Un beso atrevido ?

Saturday, February 17, 2007

A Kiss Too Far?

By GUY TREBAY

Published: February 18, 2007

THE spot was only 30 seconds, almost a blur amid the action at the Super Bowl. Yet the hubbub after a recent commercial showing two auto mechanics accidentally falling into lip-lock while eating the same Snickers bar went a long way toward showing how powerfully charged a public kiss between two men remains.

Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Could a gay couple who weren’t hired

models get away with this in Manhattan?

Football is probably as good a place as any to look for the limits of social tolerance. And the Snickers commercial — amusing to some, appalling to others and ultimately withdrawn by the company that makes the candy — had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not.

The demarcation seemed particularly stark during the week of Valentine’s Day, when the aura of love cast its rosy Hallmark glow over card-store cash registers and anyone with a pulse. Where, one wondered, were all the same-sex lovers making out on street corners, or in comedy clubs, performance spaces, flower shops or restaurants?

“There’s really a kind of Potemkin village quality to the tolerance and acceptance” of gay people in America, said Clarence Patton, a spokesman for the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. “The idea of it is O.K., but the reality falls short.”

Provided gay people agree to “play a very tightly scripted and choreographed role in society, putting your wedding together or what have you, we’re not threatening,” Mr. Patton said. “But people are still verbally harassed and physically attacked daily for engaging in simple displays of affection in public. Everything changes the minute we kiss.”

Snickers withdrew a commercial featuring
an accidental kiss that many people did not find amusing.

The lugs in the Snickers commercial recoiled in shock at their smooch, resorting to “manly” behavior like tearing out their chest hair in clumps. Alternate endings to the commercial on a Snickers Web site showed the two clobbering each other, and related video clips featured players from the Super Bowl teams reacting, not unexpectedly, with squeamish distaste. The outrage voiced by gay rights groups similarly held little surprise.

“This type of jeering from professional sports figures at the sight of two men kissing fuels the kind of anti-gay bullying that haunts countless gay and lesbian schoolchildren on playgrounds across the country,” Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. A spokesman for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation condemned the advertisement as “inexcusable.” Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars and the maker of Snickers, withdrew the offending ads.

But for some the commercial left the lingering question of who owns the kiss? How is it that a simple affectionate gesture can be so loaded? Why is it that behavioral latitudes permit couples of one sort to indulge freely in public displays lusty enough to suggest short-term motel stays, while entire populations, albeit minority ones, live real-time versions of the early motion picture Hays Code: a peck on the cheek in public, one foot squarely planted on the floor?

The freedom to kiss in public is hardly the most compelling issue for most gay rights advocates, or perhaps even in the minds of many gay Americans. Yet the symbolic weight of simple gestures remains potent, a point easy to observe wherever on the sexual spectrum one falls. “Whose issue is it? Why is it only a gay issue?” said Robert Morea, a fitness consultant in New York.

Although Mr. Morea is heterosexual, his client list has long included a number of high-profile professionals, the majority of them gay women and men. “The issue is there because for so many years, people got beaten up, followed or yelled at,” he said. “Even for me as a straight man, it’s obvious how social conditioning makes it hard for people to take back the public space.”

After considering herself exclusively lesbian for decades, Sarah Van Arsdale, a novelist, not long ago found, to her surprise, that she had fallen in love with a man. At first, as she wrote last week in an e-mail message from a writer’s colony in Oaxaca, Mexico, “ Whenever we would hold hands in public, I felt a frisson of fear, waiting for the customary dirty looks or at least for the customary looking-away.”

In place of revulsion, Ms. Van Arsdale was startled to discover that, having adjusted her sexual identity, she was now greeted by strangers with approving smiles. “I felt suddenly acceptable and accepted and cute, as opposed to queer,” she said.

