Thanks Stacy and Michele

Matt Alber

Edith Piaf and Théo Sarapo, 1962
Words and music: Michel Emer

To Tango is to trust, to pause, to dance in a close embrace, articulating the unfolding of desire into passion.” — Dr. Hugo Heyrman

Film: All-male dance sequence from ‘Tango,’
written and directed by Carlos Saura
Music: ‘Calambre’ by Astor Piazzolla
Choreography: Julio Bocca
Principal Dancers: Julio Bocca & Carlos Rivarola
Clip/title hat-tip: Greg

The movie had its world premiere last week at the Venice Film Festival and all reports point to Ford’s freshman effort as being something of great beauty, emotion and, of course, style. Colin Firth won the festival’s Best Actor prize. During a press conference, Ford and the cast received an uncharacteristic standing ovation from the press corps. At the Toronto Film Festival a few nights later, the Weinstein Company paid a six-figure sum for the U.S. and German rights.

A Single Man is set in 1962 Los Angeles where 52-year-old literature professor and British expat George Falconer (Colin Firth) is coping — and not coping — with the accidental death of his longtime companion (Matthew Goode). Focused on the events of a single day, the story follows George as he navigates his past, his devastating grief and his present. Charley (Julianne Moore) George’s BFF and confidante, and Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) a student with designs on him, are two people who infuse George’s day with human interaction, but fundamentally this 24-hour saga is an examination, from the mundane to the sublime, of George as a solitary gay man. Sad, happy, biting, comical, George streams his innermost thoughts to us about what it means to be alive.

Beyond being an interesting character micro-study, A Single Man is an important novel in the context of gay literature. Penned five years before Stonewall, the book was scandalous in its day for the matter-of-fact treatment of the main character’s homosexuality. George is not troubled or suicidal because he is gay, as was common in fiction from that time period, he’s troubled and suicidal because his young lover was snatched away by death without any notice. Here, Isherwood freely shares George’s everyday as this man comes to terms with being a gay widower, flirts with young guys at the gym, observes how much more fit older gay men are compared to their straight counterparts and so forth. George honestly and unapologetically observes a very normal gay life lived in a straight world. This was subversive stuff in 1964.

Interestingly, David Scearce, the movie’s screenwriter, sheds light in an interview with the National Post on at least one answer to the long standing question of why this film hasn’t been made until now:

“This is my first film and my first script,” said Scearce from his Vancouver office, where he works on aboriginal legal issues. “I wrote it all on spec, and when it was done, I sent it off to Don Bachardy, who was Isherwood’s life partner and owns all the rights to his books.” Though Scearce says he knew Bachardy, he knew it was a gamble to send off unsolicited material. “But [Bachardy] was impressed with it because out of all the adaptations he’d seen, it was the only one that didn’t use a voice-over. … I used flashbacks instead.”

There are many reasons that A Single Man the movie is adding up to something to eagerly anticipate. Curiosity about Tom Ford’s signature. Participation by actors whom audiences respect tremendously. Interest in a screenwriter’s first script, adapted from an iconic gay novel. It looks like it could be magic.

A Single Man will get a limited release this year in order to be considered for the Academy Awards and a wide release in 2010. The film will be shown at the London Film Festival on 16 October followed by the Tokyo festival 19 October.

PS: Whatever you do, read the book first if you haven’t already.

Whitney Houston will release I Look To You on August 31, her first studio album in seven years. Can the absent diva who launched a thousand “crack is whack” jokes win our hearts again? It remains to be seen.

Even if our hearts are willing, it takes more than just showing up to claim a comeback success. She has to deliver something exhilarating, something dramatic, something as close to perfect as the thrill of her voice when it first seduced us more than 20 years ago. That’s a tall order, no matter how badly she or we want it to happen. But it’s possible.

Fans have been through a lot with Ms. Houston, suffering the humiliating sight of one of the world’s greatest singers lowering herself to the reality-TV train wreck that was Being Bobby Brown. We’ve been frustrated with the years of rehab reruns, previous false comeback promises and the chaos of her life which kept her from giving us what we want: more Whitney Houston. Can we overlook the missteps and give her a chance now to debut singles on our iPods instead of our Walkmans?

We can at least give her the chance, and here are at least 11 good reasons why:

Saving All My Love For You (1985) Greatest Love of All (1986) How Will I Know (1986) I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) (1987) Didn’t We Almost Have It All (1987) Exhale (1987) Where Do Broken Hearts Go? (1988) So Emotional (1988) I’m Your Baby Tonight (1990) All the Man That I Need (1991) I Will Always Love You (1992)

All number one hits, each and every one of them. Houston is one of the biggest selling stars ever, with more then 170 million albums sold. Her music helped to define the late 80s and early 90s and set the stage for one of the grandest and best-selling songs of all time, I Will Always Love You, the hit from The Bodyguard, a film in which she made her screen debut. Further, and incredibly, Ms. Houston was the first recording artist ever to have seven consecutive singles top the Billboard Hot 100. Magic.

