Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

This movie could be viewed as a political statement (it was banned in Iran) or a purely artistic work. Either way, it works, and it is Panahi’s masterpiece in a filmography that has been dedicated to the disenfranchised (Crimson Gold) and women’s secondary status (The Mirror, Offside, The Circle) in Iran. It should be mentioned that the dvd includes an interview with the director, who makes a point to mention that some of the Iranian laws depicted here (restriction from traveling without the accompaniment of males) have been abolished since the making of this film. However, the familiarity with such customs are still intact.

This is a superb piece of work both in craft and emotion. Beginning in a long circular tracking shot from a hospital window, a family learns a newborn is a girl when they expected a boy. From here, it moves in a continuous shot out onto the street (Iranian filmmaking tradition is intertwined and indebted to the Russians as the Bolshevik Revolution forced Russian filmmakers to flee to neighboring countries, one of which was Iran. The Russians are famous for their long continuous tracking shots).

A baton relay “race” is set up as the story of one disenfranchised woman is passed on to the next. Three women who have escaped from prison are attempting to move through the city with the least of means. We go from one to the other, as we learn of their personal histories and events that have led to their present hour of desperation.

Non-professional actors and professionals share the relay. Nargess Mamizadeh, whom Panahi came across in a park one day, was enlisted to play Nargess (the first girl with the thick handsome eyebrows and black eye). She’s extraordinarily pretty, to the point that Panahi had to “dress her down” with an unexplained black eye. Fereshteh Sadr Orafai as Pari who searches for a doctor to abort her child (the father was killed in prison and she has no way of providing), and Fatemeh Naghavi as a mother who dresses up and abandons an adorable daughter in hopes someone with better means can take her in, are both professional actors.

Circular motifs and circular settings get reiterated throughout the movie, illustrating an allegory of the vicious circle in a society that puts restrictions on women. Panahi mentions that his film is an attempt to compress an entire lifetime of a woman into one day, using eight women’s circumstances as a conduit. The movie begins with fast, jittery hand held pacing, and eventually decelerates into stasis, before ending in the same window first shown in a hospital, but now belongs in a prison cell.

Fatemeh Naghavi’s desperate mother and her forlorn five-year old daughter was absolutely heartbreaking to watch. When I watched the abandoned child crying, something inside me broke, and remained unmendable for weeks.

I never like recommending these types of movies to friends, because I shudder at the thought of them coming back afterwards with a review I see often about The Circle: “It’s depressing.” Not all films are meant to entertain and make their audience walk out “feeling good.” But as much as Panahi shows the oppression of Iranian women by men, it’s inspiring that as an Iranian man himself, he is boldly speaking out for those whose voices have been muted.

I have Middle Eastern men friends who often tell me that how they are represented throughout the world is not accurate. “We’re not all like that. It’s just that the ones who have the loudest voices get heard.” Panahi’s work is a testament to the existence of Iranian men who are concerned with the injustices dealt to the other half of the human race.

deja vu: Mamma Mia and Across the Universe

I was recently asked why I opposed the spate of movies and Broadway plays that retrofitted new images and storylines to old pop hits. Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia to the music of Abba, and Julie Tamor’s “Across the Universe” to the music of the Beatles.

The most apparent reason is the aural experience of listening to music. Similar to reading, listening to music forces the participant to bridge abstract representation with mental images. Th act of mental bridge-building is a creative act in itself. Music videos were criticized for deciding what images to go with a piece of music from which we would have needed, otherwise, to form our personal vista. When developed to its logical extreme, image association turned into simulacra, and beautiful people were utilized to sell music.

George Michael’s “Freedom! 90″ video, enlisting Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington marked the height of the era: It combined beautiful people (who had nothing to do with the song) with a recycled song.

Where could we go from there?

The Retrofitted Music Movie was the next plateau.

Images superimposed on music frees us from the task of creating images alongside the abstraction of lyrics and sound. It makes us lazy, supplying us with prefabricated imagery when we should be constructing our own. I guess that’s why you often hear people dismiss a movie with “the book was better.”

