Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

A love song to Occupy Wall Street: The Land I Love

The mainstream media doesn't get this story. They say there is no coherent message to Occupy Wall Street. All you have to do is see all these signs to know that there is a serious, unified goal that these new activists share. And I share it as well. Oh, and no small thing - the guy who wrote the music and lyrics, sang and played every instrument in this video is my brother Robert!

Lesbian Space Aliens Invade NYC Again

Tonight Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, the insanely funny film by Madeline Olnek, will be showing at MOMA as part of a series: Films Not Playing At A Theater Near You.

And too bad that it's not playing near you wherever you are, since when I first saw this film at NewFest this last summer I found myself laughing at odd moments for weeks afterwards.

The showing on Saturday night sold out. So if you want tickets for tonight's showing, act now as we say in the ad biz.

He's just my type

Okay, bad pun. Sue me.

This ad appeared in adsoftheworld.com for oxydo, an Italian eyewear manufacturer. I don't like the ad. I don't like the series of ads. They don't mean anything to me. But it's fashion, so what the hell - it's supposed to make you look at it, and make the product look good. So here are a couple of pretty boys wearing nice frames. And one has a typewriter theme, which always attracts me as a typewriter enthusiast. Okay BBDO Italy got me to pay attention. I even went and looked at framesdirect.com to see what kind of frames they had here. So I guess the damn ads worked.

Still, I ain't gonna look like either of theses models. Now if these models came with the frames.... Of course, in the ad below, while the guy is pretty, the ad suggests he's not real on any number of levels. And playing with him would be rather mechanical. Okay, enough.

"We are open to all families" IKEA ad stirs controversy in Italy

Britain's Daily Mail reports that:

"Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by ruling prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has promoted himself as a defender of family values despite his involvement in a series of sex scandals has condemned the advert.

It labelled it as ''provocative'' and added:'’What's behind all this? It's not awareness of gay rights for gay couples. It's just a brazen marketing strategy.’

The paper went on to say that it was ''not an isolated incident'' but a clear attempt at ''Swedish Imperialism'' that tried

The paper went on to say that it was ''not an isolated incident'' but a clear attempt at ''Swedish Imperialism'' that tried to make everyone equal by having the same ''cheap furniture.''

Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by PM Silvio Berlusconi, has condemned the advert

The paper went on to say that it was ''not an isolated incident'' but a clear attempt at ''Swedish Imperialism'' that tried to make everyone equal by having the same ''cheap furniture.'' 

I am not sure what Swedish Imperialism is, though perhaps it's similar what used to be called Coca Colinization, the way American products washed over the cultures of nations after WWII.

However, what if this ad isn't trying "to make everyone equal by having the same ''cheap furniture.'' What if it is trying to convince heterosexual Italians that IKEA furniture is fashionable enough for gay couples to want to shop there, under the guise of saying they believe in equality?

Is this overthinking it? I don't know. But what I do know is that as a gay man, I sure don't want to have IKEA furniture in my home. I do I'm sorry to say, but it's for functional pieces only like book cases. Their chairs and couches are uniformly uncomfortable. In my opinion at least.

But 3 cheers to them anyway for the ad — not the first time IKEA has used gay (male) couples. Now if they could only do something about the garish logo.

Gay men, movies, theater and typewriters

What more could I possibly want from a movie poster? Making the Boys, the documentary about the making of The Boys In The Band - the play, the movie, and the way it both was groundbreaking and backwards looking at the same time simply by being staged just as the new era of gay rights was getting started is the subject of this amazing film. At the Quad this week.

Genre Transgression: Between Yü and me, how many queer Buddhist reincarnation revenge mystery historical romance stories can there be?

It’s no secret to (the admittedly few) regular readers of this blog that I have interests in gay fiction, Asia in general and Japan in particular, as well as Buddhism and mysticism.  Earlier this year I was surprised to discover there is, like yayoi, a whole subgenre of gay fiction that could be described as Queer Supernatural Asian Mystery Erotic Historical Romance Novels. I came across these books through Librarything.com — a kind of social network for book lovers that matches similar book collections by members and then makes recommendations based on these shared affinities — and started reading some of them.