While few are likely to have shared Ms. Van Arsdale’s singular perspective, her experience is far from exceptional. “I’m a very openly gay man,” said Dane Clark, who manages rental properties and flies a rainbow flag from his house in Kansas City, Kan. “My partner and I don’t go kissing in public. I live in probably the most liberal part of the State of Kansas, but it’s not exactly liberal. If I was to go to a nice restaurant nearby and kiss my partner, I don’t think that would go over very well.”

As many gay men have before him, Mr. Clark chose to live in a city rather than the sort of small town where he was raised in the hope that Kansas City would provide a greater margin of tolerance and also of safety. Even in nearby Independence, Mo., he said, “if you kiss your partner in a restaurant, you could find somebody waiting for you outside when you went to the car.”

But haven’t things changed radically from the days when lesbians and gay men were considered pariahs, before gay marriage initiatives became ballot issues, before Ellen DeGeneres was picked to host the Oscars, and cable TV staples like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” made a competitive sport of group hugs?

In some senses and in certain places, apparently, they have. The landscape of acceptance, as the Snickers commercial inadvertently illustrated, is constantly shifting — broadening in one place and contracting somewhere else. The country in which anti-gay advocates like the Rev. Fred Phelps once drew headlines for picketing Matthew Shepard’s funeral and preaching what was called “a Day-Glo vision of hatred” can seem very far away at times from the laissez-faire place in which an estimated 70 percent of Americans say they know someone who is gay.

“We don’t administrate public displays of affection,” said Andrew Shields, World Church Secretary of the Community of Christ, a Christian evangelical church with headquarters in Independence. “Homosexuality is still in discussion in our church. But our denominational point of view is that we uphold the worth of all persons, and there is no controversy on whether people have a right to express themselves.”

The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”

Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.

“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”

Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.

What Mr. Windish calls a level of peril is possibly always in play, and this no doubt has something to do with the easily observed reality that a public kiss between two people of the same sex remains an unusual occurrence, and probably not because most are holding out for the chance to lock lips over a hunk of milk chocolate, roasted peanuts and caramel.

“We forget here, because New York has been relatively safe for a
while, that hate is a problem,” said Roger Padilha, an owner of
MAO public relations in New York. The reminders surface in everyday settings,
he said, and in ordinary ways.

Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times
Roger Padilha of Manhattan says he is unafraid to hug and
kiss his boyfriend in public.

“My boyfriend and I always hold hands and, when we feel like it, we kiss,” Mr. Padilha said. Yet some weeks back, at a late movie in a Times Square theater, as Mr. Padilha went to rest his hand on his partner’s leg — a gesture it would seem that movie theaters were invented to facilitate — he recoiled as sharply as had one of the Snickers ad guys.

“He was like: ‘Don’t do that. It’s too dangerous,’ ” Mr. Padilha said. “And afterward I thought, you know, my dad isn’t super into P.D.A.’s, but nobody’s ever going to beat him up because he’s kissing my mom at a movie. I kept thinking: What if my boyfriend got hit by a car tomorrow? When I had the chance to kiss him, why didn’t I?”

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

Cristal, Oropel y Gran Diseño. Arte Sasánida de Irán (224-642 A.D.)

Art Review
'Art of Sasanian Iran'

Flaunting Dominion in Ancient Iran

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: February 16, 2007

The opening of Asia Society’s glinting and glowing show of pre-Islamic art from Iran turned into something of a cliffhanger late last week when dozens of objects coming from Paris were held up by customs at Kennedy International Airport.

Corning Museum of Glass

The objects — ancient silver dishes, carved document seals and silk textiles — all belong to French museums, including the Louvre, and have for generations. But the United States’ longstanding embargo on Iranian imports stipulates that any art objects of Iranian origin, no matter how long they have been elsewhere, can enter this country only with a permit from Washington. Even though Asia Society had such a permit, the art stayed in an airport hangar until the 11th hour, and then was rushed into Manhattan.

