TCM Remembers... and so do I

I don't really want to be sitting here doing this tonight. It's New Year's Eve after all; I should be out-- No, forget that. It's too damn cold, I'm too damn broke, and as I replied to that e-invite to Obama's Inaugural Ball (actually an e-invite to a Chicago "Inaugural Ball" celebration) I'm not in the mood to party. My mood was brighter earlier when the day was younger and sunnier and I was puttering around the house, cleaning the closets and tweaking the placement of chairs and book shelves and speaker units. There was in the background a cop flick on Turner Classic Movies, a mostly forgettable John Wayne actioner from the seventies, and after it ended, and following clips of coming attractions, TCM's tribute to the notable artists and performers who died in 2008 came on. I stopped distracting myself, turned up the volume, and sat down to watch.

You've seen it by now I'm sure, on YouTube if not on TCM, that poignant black and white video Farewell, silent but for Estelle Reiner's wryly funny throwaway line from When Harry Met Sally ("I'll have what she's having") and that song--Joe Henry's profoundly moving and elegiac lament, "God Only Knows"--that perfectly underscores the montage of famous and not so famous faces, beginning with tough guy actor Richard Widmark (who shocked 1947 audiences as Tommy, the giggling baby-faced psycho who kills an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman by gleefully shoving her down a flight of stairs in Kiss of Death, his film debut);

continues with "sexpot" actress Edie Adams (whom I vaguely recall as the sultry Muriel cigar girl in sixties TV commercials and whom to this day my mother remembers fondly as the drolly moniker-ed "Barbara Seville" in the Steve McQueen-Natalie Wood drama Love With the Proper Stranger);

and along the way includes dancer Cyd Charisse, whom the great Astaire called "beautiful dynamite" and so she was, those skyscraper legs and flashing eyes vamping him in The Band Wagon's "Girl Hunt Ballet," Gene Kelly in Singin' In the Rain's "Broadway Melody", and pretty much everyone else in one of two of my absolute favorite Charisse numbers: the erotic, alluring "Two-Faced Woman" (stupidly cut from Band Wagon and the India Adams-dubbed vocal handed to Joan Crawford for her outlandish, drag-queen turn in Torch Song) and the ethereally beautiful Silk Stockings Ballet in the movie of the same name;

directors Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella;

Carol Burnett's second banana extraordinaire Harvey Korman;

both Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn, leading man and leading lady, respectively, of the haunting world cinema classic, Black Orpheus;

Hot Buttered Soul icon Isaac Hayes, composer of the much imitated "Theme From Shaft;"

director-choreographer Michael Kidd (who must be forever celebrated for his athletic, imaginative staging and/or choreography of Golden Age of Hollywood classics Li'l Abner, Guys and Dolls, The Band Wagon and most memorable of all, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers);

and bawdy, whiskey-voiced beauty Suzanne Pleshette, now and forever Emily Hartley, Bob Newhart's raven-haired spouse on the The Bob Newhart Show, but also immortalized as the earthy, ill-fated schoolteacher Annie in Hitchcock's The Birds.

Charlton Heston is dead, lost to Alzheimer's and decrepit old age, a major star (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Major Dundee, A Touch of Evil, El Cid, The Agony and The Ecstasy, Richard Lester's splendid Musketeer films and, oh yes, Planet of the Apes) and once a Big Hollywood Liberal who somehow, somewhere along the way morphed into a spokesman for the National Rifle Association.

The realization that these luminaries were now a memory (Lois Nettleton? Roy Scheider too? And Brad Renfro--? When did Brad Renfro die? What happened?) startled and saddened me, but I really choked up at the sight of the shining face of actor-comedian Bernie Mac, gazing upward and lost in a moment of thoughtful contentment near the end of Steven Soderbergh's splendid Ocean's Eleven remake, the gifted, way-too-young-to-be-gone Heath Ledger, on horseback as the tortured Ennis Del Marr in Brokeback Mountain, the rascally stand-up comic turned cultural curmudgeon George Carlin (if his Take-Offs and Put-Ons and Occupation Foole are no longer my all-time favorite comedy albums they're still right up there in the top five), and the biggest heartbreak of all, the Big Male Superstar crush of my girlhood, the great Paul Newman, actor, director, activist, race car aficionado, Newman's Own philanthropist, family man, cool dude. (I was only flirting with Redford, you know that, right Paul? A passing fancy, nothing more) I knew he was old now, and heard he was ailing. And my grown-up, logical mind understands full well that no one, even the greatest of the Great Stars, will live forever.

But still. Paul Newman.

