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Madonna and me

THIS IS SO LONG!

(...that's what he said.)

I'm a little over 30 minutes into my Madonna video-watching marathon (thanks to the new, just-shy-of-complete-so-as-to-be-totally-infuriating 2-DVD set, Celebration). I started with Disc 2, as I'm less familiar with her later work, and was eager to rediscover gems I'd unfairly dismissed, and learn where I'd been wrong. I skip over "Ray of Light," because, well, it's hideous. I land on "The Power of Goodbye," and after 30 seconds, I'm seized by anxiety. I feel a weight on me, like my body's been hijacked and there's attempt to force something out of me. I flash back 12 years ago to my freshman year in college. I feel sad, I feel remorseful, I feel like the power of goodbye has nothing on the power of regret. This feeling that the wind, or maybe my soul, has been knocked out of me only intensifies as Madonna broods around under a blueish filter in a fabulous house on a fabulous cliff, and then on a fabulous beach, solemnly crooning words that are as painful as she is pained: "Your heart is not open, so I must go / The spell has been broken, I loved you so..." I'm seeing her drama. I'm raising it.

If this sounds gay to you, welcome to my point.

Despite its one-sided nature, my relationship with Madonna is more complicated than just about any of my personal ones. I'm lucky to get along very easily with my family, and I otherwise do not suffer fools. Shutting out people that prove toxic or time-wasting is easy; if you follow pop music like I do, shutting out Madonna is not. Even when she isn't riding the wave of an omnipresent hit, her shit hovers, provoking at least an eye roll or two (remember "American Life?"). Even while viewing her with disdain for a good part of the past 15 years, I have found her fundamentally irresistible on a visceral level. I can't not feel something for whatever she does, be it good, bad or...well, that's it, really.

Partially because I do find pleasure in being proven wrong and discovering something I'd been closed off to, and partially because I've noticed myself softening on Madonna in recent years, I decided to take the opportunity in reexamining her that was offered by the release of Celebration both in its double-CD and -DVD formats. Taking in the second half of her career (as designated by the chronological DVDs, which split the halves between Erotica and Bedtime Stories), proved eye-opening and at times painful, but the first half was shocking as well for the memories it elicited. I guess I'd repressed them to resolve with my evolving hatred, but I fucking loved this woman from an extremely early age. I remember being completely transfixed by the "Material Girl" video, virtually praying to the gods of MTV to play it when it wasn't on. I remember worrying about her toes being hurt when she kicked the pole in the "Borderline" video, or watching "Lucky Star" before there was even MTV and they played those weird syndicated music video half hours on TV. I remember being the only person on the dance floor of my cousin's Sweet 16 party in 1985, singing "Holiday" with desperation to the onlooking crowd. We needed a holiday. Why was I the only one who could see that? I remember attempting to hog the camera with an "Open Your Heart" lip sync rendition as my father filmed something that I can say with certainty now, from an objective if not quite fully recollected point of view, was just barely more interesting (a birthday party of my toddler sisters or some shit). I remember learning about what patchouli was via the scent of Like a Prayer. I remember dancing in my parents' room to the Dick Tracy soundtrack/inspired-songs collection/whatever the fuck that was -- all of it, not just "Vogue." I remember sneaking into Truth or Dare with a friend who was too much of a clod to play it stealthy - he jumped over some seats and got us thrown out of that theater and into the one we'd actually bought tickets for, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. (Incidentally, I never stopped loving Truth or Dare. I watch it whenever I find it on TV, and I pine for a DVD rerelease. I'll still take the masturbation scene over "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" any day.) I remember being in school and crawling out of my skin with antipation on the day Erotica was released, because I knew it was waiting for me at home, thanks to my mall-going mom. I remember singing "Secret" at my friend Jessica's Sweet 16 party in high school, not caring whether people were going to call me a fag, because whatever, they were going to anyway.