As it is, “Glass, Gilding and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224-642 A.D.),” is a radical reduction of a much larger exhibition from the Musée Cernuschi in Paris that included loans from Iranian museums impossible to bring to the United States. But with about 70 pieces, the New York version is still substantial. And even if it weren’t, we would have to take notice: it is one of the only major exhibitions of Sasanian art in this part of the world in more than 30 years. And it arrives, coincidentally, just as the Bush administration has sharpened its focus on Iran’s role in war-ravaged Iraq.

During those 30 years scholars have learned a lot about the Sasanians, though we still don’t know very much. For about four centuries they ruled a territory that covered present-day Iran, Iraq, parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan and stretched to North Africa. Their historical role models were the Achaemenid Iranians, who had built Persepolis a millennium earlier. Their rivals were Rome, then Byzantium and, at the very end, early Islamic dynasties.

The Sasanians were lucky with time and place. They came to power when the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean was in full flow, and they absorbed influences from the many cultures that traveled it. One of the first things you see in the galleries is a silver-and-gilt bowl decorated with a male royal portrait head clearly based on Greco-Roman prototypes, while a wine vessel nearby, in the shape of an antelope’s head, has stylistic roots in the remote borderlands of Central Asia.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A wine vessel in the form of an antelope head

In art, the Sasanians gave as good as they got, generating widespread and long-lasting influences of their own. Exquisite textiles of Sasanian design have been found in Egypt. And a gorgeous little glass cup in the show — it is purplish-brown, with protruding sensorlike knobs that make it resemble Sputnik — compares to others that ended up in Chinese tombs, Japanese temples and the treasury of San Marco in Venice.

Sasanian art made the rounds. And its wide distribution, combined with uncontrolled excavation, has made it almost impossible to date precisely, or to assign an exact place of origin. Archaeologists and art historians frequently have trouble determining whether something is actually Sasanian or in-the-style-of. (Glass is particularly elusive in this respect.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A silver plate from the fifth century.

Nonetheless, certain types of images seem specific to its imperial culture, namely those that refer to the state religion of Zoroastrianism. But even here cross-cultural sampling prevails.

The religion’s principal female deity, Anahita, the goddess of fertility, assumes various guises. In a stucco relief she is a formidable Mesopotamian matron with dangly earrings. But she is also a Hellenistic bacchante scintillating over the surface of a chunky silver vase, now owned by the Louvre. By the time this luxury item emerged from an imperial atelier in the fifth or sixth century, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Manichaeism were all practiced within the empire, contributing to its visual eclecticism.

The Corning Museum of Glass
A vessel, which could have served as a beaker or a lamp,

probably from the fourth to seventh century.

One image occurs more often than any other: the king. Among the exhibition’s largest pieces is a royal “portrait” bust in stucco found at the royal site of Kish in Iraq. Traditionally each sovereign distinguished himself visually with a custom-designed crown. And the subject of this bust, even with half his crown missing, is sometimes identified as Shapur II, as is the face in a Sasanian silver bust at the Met, which has its bulbous, stand-out-in-a-crowd headgear intact.

Yet the bust at Asia Society is probably generic and symbolic. It is a monumental image of the king as the incarnation of absolute power: civic, moral and supernatural; and as the cosmic stabilizer, the anchor of the empire.

Photo by Maggie Nimkin; Private Collection
Silver bowl from third to fourth century.

More commonly, though, rulers are depicted in action, specifically in the act of hunting. On one silver plate, King Yazdegerd I, haloed and beribboned, impales a stag with his spear. On another, Hormizd II (or III), mounted on a galloping horse, aims an arrow at a lion. In the seventh century a third king, probably Khosrow II, commissioned a mural-size rock carving of a royal boar hunt, with the king standing, weapons at the ready, at its center, as attendants drive hundreds of panicked animals into a pen for the slaughter.

In Zoroastrian understanding, boars embodied the warrior virtue of aggressive courage; for a ruler to kill one was to demonstrate matching courage. Lions, once an auspicious solar symbol, were associated with evil and chaos, and as such were the natural enemy of the righteous king. In dispatching them, he fulfilled his role as preserver of the empire and universal master.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
An eighth-century silver vessel, from Iran.

