2006-08-03 - 7:47 p.m.
Today was terribly cloudy, overcast, and even a little chilly, so I didn�t get to go into the swimming pool. I hope it will be back to being clear, sunny, and hot tomorrow. I am eager to try out my new tan-through bathing suit; it arrived in the mail today. If it works out, I�ll also order a tan-through shirt. I�m not sure how I will be able to keep some portion of this tan up once winter comes (�winter� as it exists in Southern California, that is), because how can I sunbathe when I will be working from 8:00 to 4:00 every weekday? But maybe having a tan-through shirt will help�I could change into it for lunches outside--if I�m going to be that obsessed with this. I like being outside as much as possible, anyway, though.
Also, UPS brought me my new, (I think) handsome, white straw hat, something I had ordered at about the same time. I was a little worried that either the bathing suit or the hat might not fit me well, but no, both are perfect! The hat looks white in the picture, but is described as �natural, off white� in the order. I preferred white, as shown, but would have accepted it even if it were straw-colored, because I really liked the hat�s shape and style. Well, now that it has arrived, I can see that it really is beautifully white, so I am completely happy with it.
Why did I get the hat? Well, despite my current routine of intentionally exposing my skin to the pure, unfiltered rays of the sun, I want to have control over this process and not wreck it by getting sunburned. While I could wear sunscreen, and definitely will when I have to be out in the sun for a long period of time, I don�t really like to wear sunscreen and as I wrote previously, some of the ingredients can be cancerous. (So if one wants to avoid skin cancer from burning in the sun, it makes little sense to wear a sunscreen that could, itself, give you skin cancer.)
I was very impressed with how well my suede �Aussie� hat protected my face during the eight or nine hours I was exposed to the sun on the deck of the S.S. Lane Victory. Sure, I was wearing sunscreen, too, but the hat helped tremendously. In order to shield one�s face, the brim needs to be at least three-inches wide, which the Aussie hat brim is, and so is the brim of my new Basino hat. And the Amish hat I bought a few years ago (because of my admiration of the stolidness of their culture) has an even wider brim, but that hat is so clearly Amish that I am reluctant to wear it unless, say, I am gardening or doing some kind of work outside (which, so far having just this apartment, I don�t have an occasion to do) where the �costume� of an Amish hat makes sense. I am definitely aware of these hats making statements, fashion, or otherwise, and unless I am willing to walk about town referring to everybody as �The English�, I think the Amish hat will not be for general use.
I�m not normally a �hat� person, but in the past I have used them to good effect (but mostly as costumes, not as an expression of my self). For example, when I played Lieutenant Rooney in Grass Valley�s Studio Theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace, I decided to buy a 1940s grey felt Fedora (which otherwise wasn�t part of my costume) and that hat immediately made my character for me. And it�s more than a costume that one simply puts on the top of their head�a hat can be used expressively by taking it on or off at appropriate moments and in the way it is positioned on the head, it can used to indicate politeness or disdain, malice or innocence, shadiness or optimism, or any of several other characteristics, just in the way that glasses or cigarettes can be used for dramatic effect. I must have done a good job, because after I had moved away from that area and then came back to visit ten years later, somebody told me that a large portrait of me in costume as that character was on display in the theater�s lobby. I went by there to see, and sure enough, there it was! I think this was less as a memorial to my acting ability as it was due to my completely looking like that character, and I say it was all because of that hat!
I very much disdain baseball caps, though, or, much worse, caps such as some farmers wear, advertising �John Deere� or some kind of seed or fertilizer company�these just aren�t for me, mainly because they don�t really serve any function but to hide the expression of personal characteristics behind a display of mindless conformity. (Athletic team clothing as a whole does that, such as the absolute worst of all, voluminous and over-sized nylon basketball team knee-length shorts and tank-tops on people walking out in the street instead of actually playing basketball�just a little too much worship of the �Lakers� for me.) �Bills� do absolutely nothing to protect the face from the sun, but do everything to cut off from consideration the whole top half of the head. Brims, yes; bills, no.