Shortly after I’d finished reading a couple of Sedonia Guillone’s “Beautiful Samurai” novels in this subgenre I received an email from Joy Shayne Laughter, the author of a book that fits most of the categories in this subgenre — but let me be clear immediately that her book, Yü: A Ross Lamos Mystery,” does not tick off the “erotic” check box in this subgenre. Yü is more of an intellectual and spiritual effort (this is not to suggest it’s not fun — the many pleasures of this book will keep your hands above the table and turning pages relentlessly).

The appearance of Yü in my mailbox got me to thinking about the history of this subgenre. After all, in 2006 I had a short story, called Musuko Dojoji, published in an anthology of gay fantasy fiction called Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling. Musuko Dojoji was a retelling of a thousand year old Japanese folktale (Musume Dojoji) framed by a contemporary gay love story. The folktale is connected to the contemporary story by a reincarnation motif. I wrote this story out of love for my late boyfriend, Hiroshi Aoki, as a way of keeping his memory alive through our shared love of folktales and mysticism. It was one way of honoring our connection — a connection I always felt was something that went beyond my limited understanding of reality.

As I thought about reincarnation as a plot device in queer love stories, I realized this motif is hardly new. One of the things Hiroshi and I shared was a love of kabuki — and we were both great fans of the classic kabuki play, Sakura Hime Azuma Bunshô: The Scarlet Princess of Edo.

This play’s prologue is the story of two lovers fleeing an angry mob of monks. Indeed, the two who are running away are the monk Seigen, and his young chigo ( temple acolyte), Shiragiku.

The chorus sings of same-sex love as they climb the cliff at Enoshima, a site famous for love suicides named Chigo ga Fuchi (Chigo Falls) in memory of this particularly notorious plunge:

Not only woman can be in this mortal world
closet companion to man, his dearest lover.

Seigen and the boy pledge to die together rather than be kept apart by the world  —supposedly not because this is a same-sex or intergenerational relationship but because Seigen is a monk and thus has broken his vows of celibacy. Of course, the audience knew that these relationships were nothing out of the ordinary.

Before jumping, Shiragiku prayed for a rebirth as a woman so he could marry Seigen. And then he threw himself to the rocks below. You can see the two in the moment before Shiragiku jumped in the photo below — the boy is the young Tamasaburo Bando in his very first role on the kabuki stage before becoming world famous as an onnagata, a man who traditionally plays female roles. One of Tamasaburo’s most acclaimed roles is that of Sakurahime.

Back to the story: after the boy jumped, the monk Seigen, seeing the body of his lover broken on the rocks below, reveals himself as a faithless coward:

I would die for you without a thought, but…

Seigen has second thoughts, and runs away. The prologue ends and then the real action of the play begins, 17 years later, when the boy acolyte, now reincarnated as the Scarlet Princess, and meets the cowardly and duplicitous Seigen once more.

Written by Tsuruya Namboku and first performed in 1817, this is the earliest example of a romance/revenge/reincarnation/ghost story centered around a male/male relationship that I am aware of. If you know of anything earlier, I’d love to hear about it. Oh, and if the whole story sounds over the top operatic, you’ll be pleased to know David Henry Hwang, author of M. Butterfly, wrote the libretto for an English language opera based on the story, composed by Alexina Louie, called The Scarlet Princess.

But enough about me and my interest in this genre — let’s talk about Yü. Promoted as the first in a series of books about Ross Lamos “karmic detective,” Yü is the story of a gay antique art appraiser who has psychic touch — simply by holding an object, he will not only know its provenance, he’ll go into a trance, reliving the experiences of everyone else who touched it.

When a woman walks into the gallery where Lamos is employed (and where he keeps this supernatural gift secret from his employer) and presents him with three exquisite Han Dynasty jades he is plunged into a 2,000-year-old murder mystery. His touch reveals that all the players in that long forgotten drama have reincarnated around this woman today.

Lamos also discovers that his employer is planning to replace the jades with fakes because he’s running an art forgery operation. And while Lamos is busy trying to solve an ancient mystery and save the jades from being stolen, he’s doing his best to reconcile himself to the fact that his philandering ex-boyfriend has become a celibate Buddhist monk at the temple where he began his own spiritual practice.

There’s a lot of movement between past and present in this story — though really the crux of the action takes place in the Han Dynasty, a little more than 2,000 years ago. It’s a tale of passion and philosophy — desire and Taoist thought in the imperial  court. And the confusions of physical and spiritual love in this story of palace intrigue are reflected in the story of Lamos, his clients and friends today.

