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Some Great Reward: Boozing the Muse

No. I’m actually not talking about the name of a Depeche Mode album. I’m talking about the lubrication we artists and creative types often require before diving off the deep end. That device of loosening up the gears comes in a variety of flavors, but you might know them as drugs and alcohol.

Modern pharmacological advancements have not caught up to the demands of the muse, the requirements creatives have for a substance to safely guide us from the chatter of mediocrity, away from the distractions of social media, from the pulls of adult life and its trappings of repetition that slow the heart, and dull the very core of the mind.

We still rely on the poisons, for lack of a better term, that wreck upon the shore of the body, and with an army of bedazzled pirates with nothing better to do than to rape and pillage, the body declines to a vast washup of useless sand, devoid of life, and dead from the possibility of future life.

If only it were easier to get that muse to wake up without indulging, for don’t we all know of countless stories of artists succumbing to the very thing that perhaps kept them going at all. It’s an ironic predicament. But this all has to be taken in with that little ol’ proverbial grain of salt. Artists that adhere to the straight-edge approach, or only moderately indulge in some offbeat substance, don’t sell magazines or newspapers. We aren’t a culture that finds interest in the middle ground. We like extreme everything.

Hunter S Thompson. Boy, did he like the "poison."

 It also should be noted that the “poison” really lies in the eye of the beholder. In some cultures, drinking anything is strictly prohibited and can lead to some extreme reaction, where in others no one blinks an eye at finishing a bottle of wine in one night.

My poison? I’ve sampled in the past from the tray of options, but I’m a moderate. Currently, I consume two bottles of red wine over the course of four nights. (Keep in mind when contemplating my body’s reaction to alcohol, I weigh 120 lbs and am female). I used to consume way more, some eight years of nightly red wine drinking to the tune of three full glasses a night, a habit started while living in Spain. I don’t like other types of alcohol, or wines with white or pink colors. Red is it, and red is all.

But as a creator with varied interests, I find some outlets require the straight edge approach, and others absolutely need alcohol to get things flowing, sometimes forcing me to break my two bottle a week rule.  I’m currently finishing up a first draft of a novel, while also working on two new screenplays. One requires the “lube,” the other shuns it. Can you guess which one falls into favor of dear old Bacchus? If you guessed novel writing, big gold star for you!

Marguerite Duras in France, c1955. Photograph: Robert Doisneau/Gett

The novel writing process these past few months has been so intense, growing more intense as the word count has gone up. It could be the desolate cold setting of the story, and its dark tone, piled on to the fact I’m writing it in the dead of winter in a house by myself (when I don’t have a cat in my lap.) Sometimes, getting the wine buzz going has been the only way to push forward, to open up the tap to unusual word combinations, to take risks and fully slide into that dark cold world and witness my characters do horrible things to each other. Trying to do this sober has been wrought with tension, with frustrated tears at times, or I’ll walk away from the work, welcoming a distraction from the reason I carved out an hour or two in my day to write at all.

Strangely, while working on screenplays, the alcohol does not help one bit. If I start drinking and working on a screenplay, I soon can’t make the connections from something starting on page 10 to something happening on page 67. I am not able to think big picture anymore, or think about characters arcs, tying up loose ends, and I get stuck in the minutiae. I don’t drink when I’m working in pre-production for films or screenplays. But something about making that first draft of a novel appear just requires it.

How many writers go to the bottle? I am sure we can all name more than one without even typing “writers that were alcoholics” in Google. (Here is a really fascinating piece in The Guardian on women writers and alcohol.) What is it about writing novels that makes drink so attractive? For me, it has a lot to do with the maddening process of novel writing. It’s largely a solo activity until one is ready to start workshopping, hunting an agent, etc. Being such social creatures, there is something just a little unnatural to shun human contact in the name of art, to listen to the maddening hum of the inner critic, and stare at the sharp downward slope of the empty page. While many can write with lots of human activity going on, like in a coffee shop, I cannot craft prose while people are gabbing away at the table next to me and the barista is calling out the third time for James to come pick up his double latte with soymilk. I require isolation, usually listening to dark ambient drone music (Soma FM Drone Zone is my go-to), and then the two glasses of wine. An hour and a half later, I’ve coughed out 1000 words, my daily goal on workdays, and I brush my teeth and go to bed, my brain usually still working on the novel until I finally sleep.

Well, certainly those 1000 words must be crap, you might think, coming from the place of booze. Actually, they aren’t. The stuff that comes out is usually daring, the pacing and rhythm of the language defined, and with some slight reworking, ends up becoming something I really like. I’m also not a blundering drunk when I drink wine, pushing over my pencil cup, kicking my cats and tripping on my own feet. My head is just nice and warm, and novel-land is not such a scary place to be.

