(Originally posted last Christmas… Last Christmas … sniff… R.I.P. George Michael…)
I plead guilty to being a bit of a Christmas Carol Grinch. OK, I used to be a BIG Christmas Carol Grinch, really loathing most carols and sometimes resorting to lip syncing rather than singing out loud when drawn into a festive sing along. This bad attitude probably stems from having been raised in a secular household blissfully devoid of Christianity. I still enjoyed all the pagan accouterments of the holiday, the decorated (Solstice) tree, the presents, a belief in Santa until I was five (OK, that may not be pagan). But being an aggressively atheistic kid, and stubborn, I didn’t enjoy singing about “Christ the Lord” or “God” or “Baby Jesus”. I admit my atheism at times was as obnoxious as the aggressive certainty of an overzealous Evangelist.
Now, I’ve put atheism behind me, but I still consider myself “spiritually unaffiliated” and still am a little allergic to the “C” and “J” words, as well as still a bit of a snob when it comes to the whole baby in the manger kitsch factor. Nonetheless, 22 years together with Ed has welded me firmly to a family that loves singing carols together, and has taught me to temper my unfestive disdain, and join in with the music.
And truth be told, the music to most Christmas carols is very beautiful. I still cringe a bit at the words, especially when it seems the lyrics of foreign carols have been mostly rewritten to interchangeable Christchild adoring homogeneity in English where there was a greater thematic variety in the original, and I still bristle at Beethoven’s Ode to Joy having been rewritten as a Christian Hymn (“Sacrilege, I say!”), but I’ve grown way mellower with age and will be happy to sing along with the program with all the Elders this holiday.
It is though a bit of an irony that I of all people, this longtime carol-phobe, have found myself writing what I only in hindsight realized were three perfectly seasonally appropriate carols. They are songs from my musical “beTwixt, beTween & beTWAIN” (about which I have posted before here and here) called “Pilgrims from America”, “Jerusalem” and “Sea of Galilee”. They are unreservedly suited for caroling occasions. They may not include the direct references to “Christ the Lord” or “Baby Jesus” but they should nonetheless please the sensibilities of all carol singing enthusiasts, even the very religious.
The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower is the most famous building in Brooklyn. Completed in 1929 it remained the tallest building in Brooklyn for over 80 years. For all that time it stood alone as a kind of beacon in its corner of Brooklyn just north of Park Slope and South of Fort Greene and just across the way from BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. You could give directions by it (“walk towards the big tower”, “walk away from the big tower”) because there was nothing tall like it near on the horizon. That has changed now that many similarly tall buildings have joined it only recently in the skyline, but the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower still stands unique and unequaled in the Brooklyn landscape.
Today I will share some photos I have taken over the past few months that feature a play of light and shadow in a diverse variety. I’ll complement these images with songs about shadow and light, the first one actually called “Shadow and Light”, a song from my musical Speakeasy that I hadn’t yet shared on this blog before. A few of these pictures and tracks have been featured on Notes from a Composer before, a few will be included in an upcoming post. But most are unique to this post.
I moved to New York City in 1986 yet sometimes I still enjoy it like a tourist. You know the old joke about telling the tourists from the New Yorkers by who is looking up? Well, I may be a New Yorker of more than 30 years but I still like looking up in awe, and sometimes I’ll start taking some “beauty shots” just for the fun of it. Two-Fisted Touristing in my home town. So it was while I walked up last evening past the Hearst Tower on 8th avenue and the corner of 56th Street. The remarkable building, 
Brasília was founded in 1960, developed much like Washington D.C. in the States as a city designed to be the federal capital of Brazil, within a federal district distinct as a municipality from the rest of the country. The city structure is known as the Pilot Plan, in the shape of an airplane or bird with a wide wingspan. The centers of all three branches of government (Congress, President and Supreme Court) are located in the head, or cockpit, of Brasília’s bird, or plane. And that is where these twilight pictures were taken.
After exploring the gate for a bit, we wondered whether that glimpse from outside was all we could expect anymore. We were about to leave. But then I said, “Let’s just ring the doorbell. Maybe someone can at least tell us what’s up.” We rang, and then rang again, and then rang again. I suppose that was a bit obnoxious of us, but our curiosity and interest were for once stronger than our reticence.
The four festival films left all hail from Europe – the North and South American selections I saw being 
Having grown up in Germany I of course would seek out the German entries in the NewFest festival. There were only two, separated by 97 years. “Where Are You Going, Habibi?” (“Wo Willst Du Hin, Habibi”) is a good-natured comedy about an ethnic Turkish Berliner, comfortable with his homosexuality but not out to his family, who unwisely develops a mad crush on a blue-eyed blond ne’er-do-well, who is not only heterosexual, but also a small time criminal. No good can come out of it, except maybe, eventually, an unlikely friendship. This low-budget effort by Tor Iben humorously and sensitively navigates the expected and unexpected plot twists.
