The Snowman

I have an aunt who lives in England and she would send us classic books for Christmas. I'm not sure if she was the one who sent me The Snowman by Raymond Briggs, but that book deserves its place as a classic.

Wordlessly told with lovely illustrations, the book tells the story of a little boy who goes outside to make a snowman one winter's day. At night—in a dream or reality, the reader decides—the Snowman comes to life and after playing in the house, he and the boy go flying through the air. Returning home as dawn is approaching, the little boy goes back to bed. Waking up, he goes outside and discovers that the Snowman has collapsed.

I knew The Snowman only from the book, which vanished quickly over the years, but when my younger siblings grew older, they found it and the animated film adaptation at the library.

The animated film successfully captures the look of the illustrations, but the plot deviates from the book when the Snowman comes to life. A number of the escapades in the house are cut, and there's a ride on a motorcycle added. When the Snowman and the boy (who gets the name James here) fly away, the beautiful song "Walking in the Air" sung by Peter Auty plays over the scene, making for a hauntingly beautiful sequence.

The Snowman and James join other Snowmen as they gather around at a celebration with Father Christmas, who lets James meet his reindeer and gives him a scarf. James still has this scarf when he wakes up in the morning, suggesting the experience was not a dream.

In 2012, a sequel to The Snowman film was released, titled The Snowman and the Snowdog. A new little boy named Billy, having recently lost his dog, finds a photo of the original Snowman and his remains. When it snows, he recreates the Snowman and makes a dog out of snow as well with sock ears. When the pair come to life, they fly in an airplane to another celebration, where they meet a more traditional Santa Claus who gives Billy a collar that turns the Snowdog into a real dog when he returns home. After finding the new dog when he wakes up, Billy and his dog discover that the Snowman has once again collapsed.

I was rather disappointed with The Snowman and the Snowdog. While it holds up well visually, the plot is too obvious a retread of the original story, now with a dog added. Perhaps magic can happen only once.



Recently, The Snowman was released on Blu-Ray in the UK and reissued on DVD in the US. I do have to express my disappointment that the original 4:3 image was cropped to a widescreen version in both releases.

Santa Claus (1898)

 Released in 1898, Santa Claus is believed to be the first movie with a Christmas theme. If it is not, it appears to be the earliest extant Christmas movie. It is also the first film to depict Santa Claus. Running under two minutes, it simply depicts two children going to bed, Santa coming down their chimney, leaving them presents in their stockings, then leaving, and the children finding their surprise.


Filmed in England, this was one of the most sophisticated films made at that time. One thing to realize is that electric lights weren't strong enough to light the set: the bedroom is a set that was actually outside. To simulate darkness, a curtain is drawn over the bedroom background (you can see a jump cut). The image of Santa going down the chimney appears to be a clever double exposure work.

Because that runs at two minutes, here's a couple longer silents.

First is The Night Before Christmas from 1905. Produced by the Edison Company, the classic poem is re-enacted with a little expansion.



And from 1914, here's The Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus. Octavius, Amateur Detective (who had starred in a series of silent comedies, of which this was the last) visits his friend in costume as Santa Claus, only to be knocked out by a thief also dressed as Santa who robs the family. Octavius must catch the thief!

I'm not okay.

I'm sorry if I'm not joining in on the holiday. For those of you celebrating, I hope you have a great Easter. Me, I'm working in the morning and afternoon and will likely just be at home in the evening.

Just like every other night.

Guys.

I'm not okay.

Recently, I just feel stuck. As some of you know, I've more or less been at the same job for about nine going on ten years now. And frankly, it is not a job I want to be in. Last year, a friend suggested I look into a specific field. Well, I did and had a number of job interviews, and apparently failed them all. I get e-mails every day from a couple job search sites with positions that I don't apply for. Perhaps I'm just sure that if I tried, I wouldn't get them.

I also live with my brother in a small apartment, and frankly, I need out. He and I are not a good roommate match. Maybe it's me, maybe it's him, but we just don't work. Also, I need space. Tonight the lack of space was almost unbearable when my little brother visited.

I've recently realized how little of figuring out who I am I've actually done. While I try to keep in mind that this isn't a bad thing, I keep getting certain people who want to crow about their accomplishments, specifically people who have basically scolded me about my life. And I know, this is my life, but they need to understand that just because one person can be married and having kids and renting or mortaging a house by my age doesn't mean my life is any less just because it hasn't happened for me yet.