Oh, Oscar Wilde. Loved the absinthe.

Still, one does wonder about the sustainability of requiring drink to write novels. If this is something I want to continue, perhaps two (sometimes three) bottles a week is not a big deal, or maybe I’m slowly desiccating my poor liver into a something resembling a sundried tomato. Research on the effects of alcohol just can’t seem to get shit straight. Good or bad? Who knows anymore? And if I get crushed by a Mack truck or die in some plane crash this year, does it matter how much wine I drank?

So until the research “ducks” are all in line on booze and health, I’ll keep pulling forth that sadistic muse with my cabs and malbecs, as I listen to her guide my stubby little fingers over the keypad. Sorry screenplay muse, only herbal teas for you.

Reflections from the Half-Way Line

Recently, on a road trip through South Texas, my mother told me she did not plan to live past 80. I turned to her and gave her a look like “What does that mean?” I suggested that she wait to see how things are when she is 80 to assess whether she is ready to continue living or not.

Later, when we stopped by a nursing home in Corpus Christi, Texas to visit an friend of my late grandmother’s, I began to see what she meant. As we all piled into his small room, and I looked over the old photos of him as a younger man with his wife and his children, and then viewed the failing frail body of this man before me, I thought about how he must spend his days, teetering ever closer towards death. I wondered if he thought much about it, if he reflected on the past, especially on mistakes or missed opportunities. Now, I know that what a 40 year-old thinks about is not what a 90 year-old thinks about, as there is that half a century gap of experience to consider, but I started to rethink my mother’s idea about life essentially ending at 80.

People marvel at the individuals who live well into their 90s, and ask things like “What is your secret?" But my question is, do these people also consider the quality of these years beyond just what is obvious? I don’t consider sitting in a room watching TV and having rather uninspired food served to me three times a day between naps to be a very good life, even if I am 103. Just being alive is not enough to justify a “good” old age. I understand the body’s tug against the individual’s will eventually wins, and one simple cannot keep doing the things they did as a younger person, but perhaps my mother was right about not wanting to live past a certain age that doesn’t seem that old right now.

If 80 is indeed a mark of descending into a passive old age, then I am already at the half way mark, assuming, of course that some other health issue or accident does not curtail my trajectory towards old age. “Yes, but people are living longer these days,” or, “Modern medicine is making strides to improve the quality of old age,” I have been told. Perhaps, but as one who has chosen to follow a creative path, rather than chase a paycheck, I will probably never be able to afford these “improvements” to aging better. So, I hope that when I feel I can no longer do that things that bring joie de vivre, I will be able to call it quits on my own terms.

My idea of a good death? Knowing like some animals do that it is “time,” wandering into a desert or forest somewhere and just letting the earth soak me back up. I’m ok with being a meal for whatever is hungry. Even though I am a vegetarian right now, god knows I’ve eaten my fair share of dead animals, so maybe it’s time to return the favor.

Hitting my 40s has definitely changed things. I do tend to look back a lot and see how expanse and endless my 20s seemed, how I dabbled in just about everything that ever interested me, and perhaps in someways, I still am. I wonder where the fuck my 30s went, and realize that making two feature films sneakily sucked most of that decade away without me even realizing it. I'd sure like some of it back. I realize that singing all of the lines to 80s electro-pop hits now is probably the equivalent to laughing at my parents singing to 60s hits just a few decades ago. I reflect a lot on bad choices I made in my 20s, especially when there were really great opportunities while I was an electronic musician, some very influential people I met during this time, but my stupid ego got in the way. I look at my ignorance in my early 30s about the “industries” of the arts and my naivete about filmmaking, thinking I could make films with my own distinct take, not understanding this is a business where men still largely rule the game, that appeasing corporate sponsors has taken over the agendas of once well-meaning film festivals, and there is little room for originality right now. I often feel that being 40 starts to make you question what is worth working on, as I am still trying to create significant and meaningful art through my films and writing. I am more reluctant to just jump into projects if they are not meaningful to me. I've been drifting back into prose and illustrating, even music, primarily because feature films (for me) take incredibly long amounts of time, and I'm not sure I want to be 50 and still have only made two more features over the span of 10 years. This is not from lack of trying, for ask anyone that knows me, I never stop working. Features are just massive beasts of a project. I am also starting to become aware of how our culture hates old people. We don’t want to deal with them, or what they represent as our destiny. We are obsessed with the young, and what the young do.

