Arielle Burgdorf

Dreaming in French

barbara — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

On the surface, Dreaming in French sounds like the type of book I would love. It’s about a strong-willed girl named Charlotte growing up in Paris during the 1970s until she and her mother are forced to move to New York. I love anything about Paris, especially during the 1970s with its yé-yé girl singers that ruled the charts, inventive fashion, and sexual freedom. I also love reading about New York during that time period, when a lot of powerful, creative music and art were coming to light.

Sadly, the book is not really about Paris or New York, but about a spoiled, pretentious girl and her equally spoiled, pretentious mother, Astrid. A teenage Charlotte can be forgiven for her self-absorption, but as we watch her grow up, she only becomes more selfish. Astrid is even more selfish than her daughter, breaking the family apart when she has an affair with a Polish dissident and, in a Kafkaesque twist, ends up in jail. Her daughters rally to Astrid’s side, but her faithful husband feels betrayed and will never forgive her. They divorce, and Astrid leaves for New York to start anew. Charlotte, who adores her mother, decides to go with her. Her sister Lea remains in Paris with their father Frank, while his Swedish secretary slowly carries out her plans to marry him.

Charlotte goes from a life of comfort to a life of… slightly less comfort. Her father provides her with some money, and she attends a private school after she and Astrid check out the local high school and find “a group of black girls…tough urban girls with knowing eyes.” This is but one of several racist statements McAndrew makes throughout the novel.

It is hard to sympathize with Charlotte’s troubles when it seems that she has everything going for her: she is thin, white, beautiful, extremely intelligent, and wealthy. She is aware of her privilege but never thinks about it extensively, providing the perfect example of how acknowledging privilege is not the same as understanding it. Rather than use her privilege to try and change the world or examine questions of inequality, Charlotte seems to take pride in how spoiled she is.

Charlotte reminded me a lot of Rory Gilmore from the TV show Gilmore Girls because she is also smart, pretty, and white, except that Rory is humble and likable, whereas Charlotte is not. No doubt due to her pedigree and upbringing, Charlotte gets into Yale, and busies herself studying post-structuralist feminism. At Yale she has a disturbing relationship with a man named Azher, who attempts to enter her almost brutally. Their forceful, violent sex and bordering-on-abusive relationship is treated with the same detached superficiality of everything else in the novel. McAndrew handles cancer, eating disorders, cross-cultural interactions, AIDS, and political uprisings with the aloof tone of one talking about the weather.

Eventually Charlotte comes into her own working for Glamour magazine and the reader is supposed to be happy for her, but Charlotte is still more of a petulant child than amiable heroine. McAndrew’s tendency to rely on clichés only exacerbates the situation. By the end of the novel Charlotte has discovered that she holds the key to her own happiness, her father has remarried a sweet widow who is also the mother of Charlotte’s childhood best friend, and her sister Lea is literally living happily ever after in a castle with her husband who’s a legitimate Prince. It’s all the stuff of an airplane book, and not a particularly good one at that.

The world really does not need another book about a privileged young woman trying to find herself through shopping and sex with men she doesn’t love. To this type of ridiculous, pointless novel, I say j’en ai marre—I’ve had enough.

Written by: Arielle Burgdorf, March 11th 2011

Eyes Wide Open

mandy — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Haim Tabakman

First Run Features

Viewing Eyes Wide Open is like watching a wrecking ball swing towards a beloved old building from afar; you can see the destructive aftermath coming, but are powerless to stop it. It is a gorgeously filmed demolition, filled with exquisite tenderness and emotion, but a demolition nonetheless.

The story follows the love between two Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem. Aaron (an amazing acting job by Zohar Strauss) is a butcher, content living a simple life divided between his wife, children, job, and religious study. When Ezri (played by Ran Danker), a young gay man, is in need of a job, Aaron takes him in and teaches him the butcher trade. Soon it is Ezri who is teaching Aaron—opening his eyes up to fun, the pleasures of sex, freedom, and real human connection. Aaron awakens to a life outside of religion, and fights to reconcile it with everything he has been taught. He struggles to deny his passion for Ezri, seeing it at first as a challenge from God, but soon is overtaken by his desires and finds himself having an affair. Eventually, Aaron’s wife and the rest of the community find out, and the two are ostracized and attacked.

