The Tin Man

Friday, May 9, 2008

This Times editorial says something silly that I’ve also seen elsewhere.

There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process.

Will people stop using this straw man? Has anyone ever said she has no right to continue campaigning? No.

I have the right to wear a clown suit to work every day. But if someone says “You shouldn’t wear a clown suit to work every day,” and I respond by saying, “But I have the right to do it,” that doesn’t really address the point. “I can if I want to” is rarely a useful answer to anything. It’s what a five year old says.

The question isn’t whether Clinton has the right to continue campaigning. Of course she does. The question is whether it serves any purpose. Me, I don’t care if she continues campaigning or not, as long as she stops bringing the likely nominee down with her. Also, superdelegates are allowed to change their minds as many times as they want until the convention at the end of August, and since neither candidate will reach a majority without superdelegates and Obama could still somehow collapse over the next three and a half months, she’s there as a backup.

But she’d be there as a backup anyway. Maybe the best thing for her to do is not end her campaign, but “suspend” it, right after the Montana and South Dakota primaries on June 3. At that point, there won’t be anyone left but superdelegates to convince, and while it’s unlikely a publicly-declared superdelegate will have a change of heart, she can still be there as a backup in case Obama falls apart.

Side note: how weird is it that Puerto Rico has more delegates than Montana and South Dakota combined, and more delegates than Kentucky alone, but Puerto Ricans don’t get to vote for president?

10:54 AM | 3 drops of oil

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Other Jeff linked to this video of the end of last week’s Brothers and Sisters, where Kevin proposes to his boyfriend Scotty. I got all teary watching it again. I’m such a creampuff.

12:21 PM | 4 drops of oil

From the Times:

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, was among those on Wednesday giving Mrs. Clinton room to make her own calculations about the race, saying “a win is a win,” in reference to the Indiana results.

This is something that has annoyed me throughout this nomination process. A win isn’t a win. There’s no such thing as “winning a state” in the Democratic nomination process, or rather, there’s no real importance to winning a state, since states aren’t winner-take-all. These primary nights are not about winning a state; they’re about adding proportional chunks of delegates to running totals. But to the news media, that’s not quite as exciting.

News anchors were up past midnight waiting to see whether Obama or Clinton had won Indiana, when it really only meant the difference of one or two delegates out of 2,000. The media is used to covering winner-take-all presidential elections, and they’re wedded to the concept of “calling a state” for one candidate or another. Determining a “winner” creates news. But it’s inaccurate to say that “winning a state” matters in anything but a symbolic sense.

11:57 AM | 1 drop of oil

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Glory Days, the new musical about four college friends, has closed after opening night. One official performance. The reviews were pretty miserable. We saw one of the preview performances a couple of weeks ago; it was a cute show (with cute guys), earnest and somewhat poignant, but it didn’t belong on Broadway.

The songs aren’t bad. You can hear some of them on the show’s MySpace page.

(The last show to close after one performance was The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman show starring Ellen Burstyn five years ago. But at least both those shows opened, unlike Bobbi Boland, starring Farrah Fawcett, which closed in previews.)

10:36 PM | 1 drop of oil

Related to my previous post: here are my two favorite ABC-TV jingles ever, from 1981 (“Now is the Time, ABC is the Place”) and 1982 (“Come on Along with ABC”). These promo spots are filled with TV stars and the tunes are just so damn catchy.

TV networks would never spend money like this today, and this wonderful schmaltz would never fly in our irony-dominated age.

3:28 PM | 1 drop of oil

Here are some musings that are not very well organized or polished, are probably naive, and might seem silly to anyone else but me. But I want to get them down.

I was having weird thoughts the other day about television, popular culture, and the passage of time, and particularly, for some reason, the vast gulf between the years 1977 and 1983. This was triggered by these compilations of TV show openings that I discovered on Sunday morning, especially the ones from the early 80s.

Why 1977 and 1983? Perhaps because of the nice symmetry — three years on either side of 1980.

