I still don’t know. But as a co-writer on the Norwegian blog collective Skrivekollektivet, yet first and foremost as a great friend of Tore, I have found my own ways to express my sorrow. Almost more than anything, I have found strength in music. In the months after July 22, I found strenght in the words of the song Til Ungdommen (literally: To the Youth), and in particular the lines that read “ubygde kraftverker/ukjente stjerner” (literally: “unbuilt powerplants/unknown stars“). It’s not by far the most powerful lines of the poem, but it carries with them the optimism and unfilfilled promise that was so brutally ended on that day. Also, for those of us who knew and loved Tore Eikeland (1990-2011) (unfortunately his English Wikipedia page seems to have been deleted), it captures his political spirits in several ways. Unfortunately, I have not found an English version that captures the almost hymnal essence of the song in a satifying way, although the song has taken on an almost official status as the song to rally around in the aftermath of July 22.

But every time I really feel the need to remember the loss of July 22, the need to reconnect with my innermost feelings, the feelings of a time when Norway was still insperable in its determination to fight together against these forces of utfathomable evil, I turn to Jackson Browne’s For A Dancer. More than anything, this song gives me the opportunity to really express the sense of loss that’s still very much there, even though it has been a while. It reminds me of the shortcomings of the old saying that “time heals all wounds.” For one, it is not true, and in a sense it feels like a betrayal to even think that it could be true. But what it does remind me, is who Tore was, an unrelenting advocate for equality and justice everywhere. Other friends may have other favorites to remember him by, but this is mine:

I don’t remember losing track of you

You were always dancing in and out of view

I must have thought you’d always be around

Always keeping things real by playing the clown

Now you’re nowhere to be found

As usual, my lift follows the Norwegian release schedule, which means that any movie that was released to theaters, DVD or had a festival or first-run television screening between January 1 and December 31, 2011, was eligible for inclusion. While I have seen quite a lot of movies this year, availability issues, time concerns and mere personal preferences dictates that are of course a well of great movies I have not seen yet. In addition to the aforementioned Oscar contenders, I wouldn’t consider this working draft anywhere near finished until I have caught up with, among others:, A Separation, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Live, The Arbor, The Artist, The Future, We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Skin I Live In, 50/50, Le Havre, The Kid With A Bike, We Were Here, and Play. I’m sure there others. As always, I reserve the right to amend the ranking at any time, likely returning with a list of honorable mentions later this month.

The second, more complicated answer is that which may go some way toward deeming 2011 a less-than-stellar year for movies at the same time one of the reasons that I loved so many of the films that are included on my list. I love them because of their imperfections, not in spite of them. Having had to wrestle with not only with whether I loved them, but also how much, in what ways and why, I kept thinking about several of them for much of the year? Whether it was the possibly problematic mythification (if that’s a word) of the Ozarks in Winter’s Bone, the gusto vs. unevenness quotient in Easy A, the potential dark undertones of the perfect couple at the heart of Another Year or the wild overambition presentation in The Tree of Life, those qualities in and of themselves secured a place in my heart for each of those films. And there were many more like them. In that sense, 2011 was a truly fascinating year for movies.

Before we dive into my best cinematic experiences of 2011 for real, however, let me just reveal that the five most atrocious movies I saw last year were The Smurfs, Green Lantern, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Larry Crowne and Hysteria. If you want to know more about my deeply felt hatred for these movies, fire away in the comments section. But be warned, I might not even be able to articulate my disdain. The mere thought of any of them usually reduces me to a fuming, rambling mess.

On a cheerier note, then, my top ten favorite movies of 2011:

1. Never Let Me Go (Directed by Mark Romanek)

I respect that there may be different views on the merits of this movie, but as a huge of it, it still stings that it didn’t even get a theatrical release in Norway. It was first scheduled for an April 2011 premiere, but it kept getting pushed back, until it disappeared entirely. By that time, it had already gone several months since I first saw it, and I physically ached to see it again, and to show it to my friends. That’s what this movie does to me, every time. An eerie fable of the dehumanizing potential of biotechnology coupled with a emotionally resonant love story, Never Let Me Go confirms Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan and even Keira Knightley as three of the absolute best actors of their generation. It was not the only movie I saw this year that tried to deal with human replacement of some kind (Benedek Fliegauf’s fascinating failure Womb explored the cloning, whereas Dogtooth director Giorgios Lanthimos tackled human substitutes in the chilly Alps), but Never Let Me Go had the warmth that both of those movies lacked. In my opinion, it’s the best movie of it’s kind since A.I. (2001).

 2. The Tree of Life (Dir: Terrence Malick)

Never really a fan of Malick’s previous movies (I respected but didn’t love Badlands and The Thin Red Line, was left unconvinced by Days of Heaven and actively detested The New World), and periodically annoyed by his grandiosity and aura of critical invincibility, I was nevertheless intrigued by the sheer ambition of his Palme d’Or winner. One of the least perfect movies I saw in 2011 (Darren Aronofsky’s mesmerizing yet messy Black Swan certainly gave it a run for its money), I eventually sucked in by the fact that this movie had even been made. For all their differences, I can’t find a better comparison than Paul Thomas Anderson’s monumental There Will Be Blood. Although either movie is just a little over two hours long, they crammed so much of history, so much of what ambition and being a good and successful person means into those two hours, that it feels like we’ve been watching the characters for a lifetime. The Tree of Life may be heavy-handed in it’s symbolism, Sean Penn’s character may be completely wasted, the metaphysical feel-good ending may tick you off, but again, to me it come down to a breathless “wow, this movie actually exists!“. At it’s best, The Tree of Life will leave you wanting to go back to 2001: A Space Oddysey (for the “history of the earth” sequence) or to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (for a more cynical take on the man vs. nature thing), but even so, it is completely its own, a unique work of art. And having said all this, I have to underline that the movie is even better when it centers on the family dynamics at its core. Brad Pitt has never been better, and I prematurely lament that Hunter McCracken will not be up for an Oscar as the young Sean Penn. I’m rambling in a Tree of Life way, but the bottom line is this: You need to see this movie.

