Categories
Film Hollywood Queer Rant

Racist Hollywood

  
Did you think I was oblivious?  When I toured the fancy talent agencies?  Meeting the managers in their art filled, airy offices on the west side?  Shaking hands with eager entertainment lawyers. Do you think I didn’t notice the teamsters and the grips and the sales agents… the casting directors, the art directors and the camera department… do you think I ever said out loud… why are none of you black?  Why are so few of you latino or asian?

When I arrived in Hollywood, at the talent agencies, they introduced me to gay agents… because I’m gay.  They thought I might feel more comfortable. They talked gay with me.  They told me about their husbands, they hoped I might party with them in Palm Spings. What do they do with their black clients?  All those white agents perfecting their patois, their chicken and waffles… their white shame… their apology.

On their own… feeling safe, they tell you what they really think.  On the golf course, in the AA meeting.  Listening to the talent agency owner whilst he disparages woman (‘nobody wants a woman director’) and people of color (‘they just don’t have our work ethic’).  At the white AA meeting we attended in The Palisades I watch in awe as the sober, white entertainment lawyers… hoping to do business with the fat, short, racist… laugh in agreement.  It doesn’t go unnoticed that most of the powerful white men I meet pandering to low grade racism… are Jewish.

I was told by one mega producer who famously makes very, very white super hero films that he wished every muslim would either convert or die… and when I wrote to him the following day explaining members of my family were muslim he replied it wasn’t his problem I was related to ‘rag heads’.

I was called a rag head and sand nigger by a well known gay white writer when we fought about money.

The white, gay caterer told me last week he didn’t employ black people.  “It makes my clients uncomfortable.”  He smiles, he hopes his winning smile will somehow deflect my critical glare.  He hopes, because he has come out as a racist, I might extend some sort of sympathy, some understanding.  When he came out as gay… he was a hero.  Would his honesty about race garner the same result?

Sales agents told me, when casting  my film Dorian Gray, “Don’t even think about a black lead, we won’t be able to sell to the Middle East.”  They were unembarrassed by their racism, actively excluding black people from lead roles, from leading, from leading a better life.

I asked talent agents to suggest people of color to play Dorian Gray.  They couldn’t.

Charlotte Rampling and Michael Caine are not the problem.  The teamsters and the agency boss are the problem.  Of course Charlotte and Michael see black faces on set, in the make up trailer and at Craft Services.

They say the Oscars don’t matter.  Of course they fucking matter.  White people with an Oscar nomination can expect a wage increase of a gazillion %.  Awards are factored into contracts, an award contractually guarantees the writer/director/lead cast more money.  That’s how contracts are structured.

Pretend, as Robert Redford did yesterday, it was the work rather than the award that mattered… betraying his disingenuousness.  His elitism.  If awards don’t matter… get rid of the Sundance awards.

White men (gay and straight) keep women and people of color away from the big money, excluded from the validation, the opportunity, from the prizes.  

Prizes that suddenly don’t matter to Robert Redford… because it’s not about the glory, it’s about the work.

Tina Gharavi is an Iranian Film Director.  Her statement on Facebook today should bring tears to your eyes.

