Last year I spent good money to watch a documentary, one shot on video, projected onto a movie screen. (Ordinarily a pointless exercise; documentary is a home-video genre.) But ACT UP is a part of my history that I had almost forgotten. You may not know that I used to write for OutWeek (19 articles). Even I barely remember it.

I gradually realized that every single review – even from heterosexualist males, always the last to know – was an unqualified rave.

I brought all that and more with me to How to Survive a Plague, the best documentary of the 21st century.

Those paragraphs took a year to assemble.

Why did How to Survive a Plague lose the Oscar? Because it was up against a movie about a shaggy nonwhite musician with a guitar. Nothing says “authenticity” like that. It’s rock snobbery taken to the limit.

I told Peter Staley they were facing a Brokeback Mountain scenario: “Chickenshit Academy Jews, liberals, and aging bald heterosexualist males know your movie is better, then proceed to fink out and vote for the safe refuge of the documentary about the black musician. This has been my nightmare scenario for months, in fact.”

Only one outcome was possible and it enraged me. I know how Annie Proulx felt. I was even angrier when I read about the fraud involved in the winner’s story.

Which movie will actually last? Let me put it to you this way. There is no such thing as Lego fucking Crash.

I kept telling David France that the captioning would be a disaster unless he intervened early. Lo and behold, the abomination that is CaptionMax did its worst.

How to Survive a Plague: The Television Event

Casting the television miniseries:

• SHIA LEBŒUF as Spencer Cox

• JAMES FRANCO as Peter Staley

• MICHAEL FASSBENDER as Bob Rafsky

• DOMINIC MONAGHAN as Mark Harrington

• ZOOEY DESCHANEL as Garance Franke-Ruta

• DIANNE WIEST as Ann Northrup

• CRISPIN GLOVER as Jim Eigo

• JOAQUIN PHOENIX as Ray Navarro

• STANLEY TUCCI as Dr. Anthony Fauci

• CHERRY JONES as Dr. Mathilda Krim

• …and AL FRANKEN as Larry Kramer

Weekend

I was one of only two known detractors of Weekend, the film by the uncharitable Andrew Haigh. It was so popular it spawned not fan fiction but fan line art inspired by its publicity photos.

The minute the DVD became available, I bought it. Then every molecule of the universe had to line up just right to find a time to watch it (with, yes, those perverse Captions, Inc. all-centred captions, this time in Arial).

I discovered I had been wrong about Weekend – and why.

To watch the Toronto première, my esteemed colleague and I packed ourselves into a full auditorium at Inside Out on a cold spring evening. Everybody had a coat on or was sitting on a coat or had a coat stuffed under the seat. What I understood at long last is that I simply could not hear half the dialogue in the movie. It was muffled by the room. I needed a volume control that I could adjust myself and, again yes, captioning.

I hadn’t been as impressed with Weekend as everyone else was because – I know now – I couldn’t hear half of the most important lines. Has this ever happened to me before? It meant I did not understand the movie.

I now agree with everyone else. Though futile, I apologize to Andrew Haigh.

The Criterion package – itself a bit of a coup – sits face up on my desk alongside Cabaret Voltaire as a cultural talisman.

Actor updates

• Chris New is apparently happily pursuing theatre acting and independent film. (In fact, a script he wrote was just greenlighted.)

• Tom Cullen, who was here and apparently in Sudbury several times, shot some obviously atrocious movie set on Mars. (Presumably its near-moonscape was why he was in Sudbury, though nobody there could confirm that for me.)

  He’s in another picture, an Arabian meditation on dance, at whose prospect I cringe. It’s the kind of movie weepy admin assistants and middle-aged ladies in sexless marriages watch. It’s already been done (see Cairo Time; I won’t) and I didn’t want Cullen to turn into an Alexander Siddig manqué. One of all those is more than enough. And, while “Siggy” was admittedly very good in Syriana, Mr. CULLEN is unlikely to spawn a Usenet group in his name.

  But here’s where Mr. CULLEN’s future is assured: Getting cast in Downton Abbey ensures he will be an international megastar within five years. Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella.

Keep the Lights On

When you read about Weekend, you also read about Keep the Lights On. They’re presented as peas in a pod.

I called bullshit from the outset because director Ira Sachs has the kind of fatal depressive instinct more suited to Toronto filmmaking. (Toronto cinema is one sad lonely picture after another.) Do not, for example, attempt to watch The Delta, as it will dig a chunk out of your lifeforce. How in the name of Christ he gets funding for his soul-corroding cinematic indulgences I will never understand.

Keep the Lights On, a structural mess beset by almost unremitting bad acting, was abrasively antilife. Nobody else has told you so. You’ve been deceived. I was wrong about Weekend; everybody else is wrong about Keep the Lights On.

But, even having seen Brotherhood –

– I was stunned by the epic openness of Thure Lindhardt. His performances make me, with my sarcastic, critical nature, feel like a mass murderer by comparison. I cannot understand it at all. Not just the infinite blue eyes, the blondest hair in the world… how is it humanly possible even to simulate that level of guilelessness?

