When I was in college, my most over-the-top, crazypants, tortured love affair was with a talented, if a bit bat-shit crazy, actor. Shortly after we started seeing each other, he starred in Falsettos. When I hear any song from Falsettos, I think of him, but “What More Can I Say?” is the one he would sing to me. While he was on stage. Acting, schmacting: His boyfriend was in the audience, and that was a love song, and that boyfriend turned to a quivering mess of Jell-O when being sung to. Ah, young love. Ah, stupid, stupid, stupid young love. Anyway, here’s a grainy video of the original Marvin, Michael Rupert, singing the song. The photo here is from a clearly much sexier version of the show that ran in San Francisco a few years ago.
Okay, they’re not paying me very much, but still it’s enough to justify declaring myself self-employed and deducting from my taxes movie tickets, cable TV, and my Entertainment Weekly subscription. Among other things.
Anyway, I’ve muttered a few things here and there on the social media sites about this, but I haven’t — as promised — been posting on the Giddy Bib about it. So here it is: I’m the movie critic for LGBT Weekly, a new weekly news magazine for San Diego queer community run by Stampp Corbin. I’ve been doing it since January, and I now have enough reviews under my belt to apply for membership to the San Diego Film Critics Society. I’ve always wanted to be a member of one of those organizations that doles out year-end awards, and if I can get more folks caring about the Golden Teddy Awards, maybe I’ll get them written up on time. (BTW: I’m almost done with those. I hope I can finish before the last of the previous year’s awards, the Pulitzers, come out.)
This week, I reviewed the best movie I’ve seen this year that came out this year (since I saw a lot of movies that came out last year this year because of the whole released-for-Oscar-consideration thing). My published review of Hanna is here, but the last few paragraphs got cut for space (grrr!) so, I’m going to post my writer’s cut here:
Children can be badasses, too.
Hanna
Directed by Joe Wright
Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr
Starring Saoirse Rowan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
About two-thirds of the way through Hanna, Marissa, the CIA agent hunting the film’s title character, says, “Sometimes children are bad people, too.”
You already know that Hanna isn’t bad, just badass – a 13-year-old superhuman fighting machine Marissa created and now wants to kill. You feel for the naïve Hanna and hate the sociopathic Marissa, but Cate Blanchett delivers Marissa’s line with such southern-accented smarm that you have to giggle while loathing her.
These juxtaposing emotions continue throughout watching Hanna. You’ll love Hanna’s naiveté and genius, but you’ll be shocked and scared by her violence. You’ll be thrilled by the fast-paced chase scenes and beautifully choreographed fights, but you’ll wish you could watch it all in slow motion because the cinematography, art direction and lighting are all so crazy beautiful. You’ll want Erik, Hanna’s father played by Eric Bana, to hurry it up and save his daughter or kill Marissa, but you’ll also want to him to stand still in wet underwear a little longer, because, damn, Eric Bana has a hot body.
Hanna, the best movie I’ve seen this year, is a big surprise. Joe Wright made his name directing two excellent period dramas, Pride & Prejudice and Atonement. Both are smart, beautiful literary adaptations about British domestic drama, so Wright is not the person probably anyone would think about first when looking for a director for a movie about a teenage super soldier on a mission to kill the woman who killed her mother after experimenting on her embryo. It turns out that Wright may be as versatile as fellow Englishman Danny Boyle, who transitions easily from epic to intimate, whose visual and sonic style Wright’s Hanna most closely resembles.
Wright’s bold and beautiful colors (reds, blues, whites and greens in particular), his unexpected camera angles, and a pulsing techno soundtrack from the Chemical Brothers all reminded me, at times, of Boyle’s work on Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire.
But Boyle never had Saoirse Ronan or Cate Blanchett to work with. Wright used the almost translucently pale Ronan with skill in Atonement; her character’s childish ignorance costs her sister everything, and Ronan was brilliantly believable as the jealous and confused girl.
In Hanna, Ronan is a full-fledged teenager. Hanna has until now been living in the woods with her father, and she knows nothing of music or television until she decides to go after Marissa. Hanna is growing up, discovering the violence of herself in the violence of the world, and discovering secrets, veering towards an early adulthood.
