Red Tails isn’t my kind of picture (warriors; loud guns; noisy machinery), so I haven’t seen it. Years ago I didn’t go see Glory – about an all-black Civil War regiment – for the same reason; later I caught it on TV and loved it to death. Anyhow, while I can’t say anything much about Red Tails, now that I’ve heard it’s immersed in controversy, I want to jump into the fray.

Racial controversy in Hollywood is a recurrent theme, one I’ve written about several times. I still haven’t gotten over my shock and anger that Hollywood failed to notice two of my favorite movies, The Five Heartbeats and Set It Off. I saw the latter when it came out on DVD, so I don’t know what the audiences were like – but I saw The Five Heartbeats in three different theaters, each time dragging white friends along to see it with all-black audiences. Both those movies were, in my opinion, absolutely fantastic, and I’ve seen each of them several times. They were at least as good as any in their genres: one the story of a rock ‘n’ roll group, the other of a bank heist. Neither was nominated for any Academy Awards. At the very least, Queen Latifah, a mere child at the time, deserved an Oscar for her performance as a bad-ass gun-toting lesbian.

The most recent film to cause a racial dustup, prior to Red Tails, is The Help. The book as well as the film drew the ire of black women, particularly those in academia,  for a multitude of alleged sins: they protested that a white woman shouldn’t tell black women’s stories to begin with; the film trivialized the lives of black domestic workers; it overlooked sexual harassment and civil rights activism; and in the end it’s really just a white woman’s coming-of-age story.

The Help –  and its black and white ensemble cast — is being showered with awards left and right. I for one am thrilled that two female movies (i.e.,chick flicks),The Help and Bridesmaids, are knocking them dead at the award ceremonies. Meanwhile, Viola Davis, who won the SAG award for best female actor, probably did more to integrate Hollywood than anyone when she named her two greatest inspirations: Cicely Tyson and Meryl Streep.

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Jorge Posada has never spent a summer with his children. That’s what he’s most looking forward to now that he’s retired from baseball.  Like everything else Posada said today at his press conference, the guy’s sincerity is never in doubt. Mental images of Jorge splashing about in the ocean with his kids fill my head as I write this.

It was a sad sad day for Yankee fans, some of whom were on hand for the press conference organized by the Yankees. The “Bleacher Creatures” who do roll call at the start of every game and other season ticket-holders were not only present, but featured in a video farewell. Thurman Munson’s widow, Diana, spoke, saying she was lucky she “loved two Yankee catchers in my life.” Also present were the Steinbrenners, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera.

It wasn’t only about baseball, either: from Wisconsin came Lisa Niederer and her son Brett, who has craniosynostosis, a condition shared by Jorge Jr. for which the Posadas started a Foundation. Niederer  said she found out about the group while watching the 2002 All-Star Game, when Jorge Jr. came out on the field with his father, and the announcers told his story. “It was the first time,” said Niederer, “I didn’t feel alone.” She now works with the foundation mentoring other parents of children with the condition. She called Posada “a hero, not just for what he did as a Yankee but what he’s done for craniosynostosis families.”

But the biggest tear-jerker of the day was Jorge himself, who choked up every time he referred to his Yankee “brothers” and the Yankee “brotherhood.” In response to the question of whether he’d play for another team — several have come calling — Posada said, choking on his words, “I can’t put on another uniform. I don’t have it in me.”

Posada caught for the Yankees for 17 years. At an early age he decided he wanted to play in the major leagues, and never doubted for a moment that he would. The only deviation from his plan was the catching part: the first time they decided to try him in that position, he said, “It wasn’t a pretty sight.” But gradually he came to love the challenge, and developed an identity so strongly tied to catching that last season, when told he’d be Designated Hitter and do no catching, it was “really tough…. I had to fight for my job.”

We all saw how Jorge suffered last season, some of us outraged by the way he was treated. So it was a surprise, to me at least, that retirement seems to be his own choice. At least, that’s how it looks—and like I said, it’s impossible to doubt anything he says.

My friend Nan, also a Yankee fanatic, is hoping Joe Torre, who just bought the Dodgers, will hire Jorge as a coach. I don’t see it happening, though; he’d have to wear a different uniform.

One time, during a baseball conversation with a few people in a bar, a guy I didn’t know pegged me as a typical “girl” who followed baseball just to ogle cute guys in tight uniforms. “Who’s your favorite player? he asked with a sneer, “Derek Jeter?” I retorted, with pride, “Jorge Posada!”  Nobody can accuse me of liking Jorge for his looks : they’re nothing to write home about. But as Diana Munson put it, he has “The IT factor,” something inexplicable but there. I’m gonna miss ya like crazy, Jorge. Adios and vaya con dios. 