I haven�t fully left the subject of the hat, but I want to move backward a little bit and talk about one of my interesting days at Outfest last July. This was one of the two days in which I had events at the Redcat. I was there for three programs, a program of experimental short films curated by a group I had never heard of called �LTTR� (which ended up standing for �Lesbians To The Rescue�), an experimental full-length film that ended up being my favorite of this year�s Outfest (Wild Tigers I Have Known), and another slate of experimental short films curated by an innovative video artist who had put together experimental short film programs for Outfest before. Oddly enough, these programs were �lesbian,� �gay male,� then �lesbian�, which I would consider peculiar because it worked against people signing up for all three programs and being able to stay down at the Redcat all day, instead of having to go back and forth among other venues. However, the programmers weren�t thinking �lesbian� vs �gay male� so much as �experimental�. I am one of the few male Outfest goers who will go see lesbian films, and so I had no problem seeing this whole Redcat line-up. (Lesbians are much better at going to gay male films than gay males are at going to lesbian films. Too bad, because lesbian films are fascinating, not to say educational and experience-broadening.)
However, despite what I just described as possibly a broad-minded attitude (although the truth is that it is not due to broad-mindedness, I just happen to enjoy lesbian films and see them due to that interest, not due to any sense of political correctness or whatnot), at first I felt decidedly out of place with the audience that slowly filtered into the Redcat lobby. For one thing, there were very few males, and beyond that, I had never before been in a group of so many people whose gender was actually unclear. This made me feel so redneck and heterosexually homophobic, like I HATED feeling of �I can�t tell whether this is a boy or a girl,� but that�s really how it was and even now I still can�t explain it. At first I contemplated the idea that they were mid-stream in sexual reassignment, but I�ve known a few people like that and they are always clearly tending toward one side or another, i.e., they are a �woman� but something isn�t quite right, or the other way around. But these people weren�t that way, they really had a peculiar admixture of both. For example, there was one person whose name was �Bill� (and who had made, of all things, a film about deer hunting), and he wore boy�s clothes, had a boy�s haircut, had sideburns, and even had a genuine male-sounding voice, and yet also had breasts and was definitely friends with and interested in the clearly-female lesbians. To contrast with Bill was a person who I at first took to be female, definitely had a girl�s beautiful face and had very long, female hair, and even completely wore female clothes such as a dress and girl�s shoes, and yet had underneath those clothes what appeared to be a perfect, hot, lean-athletic male body, spoke with a clearly male voice, and had a boy�s name. He also was quite a turn-on in a completely androgynous way, yet he was an active member of this �Lesbians To The Rescue� group.
I just didn�t understand, that�s all I can say.
And then there were genuine lesbians, particularly a group of older women, all of whom seemed to exhibit some kind of a disability (I saw more canes in use that day than I have seen in a nursing home), or who artificially �disabled� themselves in some way, such having obvious turn-off facial piercings (like several rings in the nose) or repulsive tattoos. These elderly lesbians were of the �man-hating� variety who absolutely would not return my smiles or otherwise acknowledge my presence, but kept up a conversation of how men were �hurting� them, such as one woman who talked the whole time about a man living in an apartment across from her view whom she could see masturbating every day. She was contemplating some kind of police action or civil suit against him, whereas I figured she should just look away and forget it. After all, he WAS in the privacy of his own home and SHE was the one continually watching him. Maybe he had no idea that he could be seen? Or maybe he was an exhibitionist, but still, that didn�t mean she had to be offended. After all, it was her choice whether to look at him or not. But you know, some people love to position themselves as victims, even if all they really have to do is walk away.