In order to do that, she must destroy the malicious woman who loomed over her childhood. She must kill Marissa, who is a combination of the Queen in Snow White and the Wolf in Red Riding Hood. Fairy tale symbolism is central to the film’s imagery, and Blanchett’s regal beauty and effortless, efficient communication of evil (with a dash of angst) make Marissa more than just an archetype. While the psychological damage that caused her evil is only hinted at, Blanchett makes the most of it, creating a character and a performance that makes me hope she’ll be cast as another villain sometime very soon.
Anyhoo, that’s that. Visit the site, link to my reviews, and comment on them. Yay.
Here’s the second of my five Golden Teddy posts. I’ve done my Most Excellence in Music post, and to come are Most Excellence in Stuff, Most Excellence in Writing, and Most Excellence in Film. The second will probably come in late January, because most of the good movies from 2010 haven’t played here yet. I’ll do Stuff and Writing today or tomorrow. (I changed Most Excellence in Books to Most Excellence in Writing, because I haven’t read that many books this year, and I seem to have short-shrifted stories, articles, and poems in the past.)
Anyway, here’s the TV!
And please note: I watch a lot of TV, but I don’t watch a lot of what’s on. So, I don’t have an opinion about a lot of things — like The Real Housewives of [Insert City Here],The A List, CSI: [Insert City Here], or anything animated, because while I almost always like The Simpsons, I almost never like Family Guy or Southpark — and thus, they won’t win any awards.
Most Excellence in Being Exactly What You Are and Nothing Else
Tie!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmC77zrxkjg]Smallville. I’ve watched almost every episode of Smallville, and I’ve been watching since its premiere ten years ago. I stopped for a bit somewhere in the middle, when it got really silly and strangely focused on Lana Lang’s occult powers, but I returned three years ago when other DC ‘verse folk showed up. It got geekier, more myth-y, campier, and simply more fun. Now, in its last year, Smallville is all about Clark and Lois and their destiny. It’s all going somewhere, and it’s doing it as if the show were a filmed comic book. It’s one of the shows that I’m most excited to see on the list of stuff the TiVo has recorded. I love this fan-made promo video for the final season.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJk6b3kAvME]True Blood. The first season was awesome in its shocking blood, sex, and astronomical production values, and the second season was pulpy but unsatisfying and sorta, well, bad. But this past season, the third, True Blood went back to being great at being what it is: blood, sex, astronomical production values, and a coherent, engrossing through-line that made you want to keep watching. And there are two reasons: Joe Manganiello, who was so hot that it was hard to sit still watching him on screen, and Denis O’Hare, whose uber-baddy was camptastically evil.
Most Excellence in Filthy, Gorgeous Camp … and Sadness
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQT4yvkNR_U]Spartacus: Blood and Sand. I have no problem admitting that I started watching Spartacus because I’d heard there were lots of naked gladiators in it. And there are. But it was also insanely entertaining, in 300 meets Rome kind of way: So much blood, so much sex, so many shots of Lucy Lawless’s breasts, so many discussions about honor, so very little subtlety. And Andy Whitfield, who played the titular character, is such an amazingly hot and fierce (in the gay and traditional definitions) action hero. It is deeply awful that promptly after becoming world famous for this role he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and blarg, the role has been recast with some guy who will never be as awesome.
Most Excellence in Scaring the Living Poo Out of Me
The Walking Dead. Like vampires, zombies have gone high-brow in the last decade. Danny Boyle started it with 28 Days Later, and now we have a high-art cable show on the same network as Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The pilot of The Walking Dead is easily one of the scariest and creepiest 90 minutes of televisual entertainment I’ve ever encountered. I’ve heard complaints that after the first couple episodes, the show got boring. As far as I can tell, “boring” means that the show didn’t focus solely on blowing the heads off of zombies but rather on the human emotional upheaval of the apocalypse, which The Walking Dead does much better than Battlestar Galatica ever could. The acting and writing are as good as anything else on the air right now, and the action — of which there is a lot — is intense and often brilliantly directed. As you can see from the clip here.
Most Excellence in Wrongness (Comedy)
Raising Hope. I liked My Name Is Earl, but there was something a bit mean-spirited about it; the characters, despite Earl’s desire to do the right thing, were deep-down not very good people. Raising Hope, which has the same creator and which is set in the same town, uses white trash humor a bit more humanely and lovingly. At the heart of the show is family, love, and responsibility. And it’s crazy, crazy funny.