I am constantly told, oh it doesn’t matter, doesn’t exist, it’s not worth getting upset over…. or that it will change with time, that it’s all in my head… or make a film that they cannot ignore… or if you were any good, it will happen anyway…. At the end of the day, my whole career has been needing to prove myself twice more over than those on my left and right and it is exhausting. More than just the work itself, it’s the fact that people deny the prejudice even exists. When I first met my partner, he was skeptical that there were systems at play that did not give me the same chances as other filmmakers. After 5 years of watching, he has seen the many times that opportunities were given to others less qualified… of the invitations that never arrive… Now he is more livid than me…. He sees the fact that the panels will invite the white male director (except when it is a panel where they need to discuss diversity or need a female to turn up). Truth is many black filmmakers watch their white peers rise up with projects which are less interesting and challenging… well, one can imagine the effect that has on the soul. Films are a commercial as well as an artistic expression. I have said this before, sometimes I wish I had never left painting. You can paint without much money but filmmaking… that means a lot of people have to have incredible belief and support for your vision. Most of the time, however, it is a failure of imagination… and that is were we are all poorer. We need to confront this and Charlotte would do better than making choices and decisions based on her own experiences. I don’t know many black or ethnic filmmakers who would agree with her. I challenge her to work on my next film, not as an actress but as an Exec and watch exactly how many opportunities I am given which impoverish my fellow white filmmakers. I call her out… if she wants to really see what the truth of it is. If she was following my story so far she wouldn’t have said what she did. I don’t want a leg up just because there aren’t enough black filmmakers…. I want an equal opportunity because I have important stories to tell.

Categories
Film Gay Hollywood Queer Rant Tivoli NY

Carol: Lesbian Love Story


Carol, the well written, well designed, well shot, well acted but ultimately turgid new movie by avant garde industry darling Todd Haynes has a fan base… an angry, indignant fan base.

Many beyond the film industry feel this mostly second rate film should have earned a place in the best film and best director categories at this years academy awards.

The vociferous fans feel the film has been ‘snubbed’.

There are blogs and op eds and blazing Facebook posts about this apparent injuctice. The fans blame homophobia, misandry, misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality.

Even though Carol has in fact been nominated in 6 categories including the prestigious written adaptation category this is not enough for many disgruntled Carol fans.

There’s plenty to complain about this award season.  People of colour are vanished from the awards. Female directors?  None.  The roles women are asked to play:

Best Actor jobs: Screenwriter, astronaut, trapper, inventor, artist.

Best Actress jobs: Mommy, lady, inventor, girl, wife.

I’m wondering if, after this so called scandal, members of the academy will bother voting for this slight film at all.

Wether they are directed by white men or not (Carol was directed by a white man, a man… why?) most of the other nominated films are simply more engaging and well directed.

Personally, I’m rooting for The Big Short. There, I said it.

2.

Tivoli is under siege this afternoon,  gangs of identically dressed gay men.  Fur trimmed Parkers and skinny jeans.

Identical white gay boys.  Vile.

They stare at me dressed in my tweeds and hunters like I’m a fucking circus freak.

Fuck off.

Categories
art Money Queer

Powerball

  
The lottery.  One and a half billion dollars.  Imagine…

Imagining, like millions of others this weekend, how one might spend a billion dollars… I learned something helpful about myself and my life goals.

Recently I met a psychic.  She told me my mother would win the lottery.  I told my mother to play… she won $50.  She was thrilled. I was thrilled for her.

Gripped by Powerball fever, everybody wants a chance at the big money.  Everybody wants the Powerball mega bucks payout.  I took notice of the rolling stock market jackpot indicator.  $700,000,000.  I baulked at the tax one would have to pay.  You wouldn’t see any more than $300,000,000 if you opted for the one time pay out.  Sad face.

Frankly, a crisp $20 would have done the trick. 

Everybody wants the jackpot.  Rich people were doing it, poor people do it every week.  With so much at stake, everyone everywhere in the USA contributed to the largest purse in lottery history.

I surreptitiously bought five tickets at Hannaford supermarket in Kingston.  I told the woman who sold them I’d never bought a lottery ticket before.  A ghost of disbelief flickered across her white  face.

“A psychic told me to buy it.” I lied.

She said, “I’ve sold so many tickets to ‘first timers’ this week.”

“Thank you, thank you for that.” I replied.

I felt better about buying a lottery ticket.  I felt relieved.  Affluent people don’t buy lottery tickets.  Poor, uneducated people buy lottery tickets.  It was essential she understood I would never usually gamble in the ghetto.

As I lay in bed that night, my ticket folded neatly in my wallet, I imagined a life with $500, 000, 000 in the bank.  What would I do?  

