Flight of the Cardinal: There are some things to dislike about this movie, among them a pretty heavy-handed fake accent done by one of the characters and a climax that feels bizarrely slapped together. However, there are many more things to like about this, including really great performances by all the actors. What feels for the first half like a skillfully executed if by-the-numbers story of “local kid on the take cons the out-of-towners” suddenly takes a very, very clever twist and becomes a whole different kind of movie. Even if the end feels like something someone slammed home for a NaNoWriMo entry in the last hours of 30 November, what’s good is very good and the more I reflect on this movie the more I like it. That it was filmed not that far from where I grew up is a bonus, yes, but that isn’t what puts it over the edge. I would absolutely watch it again. One of the best suspense films I’ve seen at NCGLFF.

My last film going experience of the weekend was the shorts collection Mother Nature Does the Rest:

Mother of the Year: Really genuinely funny and warm and very good. The audience laughed with real gusto and I was pleased with myself for getting one of the better gags way ahead of everyone else.

Gay Baby: You know exactly the arc of this short but it’s well done and funny and it features a cameo by Richard Riehle, possibly my absolute favorite hey-it’s-that-guy guy. You’ve seen him in something, I assure you, whether it’s Office Space, Star Trek or an old movie. He is always hilarious and his twenty seconds on-screen at the beginning of this short don’t fail that standard. I’m not sure I’m thrilled with the messages of this short, to be honest, but it’s so short it doesn’t have time to give too great offense.

Judgment Day: Really truly a beautiful little short. This is why I love NCGLFF. I loved this film from start to finish. It got fast and resounding applause. I can’t talk about the content because that would be like trying to describe a poem. It was just really good.

Lost Hills, California: Speaking of a poem, that’s what this film is. Again, I loved it. It brought tears to the eyes. This and Judgment Day were distinctly unlike any other film I saw at the festival this year and in a very, very good way. I really enjoyed this one.

Mothers: Surprising in its resolution if completely predictable up to that point. It surprised me by how much it resonated with me given that it’s about a circumstance I don’t ever expect to be in – fatherhood.

Second Guessing Grandma: Absolutely fantastic. I loved this film and so did the rest of the audience. Great writing, great acting, really magnificent cinematography, direction, editing – this one had it all. It didn’t look like the ’80s, but whatever. It’s a really, really good film.

Lost in the Crowd: This was a very powerful and affecting film, if very short. It tracks a handful of homeless LGBTQ teens in NYC in 2003 up through 2010. The slow horror of the film is realizing that a significant portion of the kids seen in 2003 aren’t able to be found in 2010 or 2009 or even as early as 2005. I think people who watch a lot of documentaries get accustomed to the usual course of twists and turns, and even if the content of those twists is unpredictable the viewer can at least expect those twists to occur. When people simply disappear from in front of the camera, that’s disturbing. It’s something I don’t recall seeing since I watched Paris Is Burning in the ’90s. This was an extremely worthwhile watch and it has in fact made me decide that I want to be involved in some sort of youth outreach through the LGBT Center in Raleigh. This weekend’s big impression on me was that it isn’t enough to sit around having a good time and it isn’t enough to sit around wishing I’d had a better time of it when I was young. All the progress of the last twenty years makes us feel very comfortable and I can’t let myself be lulled into assuming progress will continue without me; on the other side of the coin, I cannot spend the rest of my life dwelling on the ways my parents’ philosophies have failed to motivate them to accept me. I cannot sit around wishing my parents were more mature. If I do that, I will just wind up bitter and cynical. If I think role models and acceptance would make youth more palatable then I’d better get off my ass and make it happen for someone else.

Howl: This movie was INCREDIBLE. This was hands-down the best thing at the festival and I was simply stunned at how good it was. Incredible animation, fantastic performances in the live-action sequences, surprise cameos and a really affecting, moving and motivating story. When Jon Hamm delivers the closing argument in his performance of the attorney defending Lawrence Ferlinghetti – the publisher of Howl – it raises goosebumps, it brings tears to the audience’s eyes and it gets applause. I have never heard people applaud in the middle of a movie. I have never heard people physically howl at a movie in accolade. It was an amazing film and rumor has it they delayed their release date specifically to show it at NCGLFF. (Films at NCGLFF cannot have already been released; the point of the festival is to show movies one cannot find elsewhere.) When this sees wide release I am going to see it again. Possibly twice.