Most Excellence in Wrongness (Drama)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RB8t0CCZB4]Breaking Bad. Since the premise of show is watching when, how, and why people “break bad” — become criminals, do terrible things, compromise their ethics and morals — I shouldn’t be surprised by the number of times I screech “Oh, no!” when I’m watching Breaking Bad. The one here is the most epic. Lawd. It’s really hard to watch. I’m not even sure if it’s entertaining. But it’s damn good drama. That said, I’m probably only watching it because my dissertation is about meth, and so is this show.
Most Excellent Endings
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEqcMPsUqQ8]Lost. While no series finale can touch the last episode of Six Feet Under — which I think should be used as the definition of “sublime” — the finale of Lost is one of the few that actually both ends a story and does it in a satisfying, emotionally rewarding way. It took me a while to comprehend it fully how it worked, but the ingenious duel storylines of the last season, one of which only in hindsight took place in a sort of Purgatory, allowed a mysterious build-up of catharsis that I had only experienced while reading great novels. I wept in the same way I did after reading the last page of Atonement.
Most Excellently Awful, Sharp-Jumping, Are-You-Fucking-Kidding-Me?! Ending
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qesx7T6s6_o]Project Runway. After three months of watching Mondo make exquisite, artful, original and deeply personal women’s clothes and also watching Gretchen making dreadful clothes inspired by Joni Mitchell album covers from the late 70s, it was, to say the least, appalling to watch Gretchen win Project Runway. It was one of the best seasons in a while: drama, drama, drama, and some cool clothes, too. But in Mondo being robbed, it was the first time that someone truly, truly undeserving won.
Most Excellence in Being Dreadfully Awful
Fox News. What’s that sound? It’s all 73 of my readers saying “duh.” All you need to know about how evil of this station is in the survey that showed that its viewers are the most misinformed compared to viewers of MSNBC and CNN. And how did Fox’s spokesperson respond? By attacking the authors of the study because they’re researchers at the University of Maryland. Cuz it’s a party school! As if that has anything to do with whether the methods of the researchers are valid. If the researchers were from Harvard? Liberal! If they were from Oxford? European! If they were from Bob Jones University? Silence. Based on the amount of partisanship, cynicism, anger, and discursive evil it has wrought, Fox News is the single worst thing to happen to the American polity since Watergate.
Most Excellence in Pointing Out How Dreadfully Awful Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC Are
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JnDY2Gv5YQ]Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And I don’t even watch their shows; I just watch the clips when they’re posted on Facebook. Sadly, as good as Stewart and Colbert are at shredding into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces the falsities and cynicism of Fox News, nothing changes. Everyone with a clue knows that Fox News is not news, but rather hateful, dishonest propaganda. And everyone who wants to hear only what makes uneducated white Christians feel good about themselves will happily watch Fox and believe whatever they’re told.
Most Excellent Topic of Argument for Pop Culture-Minded Grad Students (that isn’t Black Swan)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTnwv2NN-DI]Glee. Some people love it, some people hate it, a lot of people thought this season isn’t as good or consistent as last season (as if it was ever consistent), and I love how it makes people fight about art, drama, and the representation of gays and lesbians on TV. Queeny and manipulative and damaged and funny, Kurt is all sorts of problematic, and so are his storylines, and I love when people get all indignant about Kurt, pro or con. Also: It’s fun to watch people trash Glee in total and thoughtlessly expose their either external or internal homophobia. And by “fun,” I mean “depressing and useful.” Also: This clip shows the cutest, gayest, and most subversive thing I’ve seen on network TV in a long time.
Most Excellence in Continued Excellence (Drama)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkCzGBK3aWY]Mad Men. I don’t think there’s any debate about this being the best season since the first. I can quibble about some odd dramatic transitions, or lack thereof, particularly in the moment when Don decided to stop, or curtail, his drinking, for that scene was never shown. And I found his journaling a tad weird. But “The Suitcase” was the best episode of the entire series, and the drama of Anna’s death, Don’s quick and weird engagement with his toothy secretary, Roger’s disastrous lies, and Peggy being Peggy created an emotional roller coaster for both Don and the audience. You get why he drinks.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGnjj6pbU9E]The Good Wife. There are two shows that when I see them in my TiVo list, I get excited: Smallville and The Good Wife. Clearly, I like a lot of TV, but when it comes to pure entertainment, The Good Wife does it without being shocking, depressing, or challenging. These are all qualities that I like in a show, but sometimes you just want a procedural/soap opera that is well-acted, well-written, and not insulting to your intelligence (unlike every other legal procedural on network television.)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGoI1eW9zvs]Fringe. While there’s not too much competition right now, even if there were some competition, it’s still the best sci-fi on TV. And it got so much better this year for three reasons: 1) Taking the drama to the parallel universe, which is so Crisis on Infinite Earths; 2) Giving us Walternate and Fauxlivia, roles that give two of our heroes the opportunity to play slightly different versions of one character, which leads to some superheroic acting; 2) Joshua Jackson being all Joshua Jacksony — Yum.