I admit I was becoming more and more repulsed by this group, when suddenly one of the film-makers came over to introduce herself to me. She told me that she was the founder of LTTR and was appreciative of my coming to the event. (I was obviously just about the only male there.) She told me the name of her film and hoped that I would tell her what I thought about it afterwards. She also insisted that I go to their party afterwards (which I did not do, mainly because it was so late).
I am thankful to her for welcoming me into the fold like that. Her friendliness and consideration single-handedly changed my energy so that what was starting out to be a negative experience was turned into a positive one.
These films, though, were mostly over my head, I have to admit, or at least, I think they were. (Giving the films credit.) The beautiful-boy-body-in-the-girl�s dress did an inexplicable film in which he sang gorgeous Gregorian chants. His tenor voice was amazing, no soprano here. Bill�s film about deer hunting was a bloody, carcass-carving mess. I have never been deer hunting, and this film made me rather glad. Bill, though, WAS a deer hunter; this film was not meant as a turn-off, but more as a documentary, which made him even harder to figure out. How was he accepted as a normal part of deer-hunting society in what looked like West Virginia?
The one film that I liked and I guess �got� the most was disgusting, but also extremely funny and, I think, an audience favorite. It consisted of a woman peeing standing up in various places. First she peed in the hallway of her apartment building (every location was identified in a subtitle). Next she peed on the carpet in a hotel room. Then she peed out in the street. Then she peed on a pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Then she peed in a public fountain. The places she peed kept on being more and more public, with people around her doing normal things such as walking down the sidewalk, jogging, riding bicycles, driving by, or sitting on park benches. The girl was utterly fearless and her face was clearly shown in the film. Each new location brought louder and louder laughter from the audience, until pretty soon all of us were roaring hilariously at each new pee spot. There was comedy in the timing of the film and in the woman�s nonchalant attitude. While the film was clearly �transgressive,� it completely desensitized us to the prospect of a woman taking a pee in public standing up. Later, I mentioned to the �LTTR� founder that what I got from that film was that �all women need to achieve practical equality with men is to never wear underwear,� because all that woman needed to do to take a pee was simply stand there with her legs spread three feet apart and let �er rip. That was my impression, anyway, but whether the LTTR woman appreciated my observation, or not, she didn�t indicate.
So, what about the LTTR founder�s film? Well, it was peculiar, of course. It consisted of a platform, such as what might be used for a guitar player in a lesbian coffee house, with about ten or twelve different people in time-lapse photography walking across it placing a microphone and then walking off. As I watched it, I thought about how horrible their bodies all looked. Odd observation, I am sure, but that was what my impression was. There was one guy completely and shamelessly pear-shaped, wearing low-slung baggy jeans and a very tight �wife beater�. I wouldn�t wear a shirt like that until my fat percentage was below 7%, but that guy wore it with impunity. There were several bra-less women in the film with breasts that could be seen underneath their blouses that were obviously VERY different from each other in size, shape, and where they hung down. And there were other body peculiarities just casually on display. At first, from a kind of �L.A. show-biz� standard, this was a turn-off to me, as in �why are you people so out of control?�, how could they let themselves go like that and just completely not care about their appearance. However, when I talked to the filmmaker about it, what I said was, �The one thing I appreciated about your film was how completely comfortable everybody was in inhabiting their own bodies, like they just didn�t give in to any kind of body fascism.� The filmmaker seemed to love this comment and it made me feel that this, in away, described most of the people who were there. That in the end I was the one who was messed up by caring about a particular physical standard imposed from without instead of allowing who I was to simply flow outward from the reality within. And the people there exemplified this principle to the extent of their very own GENDERS, apparently, that these �fascist� standards even applied to what was proper male and what was proper female behavior and appearance, and they were having none of it.