The second reason I oppose Retrofitted Music Movies is this: musicians and songwriters publish their works under one publisher. After a long career, the publisher owns the catalog of their songs. Companies and buyers bid on purchasing and reselling the publishing rights to the entire catalog en-block. Once in possession of this catalog, they subtract a huge chunk of royalties that need to be paid out to the musicians and songwriters whenever the songs in the catalog are redistributed. If you look at the retrofitted music movies, you’ll realize that the birth of the concept probably had little to do with someone wanting to create a new work*. If anything, it looks suspiciously as if it had been motivated by a pure business decision to cut cost and maximize gain. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, I had a hunch, being in the music and music publishing business for five years.

Today I finally checked the credentials to see if it supported my theory. Here was what I came up with:

Mamma Mia is created by NBC/Universal Studios. If you Google the Abba Catalog, you will see that NBC and Universal also owns the entire catalog to all their works.

Across the Universe is distributed by Sony. According to Wikipedia, “Revolution was a strategic partner of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which distributed and marketed Revolution’s films. The company shut down in October 2007, coinciding with the end of the five year deal with Sony Pictures.” The company is called Revolution Pictures, and Revolution was one of the Beatles’ biggest songs. Someone must have planned the creation of this subsidiary company for the sole purpose of manufacturing Across the Universe, which was made in 2007. Upon it’s completion, the task was achieved, the company was no longer needed.

So why does all this bother me, you ask?

I realize it’s the entertainment world’s age-old strategy to cash in on the familiar. Up-and-coming bands and even nowadays with surgery, movie stars, need to look or sound like a proven commodity if they want to have a higher chance of signing a contract. Pushed to it’s logical conclusion, movies utilized soundtrack that have been proven hits, to reduce the investment risk factor by, if not more than half: even if the movie was horrible, at least audience members still walk away misty-eyed with the sentimentality of hearing their favorite hits when they were in their youthful prime.

In a larger picture, however, recycling and retrofitting old music is actually detrimental to pushing the continuum of the art form ahead. I will always remember the notorious quote bold explorer Miles Davis made about conservationist Wynton Marsalis, who championed preserving “traditional” jazz heritage by continuous reiteration versus forging ahead into new territory. It was something to the effect that if jazz musicians did what Marsalis wanted, “we’d all be back in the fields picking cotton.”

For every remake of an old hit, a new original artist/songwriter is deprived of exposure to the public. We stagnate in nostalgia to put money in the pockets of entertainment execs, but years from now, when people asks us about our fond memories (many of which are indelibly interwoven with music) of the great millennium, we can only say “it was…uh…kinda like the 70s?”

*I have to be fair here. Bach wrote parts of his greatest cantatas as variations on old hymns. A bust of George Washington is really nothing more than a reiteration of Caesar’s profile. The continuum of the arts have trudged forward with an ebb-and-flow progress, reiterating between the retelling of well-worn stories and entirely new creations.

I’m always on the lookout to try new ideas (ie. Alexandra Wentworth’s WASP Cookbook and 25 Chicken Recipes From A Retired Voodoo Master…the latter is less frightening, truth be told). Perusing over a library shelf of cookbooks, I try to mix it up, piling a cheery Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Cookbook with Sara Moulton’s Sara’s Secrets for weeknight meals, the indispensible White Trash Cooking I & II, and if I really wanted to spoil the masochist Stepford Wife side in me, there’s always Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques.

A charming surprise I came across was Barbara C. Jones’s Cooking with 5 Ingredients and Gourmet Cooking with 5 Ingredients: both were are an absolute delight, if in nothing but brevity alone. Now for myself, I’m all for spending long hours in the kitchen barefoot making stuff artichokes and escargot-filled mushrooms with truffles under bay leaves with a touch of bechamel, but for those nights when all working couples (ugh! unthinkable!) return home exhausted with the kids whining for repeated viewings of TransAmerica, a quick homecook meal is still infinitely healthier than any thing fastfood chains can introduce into your body.