Most Excellence in Continued Excellence (Comedy)
30 Rock. It’s beginning to have that not-so-fresh feeling, but the satire is still genius. Explaining comedy is hard. Here’s a clip.
Modern Family. For the same reason as last year: incredibly funny and not mean. 1/2 Arrested Development, 1/4 All in the Family, and 1/4 Leave it to Beaver. And we have a clip to prove it.
Parks & Recreation. It’s almost as good as The Office was when that show was at its best. I’m worried about the new presence of Rob Lowe, who I’ve always found to be incredibly unctuous, but Parks & Rec wonderfully uncynical, openhearted, and silly. Clip!
Today is the first Harvey Milk Day. After a long battle, and probably only because the film Milk gave Milk so much new publicity, which in turn (probably) led President Obama to award Milk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, our governor signed Mark Leno’s bill making Harvey Milk’s birthday a state holiday “day of recognition.” It’s not like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday or Cesar Chavez’s; schools and state agencies aren’t shut down. And the law, SB-572, simply “encourage[s] public schools and educational institutions to conduct suitable commemorative exercises on that date.” Whatever that means. Well, it means that if you live in a county whose school board is run by anti-intellectual bigots, you’ll never learn about Harvey Milk.
Anyway.
This week, ABC News did a segment of their “What Would You Do?” series on anti-gay harassment. They put some actors in a diner in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and had them act out an egregious display of homophobia: A bigoted and hostile waiter told gay a couple and their kids that they were abnormal, wrong, gross, and then asked them to leave. They did the scene with both a lesbian couple and a gay male couple. And ABC had set up a hidden camera to see who would intervene. Some did, and wonderfully. The vast majority did nothing: “It’s none of my business.”
As I watched the first of these videos, I burst into tears, because of the callous disregard for the cruelty on display and the very weak responses from those who bothered to speak up. And then I continued crying during the second video, which shows some powerful interventions, one from a very righteous young man (who was suffering from nicotine withdrawal, but still) and one from the son of Holocaust survivors.
The videos bring up some interesting issues, to say the least. One is that, well, ABC News did not hide their pro-gay standpoint. The explicit assumption of John Quinones’s narration, editing, and choice of expert analysis is that the people who intervened are good and those who did not are bad. The first person who intervened was praised, and then ABC showed that he was still rather homophobic in a scathing gotcha moment. ABC News is right to be boldly declaring their position against anti-gay discrimination. I think that, like all people, journalists have an ethical duty to support human rights and human dignity. This does not mean that journalists should report with bias on all things, but rather that there are some things about which they should have a bias. They should be biased against racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, and cruelty. What is particularly heartening is that three decades after Harvey Milk was assassinated, that sort of bias — good, moral bias — is pervasive across much of the mainstream news media. Hooray for secular intellectuals.
However, of the 100 people who witnessed these scenes, only 12 spoke up. While this is probably 9 or 10 more people that would have spoken up during when Milk was in office — and yay for that — it’s still an appallingly low number. Now, I’m sure that even if it was an explicitly racist scene, less than half of the people would have said anything. After all, this is the city (and the country) of Kitty Genovese. But even if we can get half of Americans to be in favor of banning certain types of anti-gay discrimination — averaging out those who favor ENDA, oppose DADT, and are in favor of same sex marriage — actively and selflessly defending gays and lesbians is another thing entirely. There are well over a hundred million people in this country who don’t give a flying fuck about our rights and our oppression.
To wit: Earlier this week, the governor of Minnesota and future presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would give same-sex partners the right to make burial decisions for their deceased spouses. He’s quoted in The Minnesota Independent:
Pawlenty said the bill “addresses a nonexistent problem” saying that same-sex couple must simply draw up the appropriate paperwork. He also said that a “surviving domestic partner” should not be “afforded the same legal recognition” as a spouse.