In 1977, we were in the Carter era. In 1983, we were in the Reagan era.

In 1977, “Star Wars” came out. In 1983, we had “Return of the Jedi.” (Side note: a long time ago I found an online list of pop-cultural touchstones - “you know you’re a child of the 80s if…”, or something like that. One of the touchstones: when you saw “Star Wars,” you noticed all the cool spaceships. By the time you saw “Return of the Jedi,” you noticed Princess Leia’s breasts or Han Solo’s tight black pants. I was a little too young for that, being just nine years old for most of 1983.)

It’s weird that most of the TV shows we associate with the ’70s were still on the air in the early ’80s, and aging: Three’s Company, The Jeffersons, Alice, One Day at a Time, Happy Days, Benson, The Love Boat. Inga Swenson’s ’70s bowl cut was replaced by a chic, short ’80s do, and she and Benson were still trading insults. I can’t think of many ’80s shows that lasted into the early ’90s, but for some reason there’s this big ’70s-’80s overlap.

In 1977 there was disco. In 1983, there were personal computers. Remember those Charlie-Chaplinesque commercials for the IBM PC? Disco and PCs seem to belong to totally different eras.

In 1977, gay people seemed to live in a paradise. I think of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City.” But by 1983, AIDS had begun to destroy the gay community. On the other side of 1980 lay devastation. My fourth-grade mustachioed math teacher (1983-84) would one day die of AIDS.

In 1977, the big thing in television was jiggle TV. Sex abounded. By the early ’80s, the conservative Reagan era was beginning to take hold and kids and families were coming to dominate TV sitcoms again. Diff’rent Strokes, Silver Spoons, The Facts of Life, and Gimme a Break were essentially about blended or nontraditional families; soon the nuclear family would make a comeback with The Cosby Show and Growing Pains, and Family Ties, already on the air in 1982, would become a big hit. Early-80’s TV, with its kid-filled sitcoms, seemed tailor-made for my age group; what would kids have watched in the late ’70s? The Fonz? Laverne & Shirley? (My own kid-centric experience of the early ’80s is no doubt distorting things. There were probably shows of both eras that don’t fit this mold. See Cheers.)

All of these long transitional years led up to what is, for me, the quintessential ’80s year: 1985. In 1985, my friends and I were in fifth grade, the highest grade in the elementary school, so we were sort of the equivalent of high school seniors and felt cool. My favorite movie, “Back to the Future,” came out that year. I discovered comic books. “We are the World” was the big pop-cultural thing and made us all feel happy and uplifted because, if we put our minds together, we could end world hunger!

I think the greatest year of childhood is the final year before you hit puberty. You’ve come to know who you are as a kid; your brain has developed far enough along that you can understand things well; and hormones haven’t yet begun to mess with everything you’ve come to be. In 1977, when I was three years old, we’d moved to the suburbs and into our New Jersey house. By 1985, I was 11. I’d lived in that house in that idyllic suburban town for eight years. It was home, and familiar; I’d grown comfortable in my skin and my school; I’d come to know who I was.

Over the next 2-3-4 years, it all changed. The decade aged. I went on to middle school, I was forced to skip a grade, I started to have troubling sexual feelings. In 1986, Iran Contra would damage the Reagan image and I’d discover “Saturday Night Live,” with its cynical skewering of politicians. In 1987, the stock market would crash. The ’80s seemed to go on forever, but everything after, say, 1986 didn’t feel like the ’80s to me anymore. By 1987, the ’80s were past their prime, like Christmas lights on December 29th. The ’80s for me basically ended in 1985.

I love the idea of people living at the end of the ’70s, on the cusp of the ’80s, not knowing what was in store. Hedonism would be replaced by conservatism. Self-actualization would be replaced by money. Wide neckties would be replaced by skinny ties. Disco clubs would be replaced by clubs where Wall Street Masters-of-the-Universe types would order expensive bottles of champagne.