On the other hand, I am pleased as peaches about lots of things I did do: I dropped out of college when it no longer resonated with me, kicking the notion that high school graduates need to immediately go forth with higher education, and went back to college at 27 when I was ready and eager. I enjoyed my classes, took quite a few of them, studied three different languages, and had enough money smarts by then to get my degree without taking out more than $1000 in school loans, and this was for film school.

I am glad I never had children. I know few mothers will probably admit that they regret being parents, because tricky things like hormones and biological impulses influence our vision of our own kids, but I feel that had I tried to raise a kid, I would have had to make that choice that I see a lot of ambitious women make: between family/work and doing what they love to do. I barely have enough time in my week to really put as much focus and time as I want to into my projects, much less trying to shove raising a kid into all of that. In my own circle, I see women dropping their career ambitions, or the serious hobbies they loved doing, in order to raise children, when their male partners typically still can pursue their projects, careers, etc. Of course, if one of the ambitions is motherhood, then obviously, this is no problem. But I typically note that most of my women friends or family tend to hint at losing their own sense of identity, with some sadness, when talking about parenting.

I am glad I spent several years traveling to Europe and working on organic farms there, and then spending some time traveling in India. Getting some perspective on my own culture and country by leaving it for more than just a typical vacation, has been invaluable, even if it did darken my perspectives on American behavior on the international stage, and bring some degree of humiliation about being an American. Being in Spain during and after 9-11, I often found myself explaining I was Canadian, or wearing a Canadian flag, for fear of reprimand.

And lastly, I’m glad I pursued all of my whacky weird artistic impulses. I think it’s taken me this long to start really honing a voice and style, and I've made tons of mistakes in my films and other projects, but I have always been a creative risk taker, and faithful to the creative spirit(s) that likes to hang out with me for some reason I can’t figure out. I don’t consider myself that great of company, but they just won't go away. It's okay with me. I kinda like the cool little ideas they toss out at me.

So, assuming I have another 40 good years ahead of me, I wonder what sort of stuff I’ll look back on in 2055 (uh, gulp!), and how my perceptions of my choices will have changed over the years.  

White People Get Away With Everything: How "Empowerment" Agendas Backfire

I try to blog once a month, but lately even that has been a tall order. (Sigh...with tiny violin in hand.) Between my day job and writing at night, working on film program applications, scripts I’m tidying up, petting attention-starved kitties, etc., the hum of fatigue rattles the walls of my skull. No amount of coffee or good sleep can quite shake off this monster, convince it to retreat into a dark cave of complacency where it can groom its toenails. So, I apologize for lack of cohesion. I will have to blog about this stupid false concept of work-life balance, because I think it’s a load of shit, passed through the intestines of the wolves of corporations hiding in sheep’s clothing.

But not today. Today is about stuff I touched on in the last blog, long long ago in a far away land during an ancient time called March of 2015. I wrote then about ethnicity, and the problems it can cause an artist when they label themselves, or are labeled, as part of a minority group. Whether that group be an ethnic or racial minority, sexual minority, etc., putting a label on oneself can be a bit of a dangerous game creatively speaking. Sometimes, you just can’t avoid it, say, by virtue of your name or gender, for two examples, and other times, you can choose to avoid telling the world.

On one well-manicured hand, attaching this label to oneself does open up opportunities for exposure, for there are plenty of entities like some film festivals or grant programs, that want to expose the work of a particular group. It’s wonderful to have these organizations around, because ultimately, they are giving presence and attention to certain people that might not otherwise have it.  

On the other dirty nasty hand, it’s when some of these same groups expect those they are promoting to support the agenda they have.  For example, and this is one I see ALL of the time, quite a few female-oriented film festivals that promote the work of women filmmakers expect these films to empower women by showing “strong” female characters, create “uplifting” messages for viewers, “enable” women to seek self-empowerment.  Sounds a bit like a propaganda machine to me.  Apparently, it’s not enough to support women just by virtue of showing their work, no matter how it may come across or what their messages are, it has to be a big pat-each-other-on-the-back affair. I see similar situations in some organizations that want to promote the work of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities. 

Frankly, this is all quite boring. Why would I ever want to go to an art exhibit, or film festival, or stage play, where the creators are cramming an agenda down my throat? As a creator, I also find this limiting AND horribly dull. None of my films or fiction are about women sitting around empowering each other. They are about people, men and women of various ethnicities and sexual orientations, dealing with life’s messy shit flying at them at 90 miles an hour. Tragedy does not discriminate, and well, comedy doesn’t really either. 