“Marriage — as defined as between a man and a woman — should remain elevated in our society at a special level, as it traditionally has been,” said Pawlenty in his veto message. “I oppose efforts to treat domestic relationships as the equivalent of traditional marriage.”
Yes, thirty years after Harvey Milk was assassinated, it’s both politically expedient and morally upright to insult and denigrate gay and lesbian couples at their most trying time. Thirty years later, a hateful bigot is governor of Minnesota and a viable presidential candidate. (At least the hateful bigots who run Arizona and used to run Alaska are not considered serious national politicians by other serious national politicians.) He believes that the Bible — or rather, select passages of the Bible as interpreted by other hateful bigots — should govern our actions. He believes that it’s okay to hurt minorities in order to gain popularity among other hateful bigots who he needs in his quest for power. Thirty years after Milk’s death, people vote for people like Pawlenty all of the time.
And then there was the sad story of Dr. Jonathan I. Katz. President Obama, via the Department of Energy, had appointed Katz to the team of researchers and government scientists who are charged with figuring out how to stop the epic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is more hateful than Tim Pawlenty by several orders of magnitude. He is the author of the essay titled “In Defense of Homophobia,” in which he writes about the “innocent” people who died of AIDS, “These people died so the sodomites could feel good about themselves.” This a rather standard, if despicable, trope, but he makes a new (or new to me) argument is in a postscript he wrote:
Post-Script October 9, 2005: In recent weeks this essay has been the subject of controversy at, and even beyond, Washington University (see, for example, recent issues of Student Life). A number of critics have asked if monogamous homosexuals are also culpable. Quite apart from the question of the definition of monogamous (sexual contact with only one person in a lifetime? serial monogamy? some cheating? etc.), I suggest the following analogy: A man joins the Ku Klux Klan. He is not violent, and would never hurt a fly; he just wants a safe place to express his racist feelings. Is he culpable for the Klan’s past acts of violence? I believe that even though he is not criminally responsible for acts that occurred before he joined, he is morally culpable for joining the Klan. The Klan has blood on its hands, and anyone who joins must share the guilt. So, too, with the homosexual movement.
Yes, Katz claims that being gay is like being in the KKK. This man is a famed scientist, and he wrote an essay using logic that wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year comp class. His use of evidence, or lack thereof, wouldn’t pass muster in a junior high comp class. And morality would only pass muster in, well, the KKK.
President Obama would never appoint a “proud racist” or a “proud anti-Semite” to a panel of experts, and showcase him as one of the best minds in our country, and he shouldn’t appoint a proud homophobe either.
After reading Katz’s essay and John’s comments, I felt physically ill. I cannot believe that no one googled Katz before appointing him, so at least someone in the Obama Administration decided that his bigotry was irrelevant. (And they also weren’t bothered by the fact that he’s against doing anything to stop climate change, which is perhaps even stranger.) And this is depressing in a stomach-churning way. For while the outcry against Katz from the gay left got him fired from the commission, it took outcry to do it.
But that’s what outcry is for. That’s what teaching about homophobia is for. This is why we tell our stories, and march, and vote. And pass along videos like the ones I’ve posted here. And why we intervene, because one person intervening is better and than none, and one person intervening will lead to more people intervening. Or that’s the hope anyway.
This video, which I love in all of its derivative and hilariously over-the-top glory, is for the song that Adam sang at the American Music Awards. It’s a better as recorded than it was sung live…
While I knew that Lambert would be performing at the AMAs, I wasn’t watching the show, and I wasn’t paying much attention. Until I clicked onto my sitemeter and saw that someone found my blog by searching for “adam lambert stunk on ama.” Not that I had ever written anything like that — Google does weird things. Intrigued, I clicked around and saw that he’d closed the show, and since it was time-delayed for the West Coast, I set the Tivo so I could watch it in a couple hours. Wow: Closed the show. Some producer really wants him to get some attention, and since the album was to come out the next day (today), it was some perfect synergy. I have sense been reminded that the AMAs are produced by Dick Clark, who has become Ryan Seacrest, and Ryan is nothing if not an “Idol” booster. Rock, on, Ryan.
