The Nativity, Brought to You by MGM

I wouldn't want to watch the entire 4 hours of Ben-Hur online, although it's available. As the season demands, here is the opening, with the Star of Bethlehem, Three Wise Men, the Manger, Mary and Joseph, a donkey, Roman centurions, and the incredible Miklos Roza score:

and part 2 is here.

Since Obama Chose Rick Warren...

Caroline Kennedy came out.

The New York Times called civil unions for gays separate but not equal.

Keith Olbermann reported and discussed Warren's bigoted ideas.

Over 2,000 news articles popped up daily (today, for instance) on Google News when you typed in the words "inauguration" and "warren."

And it's a safe bet that the gay marriage issue will be featured in commentary during television coverage of the inauguration on January 20th, particularly right before and after Warren's invocation.

I spent two days last week being very disappointed, like so many others, with Obama's choice. Then on Friday morning, I woke up and thought about all the coverage the community nationwide is getting. It's like Obama handed gay advocates an early Xmas present of widespread media coverage, and the corresponding opportunity to teach and persuade.

When, in the history of the U.S., has a gay issue been so prominently featured in the buildup to a presidential inauguration?

...and this just in... Rick Warren pulls anti-gay language from his Web site.

Scenes from a Baby Boomer Christmas

Before Rudolph, Charlie Brown and The Grinch, there was...

Madness...madness!

In my job I'm exposed to a great deal of media that daily chronicles the dire straights across the country. Mix that with a number of seasonal, family, and age-related challenges and unfortunate yet expected occurrences in my own life, and I'm left in the evenings with a brain that tries to sift through an alphabet soup of alarming thoughts, which are hard to bring together in an intelligent format.

Tonight I flashed on the final few minutes of David Lean's "Bridge on the River Kwai" in which Alec Guinness plays a British officer and WWII POW (Col. Nicholson) who commands the men under him to assist the enemy in building a bridge. But instead of delaying its construction, he succumbs to his immense ego (rationalized to himself as Enlightened Superiority) and delivers a formidable bridge into Japanese hands. Here, the team sent to blow up the bridge battles Nicholson, who realizes, (SPOILER ALERT!) almost too late, the extent of his folly:

The Unexpected Is Always Upon Us

I had to do some Christmas shopping today so I took the Metro to Pentagon City. That was my first mistake, because the train was insanely crowded for a Saturday. Then the mall was packed, so I quickly passed through it and headed out to Hudson Trail Outfitters, where I could not find any gloves. Then, on the way to buy a Christmas card, I crossed the parking lot and was almost flattened by a car backing up - the driver wasn't looking where he was going, and when he saw me he yelled at me for getting in his way.

At that point I gave up and came home, not willing to take on any more madness. On the way home, three young ladies in traditional Santa Lucia costumes boarded the train and sang Swedish carols, which would have been nice if the Metro's tunnel roar hadn't drowned them out.

It was all quite like Luciano Berio's take on the Mahler 2nd, 3rd movement I wrote about a couple of days ago. In the third movement of his Sinfonia, Berio takes the Mahler scherzo and runs it through a blender, feeding in other pieces and quotes from Samuel Beckett, among others. According to Wikipedia, "Berio himself describes the movement as a "Voyage to Cythera", in which a ship filled with gifts is headed towards the island dedicated to the goddess of love." Well, there were no gifts in my afternoon and precious little love! Here's the first part of the Berio:


...and here's the second part.

16 Things I Hate About the Holidays

Everybody hates fruitcake, New Year's Eve, and Secret Santa gift swaps. They're easy to despise, and few will argue for them. But don't we each keep our own list of festive things that seriously test our goodwill? As today in D.C. is wet, cold, (now dark), and miserable, here are mine:

• "O Holy Night."
• Melismatic pop singers lugubriously mangling "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," "The Christmas Song," and "White Christmas."
• Those gigantic red bows on gift cars in commercials.
• "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer."
• The Perfect Gift.
• Rankin-Bass holiday specials (except for Rudolph. And the Rankin-Bass logo tag.)
• Virginia.
• Holiday movies in which a mysterious package appears under the tree Christmas morning which signals either that Santa exists or What Happened To The Hero The Night Before Wasn't Just A Dream.
• Office building holiday dessert receptions in the lobby.
• Midnight mass.
• Darkness, cold, and those illnesses that spring forth this time of year.
• Those who try to make other holidays into the alternative Christmas (let those holidays be what they are!)
• Office decorations.
• Whimsy.
• Traveling.
• 24 Hours of "A Christmas Story."