96 years earlier, German cinema produced what is believed to be the first sympathetic portrayal of homosexual life in movies: “Anders als die Andern” AKA “Different from the Others“. It was co-created 1919 by the head of the Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirshfeld (who also plays a supporting role) as an “Aufklärungsfilm” (which literally means Explanation Film), an agitprop narrative designed to shed a sympathetic light on homosexuality and agitate against Paragraph 175, the German law which criminalized gay sex. In 1920 German authorities banned the movie, and the Nazis, who would exploit Paragraph 175 to devastating effects for homosexuals, later destroyed every known print. However, about 40 minutes worth of footage would be found in the Ukrainian print of an anthology film of the late 1920s into which Magnus Hirshfeld had edited in parts of “Different than the Others”. This found footage became the basis of a handsomely restored print screened at Newfest with superb live piano accompaniment (the excellent documentary “Paragraph 175” was also screened again).
with men dancing with men, women dancing with women, in all variety of genderfluid costumes, as well as a touching flashback segment of the violinist as a young man falling in love with his boarding school friend. The descriptions of the lost footage reveals the wider scope of the original movie, showing how both protagonists’ families deal differently with their sons’ homosexuality, the men’s doomed attempts at heterosexuality, and a prologue and epilogue connecting the hero to the fate of many (famous) homosexuals throughout history.
We’ll be traveling far and wide through space (Europe and South America) and time (1919 and 2040), but let’s start here and now in Ohio with the romantic drama of young gay lovers facing unexpected obstacles: “Akron“. It’s refreshing to see a love story between two male college students where the conflict is not their coming out or their ethnic differences. No, their families are both fully accepting and supportive of their sexuality and relationship. No trouble there … that is, until a family secret worthy of Sophocles (which is telegraphed early on in the movie but which I won’t spoil here) is revealed one by one to the characters and one by one, parents and sons alike deal with the bombshell in ways that are not admirable, but believable, threatening everybody’s love and happiness.
“I Love You Both” is another US indie about a twentysomething couple, in this case brother/sister twins Donny and Krystal, played by real life twins Doug and Kristin Archibald, who also wrote the screenplay (while Doug directed). The IMDb synopsis, “Krystal and her twin brother/roommate confront twenty-eight years of their codependency when they start dating the same guy”, deftly describes this often drolly funny, sometimes wistfully deadpan effort. In the Q & A after the screening Krystal Archibald explained the “I” in the title could refer to either of the siblings, or even their mother, but copped to push back from many audience members who came into the film expecting the bisexual love object of the twins to be the one saying “I love you both”, expressing their disappointment that the movie never actually explored that scenario nor developed the bisexual male love object as a fully fleshed out character. I felt disappointed at the end of the screening too, yet the problem with that disappointment is that I wanted the film to be something other than the film actually was setting out to be. But is it wrong to expect a movie called “I Love You Both” to more overtly explore a bisexual love triangle from the actual bisexual’s perspective? The working title for the film was “Quarterlife Crisis”, which describes the film we saw much more accurately, but may not be as enticing a title for audiences. Perhaps another title option can still be found, one that evokes the offbeat humor and low-key tenderness of the film without being off-putting or misdirecting.
Most of the NewFest films I saw will get little fanfare, which is why I hope writing about them on my little blog may help direct some attention to new indie and foreign LGBTQ movies. “Moonlight” is getting plenty of attention, but it may be in danger of getting marginalized the way movies about the African-American experience, or movies about LGBT people, or movies about drug addiction often do. That would be a shame and a loss to anyone who loves to see a great movie. I don’t think of myself as a critic, and frankly, there is not much I can add to A. O. Scott’s New York Times 
Unexpectedly, although so very different in many ways, “Moonlight” would have some key thematic and structural commonalities with “The Pass“, the Opening Night film of NewFest’s 2016 LGBT Film Festival. In addition to the theme of a man trying to deal with his homosexuality in a difficult environment, in the case of “The Pass” a star soccer player, both movies are based on plays and take on a distinct three act structure, each act separated by time lapses of 5 or more years. There are marked differences in how both films adapt the plays they are based on. According to A. O. Scott, in “Moonlight” “Mr. McCraney’s play is a layered and fractured collage of voices, and … (the director/adapter) Mr. Jenkins has adjusted the shape to the linear demands of narrative filmmaking” in creating three separate segments in three distinct time frames. “The Pass” presents three crucial moments in the life of soccer player Jason (Russell Tovey, Johnathan Groff’s boss/lover in HBO’s “Looking”) in uninterrupted real time within three contained spaces, very much like the play it is based on. But it is filmed and performed with such verve that it doesn’t feel “stagey”. As the playwright/screenwriter John Donnelly suggested during the Q & A that followed the NewFest premiere, “opening up” the play (as often happens when stage drama is adapted for the screen) may have sapped the narrative of its suspense and claustrophobic intensity. When a single cinematic “opening up” does occur at the end via a crucial flashback, the effect is devastatingly heartbreaking. “The Pass” haunted me with the tragic implications of its conclusion as much as the final image of grace in “Moonlight” filled me with the balm of hope.
Notes from a Composer 