This is how it went:
Ryan announces that the “Favorite Artist of the Year” is Taylor Swift, which is sort of appalling, but whatever, and then he announces that Adam is going to close the show. In case the video to the left is pulled from this site, this is what happened: His name, as logo, appears on the curtains, and the lights focus on Adam, who is singing the first lines of “For Your Entertainment” slowly and only accompanied by a Liberaced piano tinkle — exactly like Lady Gaga does when she performs “Poker Face.” His hair is gelled six inches high, and he’s wearing a silver suit with spikes on his left (your right) shoulder. Then the song really starts, and the band and the dancers, dressed like horny goth space aliens, bump and grind amid strobe lights and Adam being Adam: Making out with a girl and boy (but the boy was cut from the West Coast feed), leading slave boys on leashes and then simulating oral sex with one of them (though the oral simulation was cut from the West Coast feed), running around, tripping and falling, and really letting loose on the high screamy notes that usually he uses to punctuate his performances, not completely dominate them.
I’ve been rather pissed at Adam for his behavior concerning Out over the last week (see here), so I readily said, “Wow, this is baaaad.” Now, part of the problem is that whoever was in charge of the audio mix of the show last night was incompetent, so even when Adam wasn’t overdoing the vocals, it sounded terrible. And that song, as much as I love it when I listen to the recording, probably isn’t meant to be performed live. Or maybe it is, and this was just, well, a bad performance. Rob, sitting next to me on the couch, said, “You’ve turned on him already?” And then I felt guilty. Then, I thought, “No, singing-wise, this was kinda bad. The stage production, with the sex and stuff… well, that’s kinda hilarious.”
A little later, I went online and saw that the Twitterverse had shot Adam to the top of the trending topics, and it seemed that most of the tweets were about how awful he was — awful in the “OMG! IT’S SEX AND GAY!” JoeMyGod got a post up almost instantaneously about the controversy over the sexiness, and, per usual, some of his commenters did their best to trash Adam for, ya know, not being Barry Manilow or John Mayer. But a number of commenters made the very good point that if Madonna or Britney had done worse, no one would have blinked. Okay, a few people would have blinked, but not like what has happened in the last 18 hours. The AP just reported that ABC, which ran the AMAs, had received 1500 complaints about Adam’s performance. And not for the vocals.
“American Idol” sometimes get criticized for cranking out safe, digestible, inoffensive pop stars. But this year’s runner-up, Adam Lambert, did his best to break out of that rap with his ultra-lewd closing performance of “For Your Entertainment.” ABC censors had to quick-cut to an odd aerial shot of the audience when Lambert had a male backup dancer simulate oral sex on him midsong. Parents may be outraged, but thank God for that. We were thinking music was getting a little too stale.
“The energy felt good. Adrenaline is a crazy thing to feel,” Lambert said to Pop & Hiss after the show. “That’s what I love about performing. I’m hoping people were entertained. For those who weren’t, maybe I’m not their cup of tea.”
When asked if he thought the most extreme moments would be edited out of the West Coast broadcast, Lambert wasn’t shy about how he would react to such a move.
“If it’s gonna be edited, then in a way that’s discrimination. I don’t mean to get political, but Madonna, Britney and Christina weren’t edited,” Lambert said. “It’s a shame. Female entertainers have been risqué for years. Honestly, there’s a huge double standard.”
That’s Adam being very political. I wonder if he’s making up for what happened the past week with Out. Because if he was worried about alienating people by being too gay in a magazine read only by gay people, he certainly wasn’t worried about being too gay on a show watched by everyone else. And if you want to see some alienated I’m-not-a-homophobe-I-just-can’t-deal-with-male-sexuality commentary, just read the stuff after the LA Times piece.
So, I’m of two minds about Adam’s performance. Vocally, it was off. And it was too frenetic and thematically unclear. But it pissed a helluva lot of people off. And all the right ones. And it’s at least partly to blame for sending his stuff up the charts on Amazon and iTunes.