Bear City: There’s a lot to like in this movie – some snappy writing and some really great performances – but overall I had extremely mixed feelings. Uplifting be-yourself-and-be-loved messages are always welcome, and this movie’s iterations of that are mostly done quite well. However, I had real issues with some of this movie’s messages. I’m sorry, but I don’t see how it’s okay to tell someone who is morbidly obese that he should abandon a desire to change himself and conform to a body type to appease his lover and his friends – a message that would send the audience into the streets if it were directed at a woman in order to pressure her to be thin. I am not a small man – I’m 6’3″ and I weigh in somewhere between 250 and 280 at any given time – and I am someone who has spent the last year trying to find the very fine balance between working on my weight and fitness without obsessing over them (thanks, family history of eating disorders). I am really not OK with a movie in which someone who is clearly unhappy with his body and worried about its future is actively discouraged from taking action to improve himself. Now, that said, the character is discouraged from taking a drastically invasive action to change himself, yes, and none of his friends tell him that he is not allowed to lose weight; but the procedure they so radically discourage also happens to be one chosen by a cousin many years ago and by my mother-in-law a few years ago and by a fraternity sister a couple of years ago, all with tremendous success so their melodrama feels more than a little overwrought to me. The movie works hard to affirm that this guy can be happy and in love and successful regardless of his weight and that is a good message, yes, but it all feels like a reward for listening to his friends who tell him with the same breath that they want him to be happy and that they want him not to do what he wants to do. I think there’s no pretending that it’s OK for someone to pressure his boyfriend to stay morbidly obese because the boyfriend is into that. Again, if the story had been about a boyfriend pressuring the love of his life to lose another three pounds when she or he is already down to double digits, how would we feel about that? How should we feel about a boyfriend begging his lover to keep two hundred pounds, then?

After that, Writing Medic and The Boyf and I went to the tent party out on the plaza where I enjoyed some of the best spanikopita I’ve had in years and tiny squares of dark chocolate fudge that were so rich they had arm candy. I had some truly generous bourbon and Diet Cokes and best of all someone recognized my Miskatonic University t-shirt. Some fellow nancy queen stopped me on my way across the tent for a drink to say, “Is that from Lovecraft? Call of Cthulu?” I said, “Girl, you know it is!” and then I turned around to show him the back of the shirt, slapped him on the shoulder and kept going. Loved it! I also got stopped by a woman who asked what the shirt was about because her dog’s name was similar to “Miskatonic”. The woman with her was like, “No, it’s from those books! I haven’t read them in years!” I had the opportunity, then, to recommend Lovecraft with a footnote that he was very much of his time. So, I got to get a drink on, get some spanikopita and talk Lovecraft with strangers? And hours of good companionship with The Boyf and Writing Medic? Holy shit, that officially made it the best. NCGLFF. Ever.

You Should Meet My Son: This is a comedy to which the word “zany” might well be applied. I really enjoyed this movie, because even though the editing is a little uneven at times it is hilarious. Very sympathetic performances, fierce queens and some great delivery made this an extremely fun movie. I am really, really glad I caught it and I was recommending it all weekend.

Role/Play: A really neat idea for a film and two lead actors who make the most of what they have just weren’t enough to save this for me. This is a movie that raises some really interesting questions but the meat of the story – the mysteries these two guys bring with them into their current circumstance – were either insufficient for the air of controversy aroused by them or just plain kind of silly. It also dragged a little – another case in which some tidy editing could have really made it shine. That said, the leads have real and engaging chemistry and I kept being impressed by that; later I read that they’re a real-life couple, so that is genuinely nice. They are also smoking hot and this movie has eye candy galore. In the end, I’m glad I saw it.

Later that night I went to see Bruce Vilanch do a live show in Fletcher Hall at the Carolina. This was really, really, really absurdly fun. Vilanch told us about being in Durham three decades ago to work on a script with a producer – and to go on the infamous Rice Diet in the process. He told some great show business stories, some hilarious jokes and some truly hilariously raunchy gags. I had an absolutely fantastic time hanging with Bust O’Lipp for this show and getting to meet a young friend of Busty’s for whom this was his first NCGLFF. It was a great time and I really did love hanging out after. This was the best NCGLFF I’ve been to in years and I really had a great time on Friday night.