I spoke to one other filmmaker, this time a very beautiful and elegant-looking lesbian, whose beauty came out of her as a genuine beauty instead of something artificially imposed. Her film was called �love/torture� and consisted entirely of standing with her back to an audience and reading poetry that sounded like what could be a President Bush/Attorney General series of justifications for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture of �enemy combatants�. When I talked to her, I said, �I think of your film as �Ode to George Bush�,� and she said, �You absolutely got it. I merely quoted in my poems his exact words on the subject of torture.� Wow, she made me feel like these films truly were speaking to me after all, and really all I was doing was expressing the impressions that they had genuinely given to me.
These exercises at Redcat really were educational for me, not only in understanding the visual and spoken language of film more, but in understanding the much greater diversity in people than I had even known existed. A more �conservative� or �this is the only way to be� value system sounded like something that was now clearly way inadequate for understanding what was truly the grand panoply of humanity. God did not make only one kind of people�why did I think so, before? People can be as different from each other as mastiffs and chihuahuas, I guess.
Now let�s skip ahead to the third program, the other group of experimental shorts. By now I was thoroughly comfortable with myself at Redcat. I had been there for several hours, had spoken to and learned from some very strange people, and had a wonderful meal at their beautiful �bar�. Redcat really is a perfect artistic space, very welcoming and transformative. I imagine that sometimes in the future I will just go down there when I feel like it to step into a completely germative world. It seems that they charge no admission to their art gallery, and parking is a snap. It�s very peaceful and seems to stand somewhat �out of time�.
I had also seen, as I said, the best film in this year�s Outfest, and during the Q&A had asked the filmmaker some questions that he enjoyed and appreciated. There was a woman there also asking him some questions and it was clear from what she said that she was a professional film reviewer, a film maker herself, and was also putting together a film festival of her own (for the Napa Valley of California). She was incredibly brilliant and filled with foresight.
As we were walking out of the theater, the woman came over to me and said, �You have been asking some brilliant questions,� and thus started a conversation between us that left me breathless. I don�t think I have ever met before a more intelligent and curiously knowledgeable person in my whole life. We spoke for nearly an hour and not a sentence came out of her mouth that didn�t enlighten or clarify something for me. I felt as though her IQ was about 220 and her life experience equal to someone as travelled as Captain Cook. Wow, she just skyrocketed me to a stratospheric dimension. (Also, interestingly, she mentioned that she wasn�t a lesbian, that her sexuality was �phallocentric�, a statement that makes perfect sense to me, but so far everyone I have repeated this to responds with �Huh, what does THAT mean?� Seems pretty clear to me.)
But her interest in Outfest and things homosexual was not an expression of an unaccepted homosexuality within her (as some might presume), but more as an expression of what I learned earlier in the day about the vast panoply of humanity. Gays like I was seeing at Outfest were at the cutting edge; that was their main importance.
When it became time to enter the theater for this final program of the evening, I separated from the woman, who was welcome to sit in a special �reviewer�s gallery�, whereas I took my place in my chosen spot in the very center of the back row.
There is one thing about lesbians at Outfest that has long bothered me. Due to my membership level, I have priority seating, which means that I get an early entrance into a theater and can usually secure my favorite place to sit. (That people care about this is one of the reasons they offer priority seating in the first place.) I care enough about this that I put myself in the priority seating line one hour ahead of show time. This means that I am almost always the very first person in line, and there are very many Outfest ushers who know me because of this.
However, despite this, every once in a while a group of lesbians will come in (later, obviously), and find that there isn�t enough room for all of them to sit together, that is, there would be enough room if only I would move over a seat or two. This I detest and usually will manage to simply state that �no�, I will not move over, that I have the seat I like. I usually justify this by saying that moving over will put me behind a very tall person (which invariably IS the case), whereas where I am sitting now in my carefully-chosen seat, I have a clear view of the screen. But I am made to feel like an asshole in doing this. It�s always lesbians who ask, never gay men. It�s always lesbians who travel in packs and arrive late; it�s always lesbians who act like they are physically dependent upon being able to sit next to each and every member of their group. Since I go to all movies alone, I don�t understand this (what I consider to be a) pathetic need to be in a group like this. Movie-going should not be a group activity�you can�t (or shouldn�t) talk during the movie, so what�s the point of company? With lesbians, I think of it as insecurity, although I really don�t know WHAT it is all about.