And I want to tell them this. I'm happy they've gone so far, and really don't want to sound like I'm conflicting statements. I also don't want to be saying, "It's all so easy for you," because I'm sure from their perspective it wasn't. But from where I am, it almost seems that way.

Frankly, I'm depressed over this, and the toll it's taking is becoming noticeable. Technical issues aside, I've barely done any work on the next episode of my podcast and don't blog as often as I used to. I can't seem to get into my creative writing so well either.

This isn't just my creative output. At work yesterday, I had a full-on mood swing. I tried to laugh it off, but it happened. Overbearing people become unbearable, and I even admitted to a couple homicidal fantasies about them. (Also, decreased sex drive, but let's not go there.)

I haven't written about this issue in this level. I have put out a few tiny cries for help that have gone ignored. There's been no one I feel comfortable with talking about it. Even in private chats with my dear friends Jami and Tiffany, I've had trouble spilling to them.

So on top of not being able to get a new job and thus try to get my own place, my current state of mind now is really not helping.

Most of the actual story

Two years ago, I published a blog titled "A question of what you like" in which, I made public that I identify as homosexual. Since then, I've looked back at that blog many times and realized how little of my coming out experience I actually documented. It even contains one or two things I now wish I hadn't said then, but I've learned a lot in these two years since posting that, so I've elected to let it remain as an example of who I was then.

Not long ago, I was looking at Yahoo Answer's LGBT section and found a question asking when you first realized your sexual orientation/gender identity. In the 2012 blog, the way it was written, I made it sound like it was a recent realization. The truth is, I probably would have identified as gay years ago with better sex education.

My parents never had "the talk" with me. The most I got was assurance was that some woman would find me attractive and that I should follow up on it. Well, I'll be honest... Some women did. At church camp one summer, a girl got an all-out crush on me and went out of her way to say hi. I simply was not interested and probably brushed her off a bit ruder than I should have. On two occasions, women have asked me to marry them. Both times, I let them down. (I was dating neither. One was a coworker who was married with children. The other was a friend I chatted to online.)

"You just haven't met the right girl yet" is the mantra to encourage single guys in this situation. And in my case, it was true: I hadn't met the right girl yet. And I never will. Because she doesn't exist. And the more I think on this, the more I realize I should always have known that I never wanted to fall in love with and marry a girl. The signs have been right there, I just didn't know how to read them.

Thus, I'm presenting most of the times in my past when my same-sex attraction seems obvious. Most, because there are some that I've elected to stay private. I'm typically pretty open about my life, but there are things that I just don't want to share with the world.

I've had a fascination with other guys (particularly their bodies) as far as I can remember. Being the third kid in a big family, if I had a bad dream, sometimes I'd go to my oldest brother and sleep with him. Thinking back on that, I know what I liked was his warm, comforting body near mine.

When I finally heard what homosexuality was, I kind of sneakily looked up gay pornographic images online and found myself liking them. This was when I was 16 or so. I didn't have home internet access, so I had to fleetingly download it to a disc at a library before anyone noticed and I'd look at it at home.

My sister and I moved into an apartment when I was 20, and in a little over a year, she moved out to be with her then-boyfriend, now husband. After she moved out and I had the place to myself, at one point I considered a rent boy. I had heard a coworker use the term "bicurious" and wondered if that was me, because frankly, when I tried to imagine having sex, it always wound up being sex with another man.

Note, over this time, I had people making accusations about my sexuality and some people asking and wondering. I didn't date or go out with anyone. At all. I once worked with the church youth group and even taught that homosexuality was wrong, but I found myself saying that homosexuals weren't necessarily evil people. The woman who was teaching with me agreed. (Surprise, her husband came out a couple years ago.)

At age 25, I met a long-time pen pal in person on vacation and we shared rooms in hotels for a few days. I couldn't help but think that he was very attractive. I found my interest in men becoming more dominant as I got closer to 26. 25 is the age where your mind is finally able to understand love, and on April 1, 2012, I accidentally made close contact with another gay guy's butt and knew that beyond any shadow of a doubt, I was gay. I came out of the closet to friends and family a week later.

I often wonder what may have happened if I'd had a better sex education, the actual "birds and the bees" talk. Would I have come out sooner? But then, considering that from third grade on, I was homeschooled and then put in a Christian school for one year, I likely wouldn't have heard an LGBT positive view.

