aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, May 20, 2005
Our last night in Philly
We had friends come down from New York tonight for dinner and had to pick a place to meet. We’re staying across the street from Woody’s so you might think we’d pick there.
You’d be wrong.
No, we picked the Ikea in South Philly, situated directly across the street from the haunting hulk of the SS United States.
Now I’m not an Ikea critic, I like the place just fine (and Doug does the assembly in our household), but on vacation we’re furniture shopping? We can’t wait for the late June opening in Atlanta? Not Doug. Friends Alex & Howard agree. I get with the program and we buy an umbrella for our backyard table.
As it happens, Alex is the friend I went with to the opening of Attack of the Clones. You may recall what we thought of that. Tonight we laughed together at his recapping of Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of episode three:
The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menaceâ€Â� and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing"-or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending"-he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay gold-plated Jeeves.
No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung.
Read the whole thing. I laughed out loud. Looks like I’ll be taking a pass on this one. I have my doubts about a rediscovered Lucas avant-garde soul as well.
Ticking Clock
Guest post by Jen.
The local (sort of) alternative paper, in this week’s follow-up article about runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, quoted the New York Post.
Jennifer Wilbanks hails from a slice of the South where 32-year-old-never-married women are either insane, in prison, or gay.
Three months until I am 32. But there may be a hidden benefit to spinsterhood, says Brutal Women.
Waiting to have children may add years to a woman’s life, says Jenni Pettay of the University of Turku in Finland. The evolutionary biologist analyzed 5,000 birth records from four generations of 17th- and 18th-century Finns and found that women who waited the longest before having their first child were statistically more likely to live longer. The delay in childbirth seems to be inherited: Late mothers’ daughters also tended to become late mothers themselves. (Late was defined as after 30.)
Something to look forward to, even if I am insane, in prison, or gay…