3. Another Year (Directed by Mike Leigh)

Another 2010 movie, Mike Leigh’s comedy/drama probably was the most humane piece of filmmaking I saw all year. Another Year took my by surprise from the first scene. What at first looked like a dreary social realist drama immediately turned itself around, into a warm and funny portrayal of a middle-aged married couple (Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent) who opened their home to a host of charmingly flawed characters (first among an exquisite Leslie Manville). The humor and wisdom will have to be seen to be properly experienced, but was fascinated me the most, was how Sheen and Broadbent’s characters were never reduced to be being simply good and well-meaning. There’s always a nerve there, a whiff of potential condescension, when well-adjusted people are exposed to other people’s problems and sorrows. This doesn’t mean that Leigh lacks compassion for his characters, only that he allows them to be more complex than what you’d expect at first. It may be what every filmmaker aspires to do, but it’s so hard that when anyone succeeds it sticks with you. In Another Year, Mike Leigh succeeds.

4. Beginners (Dir: Mike Mills)

Beginners is yet another movie that’s actually improved by the friction caused by its inherent imbalances. I invested much more in the relationship between the adult son (Ewan McGregor) and his deceased father (a magnificent Christopher Plummer), than I did in his attempt to strike a relationship with an insecure actress (Melanie Laurent). For large chunks of the movie I found the latter relationship, though meticulously etched in brief moments, to be a little too cute, but in the end I think their shared romantic passivity provided a nice contrast to the father-son relationship. That said, the core of the film has to be how McGregor’s character has to more or less reconceptualize his whole upbringing in the light of the revelation that his father came out to him five years before he died. It informs how we understand some wonderful scenes between him and his mother, and it brings emotional nuance to the father’s trajectory and his need to not let his deteriorating health get in the way of him finally living the life he had always wanted for him. The thought that someone so obviously liberated by the thought of coming would then get only five years to realize that dream, it just crushed me. I never cry at the movies, but Christopher Plummer’s performance and the poignance of his character’s plight had me tearing up, repeatedly. I love this film.

5. Blue Valentine (Dir: Derek Cianfrance)

The most admirable thing about this very accomplished directorial debut is that it doesn’t shy away from anything. The unraveling of Michele Williams and Ryan Gosling’s marriage is so portrayed with such naked honesty it’s positively painful. The genius lies in how the movie gives us the insecure courtship, only to then skip to six years later, when things are starting to come apart. In a way it reminded me of Francois Ozon’s 5×2 (2004). but this movie is even braver in how it doesn’t tell its story backwards. I also have to give a shout out to the shout out to the set design; the futuristic motel might just be the most unpleasant I saw at the movies this year. And please, please stay for the exquisitely beautiful end credit, coming at the end of an emotional riveting finale. Oh, and Michele Williams was way better in this movie than the overacting Natale Portman was in Black Swan. Just to put out out there.

6. Winter’s Bone (Dir: Debra Granik)

With Winter’s Bone, we return to the theme of imperfection. There was a moment late in this movie, when Ree (a fantastic Jennifer Lawrence) learns the true fate of her father, that it turn a turn for the grotesque so decisive I was starting to wonder if Debra Granik had completely lost sympathy with her characters. And wasn’t the portrayal of the Ozarks just a tad too broad and cliched? My answer is no on both. I learned from an interview about writing the movie were Granik was coming from when she wrote it, and it made me realize that it was just right. And more importantly, I felt like I was invited into a part of the American experience that I knew absolutely nothing about. Is it nuanced enough? Probably not. Does that lack of nuance make up for itself in emotional investment? Most definitely. And if you’re looking for a scene to sell you on this movie once and for all, just watch the scene where Ree tries to enlist in the military, in order to pay of her father’s debt. Yes, I cried.

7. Catfish (Dir: Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost)

In the end, does it matter is a documentary is one-hundred percent true? Catfish convinced the answer is no. The story of how to brattish college kids connected with this girl who turned out to somebody completely different may not have have happened exactly the way we seen in the movie, but its recreations are so convincing and suspense that I don’t really care about how genuine it is in the end. More than anything, Catfish made me think of last year’s The Social Network, and how in the end, I ended up not really caring whether the movie presented an accurate portrait of Mark Zuckerberg. The portrait that was there on screen was so compelling and so moving, that the question took second billing. Not only does Catfish have the suspense of a Hitchcockian thriller, it also has a twist so deftly handled so as to be downright moving.

8. Senna (Dir: Asif Kapadia)

The tragic story of racecar driver Ayrton Senna is a story so special you can’t make it up. Sure, one can hardly ask for more interesting rival than the socially conscious Senna and the arrogant but brilliant Frenchmen Alain Prost, or for that matter  the villain of the piece, Formula 1 director Jean-Marie Ballestre, but the movie doesn’t direct itself. Kapadia adept use of archival footage creates a truly suspenseful narrative, even if you already know Senna destiny beforehand. The movie is interesting for the way it provides a glimpse into the politics of Formula 1, in much the same way the the excellent ESPN The Two Escobars gave us a look into the cultural significance of soccer play Andres Escobar and drug lord Pablo Escobar.

9. Easy A (Dir: Will Gluck)

The only comedy on the list is carried very much on the strength of Emma Stone’s performance. A modern day Scarlet Letter reminiscent of 1999′s reworking of Twelfth Night into 10 Things I Hate About You, it stars and A-list cast of Stone, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Lisa Kudrow and Thomas Haden Church. First-time director Will Gluck (who later went on to make the much blander Friends With Benefits) shows a knack for rapid-fire dialog in the vein of Aaron Sorkin, although the movie does drag on a little in the middle section. If I were to recommend one segment in particular, be on the look out for the scene with Tucci and his son. I haven’t laughed this hard at the movies for a long time.