It can’t just be acting. You can’t act what you don’t feel. How do you grow up to be that open?

What is someone with an unfathomable degree of heart doing in a movie like this?

How words get into dictionaries. Petitions, direct requests, and (not atypical from transgenders) veiled threats aren’t how it happens. The absence of the word transphobia from any dictionary is not evidence of transphobia. Nor is there such a thing as “the dictionary,” a phrase that basically gave the game away right there.

I asked the organizers if they understood, first of all, the actual process of inclusion of words in a dictionary. I also asked if they even understood that the two examples in their petition – the OED and Microsoft Word – are two largely unrelated kinds of “dictionary.” (The latter, a spellcheck dictionary, is really a lexicon and in all likelihood is algorithmically generated.) Of course I didn’t get a reply.

If you want to do this properly

Submit citations, ideally going back at least ten years, of the word in use. This is a pain in the ass to do, as I know from experience. Googling is an only-barely-viable method.

Update

(2013.07.05) After I sent her the link to this post, Claudia White wrote back and claimed indeed to know how the OED adds words to its “lexicon” and the difference between the two kinds of dictionaries. I wrote back that, if true, her task now is to submit citations. “To paraphrase RoboCop, your move, creep.”

“Long-awaited.”

(I would also accept “long-cherished” or “hoped-for.” The sentiment, though unstated, is present.)

Every year an article gets passed around about interpreters at concerts. Last year – actually, two years ago – it was the Washington Post’s, focussing on Lady Gaga. At every L. Gaga concert in the United States stand a gaggle of teenage girls, and a few special boys, watching the interpreters. This year it’s all about Holly Maniatty, who admittedly does krazy shit and gets paid peanuts for it, which is more than a crime.

Then people start asking, either innocently or disingenuously, “Deaf people go to concerts?” Yes. Even stone-deaf people (this means teens and young adults) will go, but the more hearing you have the more likely you are to go to a concert. (That’s true whether you consider yourself deaf or Deaf or whatever else.) And you go because you can: Organizers have to provide interpreters, captioning, or whatever else you need.

Those reasons you could have researched yourself. But you won’t know about this one. Deaf people go to concerts because an entire generation has grown up with captioned music videos. There are tales of one or two videos having been captioned before 1989, but that was the year captioning became the norm for major-label music videos. And that happened only because Ed Stasium, a record producer with a hard-of-hearing daughter who is surely all growed up now and could look up this post quite easily; Donna Horn, then of the Caption Center and latterly of the abomination known as CaptionMax; and I all made it happen. Ed used his label contacts and influence; Donna patiently explained how the process works to one label, producer, tape house, and broadcaster after another; and I wrote a couple of articles on the topic, chief among them an op-ed in Billboard that everyone would have seen. (I also persuaded some of the Canadian funding bodies to require captioning and sometimes to pay for it. Ask me about getting strung along endlessly by MuchMusic.)

Thousands of (usually ill-captioned) videos later, deaf kids have grown up just accepting they will have some access to music, however limited or not by their hearing impairment. So of course they’re gonna show up at concerts.

(CORRECTED) The ACT UP Alumni Reunion was last night. This is seriously the banner art they used for it:

Gran Fury would be rolling in its grave were it not for the fact that Donald Moffett et al. are all still alive. Some dumb twat banged out the RE in scrunched Arial instead of spending at most 40 bucks to retypeset the word in its original typeface, Gill Extra Condensed Bold.

Gays, who should know better, are willing to besmirch – here, to rewrite – gay history. I thought we had heteros to do that for and to us.

Also on the topic of ACT UP graphic design

• There’s an entire exhibition on.

• Avram Finkelstein disputes the accepted history of the SILENCE = DEATH logotype (not once but twice). But he didn’t answer my mail offering him all the space in the world to prove what he says. (He could still be right.) It’s undisputed, if little-known, fact.

• The other month I flipped through AIDS Demo/Graphics (sic) for the first time in 20 years. I see now I was too young the first time around to understand what a crashing theoretical bore it, and its insufferable author, are. Graphic design is resistant to theory.

Lifetime Achievement Award in
Retroactive Misapplication of Queer Theory

Just as you would do in response to someone who spontaneously clobbers you with a term like abortuary or rape culture, anybody who uses the word intersectionality and means it is somebody you cannot trust.

A worst-case scenario of retroactive misapplication of that LGBT buzzword has to be Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (no relation). She had the temerity to criticize ACT UP for having been too white. Buddy Cole would say “as if anything can be,” but what I said instead is that ACT UP saved millions of lives. All this catchphrase-wielding vizmin has managed is writing a few music reviews, which I can say from experience is easy to do badly.

I have finally located the source for the hard-to-find photograph of Jonny Ive and apparently all his designers (16 total, two female, two J) receiving a D&AD achievement award.

Alternatively: The typeface that word looks best in is Zapf International.

Not a poisoned apple.

Crashtext; Glitcher.