That's So Gay

Approximately ten or so Grade Eight students at Chestermere Lake Middle School, near Calgary, were instructed by school officials to either cover up or remove tee shirts worn in class this week that were meant to demonstrate the student’s support for an environment of anti-homophobia.

The tee shirts – inspired by ones the students saw online – were white and contained homemade messages made with markers, which advocated messages the school deemed inappropriate. Some of the tee shirts read “Homophobia is Wrong” while others stated that “Homophobia is Gay” with the word gay crossed out and replaced with the word “Lame,” an attempt by the students to point how hateful and hurtful using the phrase “that’s so gay” can be.

The school, however, saw it differently. Principal Kim MacKenzie said the word gay was misused and that the tee shirts themselves were inappropriate for a middle school level, and failed to follow the school’s dress code. He also said the tee shirts raised a conversation that was not suitable for the age level, adding that several Grade Five students were confused as to what homophobia was; a discussion that MacKenzie either was unprepared or uniformed to have with his students. He added that he was unaware of the motive behind the tee shirts. "All the students were told it was not appropriate for school," said MacKenzie. "They were also told they are allowed to have opinions, but there are 10-year-olds in the school as well as a number of people that felt (the tee-shirts) were offensive."

According to the students who orchestrated the wearing of the tee shirts, the motive was simple – it was meant as an expression of tolerance and of acceptance and a communication of the idea that judging anyone on the basis of their sexual orientation is hateful and wrong.

Whatever way MacKenzie and officials from the school and the district wish to play this incident, it seems a rather big no win. How anyone, anywhere would find tee shirts imploring acceptance and equality offensive, untainted sentiments coming from remarkably smart and savvy teenagers, well that person and their myopic view of the world would have to live in Alberta.

Oh wait. That’s right. They do.

Hall and Oates

Daryl Hall and John Oates – Hall is the blond, blue eyed one; Oates, the darker, mustached one – play two shows in Los Angeles tonight, at the legendary Troubadour Club in West Hollywood. It’s noteworthy not only because the famed seventies and eighties duo played the same club in their first Los Angeles appearance thirty-five years ago, but because it begins the beginning of a reevaluation of the pop tandem, the most commercially successful duo in recording history.

What’s interesting is that the reappraisal is without irony. Hall and Oates seem unassailable to satire, unlike hit makers from the same era who seem subject to joke like resurrection (and the duos cameo on Will and Grace was, surprisingly, without irony), Hall and Oates are being viewed with a critical regard from a rather disparate circle in the most reverent ional and serious manner. Not for them an endless loop of county fairs and wayward casinos, and the inevitable unsavory revelations. Hall and Oates are now being seen as professors of pop, offering a master class on the making of the perfect pop.

The renaissance may be traced back a few years, to a piece that Death Cab for Cutie front man and now Gossip Girl accessory Ben Gibbard wrote in Pitchfork.com listing his favorite Hall and Oates songs and their influence over him. Or it could have been Killers leader Brandon Flowers exalting the duo’s Rich Girl as the most instructive song ever written. It might have been Hall and Oates liberal use in any number of hip-hop songs from artists like De La Soul and the Wu Tang Clan.

Whatever its origins – the group’s influence is easily identifiable in the work Justin Timberlake (the floating falsetto) and in Maroon Five (who should be sued for outright theft of the Hall and Oates catalogue) – the Hall and Oates reemergence is in full flight. It’s only slightly disappointing for one very obvious reason: listening to the group’s carefully crafted standards – the wondrous Sarah Smile, the haunting and scathing Rich Girl, the eagerly enjoyable Maneater, the deceptively brilliant Private Eyes, the joyous Kiss on My List, etc – you long in a real way for a time when the radio wasn’t a wasteland of awkward, disagreeable sounds and when wanting your MTV made perfect sense.