Related articles

• Jorge Posada Retires From Yankees (onlineupdaters.wordpress.com)
• Emotional Jorge Posada Says Goodbye To Yankees (preprod.cbslocal.com)
• Jorge Posada: I Will Forever Be A Yankee (tracking.si.com)

Has there ever been a more blatant display of misogyny than Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum falling all over themselves to prove who’s the most anti-abortion? The war for the Republican Presidential nomination is being waged over the bodies of women.

They’re acting like a bunch of fat hairy gorillas, pounding their chests a la King Kong on top of the Empire State
Building, the difference being that Kong was a sympathetic character. And these guys aren’t fighting for their lives, but for their sperm. Santorum doesn’t even want a condom playing catcher with his stuff — he thinks every ejaculation deserves a name. If ever I itched to overthrow the patriarchy, it’s now.

I’m disappointed in Obama, but he’ll get my vote. Hell, I might even make a few phone calls on his behalf. These Republicreatures scare the shit outta me. Romney is probably the least scary just because he’s malleable – but he needs to be surrounded by sane thinkers, and there aren’t that many sane thinkers left in the country.

I can see how easy it must be to adopt an absolute position on something, anything really, and run with it. It’s so much easier than thinking. And if you happen to trample over a few million women in the process, so be it. They’re only women, after all. So long as the sperm’s okay nothing else matters.

Well, that’s not entirely true: apparently it also matters what kind of a capitalist boss you are. This week they fought over who’s the meanest, with Romney leading the pack for firing people from Bain Capital, his corporation. Soon they’ll run through that thrash, though, and turn their attention back to abortion – and, if Santorum has his way, contraception as well. They’re too obsessed with controlling women to leave the subject for very long. Which raises the question: will Obama be forced to debate abortion? Contraception!? And if so, will he come through for us? Or will he cave, as he has on so many other issues, to prove he’s as manly as any self-respecting Republican fetus lover? Stay tuned.

Related articles

• Robert Walker: Santorum And The “Anti-contraception” Conservatives (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iowa Drives GOP Field Far Right On One Issue (huffingtonpost.com)
• Mitt Romney Made Controversial Birth Control Veto (huffingtonpost.com)
• Abortion, gay marriage take centre stage (smh.com.au)
• Romney Touts Anti-Abortion, Anti-Gay Positions In South Carolina Radio Ad (thinkprogress.org)
• Eugene Robinson: I Didn’t Mean to Call Santorum Dead Baby Ritual ‘Weird’ (ibtimes.com)

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Portlandia

I couldn’t wait to see Portlandia.  Last year I didn’t even know it existed, but this time the PR was intense: I heard a Fresh Air interview with Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein  and read a profile of them in the New Yorker.  They even did a big-city pre-season promotional tour. The show sounded fabulous, maybe the first intelligent sitcom to come along in a dozen years or so.

Portland sounded so great in the hoopla that I was starting to regret not having moved there four years ago, when I’d seriously considered it – I even went and looked at houses with a realtor, big rambling houses for a third of what they’d go for in the Bay Area. The sidewalk cafés sold cups of upscale chocolate, and friendly folk started conversations with me. The bathroom graffiti was high-quality, the bulletin boards jammed with psychic workshops and environmentalist groups. Full-service gas stations! City-wide bicycle lanes! Light rail! It reminded me a little of San Francisco 24 years back, when I first moved here. Then it was an extremely livable city, but I didn’t know I’d arrived on the tail end of laid back: during the next decade traffic increased to an untenable volume, and climbing rents forced people like me to move across the bridge. I wonder if Portland will follow a similar trajectory, now that it’s The Place To Be.

But I digress. Portlandia didn’t grab me as much as I’d anticipated. In deviating from tired sitcom patterns, Armisen and Brownstein have made a bit of a muddle. They play most of the characters — and what characters! – but they aren’t entirely convincing, and I think they would’ve been better off hiring actors. Armisen is currently a player on SNL and it shows: Portlandia is more a string of clever skits than an ongoing story. But hey, it was only the premiere of the second season, and maybe it was just too much hype that caused the letdown, so I’ll give it a few more viewings.