Indeed, from around the time of "Vogue," and probably before, I was aware (and made aware and remade aware) of how gay it was to like Madonna (this despite having the vaguest of vague awareness of Paris Is Burning, thinking it was about gay people in French hell or queer arson or something). I get angry when I think of how complacent I was in the face of steady gay bashing from the time I was in second grade through high school, but I do credit myself for not caring what people though about what I thought about Madonna. I just went right on loving her loudly and singing her even louder.

I guess she was something of an outlet to my repression. I didn't come to realize that I was gay, I was told it constantly, everywhere I went. Gay was bad bad bad bad, according to everyone, so I was determined not to be that even through my college years. I really related to Whitney when she told Oprah that part of the reason she stayed with Bobby Brown so long was to show up the very vocal naysayers. People could talk all they wanted, but I wasn't going to let anyone determine my identity. I guess instead of exploding on them, I restricted myself. It was self abuse to such an extreme that during my teens, I would steal Playgirls (and Hustlers, since there were always a few dudes in there) from my father's drug store (I worked there), jerk off to them, and consciously tell myself, "You are straight, Rich. Straight." If this had the effect of shaking the soda bottle of my psyche, Internet porn put me in a fucking centrifuge. I can almost relate to the religious zealots who hate me on principle, since I lived through years and years of rejecting reason for faith in the absolute impossible.

Loving Madonna in the midst of all this was no coincidence. People wonder what attracts gay men to her and the larger-than-life women of her ilk. I think some of it has to do with the fact that when you are gay, there are really no restrictions on taste -- you can enjoy the girliest of girly things because what are people going to do, call you a fag for liking something? They already have. But that's more circumstantial that specific. More to the point, I think gay men take an active interest in Madonna, because when whipped into her entertaining frenzy, she seems so free. While masculinity is so often defined by restraint (Sports have so many rules! Real men don't cry!), iconic women like Madonna are characterized by their lack of it. They're allowed to put it all out there, to be as emotional as they want (maybe they aren't always praised for it, but they don't receive questions about their womanhood or death threats as a result). For those of us who feel repressed in any way for being what we are, the Madonnas of the world offer a vicarious thrill, an exuberance in one's identity. It's something to aspire to.

After Evita, things changed. As fixed on delusion as I was, it was becoming harder and harder to ignore my homosexuality. Like transubstantiation, it didn't make sense (Incidentally, I also stopped going to church entirely around this time, though I had been raised Catholic). My freshman year of college at NYU, Ray of Light came out and I dismissed it on the spot, now wary of the gay association. Paradoxically, a few months after the release of Ray that I attended by first gay-oriented event, the 18+ party Curfew at Twilo. I went with a girl because (don't laugh) there was some Tori Amos-themed giveaway going on (OK, you can laugh). You can't even imagine how confusing this was for me. I mostly avoided eye contact with everyone entirely, except for these two guys that came and sat across from us, repeatedly asking if we knew where they could get ecstasy. I was 19, at a gay party with a girl, fixated on my shoes. I can't believe they asked for E, when all signs pointed to K-hole.

Anyway, some dub of "Sky Fits Heaven" played that night (I recognized it because my Freshman year roommate -- gay, of course -- owned Ray of Light). The song just felt so...definitive. As much as I distanced myself from this world, my arms were only so long and so strong, and I kinda always knew that. I remember the dub being mostly instrumental, but one couplet that remained in tact was, "Think I'll follow my heart / It's a very good place to start." I didn't want to face it, but I could barely argue with it. I loved that song from that second on, and it remains pretty much the only thing that I fully adore from Ray of Light. (Though, obviously, in its ability to take me back to that feeling of closeted hopelessness, "The Power of Goodbye," has a place on my heart, as well.)

