Holiday weekend

It's the Chinese New Year, so this seemed like a great time to go to the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution where they have their National Museum of Asian Art to view their collections of Chinese artifacts, especially their temporary exhibit on Chinese musical instruments as an art form. Naturally, I had to take some pictures.

The Freer Gallery was the first museum of fine arts in the Smithsonian, built back in the 1920s to house the collection of Charles Freer, a railroad tycoon who collected American and Oriental art. A lot of people don't realize that the Smithsonian's fine arts collections are fairly limited, since the major art collections in town are at the Corcoran Gallery and the National Gallery of Art, both of which are separate institutions from the Smithsonian. Where the Smithsonian does shine, however, are in the more esoteric collections outside of the Euro-American mainstream. The Asian collection is world-renowned, including some Chinese bronzes and ceramics which are over 4,000 years old, and a vast quantity of Chinese masterpieces from the first millennium A.D.

Here are some pictures of some of the more interesting pieces of art I saw this weekend. I didn't write down what all of them were, exactly where they were from, or when they were made, but these are all specifically Chinese pieces. So, just enjoy them cause I thought they were pretty.








Meanwhile, it's been a beautiful weekend in D.C. The temperatures have been in the 50s and 60s, so everyone is running around in short sleeves and shorts.

We're observing all the Chinese New Year traditions. We put up a little Chinese poem in the entry hall. We're not sweeping the floor today. We're not taking garbage out the front door (which in our case means not taking it out at all since we've only one door). And the thing I hate most, I haven't washed my hair all day—I can't wait til tomorrow! The dragon parade in Chinatown isn't til next weekend. We went to dinner tonight, too—more about that later.

The Freer Gallery wasn't all "historical" pieces. Here are some pictures of the installation in the entry lobby of the museum. It's called "Floating Mountains, Singing Clouds," by Mai-ling Hom, and it's a brand-new temporary installlation made from chicken wire.

Touring the Renwick

One of the less visited gems of the Smithsonian Institution here in Washington is an antebellum red brick building with a black mansard roof just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

Named after the famous architect who designed it (he also created the Smithsonian "Castle" in D.C. and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York), the building originally housed the art collection of William Wilson Corcoran and was the first major building in the U.S. to be built in the Second Empire style. After the large Corcoran Gallery museum was built a block south and the collection moved in 1897, the federal government acquired the building and used it for the U.S. Court of Claims until 1964. After a lengthy restoration, it opened in 1972 as the Renwick Gallery.

The Renwick is used today as one of the buildings for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, displaying permanent and traveling exhibitions of American crafts and decorative arts. The main collection on indefinite temporary display right now is the Catlin Collection.

George Catlin was an early 19th century American lawyer who visited Indian tribes west of the Mississippi all across the Great Plains and painted hundreds of portraits of Indians. Anthropologists today consider them to be an authentic record of period tribal clothing and adornment styles during the early 1830s, when tribal contact with Euroamerican culture had still been fairly minimal.



Catlin took his paintings on tour in Europe to great public acclaim, and the Renwick's display is designed to resemble the way Catlin showed the paintings in Europe.

The visual impact of hundreds of Indian portraits on the rose-colored walls in the Grand Salon is stunning. Many of these paintings are quite well-known from art books and Indian histories, while others have seldom been seen.




Not everything in the Renwick is Indians (after all, the Smithsonian does have a whole museum down by the Capitol devoted exclusively to Indians). The temporary galleries downstairs were devoted to a huge retrospective of American silver ware from the traditional to the very contemporary called "Modernism in American Silver." Not just forks and spoons, the exhibit showed unusual tea services, bowls, table and barware, and candelabra from fine private homes, grand hotels, and even Navy battleships. We just barely caught the silver on the last weekend of its exhibition here, and now it has moved to the Dallas Museum of Art.

There's a bit of whimsy in the Renwick's side galleries upstairs, as well, where the permanent collection includes Larry Fuente's "Game Fish," a sailfish made of popular American game pieces such as dominoes, ping-pong balls, dice, poker chips, and Scrabble tiles.

West Wing ending

NBC executives announced today that this will be the final season of The West Wing. I'm saddened by that. Certainly the series could be ponderous and self-important at times, but I loved the writing, and I most especially loved the writing for the presidential speeches—if only the real life White House could get speech writers like that!

It seemed that they were setting the show up to continue in the future with either Jimmy Smits or Alan Alda in the White House after the term of Martin Sheen expired, and then the series could have a potentially perpetual existence, much the same as NBC has done with E.R. and the multitudinous Law and Order series. The untimely and unexpected death of series regular John Spencer last month, who was Jimmy Smits' vice presidential running mate, seems to have thrown NBC for a loop, and they were not able to resolve their creative and plot problems, which is a shame, given how much the writers and producers on that show are paid.