UPDATE: People have lost their minds. According to Perez Hilton, ABC has canceled Adam’s mini-concert on Good Morning America that was supposed to happen on Friday. And now #ShameOnYouABC is a trending topic on Twitter. Meanwhile, the dumb twit Elisabeth Hasselback trashed him on The View, and since she’s basically a mouthpiece for the Sarah Palin set, the thumpers must really be in a snit about him. Feministing explains why Adam Lambert scares people with a post called, ha, “It’s OK patriarchy, I understand Adam Lambert made you feel funny.” (And the comments to the post explain why many people think feminists might be sex-negative.) The Times has a wrap-up (minus Perez’s scoop), and the comments are ridiculous. Per usual. In response to all of this, Adam said to Ryan Seacrest, “I’m not a babysitter, I’m a performer.” Oh, snap.
UPDATE #2: The CBS’s The Early Show, which gets a tiny fraction of GMA’s or Today’s audience, saw an opportunity, and they invited Adam to discuss the controversy and perform — the day after GMA threw him under the bus. And Adam gave good interview. From the Times website, which is so all over Adam Lambert and the AMAs that they have a hub called “The Adam Lambert Fallout: Were You Not Entertained?“, some choice quotes:
As his performance from the American Music Awards continues to stoke controversy, even costing him a booking on “Good Morning America,” Adam Lambert acknowledged in a television interview that he “did get carried away” during his awards show appearance. But the singer declined to apologize for his act, saying that it was ultimately “up to the parents to discern what their child’s watching on television.”
Damn straight. As it were.
Mr. Lambert said in the interview that he had “no clue, no clue at all” that his routine would upset viewers. He added: “I admit I did get carried away, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. I do see how people got offended, and that was not my intention. My intention was just to interpret the lyrics of my song and have a good time up there.”
The singer said that some of his sexually charged moves during the performance had not been previously rehearsed. “Those kind of came from more of an impromptu place,” he said, adding: “I think ABC was taken a little by surprise. That wasn’t my intention, I wasn’t being sneaky. It just – it got the most of me, I guess.”
This sounds great, and I want to believe it, but the guy has done a lot of live stuff. In the theater. Improv usually isn’t allowed.
Mr. Lambert said he understood why some viewers, especially parents, might have been offended by his act. “It was almost 11 o’clock,” he said, “it was a night time show. I was there in the audience full of mostly adults. Sometimes I forget, oh, there’s a camera on. I come from the theater, and I’m programmed to look at who’s in the live audience. And that’s where I come from. I was looking at the crowd and saw some of my favorite pop stars, and thought, I want to let loose.”
He’s selling authenticity. And I’m buying it.
Mr. Lambert cited similarly provocative performances given by his fellow pop stars at the American Music Awards that did not seem to generate as much outrage.
“Just to play devil’s advocate with you,” Mr. Lambert said, “Lady Gaga smashing whiskey bottles, Janet Jackson grabbed a male dancer’s crotch. Eminem talked about how Slim Shady has 17 rapes under his belt. There’s a lot of very adult material on the AMAs this year, and I know I wasn’t the only one. I’m not using it as an excuse, and I didn’t take any offense with those performers’ choices.”
And he repeated his assertion that he is the victim of a double standard in the entertainment industry. “If it had been a female pop performer doing the moves that were on the stage,” Mr. Lambert said, “I don’t think there would be nearly as much of an outrage.”
Asked if he thought he was being criticized because he was a man or because he was gay, Mr. Lambert said, “Both. I think it’s a double whammy. I think it’s because I’m a gay male, and people haven’t seen that before.”
Yes, yes, yes. Unfortunately, CBS double-standarded it up in their coverage by blurring out Adams’ same-sex kiss from the AMAs perfomance while not blurring out the for-comparison image of Madonna and Britney Spears doing the same thing. Tacky, tacky, tacky.
He did not believe he needed to apologize for his American Music Awards performance. “I’m not a babysitter,” Mr. Lambert said. “I’m a performer.”
Clearly, he realized this line worked on Seacrest the day before, so he used it again. It is a great line, and it really shows up the fucktards who are screeching “What about the children?!” about a vaguely sexually charged performance of a pop singer at 10:55 PM on a school night. Or, as I wrote in a Facebook comment yesterday: “The censored reruns of Sex in the City that air at the same time in many markets are vastly more raunchy. Of course, that’s all heterosexual sex. And the shows that air on network TV at the same time, or earlier, are more explicitly violent than Lambert’s was sexual. CSI, SVU, and Criminal Minds are pornographically violent — and in-depth. Grey’s Anatomy (ABC) is all blood, all of the time. Or Private Practice — on ABC — had a whole multi-episode arc about someone ripping a baby out of the belly of a major character. Lambert’s split second simulated oral sex — face in groin and that’s all — is nothing compared to what is commonplace on TV. ABC attacking him for that performance is the height of hypocrisy.”