But those are exceptions -- I mostly disliked everything else through Confessions on a Dance Floor, which came out years after I finally did. (Biggest regret of my life: I didn't so much as kiss a guy until my last semester of college. I could have had so much fun, though given the fact that it wasn't until I was 25 that I realized I was mortal, I also could have put myself in grave danger. Maybe things worked out for the best?) Even though I still don't like Confessions (whatever good ideas Stuart Price has, he compresses into this hissing brick of sound), and even though when I lashed out about it on this blog, so many years ago, it was mostly in response to what I perceived as the thoughtless adoration from my online gay brothers, there were still some kind of unresolved issues with my sexuality going on that were coming out in my bashing. I didn't like Madonna because I wasn't one of those gays (despite the myriad other gay shit I loved and gushed about gaily). What nonsense. But, you know, self-acceptance is a process. I like to think that I'm finally there, but I also look forward to a time in the future where I look back and realize that I didn't even know the half of it at this point.

If Madonna is my barometer, as she has been all my life, I'm making strides. I enjoyed Hard Candy. Despite my tendency to grind my teeth whenever she aspires any kind of meaningful discussion, I loved what she had to say about Michael Jackson at this year's VMAs. Via Celebration, I've even gone back and learned to appreciate stuff that I'd turned up my nose at previously. I understand why I hated "Frozen" at the time of its release -- it sounded instantly dated, with a percussive rattling not unlike Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy," from 1991, which was not a good look in '98. Now if something came out mimicking that sound, I'd fucking flip for it. (Ray of Light, as a whole, does strike me as entirely too po'faced -- it's forced maturity at the expense of fun, which is kind of a sucky thing for pop music to be). Indeed, Madonna's rep as a pioneer still boggles my mind, as she repeatedly was behind trends (she cut her new jack swing album in '94, dabbled with trip-hop in '98, incorporated French house into her sound in '00, did the very electroclash thing of constantly referencing Giorgio Moroder in '05 and didn't get around to working with Timbaland and Pharrell until '08). On the other hand, "Die Another Day" now strikes me as way ahead of its time -- it's Autotuned electropop that would have no problem fitting in (and being better than most of) today's Top 40 programming. I even enjoy "Hung Up," now (the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" sample is genius), although Stuart Price's lisping mess of percussion is infuriating.

As I've come to value the importance of logic and reason (to an almost zealous extent), I realize that when it comes to Madonna, there is no need for extremes. I can handle adoring "Everybody," and hating "Sorry" (and "Don't Tell Me" and "Hollywood" and most of True Blue and Like a Prayer) without feeling particularly conflicted. I can admire Madonna's seeming fearlessness and engagement with the unfamilair without fully giving myself over to her (to do so, I think, is to invest more in opportunism and the importance of popularity than I'm comfortable with). See, right now, I'm all about aspiring to balance. Madonna has allowed me to see myself, again and again, and as recently as this post. It turns out that she's meant more to me than I've wanted to admit, to the point where the prospect of hitting "Publish" is making me uneasy.

But fuck it. Here's to freedom

October 07, 2009 in Dance music all night long, Gayness | Permalink

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Given my love of editing and cliches, this was probably inevitable: a montage of contemporary horror and suspense cinema's go-to roadblock, non-working cell phones. I'm probably more psychotic than your average horror villain for sifting through this crap and compiling this (66 movies are included!). At the same time, the fact that I couldn't include cellular mishaps in still-in-theaters fare like Jennifer's Body and The Final Destination is killing me. So, you know, at least I'm balanced. September 23, 2009 in Filmses, Horrors! | Permalink

Before I say anything about Whitney's epic two-day interview on Oprah, let me get this out of my system:

 

Oh boy, is this woman amazing. Enthralled for the full two hours Oprah rightly devoted to Whitney, a lot of things came to mind, but nothing more forcefully than these two words: consummate entertainer. Her story of drug addiction, co-dependency, getting sick of fame to the point where she really thought that part of her life was over, playing her status as an icon down so as not to emasculate her husband, doing Being Bobby Brown just for his sake (but thinking it was an accurate portrayal of their dysfunction) and on and on and on -- it was all so compelling, and the way she told it only made it more fascinating. I didn't think for one second that Whitney was anything but entirely honest -- at this point, what does she have to lose, anyway? This was the specific counterpart to her vague (but good) "comeback" album I Look to You, and I'm seriously in awe of Oprah's skills. I guess you don't get to be Oprah by accident.