Now before you angrily retort with closed fists and gritted teeth: “Yeah well, the repressed need to fight back with strong messages about how bad things have been and how bad things still are.”  I suppose. I’m not saying I agree with complacency and the status quo, and letting old white men continue to manage all the power and resources, and that people SHOULDN’T be making art about things like, transgender discrimination, as one example, but I’m saying there are better ways to go about expressing messages in one’s art.

Once the artist is required to create around an agenda and portray a message before looking at the qualities of what are just generally good aspects of a story or work of art, the beauty and subtlety of that piece is lost.  Walter Kerr said it best: “The best way to destroy a play is to force it to prove something.” I cut this out from a book I read during my many playwriting classes in college and I have carried this with me ever since, taped to my editing station at home. If I ever try to focus on theme or message before I get a really good solid plot down, and get to know the nuances of my characters, the work is lost. It’s like wine without alcohol, it’s not so great anymore, better suited for a journey down the kitchen sink.

None-the-less, it’s very sad that artists living and creating on the periphery of their societies are very often expected to create within a very narrow band of theme that only addresses issues of repression, discrimination, injustice, etc. If you read an interview with a white male filmmaker, we don’t have the same creative expectations of his content that we do when, say, a black lesbian female filmmaker is being interviewed. We expect minority filmmakers, or minority creators of any sort, to make content about their own racial, ethnic, sexual group, etc. and we expect it to be laden with messages. That's what organizations give grants for, what convinces film programmers to include in their lineup, what journalists like to write about in interviews, etc. etc.

But this is limiting. Why do white men get to make work about whatever they want and as a female filmmaker, I am expected to make romantic comedies and “good” portrayals about women? In my first film, In the Shadow, (a horror-tinged psychological drama, not a typical "woman's" film) my female lead character makes a confession about how she had a momentary impulse to drown her infant. Despite the fact we often read in our daily news about mothers in real life doing similar horrific acts to their kids, I have been told during a test screening: “Women just don’t feel like killing their kids.” Talk to any mother and I can guarantee you that at some point, they probably had the desire to stop an endless temper tantrum by strangling the kid. But when I address this issue in my work, by giving a nuanced and complicated portrayal of a mother, I am creating a “bad” female character who should not be seen on screen, and I'm not "empowering women." 

I can’t tell you how many grants and film festivals I cannot apply to because my female characters are complicated people, with lots of “flaws," rather than some poster child of Second or Third Wave Feminism, or show some idealized characteristics of modern motherhood where women "have it all." I almost don’t read the posting for calls-for-entries when I see the word “feminism” or “femme” or anything related to women in filmmaking. Most of them just sound like copy cat versions of each other, asking for things no truly self-respecting artist would impose on their art. By limiting the scope of the peripheral artists’ work, these organizations are doing the very thing they claim to be fighting against: limitations, repression, and false representation.

Before I step down from my soapbox and get back to work on a screenplay, let me just say that, as a female writer, filmmaker, and all around artsy-fartsy dreamer, the very fact that I create at all, and have opted to make my work public, I am empowering women creators (and hopefully men too), just by making something from my own experiences and perspectives. I don't have to infuse any messages in it. That will work itself out on its own. It just happens naturally when the place of creating is honest and real.

“Are you really Hispanic?”: Filmmaking and Ethnic Identity

My last name is Elmer, my father’s last name. He is of French, German, and Irish descent. He tells me he remembers as a boy listening to his grandmothers speak French to each other, while his relatives swapped out potato salad recipes on Texas ranches with strong names like “Voss” hanging from iron entry way fences.

My mother is of Mexican descent, with our families traced back further to Spain some three hundred years ago. There might be a little Italian thrown in there, judging on a few of the names we can see on the family tree, but this was a long time ago. I still have distant cousins in Mexico, but most of our family’s history of the last 75 years has been in “the Valley” of South Texas near the border.

This varied ancestry, culture, and ethnicity combination is nothing unique. Humans have been mixing for as long as we’ve had sex drives and mobility, but personal identification with certain regions as defined by geopolitical boundaries, languages, culture, seems to be something Americans are more into than most, I would hazard to guess.

Road leading to my family's ranch, "Los Braziles" (courtesy my Tía Dori)

Whenever I’ve been asked about my ethnicity, through government surveys, school applications, or just general chit chat with friends, I’ll identify with being Hispanic first, then follow with the collage of my father’s background.  I’ll explain why shortly, but suffice it to say that people get the French-German-Irish part, but many don't get the Hispanic part at all.

