Armistead Maupin was here and I missed him. *sniff*. Buuut, thanks to the wonders of teh tubes, here’s a link to his talk at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival as broadcast on the Book Show on ABC Radio. This’ll take you the page about the talk where you can either listen to it or download it for later. Click me.

In it, he reads a bit from his new book Michael Tolliver Lives and then gives a bit of a directed talk. I loved hearing him read, and I love that Mouse is back and that Anna Madrigal is still alive and kicking.

Maupin makes some excellent points about visibility for the GLBTI community and why it’s important for authors and artists to align themselves with it if they happen to be part of it (or even if they don’t, really). He takes on Gore Vidal’s refusal to do so particularly well, and I think he’s right. If it really was just about who you have sex with and nothing else, it probably wouldn’t be such a big deal. It becomes a big deal though because being gay or lesbian or bi has to do with who you love and who you build a life with – that’s what gets up people’s noses because it says to them that there are other, reasonable, valid ways of living than theirs. I just find it funny how, despite the lip service payed to loving one’s neighbor, charity, community, etc., hate is by far the easiest emotion to stir in people. Anyway, not getting onto that soapbox just yet. Listen to Maupin.

I have to admit clowns make me nervous, but this is just awesome. The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, or CIRCA, is a group of actual, trained clowns that, according to its website

…aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life’s paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion – adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth.

The rebel clowns that make up CIRCA embody life’s contradictions, they are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives.

Rebel Clowns are trained by CIRCA recruiting officers, using a variety of different exercises, training includes finding your inner clown, civil disobedience tactics, learning to be spontaneous and playful, practicing clown gaggle manoevers and last but not least marching and drilling.

They got a chance to put the training to excellent use at a VNN/Nazi rally held in Knoxville in May this year. I found the story thanks to Belledame222 over at Fetch Me My Axe who posted an excerpt from an Indymedia article describing how the clowns completely took the wind out of their white supremacist sails.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

There’s a more sober account of it in the local newspaper that focuses more on why the rally was held and talks about the arrest of its organizer, who apparently couldn’t control his rage at the clowns and attempted to attack them, then resisted arrest. Tsk tsk.

I think this is brilliant, not just because I love it when people get all subversive, but because CIRCA really does what clowns/fools/madmen through the ages (at least those we know of, starting with the Greeks) were meant to do: hold up a mirror to society and reveal all the really ugly bits we’d rather not deal with.

What crap.

Seriously.

Ameel loved it. Stephanie Zacharek, who writes brilliant reviews for Salon, loved it. I’m sure other people did and do as well.

And there were good things about it. I liked the way the story began right where the previous movie left off, that the end looped back to the beginning, that the bad guys seemed likely to see some kind of justice. I also like the way the story looks at identity as a construct of our memories and the dissociation that happens when one loses or at least can’t locate those memories. All good stuff, all interesting. I have no issues with the story itself or the larger metaphorical tale-of-our-times stuff that everyone’s raving about.

No. The issues I had with the movie had more to do with the way it was put together. Did we really need all those over-the-shoulder shots of intensely intense eyes being all intense? Did we really? And all from the same angle too? Oh and how about that shaking camera? Nothing like feeling carsick in the middle of a movie theatre to put the finishing touch on your cinematic experience. And that chase in Tangier that some people loved? Oy. Yes you can run over rooftops and through windows, open or not, but do you have to do it for ten whole minutes? And yes you can beat the living shit out of the guy out to kill you, but could you, um, well just get it over with already? First you slam the guy into a wall, then you get slammed into a bookcase, then it’s other random bits of furniture, then a huge mirror, then you get books involved, then you take it to the bathroom whose fixtures, naturally, come into play, and then, finally, finally, the baddie croaks. Phew. Well that was close. Because, with about half the movie’s running time left, there was a big question mark there about whether the title character would make it. Yeesh.

Oh and please, let us not forget the silences. The long, meaningful, significant and deeply, deeply, deeply annoying silences. Yes, yes, he’s alone and isolated. Yes the dead girlfriend is still ‘there’ (and far more substantial than poor ol’ Julia Stiles without even being in the frame). Yes there’s a story there with Stiles’s character, but please somebody bloody say something. I’m all for tension building and such, but this was frustrating because the actors were so busy emoting their little guts out that they forgot to engage with anything. What is this, acting by numbers? Ameel pointed out that it might have just been bad editing, and I’d like to believe that if only because I like Stiles and I think that even in a crappy role she brings something interesting to the screen. If I can blame someone else for her crappiness, I’d like to.

One of the best scenes of the movie was utterly ruined because they show it, or at least all the important bits of it, in the trailer. God I hate it when they do that. And the less said about that inane car chase the better.

This movie annoyed me because, with all the potential there was for a truly fantastic ending to an interesting story, we got this shoot-em-up drivel rife with oh-look-I’m-pretending-to-be-a-spy speak. By the time it ended, I had no idea how it had begun, who had done what to whom, why, when, where and, quite honestly, I didn’t care. Bourne gets his memory back and lives to swim out of the East River, bad men get arrested, Julia smiles to herself in a coffee shop, and all’s right with the world. Lovely.

<Insert rude noise of choice>