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (Dir: David Yates)

David Yates made it. That’s the most importamt achievement of the second Deathly Hallows segment. It’s not the better Potter by far (I’d rank both Deathly Hallows part I, The Half-Blood Prince, The Order of the Phoenix and The Prison of Azkaban ahead of this one), but it still is a satisfying end to one of the best movie franchise of recent years. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about the whole thing is how the three main leads have grown to leading person potential. Daniel Radcliffe used to drag the franchise down, but now he’s a draw by himself. If I have any frustrations, I must be that this is the last time I get to see Alan Rickman do Severus Snape. I’ll miss his threatening mix of coldnesss and good-natured self-parody.

The presence of Cooper on CNN doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t rather watch Rachel Maddow outshine and outsmart her liberal blowhard colleagues on MSNBC (is it me, or is Lawrence O’Donnell becoming more unbearable than Keith Olberman ever was?), but when CNN is what you’re stuck with, he’s still an oasis of reason and good humor. Case in point and the main reason for this whole post, a moment late in the Iowa election night coverage, pointed out by the site Mediaite. The Romney-Santorum race is as undecided as ever, and Erin Burnett is supposed to show us something on the electronic wall-thingy she’s operating. Something goes wrong, however, and the thing breaks down. So CNN’s completely redudant social media person breaks in and wants us all to focus on a graphic charting the Twitter buzz for the different candidates. It was uninteresting the first he showed it to us, and barely comprehensible at that, and now Anderson has had it with him: “Again with the social media screen? This is the third hit and I still don’t understand what the hell this thing shows!” As the whole show threatened to unravel, I was laughing heartily and ready to kiss him through my TV screen for finally injecting some humor into the self-important proceedings.

It’s seems that’s kind of his thing. Earlier in the evening, when Blitzer was showing off some other useless digital vehicle, meant to illustrate the difference between the “first and second wave” of caucusgoers (or something), Cooper seemed to sense the absurdity of it all – or maybe he just remembered how the network was savaged for the hologram debacle of 2008? – warning viewers that they could watch the no doubt impending Daily Show send-up instead. I was thinking the exact same thing. I hope Anderson appreciates his employer more than I do, but other than that, I honestly think we are soulmates.

Apart from being a good journalist with the ability to drive the national conversation (witness his anti-bullying coverage), he also is a good sport about his status as a silverfoxy lust-object of gay (he’s a surefire contender for my next ’20 over 30′ edition of the SMA). Of course, that won’t satisfy some people, who won’t rest until he gives a defintive statement on his sexual orientation – and something tells me anything less than a straight up ‘I’m gay’ just isn’t going to cut it – but as long as people are gay-friendly my impulse is to grant them some privacy on the question. And my man Anderson sure knows how to charm his audience. When AfterElton named him to their Hot 100 list in 2010, Cooper commented thusly:

I was very humbled and flattered to be number 11 on your list, until I was reminded I was number 9 on it two years ago. Is it my wattle, or the bags under my eyes? Despite my rapid decline, thank you very much. My trainer is also very thankful, because you have just guaranteed his employment for the coming year.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m super-psyched about this political season, but when you’re forced to have it curated for you by CNN, thank heavens Anderson Cooper is there to make it less intolerable. Also, I advise magazine writers to take their eyes off Brian Williams for long enough to pen a piece about the humor of Anderson Cooper. That one I’d read.

The marker itself is arbitrary, but this year more than ever, I need 2012 to symbolize a new beginning. A year in which we don’t forget, but accept and learn to live with the loss. Hopefully, 2012 will also provide a satisfying answer to one of the questions that have been haunting me ever since the tragedy occured: How am I supposed to respond? I don’t mean in the sense of what ways it’s appropriate to grieve, but what comes after that. When people you love and respect die fighting for a cause you had in common, how can you best honor their memory? My immediate reaction would be to double down on politics, to march, petition, speak up for the values that where attacked but not weakened, their values. And mine. It seems almost self-evident: Since our dead friends can no longer speak for themselves, we must take up the fight on their behalf.

Except, it’s not that simple. At least it hasn’t been for me. I threw everything I had into the campaign for the local elections in September, but even as I did that, I felt that what I did was somehow inadequate, or at least a very disproportionate answer to the scope of the tragedy. This may have been an irrational reaction (I’m sure Tore and the others would have wanted us to go on fighting for the cause of social democracy), but it has persisted. I still struggle to marry the relativel small-scale political work I’m doing day-to-day with a vision for an adequate way of paying tribute to my late friends. This is where politics suddenly is interwined with the Christmas spirit itself, understood as taking stock of how I’ve been as a person in the last year: Have I been a good person? Do I find my life to be meaningful?

A short blog post is not the right format to answer either question, but the mere question that they have to be asked indicates that my answers are not straightforward. I can hope that I’ve been a source of support for people around me in these hard months, but the grief process also entails an unavoidable sense that my grief is somehow self-centered, since there are always people who are worse off than me. On the question of leading a meaningful life, for the first several months I repeated a mantra to myself: Do whatever it takes to get through the day. And I succeeded. After that initial phase, the question of the appropriate response has become more pressing. My hope for 2012 is that I’ll able to channel the sorrow that is always there into something more constructive, something that feels meaningful, appropriate and which further the reach of the values of social democracy.