We are all limited by our imaginations.

I’ve seen some of my friends earn extraordinary amounts of money. The last time I saw JJ he told me since becoming very rich, very successful… rather than having a huge life his life had… shrunk.  The same faces, the same path around the world.  Holding onto his position at the top of the pile. Fame and fortune can hamper the inquisitive.

My current best friend is very rich.  Very, very rich.  He lives well but has worked the same job the past twenty years.  His money and his job are unconnected. He has a nice life.  I found myself wanting to ape him.  A lovely apartment in the city, a house in the country, a dependable car.  He gives money to charity, he is generous with his friends.

But… with his kind of cash, where would I want to live?  To my surprise, I knew immediately that I didn’t want to live in the USA.  I started my search for a dream home in Paris.  I found a sweet apartment in the 7th for 1.5 million euros.  I looked for a country house in the french countryside and quickly settled for something that cost 500,000 euros.  

After I’d made myself and my family comfortable… which charity might I patronize?  I decided to set up a foundation for poor British kids who can’t get into drama school.  I gave money to a bat charity and another that supports country skills and farming practices.  I gave money to beautify Whitstable, my home town.  I concluded that with the bulk of the money I wanted to help the motivated, stuck in poverty or prejudice, achieve their goals… to break through their own glass ceiling and… fly.

As I lay there I realized I didn’t need $1.5 billion to achieve my rather humble aims.  Everything I wanted to achieve was within reach.  I could already buy a place in Paris.  I could determine to raise money for all of the charities I wanted to help.  Maybe winning the lottery, for some one like me would be a curse?   Untold millions would merely inflame the disease of more that seems to blight me… blight us all?

Today I walked home with half a baguette in my pocket.  This simple action gave me so much pleasure.

The first week yielded no winner.  I wanted to see this through.  The Powerball lottery and I have a relationship now.  I could have gone elsewhere to have a second go. Instead, I went back to the reassuring woman in the supermarket.

“Didn’t win?” She smiled.

I bought ten more.

I didn’t win that week either but three people did.  The jackpot divided into three paltry $300,000,000 increments.  I found myself wondering, what would THAT buy you in the modern world?

 

Categories
art Queer Travel

Marina Abramovic Isn’t Coming

Hudson, NY 2015 winter.  I moved into the Princess Beatrix House, owned by Tanja Grunert and Klemens Gasser.   The ice so thick on their un-ploughed drive it’s almost impossible for the tiny Mexican movers from sunny California to negotiate the heavier items from the pantechnicon to the house.  They wear my Knole sofa like a huge hat.  It is bitterly cold yet these foolhardy boys brave the day dressed only in thin, grubby tee shirts and flimsy, cheap sneakers, skidding up and down the icy drive.  They are totally unprepared for the winter delivery.

Before I arrived in Hudson, NY I had never heard of Eric Galloway, Eleanor Ambos, Tim Dunleavy, Warren Street, Modern Farmer, Anne Marie Gardner, the Bonfiglio bakery… or the slew of slippery realtors wheeling and dealing all over town.

I didn’t know the Basilica or Helsinki or Etsy.   I didn’t know the darker side of hipster culture, the craving of desperate, lonely females and the clawing misery of gay men trapped upstate in search of a better, freer life.

The only person I knew ahead of my 9 months in Hudson was Marina Abramovic.  And it was she who piqued my interest the very first time my friend Tom Taylor showed me the building Marina had acquired, the building Rem Koolhas had been charged with transforming into a ‘laboratory devoted to performance art’ funded by 12 million crowd sourced dollars.

The Old Tennis Court on the corner of North 7th Street and Columbia Street in Hudson, NY owned by Marina Abramovic, stands forlorn, peeling and abandoned.  The windows boarded, trash blown under the grand portico.   It waits, warehoused like so many building in Hudson, for it’s owner to come renovate, repair or make good the myth of Marina Abramovic transforming this imposing building into her performance art institute.