Each section of the book begins with a translated text from a famous Chinese Taoist philosopher or historian that gives further depth to the action. The parts of the story that take place in ancient China captured all the beauty and tension that is heightened by the restrained expression of Chinese imperial court life.

If there were anything I would have wished for in Yü it would be more of Ross Lamos today rather than in his previous incarnation. The Chinese story is really a story of heterosexual love. And Ross is so caught up in his work, and this old mystery, that his personal life, and love life, today suffers. I don’t need to read about someone with a problem like that — I can just look at my own life (cue the violins).

Ross is a character I want to get to know better — not only in his previous incarnations, and I assume that if there are going to be more in this series, in each volume we’ll not only follow his current life, but his previous lives as well. I just want more of a balance between the two. Or more of an intersection between the two next time.

A Ross Lamos series holds the promise of both past and present, sexuality and spirituality, coming together in a way that heals and reveals reality at its deepest, while giving the reader the pleasure of a page-turning mystery. So I look forward to more books in this promised series.

Another series of books that fits the romance/reincarnation/revenge motif (and given that it appears enough times in stories at this point I think it has to be recognized as a motif) are the “Beautiful Samurai” books by Sedonia Guillone.

In contrast to the more spiritually entertaining goals of Yü, the Guillone’s Beautiful Samurai books are described as m/m erotic fiction (with all the other subgenre categories appended). However I found the long passages describing sexual acts in overblown (ahem) prose so graphic as to cross the line from erotic to pornographic.

 

This is all a question of taste. I didn’t want to like the Guillone books. However, I did like the stories if not the writing or the lengthy erotic digressions. The characters she has created are interesting, if not fully drawn in depth. There is so much more possible here that the graphic sex scenes actually seem to get in the way — even though passionate sex is what draws a demonic force to manifest and recreate an Edo period murder in the first book.

Here we are introduced to John Holmes — an American Gulf War veteran, who also has psychic touch and other psychic abilities. He is brought to Tokyo to help solve some weird crimes, and there he meets a young Japanese detective, Toshi. They fall in love and have lots of sex. And in the process they solve the murder mystery that is several centuries old, while solving the current crimes of passion taking place in Tokyo.

As I say, I didn’t want to like the Guillone books. There were spelling errors. Mistakes about Japanese culture that bothered me. And more sex than was really necessary unless you wanted to read the books with one hand below the waist. But as I say, I thought the stories were interesting — better than the prose they were written in.  And the characters were interesting too, if one-dimensionally drawn. These books had potential the author gave up by putting more energy into the sexual escapades and to me they suffer for it.

As for the physical book itself, I can forgive the fact that the typesetting is amateurish — this is clearly a publishing house that exists because computers make printing easier and cheaper than ever. But spell checking and professional editing, often invisible to readers in the final product, as they should be, are glaringly absent here. This publisher, Torquere Books, is one of the centers of the new m/m pulp fiction (oddly written by straight women) and some of their writers have been recognized with awards for writing queer science fiction.

So how many more books can we expect that mash up all these genres to create a subgenre that even Marion Zimmer Bradley (whose queer pulp science fiction Darkover series was groundbreaking back in 1975 with The Heritage of Hastur) would never have imagined? Well, given the mainstream appetite for vampires, werewolves and wizards in film and print I doubt we’ll see the end of this almost Jacobean fascination any time soon. And when a good book like Yü: A Ross Lamos Mystery comes along, I’m not complaining.

Choc Tease: Women with (malt) balls make this TV commercial one of the U.K.'s faves and a queer hit.

<p>It's always nice to see two men cuddling together on the couch with a gay kiss (even if it is unconscious smooching). Even if, from my point of view it's not naughty or new. But as a TV spot for candy? Sweet. My thank yous to Johnny in Rhode Island for catching this on the list of top 10 best-liked TV ads in Britain:

The Best, Most Strategic Viral Web Copywriting You'll Ever Read...Today

Brian Barrett over at Gizmodo waxed rhapsodic over the "rant" in this online ad for an inkjet cartrtidge. And he wasn't the only one. As if it really were a Howard Beale moment in the world of copywriting. Really?