So give it a shot. There’s even a quickie chapter on beverages. Make a Pink Fizz (pink sparkling wine with lemonade concentrate and beverage) to go with your cucumber dip, before a Pasta with Basil dinner and sweet potato wedges on the side

D332 Stepford tip: Substitute tofu, soy, and vegetables for all things unhealthy….except the bourbon.

D332 extra cooking tip: Look in old magazines for recipe ideas. I recommend 1955-1957 editions of Ladies Home Journal.

Violent movies and novels are on the rise; women and girls are loud and crass, aping cavemen histrionics as an indication of equality and liberation; kids are being taught sex education way too early; condoms are being passed out before a childhood is been experienced; teen girls are sporting tight “porn star” t-shirts as a fashion statement; leering surly men everywhere, what’s a girl to do?!

A Return To Modesty inspects premature sex education, cavalier attitudes towards dating (ie. “hook-ups”), the riot-grrrl concept of equality through women behaving as badly as men, men, college and campus life in the form of militant and radical feminists, the problems and peer pressure of coed dorms and shared bathrooms, (an almost out of place chapter on) prozac to treat sensitivity in women, parental guidance, and of course, understatement in one’s public presentation. There’s also a charming appendix featuring snippets of etiquette advice to the modest woman from all decades.

I’m sure the same complaints filed against Friedan’s Feminine Mystique will resurface here: there’ll be a rift between class and race, as plaintiffs declare that whole segments of the melting pot are not being addressed. But in Ms Shalit’s defense, I think it’s important to write about your world and what you know. If she were to venture into different socioeconomic and racial sectors (which she may have little experience), there will be yet another group that rails against the absence of another subdivision. Modesty for Bosnian women living in Russian-populated Brighton Beach anyone? Where does it end? I say, stick to what you know. If the naysayers want representation, they should submit their own drafts.

The opening pages of A Return To Modesty has the author stating: “As anyone who has ever had an ideology knows, you do not ask; you just look for confirmation for a set of beliefs.” Although this gets negated later on, I felt that oftentimes throughout the book, Ms Shalit DOES go looking within a narrow genre in the media to support her arguments: audacious headlines from Cosmopolitan magazine resurfaced throughout the book; The End of Alice (a novel about a sexual predator who violates and decapitates his underaged victims); Playboy magazine; Howard Stern; Dear Abby Q&A; Nazi’s; Complete Woman Magazine; and Vogue magazine. It’s almost too easy. Even friends of mine who watch UFC cagefighting to relax would blush more than Ms. Shalit’s modest women at the mention of some of these topics. All of my friends and family members (male and female) groan at the first mention of Cosmo magazine. It is true that all these factors collectively form the zeitgeist of current trendy behavior, but they are not the only culprits of the modern push towards brazen manners.

Don’t get me wrong, there are cursory references and quotations from a broad cross-section of the Western canon: Kant, Kinsey, Samuel Johnson, Satre, de Beauvoir, Aristotle, Plato, etc. At one point, I almost felt it was more interesting to read the book as a collection of quotes. But that’s all they were: quotations. It didn’t get tied together into one cohesive argument that flowed from one paragraph to another, one chapter into the next. It sometimes felt as if established philosophers were rallied by Ms. Shalit to bulwark her debate. Names get enlisted for a short quote in one paragraph and dropped in the next. That’s ok for a few paragraphs, but when it continues throughout an entire book, I must confess the focus was difficult to sustain.

I also felt the author’s occasional snippy and sarcastic retorts to quoted comments from glaringly insensitive people are immodest and unnecessary.

