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In yesterday morning's New York Times I came across a letter to the editor from a lawyer who fights discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community. Now of course I know about the LGBT community, but I'd never heard of the expression "LGBTQ", though I kind of had a feeling about what the Q might stand for, if not what it means in this context. So I went online and found a recent USA Today article that addressed the Q question. It turns out that Q does in fact stand for "queer". The LGBT community has been reclaiming this word from its past as a demeaning slur, too often accompanied by violence, and is now using it as a word to help describe, according to an individual interviewed in the article, anyone "that exists outside of the dominant narrative," Queer, then can mean that one is lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, or it can mean that one isn't quite sure where one fits on the gender-orientation spectrum. It can mean that one has accepted not fitting into one or another gender-orientation category. Or it can mean that one is still trying to figure it all out, that one is questioning, which is also what the Q stands for. "Questioning" is, in fact the better word to use for now, as "queer" hasn't yet completely broken free of the stain of its past use, and there are those within the LGBTQ community, or even the straight community, who still find the word offensive. Like me. But maybe if society starts using that word, "queer", purely as a descriptive word, the same way we now use "male", "female", "gay", "straight" without any unkind intent, it will cease altogether being an unkind word. According to the article the word is getting closer to that place among the younger generation. But it's not there yet. Nor is Q the last letter. Even as society's understanding and acceptance of those who "exist outside the dominant narrative" is growing, the acronym has grown to sometimes include two more letters, "I" and "A". The I stands for "intersex", meaning those who have physical characteristics of both sexes, or who may have the physical characteristics of one sex on the outside but the sex organs of the other on the inside. The "A" stands for "asexual", or those who aren't sexually attracted to anyone. But the "A" can also stand for another group: the allies, those who are straight but support the LGBTQIA community and the cause of gay rights and equality. So, then, LGBTQIA includes a place for everyone, if not everyone in their place. References:
1. "After Marriage Equality", Anya Mukarji-Connolly, Letters To The Editor, The New York Times, July 6, 2015. 2. "What does the Q in LGBTQ stand for?", Lori Grisham, USA TODAY Network, 9:42 a.m. EDT June 1, 2015. 3. "What does LGBTQIA mean?" , Tahoe Safe Alliance, http://tahoesafealliance.org/for-lgbqtia/what-does-lgbtqia-mean/
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"Jurassic World" got stank reviews but I went and saw it anyway. Then I went and saw it again. And if anybody out there needs someone to go see it with, I'll go see it a third time. It's true that, except for the beautiful views of the island of Kauai where the movie was filmed and the computer-generated dinos, "Jurassic World" isn't piece of cinematic art. But then a few weeks ago I went to the Drexel, our local art film place, and saw "The Clouds Of Sils Maria", which got 4 1/2 stars and rave critical reviews and at the end of the movie I exclaimed to anybody close enough to hear, "What the heck was that about?" and the lady sitting in front of me turned to me and replied, "I don't know, but I want that two hours of my life back!" I will admit, though, that there was an awesome scene in "The Clouds Of Sils Maria" of the Moloja Snake, which is a vast cloud formation that daily winds its way above the Engadin Valley in St. Moritz, Switzerland, so that from a distance it looks like a giant white snake is winding its way through the valley.
So while I did enjoy watching the scene of the Moloja Snake, and I guess it was kind of educational, I'm not sure "The Clouds Of Sils Maria" was worth the price of the six-dollar movie ticket. Eh, maybe it was. "Jurassic World", on the other hand, was unequivocally worth the cost of the two tickets I've sprung for so far as well as the third I may yet end up shelling out for. I mean, the characters in "Jurassic World" may not be emotionally complex or nuanced - well, at least not the human characters; the dinosaurs, on the other hand kind of are. Especially the raptors, who throughout the film appear to be struggling with nature-nurture issues,
So there's that dramatic tension and suspense. Spoiler alert for the very slow:
Anyway, back to what I was saying, if one can get over the fact of the plot being just a weence farfetched even beyond the premise of the original "Jurassic Park", and if one can suspend one's disbelief that a dinosaur could be possessed of a personality (which premise even the character of the park manager has a problem accepting at first in the movie, as exhibited in the scene where she snaps at the raptor trainer, "Look, we're talking about an animal here!), the dinosaurs of "Jurassic World" do have lots of personality.
I went to see this movie because the Columbus Dispatch review proclaimed it "hysterically funny" and Rotten Tomatoes called it "witty and unpredictable" and Wikipedia described it as "an increasingly humorous and zany series of encounters".
It wasn't funny. At all. There were lots of scenes that looked as though they were supposed to be funny but nobody in the theater was laughing. Still, I'm predicting the "The Overnight" will win an academy award even though it's just a big dull mess of a movie and far less believable than an amusement park full of cogitating dinosaurs running amok. So whatever you do, when it comes to a theater near you, don't go see "The Overnight". Or "The Clouds of Sils Maria", either. But if you want to go see "Jurassic World", give me a call. The art. The artist.