First up on the docket tonight was the “mixed shorts” collection Everybody’s Having Sex… But Ryan:

Rubdown: Good production quality, super-hot actors, genuine chemistry between the leads and some great writing but it all still falls flat somehow. The actual events of the movie – aside from the flesh and the fantasy sequences – are about as compelling as a potato salad recipe and take up way too much of it compared to the rest. Excellent eye candy and actors making the best of what they’re given don’t wholly redeem it.

Waiting 4 Goliath: Extremely predictable but also extremely well-made and the characters were simultaneously sympathetic and unhappy with themselves or each other. It fastidiously colors between the lines but does so with real skill.

Little BFFs: Cheap, cynical and hilarious. It’s like an even cattier Robot Chicken. Well worth seeing.

Go Go Reject: A genuinely sexy, hot, funny and uplifting short. Every shorts collection I’ve ever seen at NCGLFF has contained at least one really winning anchor film and this is definitely the one for this collection. The important things in comedy, for me, are the delivery, the timing and the unflappable sincerity of the actors’ performances; as soon as an actor stops selling the role and starts mugging for the camera it falls flat. The lead works his ass off in this and manages to deliver a character who’s wholly naive, utterly sincere and completely sexy. It’s also interesting to see twinks challenge the muscle-god standard in gay male beauty. The lead is still absurdly hot to be playing a role that feels inferior but such is show business. The short itself manages to make its point, entertain while doing so and wrap things up without beating the audience about the head and neck with the morals hammer. Fantastic.

You Can’t Curry Love: Often clever in both craft and presentation but the seams show, usually when the camera’s eye cuts to stock footage. The story isn’t exactly full of surprises and a couple of the performances are pretty wooden and, overall, while I don’t want to say it used too broad a brush I will say there’s more line than lane by the time this paint truck goes by. That said, wicked hot leads and it got some real laughs. The main character’s obsession with an unavailable constant tease is something with which plenty of us can identify, too.

Everybody Is Having Sex… But Ryan: Well made, but it raises that age-old question of why so many best friend characters are such insufferable twats. This question overpowers everything else the movie might have to say.

Deaf Relay: At Your Service: Incredibly funny and magnificently written. The audience cracked up repeatedly throughout and I would love to get a chance to talk to the filmmaker at some point because she’s actually in attendance at the festival.

Later I went back for a different set of “mixed” shorts called The Wolf With the Red Roses:

Little Love: I only caught the very end but it was extremely well-made and the performances I saw were touching and sincere.

Closure: A tad “film class final project” at times, and it felt very nineteen, but the people who made this are going to make something truly great sooner or later. Halfway through it the ancient old dried up husk of a queen two seats to my left yawned in this ridiculously melodramatic way and frankly that made me like the movie even more.

Remission: Disturbing and creepy and very genuinely moving. I can’t talk about the content itself without spoiling the film so I won’t say anything other than the performance is really humane and touching and when the film wants to take a hard left turn into creepy it does so with gusto and to tremendous effect. This is possibly the best short out of both programs and one of the best dramatic or horror shorts I’ve ever seen at NCGLFF. It was what made me want to see this collection and it really did not disappoint. This short would have been right at home at NEVERMORE and in any given year it would be one of the best things shown at that very fine festival, too.

That said, the same bitter old queen next to me – and his date – hated it and they weren’t letting anyone get out of there without them knowing that. They made audible comments throughout, laughed at moments of simple human vulnerability and then mocked it when it was over. I stood up to leave between films because I refused to sit there and listen to them any longer and one of them said to me, “Can’t take it anymore?”

I replied, “Of the company, no,” which got a miffed little “hmph” out of the other. “Maybe you’d prefer to rent it and watch it at home,” I said, and that didn’t get any response except a laugh from somewhere else in the theater. Yes, we are a dynamic and active community and yes as the resident custodians of culture it is as often our job to criticize as it is to curate, but goddamn it my ticket was worth just as much as theirs and I didn’t pay to hear their opinions. What the fuck is wrong with people? If someone is so cynical they can’t manage to squeeze out a single bead of sympathy for what was a genuinely moving story and a stark example of personal horror, why are they bothering to watch the films in the first place?

