic books has been whetted, you think to yourself What to read next? Since your friends are too busy trolling the latest issues of Next and HX to make any coherent suggestions, you obviously turn to Popnography for all your gay comic queries. There is not a stitch of spandex in this next suggestion, in fact it is probably as far away from masculine superheroes as one could get. Fun Home written by Alison Bechdel, was Time Magazine's Book of the Year when it was released in 2006. This autobiographical graphic novel, by the woman who wrote the popular lesbian comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For is about Alison's life growing up in an old Victorian home in rural Pennsylvania with her eccentric family, including her closeted father.
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