Muddled

Mud-bogging, which involves the use of off-road vehicles and the deliberate destruction of terrain, could only be done with such recklessness, such an utter contempt for the laws governing man and nature here, in Alberta, at this moment in time. No where else it seems, would such a willful, violent criminal act been thought of as sport, as something now a traditional of the first long weekend. And no where else would the unprecedented debauched damaged underline just how lazy the province has governed and is likely to be governed, sadly, for years to come.

On Tuesday, Alberta Fish and Wildlife officers, surveying the areas just south of Calgary, an area known as McLean Creek, estimated the damage done to the environment by mud-bogging participants, whom were estimated to be over five thousand for the three day holiday weekend, and were at loss for words accurate enough to describe the scene.

Meadows, pathways, valleys, and more were all destroyed, by the usual suspects – the young, the overpaid, and the uneducated – all fuelled by a woeful combination of alcohol and other substances and motivated by sense of entitlement that would look at the beauty of the Foothills as something to be used as a playground, with little to no regard for anyone else.

In all, officials from the Fish and Wildlife agency and from the province’s Sustainable Resources handed out over four hundred and fifty tickets, mostly for trespassing, while the RCMP made a dozen or so arrest for public intoxication and outstanding warrants. Yet, since the Alberta government continued relaxed, almost ambivalent attitude towards governing remains, officials were helpless to stop the vandalism to the environment since no laws are in place protecting the area – an area that is public land, owned by the government.

By Wednesday, caught in yet another public relations disaster and forced to be on the offensive, the Conservatives announced plans for a blueprint that would effectively manage the province’s environment by dividing Alberta into a grid of six major regions, a move that would, the government insisted, create plans for the sustainability of each area based on their water limits.

However, the plan, well thought through or not, is unlikely to have any impact at all as the agency responsible – Sustainable Resources – is headed by dismal Ted Morton, himself a fraud, whose hollow head is filled with truly frightening and hateful ideas. Morton, because you or anyone else should never, ever forget, was responsible for the introduction and debate thereof of Bill 208 – a hateful piece of legislation directed firmly at gays and lesbians of the province. Specifically (and in truth, its hard to imagine just how malicious Morton and his ilk are until you understand the lower depths they continually plummet) the Bill, had it passed, would have “removed all punishment for an individual exercising their beliefs against gay marriage;” language that would have, with great deception, allowed gays to be terminated from employment, evicted from or simply refused housing, etc simply because the other individual was “exercising their beliefs” against – well against gays.

Since the same destruction was caused in an astonishing way last May, 2007, by mud-bogging in the area known as Indian Graves, it’s hard to comprehend how spectacularly unprepared or perhaps uninterested the government was for this long weekend. Yet, when you realize who is charge – that is it the same Stelmach led government, it is not surprising in the least. Everything about this government, about the disconnected manner by which it functions isolates more and more how much of con game has and continues to be run here in Alberta – in “God’s country.” That anyone can sit idly and witness the continual, intentional destruction of some of the most majestic landscape in the world, a destruction whose means and ends is purely selfish, is itself stunning, but then for anyone to act a willing participant in the destruction, well that is something difficult to understand.

Yesterday, Morton, ever the observant one, told reporters that “Albertans have told us that they want stronger provincial leadership on land use and a sustainable balance between development and conservation.” Really, you needed Albertans to tell you that they demand a semblance of leadership, and some plan – any plan at this point – that would conserve, rather than destroy the land?

I hate to sound so continually one note, but the idea that the earth, the land here in Alberta, is subject to a sort of perpetuity is not only erroneous, but intensely ignorant. That a populace – and perhaps it’s a minority, but I have my doubts – would sanction that kind of wrongheaded thinking, whose outcome is tragically irreversible, would allow a government so confused and indifferent to so much to remain in power, tells you everything you need know about Alberta in 2008.

Absolutely everything.

The Shallow End

The Hills, that curious cultural catastrophe and apparently unrelenting MTV behemoth, ended its third season last Monday night. Throughout the airing, perky personalities kept reminding us of the after show where the cast would appear and take questions from an assembled audience, several of whom appeared life-like, and that Usher would be making a special appearance to promote an album that was to “drop” soon. The Hills is reality television, but it isn’t real at all, or least what anyone would recognize as being real.

