Starting Out in the Evening

Andrew Wagner’s film Starting Out in the Evening is a very good film about a washed up, aged writer, hoping to finish his last book before he dies.  Frank Langella gives an excellent performance as the writer Leonard Schiller.  This is a thoughtful film with not a lot of action, but plenty of drama. In addition to Schiller, there’s his daughter, Ariel, wandering aimless through her life, already half gone.  Just as important at this point in Schiller’s life is a graduate student, Heather, who is doing her master’s thesis about his work.  She arranges to meet him and manipulates him into letting her hang around, ask questions, and generally try to learn what motivated his most successful books.  She is all doe-eyed and worshipful at the beginning, but in the end writes a critical thesis.  She also helps to jolt the old writer out of his stagnation.  

I thought one aspect of the story was not realistic.  Schiller has a major stroke, survives, comes home with a walker and not long afterwards seems to be back to his old self, with no visible side-effects.  I couldn’t buy it.  Perhaps the stroke was meant to be minor, but I’m pretty sure the doctor used the word “major” or “massive”.  Anyway, this film is definitely worth seeing.

The Gates by Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles

 

The Gates is an interesting, and often amusing documentary film, but it also drags at times.  It is about the largest art installation ever done in New York City: a series of “gates” (imagine miles of giant croquet wickets all lined up with an orange flag hanging from each one) in Central Park.  It is portrayed as controversial when it was proposed, but reasonably popular after it was constructed.  It was a temporary installation, only lasting two weeks after construction was done; so this documentary and all the photos of the work are all that’s left.  The camera followed the artists everywhere during the entire process, from hearing public comments, to getting initially rejected, to eventually getting the City’s approval,  throughout the construction, and finally during the two week viewing of the work.  It was done in the winter of 2005 and the weather cooperated nicely by presenting a variety of weather conditions for the viewing.  

The public reactions are what’s funny in the film.  The photos of the piece are interesting to see, but sometimes I felt like I had seen enough, while the camera just kept showing me more and more angles on the work that were not significantly different from those I had already seen.  The film didn’t make me like the artists who created The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  I found them self-centered and personally uninteresting.  They seemed pretty awkward interacting with the public.  It’s amazing to me that they ever got permission to do the work.  They didn’t even pretend to want to build The Gates to benefit the public.  They did it solely for themselves and no one else, and publicly said so.  The film shows evidence that the project did benefit the public despite the artists lack of interest in that.

 

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl

 

The first part of the book is an independent 262 page exposition of homosexual, bisexual and transgendered animal sexuality. If you want to know what the birds and the bees are doing when Jerry Falwell isn’t looking, this is the place to find out. Don’t expect to find traditional family values in these pages. What you will discover instead is that animals aren’t doing it for Darwin, they are doing it for fun. There are amazingly detailed descriptions, pictures and illustrations here of animals having all kinds of sex (that will amaze you), and most of it isn’t for procreation.

More interesting to me, though, is the speculation on the sexual origins of language and culture in chapter 2 and the devastating examination in chapter 3 of bigotry in the biological sciences in over two hundred years of observations of animal homosexuality. Bagemihl shows, for example, that in science as in society, there’s a presumption of heterosexuality. Field researchers have commonly assumed, with no independent verification, that whenever they see a pair of animals engaging in what appears to be sexual behavior they are observing a male-female pair. Conversely, whenever they observe a known same-sex pair engaging in behavior that would be classified as sexual between a male and female, they classify it in some other way. This protocol largely precludes the gathering of data about animal homosexuality even when it’s being observed. In some cases, though, it resulted in published studies being repudiated as much as 20 years later when it was discovered that what was presumed to be heterosexual behavior in a population was really entirely homosexual. (It’s an interesting fact that in some species heterosexuality has never been observed by scientists even when they go to great lengths to observe it over periods of many years.) Also, a lot of animal homosexuality that has been recognized as such has simply been excluded from the published reports. As a result, there is still widespread belief among scientists and the public that animal homosexuality is rare or nonexistent. People will believe otherwise after reading this book.

