My Daily Bone: September 19: movie (15 minutes)

I didn't feel like sitting at my computer anymore last night -- my butt was numb, my back was sore -- so what did I do? I went to see a movie, where I would sit on my butt for two more hours. At least I would be able to slouch differently.

I like to go to movies that I don't know anything about; I'm willing to take a chance at seeing something bad because I also might find a treasure (like I did the summer Junebug -- still one of my favorites -- came out, after only seeing a trailer once).

I had heard a very little about Descent (THE YEAR'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL FILM -- oh, please!), and I went at least in part because of the NC-17 rating ("for brutal rape"). I wasn't hoping to see a brutal rape, necessarily. I was thinking more about Rosario Dawson's "descent" into drugs, sex and risky behavior, according to the blurb on the press release in the paper. I'm always interested in other artists' portrayal of these things, and I figured there might be a lot of freedom to explore deeply and honestly, what with the "morals-free" rating.

Overall, I didn't like the movie. If you're one of those people (like me) who doesn't read reviews before you go see a movie, stop reading now, because I find it hard to say much about a movie I don't like without giving some things away.

There were only three other men there to besides me (kind of telling, huh?!) sitting in separate places around the theater. It reminded me of the Times Square porn theater days of my youth, though this theater was much cleaner (but, in contrast, the old horsehair-stuffed seat cushions back then were much more comfortable).

There are two rapes in Descent. The first one wasn't all that brutal, and I was glad that the second one happened (saw it coming, said "It better happen or I'll be pissed!"), but it wasn't very brutal either. The second was man raping man (that, I believe is the real reason for the NC-17 rating). The rapist is doing a favor for someone by raping this man. Although he is belittling the original rapist -- who said some pretty offensive things to the woman as he raped her -- I was still personally offended when this man said (as he fucked and fucked and fucked and fucked the guy) "I ain't no fuckin' faggot!" What?!

The director/co-writer was, I suppose, trying to make some kind of point, but it went over my head; I don't know about the other men in the theater (one left after the first rape, I'm thinking because it wasn't brutal enough for his tastes...) Earlier in the movie this very sexy Black Latino man (whose character is confusing in so many ways) belittles another white man in front of Rosario -- in sort of an "I'm the Master" way, and that piqued my interest. "Oh, maybe he's bisexual," I thought to myself. That was interesting.

There were a lot of interesting ideas -- I applaud the director's vision -- but the writing was obvious and clunky throughout. The scenes of Rosario's supposed "descent" were filmed in such poor lighting that it was hard or impossible to even tell what was going on. At one point, somebody thankfully shone a spotlight on her so that we could see what she was doing, but she was only rubbing up against and fondling (tamely) a variety of men and (even more tamely) women, which was I suppose the sexual descent the press release alluded to. She was told by the bossy hot guy to snort a line of something or else she would hurt the drug dealer's feelings, but we didn't get see her go down on the line, and this only happened one time. As for the "risky behavior," I'm not sure I saw any of that, certainly not of the NC-17 variety!

The acting was okay all around (excluding some really bad brief scenes in which even good actors couldn't have made that schlock sound like anything a real person would utter). In order to show her descent from introverted college co-ed to rape victim on the verge, Rosario Dawson got a haircut. Nothing major. A new style. (Which wasn't even the hair-do that's in the ad for the movie, which for some reason annoyed me!) And she pouted (with those huge lips, who could miss that she was pouting?), but it didn't really feel like any kind of actual descent took place.

A reviewer for the New York Times (Matt Zoller Seitz) wrote: Dawson's intricate, imaginative performance equals those of Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver" and Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry" ... essential to see!

Matt, you owe me $8.75.

I am a writer.

I’m writing my first novel. I'm actually fairly close to the end of the first draft. But I'm struggling. Writing a novel is hard!

I’ve been writing all my life (well, since I was in first grade). Around eighth grade, it became therapeutic. Maybe it was all along and I just didn’t realize it. I started by writing short stories. I “wrote a movie” in the eighth grade based on an urban legend from the town I was living in, featuring a Goat Man who killed the teens he caught on Lovers Lane by removing their legs and leaving them to bleed to death. I didn’t know anything about writing a movie; it’s pretty funny to look back at the script/story now. The camera and music moved around the scene like characters (i.e., “The camera climbed the street sign, it said Evergreen; the music screamed!”).

I moved from Bigtown, Texas, to New York City when I was twenty-four, with hopes of writing musical plays. I loved Oklahoma! and Hair and thought that loving them was enough to make my dream a possibility. I joined a group of musical playwrights and was told I didn’t know anything about writing musicals. I started writing straight plays, short stuff, one acts, monologues. Most of it black comedy. I was fortunate to have several of my plays produced, one of which starred RuPaul; it was "an intergalactic one-act," sort of an "I Love Lucy" that took place on the planet Ramada. It was called "My Pet Homo" and it ran for a couple of months as a late-night show in a theater in the basement of a Methodist church. It got pretty good reviews, too, even though the two main actors usually flubbed their lines (some of the reviews were good because of that fact.