Yet no matter how much I may look forward to turning the page on 2011 in order to find a way to move on constructively, a significant part of me wants to stay in 2011. Not because I fetishize the misery of this year, but because I have an almost paralyzing fear of forgetting. It’s like even admitting that I want to move on from this year constitutes a possible betrayal: What happens when the sense of loss fades? Do I even want things to go back to normal? Wouldn’t it be safer, again, more appropriate, to stay within 2011, to ensure that I never forget? Yes, this too might seem like irrational questions, but I’ve been struggling mightily with them nonetheless.

Occasionally throughout the fall, I’ve been trying to blog about these thoughts, or even about something random and shallow, but I’ve published very little of it. It just didn’t seem appropriate, like it would somehow diminish or disgrace the memory of the tragic events and their aftermath. I struggled to find the words to express precisely how I felt – how do you rip your heart in a foreign language, anyway? – so in the end I stayed silent.

That said, you shouldn’t necessarily expect a deeply personal turn on the blog in 2012, but believe me, the events of this summer will be there, in everything I write. It informs how I watch movies now, how I read, what music I listen to, and what political issues I consider important, as I imagine it would impact anyone. It keeps me from forgetting.

There are some signs that this fact has become the source of something of a type-cast problem for Brody, forever associated with his signature role as Seth Cohen on the glossy mid-aughts teen angst dramedy The O.C. On paper the roles may have charted a slightly different path from the Cohen type, but both in temperament, function and delivery, there was lots of insecure, slightly geeky motor-mouth in his roles in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2003) and Thank You For Smoking (2004), for instance. Not that I’m complaining. Brody is one of several young actors who are eminently watchable as long as they stay within their comfort zones (Logan Lerman and Ryan Phillippe are others).

Of course, Brody is watchable in more than one sense. Even if Seth Cohen worked on The O.C. in no small part because of Brody’s natural charm and sharp delivery – and because he, reportedly being a semiautobiographical version of showrunner Josh Schwartz as a young man, so obviously was the character written with most love and care – I never quite accepted him as a loner. A geek, yes, and one whose interests may have been slightly obscure to girls of lesser minds. But one who never had a serious girlfriend? Nah. Not when you look like that. At the very least, I’d assume that the acerbically funny but surprisingly tenderhearted type would have potential to become the (presumed gay) best friend of lots of girls? Then again, while I didn’t quite buy that about him, I felt closer to Seth Cohen for it. When I discovered The O.C. in 2005 at age 20, and still a year away from accepting that I was gay, I saw strands of myself in him; an arrogant pop culture snob without any luck with the ladies; a deeply felt bond with some of my male friends; and a sense of humor that I used to paper over personal insecurities. There was an ironi in all this, of course, in that my developing crush on Adam Brody, which I processed as a wish to be like him, contributed to that insecurity.

However, I think I was beginning the slow process of interpreting these feelings as gay. I remember watching the show and falling for Brody immediately, emotionally and physically. I couldn’t say so to my brother – who, I later learned, struggled with similar feelings of closeted homosexuality and Brody-crushing – but I when I tested my no-way-Seth-can’t-get-girls thesis on him, a part of me was aching for him to say something that indicated that he’d seen through me. If he had indeed said anything to suggest that I only said that because I found him hot, I would of course have denied it furiously. And there was really nothing in my question that could have set off any alarm bells about my latent gayness. It was just the kind of hyper-sensitivity I had toward the subject at the time. Because I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself yet, I thought just about anything I did would raise suspicions.

So, where does this leave Adam Brody? The O.C. is long gone, and his movie career seems to have stagnated somewhat, with appearances in In The Land of Women and Smiley Face in recent years, and a supporting role in the fourth installment in the Scream series earlier this year. But as with most of my other Early Gay Crushes, there will always be a place in my heart for Brody. He remains very pleasant to look at, and when it comes to earning my loyalty he has not one but two things going for him. Like all other ECGs, yes, he helped me to realize I was gay. But, in a way perhaps rivaled only by Jesse Eisenberg, his screen persona in my formative years as a searching homosexual helped me understand myself better in other ways as well. And as Seth Cohen, he gave me someone to aspire to. Now I only hope that Aaron Sorkin would extend a helping hand to Brody, by writing a movie or a TV series that made complete use of his knack for rapid-fire delivery and cocky wisdom beyond his years.

So, if only to get back in the game, let’s start with a true softball: The beauty of Logan Lerman. Regular readers of this blog should not be terribly surprised by the subject, seeing as Logan has previously been featured in the #1 spot at the Sexiest Males Alive list. But even though I don’t think I need a specific reason for serenading him, I have one nonetheless:  Last week saw the release of a new photoshoot he did with Hedi Slimane, for VMan‘s “Young Hollywood” feature. The strange thing is that it was what I didn’t like about the pictures that convinced me of what a true beauty Lerman is. Logan has a sleep-deprived, glassy look in these pictures, which was something of a turn-off. But no matter how hard you try to shed him of his mild-mannered charisma, you can’t take it away. It’s there in these pictures, as in all others. It reminds me somewhat of the “Dirty Zac” photoshoot with Zac Efron from Interview Magazine, that I wrote about a couple of years ago. You can run Zac through the mud as many times you want, but his natural beauty will still win the day. Just like Logan survived Hedi Slimane’s rough-up.

In a sense, you can see it in his acting career as well. In my estimation, his best performances to date has been as Bobby McCallister in the WB’s 2004 teen drama Jack & Bobby, and as the son of Renée Zellweger in Richard Loncraine’s 2009 comedy-drama My One and Only. They seem to play to his temperament as an actor, and at the same time they play to his nice-guy looks in a way that allows him to subtly tweak that image when necessary. His greatest asset as an actor is therefore also his greatest liability: He has a physique (open face, lanky build) that naturally exudes both insecurity and personal warmth, but when he is asked to counteract this by going for a bigger, louder and more self-assured performance – as seen in the awful fantasy spectacle Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2010), and, judging from the trailer, in the upcoming 3-D Musketeers movie – it’s like he tenses up to the point of being reduced to wide stares and heavy breathing.