So here at the Redcat, I take my seat and suddenly a group of women come up next to me in the row and ask me if I would be willing to move over. Well, I was feeling charitable toward them by now, but when I looked up, what I saw were about fifty lesbians. This shocked me so much that I simply said, �No, I�m not going to move over for a whole damn row!� I mean, what were they thinking? They ALL have to sit together, for God�s sake?
Whoever said (Aristotle or Plato, I think), �An army of lovers would be unbeatable� was at the time thinking of gay males, but nowadays, that would have to refer to an army of lesbians. No other group of people is able to mobilize at a moment�s notice a group of 50 women like that.
However, these lesbians were good-natured about my refusal to move and decided to surround me, instead, with one of them saying, �We�re going to put you in a sandwich!� I laughed at that, and said, �Sounds like it could be FUN.� Once they were all through, they had, LITERALLY, filled up that ENTIRE row. And the rows at Redcat are very long, so this was a huge group of women.
Of course it would have been silly for me to have moved, they don�t ALL have to be in one uninterrupted row of audience members, and I think they figured that out pretty quickly. Maybe they had just thought that I would be uncomfortable in the presence of so many lesbians, but why should I be?
But BOY, what lesbians these were! As different from the lesbians of the earlier program as could be imagined. These women were amazingly beautiful and perfect, beyond perfect, actually. �Diversity� now expanded to yet another dimension; whereas what I determined about the first group of lesbians was that they didn�t care about body fascism and thus let their fat stomachs or pendulous breasts flop however they may, THIS group of women didn�t seem to care either, in that they set a whole new standard that had come down from some Olympian heights.
But I need to stress that these women weren�t just beautiful, they were also NICE. They were altogether a super-race of people.
One of them, two women over from me on my left, kept smiling at me the most beautiful and glowing smile. I would have been happy to have simply looked at HER the whole time and skipped the films. (I�m reminded of the Indian movie Siddhartha, in which after a lifetime of spiritual searching, Siddhartha sees the courtesan, Kamala, being carried into the palace on a litter and he says, �From now on, I want YOU to be my guru.� I wanted this smiling woman two seats over from me to be my guru.)
All of them were wonderfully dressed, as if each one were her own individual talented fashion designer, but this one was the best of all, possibly because of her smile, but also because of an amazing beauty and arrogance in how she was dressed.
She was dressed entirely in white, from white form-fitting, flare-bottom pants to a tight white Eisenhower jacket, to a crisp white, narrow-brimmed fedora-type hat. She somehow exemplified the best of both masculinity and femininity together in the same person, and also clearly was entirely herself and fearless in displaying that. I wanted to be just like that, not copying her in style, but copying her in the power of her self-expression. Why do we all dress like clones? Well, none of these breath-taking women, and so why should I?
The films were fine, but pretty soon a crisis built up within me. I had talked too intensely with the film-reviewer woman that I had neglected my pattern of making sure I had gone to the bathroom before the film. Now I was paying the price of that, I had to go to the bathroom BADLY. I kept trying to figure out the time from my watch, how much longer did I have before this program was over and I could make quite a getaway to the bathroom? But I just couldn�t figure the time out in the darkness and realized that really the best course was to simply leave the theater and go to the bathroom NOW. However, these were very TIGHT rows, with virtually NO space between the backs of the seats ahead and the kneecaps of the people in the row, which consisted of SO MANY women from where I sat in the middle all the way over to the very end where the aisle was. HOW was I going to squeeze my way out? And not only had I been �rude and selfish� by not moving over for them, now I was going to step on all their toes and interrupt their watching of the films. What a terrible position to be in!
