Welcome To All That

Was 2011 a good year for movies? For me, there are to ways to answer this question. The short answer is I don’t know yet. As always, the expected Oscar contenders mostly have not premiered in Norway yet, and assuming that at least some of them (Hugo, maybe, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or The Descendants) will be worth waiting for, the following list of favorite movies of 2011 should be considered little more than a working draft. The other side of that coin, however, is that 2011 gave me a more complete view of the glorious movie year that was 2010. If my 2011 list feels even more stale and safe than unusual it is probably due to the fact that it contains several great movies which premiered in the US a long time ago. It may also say something about a more meager harvest from the festival crop than in recent years. (more…)

A year ago, I compiled a playlist for my friend Bryan Borland’s poetry collection My Life as Adam, and Bryan quickly followed suit with his own pop-cultural interpretation of his own book. It speaks to how deeply integrated these two forms of cultural representation are, and how silly it would be to think of them in hierarchical ways. When you open a book, you take a set of values and references with you into reading and interpreting it, and for me that means that fragment of music and movies will  always influence my experience of it. (more…)

I changed the format on What to Read, then promised to update in early and often, only to post with even less regularity than before. Anyway, here, finally, are some reading tips from around the web, adjusted for my personal politico.cultural biases and interests. By my regular rhythm, you should expect expect to see another installment sometime in early summer. (more…)

At first glance, it seems obvious why Hunter Parrish re-took the top spot on the Sexiest Males Alive list. After all, the sixth season of Weeds is well underway, and my love for the guy occasionally makes me want to rewatch It’s Complicated. But actually, there is no particular reason why Hunter won. He just has most of what this list measures; sexiness. Oddly, I thnk the fact that Hunter won on this simple yet so complicated metric alone, is itself kind of beautiful. (more…)

Now for a first on this blog; a bit of self-promotion. I am featured in Ganymede Unfinished, a tribute to the late Ganymede editor and renaissance man John Stahle, out now on Sibling Rivalry Press. Stahle published seven issues of the gay journal over the course of two years, and the tribute issue, honoring Stahle’s memory by collecting a wide range of gay expressions from photography to essays, fiction to reviews and interviews, is edited by my friend Bryan Borland.

You can purchase Ganymede Unfinished here.

I’ve been doing it for over a year now, but since I don’t know it anybody ever reads my (semi)weekly What to Read feature, I’ve decided to take a page out of the playbook of the magnificent Jessie Carty (whose blog you should visit several times a week). (more…)

Reviewing Jeffrey Escoffier’s gay porn history Bigger Than Life recently, I also talked about the first time I saw Jochen Hick’s documentary double feature on the business, Sex/Life in L.A (1998) and Cycles of Porn: Sex/Life in L.A. Part 2 (2005). It was an exhausting, unnerving, but also secretly exciting experience. I watched it as a special screening at my local film festival in 2005. (more…)

There’s no limit to how wrong I can be sometimes. Now the time has come to give a particularly tough spin on my apology to Zac Hanson, of whom I said – in an adoring Early Gay Crushes piece, no less! – that he would “never be hot”. To my defense, I did add “at least not in the classic sense”, which may still be correct, and I could of course not foresee exactly how great the drummer would look in 2010. But I was wrong, bigtime. (more…)