The energy mess and fascist gays

If people are "naturally" homosexual, it's easier to qualify them as a protected class (Civil Rights Act of 1964). Then it's easier to allow same-sex marriage (viz. Loving vs. Virginia -- you cannot deny to a man what you legally allow a woman; namely, the right to marry a man). Then all other civil rights fall into place. There. Politics inscribed on the hypothalamus.

-- Chris Cronin

yet another queer pc feminist has come around to your relentless argument. years ago as an angry feminist undergrad, i despised your ideas about gender. all wrong, said feminism 101 (catharine & andrea) .... years and many lesbian relationships later, i'm in love with an FTM trans-guy and have happily thrown just about every damn thing i thought about gender out. The deal is: my guy has a chick's body and a man's brain. And i do not. No amount of feminist retraining in the male arts of politics and aggression (accompanied by a denigration of all things "essentially" (gasp!) feminine) will make me what he is, and decades of instruction in small (canadian) town femininity did not manage to unseat his underlying maleness. So, as for the fact that our sexual identity may be changed to make us straight and that nature clearly operates heterosexually .... i'll buy that. and so? in all my sexual experiences i've never felt threatened by the knowledge that what i do is certainly unnatural. i don't feel slighted by the scientist who points out how i pervert nature's path in doing so. it's true, i'm not even remotely normal or natural by most evolutionary and religious standards. Am i the only queer who doesn't want to cry when scientists like Spitzer point out the obvious?

-- R. Chanelle Gallant
York University
Toronto, Ontario

Steven Pressfield has written two of the best works of historical fiction on ancient Greece I have ever read. His latest is called "Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War." Pressfield tells the story of Jason, an retired Athenian soldier who defended his comrade Polemides in his trial as the assassin of Alcibiades. The story traces the life of Polemides, a Spartan warrior, through his campaigns with Alcibiades, including their disastrous invasion of Syracuse.

-- Mike Lotstein

Alicbiades is a character in Shakespeare's abortive "Timon of Athens," of course, but imagine a fully developed Shakespearean Alcibiades! The paired life in Plutarch is "Coriolanus," and the comparison between the lives focuses on how exposure to Socrates softened Alcibiades in ways that made him more successful than the hard Coriolanus. I believe Shakespeare may have intended the cynical Timon to contrast with the erotic Alcibiades, but he abandoned the play and turned instead to the character study of the frigid and self-sufficient Coriolanus. I suspect the eroticism that might have been explored through Alcibiades got poured into both Antony and Cleopatra.

-- Dave O'Connor
Dept. of Philosophy and Classics
University of Notre Dame

I believe "The Sopranos" is over-hyped. However, I also believe that it is very entertaining television. The characters are well-developed, the actors are talented and the writing is crisp. The plot lines don't follow the formulaic pattern of so many other TV dramas. Everything isn't tied up in a nice little bow at the end of the episode, or season for that matter. I realize that it is full of stereotypes, but I feel like the show spends as much time breaking them down as reinforcing them.

The best thing about the show is that despite the fantasy Mafia world created by Chase, it is essentially about everyday people and problems they face. Trying to do better for your kids than what you had, problems with co-workers and underlings, balancing work with family, lack of mobility in your current job, dealing with elderly parents and what happens when the separate parts of your life you think you have compartmentalized come clashing together.

It is a story well told about real people. It's only about the Mafia because a weekly drama about tax attorneys would be pretty boring.

-- Matt Jones

I do agree with you about "The Sopranos." I don't get the hype. I've tried to watch a few episodes only to change the channel after a few minutes. It's the same thing with the sitcom "Will & Grace" or "Dharma and Greg." I do not find those shows funny at all.

-- Andrew M. Cox

You are right on the mark about this incredibly stupid show. I have tried in vain three times to watch it, hoping for some glimpse of the opera that made the "Godfather" movies so great. One wonders where the disconnect happened. I think it is the same disconnect that took place from "Goodfellas" to "Casino." As a friend of mine said about "Casino," "They should have just welded a telephone handset to Joe Pesci's hand so when he beat people he wouldn't have to pick up the phone."

-- Jeff Jones

The characters in "The Sopranos" are imagoes twisted in the funhouse minds of an intellectually atrophied TV-nation resistant to self-examination, and inured and indifferent to violence. Last year William Paterson University in New Jersey refused to allow the show to film on its campus. Susanna Tardi, an associate professor of sociology there, said she wanted to see Italian-Americans who are "hardworking, educated and articulate" portrayed on television and that "they can do that and still make money and win awards." Bring back classical education! There are armies of clueless young'uns who crave this crap (and their parents too), and many of them will one day be writing for TV (God help us). If extraterrestrials are catching our signals, no wonder they haven't made contact.

-- Lara Roth-Beister, New York

I gather that "The Sopranos" is big news in the U.S. It's been tried repeatedly here in Australia and has never attracted a big audience -- despite considerable drum-beating by assorted local critics.

One increasingly gathers that America, having taken over the world's entertainment industry, is concerned more with the cankers in its own society than is the rest of the world. You have to think that the nastiness of the U.S. movie/TV trade is a reflection of the nastiness of the people making the shows.

A Hollywood wardrobe mistress reported a year or two ago about costuming a large number of actresses for some major film scenes. None wore brassieres, she said, all had gym bodies with standup breasts and clearly defined muscles; and for hygienic reasons, she had a tough time getting them in and out of costumes that could be used again. And these, mainly, were extras, eager to climb the greasy pole. Beauty, in the age of the labor-saving device. It's a muscle thing. Conventional dresses don't sit well on such bodies, the wardrobe lady said.

You mention Jennifer Lopez, whom I saw in an Elmore Leonard movie a couple of years ago. Later, an American colleague asked what I'd thought of it. Clooney wasn't interesting, I replied, but Lopez could play any part at all that required quiet strength and mana: I was watching an Aztec princess. I haven't seen her since but read that she's doomed these days to playing "damaged characters," whatever this means. What it MAY mean is that strong women are, in Hollywood today, dangerous. Our own dear Nicole Kidman comes through as a twittering bubblehead, and is rich because of it.

-- Paul Kunino Lynch, Kings Cross, Australia

Jennifer Lopez did not transition from the pop world to the big screen. She started out dancing on "In Living Color," then made bad TV movies and mediocre Hollywood films and finally bought herself a recording contract with Sony. Her media blitz of second-rate imitation hip-hop, cheesy vanity videos and "look-I'm-almost-naked" wardrobe choices got her the widespread attention she craved, so there was an increase in the quality of the movie roles she was offered. She is exactly the type of glossy, empty-vessel mannequin that has brought down the stock of the entertainment world and clogs the airwaves with stupid videos that often resemble soft-core porn (see Sting's latest video). But maybe that's what people want. At least Madonna has something to offer.

-- Matthew Haislip

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