That’s another reason why I’m truly excited to see what he can do with his upcoming lead role in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, set for release sometime next year. The source material, a well-written, tender and funny novel by Chbosky himself, should put Logan’s range as an actor to the test. The role of Charlie, an obviously smart but somewhat distant high school student who is slowly drawn into a world he has thus far only observed from afar, intuitively lies closer to the Lerman of the Hedia Slimane photos, than the one who last year put himself up for a young Peter Parker. If the movie version works, I imagine Logan’s Charlie as something like what Jesse Eisenberg’s Walt Berkman in The Squid and the Whale (2005) could have been like if he had actually read the books he was constantly going on about.

My main reason for hoping that Wallflower is a hit, however, apart from what it would do to the demand for more Logan, is that it would keep him at firmer footing in the business. Although he’s reportedly doing another Percy Jackson movie, his efforts at broad box-office hits have so far been pretty abysmal (The Three Musketeers is gonna tank, believe me). If he wants a chance to right his career afterward, it will serve him well to show that he can play moody dramas on the side. Plus, less CGI means more of the Logan I know and love. And he’s even a decent actor.

***

August 7 is the one day of the year when I allow myself to be absolutely, unabashedly, one-hundred percent gay. I don’t know much about personal courage, living in a liberal country with my liberal friends and liberal family, but I can’t help but feel a little bit of pride when I think back at the day when I finally took the leap, and told others about my true identity. That’s also why I so deeply admire all the young people growing up knowing, or simply fearing, that their being gay will cause them pain and exclusion, and then do go ahead and do it anyway – because they want to be true to themselves. These things take character.

But then again: Will you ever meet someone as critical as you are of yourself? For me, the hardest part of the whole coming out process was to convince myself that this was the real deal, that my attraction and emotional bond to guys was not going to go away. I  was never a self-hating gay, I simply had trouble coming around to the fact that I was not quite like anybody else I knew. I had my first serious crush on a guy (a classmate of mine) back when I was thirteen, and another one when I was fifteen, and I guess I had briefly asked myself the supposedly terrifying question ‘You’re not gay, are you?’ (notice the somewhat defensive phrasing), but as those crushes faded, I simply went back to being the presumed heterosexual. Strangely, I never considered the fact that I never had any female crushes as an indication of gayness.

Anyway, it was not until I moved away from home back in 2004 to go to university, that I started rethinking who I really was. Even though I love both my older sister and my twin brother, and they both had been very supportive of me at all times, I found it liberating to get a chance to redefine myself to other people, without having them comment on every minor change in my personality or appearance. When I think back on the period between fall 2004 and Christmas 2005, I’m always struck by how obvious it seems to me now that I was slowly adopting a gay identity, and how I still didn’t see it myself. Sure, I found a little bit of myself in such different pop-cultural works as Gregg Araki’s heartbreakingly earnest and beautiful gay-themed Mysterious Skin and encores of Dawson’s Creek, but still I couldn’t (or didn’t want to?) collect the dots emotionally, so to speak.

It might seem odd, then, but what eventually made me realize I was gay, was that my twin brother came out to me in late November 2005. We’ve always been close, and of course I was both happy for him, and proud of him for acting on his realization. We gave each other a big hug, and I told him how happy I was for him. This was not my full reaction, however. I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but when he had left that night, I also battled a strange sense of envy. It wasn’t that I wasn’t truly happy he had finally concluded he could be open about his orientation; I was. Instead, I battled the conflicted feeling that he had somehow beaten me to it. At the time, I wasn’t ready to admit, neither publicly nor to myself that I was gay, but I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the fact that he was now openly gay, could make it harder for me to conclude with regard to my own sexuality.

In retrospect, this of course seems like a really silly concern, but it was real enough back then. Gays pondering their identity ask all kinds of questions, not all founded in reality. Thus, one of my prime concerns, as I became more and more convinced throughout the spring and early summer of 2006 that I was in fact gay, was whether people I loved and trusted would consider me a ‘copycat’ if I came out so soon after my brother. They didn’t, of course, and had I not been so self-absorbed at the time, I would have realized the entire assumption was just silly.

When I retell the events of my self-realization to other people, I tend to say that I realized I was gay almost overnight. From what I’ve written so far, that of course is an exaggeration. But even though I might comprise what happened for dramatic effect, it’s not entirely false. It is in fact true that I decided to come out the very same day I told myself in a ‘it’s-not-just-a-phase, there-is-no-way-I’m-gonna-change-the-way-I-feel, this-is-the-point-of-no-return’ kind of way that I was gay. You can believe me or not, but as I woke up on Saturday August 5, 2006, from a night of conflicting feelings, and days of going around weighing the pros and cons, rejecting the last lifeline (‘Might I at least be bisexual?’, ‘What about that nice girl back in kindergarten?’ etc), I decided I couldn’t take it any longer.

And then I chickened out. Just like my brother had done the year before, I decided I wanted my father to be the first to know. Picking up the phone to call him probably is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, and that excruciating insecurity lingers, even though eventually I couldn’t get myself to tell him. I wanted to tell him in person, but I didn’t have the guts to arrange for us to meet. When I dropped the idea, and instead started talking soccer with him (a common passion), I was truly ashamed of myself for being weak, but also for not ending my state of emotional limbo.