A Whole Lotta Resurrecting Going On

It seems unprecedented, how every day seems to bring yet another bout of bad bad news. And it's not just a spate of unfortunate current events - the very foundations of our society are quaking, and so many people in various towers of power who once said "trust me, this is working" are now saying "you know, we need buckets and buckets of help." Heck, even Tom Peters is depressed.

So it's interesting how much I've been reading about Gustav Mahler's 2nd Symphony ("Resurrection") and Gilbert Kaplan, a businessman who, without formal classical music training in his early life, became a remarkable orchestral switch-hitter, focusing exclusively on this massive work, learning how to conduct its forces...because he wanted to. And he did it again last night, with the New York Philharmonic, 100 years after Mahler himself conducted the same symphony with the same group.

I found references in The New York Times and The Economist, as well as a number of other unusual places that I should have written down. A coincidence of my own making perhaps.

Mahler's 2nd is a huge work that famously builds to a massive, transcendent climax, beginning, in my opinion, with the chorus singing "What has been created must pass away, what has passed away will rise again."

What's been taking my mind away from it all is the knowledge (hope) that one of the major driving forces of society is currently being resurrected. That, and the 3rd movement of the Mahler, in which the huge orchestra dances lightly, a bit sardonic and not entirely carefree. Here's Simon Rattle embodying the rhythm in the score while he barely conducts :

Here's part 2 of the 3rd movement.

Less Media More Social Part 1

I shared my building's elevator tonight with a resident who I've seen quite a few times but never spoken with. And for a couple of decent reasons, I've wanted to. Trouble is, in my neighborhood, you can see someone for years and not speak. Washington's a busy place, and everyone seems to go about with this aura of "don't bother me" emanating from them. Plus there's the memory of those times I did strike up a conversation, and was met with a cold stare, or a monosyllabic answer. Granted, there's also been times when a friendly moment resulted...but we all seem to bring up the negative memories first.

Which is why I really liked Chris Brogan's extremely short yet precise video on the subject:

Asleep at the Wheel - Time to Drive Again, But Maybe We Need a Smart(er) Car

By now it's generally understood that the gay community was asleep during the recent Proposition 8 debacle. However, we've woken up somewhat, enough to swerve and miss plowing into a tree and totally wrecking everything. Just take a look at some of the media that's been created lately.

There's Proposition 8: The Musical, which is the most talked-about thing online right now. I admit I only watched half of it - I think it speaks more to the already converted, while those who still believe homosexuality is morally repugnant will find in it further justification for their [_____________] (insert euphemism for bigotry.)

I prefer this piece, which asks everyone to sign a petition protecting marriage. It's sneaky, it's smart, it's somewhat argument proof:


There's a feeling here in D.C. that HRC wasn't doing its job in letting the California vote go the way it did. That's probably true, but I believe it's because they're a large organization, and large organizations are almost always more concerned with keeping themselves going, consequently making decisions that try to appease many instead of creating real change.

The real stuff that's going on now isn't the result of one advocacy organization. Even the recent nationwide demonstrations were grassroots affairs, linked under the online banner of Join the Impact, an organization that looks to have risen in the days after the election. They say they're a nonprofit, but they're a .com and not a .org, and probably haven't had time to apply for 501(c)(3) status. If I'm wrong, then somebody tell me...

Join the Impact's next steps include Day Without a Gay, a national food drive that will target faith-based emergency food providers as the recipients of goodwill, and Light Up the Night for Equality.

Finally, we need a radically redesigned communications strategy. We need to stop debating in forums where we can't win. In today's NY Times op-ed "Showdown in the Big Tent," Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz write "Although it has come as a shocking realization to many in this community, a host of sociological studies confirm that many blacks feel a significant aversion to homosexuality itself, finding it morally and sexually repugnant." It's time to bring in some big gun "new marketing" gurus to massively reframe the dialogue, take over the debates and focus exclusively on civil rights. But not before somebody does some research on why so many people find homosexuality morally and sexually repugnant, so we can target the cause of hatred and not the symptoms.

In the meantime, how about a national "Day With A Gay?"
____________________________________________________
OK, this post is entirely too long now...but I had to find a place for the following video I found on YouTube. Where to start? The background music is wonderful...

Don't People Have Better Things to Do?

Oh come on....