Every decade grows old and encrusted before the people who have lived it move en masse into the next era. The people of 1977 found themselves living in a different world six years later — just as the people of 1997 would barely recognize the mood of 2003 (with the intervening impeachment, election recount, dot-com crash, and massive terrorist attack).

Ah, the passage of time.

1:50 PM | 6 drops of oil

I’m pretty sure I saw Paul Krugman on my NJ Transit train this morning. He was sitting across and two seats behind me in a quarter-full car and was typing on a laptop. I know he’s affiliated with Princeton, and he might have been going there — I was on an express train and Princeton was the next stop after Newark.

I’ve disagreed with stuff he’s written about Clinton and Obama lately, but I wouldn’t have known what to say to him.

10:00 AM | oil me

Monday, May 5, 2008

If you want to get any more work done today, do not click on this list of YouTube videos. Many of these videos are 9-minute compilations of various TV show openings from 1979 to 1992. This one from 1983 contains “We Got It Made” (sexy maid) and “Jennifer Slept Here” (Ann Jillian as a ghost). This one from 1981 contains “Mr. Merlin” (Merlin’s alive today as an auto mechanic), an obscure sitcom I’d always remembered but had sometimes thought I’d imagined.

You can also see the cast of “One Day at a Time” change through the years.

3:07 PM | oil me

How did I never hear that Glenn Scarpelli, my childhood crush from “One Day at a Time,” came out a few years ago?

2:39 PM | 1 drop of oil

From an article about the upcoming “Sex and the City” movie:

While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, Mr. King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. “My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,” he said. “The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.”

Also driving Mr. King’s decision was his fear of falling into cliché. “Who was going to play Carrie’s mother? Connie Stevens? It’s such a traditional sitcom limb. It’s the Thanksgiving episode, and there are Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch. I never wanted to do anything like that.”

I would pay to see Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch as anyone’s parents in a sitcom episode.

12:21 AM | 3 drops of oil

Saturday, May 3, 2008

We’ve moved! We’re in the new place. The Time Warner guy left about 45 minutes ago, so we have cable and Internet, and I can blog.

The move went off without a hitch. Moving is SO much easier when you pay people to do it for you. We used Rabbit Movers and they did a good job.

I unpacked all my books yesterday, most of which I hadn’t seen in months. I got rid of tons of books last fall, but I still have too many. Last night I’d open a box and find yet more books in it and shake my head. I like having shelves of books, though. They make a home more homey.

It’ll take more time to unpack everything, figure out where it all goes, get curtains, get settled, etc. But eventually this will be home.

11:16 AM | 3 drops of oil

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Tomorrow we’re moving to the new apartment. I worked from home today so I could pick up the keys during lunch. (Matt has been crazy busy at work so I volunteered to get the keys. I work in New Jersey and the apartment’s in New York, so it was easier to just stay in the city today.)

Packing is annoying. Matt’s way more stressed about the move than I am, although I’m not what I would call calm. Fortunately, since we knew our current apartment was going to be temporary, we left much of our stuff in boxes. I never unpacked my books or DVDs, so that was one less thing to worry about.

We’ve been really spoiled these last six months. The temporary apartment that Barnard (Matt’s employer) gave us has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a huge living room. So we’re going to have to downsize again. I know, boo hoo. We told ourselves we wouldn’t let ourselves get spoiled… but we let ourselves get spoiled. Still, it’ll be fine.

Tonight we finish packing, and tomorrow morning the movers come. I was trying to figure out the best way to not be stressed about the move, and I decided that the best way to do that is to not expect perfection. If there are glitches, if we have to pay a little more than we expect, if something breaks, then whatever. It’s not like it’s death.

Wish us luck.

5:09 PM | 4 drops of oil

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Flash is back! Barry Allen, that is.

(That link also explains “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” which I referenced the other day.)

3:02 PM | oil me

Aha. Here’s a good reason why we should keep using capital letters:

Using capital letters to start sentences is similar to indenting, or doublespacing, to indicate paragraph divisions. The practice makes it easier for readers to move through a piece of prose.