Patrick Wolf

So, in my last blog, I mentioned how Were the World Mine used a song called "The Magic Position" by an artist named Patrick Wolf. And it sounded like this.

The song is bouncy, exuberant and joyous, very catchy and smile-inducing. So, I decided to get the song. It was on an album called The Magic Position.

The Magic Position opens like a celebration of love, going from loving yourself in "Overture" to the joyous "Magic Position," which is of course about love for a partner.

Then the album suddenly seems to switch up in "Accident and Emergency" which finds joy in even the worst of times. Then the upbeat tone is broken with "The Bluebell" and "Bluebells," a two-song ballad about how a lost love can make you feel. This is then followed by the mysterious song "Magpie." The entire album is rich in lyrics, but the tone changes often. But by the time you get to "Finale," an instrumental, you'll find it hard not to have picked some favorite tracks.

I really enjoyed the album and decided to seek out more of Patrick Wolf's music. As it turned out, The Magic Position was his third of so far six albums, and in addition, he had released four EP albums and many singles in many forms (vinyl, CD, digital download), many of the singles and all of the EPs containing songs not on the albums. To keep this blog short, I shall only talk about the albums, though I've managed to obtain the entire discography.

The order in which I listened to the albums were largely based on the order I got them in: The Magic Position, The Bachelor, Wind in the Wires, Lycanthropy, Sundark and Riverlight, and Lupercalia. However, to now shift from my story to Patrick's, I'll look at them in chronological order.

Patrick Wolf, an English/Irish musician, had started his music career in 2002 with The Patrick Wolf EP, and then the next year released his first album, Lycanthropy. This first outing proved to be a little rough, but one in which Patrick laid his story raw. Because the thing about many of Patrick's songs is that they are based on his life experience or his own understanding of things. He uses many metaphors and is not afraid to use downright disturbing themes. "The Childcatcher" is about pedophilia, and Patrick openly said that it was based on a sexual relationship he had at 15, when he was still just a child. "Peter Pan" is a simple song about dealing with conflict, while "A Boy Like Me" is openly about expectations put on a person and how you might dream of something different.

2005 found his second album being released, Wind in the Wires, which has a more mellow tone than the previous album, but "The Libertine" does kick into high energy with a message about breaking away from the majority. The title track is "a love song to electricity," but deals a lot with how nature has been subverted. ("This wild electricity/made static by industry/like a bird in an aviary/singing to the sky/singing to be free.")

The album kicks up again with the highly energetic "Tristan," based on "Tristram of Lyonesse." It seems to be largely about being your own hero in the face of overwhelming odds, even including the one time in his entire discography that he uses profanity: "I am fucked, and I am fucking too." Finally, "Land's End" begins rather merrily, but ends in almost a dirge.

2007 brought Patrick's biggest hit in The Magic Position, when he confirmed that his sexuality was on the queer shade, saying, "I don’t know whether I’m destined to live my life with a horse, a woman or a man. It makes life easier." He later said that his sexuality was "liberal," and that "I guess you would call me bisexual."

Touring for The Magic Position led to the much darker tone of his fourth album, The Bachelor, released in 2009. Experiencing depression and some sexual experimentation led to some of the darker songs on the album: "Vulture" particularly deals with feeling dead inside, and in this case, wishing to have the "dead meat" taken away. Tilda Swinton appears on the album, speaking roles on certain tracks as "The Voice of Hope."

"Hard Times" clearly speaks about a world at war, even referencing "two towers." While it's not the only Wolf song to focus on contemporary issues, it is the first to clearly identify them. The song "Oblivion" is certainly about young people going to war.

"Thesus" compares the myth of Thesus to being a music star. The song, "The Bachelor" is based on the traditional song "Poor Little Turtledove," and is obviously about being alone. The song takes a queer twist with "So I went up to this mountain/to give my horn a blow/All the boys in the valley said/Yonder comes my beau." (The original song used the line "And every girl in the valley said.")

Patrick planned to have the next album, titled The Battle, follow up from The Bachelor, but that didn't work out. In 2010, Wolf announced that he was engaged to one William Pollock. His 2011 album, Lupercalia, features a short song titled "William" which opens with the lyrics, "And I showed you my ugly heart/still you did not surrender." He further goes on to ask William to be his conqueror. Wolf had decided to identify as gay in 2009, despite previous relationships with women. He decided he would not care if his music sounded "too gay or too straight or too this or too that."