So, in cosmic terms, which are always basically earthly terms with spin, these images of domination through combat are political art, or more precisely, political advertising. What is the difference, after all, between a carved relief of an ancient king-of-king’s victory in a hunt and a press photograph of a modern leader declaring victory in a war?

Aesthetics is one difference, a big one. Most of the objects in the show — organized by Françoise Demange, chief curator of Asian antiquities at the Louvre, with Prudence O. Harper, curator emerita of ancient Near Eastern art at the Met, and Michael Chagnon, a curatorial consultant — are superbly beautiful in formal terms, beautiful enough to smooth over the reality that control through violence is a primary theme.

When we see comparable violence played out on television news, we are appalled; some people have ethical qualms about its omnipresence, in fictional form, in films. But in high art, we tend to put our scruples on hold and give it a pass, because of beauty, or rarity, or distance in time, or because we don’t know what we’re seeing, or because we just don’t want to acknowledge what is really there.

Corning Museum of Glass
The Sasanian portrait head on this bowl

suggests Greco-Roman influences.

A large part of art’s allure is its ambiguity; you can take it as you wish, make of it what you will. This exhibition, with its luminous cruelties, is a reminder of that. But the ancient Sasanians were surely clear about what they were seeing in their imperial art. And in some sense the viewers who understand art as political advertising most directly today are iconoclasts, the suppressors and destroyers of art. They may be the only people for whom art actually does speak for itself, but for whom beauty truly is not enough.

So by all means see the rare and fabulous work at Asia Society, for the intense pleasure it gives and for the windows its opens onto history, present and past. But also see it for the hard questions it poses about the profoundly uninnocent nature of art — in particular imperial art, wherever it comes from — and the moral responsibility we should ask of it.

“Glass, Gilding and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224-642 A.D.)” remains at Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street), through May 20.

2007 Copyright by the New York Times Company :::

Muy lejos de Hollywood....

Fashion Review Far From Hollywood By CATHY HORYN Published: January 25, 2007

PARIS François Guillot/AFP - Getty Images TAKING FLIGHT From the Dior show in Paris, a John Galliano gown, tucked and tiered with intricate origami detail. SINCE the most effective Hollywood stylists are probably to be found behind the scenes, Rachel Zoe's presence in the front row at the Chanel haute couture show could only mean that she wanted people to see her. Putting aside the mental block that forms at the mention of the words Hollywood stylist, Rachel Zoe was giving herself a special role. This seems a good place to say that she is promoting a false assumption, namely that the couture collections are tailor-made for the red carpet. Actually, the couture collections are tailor-made for about 500 people in the world who have the means or the connections to get an $80,000 dress, and the rest is just ballyhoo to sell the cheaper commercial stuff. True, one or two houses will specially make dresses for the Oscars, as Chanel did for Penelope Cruz for the Golden Globes. But the red carpet is really a concession to middle American tastes; if you stopped to analyze it long enough, if you added up the number of ruched or beaded dresses trucking down the carpet, you wouldn't have Paris or even Hollywood. You'd have the suburbs of Detroit on a good night. And that's not a put-down to Detroit; it's a statement that many affluent people nowadays have access to stylish clothes. Jean Luce Huré for The New York Times Stage Presence A Chanel wool bouclé coatdress.