Stunningly, I learned that The Hills has an actual pedigree. It seems it can locate its origins as a direct descendant of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange Country, which itself was an idea MTV stole from Fox’s The O.C. Laguna Beach aimed to document widely affluent and untouchable Orange County high school students, all white, all, if I remember correctly, blond, and all very vapid. Drama was in short supply and there was a famine of actual interest, mostly since never had there been assembled a more dull assortment of vaguely attractive young people. Until The Hills that is.

The Hills is an old fashioned spin-off; an extension of Laguna Beach in the person of one Lauren Conrad. As Laguna Beach ended, Conrad left to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in fashion and thus The Hills was born. She and her three friends, Heidi, Whitney, and Audrina, wildly vacuous all, day in and day out suffer the perils of what it means to be young and dumb in America and I’m guessing that someone, somewhere, thought that would make for good reality television.

It doesn’t.

Most of the time, it seems like everyone – absolutely everyone – is living underwater. The actions are slowed, the dialogues even slower, and events, such as they are, seem random. At some point, Whitney and Lauren, were brought on as interns at Teen Vogue, a magazine The Hills helpfully explained, is all about the smile, as in smile, all the time, no matter what, no matter where. Towards the end of the show’s second season, Lauren was offered an opportunity to spend the summer in Paris, working for Teen Vogue, an opportunity that she – with great dramatic effect – turned down in order to stay with her then boyfriend, who may have been Brody Jenner, although I grew confused as he appeared on his own Fox reality show – The Princes of Malibu – which was not about his life with his father, former Olympic champion Bruce Jenner, but his step-father, the creepy egotist David Foster and his mother, the actress, Linda Thompson (who soon divorced each other), although thankfully that show was cancelled after a mere two aired episodes, and now Brody turns up on the equally hateful reality show, E’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians, starring his step-sister Kim.

The Hills is remarkable for one reason alone – it’s a new form of television, one that dares you to comprehend why exactly you would invest any time at all watching it – at all. The entire show seems sunk by its own superficiality. Nothing interesting occurs; nothing interesting is said, not even uttered in error. Emotions among the friends tend to be variations of three – happy, sad, and bewildered – all buoyed by the kind of murky overly sensitive pop tunes that make you certain the end is near, and yet the show remains hugely popular, an audience eager to follow the trials and travails of Lauren and her girls. Some interest is injected in the guise of Spencer Pratt, Heidi’s boyfriend, as boring and loathsome an invention as could be, who came between Heidi and Lauren (they are no longer friends), and may or may not have circulated a rumor that Lauren and her now ex-boyfriend, Jason Wahler, made a sex tape, a story with such strength that recently US Weekly devoted its cover and pages to exploring whether there was any truth to the rumors.

I tried to watch, in preparation for last week’s finale, the entire season, but I kept wandering away, literally and figuratively. At some point, during the last ten minutes of an episode, it may have been the second or third of the season, devoted to Lauren having lunch, I left to re-organize my clothes closet, only to return to find Lauren, an episode later, pondering dinner.

The show is so unrelenting in portraying the bland and homogeneous residents of Los Angeles that it could be set anywhere, it has such a limited and unreal connection to the real Los Angeles. No one of color, and perhaps, more detrimental, not one gay person ever comes into contact with Lauren and her friends – and seriously, the one thing The Hills could truly stand is an injection of gay.

When I see something like The Hills, so dismal and depressing, so manufactured (when the show first began airing, questions arose as to whether it was staged or real, a questions that in hindsight I guess was meant to be entirely rhetorical), so far removed from any sense of reality, I'm left with one thought – why are gays (and our purported agenda) always being blamed for the end of society as it is known? The real evil, the real agenda being put forth, is the emptiness of pop cultural artifacts like The Hills, whose intention as best I can determine is to drown the world of anything meaningful and you know, actually real.

