• iPad split keyboard, iOS 5, 2011 (V/B):

  

  (Concept, 2010.)

• Apple Adjustable Keyboard, 1993 (B/N):

  

I am about to venture into the realm of neologism. Running the Canadian Word of the Year list for a couple of years has taught me the dangers, but I’m doing it anyway.

iOS 5 has two new accessibility features: “The LED flash and custom vibration settings let you see and feel when someone’s calling.”

That means not only can you set a ringtone for each of your contacts, you can set a flashtone and a vibetone. (Apparently not a true flashtone, i.e., different strobe or illumination patterns for different callers.)

You still have friends and one of them wants to talk. Guess who.

An unnerving sociological event takes place at the homosexualist film festival right after movies that only aging gay males can relate to. I witnessed it three times this year – at We Were Here, a manipulative AIDS documentary that treats ravaged PWAs like Holocaust victims; at Making The Boys, a zippy and informative documentary about The Boys in the Band that keeps the timeline crystal clear; and at Florent: Queen of the Meat Market, about the restaurant whose ads I kept reading in Spy.

We walk out of the cinema in each case and find ourselves, to our bewilderment, surrounded by other guys our age. Who are these people? Where did they come from? Half of them, grouped in twos or threes, are talking to the friends and/or lovers they came to the movie with. They aren’t looking around much. Singletons keep a nice comfortable buffer of empty space around them.

It’s overwhelming because we’re suddenly reminded of how many of us exist. There are tons and tons of us in this town – and we’re looking at just the stratum that can afford, or at least self-justify, $14 tickets at a film festival. But how are we ever going to meet these guys? This is the only time we’ll ever lay eyes on them, nothwithstanding the point that nobody’s making eye contact.

Put a hundred atomized old gay males in one lobby and suddenly we all realize how old and atomized we really are. We won’t be getting any younger once we head home, but the atomization problem, unlike aging, is not a case of rust-never-sleeps. We’ll stay exactly as isolated as we were before we showed up for the movie. Except now it’s worse because we know how many others just like us there are.

I saw, standing by himself, that tall, ever-smiling black community organizer (the one who, true to form, has a white lover); the board chair of that beleaguered annual festival; and legions of bald guys who were either rail thin, built like a brick shithouse, or 30 pounds overweight. Recognizable types divvied up into single-serving packets.

The higher echelons within this high echelon (this is indeed a gay-money test case) will go back to their semi‑ or fully-detached houses in good neighbourhoods and the nice daily to-and-fro they enjoy with their heterosexualist neighbours and their endless children. They will return to socializing with nice straight people of like class, a habit that, up to this point, they could tell themselves represented a triumph of integration. More like assimilation. Another way to look at it is estrangement from your own kind.

My esteemed colleague says socioeconomic status is the main driver here, but my complaint is structural: Where exactly are we supposed to go to meet each other? If you’re a “questioning” youth or a water-polo player or some kind of tranny who needs testosterone in your ass on the government dime, there’s a nice welcoming place for you in “our diverse communities.” If you’re of the generation that made gay Toronto, the generation that was affected by the bathhouse raids of 1981 or was actually there, you’ve got nothing. And that’s what you’re worth.

See you next year. We won’t acknowledge each other then, either.

I have something to say about the director of a wildly successful independent film and his choice to insult a fan.

Twit Jason St-Laurent described Weekend as a “Neo-Realist masterpiece” before the movie rolled at Inside Out this week. The film has received nothing but critical accolades. (I should know; I’ve read all of them.) Andrew Haigh is, frankly, living the dream.

• He wrote and directed his first picture. Somebody else paid for it, but they don’t hold the copyright. And this film will turn a profit.

• That film was received with delight at South by Southwest, where Haigh landed a distribution deal (later a few other such deals). You’ll be able to watch Weekend in cinemas, on video on demand, on disc, and eventually on television. (Probably with crap captioning and no description, but it will be available.)

• The film’s rapturous reception continued unabated at other festivals from Nashville to Toronto, which flew Haigh and his lime-green sneakers into town and treated him like a prince. He sold out a newly constructed, prestigious, 540-seat auditorium.

Who else’s story can be compared to Haigh’s? Lisa Cholodenko made her first feature, High Art, on a shoestring. (Given the economics of film versus video, the two movies’ budgets were roughly proportionate.) Critical response was equally as rapturous, and if you want another point of comparison, both movies are built around drug-taking.

