No, not what you think. Susan Sontag’s legendary essay will stand unamended by this wee filing, which is instead a stolen out-breath following the close of our girlie’s first summer camp. [And yes, another weekend went by without a photo posting; it was preceded by another week in which the S.S. LD continued to rock around in frothy waters.  Which is to say that adequate space and time in which to do this here remains juuuuust out of reach, even as I see the where and when of its return on the horizon. Thanks for sticking around during this wet/dry time.]

À la Sontag’s camp notes, I’ll number these. Probably won’t get to 58, though. Which of course is good for both of us.

1. Girlie’s camp was FANTASTIC; she was a zealous fanatic about it within about a half a week.

2. They didn’t tell me she was going to grow up some more during it, though. Such as, during an overnight sleepover.

3. No, I didn’t position myself behind a moveable bush outside where she was sleeping. Though I threatened to.

4. It’s been voted the Bay Area’s Best Jewish Day Camp, and I can see why. Not that we have any experience of the Bay Area’s Worst Jewish Day Camp to compare it to, or for that matter any Day Camp whatsoever, Jewish or no. But it’s easy to see this camp has created a helluva community over the 20+ years it’s been operating.  Several of the girlie’s homies from Kindergarten were alums of the camp and headed back this summer, and when we got first-hand testimony from one of ‘em, plus her ma, who had been a camper for years and then a counselor, we were sold. Music looms large in it.

5. Among the things they don’t tell you about this raising kids thing is, after one year of public elementary schooling, you will be tossed back into having to think up or pay up for something edifying/ not illegal for your kid to do during the daytime hours when you’re at work. For some reason we didn’t see this coming. The rest of youse: save up!  Gradually skim it off of the kid’s school year lunch money if you have to.

6. After the second belly-flop delivery, I gave up trying to convey, in shorthand, my warm and runny relationship to Jews and Judaism. In casual conversation waiting for our kids to be delivered by the wildly enthusiastic counselors, one person or another asked, off-handedly, “Are you Jewish?” In response, I would burst out with something to the effect of, “No! But I’m a big booster!” Once, in a perverse gesture of solidarity, I even held my hand up in a Vulcan salute. Why I’ll never know. Also, it did not have the intended effect (”We’re all brothers, sister!” or some such). Instead, it inspired a kind of deadpan stare. (Hey! Had I read this web page first, I mighta helped pry my foot out of my mouth!)

7. My daughter now knows almost as many Hebrew words as I do, and can pronounce them better.  This, even though I’ve worked off and on for over ten years with an editing client (and now friend) who’s a prominent Jewish Studies scholar. I try not to resent my daughter.

8. The counselors greeted every camper who drove up with a rousing welcome to camp. Cars would drive up, the counselors would crowd around the door, open it, and then bellow out their morning cheer. Probably frothed up 90% of the little campers into a ball of happy anticipation. Except ours was in the 10% (or 5?) who was overwhelmed to the point of tears several mornings. But did this deter her love of camp or its counselors? No it did not. She didn’t want us to talk to the counselors and specifically ask she not be given the full-throated welcome, so instead we hatched a system whereby she would wear the headphones I don when mowing our lawn, or noise-polluting the neighborhood with the leaf blower. She also fashioned a little white flag of surrender.  From the second week on, as we’d approach the synagogue, she would hastily position the headphones on her pig-tailed head, pick up the flag, and wave it feverishly in the faces of the cheery counselors when they swept open her door. Did this get them to dial down the morning’s sonic blast of welcome? No it did not. Not until the very last day. (”Those were headphones?! To keep the sound out?! Ohhhhhhhhh!”) Fortunately, by then our girlie had already begun to break out of her chrysalis.  A job well done on everybody’s part.

9. At the Shabbat that closed the camp, all the families joined their campers in an enormous field in a park in the hills, and it was a sight to behold, hundreds of young people, bounding and cavorting inside this huge container of loving, energetic spirt, of ruach. When the counselors led everyone in rousing renditions of the various camp songs, our gal hopped and danced and sang out (or mumbled when necessary) for nearly every one. Declaring for each, “This is my favorite! This is my favorite!” As if she’d been singing them for years.