Scenes from a Depression Past

With all the tragic economic news alongside the "New" New Deal rumblings from the off-and-running office of the President Elect, I've been searching out escapist fare online. From the Great Depression of the 1930's, I found these visually fascinating and surreal productions from the great Busby Berkeley. Looking at them now, I find the contrast between the dated, not-quite-classic 30's musical language and the hard-edged, at times minimalist sets, patterns and choreography really resonant and fun. My faves:

"The Words are in My Heart" and its 56 floating, skating pianos.

"All Is Fair In Love And War" may go on too long, but I like the combination of the chromatic martial melody and dozens of giant white rocking chairs; the flags are fun and spectacular too.

His masterpiece, "Lullabye of Broadway," is a sinister take on broadway pizazz, and features many of his thirties motifs: disembodied singing heads, tiny urban vignettes,, impossible transitions, endless variations on a popular song, and massed geometric dance patterns. That it ultimately takes a tragic turn and becomes a cautionary tale for party girls everywhere makes it all the more nifty.

Watch Part 2 here.

In the forties Berkeley worked in color, and his hard edges bleed in the three-strip technicolor film process. His last great signature pieces, "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" (reminds me of hallucinations I experienced when I had surgery at 8 years of age), and "The Polka Dot Polka" get stranger and stranger as they go along. It probably drove him crazy when he couldn't get everyone and everything as precise as he had in the previous decade, and the studio most likely gave him less time and money to work with. Consequently, the human waves aren't quite in sync. However, the "Polka" ends with creepy disembodied heads floating in a disturbing technicolor space, but not before a series of images that almost rival Kubrick's Star Gate sequence in 2001 for their sheer abstract quality.

Strange...and tons of fun.

Show Me Less, Give Me More

"...smaller-scale visual narratives have been flourishing on the Internet, delivering topical satire, political commentary and slices of real-life absurdity with a nimbleness and speed that makes both conventional film and traditional television seem unwieldy. Movies, meanwhile, are once again responding by growing louder, brighter and more sensational. Imax and variously improved 3-D formats are becoming more popular with the movie studios, even as the widespread use of digital effects gives their products less and less resemblance to traditional cinema."
A. O. Scott, "The Screening of America," NY Times Magazine, 11/21/08

Hollywood's natural inclination to show us an otherworldly environment is to throw a ton of money at computer graphics and show us every digitized pixel in the Center of the Earth. Obscene amounts of money, especially in today's economic environment. But it doesn't have to be that way. Check out these fantastic scenarios, from the days before CGI. I find these flicks far more fascinating than anything on Isla Nublar.

Orphée - film run backwards, hands plunging into mercury - that's all it takes to get you from this world to an afterlife.

Cube - essentially filmed on one set, which gave the director more money for special effects, including a couple of process shots. But the movie would be just as disturbing without all the slicing and dicing. Available complete on Google Video.

Primer - a nifty time-travel film, made for $7,000. Granted, it gets incoherent near the end. But it was made for $7,000. Also available on Google Video.

Fahrenheit 451 - couples Bernard Herrmann's music with the ramrod-straight firemen on an open red fire truck to portray a society in which books are illegal.

Jason and the Argonauts - Herrmann again, bleating low rumbling brass notes to accompany the sight of an impossibly huge statue. And then that statue turns its head...

La Belle et La Bete - the real movie magic happens at 2:25 in this clip.

Revolutions All Around

Seth Godin on what the Government should do with the Big Three Automakers.

Stonewall 2.0 as, allegedly, Christians are "chased out of the Castro District." (The possibility of violence disturbs me, but I do like the whistles en masse.)

Traditional cinema in danger of succumbing to the online world, detailed in A. O. Scott's blandly balanced article in the Sunday New York Times.

Godin again, on the failure of the New York Times (and, subtextually, of all large, monolithic, flexible-as-stone corporations) to fully score in its own game.

Fun with Footwear

The sock puppet version of There Will Be Blood:

The Nature of My Mid-Life Crisis

Type 2, with a side order of Type 1.

Based on the categories listed in What Do You Mean There Are Four, or Five, or Six Types of Midlife Crisis? at LifeTwo.com.

DC Proposition 8 Rally Peaceful, Weather Not So...

Video by quixotist2, found on YouTube. Click here for more DC Rally videos.