My Week With Marilyn

Yet another disappointment. Full disclosure: I slept through parts of the movie, so I’m not certain I have the right to critique it, or that my impressions are reality based. Still, I saw enough of Michelle Williams to know she’s no Marilyn Monroe. Having just watched The Misfits for the fifth time last week, Marilyn’s gestures, voice, laughter, walk and mannerisms were fresh in my memory, and Williams got none of them down (if only Meryl Streep was still young enough to play Marilyn!). And of all the stupid inattentive screwups, the makeup artists didn’t do their homework: Marilyn’s makeup was pretty much always the same, so how hard could it be to replicate? Yet they couldn’t manage to create that shadow at the outer corners of her eyes, or the almost reflective shine of her lips. Plus, of all things, her beauty mark traveled to different places in different scenes, sometimes on the left side and sometimes on the right! I figure this has something to do with camera technology, but is it really impossible to fix? And finally, dear god, Kenneth Branagh playing Lawrence Olivier?! Check out their pictures. ‘Nuff said.

To the left, Sir Lawrence Olivier. To the right, Kenneth Branagh. Come on!

Addendum : Tuesday January 10th

Maybe I’m crazy: I read a bunch of reviews, all raves, particularly about Michelle Williams and her excellent portrayal of Marilyn. One review said Branagh looked enough like Olivier to play the part. AM I crazy? I fell in love with Sir Olivier, based at least 50% on his looks, when I was in college and saw him do Hamlet (film). Kenneth Branagh is, to my eyes, one of the least good-looking actors in the known universe. Did I get this movie wrong because I slept through some of it? Or did I sleep through some of it because it wasn’t that great? (I don’t think it’s the latter, because when I saw the Johnny Cash biopic I also fell asleep, and decided it was lousy. Two years later I saw it again and loved it.) Guess I’ll wait for this to come out on DVD to do a reality check. In the meantime….anyone have an opinion? That’s what the comment boxes are for!

Home Room

One weekend special that did not disappoint was in the food category, at a new restaurant near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. Home Room’s  menu consists solely of mac & cheese entreés. Even though the meal was probably responsible for my movie napping, it was worth it. I had The Gilroy, made with pecorino, gouda and roasted garlic (hence the Gilroy appellation). Daryl had Mac & Blue, made, naturally, with blue cheese. Scrumptious — and so filling I took more than half of it home for dinner.

Baseball Note: Hip Hip Jorge!

Jorge Posada, shafted by the team he was dog-loyal to for 17 years, has decided to retire in pinstripes, despite offers from the Tampa Bay Rays and at least one other team. No surprises here – but I was hoping he might go down to Florida to play against the Yankees and remind Girardi, Cashman and Steinbrenners Junior – dense nincompoops all – of what they so casually threw away.

Only Bill Dickey and Yogi Berra have caught more games in pinstripes than Posada (1574). With his departure the Core Four – Jeter, Rivera, Pettite and Posada – shrivel to two. My bet is on Rivera as the next to leave; I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened after this season. Posada and Rivera are my favorite players, not only among Yankees but in all of baseball, and losing them is tough. But I don’t begrudge Jorge  spending more time with family, considering what must go on there: Jorge Jr. was born with  craniosynostosis, and has had a number of surgeries over the years. Happy Retirement Jorge: you deserve it! I hope he doesn’t end up missing the game too badly.

Will the Real Marilyn Please Stand Up?

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• Channel Surfing | ‘Portlandia’: Being In on the Joke Doesn’t Always Help (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Speaking up for the rights of sex offenders is a little like defending the rights of smokers: God is never on their side, and almost anything said to defend them comes off as desperate or lame.

I’m not going to defend the rights of smokers just now, but rather the rights of those other pariahs. Because of widespread confusion, ignorance and fear about sex itself — not just harmful sex — whenever another sickening crime occurs, legislators go  into panic mode and pass a new law. Some make sense, others don’t, but the worst thing about our sex offender laws is they seldom if ever distinguish between different kinds of sex “crimes.” These laws plunk together the 19-year-old kid who has sex with his 17–year-old girlfriend with the 30-year-old kid-snatcher who molests five-year-olds in his car. These draconian laws vary from state to state.

In Russell Banks’ latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, The Kid, a 21-year-old virgin and Internet porn addict (in this case the term porn addict isn’t a stretch) is invited by a girl on a chat group to come over while her mother’s out of town. Naturally, The Kid is champing at the bit, eager for his first real sexual contact, and rides the bus to the suburbs, bearing gifts of condoms, beer, and his favorite porn video. When he walks into the house, he is promptly arrested by an FBI agent.