There's a process that we copywriters go through. Nothing is unmediated. Forget that things go past supervisors, account people. Let's just stop and notice all the spelling errors in this piece. It wouldn't get through proofreading.

I suspect this was an extremely clever viral strategy that everyone fell for. Because this has turned up all over the web today.

I can be certain this was a plant because way before the Internet became a public wall instead of a Defense Department tool I was living in Tokyo, where I worked as an English language copywriter at Japan's largest ad agency, Dentsu. And I created an ad for a very rare daring Japanese client who ran it knowing it would become a subject written about with humorous condescension in Tokyo's many English language newspapers.

If you follow sites like BoingBoing and Gizmodo, you will on occasion find hilarious examples of Janglish — that weird combination of Japanese and English that comes from either a misunderstanding or spelling errors. My client, the New Otani Hotel, had a steak restaurant on the premises called The Rib Room. In Japanese, the R and L sounds are very close, and the B and V sounds are very close. So a Japanese person, in trying to pronounce the English work Live might say, and for that matter, spell this word, in a way that a native English speaker might hear as Rib.

Taking out the copywriter tool box, which includes using familiar phrases and playing with them to make a headline more memorable, I wrote the ad you see below for the restaurant. I told the client that some in the local press and letter writers would make merciless fun of them for running the ad. And that others would recognize that the restaurant was in on the joke. But that it would be reprinted and talked about. It was.

I make no claims to this being award winning or wildly creative. When I was a 30 year old writer in Tokyo, I was proud to have found an opportunity to do something fun, and happy to find a client brave enough to play.

Today, the internet makes such opportunities both harder and easier to recognize. But when done well, and when picked up, the rewards can be a worldwide business bump, instead of simply a few more seats filled at The New Otani.

Mind you, the only reason there was an open position in Tokyo so that I got the job was that a writer before me had mischeviously written a headline for a now defunct Japanese bank that took advantage of the fact that the Japanese client didn't recognize the semi-salacious word-play.

The logo of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank was a heart. So this writer's headline, which ran in the Japan Times and the other local English language papers was: Dai Ichi Kangyo Has A Heart On For You.

I don't get opportunities like this much anymore. My work does in fact go through account people, proofreaders, lawyers lawyers and more lawyers. So you might understand why I don't believe the ink cartridge ad was a real "rant." A great copywriter sees opportunities on match book covers if that's the media to work in (and that tells you how old I am!). 

Never juxtapose the word "scream" with "German engineering"...

Is it just me? I mean, I realize it's been 65 years since the end of WWII, but the headline for this ad for Bosch in today's New York Times made me recall the photographs of bodies stacked outside the crematoria. It just creeped me out.

Now I realize that the copywriter who wrote this, and all the executives involved are probably under the age of 35. And I know I work in an industry with people like Jerry Della Femina, whose book "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" I devoured in the 70s when I was working at Ted Bates. When I watched the episode on Mad Men this last season where Roger Sterling was enraged by the agency pitching a Japanese car company I recalled my next door neighbor when I was a child in the early 60s who went batshit crazy angry when an Asian family moved in down the street because his son died in the Pacific (no matter that the new neighbors weren't Japanese, all Asians were suspect to him). I don't want to think of myself in any way like these guys.

But this headline just stopped me. And not in a good way.

But to critique it from another POV for a moment: if the agency thinks that the people who drive a Mercedes is the target for this ad, it works, since a Mercedes is quiet. But I would imagine that there are just as many BMW owners who read the Times. And a BMW is not a quiet machine — part of the satisfaction of a BMW to its owner is the sound of the engine.

Sorry, this ad just doesn't rise to the level of David Ogilvy's famous line: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." And personally, it leaves me with a sinking feeling.

 

Men who know how to play with it.

The men behind Butch Bakery have a post-gay sense of humor. With products described as" Masculine styled cupcakes for the guys (and the guys/girls who love em!)" and a website that makes fun of frilly pink frosted cupcakes in a way that doesn't feel like coded queer bashing but in fact is laughing at homophobia and misogyny while at the same time introducing a whole new kind of cupcake experience that clearly can be said to have a masculine aesthetic. Kudos to founder David Arrick and to ad agency readybreak in New York for creating a print campaign that truly made me laugh out loud.