So clearly I haven’t been writing.  This blog is pretty much defunct.

I may write again. I may not.

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When my friend Caroline at Garbo Laughs, my favorite classic film blog in existence, announced a Queer Film Blogathon, I knew I had to participate.  I was going to write about a movie that was sexy and awesome and interesting and erotic, and as I was readying myself to sit down and think hard about it, I realized that I already had my answer: Kenneth Anger’s 1965 short Kustom Kar Kommandos.

I could go on and on about how important Kenneth Anger is to the history of queer cinema, the history of experimental film, of rock and roll, of Los Angeles, of the USA, of film censorship, of blah blah blah blah, but I won’t.  It’s important but it’s been done to death.  Read his damn Wiki page.  I’ve been drinking wine all day and don’t feel like rewording his bio.  Instead I’ll just show you a nifty drawing and give you key basic facts.

Kenneth Anger was born in 1927.  He grew up in Los Angeles and made movies throughout his childhood and adolescence.  His highly homoerotic film Fireworks got him arrested for obscenity at the age of 20.  He was later acquitted by the California Supreme Court. Pretty auspicious beginnings.  His most known work is probably his 1961 motorcycle/leathermen themed short Scorpio Rising.  He is way into the occult and was a good friend of Anton LaVey.  He is one of the only directors I know of who has “LUCIFER” tattooed across his chest in large letters.  He is also one of the first filmmakers to have used Top 40 pop songs in lieu of traditional film scores.

 

And now our feature presentation

Okay it’s actually not a feature presentation.  It’s not even long enough to be a short.  Lady Gaga’s shortest music video is probably longer than this film.  It’s one scene of a film that was supposed to actually be a feature, but Anger spent his funding elsewhere, so only this 3 minute piece was completed.

Without further ado, I give you Kenneth Anger’s 1965 short Kustom Kar Kommandos, a film which I consider to be one of the most highly erotic ever made.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EP6T_9DXhA

“But why this one?”

You might be wondering why I didn’t choose to write about Scorpio’s Rising or Fireworks, which are not only widely considered to be more influential and important, but are also LOADED with imagery to talk about.  I’m writing about Kustom Kar Kommandos because it is the only one of Anger’s films that I’ve seen that I would really describe as being queer.

Kustom Kar Kommandos is perfect and self-contained: one song, one man, one car.  It is straightforward– there’s no doubt as to what the film is about.  It’s a young muscled man taking care of his shiny hot rod.  And it’s almost entirely shot at crotch-level.  There’s no subtext or reading between the lines here, just tight jeans and a powerful engine.

Gone is the black leather and worn jeans of Scorpio‘s bikers; our hard shiny virile object of desire is instead clad in head to toe powder blue, placed in a surreal unexplained bubblegum pink space.  He moves slowly under soft and ethereal lights, gingerly running his pink fluffy shammy across the car’s surface.  This is decidedly not good old fashioned American masculinity (gay or straight, it’s the same ideal), nor is it a simpering stereotype of effeminacy; this is something else entirely.

Who is this guy?  Where is he?  Where is he going?  What’s going on anyways?  None of these questions are even addressed, let alone answered, yet they don’t seem to pop into my head until it’s already over.  I’m too entranced by the way the light hits the metal of the car, by the way the camera moves, by the excruciatingly slow journey of the pink fluffy cloth, and of course by the Paris Sisters’ breathy slowed-down rendition of Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover.”  It’s a beautiful song, but the version used in Kustom Kar Kommandos has a longing, an ache, that is absent from Darin’s original.  When lead singer Priscilla ever so slowly sings “Every night I hope and pray,” she emphasizes every word.  A song about wanting becomes a song about the pleasure of wanting.  This is not an ache felt by the heart.

Who he is doesn’t matter because he’s no one in particular.  He is where he is, which isn’t really anywhere, and when he leaves he’s going away.  What matters is that he’s ours to watch, and that he can be who or what we want him to be: top or bottom, butch or femme.  He is caressing a car, which in fact isn’t really doing much of anything, but the action is loaded with an unnamed erotic significance which the viewer can define as they see fit.  The American Male and his Automobile– the great mascot of simple American masculine independence– is thus completely queered.  He is not merely objectified, but made fluid, ambiguous and complex.  We do see his face at the end, as he gets ready to drive away, but nothing is really revealed.  Our questions are still not answered, and for me that’s what queerness is really all about: we can toy with mythologies and archetypes, but never be reduced to them.  Our Dream Lovers remain in the pink sparkly ether, nameless, faceless and ever-shifting.

I don’t even know how to approach this.  I’ve been trying and trying to for years now, but it can’t hurt to try again.

Today I was listening to NPR at work and decided to instead check out the address Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the US Congress earlier in the day.  I was expecting to be appalled, but it triggered much more.  Rage. Shame. Desperation. A million knives twisting inside me, tears welling up, my jaw clenched, every inch of my skin screaming.

Fuck. Fuck. I switched it off, went back to All Things Considered and continued to do my work, but I was still thinking about Netanyahu, about Gaza, about the settlements in the West Bank, about the time I spent traveling through Israel about 11 years ago.  I remembered the names I was called once when I expressed horror and disgust at the human rights violations the Palestinian people have suffered at the hands of the Israeli government.  Among other things I was called anti-Israel, a self-hating Jew, a traitor, and worse than a Nazi. I was devastated.

I remember going to see my history professor at the time during her office hours to talk about it.  She told me about Hannah Arendt’s difficult relationship with Israel and told me to read Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I did.  I felt better knowing that I wasn’t the only Jewish person who had issues with Israel.  But the Israel shit kept coming up again and again, and each time I distanced myself a little bit further from the Jewish State.  A year ago, during the Gaza Flotilla Raid fiasco, I struggled again with my feelings of horror, rage and shame.  Then Peter Beinhart’s piece in the New York Review of Books revealed that my feelings were shared by the vast majority of young American Jews:

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.

I was thrilled. I posted the article everywhere.  I decided that Israel really didn’t have anything to do with me.  The homes of my ancestors were the freezing forests and crowded cities of Germany, Poland, Russia– not some little slip of land on the Mediterranean.  I felt comfortable embracing my Jewish identity as a Jew of the Diaspora, a Jew of Europe, a Jew of the United States, yet another in a very long line of secular intellectuals with a love for kreplach and stuffed kishkas.

But a year later I still can’t hear about Israel in the news without feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach and ripped apart.  As I was packing my boxes this afternoon, trying desperately not to cry and even harder not to scream at my unsuspecting co-workers for no reason, I realized that Israel is a part of who I am, whether I like it or not.  Maybe it can all be chalked up to the years of blindly patriotic zionist conditioning I underwent in Hebrew school, or maybe it’s just that the people of Israel are my people, just as much as my fellow critical secular American Jews, and just as much as the black hatter who cut me off this morning on La Brea and Santa Monica.

Either way, I seem to be stuck with that beautiful little slip of land, with their fucked up policies, with their government that I hate.  I’m stuck with holding my people accountable for the shit they pull, with the agony of watching helpless from the other side of the world as my people, ever the occupied and oppressed, ever the victims, ever the expelled, continue to occupy, to oppress and to expel.  Because if those of us here in the States don’t speak up for our people in Israel who are equally if not more horrified, ashamed and outraged, if we don’t speak up for the Palestinian people, who are suffering much as we did under our various ancient occupiers, our people’s crimes will continue to not only go unpunished, but to be applauded, receiving standing ovation after standing ovation as they did this morning.  As much as it hurts to accept that Israel is a part of us, I realize that it hurts because it’s supposed to.