As a reader, it is harder to keep one’s place, or to locate a key passage, if one is faced with a large block of words. If writers stop using caps, the next step may be the elimination of spaces between words.

As a former teacher of writing and rhetoric, I emphasized that writers should be sensitive to the needs of their audience. Keeping caps in standard English is one way of showing concern for readers.

The purpose of linguistic rules is to make communication easier. If we all agree on a set of such rules, we can more easily understand each other. That said, the rules do change over time, and the human mind is adaptable. Once a critical mass of people has adapted to new rules, those new rules become the norm.

10:23 AM | 5 drops of oil

Monday, April 28, 2008

DJRainDog is disappointed that in my post about the New York Times article on gay couples getting married in their 20s, I didn’t express an opinion. So… here goes.

I really want to talk about the accompanying photos. But first, the piece itself.

I’m happy for all the gay couples that get married in their 20s. It surprises me that gay couples would do this so young, because I think people in general get married at a later age than they used to, and this seems to go against the trend. But as gay people come out younger and younger than they used to, their life stages might start to parallel those of their straight peers. If straight couples can get married in their 20s, gay couples should be able to do it, too.

But I envied several of the couples mentioned in the piece. It made me feel old, and it brought up all my old feelings of regret about not coming out until I was 24. Now that I’m 34, age 24 doesn’t seem quite as old as it used to, but I still regret that I never had a college boyfriend (at least not while I was in college — I did date a college freshman for two months during my final year of law school). Those were crucial years that I wasted, and I’ll never get them back, no matter how hard I’ve tried to make up for it.

Lewis, who is in his early 30s and came out at 23, captures it well:

There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence. While most of our heterosexual peers had experienced, in their teens, socialization around courtship, dating and sexuality, many of us had grown up closeted and fearful, “our most precious and tender feelings rarely validated or reflected back to us by our families and communities,” as Alan Downs, the author of “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World,” puts it. When we managed to express our sexuality, the experience often came booby-trapped with secrecy, manipulation or debilitating shame.

No wonder, then, that in our 20s so many of us moved to big-city gay neighborhoods and aggressively went about trying to make up for lost time. And no wonder that some of us — myself included — occasionally went overboard.

“The expectation for many years was that if you did any dating in your 20s, they were essentially ‘practice relationships’ where you did what heterosexual kids get to do in junior high, high school and college,” says Jeffrey Chernin, a Los Angeles psychotherapist and the author of “Get Closer: A Gay Men’s Guide to Intimacy and Relationships.” “But for many gay men, your 20s were about meeting a lot of different people, going out to bars with your friends and having a lot of sex. That has long been considered a rite of passage in the gay community.”

I don’t know what I miss more: that I didn’t get to have all that casual sex earlier or that I didn’t get to have a relationship earlier. I’m envious of these people who have gotten their shit together so young.

Then again, getting married doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten your shit together. And I wonder how many of these young gay marriages will end in divorce? Some will, some won’t. Sometimes straight people get married too young and it winds up being a mistake; that’s bound to be true for gay couples as well. Lewis does, in fact, profile two 26-year-old men who have each been through a same-sex divorce.

So it was an interesting article.

But those photos.

The photos were the first thing I noticed about the piece, of course — including the magazine cover. The photos are fun and campy, even if ironic faux-1950s style has become overdone. But what really struck me was that they were all photos of white guys. And that bothered me.

Lewis does address this, briefly:

To find out [what these marriages are like], I spent time over the next few months with a handful of young married and engaged gay couples — including Joshua and Benjamin. All were college-educated and white. (A 2008 study of gay and lesbian couples in Vermont, California and Massachusetts — three states that offer some form of legal recognition for gay couples — found that “couples who choose to legalize their same-sex relationships . . . are overwhelmingly European American.”)