So, having gotten my requisite hating-another-patron-for-running-their-fucking-mouth out of the way for the weekend, I look forward to being able to enjoy myself tomorrow night.

After that we went over to the huge indoor flea market on East Pettigrew, a place we’d both heard about more than once but had never gotten around to checking out. This place turned out to be more than a flea market, though. It was an experience.

The indoor section is mostly clothing, jewelry and vast swaths of unabashedly counterfeit DVDs. There are banquet tables literally covered in three-ring binders of photocopied box art and movies burned to DVDs. It doesn’t really matter how your tastes run, as there’s a booth for every genre iteration known to film: Asian action flicks, American blockbusters, telenovelas, name your movie and someone there will have it. There were a couple of extremely lackluster booths of car parts and used appliances, too, but the real stars of the indoor area were the food booths. There were four or five booths indoors and a few more outdoors selling food, booths where the staff and the clientele were all of the same ethnicity and the food was clearly as authentic as it’s ever going to get in these parts. We weren’t hungry at all after the OnlyBurger or I would have gladly bellied up to a counter and seen what I could eat.

The food booths alone would be reason enough to go back but the real stars were the produce stands. Located outdoors, on either side of the building, there were produce stands that sold everything from the standard fare to plantains, mangoes, dried peppers that smelled rich and dark like cured tobacco, scarred and pitted jalapeños that looked like they could burn your tongue from across the room and more. We found thick, beautiful carrots, huge stalks of celery, avocados, weird albino zucchini squash and bags of napoles trimmed and chopped on demand. All of this was extremely fresh and at absolutely rock-bottom prices. We could not believe our eyes. They can sell all the counterfeit movies they want, my friend, as long as they keep the fat, juicy, 3-for-$2 mangoes coming. The folks we talked to were all extremely friendly and the place was a riot.

My absolute favorite thing, though, had to be the “Let Me Fill Your MP3 Player” booth, where for a few bucks a guy would load all the mp3′s one could want onto any kind of device one could want. No thanks, dude, but it’s nice to see the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.

So what was my small humiliation? After all that, we split up so The Boyf could go to work and I could take our shopping home and head to Katastrophes’ & Mr. Pink Eyes’ place for the afternoon/evening. First, though, I swung by The Bicycle Chain to see if they had in stock the bike I’ve had my eye on when browsing their website of late. I haven’t ridden a bike in probably twenty years but I’ve been itching to try it again and we have miles and miles of gorgeous trails around here that I’ll never experience without a bike and I could use the exercise and blah blah blah. I walk a lot, yes, but I want to be able to bike, too. At any rate, I walked in and a nice young man was talking to me about the bike that interested me – after I had stated that I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in twenty years and was just interested in easing back into it in a low-impact way – and he pulled down the next-largest-size model of the one I want (the Trek 7000 – they didn’t have my size in stock) and suggested I try to climb on and “go for a lap around the store”. I did so and immediately – I mean, immediately – crashed into a row of bicycles and knocked three of them over. Employees swarmed me and the bikes and started checking to see if I had damaged anything and I was absolutely mortified. I am a big guy and I have a lot of self-consciousness about fitness and my lack thereof and the big hurdle I think most people encounter when they try to get into better shape is that initial act of being willing to be seen exercising when they’re still, like me, fat as the queen of sea cows.

I had gone in with this vision of something happening that would cause the staff of this fancy-pants bike store to think of me as a hopeless rube and then immediately taken an action creating that scenario. The guy was nice enough to talk to me about helmets and bike racks for my car after that but he pretty clearly was ready for me to leave and so was I. When I called later to be double-sure that I hadn’t caused damage that I might need to compensate them for (I had not), I introduced myself on the phone as “the guy who crashed into those bikes earlier” and the person who had answered simply said, “Oh, yeah, you.” He thanked me for calling and seemed genuinely surprised that I had, but he didn’t really make me feel like going right back out and leaping onto the first bike I saw. I felt doubly humiliated and I haven’t really been able to shake that all weekend. Normally I just couldn’t give less of a damn if it paid double wages, in terms of what other people think of me, but for some reason this has touched some raw nerves. Now I’m kind of thinking that maybe walking should be where I stay. I’ll probably get over that, but damn, the looks on their faces is burned into my memory and I can still feel the heat on my face.