Cholodenko’s next film, Laurel Canyon, was no sellout; she retained her auteur role as writer–director. I saw Cholodenko on TV saying she had nothing to complain about, because her second film had a budget ten times bigger than her first. Both are very good movies, and I proudly hold on to my DVD of Laurel Canyon.

Cholodenko directed one more film, which she co-wrote with a gay writer. The Kids Are All Right grossed five times what Laurel Canyon did and brought Cholodenko to the Academy Awards, for which it was nominated four times over.

Andrew Haigh is too young (and as green as his trainers) to realize he is firmly on the career path that brought Lisa Cholodenko to the Oscars. Haigh’s next screenplays are already in development. (They aren’t gay-themed; he will have grown out of that ghetto, I guess. Cholodenko never felt the need.)

Haigh’s experience is a dream come true for a filmmaker

While John August has made more money, he hasn’t enjoyed anything like this degree of critical and audience success. The only other gay-male film that received a response this rapturous was Parting Glances. But writer–director Bill Sherwood was dead within months and never made another movie. That won’t happen to Andrew Haigh. I’d say he can afford to be generous.

But he wasn’t. He chose to be cruel and snide in the face of one fan’s disappointment and Haigh’s first and only mildly unfavourable coverage.

And the Times clinches it

(2011.06.17) If you thought my analysis was a tad too optimistic and Andrew Haigh couldn’t possibly be planted solidly on the path to success, note carefully that no less than Tony Scott of the Times described Weekend as “perfectly realized.” That’d be the banner of the DVD case right there, I’d say.

(NUMEROUS UPDATES and FOLLOWUP) If, as I keep saying, pace Edmund White, the function of gay literature is to induce the reader to nod and mutter “yes,” then the lesson I have learned from a quarter-century’s experience is that gay cinema is the Cinema of Recognition. If you can’t recognize yourself, the picture doesn’t work. Conversely, the only way a picture can work is if its portrayals are recognizable. Gay cinema is more steeped in archetypes than black comedies the fonts on whose posters tell you they suck.

(You see now why straight guys don’t want to watch gay movies, and why we are sick to fucking death of boy/girl love stories. Who gives a shit? Why, as Nick Spangler puts it, are you so egotistical every story has to be about you?)

I believe this is, at root, the objection that to this day burns inside Scott Thompson about Philadelphia. And it is why the Britanski Queer as Folk works while the Amerikanski version, so ersatz it was filmed here, is dishonest enough to border on libel. Nobody seemed gay on Breakfast with Scot. New Queer Cinema titles and low-budget one-offs on the TLA and Strand labels fail on this score. In fact, the list of failures is lengthy.

I have here a pile of recognition movies: Urbania, Querelle (despite everything), The Boys in the Band, the ur-text Parting Glances and its intertextual metasequel Billy’s. (Chuck & Buck. Head On. Edge of Seventeen. One role in Trick.)

We enjoyed another one recently, which I’d heard of but actually watched only because it was right there for free at the miraculous Toronto Public Library: Patrik, Age 1½, a straightforward teal-and-orange story, with good type and Arial subtitles, in which everyone seems real. (We went on to argue about Sven, the former hetero, and Göran, the gentle, motherly gay doctor for whom stability is everything. The scene we argued about lasted less than 20 seconds and there was shedding of tears.)

You could write your own fan fiction based on this movie. Imagine the hijinx Sven and Patrik get up to during that trip to Berlin to see Rammstein.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I made myself load a post from an atrocious gay blog, then actually enabled a YouTube video inside it. This sequence of events barely ever happens, so the fact that it ended up presenting me with the trailer to Weekend surely must be providential.

Director Andrew Haigh, his production designer, and his near-guerrilla actors put the cart before the horse a bit by opening the trailer with a lad crotch-first in those dark undershorts with thick white piping that all the kool kidz are wearing. (At least it separates the men from the boys.)

They shot this thing on a Canon still camera, in story order, on a budget of approximately nothing. They hired those chroniclers of scrawny gym refuseniks, Quinnford and Scout, to shoot stills (recognizable sample). It’s reminiscent of that Butt-sanctioned scrawny-gay-hipster-porn project but more wholesome.