Oh, well. I guess the mantle of television presidential politics will be passed to ABC's excellent series, Commander in Chief.

Dresses

We watched the Golden Globes last night.

Gwenyth Paltrow, who was so stunnningly gorgeous in her pink ball gown when she won her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, then wore that hideous Goth outfit the next year, continues her pattern of accepting the worst possible fashion advice a major starlet could get. I know she's pregnant enough to show and had on a maternity dress, but I've seen better formal dresses at Peas in a Pod! She was in a Victorianesque frau-frock with an Empire waist, there were frilly frumpy ruffles, and there were these tight little shoulder cap sleeves which made the entire dress look as though it were way too small for her. Hideous. Absolutely hideous.

Remember when Catherine Zeta-Jones was so pregnant at the Oscars, everyone was worried she was gonna pop out her little Douglas baby right there on the stage? Well, she managed to look elegant and sexy in a tasteful formal gown. Perhaps she can share the name of her designer with Miss Paltrow.

Poor Gwenyth. Hideous. Absolutely hideous.

The Producers

Wow! It's a return to the grand old movie musicals of the 1940s and 1950s with the fabulous staging and choreography of Susan Stroman and the hilarious dialogue of Mel Brooks in the new movie release of The Producers.

My actor friend Eric and I caught the matinee screening yesterday and it was a wonderful, light-hearted experience. We laughed, we smiled, we wanted to applaud at the end of some of the big production numbers, and after the conclusion I wanted to spin and dance my way out of the theater.

The movie screenplay is pretty faithful to the musical script, and I think they did a better job of translating the musical to the screen than producers for the recent movies of Rent and The Phantom of the Opera. The potentially offensive Negro jokes have been excised with no loss, and it seemed like they cut out a song or two (I'm not one of those people who's memorized the musical soundtrack), but the movie does not suffer.

Casting was good, too. Of course, the Lane-Broderick duo was carried forward. Those of you who are Nathan Lane fans will be happy to know that Nathan is still Nathan. He's a funny, physical actor, but I always think he's Nathan Lane playing Nathan Lane, regardless of the play, musical, tv show, or movie he's doing. And Matthew Broderick—OMG, Ferris Bueller has gotten old and wrinkled!—was a treat with his way-better-than-expected dancing skills. Neither Lane nor Broderick are singers, but they both get through the songs without it being too painful.

A lot of people who've already seen the movie complained about Uma Thurman as Ulla, but I thought she did a fine job in the role. Naturally she's not the woman who did the part in the musical's cast recording, but she does her own interpretation and it was appropriate and entertaining. Will Ferrell surprised me with his performance as Franz Liebkind, and I think this is the first time I've ever liked Ferrell in a movie role. And I can't say enough about John Barrowman, the tenor stormtrooper who fabulously sings "Springtime for Hitler" while looking the epitome of the Aryan youth.

The dance numbers were great, and they did several of those formations with the camera directly overhead like used to be in the old movie musicals. I kept finding myself in wonderment with a stupid grin on my face during most of the big songs, and they made an interesting choice to have big musical endings with a moment of silence (just like they would have done on stage), instead of transitioning immediately back into the dialogue and story, so it felt funny not being able to applaud at the end—it was set up for applause!

Eric thought he recognized someone in the cast with whom he'd been on stage before, so we stayed to watch all the credits (yeah, it turned out it was Eric's former colleague), and we were two of the only five people in the theater to see the little ending vignette with Mel Brooks which played at the very very end of the credits.

So, go see the movie! It's great entertainment.

I read the book

This evening, I finally read the short story "Brokeback Mountain" from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx, which was the basis for the current film Brokeback Mountain playing now in select cities and going into wide release on January 6.

NOTICE: Contains "spoilers."

The short story had been published in New Yorker magazine back in 1997 or 1998, and until recently was available for downloading from the magazine's website. A new book with just "Brokeback Mountain" was published last month as a tie-in to the release of the movie, though, so the New Yorker link has been deactivated. Not wanting to pay the $14.95 for the hardcover or $9.95 for the paperback, I ventured out to a Border's Books, found the special edition (it's thin!), and stood there and read the story. That should tell you just how short this short story is.

The first thing that struck me about the book is how closely the screenplay writers stuck to the original story, even with much of the original dialogue intact. The movie version was able to fill out a lot of the detail in the story, particularly with the mountain vistas, sheep herding, and the family lives of both Ennis and Jack. The one thing they didn't follow was the detailed descriptions of Ennis and Jack written by Proulx. Ennis is supposed to be very skinny with a growth on his eyelid and Jack is supposed to be curly headed and bucktoothed, later getting his teeth fixed and getting fat. I suppose, however, giving us Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is a suitably acceptable compromise.