10. The evening closed with a huge friendship circle, made up of every camper and counselor and family member.  I was hastily gathering our picnic dinner items in anticipation of a challenging departure — I was a theater widower and thus solo parent that night, the beloved off at her show’s second weekend performance — when I looked up to see a young woman sweep by and call out my daughter’s name, holding out her hand. My daughter lept up, clasped her hand, and off they sailed into the scrum of people with nary a glance cast back over a shoulder. I scooped the boy child and hastily followed, and though we caught up and stood right behind her, we went nearly completely unnoticed by the lil’ monkey.   All that camper-counselor affection — mutual, sincere — heaped up in such a short time.  All this belonging and trust in our girl. We had hoped she’d love camp, but had forgotten that this would entail loving people there, too.  That in fact it would be the people that would make it what she loved. And that they would come to love her back.  As our children move in ever-widening circles, I reckon we will learn this over and over again. It’s a lesson, I suspect, more than all others, that will get me up and dancing on my feet, declaring, “This is my favorite! This is my favorite!”

Tonight at 7pm it’s being screened at Berkeley’s Elmwood Theater in a fund-raiser for Our Family Coalition, the Bay Area’s can-do, kick-arse LGBT family organization.  Event info here at its Facebook page and via Our Family Coalition.

I am trying to find a way to be there, but may not be able to manage it (haaaaaarrrrrrgh!). Locals, get childcare (if you need to) and get thee hither! You get to meet and talk with the director and actors afterwards, and support OFC in the process. When it’s all abuzz at Sundance and optioned for major nationwide distribution, you can say, “I saw it first!”

Soon. But not yet.

Mama’s opening a show tonight, and what that means is that the household has not seen her all week. Only slightly exaggerating.  Those familiar with the ways of the theater will know that tech week is like a collegiate final exams Hell Week, times a million.  Certainly with more drama.

By now, those of us left abandoned by tech week approach it with a game, can-do attitude. For me this translates into: anything goes. Will it help pass the time? Good, we’re doing it! Might it take their mind off the vaguely un-plugged feeling that’s haunting them? Alrighty then!

Culinary and diversionary options ordinarily out of the question are back on the table.  Eating out at low-cost, high-fun local eateries is a must. And the week ends with a pizza and popcorn-filled movie night. Maybe this time we’ll do ice cream, too. Live it up. (Ice cream: it’s not just for Grandma’s anymore.) Don’t know what movie’s on the docket for this Saturday, only that it won’t be Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (don’t ask). Suggestions of winning films for 3-5 year olds will be much appreciated. Musicals especial favorites.

At any rate, last night it was dinner at one of their two favorite taquerias (the other of the two having been patronized earlier in the week). As we took a shortcut through an alley to get there, what should we espy but the world’s most mysterious, fascinating doors!

Some things just cry out for a closer look.

And a story.

For the Young Frankenstein fans in the crowd: “What knockers!”

Proper stationary supply fetishists-in-training, they had all the tools they needed and fell to sketching what they could peep of the insides, as well as taking notes on them. The doors seemed to access some sort of storage area of the nearby movie theater. Didn’t matter, though. What they could dream up was a lot more interesting than what actually was.

Though I am thinking of them.

An impressive and spirited number of those who haven’t seen the film are cocksure (d’oh!) they know precisely what it’s about and what cultural impact it will have, and are therefore both avoiding it like the plague and denouncing its writer-director. (”No cash for this trash!” one commenter declared; “Lisa Cholodenko is an idiot!” concluded another.)

To which I can only sigh and moan: My people, my people.  That, and periodically jump on one of the up-and-down ostriches and try to talk sense into the cantankerous menagerie.

As one who not only saw the film but found it breathtakingly subversive — think New Yorker cover that takes you at least ten seconds to “get,” and then after you do you go, “Wow,” or “Ha!” and appreciate the value of art that much more  (e.g., this recent one)– I am storing up observation after observation and look forward to doing up at least one post later this week reflecting (and inviting dialog) on what in the hell is up with our people and this issue that so many of us would be so, well, reactionary.  (I am also feverishly trying to scratch out the time to finish transcribing and writing up my round-table interview with director Cholodenko and actor Bening).

My least favorite theory about this tempest-in-a-stewpot is that Fox News has polluted all of contemporary American culture, not just its viewers, such that reasoned debate based on valid, primary source evidence (which one has actually reviewed oneself) has become old hat, hopelessly too 20th century.

Another, maybe less dreary theory is that a lot of online debate has the subtlety of a big ole bar fight. Between anonymous people. Who have no prior or enduring relationship to one another. The sober ones, who root their objections in sincere, very valid concerns, are often inaudible above the din, or at risk of being knocked out and silenced by an errant swing.

Is the Jules character in The Kids Are All Right a kind of a white lesbian Bigger Thomas? Maybe, maybe not. But the question, I hope, indicates that one has to think a bit, and with a modicum of subtlety,  to answer it. Also, just as one would have had to have read Native Son to pass judgment on the Bigger character and Richard Wright, one pretty much has to see the The Kids Are All Right to determine what one thinks about the Jules/Paul storyline and Lisa Cholodenko’s treatment of it.