I don’t see how a “film” shot on a DSLR actually works when projected in a cinema. (That means I really don’t want to have to pay 15 bucks to queue up to watch it, after enduring horrific lesbian short films as lead-ins, at the Inside Out festival, if that is its fate.) A very large flatscreen and an audience of 30 would make more sense, but what makes the most sense is watching it on some kind of computerized device. I’ve already mailed Haigh about how to scare up funds for captioning and description.

It’s like I’m writing the fan fiction for this movie before I even see it. Why am I doing that? It’s recognizable. (2011.03.24)

Letting oneself down

Two months after writing the foregoing, Weekend played at Inside Out. (To a full house, grossing Inside Out well over $11,000, about 7% of the film’s budget.)

It was fine, I guess.

I had built up this movie so much in my mind’s eye that I was not expecting a sodomitical Trainspotting, with full-on drug addicts. During post-screening Q&A, Andrew Haigh denied they were, but they are. (Do you do drugs before heading out to a party that later serves drugs?)

I should not have been surprised by the block of council flats whose crushingly Soviet, flat concrete exterior and dangerous walkways were so often depicted. England is a living dystopia; drugs are what its gay men need just to survive. (Compare Man’s World by Rupert Smith.)

I hated the character who was more like me but felt a soft spot for the other one, though I could never keep their names straight. Now I know for sure what I feel about the scrawny Quinnford & Scout æsthetic. (Those two have a walk-on, actually.)

I believe neither Glen nor Andrew Haigh realizes that his going-away scene has him, in essence, leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case.

The bafflement on Russell’s face (I had to double-check his name just now) as he sits among shrieking heterosexualists at his goddaughter’s birthday rang true. But Haigh commendably veered away from the expected when Russell’s best mate Jamie, that girl’s dad, insisted on driving Russell to the train station. Jamie knew what awaited Russell there was important even if he did not. Jamie has always tried to understand Russell, who in certain respects is his own worst enemy.

I was thrilled at every sidelong glance we were afforded of Nottingham’s nice modern trams. Even while it was happening, I knew that was a bad sign.

Typography is in Gill Sans and should have been brilliantly, vibrantly colourful, not flat white against the crushing bleakness of the Nottingham “cityscape.” The neutral double quotes in the closing credits were a classy touch.

After the show, we ambled down to the front row for Q&A. Haigh denied there was very much looping or re-recording of dialogue, which is another way of saying the audio is simply out of sync a lot of the time. (To my surprise, by the way, the movie looked great on a giant screen despite having been shot on a DSLR.) There were various other questions and answers.

I kept wondering why I gave a shit about helping Haigh and producer Tristan Goligher secure a grant (in an amount roughly 15% of the film’s whole budget) to get this fucker captioned and described, and why I was and am concerned that it will be subjected to some kind of CaptionMax-style hack job once it hits television and disc. I had sent both of them what I hoped were helpful and encouraging E-mails on that topic. Shouldn’t at least a producer answer E-mail that offers leads on film financing? Haigh had no reason to know who I was, but I felt especially ignored sitting 15 feet away from him.

Why did I care so much about a movie I hadn’t seen yet, and why did I care that it be treated properly in accessible versions?

Why do I feel like such a chump after shelling out 44 bucks to gain admittance to the long-awaited Toronto première of Weekend?

Why did I have to let myself down like this?

Toronto reasserted its debased standards when the twit interviewing Haigh onstage, Jason St-Laurent, quoted “a blogger” who called Weekend the kind of movie straight guys would like. So the joke won’t just be on me, then.

What does Andrew Haigh have to say?

Two months after I first tried to contact him and four hours after publishing the update above, Haigh sent along a reply, which I can excerpt here: “Sorry you felt you wasted all that money on the ticket. You should maybe lower your expectations in life.” To match his tact? (See update.)

I will now make a fourth attempt to address this topic properly.

Like you, I am bothered by untimely deaths, worse so if the deceased could be considered part of my group. I am not a graphic designer, but I was disturbed when Darrin Perry died because, as a gay graphic designer, he was as rare as an albino leopard. We can’t afford to have these guys dying off, especially when the cause of death is suicide.