As I often do when I’m frustrated or insecure in any way, I turned to writing to try to gather my thoughts and feelings. For therapy, I sat down and wrote a long essay, much like this one, to get down on paper what I felt about being gay and what should happened next. I went to the subject from every angle; writing about gay role models, the public attitude toward gays, and how I thought I would fit with gay sterotypes; early clues in childhood memories, my high school crushes, feelings about gay porn, and finally, what you could call a ‘roll-out strategy’ for how to come out to friends and family, how to tell them, when and in what order. This might sound silly (and it probably is, too), but as I wrote I had this one lyric from the deliciously catchy Savage Garden song Affirmation constantly churning in my head: ‘I believe you can’t control or choose your sexuality’. It became sort of a mantra  for me in the coming days.

My plan to first tell my dad, then my brother, followed by my sister and my two male best friends, was very close to getting scrapped when my sister dropped by that same evening. My head felt like it was going to explode, but again I couldn’t find the right way to say it. I knew she would be perfectly fine with it, but I forced myself to stick to the plan, though not before I had tried for several hours to make smooth segway into the topic of gayness. Even though in my many ways it was a painful evening, I learned one thing: In coming out to people, I had to be straightforward. Looking for ways to let the conversation just naturally turn to my own feelings, would only offer me excuses to back out. When I finally told her, a week later, after I had come out to my dad and my brother, I just straightened up and told her. She had in fact said for years that she thought I was gay (which, come to think of it, might have weirdly contributed to my insecurity), so she wasn’t exactly surprised. When I said ‘I have to tell you something. I think you might have heard it once before’, referring to my brother’s coming out, she simply broke me off, asking: ‘Is this more of the same?’, and started laughing. The laughter made me feel a little small, but she soon hugged me and told me she was cool with it. I loved her for it.

Anyway, dear reader, if you’re still with me, I’d like to return to the chronological order of events. By Monday August 7, I was back where it had all started two days earlier. Phone in hand, I was ready to call my dad to set up a meeting. I actually went though with it this time, but in a way, to say ‘I need to see you. There’s something I need to tell you’ was just as hard as breaking the actual news to him. I guess it had something to do with the fact that once I’d set up the meeting, there would be no way back. I had already made him understand I had something important to tell him, and if I tried to talk myself out of it, he would ask questions until he’d uncovered what I wanted to tell him. When he finally showed up, at 3.45 p.m., I was so nervous I thought I was going to die.

When I wrote earlier that I had to go straight to what I wanted to say, that too was a slight exaggeration. I hadn’t done this before, and I tried to buy time by making small talk about sports or the weather, or whatever. But that works for only so long, so at about 4.05 (I remember the time fairly exactly because I was watching my cellphone nervously every other minute), I said something along the lines of ‘There is, however, a specific reason why I wanted you to come. Over the last couple of days I’ve been doing some thinking. I think you might have heard this before, but here goes. I’ve found out that I’m gay, too.’ Even though I fought it vigorously, I had a smile on my lips when I uttered the word ‘gay’. I guess it was a sense of pride.

Then my dad smiled and said ‘Would it be appropriate to say congratulations?’. I nodded, and immediately I knew that all my paranoid questions had been more of a way for me to get my life in order, than founded in reality. He went to say all the things you want your dad to say in situations like these: ‘I’m glad you told me’; ‘Do you need any help breaking the news to friends or relatives’, ‘You have to do this in the way that you’re most comfortable with’ etc. In fact, he even asked me the ‘When did you know’ question, correctly sensing that I needed to talk to someone about this. I think I was even prouder of him than he was of me.

Coming out of course is a continuing process, and I’ve gotten progressively better at it. But on this very day two days ago, I didn’t have the capacity to imagine it would ever get any easier. That, among other things, is why today I once again embrace that old Savage Garden mantra: ‘I believe you can’t control or choose your sexuality’. I chose to live with it.

“I haven’t been [to the summer camp at Utøya] in years, but now I feel a strong urge to go back. One of the most absurd things of all about this, is how starkly it contrasts with what I loved about going there every year: Meeting people who believed strongly in same things I did, making friends from all over the country and from our sister parties from around the world, and doing what 15-25 years old usually do when they meet like this; listen to music, play sports, debate, eat, fight, live.

My most fundamental feeling therefore is deep, deep sorrow. One of my closest friends was killed. and he literally died for the the ideals of a free, just and democratic society. I miss him so much. In total, five people from my county died in the attacks. I mourn the ones I never got to know better, and the ones I never got to know at all.

Next, I feel gratitude for those of my friends who came back alive. And yet. it doesn’t end here; this is where it starts. A whole generation of young social democrats have been scarred for life by the unfathomable evil they were forced to witness and the impossible choices they had to make as they hid, fought and swam to safety. We don’t yet know how it will change them, or us. We just know that it will. They’ll never be exactly the same people again, the ones we sent over there five days ago. But the ones we got back, we love them even more now. It feels absurd to have to call people who return home from summer camp survivors.

Third, I feel determined. Determined to keep fighting for the ideals those who didn’t return fought for, and to assist in the fight on behalf of those who did. We will not surrender to evil, but retaliate with a political order based on more democracy. more humanism, more love, more fairness. We owe it to those who share our political views, progressives everywhere, but not least do we owe it to those democratically-minded people who don’t share our political views. A continued, spirited yet respectful public debate must be the answer of believers in democracy, from the left, from the right, from the center. That is what the terrorist tried to silence. We will not be silenced.”

I was probably overstating the consequences a little, but o come to terms not only with this vague sense of impending loss, but also to take stock of what it is I love about Bruce’s music, I decided to repeat an exercise that worked well for me when I tried to  assess my Hanson fandom; so I created a list of my favorite Springsteen songs. His output is not only vast but also remarkably consistently good, so for a moment I considered doing something like a Top 50 list, but I soon decided that would take some of the point out of the exercise. A Top 25 list would pose more a challenge, for at least two reasons. One, if I had fifty places to fill, I would to some extent be able to get around what’s actually most fun about making these lists; the killing of darlings (This is where I stop for a moment to mourn the absence of Rosalita, Incident On 57th Street, Atlantic City, Independence Day, The Promise, When You’re Alone, etc, etc. Second, a shorter list would change focus from the ranking of songs in competition with each other, and toward what songs were include and not. To make it onto a Top 25 is an act of canonization in itself, regardless of whether Land of Hope and Dreams is objectively a better song than The River. I’m not endorsing a relativist strategy in music criticism, but since I love both songs very much, I find an either/or discussion relatively pointless.