Now, to the actual carousel ride of the post title! A sweet, 2 minute 37 second detour into the experience of a three and a half-year old boy! Hope it’s as calming to you as it is to me. [Apologies: it's Baba's first iPhone video, and I'm no videographer.]  Minimal dialog, nice soundtrack. The one audible line uttered by my son I think does a good job of summing up a lot of the problem with the Kids debate amongst what I can only assume, perhaps wrongly, is a predominantly non-parent crowd: “Baba, your whole body is in the way of my face.”

I am proud to say that I was a hard sell for The Kids Are All Right, the family comedy-drama starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore and opening in limited release on July 9th.  A mainstream film featuring a lesbian-headed family?!  And the leads are among two of the finest actors working right now? With seven Oscar nominations between ‘em? Oh you betcha I’m there.  But I’m there with both expectations and hackles raised.  The attitude I bring to the movie theater approximates what you might bring to the living room in which your daughter’s prom date sits. Hopefully nervously.

Picture your kid, a sweet tender thing you’ve dedicated the last decade and a half to protecting and promoting, who deserves the best, or at least a fair shake, goddamn it.  And then there’s the date, a Usual Suspect with a history of stringing folks along and then breaking their hearts, or worse.  The sweet tender thing in this construction, though, is me and my people: lesbians, even more specifically, lesbian-headed families, and the kids in them. The prom date I’m looking askance at? Commercial Hollywood film.

I have a right to be squinty-eyed.  For most of my movie-going life, commercial Hollywood film has left me and mine either ignored along the walls surrounding the dance floor, quietly convincing ourselves of our worth despite the lack of  attention, or attended to for just a moment, only to be betrayed in the next, accidentally or even maliciously.

I will never forget sitting, or rather eventually slinking down lower and lower in my seat, in a suburban Minneapolis movie theater watching Basic Instinct in the early 1990s.  A mainstream Hollywood movie that had a lesbian in it! Plus a bisexual woman!  I had to go, and took with me my gal sweetie, a friend, and her gal sweetie.  The overwhelmingly heterosexual crowd watched placidly as blood splattered the screen in the opening scene, and then – I’m not making this up – later groaned and called out in disgust when Sharon Stone kisses her female lover.  For Michael Douglass’ benefit.  Which lover, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be a homicidal, suicidal, man-hating basket case.

Things were only a tad better in the mid-1990s romantic comedy Chasing Amy. Again, I was lured to the theater with the hopes that somehow, something resembling “our” truths would win out over “their” fantasies about us. Turned out, not so much. Ben Affleck made his big screen debut playing – surprise! – the handsome, charming guy who turns the heretofore disgruntled lesbian gal happy and straight.  I’m oversimplifying just a tad here, but not much.  I remember spending about 45 minutes after the movie trying to explain to an open-minded-yet-ignorant straight guy chum just what in the Sam Hill was wrong with all that.

Yes, there have been finer moments for us gals in mainstream film – Bound, the noir thriller with Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon springs eagerly to mind – but the disappointments have been heavy ones. Tragedy, pathology, and disposability have figured way, way too large in our film presence thus far. If we’ve been present at all.

I offer up these highlights of my theater-going past in order to help explain the squint in my eye as I entered the theater for a sneak preview of The Kids Are All Right. The good news is that, in the ten to twenty years since I slunk down in that theater seat, interesting things have been happening to me and mine, not least of which has been that we’ve been gayby-booming big time.  That, and we’ve been winning bits and snatches of civil rights, even if we’re shoved one step back for every two steps we take forward.  And some of  us — some super-smart ones at that — have been worming our ways up through film school and the film-making industry, becoming Hollywood’s best kept secret.

This, as you might have suspected, leads us directly to writer-director (and lesbian mum) Lisa Cholodenko and her new film The Kids Are All Right.  You may recall Cholodenko’s work in the creepy but compelling High Art, in which Allie Sheedy’s junkie art photographer seduces Rhada Mitchell’s ambitious magazine editor, Patricia Clarkson dripping around in the background as a tragicomic former Fassbinder actress).  Or perhaps you’ll remember the somewhat less creepy but equally naughty Laurel Canyon, in which Frances McDormand’s Los Angeles music mogul seduces the young lead singer of the band she’s producing, while her uptight son Christian Bale watches his fiancée Kate Beckinsdale slip deeper and deeper into his mother’s debauched scene.  Both are closely observed, deeply atmospheric studies of boundaries transgressed and innocents seduced.

