Thursday, July 19, 2012

July morning varia

South American flick centered on a married Peruvian fisherman and his secret artist boyfriend. They make love in a cave by the sea, rolling around in the sand. Nice visuals. In real life, not so much. Sand. Crevices. Ouch. Sorta like that very sexy image of  Burt Lancaster and Deborah Carr in the surf in From Here To Eternity. Nice idea, but cold water and seaweed and sand...



The 2009 movie, btw, Undertow/Contracorriente, deserved its numerous awards. No cartoons. Full of human characters, family, tradition and community, faith, friendship, irreconcilable passions, loss, fidelity and infidelity, courage. Complex, beautiful, moving. One reviewer called it "Orpheus on Brokeback Mountain".

Cool/warm but sunny SF day. Feels like summer.

Listened to a podcast by two supposedly smart and articulate traditionalist guys. Gay marriage came up and they got, well, inarticulate. Not from anger; they're pretty laissez-faire when it comes to private life and individuals. But they seemed unable to clarify why they reject samesex matrimony. Strange.

For me, it does not actually respect the specificity of a man making a lifebond with another man. And it is part of the nominalism of post-modernity, where things have no reality or nature but are just names or slogans to achieve social goals. A man cannot have a husband for the same reason that a woman cannot be a father. Color me essentialist. Gender/sex is a fundamental biological and metaphysical given, not an optional "performance". Accepting gay marriage --like the T in LGBT--is part of the larger urge to make genders --especially maleness--irrelevant.

And it is also part of the compulsive minority-appeasement that has our fading culture in its grip. The more I think about it, the stranger it becomes. 

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