One key scene which is clarified in the short story is Ennis's phone call to Jack's widow, when she tell him about the truck tire accident. The possibility that Jack may have met with tire-iron wielding gay bashers is a flash in Ennis's imagination. When Ennis discovers that Jack may have had an affair with another Texas rancher, he feels the tire iron incident may have been more likely, but there is no confirmation one way or the other.

The other day I mentioned in my movie review that there was one scene other than Jack's death which made all the gay men in the theater gasp and hold their breath. I'll say now that the scene in question is when Ennis is in Jack's bedroom at his parents' house and he discovers Jack's still unwashed bloody shirt from that final fistfight they'd had at the end of their sheep herding summer twenty years previously. Inside Jack's shirt was Ennis's shirt; Jack had wanted them to be together and close just like the shirts; he symbolically put Ennis inside his own skin; it was such a testament to Jack's deep love for Ennis. I think most gay men who've ever been deeply in love still have some relic, some souvenir, of that relationship, however tragically or badly that love affair ended, and thus, the gay audience members were struck both with the emotion of Ennis's discovery and their own emotions recalling from their own life that souvenir of love lost, giving them an Aristotelean catharsis.

The short story is good. This is one of the few times, though, that I'm going to say that I like the screen play better than the book.

It's full of allegory, but did they realize......

All month we've been hearing about the Christian allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the new movie based on the children's novel by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, how many of the evangelical churches have been encouraging their members to see the show, and how evangelical spokesmen have been whining about the attention Hollywood has been paying to Brokeback Mountain whilst ignoring Narnia. Finally, we decided to go see the movie today to form our own opinions and see what all the fuss is about.

Note to parents: This is not an appropriate movie for young children! It is very scary in some spots, one child character is kidnapped and put in bondage, a child is physically struck by the evil character as a means of punishment, there is a prolonged, graphic battle scene, and there are several graphic killings. I would not take any child under eight and I would urge you to use your discretion to consider how sensitive your eight- to ten-year-old child may be.

Narnia is in wide-release, with many theaters showing the film on multiple screens; our auditorium was barely one-quarter full, and there was a predominantly middle aged and older audience with a handful of young children. It's a shame that the evangelicals have conscripted this movie, because I'm sure a lot of the potential audience for the film will stay away because of the Christian cult associations. As an interesting bit of trivia for the evangelicals, the actor portraying Edmond, Skandar Keynes, is the great-great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.

If you go see Narnia just for its entertainment value, it's not really that bad of a movie. There is a lot of fantasy and battle, and the special effects are generally very good. None of the actors in the cast are known stars, yet they all do an adequate job of portraying their characters (the three "known" actors provide only animal voices: Liam Neeson as Aslan, Rupert Everett as the Fox, and Dawn French (The Vicar of Dibley) as Mrs. Beaver). In many instances, the film reminded me of an elaborate video game which might be played by younger teenagers, and a lot of the plot strongly resembles the stories of Lewis's contemporary at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the recent motion picture versions). But Oscar worthy? No. It's still a good movie, though.

I've never been a big fan of Lewis, especially since I used to socialize with a lady who did her doctoral dissertation on Lewis and talked about him incessantly. I've never read the book on which this movie is based, so this analysis is based solely on the movie, not the plot details which may have been included in the book. The plot is simple. Four British siblings are sent to live in a country house during the London bombings in World War II. In the new house, they discover a wardrobe (or what we might call an "armoire," a big piece of furniture for storing clothing) in an upstairs bedroom which some how magically leads to the mystical and magic land of Narnia, which is populated with all sorts of mythological creatures and talking animals. All is not well in Narnia, though, as their benevolent god-leader, the lion Aslan, has been driven out of the land for the past one hundred years by the evil White Witch, Jadis. The arrival of the four human children, however, inspires Aslan's return because of a prophecy that four humans would help defeat the powers of evil and return happiness to the land of Narnia.

The story line sets up the classic battle between good and evil, though I think the allegory here is a little odd for Christians, since the good guys are dependent upon magic and potions to achieve their victory. There is a rather lame Christ-like self-sacrifice by Aslan for the greater good. Otherwise, I found no strong Christian message, and any number of allegorical meanings can be thought up to fit this script. Perhaps things are clearer in the book, but I missed the sermon in the movie.

In this allegorical vacuum, one thing that jumped out at me to my great surprise is the high degree of homoerotic imagery and allegory in this film.