We want that magic back. With a Whitney Houston sparkle in our eye, those of us who need lyrics in order to shake our groove thing on the dance floor could use a new Whitney Houston pop song, house music be damned. Broken hearts long to wallow in a re-imagined Didn’t We Almost Have It All. Lovers who want to save all their love for their sweethearts need a new soundtrack. And let’s be real: drag queens need new Whitney Houston songs to lip-sync.

Alicia Keys, David Foster, R Kelly, Diane Warren, John Legend, Sean Garrett and Akon are just a few of the well-known writers and producers who worked on the new album. Their involvement along with Whitney’s talent offers some optimism that killer songs might be coming our way. Still, at the end of the day, it’s the singer herself we look to to deliver.

First-listens of a couple of songs are — eek! — okay but not earth-shattering. In listening to one of the new tracks, the power we associate with her vocal talent seems lacking initially, even if the sentiment of it is touching as it relates to her personal struggles:

I Didn’t Know My Own Strength [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

From the fans’ point of view, we want her to succeed. We want her to rise to the challenge. We’re loving the idea of the comeback which, by the way, is rumored to include concert performances at London’s 02 Arena to fill some of Michael Jackson’s dates. We want these things because Whitney Houston, in her own pop, soul, R&B, divalicious way, gave people something to celebrate. So yes, let us look past our selfish disappointment and hope with all hope that she brings it with this new album.

Whitney Houston’s biggest challenge is that she now has to compete with one of the greatest stars of all time: herself. The question is, can she live up to that standard?

“Instead of going to Planned Parenthood, we went to brunch.”

Long before the world revolved around the language of zeros and ones, cable television, Trip Advisor and Twitter, the tradition of storytelling was a primary means of human communication. Storytelling is how mankind records history, passes on knowledge and entertains others. From oral storytelling to cave drawings, the beginnings of the written word and on to sound, moving pictures and the digital age of today, the act of one person telling a story to another is one of the definitive characteristics that sets us apart from all other life forms on Earth.

Of these, the spoken word is the oldest story format. Maybe this is why many people still experience it as the purest, most personal, most instinctive way to share ideas and feelings.

If you were lucky enough to grow up with someone who could spin a good yarn, or you sat around a campfire and listened to ghost stories, or perhaps relished evenings with only a radio show to keep you company, then you know how a well-told story can regale, seduce, devastate, or distract a listener. It can open up worlds.

Those qualities may be what inspired writer George Dawes Green to found The Moth, a storytelling group that he began 12 years ago in New York. The Moth holds regular events in NYC and elsewhere where people can tell their stories, without notes, to a live audience. To date, Moth participants have shared over 3000 stories on topics ranging from personal loss to triumph, from love to hate, from comedy to devastating human drama you can’t make up. People’s dreams, fears and desires are lived out onstage. Sad, happy, funny, tragic, in the space of 5-15 minutes, people bare some part of themselves to curious ears.

In addition to the expanse of themes, it’s the diversity of the storytellers themselves that makes the Moth so compelling. While well-known personalities sometimes grace the stage — including Margaret Cho, Rosie O’Donnell, Candace Bushnell, Janeane Garofalo, Ethan Hawke, Frank McCourt and John Cameron Mitchell — it’s everyday people who have been in prison, or taken a dying spouse on one last motorcycle ride, or dated a hunky fireman despite his intellectual shortcomings, who captivate those of us with a passion for true tales of the human condition.

In one moving and well-told recent performance, writer Susan Duncan tells a story about dealing with her aging mother with whom she was always in conflict her entire life. The story starts out:

I’m going to tell you a story about my mother. It’s very hard to stand up to your parents … It took me until I was 49 to stand up to her.

I had just had a breast removed, and my lover had dumped me, and I told her this. She knew about the breast, but she never knew about the lover because he was fairly inappropriate. And she looked at me and said, “Well, men don’t like mutilation.”

Duncan holds her audience in rapt attention as she unravels, and comes to terms with, the nature of that relationship and what lies beneath the surface.

There are several ways to experience the Moth even if you can’t get to New York or to one of their traveling events. They produce collections of the show on CD which are for sale. You can also listen to a selection of shows for free on TheMoth.org or subscribe to their weekly podcast on iTunes (the aforementioned story by Susan Duncan is on iTunes; highly recommended).

There are a few videos posted by storytellers on YouTube, including the two below. In the first sample, And I Am Not Lying blogger Jeff Simmermon recounts the unusual circumstances that led to his kissing — instead of killing — a dude.

The second is from comedian Matteson Perry who won the Moth’s storytelling Grand Slam this month for his account of how he unhelpfully offers to “lend a hand” to his girlfriend after a condom is no longer on his person after making love (gee, wonder where it could be?) and deals with the threat of pregnancy.

The Moth is an antidote to the information age which floods our brains everyday. Email and 24-hour news cycles and the sheer volume of data that each of us processes is mind boggling if not ADD-inducing. You can slow it down if you want to. Take a break from the news feed on Facebook and the ticker at the bottom of the TV.

If you like a good story, get in touch with your inner Scheherazade and rediscover the magic.

The Moth

What do Broadway and the Internet have in common? Nothing. One of them is a geographic location where lots of theatrical shows occur, the other is a network of computers. Metaphorically, though, they still don’t have anything in common. That doesn’t make this Internet-themed musical any less entertaining.

hat tip: Matthew Weissman