As such, Lupercalia brings a welcome levity for Patrick after The Bachelor, "The City" bold with the message, "won't let the city destroy our love." "House" finds Patrick appreciating the beauty of home, while "Bermondsey Street" tells of "two kisses sweet on Bermondsey Street," the lyrics identifying a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, further saying, "Love knows no boundaries/sees beyond sexualities." The album is very uplifting.

Wolf's latest album, 2012's Sundark and Riverlight, was to celebrate ten years of his musical career. Rather than re-releasing previous songs as a "Greatest Hits" album, he instead selected sixteen songs from his previous five albums (and a recent EP) and presented new acoustic versions of them. The album is on two discs: "Sundark" presenting some of Patrick's darker songs ("written in loneliness and not really thinking about other people"), "Riverlight" presenting "songs of hope and relationship." Many of the darker songs now sound less harsh and more approachable and honest. ("Vulture," for example, had a rock sound in its original incarnation, but here it is more mournful.) The lighter songs sound more beautiful with this treatment.

As the world awaits where Patrick Wolf goes next, I'm very glad to have discovered his music. While I might not know exactly why he wrote each track as he did, his music resonates with me very much. What I enjoy most about him is that he doesn't write or record his music to top the charts or be a huge star. Patrick sings because this is how he expresses himself and people respond to it.

Were The World Mine

So, in 2003, there was a little short film titled Fairies that made the rounds at film festivals. The short peeked in at a couple days in the life of Timothy, a homosexual boy who attends a private school that only teaches boys. He particularly has a crush on Jonathan, one of his classmates.

In one of his classes, Timothy and his fellow classmates read A Midsummer Night's Dream aloud, and the teacher (Wendy Robie) tells them that their next class will be onstage. While preparing for the class at home, Timothy finds a recipe to make the Love-In-Idleness flower from the play. Realizing that this would make Jonathan fall for him, he makes it, climaxing with the musical number "Were The World Mine," a song composed completely of lines from Shakespeare's play.

Timothy uses the flower on Jonathan the next day, and after a triumphant finish that seems to dip into fantasy, we see Timothy and Jonathan together, surrounded by the suddenly flamboyant rugby team and coach.

The film seems to have been well-received. The concept was certainly intriguing, but some suggested to director Tom Gustafson that it needed to be longer. So, work began on a new feature-length version, which ultimately hit film festivals in 2008: Were the World Mine.

To be open, I prefer the feature length version. Fairies makes Timothy distant and a little creepy in his idea to use a magic flower to compel a (seemingly heterosexual) boy to love him. Also, perhaps it was the recording, the sound mix, or his voice, but "Were The World Mine" as sung by James McKay is a little grating. Also, the tone of the short quickly goes from surreal to goofy.

In the expanded form, the story flows much better. We discover more about Timothy (Tanner Cohen) as he is bullied by his schoolmates, and it becomes clear that one of the reasons why he likes Jonathan (Nathaniel David Becker) is because he's actually kind to Timothy. The clunky reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream has been changed to a school play, led by Ms. Tebbit (again played by Wendy Robie, the lone cast member from Fairies to reprise her role), who encourages Timothy to come out of his comfort zone as she casts him as Puck. We also discover a little more about Timothy's home life as we also spend more time with his mother Donna (Judy McLane) who deals with having an openly gay son in a less than tolerant town. (It's suggested that Donna left her husband because of Timothy's sexuality.)

A very welcome change is that the giggling and goofy Angie from Fairies has been replaced with Frankie (Zelda Williams) and her boyfriend Max (Ricky Goldman). Frankie strums on her guitar and sings ditties, claims to be "heteroflexible" ("I'm straight, but shit happens"), and by special invitation, gets to appear in the play at the end of the movie.

The film is able to feel surreal at its more relaxed pace. In the first few minutes of the movie, Timothy takes a dodgeball to the face, but just before it strikes him, it freezes in mid air and as he looks out, the other boys do a gentle dance. Some scenes aren't clear as to how much actually happens and how much takes place in Timothy's fantasy, but it doesn't matter in the end as you realize that it has a very real effect on the main characters.