Should he have sought out some non-white or mixed-race couples in the name of diversity? Or is diversity irrelevant because the article is about the people who most exemplify the phenomenon of same-sex married couples, and those people happen to be “overwhelmingly” white? I can’t answer that without knowing how many people “overwhelmingly” means or how much of an effort Lewis made to find non-white people. I’d be curious to know what some non-white gay men think about this aspect of the piece.

The photos also bother me because they play into the stereotype that all gay men are affluent and privileged and don’t really need the economic benefits that marriage would bring or the job protections that an employment nondiscrimination law would bring. They also play into the stereotype that we’re all fabulous curiosities instead of real people who don’t have equal rights.

Regardless of the benefits of marriage, I just don’t like being stereotyped. Matt and I are both white and make an okay combined living for New York City. But I’m still paying off my student loans and my savings aren’t nearly as high as they should be. We don’t have oodles of fabulous friends. We’ve never thrown a dinner party. Neither of us really knows how to cook. We both dress pretty plainly. We don’t accessorize. We don’t fly off on fabulous vacations.

Gay people are not all supercool. Enough already.

Another thing I don’t like about the photos: they really seem to paint an unrealistic portrait of marital bliss. Haven’t we learned anything from the 1950’s, when insecure housewives desperately tried to create the perfect roast and keep an immaculate home? Are those photos going to turn me into poor Laura Brown, Julianne Moore’s character in The Hours? Am I going to collapse into a heap of tears after I try to bake a cake and it comes out a lumpy mess?

It’s bad enough that we have to look like HX cover models. Now we have to learn to cook, too?

Still, I’d rather be tyrannized by some idealized vision of same-sex married life than not have the right at all.

I guess that’s what it comes down to.

Give us our rights; we’ll figure out the rest.

2:34 PM | 12 drops of oil

Sunday, April 27, 2008

The cover story in today’s New York Times Magazine is about gay couples in Massachusetts who get married in their 20s.

Last November in Boston, Joshua Janson, a slender and boyish 25-year-old, invited me to an impromptu gathering at the apartment he shares with Benjamin McGuire, his considerably more staid husband of the same age. It was a cozy, festive affair, complete with some 20 guests and a large sushi spread where you might have expected the chips and salsa to be.

“I beg of you — please eat a tuna roll!” Joshua barked, circulating around the spacious apartment in a blue blazer, slim-fitting corduroys and a pair of royal blue house slippers with his initials. “The fish is not going to eat itself!”

Coincidentally, the piece is written by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who wrote the piece about the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO that I re-linked to the other day.

6:58 PM | 2 drops of oil

Friday, April 25, 2008

People who annoy me: those who write on All That Chat and say what they think of a show and call it “My review of…” or “Here is my review.”

It’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion. You’re not a theater critic. A review is something formal that appears in a newspaper or on a theater website. If you’re a random schmo saying what you think of a show, it’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion.

I know it might seem weird that this annoys me, because everyone has a right to give an opinion of a show and theater critics can be clueless or woefully misguided. But it still annoys me. Take your self-promotion elsewhere. Get a frickin’ blog.

3:10 PM | 5 drops of oil

Teenagers are letting their electronic communication styles creep into their schoolwork.

And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

Hmm… prescriptivism vs. descriptivism strikes again.

12:53 PM | 7 drops of oil

Thinking again about the Obamacrombie boys, I dug up this Salon.com profile of Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO from two years ago. It’s worth reading because of how creepy and obnoxious the guy comes across. (I linked it here when it originally ran.)

He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips…

As far as Jeffries is concerned, America’s unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he says. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.

Two years later it still makes me want to vomit.

12:39 PM | 2 drops of oil

Thursday, April 24, 2008

You know what’s weird? Every Democratic presidential candidate who has lost a general election since 1972 is still alive. George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry — all are still alive.

I’m envisioning some big forum or parade of Democratic losers somewhere. Maybe held at some university think tank and aired on C-SPAN.

(I’m sure some snarky Republican wants to add to that total.)

2:23 PM | 4 drops of oil