Flash back to 2003. I had moved to Austin less than a year ago. I was excited to be going back to college after a long hiatus, and was starting classes at Austin Community College. One day, I saw a sign for a Hispanic Students Association meeting and decided to go. I reached out to the student leader, who was excited to have me join. That night, there was a professor speaking with the group. He spoke mostly Spanish as he introduced himself. My Spanish fluctuates from bad to okay, and I had a very hard time keeping up. Then, he asked for introductions. My name “Nicole Elmer” stood out like a splotch of red paint on a wedding dress. The students around me had last names like Tovar, Garcia, Muñoz, De los Santos. While the students did not seem to care that I was an “Elmer,” the professor did. He stopped the introductions and asked me directly: “Are you really Hispanic?” My heart dropped. I did not answer, but stayed in a dark mood the rest of the meeting. I never attended the group again, even after the student leader tried to invite me back several times.

It took me many years to think about this question “Are you really Hispanic?” Was I a false Hispanic? What if my last name was Ruíz? Would that change the game, even if nothing else about me did? What if I were blonde and had blue eyes and spoke fluent Spanish or Portuguese and no other language? Would that make me “Hispanic?” It took a pretty rigorous few years of liberal arts classes at UT - Austin  (before hopping into film production) where I really began to look at ethnic and racial issues, and who is calling who what and when, and more importantly why. It’s a complicated situation, y’all. And like many of our human-created categories of identification, it is as fluid as any liquid that’s ever existed, and maybe even more so. Here's a personal example:

When I was growing up, my mother always tried to instill more “ethnic pride” in me. But I lived in a pretty racist town, and whites and Hispanics did not mix. That put me in a strange place, since I was both. I opted for being "white." My first and last name allowed me to fit into the white group of students without question, which was more affluent, and I even took it further to try dying my hair blonde (it did not work) and staying away from the sun so I would not tan. I never told anyone about my mom’s side of my ancestry. When anyone asked, I was always “French, German, and Irish.” My Mexican roots disappeared. Stupid, I know, but I was thirteen and replying to the peer pressure around me. It wasn’t until I was 16 and more or less over the social structure of middle and high school, that I stopped caring about that shit, and just looked how ever I was meant to look (a theater nerd), and mentioned all of my ancestral identities if asked.

So, what does this have to do with filmmaking?

My second feature as a director, What’s the Use?, will be making its festival premiere at the Cine Las Americas 18th International Film Festival. My first feature as a writer/director, In the Shadow (Devolver Digital Films), a surreal psychological thriller set in Puerto Rico, made its Texas premiere here in 2012. From the Cine Las Americas website: “The festival showcases contemporary films from the US, Canada, Latin America (North Central, South America, and the Caribbean) and the Iberian Peninsula.” The festival also supports the work of Latino/Latina and Hispanic filmmakers, which is how I identify myself.

But I imagine someone going to see What’s the Use?, where Spanish is spoken for probably 20 seconds, shot mostly in Austin by “Nicole Elmer,” and this viewer thinking “Why is this film representative of Hispanic culture?” Or even worse: “You, Nicole Elmer, a white girl with a name like yours, who can’t even speak Spanish fluently,…are you really a Hispanic filmmaker?”

A still from "What's the Use?"

Since ethnicity isn’t like math, the answer is purely subjective. It boils down to what the viewer thinks being Hispanic is, or what any ethnic identity is. It’s not the same for each of the current racial categories. Here in the States, the “one drop rule” makes someone “Black” or “Native American,” even if that African American or Native American ancestor is from generations back. But Hispanic and Latino identity always seems to need to be more obvious and current. One needs to have a last name of Marquez, or speak Spanish fluently for example, or have certain stereotypical physical features like dark hair and eyes.

Let me first say this upfront: I do not discredit my father’s ancestry, any more than I can claim my mother’s. I am also everything that he is. But, I identify with being Mexican-American primarily because my affiliation with South Texas Mexican-American culture is stronger than with that of my father's various cultural experiences. I spent more time with my mother’s immense family in the Valley, than I did with my father’s family not too far north of them.  I have so many memories of visiting my great grandmother’s ranch, Los Braziles, for the Barerra family reunions, being surrounded by my tall relatives, with their hair dark as ink, all hunched over tamales, barbecue, and cold beer, speaking Spanish, mixed with English. I remember my grandmother speaking Spanish to her neighbors when they came for a visit, and making pan de polvo, even if no one was getting married. We still make tamales for Christmas every year. I remember walking under pecan trees to Tía Manuela’s house that smelled like powder and dogs, and going through her jewelry box just to look at her rhinestone brooches. I still call some of my relatives “Tío” or “Tía.” I remember long mornings in Catholic churches smelling of melting wax, staring at the strange body of a crucified Christ, wondering if the Communion wafer tasted like a Saltine cracker, and if the priest really drank blood. I remember huge weddings where mariachis played for hours. I remember when my dad told me about the time when my mom brought him to meet the family, and he was nervous about being a gringo, and the rite of passage they presented to him was to whack the head off some poor chicken with a cleaver, in order to make chicken stock. Obviously he was successful or I might not be here writing this.