The only thing I was a little bit disappointed by was that Whitney dodged the question of whether she lost her voice -- she was always confident it was there, but she made no reference to the fact that it's no longer near the condition it once was. Oh well, her performance of "I Didn't Know My Own Strength" at least restored some faith in her ability to perform live after her disastrous showing on Good Morning America. I guess she has her good days and her bad days (and indeed, in the first part of the interview, taped just the day before Central Park, her speaking voice was thin and raspy). After all, she's only human -- that seems to be her primary message these days, anyway.

Oh, and fuck Wendy Williams for taking Whitney to task for "not owning" her addiction, whatever the fuck that means. Whitney did not appear on Oprah to discuss the addition gene, but the circumstances that surrounded her drug problem (and they had everything to do with Bobby), and she certainly didn't go on Oprah so that Wendy Williams could tearfully address America and prove that she's the better recovering addict. I loved Wendy up till this. It could be a deal-breaker for me. I think ultimately she's just salty that she didn't get the exclusive, and she's trying to force her way into Whitney's spotlight. What a pig. I think we all know the appropriate response. Ahem.

Anyway, I'm not going to recap the interview or anything, just rip shit from context for maximum hilarity, because this woman is really something else. First up is a soundboard of my favorite quotes from the interview:

And then below, some gifs. They are sooo necessary...

What a weird series of contradictions Inglourious Basterds is. It's epic in look and feel, but it ends on a whimper and wisecrack. It never stops explaining itself (creating the illusion of complication), but at the end of this simple tale of revenge, it feels like the line from A to B has been a straight one. It's a Quentin Tarantino film about atrocity, yet none of the violence feels gratuitous (at least to desensitized me). It was as brutal as its story demanded, no more and certainly a lot less than the much-maligned original trailer suggested.

Despite my gorehound tendencies, I'm not disappointed about that. It felt mature, as did the dialogue, which was deficient of the fast-talking, pop-culture worship that has defined Tarantino up till now. In that respect, making a period piece must have been something of a personal challenge. I guess he got some references in by saluting things like spaghetti Westerns and the French new wave. That stuff's off my radar, and I can't imagine how far it is off the average teenager that I shared space with on Friday. It made me chuckle that these kids came expecting a bloodbath and were instead presented essentially a reading assignment, given the amount of dialogue and the fact that it's almost all in French or German. It felt like a very gentle fuck you. That's yet another contradiction.

At this point, you can't really amputate a Quentin Tarantino picture from his body of work -- it's all part of an ongoing discussion (and sometimes that discussion feels like one long declaration of self-satisfaction). More than any other working director, I can't help but judge all of his movies against his past work. I wonder how Basterds would be taken on its own, not as Tarantino's grown-up quasi-historical epic. For one thing, I suspect it would have been made to come in at under two hours. Basterds didn't feel bloated to me, save the entirely expository scene, in which a pointless Mike Myers explained Operation Kino (the military plot to assasinate Hitler and other important members of the SS). Still, I can see how it is patience-testing, as it is a lot of sitting around and talking for relatively obvious pay-off (although Mélanie Laurent laughing at her oppressors via a projection on thick smoke is about as good of cinematic imagery as any I've seen this decade -- that alone was pay-off to me). I felt like the whole thing was tense, though. It affected my physiologically -- my pulse elevated, my hand strained from clenching. The movie is essentially a series of uncomfortable conversations, in which some powerful bad guy doesn't and can't know the secret of the good guy he's talking to (whatever it may be). I think it did a tremendous job of conveying the claustrophobia of occupation.

I just have one more point, but it's a major spoiler, so it's going under a cut...