One of the questions that inevitably came up when I tried to assess which Springsteen I was so afraid of losing, was the fundamental what kind of a Springsteen fan am I? I made an attempt to answer it in my Clarence Clemons obituary, and my answer back then was that, like so many others, I particularly liked the Springsteen of 1975 to 1984, spanning the muscular E Street arena rock sound of Born To Run, The River and Born In The USA, as well as the less bombastic Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Nebraska. This still holds true. Songs like She’s The One, Out In The Street or Born In The USA, to name just a few, contains the essence of the Springsteen/E Street experience; effective storytelling combined with a hard-hitting beat that threatens to go on forever out of sheer force and confidence.

Putting together a list of songs like this was hard in itself, because to me, Bruce has always fundamentally been an album artist. Luckily, he has largely steered clear of the ham-handed concept album so popular with some of his contemporaries (although a record like Nebraska has a clear sense of place and style, as has later albums like Devils & Dust and The Ghost of Tom Joad), but over the course of my relationship with him, I’ve come to appreciate the songs in the order that they had on the albums, and my experience of them is not easily separable from that of the entire album. Nowhere is this sense stronger than on Born To Run, not just my favorite Springsteen album, but possibly my favorite album of all time. I mean, Thunder Road leads into Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, which leads into Night, which leads Backstreets, which leads into Born To Run, which…you get my drift. That album, as an original construct, is in my bloodstream. Unsurprisingly, it dominates the list, however painful it was to evaluate these songs against one another. I know some critics consider Born To Run more of a harbinger of great things to come than a great record in itself; a little to invested in the romantic mythologization of an all-American folk hero to be taken completely seriously as a deeply personal work of art. I agree, up to a point, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Sure, his voice as a storyteller is more well-rounded on songs like Factory, from Darkness On The Edge Of Town (my runner-up for best Bruce album), or the titular track off The River, but don’t ask me to discount the raw energy and simple yet affecting storytelling of BtR classics like Jungleland or Backstreet. I won’t do it.

The nature of songs vs. albums also means that there might not be a perfect correlation between my favorite albums and how well-represented they are on a list of my favorite songs. Although I enjoy them both very much, neither Born In The USA (1984) nor The Ghost Of Tom Joad (1995) are among my favorite albums, but both are represented with several songs on the Top 25 list (Bobby Jean, My Hometown, Tom Joad, Youngstown. In the case of Tom Joad this goes to illustrate that while I am deeply attached to the albums, I also respect Bruce tremendously as a performer. Based on the album versions alone, Youngstown and The Ghost Of Tom Joad wouldn’t have made the cut, but the more muscular live versions of these songs, helped by the presence of the ever reliable E Street Band, pushed them into new and interesting territory. At the other end of the scale, 1987′s Tunnel Of Love has become a contender for my top five of Springsteen albums, but that owes more to the totality of the album than a string of individual songs. Sure, I could named Valentine’s Day, When You’re Alone or One Step Up, but in the end, only Walk Like A Man and Tougher Than The Rest made it onto the list.

The examples of Tom Joad and Youngstown illustrate two other points about my relationship with the Springsteen catalogue. One, although I generally consider 1975-1984 to be his best years, I’m not interested in any rigid split between core Springsteen and everything else. Second, while my sentimental connection with a particular song may have to do with the album version, that version isn’t always my favorite. Even for a classic like Thunder Road, whose album version helped making me a Springsteen fan in the first place, today I actually prefer the stripped-down version that was released on Hammersmith Odeon ’75 live album. And although this lists skews heavily toward the classic E Street sound, I didn’t mean to suggest that Bruce isn’t also capable of making truly haunting ballads and bare-bones solo material. You’re Missing, a hidden treasure on 2002′s The Rising, remains the single most moving manifestation of the post-9/11 experience, and songs like Drive All Night and If I Should Fall Behind highlight how unflashy Bruce can be if he wants to.

If his massive success in the 1980s did in any way damage him, it has to be if some people still believe that his only mode is the energetic arena rocker of Dancing In The Dark. I hope that the list below, though fundamentally compiled based on my personal preference, could also serve as a quick introduction to the many facets of Bruce. When it’s a little light on the classics, it’s not because I don’t like them, nor is it because I strive to be contrarian. Rather, many of the classics have been played so many times that they simply don’t feel as fresh to me anymore. For the classics that made the cut, like The River and Thunder Road, it’s a testament to their quality that they made it despite having been everywhere, all the time, since the minute I started to listen to music.

Without further ado, the list:

1. Jungleland
2. My Hometown
3. Thunder Road
4. Land of Hope and Dreams
5. Walk Like A Man
6. Jersey Girl
7. Tougher Than The Rest
8. The River
9. Backstreets
10. Darkness On The Edge Of Town
11. The Ghost of Tom Joad
12. 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
13. Youngstown
14. Night
15. Where The Bands Are
16. She’s The One
17. Drive All Night
18. You’re Missing
19. Two Hearts
20. Bobby Jean
21. Out In The Street
22. Prove It All Night
23. My Love Will Not Let You Down
24. Lost In The Flood
25. If I Should Fall Behind