The atmosphere is far sunnier in The Kids Are All Right, but seduction is still afoot.  The interesting question is, Who is being drawn into whose world? Annette Bening plays Nic, a high-strung, wine-swilling, bread-winning doctor; Julianne Moore plays her partner Jules, flaky and aimless, who’s taking a stab at landscape design, her third career foray. Their older daughter Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska (late of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland), hangs in that delicate, thoughtful summertime suspension between high school and college.

It’s Joni’s younger brother Laser, played by teen heartthrob Josh Hutcherson (late of Journey to the Center of the Earth), who bookends the film.  His character provides catalyst for the film’s movement, both in its breezy opening scenes as he cycles through L.A. with a skateboarding chum, and when he asks his sister – who’s of age now – to contact the man whose sperm their mothers used to conceive them.  To Cholodenko and her co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg’s credit, the plot exposition, even around such potentially puzzling matters as identity release sperm donation, moves swiftly and clearly. (”Identity release” sperm donors are those who choose to be accessible to children conceived with their sperm upon the children’s reaching adulthood. Others are either known all along, officially or personally, or are anonymous.) At the end of the film, it’s Laser’s vision we’re left with.

Mark Ruffalo plays Paul, every lesbian’s dream/nightmare sperm donor: he’s a handsome, affable, organic veggie-growing, funky upscale restaurant-running, motorcycle-riding, magnetic dude. As in, steal away the kids’ affections magnetic.  Hi-jinx and complexity ensue when he responds to the kids’ request to meet him, goes on to meet the moms, and hires Jules to redesign his garden.

Suffice to say that, because this is a story, by definition requiring tension and conflict to exist, stuff happens.  Stuff which, because this is a story, has no obligation to be completely plausible, least of all statistically significant — it just has to be plausible enough, and work within the confines of the characters’ journeys in the film.  This is stuff which the trailer lays bare, and while it might send many folks to the movie with happy expectation (man candy! more images of Mark Ruffalo in the buff!), it will saddle others with a gnawing dread.  No disrespect to Mr. Ruffalo, who was engaging throughout, but I sympathize with that dread (if it could speak, it would be muttering from between clenched teeth, “If our first shot at a lesbian family’s mainstream film portrayal gets splatt-balled by another hetero romance I’ll scream!”).

To those of you feeling that dread gnawing at you, I say, “Scream not. Wait out the movie before you alarm your fellow theater goers. Cholodenko and Blumberg are up to something interesting here.”  As to the rest, I say, “Get ready for plenty of Mark Ruffalo’s fuzzy nekkid body in flagrante delicto!”

I’ll step aside here to note that if you must have more plot synopsis I direct you to the many other reviews of the film – from NPR (“an adorably high-spirited romp” that “puts the fun in dysfunction”) to the Chicago Tribune (“instant classic”) to the Los Angeles Times, (“witty, urbane, and thoroughly entertaining”) to Salon.com, (“ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history”). [Added later: Also A.O. Scott at the New York Times ("nearly perfect"). Or, still later, my current fave in the MSM: the clears-the-right-intellectual-hurdles Dana Stevens in Slate ("the portrait of this couple's decades-long bond underscores the absurdity of the debate about what to call same-sex unions.") And still later: our inveterate and most astute Dana Rudolph at Mombian ("the perfect lesbian mom date movie") Now how often do you hear THAT?] I find myself  in agreement with most of them, with the sad exception of Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review, whose mis-read toward the end reveals far more about the reviewer’s blinkered vision, I fear, than the film’s heart.

I’ll further note that yet more commentary on the film’s social and political statements will follow in a future post in which I slice up and share the fruits of a media roundtable I participated in with the director and Ms. Bening. Now back to the review.

As in Bound, which took familiar noir plot elements for a lesbian spin, Kids takes familiar elements – a young woman’s coming of age and cutting the apron strings that bind, in this case two pairs of ‘em; an established couple’s relationship, sagging with neglect, rocked by the introduction of a new element; a family’s stretching and reshaping as it undergoes inevitable transformations – and breathes new life in them as they’re re-told by fresh voices.  The acting throughout is superb; even the young castmembers hold their own among towering vets like Bening and Moore.  You want to watch each of these people.  And Cholodenko lets you: she holds the camera on them just long enough so that we see the twinkle of complexity and paradox in moment after moment – and then cuts before it’s a moment too long.