Modesty is a wonderful idea, and I must commend the author for proudly declaring a strong father-daughter bond (in times when it is no longer chic to do so). I also agree that women who dress better and more conservatively do get treated better, regardless of what sort of neighborhood they are in. I adore the notion of etiquette (no matter how outdated it is) and I believe it forces men to behave better. I’m sad that kids no longer have the luxury and time to be kids; peer pressure and unquestioning consumption of multiracial popular culture have forced children to become a grotesque sort of adult long before they need to be. Parents may want to pay close attention here, as subtle indicators point to the observation that teen girls are acting trashy when deep down, they really don’t want to. According to Ms. Shalit, many of them feel pressured to do so. (Readers who want to investigate this particular topic should check out Rosalind Wiseman’s “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” the book that the movie Mean Girls was based on.)

There are many great ideas in this book and there there is certainly no shortage of intellectual support, I just wish it was weaved better to present a stronger case. In these loud, in-your-face times, modesty deserves a quiet but firm push into the limelight.

As most of you may have already heard, Tim Russert passed away on June 13th. If you get a chance to watch the MSNBC special or NBC this morning, you should do it. I guarantee you will walk away a different person. It’s not just about a newsman. It’s about the idea of quality, the commitment to excellence, and the great can-do optimism that made this country great.

The internet is piling up with blog and news entries about this, so there’s really no need to repeat too much here. Predictably, there are bloggers who shrug and go “big deal, he was just a newsman, what’s the fuss all about?”

It’s about so much more than just a newsman.

Russert’s story and life was one of enthusiasm, joy, hard work and a belief that the American viewer deserved more than mere punditry. He was also respected for being well-prepared, thoroughly researching the politicians who come to sit on the Meet The Press hot seat, and going medieval on their seats when they try to worm their way out of accountability. I can’t count how many times reporters and anchormen and women have backed down when a politician refuses to provide an answer that every American has a right to know.

One doesn’t really appreciate this until “journalism” from other countries are inspected. There are places where news is doctored to such a degree that no locals even treat it as truth. My country of birth, for example, has government -to this day - who can conveniently arrange for a journalist with Russert’s persistence to disappear overnight. Even though I have lived in the US for thirty years, not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate the freedom of speech.

I know people in the armed forces are fond of saying “freedom isn’t free.” Though the cost of freedom is debatable, what Russert did was to make that earned freedom worthwhile. Not a breath was squandered when accountability was demanded. I just hope the new generation of journalists don’t get inspired by the loud, shouting FOX-News brand of critical inquiry.

What is quite endearing about Russert on this special day, was his love of life, work, and family. Look at any of the pictures of him outside the shots from Meet The Press. The fellow had the biggest, most optimistic smile that I love. It was a smile loaded with promises and the great Kerouac American spirit. He had also written a book about his close relationship with his dad, Big Russ & Me. For a man who was not only all about family, but dedicated himself to sharing the joyful wonder of his Father-Son relationship, it’s heartbreaking that he should go two days before Father’s Day. Just…sigh.

I once asked my first art teacher what decade he thought was the greatest in American history. His answer would come to play a big role in who I am today: “The 50s saw America at the height of the nation. The GI Bill had produced the highest percentage of college-educated people in the population, war was behind us, the technology left over from wartime was producing products with the highest quality the country had ever seen. The future looked bright and full of possibilities and companies were committed to excellence.”

It’s no surprise Tim Russert was born in the beginning of the 50s.

A Chinese woman’s father gets murdered in San Francisco.

She outsmarts gangsters and evades them. Fashionable, stylish, and affluent, she embarks on a solo journey to an island in Central America on a mission to nail the head of the gang.

On the other end, a Chinese American federal agent attempts to solve the murder case alone, so he goes undercover.

Eventually they both meet, and join forces to solve the case.

They both speak clear, unbroken English with no visible accent.

They defeat the criminals and ride off into the sunset together.

Am I dreaming?! THIS is not the pigeonhole extravaganza known as Hollywood today! Is this some Bizzaro world where everything has been turned on its head? Is there actually hope that Hollywood can actually show people as they are?!!