Anyway, when the urge became irredeemably urgent, I threw all caution to the wind and whispered to the woman on my right, �I�m so sorry, but I REALLY have to go to the bathroom,� and stood up. The minute I stood up, the woman on my right also effortlessly and politely stood up to give me plenty of room, as instantly did the entire rest of the row! It was so EASY, they all stood up, I quickly slipped past them, and then they all sat back down again, the whole thing took no longer than two seconds. How were they able to operate so much in concert, like they were all a flock of birds, veering to the right the minute the lead bird thought to veer to the right? Who WERE these wonderful people? (I want to contrast them with a whole row of GUYS when something similar happened to me two days later in another theater. Yep, I REALLY had to go to the bathroom. I whispered to the man on my right, who looked at me dumbly and didn't budge an inch. But I stood up anyway and crammed myself through his legs. I had to practically push, shove, and climb my way over the laps of every man in that whole row, every one of them sitting there immobile and as dumb as stunned bulls. Guys, the lesbians have definitely outmanned us, or at least YOU!)
I finished in the bathroom and went back into the theater. I had just one more short film to go. For politeness�s sake, I simply watched it from the rear of the theater near the door; I didn�t want to bother those wonderful women again.
When the program was over, I waited for the film-reviewer woman to come out and together we resumed our animated conversation. We also separated from time to time to speak with some other people about the films, but ultimately we came back together and she asked me if I would drive her to where her car was parked, which I did. We also exchanged e-mail addresses, but so far, neither one of us has written to the other, yet. I do plan to, but Outfest can be like this�you make very close friends for the time of the festival, don�t see them all year, and then resume those friendships at the next festival. However, I do think this woman is worth knowing more than that.
During one of those �separations,� I saw the beautiful woman in the white hat standing in a circle of friends. I simply had to go over and talk to her. She flashed that brilliant smile at me and I said, �I have to tell you, you are so beautiful!� She smiled again, and I put one arm around her and said teasingly, �It�s terrible when the LESBIANS are cuter than the GUYS!� I don�t know what she thought of that, except in a gay setting, that statement made sense�I�m not supposed to be attracted to the WOMEN, especially when there�s no way the women are attracted to the GUYS. But one of her friends in her group smiled knowingly at me and said, �For even MORE beautiful lesbians, you ought to come to our party,� inviting me to the same lesbian after-party that the Lesbians To The Rescue woman had invited me to. But I begged off�it really WAS terribly late and I had a whole day of film-going ahead of me the next day. Anyway, I had had enough of fantasy-land; I couldn�t see how any of this was going to lead anywhere and I was content with just some distant admiration. Maybe I have to grow into it more, and will be ready for whatever it is next time. It is all an expansion and an evolution, after all. But those were really some amazing people and it was privilege to just be in their company for a couple of hours.
So it was that woman with the man�s hat that got me into thinking more about the expressive power of hats and how they can make a person stand out as an individual, which is a position for myself that I like a lot. I don�t like being a clone or invisible, but want to be front and center on the stage, illumined by a follow-spot.
Many, many, many years ago, I was wearing a completely unusual shirt that I happened to find somewhere and had the guts to wear�a perfect shirt for me, actually. It was a tight, torso-fitting flat-black long-sleeved dress shirt, but with mirror-like buttons, shiny silver insignia-like decorations on the collars, and shiny silver rectangular metal plates sewn onto the spaces between the buttons down the length of the placket. EVERYBODY admired that shirt. But best of all was this: I was walking across a huge supermarket parking lot when suddenly I heard a loud, two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle. Way over in the distance was a woman looking at me, and when I turned to face her, she said, �Hey, dude�that is one FUCKING good-looking shirt!�
That�s what I want. Notice me from afar, and wolf-whistle at me. You�re a perfect stranger, but for one powerful moment, we eternally impact each other. Beauty works. Beauty is good. Nothing to be ashamed about with beauty�it is a force of the gods.
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