Another year has come and gone, and I've looked over my list of what I read and saw and did once again and discovered that I need to get out of this apartment more. It's gotten tougher to get to the movies because of my work schedule and The Boyfriend's school schedule (and so many of the movies these days seem so disappointing), and going to see live theater has gotten pretty expensive here in Los Angeles. I continue to read a lot, but sadly, this year is not a record-setting one.
I managed to complete fifty-nine books this year, which still averages more than one a week. Someone--I think it might have been playwright Tony Kushner--once said that an educated person should average at least a book a week. Of course, he doesn't teach writing, so that might account for his ability to read more than I do. I have been reading more and more on my Kindle device because it is so very convenient. The books are often cheaper (cheaper even than used paperbacks sometimes), and I have more than 200 choices when I open up the device. If I get bored with what I'm reading, I can just quickly search for and switch to something else without having to plan ahead and bring multiple books with me. Before the book lovers start to complain, let me just state that it was just twenty-one books on Kindle this past year, so that's really only about one-third of my overall list.
Favorite Novel: Franny, the Queen of Provincetown by John Preston is a book from the early 1980s about a drag queen who becomes an activist and community builder in the era of the early gay rights movement, roughly from the 1950s to the time of Stonewall on through to the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. It's a very character-driven book with a central character who is, at turns, hilarious, touching, sentimental, brash, and always loving of her community. I'd owned the book for a couple of decades myself but had never picked it up to read until this past fall. I finished it in one afternoon because I couldn't wait to see what happened to Franny. Preston sort of famously dismissed this early work of his, but it's a remarkable book that deserves more readers. It's told in first person as if Franny and the other characters are being interviewed about their lives. There's a sense of immediacy because of this approach, and I think that's what I responded to most while reading Preston's novel.
Favorite Graphic Novel: I only read a couple of graphic novels this year, but The Arrival by Shaun Tan is so good that I had to mention it here. I read a few pages of the novel that were excerpted in my introductory literature anthology, found it fascinating, discovered that one of my friends had a copy of it in her office at work, borrowed it, and devoured it in one night. I'm not sure that I could describe the plot other than to say that a man leaves his family and encounters a strange series of events in another city. There's no dialogue, just masterfully drawn sepia-toned images on page after page. You can easily empathize with the central character and the members of his family, and I think the recurring image that looks like a dragon's tale could lead to some interesting discussions about its symbolic weight.
Favorite Nonfiction: When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care? by Lewis Grizzard was a hearkening back to my years growing up in the South. I was familiar with Grizzard's work when I was in college in Mississippi and had read a couple of his books then (favorite title: Elvis Is Dead, and I'm Not Feeling So Good Myself). Since he died almost twenty years ago and would have likely been considered a regional writer, I figured his work was out of print, but thanks to Amazon and Kindle, I managed to purchase and download a couple of his books. This one, as you might surmise from the title, has to do with his romantic foibles (he was famously married four times), but that's not what I responded to in his book. It was the cadences of his writing, that laconic Southern style of storytelling. I don't like everything Grizzard wrote--he was a bit of an archconservative in some matters--but if I want to hear that particular kind of voice, he always manages to remind me of it.
I saw thirty-five movies in 2013, including two collections of short films (the Oscar nominees) and six more on DVD. I'm watching many more movies on television these days, and The Boyfriend bought me a Roku for my birthday which has led to me spending more time on the couch than in the theater. Not to worry, though, because I still prefer the experience of going to the theater to see movies on the big screen. Our new favorite theater is in Marina Del Rey because it offers large recliners and dine-in service for no additional cost on weekdays. You could learn to love going to movies there so long as you're prepared to have the experience interrupted now and then with dropped silverware.
Favorite Movie: Beasts of the Southern Wild is tough to describe. It's a depiction of one girl's life in a post-Katrina (almost post-apocalyptic) Louisiana. Hushpuppy, the young girl, lives with her ailing father who keeps disappearing for long stretches of the movie. She fends for herself, though, demonstrating a toughness that belies her young age. She lives in a community called the Bathtub, which is almost destroyed by a storm. There are evacuations and long passes of floating along the river and medical emergencies and large ancient beasts called Aurochs. The movie has a somewhat conventional narrative in some ways, I suppose, but that is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the movie. It's really more about the mood evoked by the images and events that the filmmakers and the filmgoing audience find intriguing. I found this movie to be mesmerizing and puzzling and melancholy and joyous.
Favorite Performance by an Actress: Cate Blanchett is deservedly receiving all kinds of awards for her performance as Jasmine in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine. She's remarkable in the role of a woman suffering a nervous breakdown when she loses her life as a Manhattan socialite after her husband is jailed for fraudulently taking other people's money. She flies from New York to San Francisco to stay with her estranged sister (the great Sally Hawkins), but finds it difficult to adjust to her new life. She gets a job and finds a new man to date, but both of these events contribute to her unease. The dentist she works for keeps hitting on her, and she worries that her new lover might discover that she has not been truthful about her past. It's a delicate, sensitive performance that Blanchett gives, one that will likely lead to her second Oscar in March.