NO. This was Hollywood SEVENTY YEARS AGO, and the film is called Daughter of Shanghai. This month on TCM’s Asian Images In Film.

(more…)

The fabulous and hilariously witty art of Robert de Michiell will be on display at the Alden Gallery in Provincetown, in his first solo show ever. This comes after decades of distinguished illustrations for Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Time Magazine, and the cover and pages of The New Yorker Magazine.

Alongside movie critic and sometimes housewife Libby Gelman-Waxner, De Michiell has gently poked fun of all the celebs in Gelman Waxner’s movie column “If You Ask Me.” (Now compiled in the paperback collection If You Ask Me: The Collected Columns of America’s Most Beloved and Irresponsible Critic .

De Michiell’s work is a household item even if you may not have heard of him; his familiar style has been unabashedly copied by magazine illustrators from all corners of the globe. Combining an economy of strokes with a cheerful minimalistic, sometimes cubist palette, this American artist captures the essence of both famous personalities and familiar personae while revealing interior angles we have often thought about but never possessed the tools to vocalize.

His exhibit will also coincide with Provincetown’s 10th Annual International Film Festival which will run from June 18-June 22.

I’m sitting here scratching my head while reading the reviews for the new illustrationless BETWEEN HUSBAND AND WIFE - (REVISED) Gospel Perspectives on Marital Intimacy. Don’t get me wrong. The Mormons have provided me with countless hours of reading pleasure. (The two Andelin books are the two books I would pick to take on a desert island).

But in the Amazon reviews, everyone’s talking about a chapter called “Drawing the Line” where the “unnatural, unholy” act is admonished as something that should not be done.

I was trying to figure out what that “unnatural, unholy” act was.

Turns out, it’s oral sex.

I can’t tell you how much of a relief that was.

I kept thinking they were talking about an 8-way with an RC on the sofa leading to a DAP while I have my tea before doing ATM’s that lead to a switch piledriver then ending in a Tony Danza Donkey Punch topped with multiple facials.

Phew…guess I’m in the clear after all!

Marie-Josée Croze as Henriette Durand

My earliest memory of Julian Schnabel are of mural-sized paintings, and photographs of the artist, topless, standing on windswept beaches. When his other films Basquiat and When Night Falls came out, I was hoping to see how he would translate it on to the screen. Everything I expected from those previous films is present in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where a pedestrian filmgoer like myself, can clearly detect the wonderful vista in the mind of an artist’s eye. The electronically-tinted tidewater glaciers breaking off in slow motion, majestically to Bach’s Concerto for Piano BWV 1056 Adagio is an absolute delight. Long hair blowing in an open-top convertible, the setting sun on the surface of a woman’s face. These are things that keep one’s interior warm and alive.

And speaking of the eyes, Mathieu Amalric has the most difficult job in the world: acting an entire movie with one eyeball. He succeeds with one dilated eye, anxiously bursting to free itself from the paralyzed body in which it belongs. Although Emmanuelle Seigner is featured on the cover, the real treat is Marie-Josée Croze as the therapist. Croze is one of those actors who, like Amanda Plummer, has such a total command of her face, she can make one dimple twist a certain way while an eyebrow moves another way, combining a facial expression that is constantly shifting, with complex emotions subtlely underlined. Anne Consigny as the stoic and handsome assistant gives that one working eye a good reason to open up each morning. If one were to pick actors for the many classical Bergman facial shots in this film, the ones presented here were excellent choices.

At first, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly reminded me of Johnny Got His Gun. After a while, like the incantation of the lettering system (”E,S,A,R,I,N….”) the story comes into its own, developing its unique visual vocabulary and rhythm. Like the most frequently-used letters, our protagonist draws on his most meaningful memories and imaginative fragments to help him construct a viable reason to exist and recuperate. It’s almost a play on the phrase “do I have to spell it out for you?” as we often see, from within the patient/narrator, that you can assemble letters into words, and then words into sentences, and yet, what is really going on inside your head, cannot always be translated.