A sudden, violent squall slammed my huge golf umbrella halfway through the DC Rally protesting the California gay marriage ban, blasting wind and horizontal rain against me and hundreds if not a thousand fellow marchers. The storm left the National Mall grounds wet and muddy and many in the crowd drenched, but the unseasonably warm November day kept hypothermia from thinning our ranks.

While my jeans got wet, my fleece pullover kept the rest dry as we walked past the Washington Monument, skirted the Ellipse and ended up at Lafayette Square across the street from the White House. At the same time thousands of other marchers in cities and towns across the country reminded the nation that all is still not well with some basic civil rights. View and read more about it here:

"Across U.S., Big Rallies for Same-Sex Marriage" from The New York Times.

More DC pictures at Join the Impact!
(Picture accompanying this post is detail from a shot taken by a fellow participant and uploaded to the DC photo gallery.)

Join the Impact! Promote love and equality in your city! - the "official" site.

The Mormon Rationalization for Proposition 8 - and the Reaction Nationwide

From "Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage" in yesterday's NY Times:

But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead, emphasizing that Proposition 8 was about marriage, not about attacking gay people, and about restoring into law an earlier ban struck down by the State Supreme Court in May.

“It is not our goal in this campaign to attack the homosexual lifestyle or to convince gays and lesbians that their behavior is wrong — the less we refer to homosexuality, the better,” one of the ward training documents said. “We are pro-marriage, not anti-gay.”

ummmmmmm, ok. Why do I feel like I just got off the Tilt-A-Whirl?

While I don't think protests are all that effective, I do believe today's events across the country could be. Here's more information on today's rally in DC, at the epicenter of freedom, which includes links to similar rallies in other time zones.

Even The Governator has shown some support...

And last but not least, here's what I found to be most powerful from Keith Olbermann's commentary earlier this week:

[T]his vote is horrible. Horrible. ... If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? ...

If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery.

Episode IV: A New Hope

Barber Violin Concerto, First Movement: Calm, measured, intelligent discourse. Not without justified anxiety.

How I Felt Like a Delegate to a Kind of Global Electoral College

Sure, I've had voter apathy in the past. I can't remember the first time I voted, and I know I've stayed home from the polls for some elections. Not this year. I stood in line for about an hour Tuesday morning, starting at 6:55 am, then cast my vote for Obama. A week before, I had asked someone who's far more politically savvy than me "Why vote in DC, when I know that the city's Electoral College votes will go to Obama?" He said, "Because we need to show how much we believe in him by turning out in incredible numbers. It'll look so much better with a high number of votes."

Or something like that. I agreed. And then I read something in BusinessWeek yesterday:

"Polls showed that in countries such as France and Germany, support for the Democratic candidate ranged between 65% and 80% of the population. The sense of engagement was typified by an editorial appearing early this year in Belgian newspaper De Standaard suggesting that given the stakes—on issues ranging from energy to climate change to the mortgage crisis—everybody in the world should be able to cast a vote in the U.S. Presidential election."
Europe Reacts to Obama Victory, Andy Reinhardt, 11/05/08

But not everyone in the world could vote in this election. Which made my vote count even more, considering the nature of today's problems (and the huge role the U.S. has played in causing a good number of them). So, for a brief moment, I felt like a delegate to a kind of global electoral college, which made my responsibility take on new meaning and weight.

The Scene Just Blocks from the White House

My neighborhood erupted at 11:00 last night, about 10 blocks north of the White House. Closer than you think, since I can see the executive mansion just a few steps from my door. As soon as the California polls closed and the networks exploded with their news, people yelled, whooped, cheered, their voices echoing in the alley behind my building. The noise got louder a few minutes later, as residents left their buildings the bars and restaurants in spite of the rain and car horns blared up and down 16th street. That's what I saw in my head, as I didn't move - the TV kept me glued in my living room - the TV and my laptop where I had the NYTimes, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC open in Firefox tabs. What was it - 15 minutes later - that the report came over the wires - McCain had conceded to Obama. I could see on TV that scores of GW students converged on the White House, pumped by the history and eager to let the current resident know that his terrible occupancy is not only over, it's finished with a blast of everything missing over the last eight years - including eloquence, intelligence, and unyielding hope.

Around 1 am I went outside. The rain was a drizzle, the car horns split the air, people on the sidewalks high-fived each other. I called my brother in New Hampshire, and held the phone to 16th street, in sight of the White House, leaving a message that was mostly street noise.
______________________________________________
Check out these stunning pictures at the Boston Globe's site, which I found thanks to kottke.org.