Chapter 4 looks at the attempts to explain away animal homosexuality and chapter 5 considers arguments on the other side that try to attach evolutionary value to homosexuality. Bagemihl rejects all the proposals on both sides, demonstrating the weakness of all the explanations and typically showing that they are plainly inconsistent with the evidence of animal behavior. Finally, he arrives at the question that the reader has been waiting for for almost 200 pages: “Why does same-sex activity persist–reappearing in species after species, generation after generation, individual after individual–when it is not ‘useful’?” His answer is not to show that it is useful, but rather to treat the plain existence of homosexuality as a reductio ad absurdum argument against the biologists’ assumption that only traits that contribute to reproduction will survive (i.e. are useful). In pursuing this line of thought Bagemihl offers interesting descriptions of animals that are nonbreeders, animals that suppress reproduction, animals that segregate the sexes so that reproduction can’t happen, animals that engage in birth control, and animals that engage in other nonreproductive behaviors. He also shows that a lot of the sex that actually occurs is not for reproduction, but apparently for pleasure. All of this he believes calls for a new conception of the natural biological world.

The last chapter describes some ideas for a new paradigm, which he calls Biological Exuberance and I must say that it is much less convincing than the rest of the book. It is interesting nonetheless. Much of the last chapter is a description of the myths about animals of native North Americans, the tribes of New Guinea, and indigenous Siberian people. When I started reading this chapter I began to wonder if I had accidentally picked up a different book, but in the end he makes a connection between the myths and biological reality. In fact, he shows that some of these myths contain more facts about animals than you can find in any scientific text. Some of the most bizarre of the myths turn out to be true.

So where does it end? In mystery. “Our final resting spot–the concept of Biological Exuberance–lies somewhere along the trajectory defined by these three points (chaos, biodiversity, evolution), although its exact location remains strangely imprecise.” “Nothing, in the end, has really been ‘explained’–and rightly so, for it was ’sensible explanations’ that ran aground in the first place.”

That’s not a very satisfactory answer to my mind, but the book is nonetheless a source of many interesting phenomena and ideas. I enjoyed it greatly. I expect most people who read this long book will do as I have done–read part one completely and then selectively read about some particular animals in part two. The second part is an encyclopedia of the queer sexuality of approximately 300 species of mammals and birds. An appendix contains a long list of reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, spiders and domesticated animals in which homosexuality has been observed.

The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux

This book is presumably meant to be funny, but it didn’t make me laugh. You get a warning of what’s to come in the acknowledgements when the author writes: ‘There’s not a word in this book she [his mother] hasn’t inspired, and then improved upon with her wit and smarts and style. When the answering machine picks up my telephone, the first thing Mother says is, “Pick up the goddamned phone.” ‘ Leleux thinks that’s humorous? It’s not.

The author is the “beautiful boy” of the title and the book is a fictionalized account of a portion of his life after his father walked out and left Robert and his mother in dire financial straits. His mother decides she needs to find a rich man to marry and she proceeds to try to make herself attractive again. Her attempts are somewhat extreme, but not really unusual, and the consequences more pathetic than funny. By the middle of the book Robert’s mother has found herself a new man and left Robert on his own. He has found himself a boyfriend and has basically moved in with the boyfriend’s family.

The rest of the book is about his struggle to finish high school, get into college and become a writer. Everyone’s life is unique and everyone has their troubles, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s life makes an interesting story and I found this one rather ho-hum. The story lacked sufficient conflict, or suspense, or character development, or anything else to keep the reader anxious to see what would happen next.

Because it is so much autobiographical, we know all along how it’s going to turn out, because we know from the blurb about the author on the back cover that he teaches creative writing in New York. So we already know that he got through school and became an author. His path to that end just isn’t made interesting enough in this book.