Friday, December 12, 2008

The Gay and the Dead (and a Flying Pig Dispatch)

porco-rosso.jpg

•With the biopic Milk having been out for about a week now, it’s worth noting the interesting dichotomy between art that is thematically gay and art that is (arguably) aesthetically gay (see: Ugly Betty), which are not quite the same thing.

Witness, for instance, this earlier Gus Van Sant work, the video for Deee-Lite’s song “Runaway,” which is arguably gayer than anything Harvey Milk-related even though, on paper, it could be described as largely concerned with the hetero-pleasing gyrations of the superhumanly charismatic Lady Miss Kier (not that I’m claiming this video holds a candle to “Groove Is in the Heart,” which is one of the greatest videos of all time and arguably one of the pivotal handful of pieces of visual art, along with Do the Right Thing, that presaged the dawn of the 90s — and, by the way, praise resembling that, while well deserved, is so plentiful in Kier’s Wikipedia entry that I suspect she wrote most of it herself, not that there’s anything wrong with that).

•In other movie news, horror collector, fan, and editor Forrest Ackerman (creator of one of the first “fan culture” things I ever loved, Famous Monsters magazine) passed away recently — and he’ll be missed, though I’m pleased he lived almost exactly a full ten years after I, worried about how much longer he’d be with us, visited his “Ackermansion” L.A. home back in 1998 (accompanied by AmGen and McKinsey co-founder Bob Attiyeh, just before his daughter Jenny dumped me, but no hard feelings).

•For a movie analysis that will make you see a cartoon flying pig as a marvelous embodiment of libertarian philosophy, check out my friend Bretigne Shaffer’s review of Hayao Miyazaki’s classic Porco Rosso.

•And here, pointed out to me by Reid Mihalko, is another bit of animation explaining the libertarian philosophy…I mean, sort of, aside from the insanity and murder and stuff (Reid says it reminds him a bit of the comic strip that I wrote and he drew back in college, Bogus University, which may be an indicator that some of my stuff is hard to follow, or that I should write for Aqua Teen Hunger Force).

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