My acquaintance (and everyone’s friend) Brad L. Graham died, by, I suspect, too many of the wrong kind of pills. I am saying it was a half-assed kind of suicide. I could be very wrong, because sometimes people just die in their sleep, like that gay medical researcher, David DiCiommo.

It is trite to say that the death of David Foster Wallace hit his followers like Kurt Cobain’s death did his. I am still completely fucked up over the death of Tim Hetherington. At least what he was doing was real. Then again, that’s the sort of thing my opponents would and do say about me.

Magnificent ginger silver-medallist boxer Mark Leduc, indeed the closest thing to an albino leopard to manfully stride the earth, died under suspicious circumstances his boyfriend won’t talk about.

Another important man who died in his sleep was Leo Obstbaum. I have been unable thus far to cover this event adequately, even at the level of strict factual accuracy. I started out calling him gay, which he wasn’t; he had a wife and kids. I mused that “died suddenly” meant “committed suicide”; that is what it means in newspaper reporting, but the term was simply used incorrectly. He merely died unexpectedly, a phrase with no ulterior reading.

Leo Obstbaum – with a name like that, he could only be Argentine – was important because he came out of nowhere and put together the most cohesive and flatly most impressive design exercise this country has seen since Expo 67 – that of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics.

Obstbaum had exactly the right idea: He knew that every · single · thing had to be designed. No reliance on defaults for anything, from the Games’ typeface to every object remotely related to medals (each a one-off ingot with almost-unique imprinting; then there were the medal-bearers’ uniforms, the presentation podiums [even for wheelchairs], the lanyards around athletes’ necks). All objects, surfaces, pages, impressions, experiences were custom-designed for that and only that context.

Canadian mediocrity rots straight to the core. We need foreign-born designers to do our best work. Once every two generations, we get our shit together enough to actually hire such a designer and let him loose. We hired Paul Arthur in ’67 and Leo Obstbaum in ’010. We got it right twice. Don’t count on a recurrence, because both of them are dead, and the kind of immigrants Canada now solicits are Chinese grandparents, Indian engineers and doctors we won’t let practise, and unassimilable Muslims.

I sat on my library copy of John Furlong’s Patriot Hearts for nine full weeks. There was an ostensible reason, and then this morning there was what presented itself as the real reason. Here is what the Vancouver Olympics CEO wrote about Obstbaum:

Before Leo arrived on the scene at VANOC, there had been months of loud banter inside the organization about the “look” that we wanted to create…. In a perfect world, we would have had our own design team working inside the walls of VANOC to have greater control over what was produced…. Ali Gardiner was heading up our young, fairly inexperienced brand and creative team.

Well aware of our vulnerabilities, she was hunting for senior talent to help get us to the next level. That is where she came across Leo.

Leo was from Buenos Aires and had done some creative work on the Summer Games in Barcelona in 1992. He had quite a bit of experience in designing mascots specifically. Ali was convinced this was the guy we needed to inspire and build our design team, but English wasn’t his first language. […]

He was just looking for a chance. We gave it to him, and he turned out to be a stunner who managed to steal the hearts of just about everyone whose path he crossed. He really was a complete genius who saw beauty in the most nondescript things. Everything he touched seemed to win rave reviews. The IOC had to sign off on every design we came up with, whether it was the mascots or the medals. And every time Leo put something in front of them, the box was ticked minutes later. […]

In meetings, if he was showing us something and it wasn’t working or he wasn’t getting the feedback he was looking for, he’d stop and say, “OK, we’re not ready. This is not good enough. I’ll come back.” And he would, with something better. But when he felt he was dead right he would pull out all the stops to get you to his point of view.

Then one August morning, Ali asked to see me and Dave Cobb. She started to talk but couldn’t get the words out before breaking down. Leo had passed away the night before in his sleep. It was his heart. The irony was lost on few of us. The guy had one of the biggest ones around. […]

He was buried on a lovely warm Vancouver day, and as we stood around his grave taking turns tipping soil on top of his coffin, a rapid-transit train with one of Leo’s Olympic designs on the side whizzed by.

Obstbaum was memorialized in the giant commemorative tome about the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Not at all ironically, the photo credits are so unreadable I don’t know to whom to attribute this photograph.

Document history

• Published, with errors: 2009.11.19
• Corrected: 2010.03.09
• Updated: 2011.05.10, 2011.05.24