The Marrying Kind

Yesterday’s decision by California’s Supreme Court giving same-sex couples the right to marry in the state is hyperbole aside, monumental. In a 4-3 ruling that effectively overturned two previous state bans on same-sex marriages, the Court, using a law written sixty years ago that overturned a state ban on interracial marriages, determined that the state must allow gays and lesbians to marry, citing, perhaps most importantly, that the title domestic partnership is not an accurate or equivalent substitute for marriage.

The Justices, in their ruling, wrote that “our state now recognizes that an individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual's sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

Opponents of gay rights – the usual suspects, arch conservatives and the religious right – are determined to put a measure on the November ballot in California that would enshrine laws banning gay marriage in the state’s constitution – a move that would subsequently overturn Thursday’s ruling.

For the moment however, the decision, which will become law in thirty days unless the court grants a stay, gives gays and lesbians to the right to wed, an initiative that will get full support from current Governor Schwarzenegger.

Not entirely surprising, I’ve never understood why the idea of two men or of two women committed and in healthy, loving relationships who wish to marry should have ever come to represent such a large, looming threat to the society as a whole. Is it simply progressive thinking that would extend the rights and privileges to include all or brave reformist thinking? It is not really novel that I – a gay men – should somehow feel an entitlement that shared by everyone else?

I was stuck by the language of the decision, in particular the section I quote above; language that is as powerful and weighty as words can be, holding a meaning far greater than what is simply on the page. Over time, over a history that I have been a living part of, the very idea of what it is to be gay, the individual’s sexual orientation that justices wrote about has changed dramatically. The ruling appears to recognize that gay men and women are not aberrations, deviants who function outside the norm. We are capable, just as capable as out straight counterparts in fact, of building and maintaining relationships whose hallmarks are strong love, honesty, and that by extension come to foster commitment. That seems exciting somehow, as though an understanding of gay men and women is slowly, but surely evolving.

Ultimately (and I know this has been stated before, in many ways) no one – straight or gay – holds the understanding of what comprises the perfect marriage, the one that lasts and is the ideal. But if two men or two women, so deeply in love, so fortunate to have found one another, want to at least try, the idea that marriage should not be available to them, that they should be denied, subjected to living in the margins of society is truly an idea both sad and silly.

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg died Monday night. He was 82. He was born on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas. He moved to New York City, where, in addition to his home in Captiva Island, Florida, he spent his life. To understand the contribution he made to 20th century art is to understand the profound shifting sensibilities that occurred as a result of post-war modernism. Rauschenberg was something of everything – a choreographer, a composer, designer (he won a Grammy Award for his design of Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues), a painter, a photographer, and a sculptor – defying tradition that an artist works within one medium. It was not that he was dilettante, dabbling at different forms with no real intent; he was an artist, the rarest of things.

Rauschenberg is generally associated with the nineteen-fifties and with Abstract Expression – one of my favorite movements – and his work during that period is brave, honest, and stunning in its ferocious optimism. He seemed to see no limits to anything – to art, to life – and the understanding that everything was, on some level, real and possible is easily evident in his work. While he is often considered a part of the Abstract Expressionist period, he seems to have been instrumental in forcing and providing a kind of bridge to the period in American art that would come next – notably Pop – and in both giving and taking cues from artists of that movement like Willem de Kooing, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and the art of the everyday that would later flourish in the nine-teen eighties.

Rauschenberg famously found beauty in everyday objects others may have thought mundane – soap dishes, mirrors, discarded junk, Coke bottles - and his use (here, he is an obvious descendant of artists like Marcel Duchamp) of those found objects in some of his more pivotal works, like his piece from 1961 entitled First Landing Jump, would inspire later works by Warhol and easily influenced the work of several nineteen-eighties artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel. First Landing Jump incorporates a rubber tire, a traffic marker, an old license plate, and an odd blue functioning light bulb creating something that initially seems incongruous, but is, ultimately, haunting and composed. His later work, the remarkable lithograph (the largest, at six feet, ever hand printed) 1967’s Booster, too uses found objects – a five part x-ray of a nude Rauschenberg, a photograph of a simple wooden chair once a prop, along with headlines from Californian newspapers – seems at first to be bleak, evoking a kind of mortality. Yet, given the title and the elongated x-ray study, the work seems to suggest a kind of lifting off, a movement upwards, and a type of celebration.