Slate’s Culture Gabfest

Slate probably was my first love of American web magazines, and John Dickerson, a regular on the Slate Political Gabfest, actually got a mention when I did the pundit piece, but nothing has done more to deepen my love for Slate than this weekly podcast. Since its humble beginnings as a bi-weekly show back in 2008, the podcast hosted by Slate’s critic-at-large Stephen Metcalf, with the magazine’s deputy editor Julia Turner and movie critic Dana Stevens as co-panelists, it has established itself as appointment listening every Wednesday. The banter and personal chemistry between the panelists is great fun in and of itself, but the greatest thing about it is how fearlessly they dive into a wide variety of subjects, from science and academia to the future of media, family relations, identity politics, music, movies, philosphy, politics or literature, without ever doing anything half-way. A whimsical, quick description made out of love might characterize Metcalf as the middle-aged, rockist, cultural pessimist; Turner as the younger poptimist who is especially insightful on media stories, and serves as the panelist who speaks for listeners who don’t have children ; and Stevens rounds it all out as a keen observer of movies and television from her past endeavours as a TV critic, whose pet cause is to turn people onto film scores. I’m not even close to doing the show justice, but take this final recommendation from someone who is using his summer listening to previous Culturefests: When you locate an episode with an appearance by either June Thomas, Slate’s foreign editor and go-to girl on television and identity politics, or music critic Jody Rosen, drop whatever you’re doing and download it. Like, now.

The Business

The Business is a weekly radio show about the entertainment industry, airing on the KCRW radio station in New York. It’s hosted by Kim Masters, writes for The Hollywood, and who has blogged for both Slate and The Daily Beast in the past. One of many strengths of The Business is Masters’ unique access to the movers and shakers of the film and television industries, and her ability to get them to talk about things you didn’t even know you wanted to know more about, or things you may not even knew existed. Ever wondered what the scriptwriter on Battlefield Earth thought of his awful movie ten years hence, or how American Idol was actually put together, or what it means when newspapers say The Beaver was on The Blacklist for unproduced scripts, or… Answers are all there in the archive. Every episode opens with a news roundup of the previous week, with either Jon Horn of the Los Angeles Times, or the show’s executive producer. It’s very similar to another short segment on a separate podcast, The Hollywood Breakdown, where Masters give a quick take on the most important story of the entertainment industry at the moment.

Filmspotting

Filmspotting, hosted by Chicago-based critics Adam Kempenaar and Matty ‘Ballgame’ Robinson, is a true veteran of the podcasting format, from back in the mid-aughts when it was still called CineCast and hosted by Kempenaar with the show’s current producer Sam Van Hallgren. I actually discovered Filmspotting through the insistent prodding of the aforementioned Culture Gabfest, but even though I have only listened for something like six months, I’ve already listened my zig-zaggy way back through at least 50 episodes from the archive. Like the Culture Gabfest, it helps if you’ve heard a couple of shows before, but the enthusiasm, wit and occasional warmth of the duo who self-deprecatingly call themselves Mainstream Matty and Art-house Adam (to give you a not-terribly precise inkling of their respective preferences), is likely to win you over immediately anyway. One of the things I love about the show is that not only is it kinda choosy about what new movies to review; it even takes on older releases and classics, be it through segments like Overlooked DVDs or multi-episode Movie Marathons devoted to a particular genre or director. They also have a consistently enteraining contest, Massacre Theater, in which the act out a scene from a screenplay and invite you to guess which it’s from, and every week they do a Top 5 segment. Over the last couple of months, Filmspotting has in fact started influencing what movies I watch, because I want to be able to listen to Adam and Matty’s discussion afterwards. It’s thanks to their marathon of the Swedish master that I’ve spend much of the summer plowing through Ingmar Bergman movies.

The Q & A with Jeff Goldsmith

It’s almost feels a little early to include The Q & A. It’s an excellent podcast in which Goldsmith, formerly the editor of Creative Screenwriting Magazine, hosts screening of movies old and new and invites filmmakers and screenwriters up on stage for a talk about the craft of filmmaking. However, the podcast hasn’t worked up an extensive back-catalog of episodes yet, which makes me yearn for the archive of the Creative Screenwriting Podcast, which Goldsmith until he broke out to start The Q & A earlier this year. Unfortunately, the archives for that podcast seems to have been taken off Itunes. But enough with the past. What initially hooked me to his podcast was that it centered around screenwriting, a vital part of the filmmaking process that I felt that I didn’t really know anything about. In his new podcast he blends that specific expertise and interest with a truly inspiring and refreshingly indiscriminate love of cinema. I didn’t know I wanted to learn of making Limitless when I’d seen it, but when I downloaded the episode, it turned to be way more interesting than the movie itself. And that’s the thing about Goldsmith. Apart from his remarkable access to the talent, in the manner of a less self-indulgent version of Inside the Actor’s Studio, he has the ability to dig out the interesting pieces from an otherwise bland movie experience. In the process, you might learn a thing or two about filmmaking, and if you’re like me, you get to test your movie biases.

The /Filmcast

This show (pronounced The Slashfilmcast) is podcast of the slightly geeky movie site slashfilm.com, hosted by Dave Chen with co-hosts Devindra Hardawar and Adam Quigley. If that sounds geeky and self-absorbed, fear not; these semi-professional critics have the critical acumen and good humor to surprise you with their takes on the latest blockbuster offerings. The show itself is great fun, though with a running often bordering on two hours it can be a little long, but the real treat to me has been the After Dark episodes. Like the After Hours episodes of Filmspotting, they are bonus episodes designed to absorb the things that didn’t make it into the show, loosely built around listener feedback. Here, they often end up talking about things that are on the margins of the movie experience, like what makes a good movie commentary, or when it’s okay to applaud after movies, or spoiler etiquette on social media. The regular dissection of movie trailers is also hilarious.  I only discovered the /Filmcast a couple of weeks ago, but already the hosts are starting to feel like friends of mine.

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If you’ve got any recommendations you’d like to share, the comments section is always open.