Flowers and a cow on Los Braziles ranch.

 My identity with this culture is not through the language I speak. And it’s certainly not my name. Dare I bring up that overused Shakespeare quote about the rose smelling just as sweet, even if you call it something else? Well, I guess I just did.

Next time, I talk about the creative limitations of identifying with an ethnic group when you are an artist, and how white artists get can away with a lot more creatively speaking. And yes, with a last name like “Elmer,” where people just automatically assume I am a white girl, I can offer some perspective of both sides of the issue.

Cut out that erection!: some musings on "Erotic Art" and the ever-problematic penis

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” We all know this one. It’s probably also fine to say “Erotic is in the eye of the beholder” as well, except perhaps when it comes to commercializing erotic images, or defining fine art as erotic.

I recently looked through a Juxtapoz Erotica book, expecting some diversity for an art publication catering to a more educated audience, but was I sadly disappointed. There were approximately 115 women and about 15 men in this collection of contemporary "erotic" art. What is worse is that I'd guess about 90 percent of the women were, of course, young, attractive, and thin. Today’s typical standard of beauty. The men in the book were usually just watching women do something sexual, or were themselves doing something to the woman who was clearly meant to be the point of focus in the composition. I did not see a single image of a male, without a sexualized woman present. As a heterosexual female, and as a consumer who not only buys but also creates art, I don't find this representing the spectrum of "erotic." I find it catering to a typical, traditional, and very limited viewpoint entrenched in gender and sexual bias.

Using the word "erotica" in a coffee table artbook like this one suggests that only young women's bodies of a certain type are erotic, and assumes the viewer is a heterosexual male. We all know that sexuality comes in so many flavors, it would put Baskin Robins to shame, but what gets repeated over and over again in the world of art and advertising does not come close to addressing this fact. Defining a 20-something thin female body as the end-all be-all of what is “erotic” sends out all sorts of narrow messages: “This is how a woman should look to be sexually meaningful,” “Women with other body types are not sexual, and thus meaningless,” “Older women are not sexy,” “Men's bodies are not erotic,” “Men always consume sexual images. Women always give them.”

Caveat: Juxtapoz's readership most likely leans a little heavy on the male side, if reading the intended audience of their ads is any indication. I still find this a lame excuse to not expand the repertoire a bit. Another caveat: I'm aware I'm only reading into one example of "erotic art," albeit a popular and acceptable one. If you open up a porn magazine geared towards a gay male readership, these messages don't quite pertain the same way. But gay male porn is on the fringe of visual erotica, books like Juxtapoz Erotica are not. (One of my collections of "20th Century Erotic Art" I purchased at a Barnes and Noble in Lousiana. I don't imagine one can find much gay male erotica at chain book stores in the Deep South.)

I am, however, talking about art. I'm not talking about porn. Arguably, porn is created explicitly to make income. Most art seems to be, in my experience, created for more esoteric reasons, with making income as a secondary cause (sometimes). I'm looking at examples of what most call visual art, erotic art even, although, sometimes the line between erotic art and pornography are extremely hard to define (see some films from the Golden Era of Porn such as Behind the Green Door, or The Devil in Miss Jones). Doesn't change the fact that when someone says "nude painting," you will probably imagine a woman, like Goya's La maja desnuda. You will most likely not imagine a nude male sitting in the same pose, on the nice fluffy couch or bed under a flattering light, with milk white skin.

La maja desnuda

I know several art models that pose nude for artists and art classes. I have done this myself on occasion. Most of the models are women, between the ages of 24-30, white and fit. I know of only one male. His confessions about how artists or students deal with the male body are funny, strange, and alarming. He has told me of more than one occasion where a student has refused to partake in class because there is a nude male, not a nude female. This non-participant is always another male, usually the kind that is in the class for an "easy" elective credit. This male model has told me how some students refuse to draw his penis, and there is just this blank spot on the page where the penis would be, like some recreation of a Ken doll, castrated by the good folk over at Mattel.