Favorite Performance by an Actor: David Oyelowo plays the oldest son, Louis Gaines, in Lee Daniels' The Butler, and I found his character and his performance more interesting than Forest Whitaker's title character, a long-serving butler in the White House, or even Oprah Winfrey's performance as the butler's wife. Louis participates in an almost Zelig-like fashion in all of the key moments of the civil rights movements from the 1950s onward. It's, of course, rather preposterous that one person would have been present at the sit-ins at segregated diners and the Freedom Rides through the South and the formation of the Black Panthers and the PUSH bombings and so on, but you're willing to go along with this conceit because of the level of commitment Oyelowo brings to the role. He's fully engaged in depicting whichever historical moment is the focus, and you believe the depth of his involvement in the various changes that African Americans made happen. Oyelowo was overlooked because he was starring in a movie with Whitaker and Winfrey, but he commands the screen whenever he appears.
I used to go to live theater much more often when I was younger. I guess it's just gotten tougher to schedule an outing, and the cost of tickets has almost gotten out of control for the touring shows. The Book of Mormon is coming to Los Angeles again, and the good seats are almost $200 on a weeknight. I only managed to see four musicals, two plays, and one play with music this past year, and four of those were at the college where I teach (which offers some top-notch productions).
Favorite Theatrical Experience: Next to Normal is a musical about the impact that mental illness has on a family. You hear that description and you think you might be in for a depressing night at the theater, but this show is amazing in its depth of characterization and the impressive range of the music and lyrics. I managed to get four colleagues to join me in a matinee performance at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, and we all thought it was one of the best shows we'd ever seen. It did win the Pulitzer Prize the year it was on Broadway, but I don't think it's gotten a lot of attention since then. The lead character of Diana is a great part for a talented actress and singer, and each of the family members (and the doctor Diana visits throughout the show) are well-drawn and interesting.
Runner-Up: In honor of our college's centennial, the Theatre Arts Department did a production of Ragtime that was spectacular: a huge cast, a brilliant set, great costumes, and performances that could rival those of professional productions. You could tell that we spent a lot of money on this show, and it showed. Everyone who saw it was in awe of the achievements of our colleagues and students.
Favorite Theatrical Performance: I've never seen an actor throw himself or herself into a part as completely and as forcefully as Tracie Bennett does in End of the Rainbow. The play covers a period near the end of the life of Judy Garland, a time when she was trying to make a comeback at a club in London. She's in love with a new man, Mickey Deans, but she's falling into some familiar patterns in her life (well, familiar to anyone who knows much about Garland's addictions). Bennett doesn't really look all that much like Garland did, and in the musical numbers, she doesn't really sound all that much like Garland did either. However, you forget that while watching her perform because she brings such dynamic energy to her performance. She's astonishingly physical at times, leaping around the stage and over the furniture, and she shares with Garland an intense singing style. The numbers interspersed throughout the play recreate how it must have felt to be in The Talk of the Town in London to see Garland's performances.
We only managed to go to three concerts this past year, and all of them were good, but one stood out from the rest as being spectacular. For my birthday, The Boyfriend bought tickets to see Amy Grant at the Greek Theatre. While I enjoyed the show, there were far too many "serious" Christians there, and all of the Christian music made me a bit uncomfortable after a while. No one said anything, but when you're gay and surrounded by Christians, you tend to feel a little bit of unease. The trip to see Chris Young, another of The Boyfriend's favorite country singers, open for Brad Paisley was also entertaining, but I can only stand to be in a crowd of drunken rednecks in rural San Bernardino County for so long because I want to leave. Luckily, we managed to escape before the concert was completely over and didn't get stuck in traffic waiting for the crowd to disperse like we did the year before in Chula Vista when we went to see Luke Bryan. What is it with country singers and performing in venues in the middle of nowhere?
Favorite Event: If you want to feel like you fit in or that everyone in the audience is "together," you need to go see Diana Ross perform live. About a week after our trip to the Greek Theatre, we went to the Hollywood Bowl as my birthday present to myself. Ross is famous for being. shall we say, "tardy" in coming to the stage, but she showed up and performed a brisk concert of hits from her time with the Supremes all the way through her solo career. I've never seen a crowd so animated since I saw Bon Jovi at the Humphrey Coliseum at Mississippi State in the late 1980s (the Slippery When Wet tour, to be specific, if you're interested). Everyone knew Ross' songs, and they sang along and danced and clapped and cheered. It was impossible not to feel happy in the midst of that crowd. Even The Boyfriend, who hails from Taiwan originally, knows who Diana Ross is and could sing along at times. She changed outfits several times during the show, each time reappearing in something spectacular and sequined, always eliciting a gasp from the audience. She's still a star, and even though she's 69 years old now, she still has a great voice. I've starting saying recently that some people will stop performing and we need to see them while we still can, so I'm glad that we had this chance to see a legend perform.
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