Tom Taylor, stopped his beaten truck outside the building.  After several weeks of heavy snow and bitterly cold nights a wall of ice stood between us and the building.  He was excited to show me, telling a story I would hear many, many times from equally excited local people.

2.

Upstate New York .  Cheap, fertile land… derelict 18th and 19th century houses desperate for attention.  Abandoned red brick factories.  The promise of space and sanctuary.

My first visit to Woodstock, with cabaret star Lady Rizo three Christmases ago, my first real taste of life beyond NYC.  The thick white, blindingly white snow, the mountains, rivers and forests a welcome respite from 12 years of endless summer in Southern California.

I returned the following winter to the same charming stone house and started looking for a home to buy.  Property prices were very low.  As usual I was tempted by obscure, isolated locations but did not give in to that melancholic fantasy.

It was an invitation from Tom Taylor to Eleanor Ambos’s huge Victorian pile in Philmont that finally ignited my passion.  I’d met him on some dating app in the city when I spent that mad winter in the Captains House in Brooklyn.  After months of asking me to visit I finally bundled me and the dogs into the rental car and headed north.

Tom is the right hand man and beneficiary of Eleanor Ambos’s valuable real estate portfolio.  Her notable possessions:  the Pocket Book factory in Hudson and The Metropolitan Building on Long Island.

“It is as if she doesn’t hear the same music that everyone else is hearing,” says director Andrew Michael Ellis of 89-year-old Eleanor Ambos. In his documentary short Ellis follows the eccentric aesthete as she loses her eyesight to macular degeneration.

Eleanor bought the dilapidated Metropolitan Building on Long Island in 1980 as a cheap alternative to the area’s warehouses to store her vast and growing collection of salvaged antiques. The octogenarian owner caught Ellis’ eye while he was shooting there. “She had no intention of being a subject in a film at first, but eventually I became her friend, therapist, practically her lover. It was impossible to be a fly on the wall.”

The month I met her she had bought a 72,000 square foot mid century modern school in Claverack.    The day I arrived to see it she was laying a delicate floral carpet in the hallway.  “I like playing house.” she purred.  And that, my dear friends, is what attracts people to her and repels people from her.  I introduce her to the thin lipped owners of the Gilded Owl in Hudson, a most pretentious ‘gallery’ curated by interior fluffer Andy Goldsworthy and down and dirty art trader Elizabeth Moore.

THE GILDED OWL is an online journal exploring craftsmanship in modern and contemporary design, fine art, fashion, and music. Inspired by authenticity, ingenuity, and above all, quality, Andy and Elizabeth Moore continually investigate subjects of fascination and enlighten their readers as to what makes the beautiful beautiful.

And if that description isn’t enough to make you puke… Elizabeth, Andy and I visited an Ambos property (they were both eager to see) namely the magical Summit Mill in Philmont with Eleanor and Tom.  After the visit Andy and Elizabeth couldn’t wait to kick the snow off their moon boots and rip into Eleanor’s aesthetic, her hoarding and wonder how other people could find her so fascinating.

3.

Hudson has a rich history of despair. The ghosts of a thousand hookers, gamblers and dismembered whales join those native American souls murdered here for their land. Something very bad happened in Hudson, something catastrophic… something that has scarred its psyche, blighted the land and poisoned the air.  Those who spend a weekend in Hudson seldom notice it, those who live there become irradiated… toxic.

Resentment and vitriol.  The Hudson cancer… is much reserved for one successful Hudson businessman: Eric Galloway.

I visit Hudson only occasionally.  I walk Warren Street, much of it owned, to the chagrin of those impoverished white people who live there, by the stately Eric Galloway and his billionaire boyfriend Henry Van Ameringen.

At the very heart of the contempt for these acquisitive gentleman is racism.  Eric Galloway is an angular, elegant black man and the despair white people have (who are not benefiting from his patronage) often descends into barely concealed racism.