Richard Matt, the escaped convict who roamed upstate New York for three weeks until he was shot to death a week ago, was a man with a history of crime and violence since his childhood, a man who's committed rapes and assaults, who broke a 72-year-old man's neck with his bare hands during a robbery and stabbed another man to death trying to steal a few dollars from him. Richard Matt was also a gifted artist. He spent his days at the Clinton Correctional Facility where he was serving 25 years to life sitting in his cell painting striking portraits of celebrities,
...political figures,
 ...fellow inmates,  ...or their family members from photographs,  ....or still-lifes and nature scenes
Matt would barter his paintings for favors and preferential treatment from fellow inmates and guards. Which begs the question: could not this greatly talented human being who was savvy enough to run a successful art business in a prison have made at least as good a living in the outside world selling his art as committing robberies? Though I suppose that's a moot question in regard to someone who's been in and out of prison since he was 13 years old. But in truth the most amazing aspect of Richard Matt's story is that it's not actually all that amazing. Apparently there is a vast community of artists within the prison system. Art seems to flourish behind the walls and cell bars and is something that prisoners gravitate to, a means of self-expression or a way to occupy time. Some, like Richard Matt, find the means to obtain quality materials, others use whatever they can scrounge, from ball-point pens to the dye soaked from M&M's applied with brushes made from toilet paper, to toilet paper as a medium for sculpture. Good art is valued among the prison population, and is traded among inmates or used, as it was by Richard Matt, as currency to exchange for goods and status. And while some inmates draw, paint or sculpt just to pass the time, others have exhibited great talent and their art has been purchased by galleries and collectors, especially the many collectors of prison art. According to an article in The New York Times: "Art by particularly notorious convicts — Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy — has always found an avid, sometimes macabre, collector base. The market for inmate art typically ranges from small galleries and exhibitions to eBay and other collectibles websites, including murderauction.com and murderabilia.net." Some states allow prisoners to sell their art in the outside world, some don't, but works of artistically gifted violent felons are displayed in prison art exhibitions held all across the country. And according to a former fellow inmate of Richard Matt's, "He was the best in the system that anyone could recall". Sometimes it's hard to wrap your head around the dichotomy between beauty and ugliness.
A self-portrait by Richard Matt
References: 1. "The Art Of Doing Time: Prisoner, Painter, Escapee," Randy Kennedy, Graham Bowley and Colin Moynihan, June 27, 2015. 2. "Richard Matt", Wikipedia, July 3, 2015 3. "Prison Style Art", C.A., convictedartist.com, July 3, 2015 3. 20th Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners March 25-April 8, 2015, https://www.lsa.umich.edu/pcap/whatwedo/artshow 4. Crime Art Exhibit, http://library.sdsu.edu/news/crime-art-exhibit 5. Safe Streets Art Foundation, http://www.safestreetsarts.org/ My Panera Posse meets once a week, at Panera, of course, 
 Our regular members include several white women, an African American woman, and an East African woman who is a mother of six and who was married at thirteen. We also have an occasional Posse drop-in, a Muslim woman from Turkey who at one time taught school to the children of a Kurdish tribe in a remote mountain region of Turkey. In truth, though, none of us seems to notice, nor have we ever discussed, our group demographics. When we get together we mostly talk about the things women like to talk about when they get together: Our families, our crises, national and world events, politics, our opinions, our new flooring, a new recipe, what we did last weekend, what we're doing next weekend, and, of course, that which bonds all women, the latest, hottest gossip making the rounds. Yesterday, as it turned out, only three of us made it to the Posse meeting. Maybe it was that our smaller-than-usual number made it possible for all of us to get in a word edgewise and so we were galloping to get in as many words as possible, or maybe it was excitement over national events of the past week, but I sensed that we were talking louder than usual. Or maybe I was just concerned, as I sometimes am when we start tossing about our political opinions, as we were in profusion yesterday, that we might offend the people around us, this time in particular a gent who was sitting alone reading at the table across from ours and who was directly in my line of vision. He was an older guy, but kind of good-looking. Think Sean Connery. Think Sean Connery in jeans, tee-shirt and a baseball cap. I kept glancing over to see if he looked annoyed, or anything, but I never noticed him looking up from his book. At one point I was telling the gals about my nephew's upcoming wedding. First I described for them his off-beat save-the-date, which took me several days to figure out, but which cracked me up once I finally did: Do you get it? Hint: what's that little thing in the middle?  Then I started telling them how excited I am about the wedding, not least because it sounds like the reception food is going to be awesome and dessert, instead of cake, is going to be flaming donut holes.
When I said "flaming donut holes" one of my friends almost spit out her salad as she was propelled into an uncontrollable laughing fit that eventually grabbed hold of the other two of us so that here we were, three old ladies at Panera yucking it up loud and long over flaming donut holes. Even as I laughed I snuck a glance over at our Sean Conneryesque neighbor, but fortunately he appeared to be still calmly engrossed in his book. Then I kind of forgot about him until half an hour later when he got up and walked over to our table and stopped. The first thing I noticed was that the book he was holding, the one he'd been reading, was a bible commentary. Uh-oh, thought I. Then he began talking. "This is good," he said with a slight foreign accent, gesturing towards us, "friends sitting together, talking and laughing. This is how it should be. This is how it is in my country." We asked him where he was from. "Greece," he replied. We immediately began sympathizing, asking him if he knew how things were, if he had any family still there. He told us that yes, his family and many friends were still there and that everybody was suffering, unable to get any money, not knowing how they were going to make it from day to day. I asked him about the tourist industry these days and he replied that tourism was his country's biggest source of income but that as a result of the economic crisis tourism had fallen off. "It's terrible," he said sadly. "But," he continued, "seeing you friends sitting in a cafe enjoying life, this brings me back to Greece. That's how it is there all the time. We need more of this here, and everywhere." Then he wished us a nice day, we wished him one back, and he left. And we sat there for a while longer, trying to figure out what to do about Greece, among other things. |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY Archives
April 2025
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