In my first feature as a director, In the Shadow, there are two sex scenes. In the second scene, the lead actor's erection is visible in a wide shot. We shot this at night, so it's not terribly obvious. It's certainly not following the shooting conventions of porn, and the wide shot itself has some really fabulous lighting to highlight the mise-en-scene, not the erection. When we acquired distribution, the film was kicked back to us for our cable release because an erection was visible for two seconds. I had to edit out these two second to get rid of the erect penis, then send it back if I wanted the film in a cable release. I call the original film where the erection is still visible, my "Director's Cut," which well, if I tie in circumcision, cutting, and…never mind.

The notice for re-editing my film did not have any issue with the fact that there is full frontal nudity of my lead actress. I guess boobs and female pubic hair isn't deemed as offensive as an erect penis. I imagine the offended censor now: How dare a movie show an erect penis! It will frighten the masses! The audience will refuse to see the movie because of those two seconds of an erect penis! They will call their Congress people and complain about the penis! They will write letters explaining how scared they were to see two seconds of an erect penis!

Hey folks. Hate to break the news to ya, but whether you like it or not, an erect penis is one reason you are breathing and telling artists to take out male nudity from their films. You, yourself, might benefit from the function of an erect penis. If you are alive, and consider life a "gift," you certainly already have benefited.

I find it strange that on one hand, people are so fascinated by the cock: the jokes we make about it, the egos and status involved with its size and performance, the masculine identity so connected to it; and yet people freak out when it's actually right in front of them. Why are we so threatened by the penis? Why do we have to cover it up, put little fig leaves on statues from antiquity when royalty are around? Put black bars over it, or tell directors to cut it out of their movies entirely?

Ancient Rome examples

This phallus phobia isn’t inherent for all cultures. In fact, many had or have a very different relationship with the phallus. It's too much to go into detail here in a blog, but some examples are the Osiris Cult in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome also had their ample share of the phallus in visual culture (see picture above), and a lot of us are at least visually familiar with worship of Shiva's lingam in India.

In my recent historical research on Puppetry for my next feature, How to Eat Pho, I read over and over again about how many puppet shows had characters with rather oversized erections. Ancient Egyptian puppetry embodied the god Min and Osiris, and gave them removable penises. Indonesian shadow puppet theater often used characters with insanely large erections. Countless cultures have enacted fertility rituals by creating humanlike objects, many with erections. (My book is full of photographs, while the internet seems to be largely devoid of these images. I wonder if this also sheds light on phallus-phobia.)

I know as cultures change, their sexual phobias and interests ebb and flow. Someday, the phallus will be back in fashion, and perhaps even it will become a mascot for a high school football team. But until the day that happens (and I will sadly not be alive to see this, but I’ll write it into a story somewhere), I'd like to suggest that all of us artists need to give the general public a swift kick in the arse, starting with ourselves. If change of what we deem as erotic is going to happen, we all need to take a look at our own phobias, and get over the addiction to the young female nude. Can’t bring yourself to draw that male nude’s “pee pee?” That is your problem. Get over it.

Those young skinny women subjects that artists keep painting or sculpting, or what is shown in films over and over is only part of the spectrum of what is erotic. I'm tired of seeing female nudes. I want to see body types of all sorts, at all ages. I want to see more men deemed as erotic in art, worthy of the gaze of spectators, under the scrutiny of the artist and the brush, pen, camera, etc. And I want to stop having to edit erections out of my films in order to reach a wider audience. I should not have to change my vision to cater to fear or irrational disgust with the human body.

In the meantime, I will leave a link to some modern artists taking a look at the "dirty parts" of the human body. Note, however, the disembodied nature of most of these works, and think: what does it mean to look at a sexualized body part without the rest of the body visible, like the face? In contrast, what is it like like to see the whole body with these "troublesome" parts also in view? How does this change things?

A Brief Survey of Blatantly Phallic and Vaginal Art  on Flavorwire

Have You Properly Masticated Your Art Today?: Problems with Art as a Consumable Supply

Having gotten through the "season of giving," I've come home with a small stack of contemporary novels I've borrowed from my sister, and several CDs of music another family member burned for me of new bands he is listening to.

As I started to listen to the music and browse through the chapters of a Sherman Alexie novel, I recalled an afternoon, not too long ago, when I got mad at a co-worker for talking about burning a few DVDs for a friend of some movies he had bootlegged. There was the silly argument of "It's just a Hollywood movie, they are making tons of money. I'd never bootleg an indie movie."  Well, real "indie" movies are hard to find, much less bootleg. And yes, big film studios do make a lot of money, but have you actually sat through the credits for one of these movies? Obviously, they are paying salaries to a lot of people to make those movies. True, some actors, execs, etc., get paid way more than any human being should, but it still doesn't justify piracy. Of any movie. Period.