When Aaron’s rabbi visits him and asks him why he does not tell Ezri to leave he responds, “I feel alive. I need him. I was dead, and now I am alive.” It is a quiet but powerful moment, representative of the best of the film. Eyes Wide Open is masterful at silences, using as few words as possible to get its message across. Although the characters say little, we quickly become attached to them and their story. This is due mainly to superb acting by Strauss and Danker, who are well cast and very convincing. The audience genuinely feels their temptation and pain, and is invested in the survival of their relationship.

The message that it is impossible for homosexual relationships to exist within strict religious communities is not a new one. What is unique to the film is that the townspeople are not just against homosexuality. They interfere in each others’ lives and with heterosexual couples as well. Anything deemed immoral is grounds for personal confrontation. Thus, the film is not just looking at how religion restricts homosexual love, but how it restricts everyone. Aaron’s wife suffers as much from his infidelity as he does and the torment he receives from his community for his actions seems a small price to pay for a break from his monotonous, bland old life.

Eyes Wide Open does not offer any easy solutions for integrating religion with personal sexual orientation. But it does indicate that greater acceptance for diversity within religion would benefit everyone. Maybe, the film seems to say, there is some way to stop that wrecking ball before it strikes. Maybe the destruction is not as inevitable as we assume.

Written by: Arielle Burgdorf, January 16th 2011

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

gwen — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Justin Spring

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who was Sam Steward? Influential professor, ballet enthusiast, S/M practitioner, author of paperback pornos and serious novels, and tattoo artist are just a few of the roles he played in his life. Among his friends were many important cultural and literary figures of the time including Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thorton Wilder, Ed Hardy, and Alfred Kinsey, yet he remains virtually unknown today. Justin Spring brings to light Steward’s story for the first time, drawing on his many letters and obsessively detailed records of his sexual encounters kept on index cards known as the “Stud File.” Steward dabbled in many professions and lifestyles, managing to be very talented at many things but never exceptional at anything.

The great tragedy of Steward’s life is that he could almost taste the fame and fortune in front of him, but could never quite reach out and grasp them. Most of his big plans fall through—he is rejected by the Navy and loses his dream of becoming a sailor, he is forced to give up his teaching position when his tattoo parlor and homosexual activities are discovered, and his memoirs remained unpublished at the time of his death.

Yet despite his failures, Spring makes a strong case for Steward’s significance in early American homosexual history. Steward was decades ahead of most in his views on pride in gay identity. He was not ashamed of his sexuality, and had a great disdain for those that insisted homosexuality was a disease. He displayed male pornography in his apartments and held “daisy chain” parties where many men would have sex together at a time when discovery of these activities would have resulted in imprisonment. A combination of self-destructive tendencies, sexual desire, and earnest rebellion fueled his search for sex in dangerous places with dangerous men. He nearly avoids death multiple times, and is repeatedly raped, robbed, and beaten up by men he seeks sexual encounters with. He has many pleasurable sexual encounters, however, including a memorable elevator experience with movie star Rock Hudson before he was famous.

Outside of sex, his life was mainly devoted to writing and teaching. He had numerous letter correspondences, the most moving of which was with Gertrude Stein. Steward was one of the first to have frank discussions with her about her lesbianism, and she doted on him like a son. Steward is forced to watch Stein and most of his friends die throughout his lifetime. In late life, he becomes very depressed and addicted to barbiturates. He dies almost all alone in the world, his life mostly a side note in the biographies of his celebrity friends.

Spring does a good job of chronicling Steward’s life, making him seem both interesting and endearing. The thoroughness of his biography is at once the book’s greatest asset and its greatest fault. While Spring is clearly passionate and dedicated to his subject matter, his work could have benefited from a lot of editing. For instance, it is not essential to know every time Steward gets diarrhea, or every brief love affair he has, but Spring includes everything. Nearly every page has a footnote, or several, with information that is not particularly vital to the story.

Overall, though, Secret Historian is a compelling homage to a man history has unjustly ignored. Steward may have not become famous in his lifetime but his writing, teaching, and friendships brought comfort to many other struggling writers and homosexuals in America and helped them to survive, and it is for this that Spring takes the time to give him the recognition he deserves.

Written by: Arielle Burgdorf, November 17th 2010