10

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

August 1, 2003

Handy Home Improvement eveningsout

by MARQUEZ RENOVATIONS

"We Measure Up!"

Drywall/Plaster Wallpaper

Carpentry

Electric

Plumbing

Kitchen

Painting

Bath

Bonded, Insured, Workmanship Warranty

Free Estimates 216-941-4150

Email: marreno@juno.com

Mon-Fri 8am-4pm

5.81984

BBB

Experience the warm glow of touch

MIC LIC

Quiet Summit... In West Akron

ski geTherapist

330.475.0775

Quitethetouch64@aol.com

Auto

Life

Health

For all your insurance needs!

Home

Business

Betsy Warner Agent

2479 Lee Boulevard

Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118

Office (216) 932-6900

Chiropractic Health Services, Inc.

RxComputerTx Raymond C. Lamy, MS PC Consultant

D0000

On-Site PC Service Home or Small Business Office

System Upgrades & Downloads New PC System Specification & Component Recommendations

PC Workstation Setup Software Installation Personalized PC Tutoring Troubleshooting & Repairs

http://hometown.aol.com/rxcomputertx/ RxComputerTx@aol.com 216-227-0144

DAVID A. BUDNY, D.C. 16900 DETROIT AVE LAKEWOOD, OHIO 44107 216-228-6622

Dedicated to your wellness

OUTSTANDING →

Come and See the Newly Redesigned 2003 4Runner...

or

It's ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS!

New & Used

See Jim Greenfield Sales & Leasing

Experience

the Metro

difference!

METRO TOYOTA

W. 137th & Brookpark Road OFF 1-480

216-267-7000

Pop goes the weasel

Three books ferret out the inside scoop on popular entertainment

by Anthony Glassman

Between the glass teat and the silver screen, society is held captive in the vise-like grip of popular culture.

Where once the New York Times was the acme of journalism, Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly now battle for news supremacy, locked in an unending struggle of demagoguery and sound bites.

Films have replaced novels as the stories that define generations. Where once Catcher in the Rye was the story of teenage disaffectation, American Pie in now the tale that epitomizes teen males.

To dig through all this popular culture, however, people still use the print medium, as three fun and fascinating books illustrate quite well.

Two of them are fairly broad. Stephen Tropiano's The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (Applause, $16.95), for instance, covers nearly 50 years of television history.

PRIME TIME CLOSET

A 4210497 67% ** *****ARS ** ** $86PMEN TROPIAMO

From its earliest days, gay men were present on the "boob tube," and lesbians followed shortly thereafter. At first, gays appeared solely as the topic of locally-produced talk shows, but later emerged into fictional pro-

gramming, often as villains in crime dramas and in a more sympathetic light in medical melodrama.

Tropiano traces the evolution from "Introduction to the problem of homosexuality," an episode of the talk show Open Mind, through to the modern day of Will & Grace and the more-gratuitous-sex-than-youcan-shake-a-stick-at Queer as Folk.

While some may question the necessity of some of the repetitious examples of early depictions, the book is an invaluable resource for tracking the changing portrayal of homosexuality over the last half-century.

Dennis Hensley's Screening Party (Alyson, $16.95) is also a fairly wide-

ranging book, although its fo-

SCREENING PARTY cus is a little nar-

DENNIS

www.WASH...

rower than that of Prime Time Closet. Hensley gathered together a diverse group of people, including the token straight boy from the video store, and forced them to watch movies together. He re-

corded the ongoing commentary from the peanut gallery.

From watching Mariah Carey's monstrosity Glitter in a Los Angeles cinema also

occupied by supermodel Tyra Banks to comparing the asses and assets of the various James Bonds, Hensley and his motley crew of misanthropes provided piece after piece for British Premiere, and the articles are collected in this oversized volume, designed to look like a magazine.

There's a bit of actual gay film in the book, with the William Friedkin film Cruising and a festival of male stripper films, but most of the movies are simply culturally iconic, like Jaws, Taxi Driver and Saturday Night Fever.

Poor Jaws. That shark will never be quite as frightening again after resident Screening Party psychoanalyst Dr. Beaverman asserted that the shark was a mother figure and Richard Dreyfus and Roy Scheider wanted to sleep together. . .

Every film gets the same treatment, and it's not pretty. It's hysterically funny, but not pretty.

Finally, Robrt L. Pela's Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters narrows the focus, although not just to Waters' life or films, but to the fandom that has sprung up around him and the iconography the gay director created.

Perhaps the only question left unanswered is what happened to the E in Pela's first

name.

Pela's book is almost as strange as a Waters film. He devotes one chapter to an interview with Divine, the late diva of Waters'

filthy

films through Hairspray. The problem is, the interview was conducted after Divine's death, through the medium

filthy Calvin Sharpee, who

BY ROBRT L. PEL

specializes in contacting deceased celebrities. As a very wise man once said, oy vey.

Then there's the chapter given over in

its entirety to quotes about the infamous dog turd scene in Pink Flamingos, gems like Waters' musing, “It was pot humor, if only because I was on pot when I thought it up."

"John had asked me a year before we did the sccene if I would scoop up dog feces and put some in my mouth," Divine said. Really said, it should be noted, since this was from an interview before her death. "I thought he was kidding, so I said, 'Sure.' A year later he said, 'Well, tomorrow's your big day, you get to work with the dog."

999

"Faggots, Fat Women and Puke: The Bluffer's Guide to Recurring Imagery and Motifs in John Waters Films" is probably the most interesting chapter of the book, talking about images like the Virgin Mary and motifs like heterosexuals.

"In John Waters films, straight people are often depicted as stupid and boring, their lives banal and unsatisfactory," Pela writes. The same could be said about much of popular culture.

One would think that, being surrounded by pop culture all the time, examining it wouldn't be necessary, but it never hurts to take a closer look at something functioning at once as the mother and the enemy.

A'Bella Gallery

"Experience Art with Attitude"

Calendar of Events

July 25 August 22 September 14 October 3 & 4 November 21 December 14

Art Opening

Dusk to Dark

Art Opening

Dusk to Dark

Arts Festival

10am-6pm

Jewelry Trunk Show

10am-7pm

Big Ruby Bash

7pm-11pm

Holiday Open House

12pm-5pm

33 Years of Sales & Service Ixcellence!

44 Front Street, Berea, Ohio 44017 •

440.239.7815

Fine Art Fine Gifts Custom Framing

Educational Programming Museum Tours