I met Steven in 1992 and he and I fell in love and started performing (simultaneously). He had a background in writing music for the theater and I was writing plays and we became a musical duo, a sort of Prairie Home Companion or Grand Ole Opry of two. We called our act "Y'all." We both wrote songs and we both wrote stories, but Steven wrote more of the songs and I wrote more of the stories. We turned the stories and songs into a faux autobiography of the characters we played onstage, self-published it and sold it to our fans.

The progression of our performing career started in the Gay & Lesbian Center in NYC, then progressed to Downtown theaters, rock clubs, random MTV and other TV appearances (one with Jon Stewart on his show before The Daily Show), Borders Bookstores (before they were so corporate and as they were becoming more corporate), folk clubs and coffeehouses, house concerts, retirement homes, and Unitarian Universalist churches.

We started in New York City, then moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to try to be taken more seriously as a musical act, then moved into a 20-foot travel trailer and lived on the road for two years, which was freeing and difficult in many ways. Our personal relationship was pretty much non-existent until we met Roger at a concert in Joshua Tree, California, and he moved in with us and we started having a three-way relationship. Things got more wonderful and more difficult all at once. A fan/friend who had supported Y'all over the years suggested we make a Y'all documentary, and he financed it. It became more of a documentary about the end of Y'all and the end of mine and Steven's relationship, and our relationship with Roger.

We split up toward the end of 2002, went our separate ways, anxious to do our own things. Steven went to Jersey City and edited the three-hundred hours of footage he, Roger and I had shot in ten months into a documentary called "Life In A Box." Roger moved around a lot and settled most recently in Massachusetts where he's a yoga instructor full-time. I lived in a Florida beach town, played nanny for a friend’s kids, did some community theater and made up a board game.

Mostly I was depressed, though. It took me a couple of years to get out of that. I was thirty-eight years old and didn’t know what to do with my life. I thought moving back to Nashville was the answer. It was and it wasn't. Things continued falling apart for me when I got there (a good friend died of lung cancer six weeks after I arrived; the UU minister who had had a strong influence on me, left the church, left Tennessee). But Nashville was also the place where dear old friends lived, and I started to heal. I lived with a couple of friends rent-free; one of them gave me a job, paid me more than that position usually paid. Tennessee had a good health care program at the time, so I was able to get psychiatric help; I met an amazing doctor, David Campbell, and took medication for depression for a while (Zoloft gave me panic attacks; Lexapro did nothing; Cymbalta was the bomb).

I got into meditating. Roger had gotten us into this when we lived on the road, he had turned me onto Pema Chödrön (her book "When Things Fall Apart" changed my life). But I wanted to go deeper. I found a small meditation group in Nashville.

At some point I decided to move to the West Coast, to Santa Cruz, close to San Francisco, where Steven was living, but not too close. I was in a relationship that wasn't really a relationship; it was frustrating and unfulfilling. A cross-country trip was part of the move. (I still love traveling.) I stopped in Houston and lived with my mother for two months while her mother died. I have a difficult time with my family sometimes, and my meditation practice blossomed; I was meditating an hour a day in half-hour increments, sometimes longer.

I was still in huge debt from living on the road those two years and meditation helped me come to the realization that perhaps the West Coast wasn’t the best place for me to be if I wanted to get out of debt. Houston is a cheap place to live, but I knew I couldn’t live there. I went to Austin for a meditation retreat and loved it. I decided after Nana died to move to Austin and stay until I got out of debt or until I stopped loving it, whichever came later. She died a lot sooner than expected and I found myself in Austin as of October 2005. I loved it so much that Steven moved here in 2006.

I got an idea for a novel (brought on by regular visits to NYC, where my freelance job is) and went to BookPeople in Austin to look for writing books not so much to tell me how, but just for inspiration. I noticed a book published by Shambhala Publications, which is the publishing house of a lot of Buddhist books I’d read, and for that reason alone, I picked up the book. It was Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. And it really helped open up my creativity.

So that’s what this blog is, essentially, timed exercises taken specifically from Natalie's book or from other sources. (The basic idea of Writing Down The Bones is to write non-stop for the period of the exercise, be it five minutes, fifteen, or sixty; the idea is to get past the internal editor to the artist deeper within.) If you decide to read what I've written, I hope more than anything else that you are entertained.

-jdjb

The last book I read was...

What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers.

I love Dave Eggers. I find his writing style very inspiring. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, particularly because of the strong voice of Deng, and because of the history lesson it provides. There were things in it that made me cry, things that made me laugh. And there were things that really annoyed me, like the fact that for a while about three-quarters of the way in, there were quite a few evidences of sloppy editing, typos, words that didn't belong in the text. That shit drives me crazy! I feel compelled to mark the text and send a note to the author, but I haven't done so with this book, not yet anyway.

My Daily Bone

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September 19: movie (15 minutes)

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