First of all, the eldest of the four children is a tall, slender, blond-haired, blue-eyed, sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy with a ruddy flush to his cheeks and a soft British accent, the quintessential sexual interest of ephebophilic British academics like Lewis. His name is Peter (at least it's not Lance or Rod or something), and when the four children assume their thrones as kings and queens of Narnia, he is crowned King Peter the Magnificent. He has a long, broad, shiny sword that he likes to pull out and hold a lot and which he received as a gift from an older, bearded man, representing both Santa Claus and a sugar daddy, who taught him how to use it. And further, Peter the Magnificent rides into battle atop a white unicorn; between the unicorn's horn and Peter's sword, there is double phallic imagery and the two phalli, representing the phalli of a homosexual couple, are needed to vanquish (with the help of extra magic from others) the evil female witch. In several scenes, he reminded me of the blond Colin Farrell in the gay movie, Alexander, riding around playing army commander. Late in the movie, we see the children all grown up, with the very adult and bearded Peter having no wife or girlfriend, and just happily hanging out with his sisters; clearly Peter has chosen a homosexual lifestyle and is very content and successful with it.

Peter's younger brother, Edmond, is about twelve to fourteen years old and has dark brown hair and the most gorgeous big brown eyes. Edmond is constantly admonished to follow The Way of his elder brother, but he rebels and aligns himself with the evil female. The evil witch just uses Edmond for what he can give her, giving him a little "Turkish delight" as a reward for his good behaviors, then puts him in chains in a dungeon after she has slapped the crap out of his face, meaning that those boys who go after women will fall into the evil ways of BDSM culture and become beaten-bloody submissives. Two supporting characters attempt to help Edmond return to The Way of his brother; he betrays them both, though, trying to gain the affections and approval of the evil female, and in both cases the evil female turns the good guy into stone. When Edmond finally turns away from the evil female to join The Way of his brother, she gets her revenge by running him through with a spear, teaching us of the treachery of women and the superior homosexual path of The Way.

Jadis the White Witch has really bad hair, reminding us of the social unsuitability of anyone with bad hair. She wears a lot of big dresses which would be the envy of any drag queen, and she is surrounded by attendants who are bears and trolls. And, once the evil White Witch is vanquished, all of her minions and bad guys disappear, giving us another message about her kind of culture, how worshipping a witch/female as a queen is wrong, and the goodness and superiority of The Way.

The two sisters represent two present-but-unneeded female archtypes in homosexual culture. Big sister Susan has become "boring" according to her siblings and is an unadventurous nag, just like the age-appropriate, marriage-seeking females who would want to date a boy like Peter. Little sister Lucy is a chubby, fun-loving girl who encourages her brothers to do things and go places, always wanting to tag along, representing the archtypal "fag hag."

Far-fetched? Unintentional? Gay propaganda? Consider these things:

—Lewis was a lifelong academic at Oxford, and later Cambridge, during an era when discreet homosexuality and pederasty was common amongst the upper classes, especially in prep school and collegiate academic settings.
—Lewis formed a close friendship with a fellow soldier in World War I who was later killed in combat.
—Lewis invited his Army friend's mother to live with him and supported her until her death in 1951.
—Lewis was estranged from his father.
—Lewis had bouts of depression.
—Lewis went to an English public school (what we Americans would call a private boarding school or prep school) where he was extremely unathletic.
—Lewis did not marry until 1956 when he was 57 years old, wedding a divorced Jewish poetess said to be his intellectual equal who fascinated him on an professional level.
—He admitted to having married solely so that his wife could stay in England and not have to return to her country.
—His wife soon became mortally ill with bone cancer, and it would be reasonable to assume that they would have had a limited sex life because of her illness.
—Several Lewis biographers report that while Lewis and his wife loved one another very much, the relationship was platonic.
—After his wife's 1960 death, he did not remarry and lived with his elder brother until his death.
—As a child, Lewis loved Beatrice Potter stories because they featured "dressed animals," and wrote and illustrated his own animal stories.
—Anglican Christians in the early 20th century did not manifest the great hatred of homosexuals currently seen amongst American evangelical Christians.

While there is no proof of Lewis being a homosexual or committing homosexual acts, there is ample circumstantial evidence which points out the strong possibility of a potential homosexual psychological orientation, especially when viewed as a whole. I submit, therefore, that veiled homosexual messages are just as probable in Narnia as the more openly-discussed Christian messages, and that while Lewis may have intended an overt Christian message, he also may have included a major subtext glorifying pederasty and homosexuality.

So, rather than being a great Christian movie, I'm afraid we're going to have to explain to all the evangelicals that this movie is merely another Hollywood glorification of homosexuality and the Gay Agenda.