Haute couture is a different game. Not only do you need piles of money, but you have to able to project yourself into a candy-pink pencil suit with what looks like a Japanese origami bird coming off the back. This was the essence of John Galliano's couture show for Dior, a feat of artistry and contemporary imagination. Of course, a stylist can ask to have the bird removed (not wishing to solicit comparisons to Bjork's famous dead swan outfit), and a house will do that, since the purpose of couture is to suit the client. But the stylist, by reason of self-interest and limited vision, will never be able to duplicate the experience of the couture show. That's why couture stands apart more and more from the red carpet. It is, in fact, everything that the red carpet is not. It is strange, difficult, emotionally affecting and accessible to relatively few. Witness the gloomy brilliance of Riccardo Tisci's clothes for Givenchy, shown on Tuesday evening on a wet stone floor, with the models dragging their long silk trains. On the whole, the point of view was immature. Yet the cut and the elongated line of a navy suede coat, rippling softly down the front and worn with a trailing skirt in navy silk, left no doubt that Mr. Tisci was proposing a distinct silhouette. This has been a season of the salon, with Mr. Galliano literally evoking the dove gray atmosphere of Dior, and Karl Lagerfeldopening the Chanel show by rolling out a cream-colored carpet and ending the presentation with the staff of the house, including the heads, or premières, of the workrooms, seated class-portrait-style opposite the audience.

François Guillot/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images An exotic geisha look from Dior. In a collection that was easily his best for Dior, and certainly his most coherent, Mr. Galliano did not spare Paris embroiderers, who gave him dragonflies and tiny, three-dimension birds, or his fabric suppliers, who made him gazar and organdy in dense triple weights, or his seamstresses and tailors, who stitched, pleated and pressed the origami folds so that they were immaculate and perfectly integrated into the whole outfit. But what you mainly felt about Mr. Galliano's work this season was how original the colors were: the sugary pinks, the lime and sea-foam greens, the shades of brown darkening to black on a long dress formed by ribbon strips of fabric that had been inspired by Japanese baskets. From the point of view of someone who is not artistic, it was daunting to realize that these colors did not spring from a book or a painting but, rather, from Mr. Galliano's mind. That's one difference between a designer and a couturier. Another is the ability to give a new proportion at the right moment. This was Mr. Lagerfeld's strength this season, though he, too, had amazing colors like a purple heliotrope gray and a creamy white with a hint of blue. In nearly every dress, including mini-coatdresses and long evening numbers, the waist was slightly higher than normal and belted, so that the legs looked longer. Mr. Lagerfeld imparted a vertical line in other ways: with a jacket made entirely from handmade strips of tweed braid; with dresses that had sheer bodies ribbed with piped organdy or tulle, and a beautiful two-piece leopard-print silk dress traced at the hem in silver embroidery. In nearly 25 years at Chanel, Mr. Lagerfeld said it was the first time he had thought to use the print.

Jean Luce Huré for The New York Times Spring Fever Giorgio Armani's embroidered silk dress inspired by India.

Valentino, in his 45th year in fashion, delivered a superb collection, opening with a floaty ivory satin jacket and matching cutout skirt. Everything about the clothes, loosely inspired by a show he did in 1968, suggested lightness, from the dominance of white to the youthful volumes and cloudlike coats. Valentino frustrates when he piles things on — the lips too red, the gowns too embellished. Not this time. A slim, many-tiered dress in white silk looked elegant and easy, while the grainy and ottoman textures of the cream fabrics seemed to pay homage to Robert Ryman. Christian Lacroix seemed mired in weird proportions and colors. Jean Paul Gaultier's Catholic procession of ethereal drapes and stained-glass embroidery was fun and imaginative. I've never seen a couture bride look like Jesus. The collection had a kitsch quality, but also a modern glamour. The striking thing about Giorgio Armani's maharajah-inspired silks, some embroidered with semiprecious stones, was the shape they imparted. This was a deft collection, though not just because it involved more Parisian heft than we've seen from Mr. Armani. It worked because he had something new to say in the cut, clearly conveyed by a simple dress in beige micro-check silk with a narrow, elongated waist and an exaggerated shoulder. The same line appeared in jackets. When told before the show that a silver embroidered gown seemed bound for the Oscars, Mr. Armani looked critically at the dress and smiled. Through a translator, he said, "Maybe for a maharajah, but not the Oscars."

Copyright by the New York Times 2007 :::

Strip-Tease diferente.....

Febrero 11 de 2007 Strip-Tease diferente...... Les gustó ?

Frases que cambiaron después de "Brokeback Mountain"