The dialog crackles with wit, ringing true and revealing – most entertainingly in Ruffalo’s Paul, who spouts a cornucopia of groovy dudeisms.  In a heart-to-heart with Laser about his bad-element friend, Paul says “That’s not ‘amped,’ that’s just being a tool.” Or, in lieu of “shut the f**k up”: “shut the front door.” In a rare and well-earned moment of communion with Nic, he reaches for her hand and says, jovially,“My brother from another mother!”

It’s a tribute to the strengths of the performances – Ms. Bening’s being by far the most riveting– that so much of the character development and plot movement happens outside of the dialog, in reaction shots.   Bening is simply a joy to watch, and in one minutes’ long scene in particular, she takes Nic through a series of thoughts and feelings, first casual, then building concern, then finally shocked gravity.  Cholodenko keeps the camera close on her face, the ambient sound at a distance, then brings the sound in all warbly, as if underwater.  It’s the only self-consciously “filmic” moment in the movie, and it’s well-spent.  If a single scene can earn you an Oscar nomination, this one would be it for Bening in this film.

There’s lots more to enjoy about The Kids Are All Right – the infectious, über-groovy soundtrack, the disciplined attention to detail (when we first see him, Paul chomps an apple as he exits his organic garden, a guy Eve; both Nic and Jules sip their morning coffee out of “World’s Best Mom” mugs).  The laugh-out-loud humor.  During an exquisitely awkward scene, Laser asks why his moms had gay male porn (rather than lesbian porn) in their dresser drawer (it’s a long story how he got there).  Moore’s Jules begins to explain the mysteries of externalized desire in an abstract, blurry intellectual fashion, going on to say, “Anyway, with lesbian porn, usually they hire two straight women to do the scenes, and the inauthenticity—“ “That’s enough!” blurts Nic, hastily interrupting.  It’s as if the screenwriters were smiling and winking at every audience member — the lesbo-cogniscenti and the along-for-the-ride visitors alike.

The main thing to enjoy about this film, though, is the love of people in it – all the people, even the cads. I went twice, which helped, since my appreciation, like the wine Nic knocks back throughout the film, became deeper and more nuanced over time.  The first time I saw it was several weeks ago with an old friend, the second time was last night with my old partner – we’ll be together 16 years this month.  She laughed out loud throughout the first hour-plus, and then for the last twenty minutes held my hand in a vice grip as she dabbed at her eyes and sniffled.  We have two kids, after all,  closely resembling those in the film.  Give or take a decade or so.  What we saw up on the screen was something we’re utterly unaccustomed to seeing there: not just something nearer to our relationship and our family than we’ve ever seen, but the reflection back of something deeper.  The simple fact we know to be true: our kids are all right. So are we all.

[cross-posted at BlogHer]

I’ve been offline for perhaps as long as I’ve ever been with this thing since it launched (ten days, yow!), at least as long as I’ve gone in a slid off the map sort of way.  It might have been an unplanned vacation, if only it weren’t actually instead a bunch of feverish rowing in a rowboat atop an avalanche of transitions, physical and psychic, our household’s and our kids’.  It’s all mostly good, but it has definitely disoriented the wherewithal — space, and time — I rely upon to post here.

Please accept my sincerest apologies, and brace for content once again.

The young kid at Pride image. I.e., asleep in the stroller. A far more photogenic version of this image was being pulled nearby us much of the way: kid in red wagon, shaded by a green froggie umbrella, and accessorized with a dozen or so stuffed animals. Big hit.  Also, kid asleep the whole time.

Snoozing kids. Pride just wouldn’t be Pride without ‘em.

Our lil’ monkey’s sign: her first. Thought it up and created it utterly independently. Then, after showing it to me, said: “I have to take this to Pride.” Times they are a growin’ up.  The sign reads: “Peac + love will end oll suffrig.” Or, for the rest of us, “Peace + love will end all suffering.”

Now who’s gonna say these kids don’t have a helluva lot of good stuff they’re fixin’ on giving the world as they grow up? I direct all skeptics to Dr. Gartrell’s recently released and much-attended to longitudinal study of our kids, whose many results included the perhaps not-so-surprising conclusion that our kids wind up being more well-adjusted than average.  I’d say keeping your eye on justice and your mind on love does good things for your overall adjustment factor. At least anecdotally speaking.

And here we go. Kids leading the family contingent in the parade. Behind them, Our Family Coalition, COLAGE, and our blocks-long, balloon-bedecked brigade, enjoying the toe-tapping sound of the Australian Youth Band in front of us. Pride wouldn’t be Pride without marching band versions of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”  (Here’s a list of the other 177 some-odd contingents who were marching.)

Wherever yours was, I hope it was the best Pride ever!