And Eartha Kitt has left us--the sleek, sensational siren of stage, screen and the supper clubs of a more glamorous (and, alas, segregated) entertainment era, the actress-singer an infatuated Orson Welles once declared "the most exciting woman in the world," died of cancer on Christmas Day, her passing too recent for her to be included in TCM's 2008 tribute. Like Kidd, who actually died December 2007, Kitt will no doubt be featured in next year's edition. Very possibly Eartha Kitt will be remembered best by a younger generation for her amusing voice work as the evil (and wonderfully sarcastic) Yzma in Disney's superior animated feature The Emperor's New Groove, but I will always love her for the languorous purr of songs like "Just An Old-Fashioned Girl," "Lazy Afternoon," and especially the teasing, sultry "Santa Baby" (ignore the juvenile and truly awful Madonna effort), the version featured on her MCA "Best of Eartha Kitt" album, without the gulping backing vocals.

To Bill

I am watching The Lawrence Welk Show on public television as I read your blog. No idea why. I could be watching the lanky and impossibly young Jimmy Stewart romance Jean Arthur in You Can’t Take It with You on TCM, or the 1973 episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show where Phyllis almost gets Lou Grant to sell his house. Instead I'm sitting here, watching this impossibly white bread song and dance routine.

My grandmother loved this waltzy, schmaltzy, relentlessly MOR variety show—especially when Arthur Duncan, the only African-American cast member, joined in ’64—and watched it every Saturday night. Sometimes, just to be with her, I'd join her in her bedroom with a snack or the evening's dessert, waiting for the appearance of America’s Singing Sweethearts, the Lennon Sisters. I never had the nerve to ‘fess it to Grandma, but I was really crushing on Peggy in those days—no, not Peggy—Kathy. Kathy was the sexiest of the Lennons and, to my 10 year old mind, the most elegant and sophisticated. I’m pretty sure it was Kathy.

Do you ever feel like life is getting too fucking complicated and you just want to go back, Bill? Not necessarily to start all over—just full out retreat to a time when life was simpler, like James Daly in that Twilight Zone episode. Or Gig Young, in that other Twilight Zone episode. A time, in so many ways, even less just than now but simpler, at least on its face.

Nothing is simple now, or at the moment, much fun. When Barack Obama won last month, I was astonished and ecstatic and emotional. Finally, it’s happened, and in my lifetime. At last, at last. My mother began to save the daily papers, savoring all the beautiful pictures of Barack and Michelle and their charming little girls, delighting in the images of America’s first black First Family. Meanwhile I gloried in all the newsmagazine covers coming into the library daily mail bundles—the Times and the U.S. News and World Reports, the Newsweeks and the Nations—the kind of magazines where previously, if there was a black male face on the cover, it probably meant trouble, disgrace. But here was Obama seated, Obama standing, Obama looking purposeful and serious, Obama with kind, crinkly eyes and a breezy smile. Obama on the cover of Ebony, emerging from a car wearing dark sunglasses; the ultimate, the epitome, of class and confident cool. God, how great was this? He was Sidney Poitier and John Shaft and Martin Luther King and Alexander Scott all rolled into one tall dark and handsome package of sexy excellence. Mister President. My president. You should have seen me grinning at my family and coworkers and neighbors and friends and all of them grinning back. Even with the snowballing economic upheavals, even growing more and more scared about losing their retirement savings or their jobs, they couldn’t stop grinning about President-Elect Obama and neither could I.

Then the reality of Prop 8 began to sink in, really take hold, and with it the dawning realization that My President was not going to talk to me about this, not going to address my shock and consternation. I understood perfectly well that while in the midst of trying to put together his new administration he was busy being confronted with one looming crisis after the next; still, his silence began to worry, and then rankle. He did release a statement through his media people, expressing his regrets, or something like that, regarding the passage of the anti-gay initiatives. That was nice… actually, no. That was bullshit. How could Obama profess to “regret” Prop 8? I mean, doesn’t he essentially agree with it? Because of his religious beliefs? Because of the way he was brought up?

And now, rubbing salt into a wound he seems unaware is there, Obama asks the new Falwell—Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor who equates homosexuality with bestiality, incest and pedophilia—to give the invocation at his January inaugural. Since the announcement, the beaming, avuncular Warren has been doing the press tour thing, making it ever clearer with his remarks exactly why “the gays” and their supporters are so up in arms about him as the choice to launch the Obama presidency.

Barack Obama is still the big hero, the Miracle Man, to my family and coworkers, for whom the controversies about Prop 8 and Rick Warren (and the lack of LGBT appointees in his cabinet) either don’t register or exist mostly as a lot of damn noise. This is hard, because when I stand up and speak out I am in conflict with them and when I don’t I am in conflict with myself. On election night my mom and I hugged each other because we knew when Obama won, we’d won too. We toasted his ascension and remembered with love and sadness those who were not here with us to share the historic moment: my younger brother Joe, her oldest sister Jean, her mom—my Grandma.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m still sorting all this out. I feel wounded and a little defeated, not at all the way I expected to be feeling now. Barack Obama is still my president. I still have high hopes for him and for my country. But I’m not grinning anymore; I am too disappointed for that. I am angry, and tired, and my heart—my heart is just not in it.