‘Educated’ white folk who think they know better about architecture, who keep tabs on each purchase Galloway and Van Ameringen make all over the world.  Tanja Grunert and others could barely contain themselves when Galloway bought much loved and recently deceased (owner of the fanciful store Rural Residence) Tim Dunlevey’s iconic Union Street home.

“That disgusting man bought Tim’s house.” She said.

Yet, who was Tim’s ex boyfriend meant to sell?  The poor white people who couldn’t afford it?  Or, the contentious black man who could?

4.

This past year Hudson’s ‘revival’ (one of so many) has continued with renewed vigor.  The expensive, beautifully designed River Town Lodge opened at the top of Warren Street.  Farmer’s restaurant on Front Street spared no expense on its warm and elegant interior, bravely situated in a less salubrious part of Hudson and lastly the airy bar Or on 3rd and Union Street enjoys enormous success in a beautifully renovated 1930’s garage.  All quality establishments, some owned by Eric and Henry.

These small businesses are the future of Hudson.  Other larger businesses are sniffing around.  Soho House are discussing the possibility of opening in Eleanor Ambos’s Pocketbook Factory.  A whirl of invesment and optimism… yet, The Old Tennis Courts on the corner of North 7th Street and Columbia Street in Hudson, NY owned by Marina Abramovic remains forlorn and empty.

As painful as it is, it’s time for everyone in Hudson, NY to accept the truth:  Marina Abramovic isn’t coming.

 

Categories
Queer

Christmas 2015

 [wpvideo Y0phwDk4] 

Categories
art Queer Tivoli NY

6 Fragments

 

Categories
Queer

This Little Piggy

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I am a carnivore!  I am a carnivore. The decisions I make around meat… the purchase and consumption are based upon the farm where the animal was raised.

Yesterday we ate a pig for dinner. It was really delicious. It came from a friends farm. It fed 10 people. However, the picture of me carrying the pig home seemed to upset some people. Some of them stopped being my social network friends.  Some of them… fellow carnivores.

I was accused of ‘lacking empathy’ for posting the pic above.

Many meat eaters pretend the meat they’re eating doesn’t come from a living animal. They are divorced from what they are eating.  This, my friends, is the tragedy of our age.

If you eat meat but cannot bear where it comes from… perhaps you shouldn’t be eating meat?  Most animals, most people eat are farmed in terrible conditions. Most carnivores blind themselves to this fact.

For those of you who eat meat but hate the idea that it was once a living thing.  Perhaps you should tour an abattoir? Perhaps you should pet a pig or cow or a sheep? Look into its eyes?

Maybe I am a cold hearted man for posting a picture of my dinner before it was cooked? Frankly, I think it’s far more honest to do that… than sanitized, pretty pictures posted on Instagram after the fact.

2.

Tamer Rice, 12 years old.  A child, playing with a toy gun (in an open carry state) with his sister in a public park was shot dead by two discredited Cleveland cops seconds after they answered an emergency 911 call.  They have since been absolved of their crimes by a corrupt prosecutor after a secretive and wholly inappropriate Grand Jury ‘trial’.

We know all about corrupt prosecutors.

Few of the ‘friends’ who were so animated by my photograph of me and the baby pig were moved at all to comment on the death of an innocent young black boy.

3.

Late one night, feeling under the weather after a bout of this particularly pernicious cold, I wrote a note to that ex.  Yep, I’m that guy.  Fuck. FUCK.

It was another misguided attempt to put the past behind me.

What is it about feeling sick that weakens ones resolve as well as ones body?  Keep me away from my lap top when a nasty cold makes me vulnerable to nostalgia.  Please.

I’d read somewhere that he has a fantastic new job and I wanted to congratulate him.  Why would I think my congratulations would be wanted?  It’s absurd isn’t it?   Congratulations.

4.