Lost Memory of Skin is fiction, but these things happen to real people in real life. (See To Catch a Predator, TV reality show.)  At 17, Anthony Croce began having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend; when he turned 18, the girl’s disapproving mother pressed charges and Croce pled no contest. He was then legally compelled to register as a sex offender. This is the most common teenage sex “crime” and punishment: when an amorous couple are caught “doing it”, if she’s underage and he isn’t, he’s arrested. He cops a plea or goes to trial, and carries the “sex offender” stigma for ten years or more, sometimes for life. His mug shot is posted on the Internet and sometimes around his neighborhood.  In most states he’s not allowed to live near schools, parks or other common kid spaces – one teen, Generlaw Wilson wasn’t allowed to live at home with his family – he couldn’t be around his kid sister. Some sex offenders have to wear GPS devices, tell prospective employers they’re perverts, and on every Halloween stay home, lights out and shades drawn so as not to attract trick-or-treaters.

Acknowledging that youthful intimacy is not the same as child molestation, a few new Romeo and Juliet laws attempt to correct these overly harsh punishments. (Romeo would be labeled a sex offender today, as he was believed to be 16 and Juliet 13.) Still, even these are frequently enforced unfairly says Mark Chaffin of the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth. “In many cases, they are enforced largely by how angry the parents of the younger party are.”

Not surprisingly, R&J laws are even harder on gay and lesbian teenagers. Matthew Limon was a mentally disabled 17-year-old who had consensual sex with a 14-year-old boy. If the boy had been a girl, Limon would have been sentenced to 15 months in prison under Kansas’s Romeo and Juliet law, but because it states that partners must be members of the opposite sex, Limon was given a 17-year sentence.

While I was reading Lost Memory of Skin, the Sandusky scandal was playing out on the news. (They say newspapers give you the facts, but novels tell the truth.) Jerry Sandusky, a football coach at Penn State, allegedly abused at least ten boys over the course of 12 years; at least one  colleague, head coach Joe Paterno, apparently knew what was going on but didn’t report it.

The law that was suggested in reaction to this latest scandal was to mandate that any adult who learns of child sexual abuse must report it to the police. Considering that at least one person knew of Sandusky’s activities for several years, this might seem like a good idea. Even my first impulse to this law was YES! A moment later, though, I realized how foolish and probably ineffective it would be. Besides, such a law already exists on the federal level.

If, as I believe, the proliferation of child sexual abuse is a by-product of sexual ignorance, then instead of passing legislation we ought to be investigating why people become predators. Banks’s Kid wasn’t a predator at all, only ignorant and isolated and horny as hell (with a sad screwed-up family background to boot). Why do grown men lust after children? What makes someone so crazy out-of-control with…what? Is it lust? Is it, as with adult rape, an assertion of power? Wouldn’t it be good to know? Molesters don’t give a shit that they’re hurting kids; doesn’t that make them psychopaths? Yet they apparently don’t even care about the consequences to themselves. Would research tell us why?

Unfortunately, at this time (as throughout most of history), anti-sex attitudes prevent such research from happening. According to “Long After Kinsey, Only the Brave Study Sex,” an article in the New York Times, very little sex research is conducted these days. From the article:

 “Pedophilia in particular is off-limits. Psychiatrists and psychologists have studied and tried to treat people imprisoned for sexual crimes, with limited success…People do not choose to become pedophiles, experts say, but usually discover as adults that they are afflicted with unusual desires, and many long resist the urge to act on them. Researchers know that boys who are sexually abused themselves may be at increased risk of developing pedophilia later on, but they still know little about how these urges develop, or in whom.

“The intensity of the emotion on this issue is so high that it is heresy to express any concern about a person with pedophilia,” much less study treatment, said Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins University sexual disorders clinic. He added, “Since the Catholic Church scandal, I don’t know anyone who has even had the nerve to suggest that some in the church are ill and need help.”

In fact, Dr. Berlin has been widely vilified for his views on the subject, and is a target of venomous threats online.  I won’t be surprised if this blog post induces similar hysteria because of my concern for teenagers who consensually explore their natural impulses with each other.

One reason I feel so strongly about this is that, if these attitudes and laws had existed back in the day, my beloved G.D. would have been sent up the river for the scandalous things we did in his car when I was 16 and he 19. Half my friends would have kept him company in nearby cells. I’ve always been grateful I had the opportunity to explore my sexual feelings with my peers, rather than among church groups under a pledge of chastity, and I genuinely feel sorry for kids today. I’m no fan of teen pregnancy or exploitation of young girls – but if the grownups won’t give them real sex education, instead of adding to their shame and confusion they should just leave the kids alone .

Anyone with an inkling of curiosity about the plight of people like Andrew Croce and Generlaw Wilson, or Russell Banks’s treatment of the subject, should read Lost Memory of Skin. Aside from everything else, it’s a terrific novel.

Related articles

• You: How Sex Offenders Prey (thedailybeast.com)
• Jerry Sandusky Arrested Again for Sexual Abuse Charges (binsidetv.net)
• Pedophilia (time.com)–An Excellent Article!–MS