Obama and Warren, Together At Least

It’s disheartening, isn’t it.

Especially after Prop 8. If only Prop 8 had been struck down, and soundly, we could all maybe take a deep breath about Rick Warren—God, he’s smug, isn’t he? Just like Falwell; it’s like he thinks we’re too stupid to see through all that roly-poly affability—and say: Okay, maybe Barack is throwing the fundies an inclusion bone. We could’ve chalked it up to Obama’s wanting to reassure the religious right that his embrace of LGBT Americans does not equal a complete rejection of them, that he considers us all, every one of us, The American Family, even if some of the siblings never get along. The problem of course is that, so far, it’s us to whom he’s tossed the bone. Barack Obama has yet to truly embrace us, and after the searing insult of Prop 8—and his silence about Prop 8—the choice of Rick Me? Homophobic? Me? Warren for his Inaugural invocation really is a tone-deaf kick in the teeth.

You were expecting better? Well, I wasn’t. I wasn’t expecting anything from Obama as regards LGBT issues, exactly, though I allowed myself to hope. I am still hopeful, guardedly.

Here’s the thing. In my experience, straight black men do not handle the “gay thing” well. They really don’t. If they’re not openly, flagrantly hostile, then they’re at least terrifically discomfited, making with all manner of nervous little jokes, and pious observations that it’s not their place to judge, we’re all sinners, and anyway let he who is without sin, etc. etc. Some even feel compelled (particularly in the presence of other black males) to make obnoxious, hurtful moves just to prove their hetero bona fides. For black men in America, many of whom struggle with fatherlessness and issues with women, it’s all about masculinity, especially as it intersects with race, and the fear of being perceived as a “punk.”

In defending his opposition to gay marriage, Obama said something or other to his interviewer about the way he was raised, and I sighed, feeling tired all over. The way he was raised, yada yada yada; plus, he’s a Christian, blah, blah, blah. I thought, yeeeeeaah, ya know, maybe we need to take a step back from this guy and reassess. True, he is brainy and charismatic and attractive, the very first African-American elected to the highest political office in the land—but more than all that he’s new, relatively. Just a few years ago, most Americans had never heard of Barack Obama. Maybe that’s key. Maybe that above all is why expectations of him run so high and why so many, including so many of us queers, are inclined to see so much in him. It’s easy to idealize someone you don’t really know, easy to lose sight of—let’s be nice and say “the probability” rather than “the fact”—that at the end of the day what we have in Barack Hussein Obama is not only just another calculating politician, but also just another straight black guy who is really uncomfortable with the whole gay thing, and is even prepared to do obnoxious, hurtful things to prove his hetero, Christian bona fides.

Blue Monday

The North Wind doth blow; we soon shall have snow—

We do have snow today, Chicago’s first snowfall of the season. All day yesterday the wind howled and raged, banging against our windows. We stayed inside, not eager to be pelted by icy sleet, dead leaves and kicked-up dirt. From my 25th floor view the street below looks like a child’s careful arrangement of Legos and building blocks dusted with confectioner sugar. The sky is so impossibly white, so heavy with the next blow, that the lake, usually a sparkling blue-green, has actually disappeared into it. I am seized with an impulse to walk the lakefront as I used to when I was a moody teenager. A few years ago, when I still lived in Hyde Park, I could do that since Lake Michigan was literally scant minutes away from my front doorstep. Here at my Bronzeville address the view of the lake is better but it is actually farther away, more trouble to reach. It’s fascinating to me that the water always looks so much closer than it really is.

I should have gone out today. I might still, for a walk around the block if nowhere else; it’s just a bit past 3.

Of course, time will not stand still while I type…

I spent most of the day cleaning up the joint and rearranging my furniture. I always do this when I’m restless, a little anxious, and don’t know what else to do with myself; it’s someplace—not the most desirable of places, but someplace—to take the energy. I haven’t wanted to do much of anything lately, not even write, so maybe today’s pre-spring cleaning is a good sign. I hope so. I’ve been feeling very melancholy and dispirited but then the winter holidays don’t often bring out the best in me. Last night my mother asked if we should order ham for Christmas dinner to supplement the turkey breast in the freezer and on the instant I was snappish and short-tempered, irritably reminding her that after all my efforts with last week’s Thanksgiving meal someone else in this family could bloody well do the cooking for the next holiday—don’t even go there. She retreated, meekly, and for the rest of the evening I felt like a shit.

*sigh*

I may have to be locked away for the entire month of December (and possibly January too) to ensure I don’t kill anybody.