Rauschenberg was frequently subject to critics who – lazy and ill-informed – would regard his efforts as something akin to the work of child, as in my eight year-old child could do that. Yet, that quality – improvised, apparently counterintuitive, and seeming unlearned – was the very thing that made Rauschenberg great. There is something freeing in his work, something suggesting a rejection of tradition and of boundaries, something almost athletic, physical. His art lacked a kind of heightened awareness, a kind of studied aesthetic and it lifted it too a remarkable place – inviting, invigorating and limitless in imagination.

Katherine Hepburn

Katherine Houghton Hepburn was born on this day, May 12th, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of a progressive doctor and a suffragette, both of whom Hepburn would credit with instilling in her a kind of fierce determination and stoicism; traits that were among her hallmarks. She attended Bryn Mawr College, where, according to lore, she developed her infamous manner of speaking – a sort of deliberate over pronouncing of vowels - an accent that, along with her pedigree, would contribute, in addition to her fondness of wearing pants and turtlenecks regardless of the occasion, to firmly (and somewhat mistakenly) placing her in the preppy pantheon.

She won four Academy Awards, still a record, for Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981) and was nominated for twelve in total. Her last film was Love Affair (1994), itself a remake of Love Affair (1939) and An Affair to Remember (1957). She died at the age of 96 at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

I think her best work was within a sort of triptych of screwball comedies – Howard Hawks brilliant, furiously funny Bringing Up Baby (1938) in which she co-starred with the talented Cary Grant, playing against type, the remarkably smart and sweet The Philadelphia Story (1940) in which she once more co-starred with Cary Grant, and the tremendously witty and somewhat subversive Adam’s Rib (1949), which saw her matched with the great Spencer Tracy, with whom she would have an off screen relationship that last 25 years until Tracey’s death just weeks after the two completed work on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

In February of 1982, for my birthday that year, my Mother took me to New York for the weekend; a weekend that included sitting in third row centre for a performance of The West Side Waltz, a play written by Ernest Thompson (he would later write On Golden Pond) and one Katherine Hepburn starred in and that ran for only 126 shows, but for which she was nominated for a Tony. The night of the performance, my Mother and I trudged through a massive snowstorm from our hotel to the theatre – cabs were nowhere to be found - and despite the night, the house was full.

The play itself was forgettable, full of hackneyed clichés and empty of any real drama – but it didn’t matter to me or anyone else. From the moment the curtain rose to the moment it fell, it was all about Hepburn. She was, in a role that was limiting at best, generous and ferociously noble and it was a moment unlike anything else – anything and everything she did or said was captivating, and unlike Dorothy Parker’s infamous dismissal of her acting ability (reviewing her work in the play The Lake, Parker commented that Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B”) she elevated the show, making it and her co-star something better than it a right to be, she was, in the strictest sense of the word – impossible.

Maybe her best work and best example of how impossible an actress she was can be found in John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), in which Humphrey Bogart was her co-star. The film – a story of cynical, drunk riverboat captain and a prudish, spinster missionary set in 1914 – shouldn’t work; it should seem contrived and deceptive, but its as a close to perfect a film as you could find. But Hepburn is so good that, by extension, she makes Bogart a complete joy to watch (he plays slightly against type) the film ends up being a marvel. Their interplay is so honest, so nuanced, and the two so generous with each other that you can’t help but be caught up in their impending romance. Hepburn is so good at conveying a kind of heartbreaking repression, of someone who yearns for love, but has worked hard to avoid intimacy, and here, in The African Queen, she is extraordinary.