Let me get off my movie piracy soapbox for just a moment to get back to the point. Here I was, bitching at someone for burning copies of DVDs, while I myself had just essentially done the same thing during the holidays: borrowed novels without paying a dime to the publisher or author for my use of them, and willingly accepting the CDs of music for which I had not paid. If the basis for "stealing" from artists, studios, musicians, writers, publishing houses, etc., is founded on the idea of me as a consumer giving money for the product (the art), then based on my actions, I am no different than my co-worker bootlegging DVDs. Just as he was, I seem to be clearly okay with not paying for some arts and entertainment, and not okay with not paying for other forms. What is the difference? Why is it okay to consume some forms of art for free, and not okay for other types of art? It's a difficult question to answer, and is really based I think largely on one's personal relationship with the arts and culture they consume, our society's perceptions of the value of that form of art, and of "sharing work." "Bootlegging" just sounds so much more dramatic than "borrowing," but it is essentially the same thing, when you look at the economics of it.

Mmmm.....music and books galore!

This brings up the larger idea of art today as a consumable item. I should first define "art" as something culturally significant (let's not go into who deems it to be so, that's a Pandora's box of history, sexism, colonialism, etc.), created by one or many people, and packaged and sold to, or used by the general public. And when art becomes as purchasable as a pair of gloves or a package of chips, it gets tricky. Books, music, DVDs can all be created en masse, where as visual art (not prints), or site specific works (theater), are experiential. When the creator of the art cannot charge for the experience (theater tickets, museum admission), and must provide a medium on which to give that experience (CD, DVD), he or she loses control to the whims of the public to distribute that medium as they wish, or, find free ways to access it. We feel we own the book we've purchased, but we don't feel we own the statues in the museum to which we've paid admission. Strange difference.

In either example, when art can be commodified, it enters a very dangerous albeit somewhat necessary place for the creator. If he wishes to sell to the largest number of people out there, the creator must become like a manufacturer of a consumable supply, like snack nuts or fruit roll ups. For example, in order to sell the most bags of potato chips, the manufacturer must make a product cheaply, but always trick the consumer into the hype created around the product: "New and Improved Look!" (change the background color of the bag), 25% more (which equates to four more potato chips in a bag filled with mostly air), "New-Nacho-Sour-Cream Onion-South-of-the-Chicken-Fried-Steak-Border-Flavor!" (because we all need another potato chip flavor to add to the 50 that must be out there now.)

Can't take credit for this. This is from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lays-do-us-a-flavor-parodies

Equate this sort of strategy when making a work of art, and the creator is forced to try to guess the mind of the consumer when the work should be created devoid of concern for how many people dislike it. How does a creator hype his work to the customer, to convince her to buy it? If the creator is an actor, they just need to be either extremely talented (Meryl Streep, Daniel Day Lewis) or they just use the techniques of sensationalism and date other celebrities with recurring frequency, while drinking and drugging their way to rehab. The later seems to be the easiest method, unfortunately, but also isn't so great for one's liver.

Lovely Lohan.

When the creator is making work that becomes an object to be reproduced and consumed, he must look within the restrictions of genre and second guess how he can fit his work into a successful genre in order to elicit the desire in people to consume it, and, hopefully, get paid. This leads to washed out and tired work, something the consumer forgets about the next day, like eating bland mashed potatoes, instead of some fabulous hand crafted meal that delights the tastebuds.

As an artist, it's great to get paid. I truly envy the artists that are able to "make a living" from their work, and envy those that can do it without compromising their vision. There are very few of them, it seems, and how they are able to do what they do often reiterates the idea of not just hard work (which is part of the equation, of course), but the uncontrollable aspect of luck that we don't talk much about in this culture as part of the "formula of success." And why would we talk about it? North Americans have been told that all one has to do is work hard for a long time and "things will happen." It's not that simple, folks.

But, I digress...If I am to raise my anti-piracy voice again, I'll have to be more careful that I actually purchase every bit of art I want to consume. In light of how I borrow books from people, or share music with friends without actually making a purchase, it's hard for me to really criticize people who do similar things when they bootleg DVDs. As a creator, it puts me in a strange place to expect people to value my work enough to pay for it, when I don't always pay for the work I consume myself.

Now, the weather is shit. So it's back to revising the script How to Eat Pho. (Can you spot my cat assistant?)