With these alterations and a lot more breathing room, Fairies is remade until Timothy makes the flower. He accidentally sprays Max with it, making Max fall for him, and causing a rift between him and Frankie. After spraying Jonathan, he uses it to make the other boys at school fall for each other and the coach to fall in love with the principal, who didn't get sprayed. Feeling empowered, he begins to spray people in town, soon changing a seemingly homophobic community into one where homosexuals can live openly. However, when parents raise objections, Ms. Tebbit approaches Timothy about what he's done. Even if it makes people more accepting of others, is an induced love a good idea?

The film has a very good, empowering message to embrace who you are. There's also a good little twist, and the music is lovely. "Were The World Mine" is joined by five other Shakespeare-derived songs, as well as a few that are original in their lyrics. Also on the soundtrack is "Relax, Take It Easy" by Mika, and "The Magic Position" by Patrick Wolf. The soundtrack presents several great songs, though it cuts out the licensed music, so you got to track that down yourself.

I did. Which will be the subject of my next blog.

G.B.F. — Review

I'd first heard about G.B.F. due to an outcry about its MPAA rating: R. People were upset about it because it doesn't contain language, sensuality or nudity that you wouldn't see in a PG-13 rated film. There's just one difference between G.B.F. and most other movies like it (critics automatically compare it to Clueless and Mean Girls): same-sex relationships and attractions are a huge theme in the movie with at least four gay male characters. Thus, critics of the rating maintain, the R rating isn't so much about language, violence and sensuality so much as it is about the movie being—well—gay.

The movie came out in a limited theatrical release last month and on video on demand services. While I could have streamed the movie, I opted to wait for the DVD release (independent movies—and most LGBT-themed films are—aren't so likely to get Blu-Ray releases, I've noted). If I shell out my money for something, why not something I can keep?

There has been some discussion over the film: is it perpetuating stereotypes? The film's trailer seems to show the film as a piece about a high school boy who comes out of the closet and becomes a toy for the popular girls at school. To an extent, that's what happens, but the film actually has a message behind it that goes beyond petty high school status symbols.

The film opens with two best friends: Tanner (Michael J. Willett) and Brent (Paul Iacono) who both happen to be closeted gay teenage boys. When the popular girls at school realize they could use Guydar (a sanitized Grindr-ish app) to see if any of their classmates might be gay, Tanner is forced out of the closet and into their friendships.

At first, Tanner enjoys his new popularity: hanging with the coolest kids who try to find him hot dates, but soon he realizes that he has no time for his old friends who were his friends because of who he was, not because he was gay. Stirring up the plot is the upcoming prom, organized by the religious McKenzie Price (Evanna Lynch), who isn't interested in letting boys bring boys to the prom.

The film comments a lot about how people, even in acceptance, don't quite understand how to treat gay people. Your gay best friend is not an accessory or a statement: they are a person. Brent's mother (Megan Mullally) hears that her son is gay (though she already figured it out), and instead of having an earnest talk with him to build understanding, she treats him with nervous acceptance and tries to bond with him over gay movies that he's not in the mood for. (She offers hilarious commentary over Brokeback Mountain.)

In response to McKenzie's anti-gay rules for prom, Fawcett (Sasha Pieterse) decides to start an "all-inclusive" prom, but explains that "to be all-inclusive, we have to be exclusive," when Tanner notes that she turns away prom applicants. Caprice (Xosha Roquemore) wants to break the rut of white prom kings and queens and noting Tanner, decides to add "straight" to the list of things to change up. Perhaps their aims are admirable, but their methods are seriously flawed.

Even trying to out someone by association or stereotypes is made a point of: a friend of Tanner's is believed to be gay, even though he's straight. In contrast, Brent is made out by many to be straight, even though most characters suspect that he's gay.

While the writing is full of these nice messages (a short exchange even points out that few would be supporting a lesbian prom queen), the overall quality is rather rough. The Wikipedia entry for the film suggests that the script was rewritten little if at all from its first submitted draft (it was entered to a contest), and the film was shot in less than three weeks, leaving little time for the story to be further developed. As a result, the film certainly has its flaws. Sometimes the action onscreen seems to be quite stilted, but fortunately, no notable cringe-worthy performances.

Despite that, however, G.B.F. is worth a watch at least once. Amazon, Vudu and iTunes let you rent it starting at $4, and in a year or so, it might be up on Netflix or Hulu.