Given the chance, Mr. Lambert said he would change one thing about that performance. “I would sing it a little bit better,” he said.
Yes, that would have been nice. Check out the video of the song at the top of this post to see how it was supposed to be done. I doubt that it could be done like that live, but whatevs.
However, if you want to see him kill it live, there are two videos of Adam singing from the morning that are pretty great. The first is him doing “Whataya Want From Me” (misnamed as “What Do You Want From Me” on the CBS website), and the second is “Music Again.” Okay, he kills it on “Whataya Want From Me.” He does “Music Again” just okay.
But all the chatter and debate isn’t stopping people from picking up his first post-“American Idol” release. Billboard writes that “For Your Entertainment” should sell at least 225,000 copies when it debuts on next week’s chart, and could possibly move more with post-Thanksgiving shoppers invading retailers. Lambert’s promo tour continues tonight with an appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman.”
Few straight white men don’t strut the way Lambert does (sadly!). Most still embody the norm in our society, because racism, sexism and homophobia still haunt us. And the norm never shows itself off. It’s just taken for granted. For all of his media-savvy and strategic approach to stardom, Adam Lambert remains a rock outsider. Though I’m his fan, I don’t think his AMAs’ turn was perfect; it would have been much more effective it his usually excellent vocals had matched the audacity of his dance moves. But I don’t agree with those who are saying his routine was just a tired attempt to shock. What he did won’t be mundane until no one in America flinches when two men kiss on the street. Or until an out gay rock star is no longer an anomaly.
There is a lot of very adult material on television all the time, and mostly it flows unchecked and unpunished, except when it comes as a surprise and hits a nerve. Community standards are mutable and vague; lots of people don’t know obscenity until someone else sees it. Ms. Jackson transgressed during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show because she exposed a nipple, which is one thing that network television normally doesn’t show. Mr. Lambert, who just released his first album, startled viewers because he did things akin to what outré rappers and female pop stars have performed onstage to get attention, only he did it as a gay man.
…
Mr. Lambert’s context was different, mostly because he is gay and his song “For Your Entertainment” is graphically sexual, with intimations of sadomasochism and oral sex. Straight sadomasochism is suggested all the time in music videos, and early this season Courteney Cox’s character on the ABC sitcom “Cougar Town” was coyly depicted performing oral sex on a younger man
…
It wasn’t the best musical performance by any means, but it wasn’t the worst display of sexual debauchery either. Mostly it was a reminder of television’s policy regarding gay men: Do tell, just don’t show.
It is tempting to write the whole thing off as lame and overblown, a fight over the cautious sensibilities of a middle-American TV audience against the need of a gay pop singer to garner attention, entertain, and push back on shame. But then I think of the self-loathing and destructive behavior of many young gay people coming to terms with their identity and the violence of ignorant people toward them. Homophobia isn’t an abstract debate—it can be ugly and dangerous.
I wonder if Time will wade in with something typically contrarian and offensive…
UPDATE #4:
Disgustingly, ABC has now canceled Lambert’s performance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show and killed his booking on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. (Here’s Michael Slezak’s lame EW story about that.) I guess it’s okay to have a running bit about fucking Ben Affleck, but not to have a split second dance move that makes people think about actual gay men having sex. Meanwhile, and oddly, ABC is letting Barbara Walters put him in her “Ten Most Fascinating People of 2009” show and perform on The View.
When I was in college, my most over-the-top, crazypants, tortured love affair was with a talented, if a bit bat-shit crazy, actor. Shortly after we started seeing each other, he starred in Falsettos. When I hear any song from Falsettos, I think of him, but “What More Can I Say?” is the one he would sing to me. While he was on stage. Acting, schmacting: His boyfriend was in the audience, and that was a love song, and that boyfriend turned to a quivering mess of Jell-O when being sung to. Ah, young love. Ah, stupid, stupid, stupid young love. Anyway, here’s a grainy video of the original Marvin, Michael Rupert, singing the song. The photo here is from a clearly much sexier version of the show that ran in San Francisco a few years ago.
And then there was the sad story of Dr. Jonathan I. Katz. President Obama, via the Department of Energy,