I have been wanting to get to re-writing my Introduction Page to this site for over a year. I’ve always shied away from paying too much attention to my website, as those of you who know me have already discovered. Any mention of any pictures will bring me here to look up, since I don’t remember which is being referred to.

While attending to my Introduction Page, I noticed many hyperlinks that go in all direction. That’s because this website is 11 years old this August. It has gone through a multitude of changes.

One of the things I promise myself to do more is to bring a camera with me when I do go out with friends. I hate for anyone to think that this girl sits at home and snaps pictures all day. I do go out often, but I never tote a camera along. I also promise to smile in more of my pictures.

Here is the new Introduction to this website (which can also be found on the upper corner side bar of every page entitled Introduction)

Eleven years after the debut of my first website at Yahoo Geocities in 1997, the mere six page Transvestite Freedom Fighter has morphed into a veritable beast in a labyrinthine maze of links. Although all the original pages can be found archived here, the original concept of the website rests on one fundamental idea: “Never apologize for who you are, or what your website is about.” I never understood why transgendered people continually prefaced their webpages with an adult warning content. Transvestite Freedom Fighter was a call to stop associating one’s identity in the same category as explicit adult content.

Eventually, the page changed into The Art of Not Passing. This theme inspected the whole importance many transgendered people put on passing. As a person who is on the fringe even within the transgender community, I saw passing as a curious metaphor for conforming. It wasn’t that I had any problems with the notion of passing. After all, one must pass to experience as little friction in our non-accepting culture, seeing that transgender people are the final frontier for prejudiced treatment in modern day. I simply chose to inspect the idea of passing as a way to illustrate how everyone needs to “pass” according to their environment, in order to survive and function.

I believe the day everyone passes will be the day the label “transgender” gets retired. Much like a global economy and a global culture, indigenous societies and unique voices are quickly being swallowed up, losing their identities.

The Art of Not Passing then became The Solitary Arc, which was just a collection of my writings and pictures. In a way,The Solitary Arc paved the way for the self-identifying d332.com. I’ve always felt that with all the transgender websites detailing every aspect of SRS and transitioning, the collective perception of trans* people is that SRS and transitioning is all we talk about. So I thought I’d reveal instead, the other things that occupy this transgender person’s mind.

I am driven by a sense of happiness that I derive from speaking to the people within the culture. I wanted to provide a modest but positive free website on the internet regarding the community, because we haven’t really been given a fair chance in the public’s eye. Most of what people get from search engine returns either adult sites or argumentative in-fighting within the t* discussion groups (and there’s a lot of that).

Certainly, the group that is closest to my heart, the brash, self-descriptive gay transvestites, have been disappointingly under-represented.

So here I am.

I have been transgender for over thirty years. I don’t plan to transition fully, but I’m going to get a few bumps put on here and a few bumps taken off from there. Anyway you cut it, both the male and female anatomy are gorgeously remarkable works of art. I am struck by wonder when I think about the beauty of the human body. I am not a hormone-taker, as I feel that sex drive is one of the critical lifeforce in sustaining the great human imagination.

My increasing preoccupation with the home-making Stepford Wife has made this website arrive at the point it is at today. Although I am a staunch advocate for women’s rights, equality, and feminism, I also believe that everyone should be able to live free and chose the life they want to lead. Stepford Wives, and more importantly for me, the docile Asian “Lotus Flower” are social constructs. The difference between the two is that one lives in comfort and modest luxury, while the other has to make do with bargain-hunting white males. For my personality type, the choice is clear.

Human beings are constantly in danger in their coexistence with viruses. But we shouldn’t flatter ourselves as superior beings. Instead, we should take the path of virus mutation as an ideal, and develop accordingly. I want to continuously, energetically, and joyfully change, morph, improve, learn, and absorb knowledge, wisdom, and humane lessons with each passing day.

This, for me, is the most important transition: to be a human being first, and a transgendered person second.

So relax, make yourself at home, and enjoy!