My brain-destroyingly terrible sci-fi entry from 2009:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

My trashy gay noir 2008 NaNoWriMo, Particular People:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2007′s redneck vampire-centric Tooth and Nail:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

In the Fuck Yes department, 2006′s horror fantasy noir The Palanquin Cat:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2005′s sci-fi sequel Root Shell:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2004′s sci-fi adventure Shell Access:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2003′s poli-sci-fi Life, Liberty And…:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Given that one’s about a Libertarian governor who completely fucks things up, that’s pretty satisfying.

I also ponied up the cash for a fancy pair of headphones because I am sick to death of the default iPhone earbuds. The originals were fine and all for occasional use but once I started wearing them for long periods I realized that whereas the left one fit great the right one couldn’t decide whether it most loved to fall out or to rub my ear bloodily raw. No thanks. I opted for earbuds I thought were crazily expensive but extremely well-reviewed: the Klipsch Image S4i.

Long story short, they stay in without issue, are very comfortable, have bud tips large enough to fit my ears and sound good enough that I can understand a podcast or the lyrics to a song without turning the volume up beyond quite modest levels. Given that my hearing is already iffy in certain circumstances, this is an excellent thing. I do not need to damage my hearing further than marching in front of the drums and years of Legends’ goth nights already did for me. They also don’t completely deafen me to the outside world. I can hear cars and bicycle bells and the clank of chains just fine so I don’t find myself shocked when a car or a dog walker or the like turn up right behind me.

The weather this weekend really was exceptionally good and the walks were incredibly restorative. I get an uncontrolled twitch in my right eyelid when I’m too tired or too stressed and that thing had been going crazy for weeks. Last weekend we consciously took it easy and that helped but this weekend seems to have made it go away. It’s nice to feel a little more in control of my health and it’s nice to spend hours in the big blue room and feel good after.

It’s an OK photo, right? Well I thought so, at least. And apparently so did Chubby’s Tacos, because they decided to put it on their web site. Without asking me. Or giving me attribution.

All of my Flickr photos are licensed under a non-commercial, with attribution, share-alike Creative Commons license. This means if you are NOT using the photos for business purposes (such as selling tacos), you can use my picture without permission as long as you grant me attribution and whatever you use it in is also distributed with the same Creative Commons license. But if you’re trying to sell tacos, or if for some reason you want to use the photo without attribution and whatnot, YOU HAVE TO ASK ME! Dangit! Chubby’s didn’t bother with that bit.

As someone who has taken plenty of personal photos in a variety of public and private settings and then made those photos available online, I am somewhat interested in the question of attribution and ownership but I don’t know anything about it and wouldn’t dare make any assumptions based on my own lack of knowledge. However, since Lisa B. goes so far as to license her photos under the Creative Commons, I already know that she knows more about this than I do.

No, what really interests me is (a) the irony that a relationship so geographically intimate as that between a local business and a local blogger can be spoiled by the communications-enabling Internet and (b) that this serves as yet another example of how the commercial/corporate world has become so accustomed to farming out every aspect of widget manufacture that no one can be blamed for anything. I’m not saying that Chubby’s needs to do their own web design; by all means, let them continue to make excellent food, thanks, and taking advantage of someone specialized in the work one’s own business doesn’t do makes perfect sense. I am saying, however, that it’s probably a situation where the website developer used the image thoughtlessly and never asked Chubby’s first and now Chubby’s is tarred by it but isn’t really at fault nor, probably by way of language in their contract, is the web designer since they probably have a clause that they just make the bits fly and aren’t responsible for the contents as long as they conform to certain loose boundaries; or, someone at Chubby’s has all the FTP credentials and uploaded a photo they liked online and the web designer, who would know all about things like CC licensing, is aghast that they might be viewed as having stolen a photograph.

It’s a microcosm of what drove me out of the corporate world in the first place, at least in part: every step in widget manufacture has been so walled off and outsourced that no one is accountable for anything or to anyone. Same as it ever was, probably, at least in terms of what’s involved in making stuff, but the age of conscious branding has created an expectation that companies who want the marketing advantages of a cohesive, coherent identity will also have some basic awareness of what’s being done in their touted name and yet they quite often don’t – and don’t want to. When at least three distinct corporations may bear some or all of the blame for the BP oil spill and no one’s terribly surprised by that, we’re all doing something wrong.

Now, for the nerds: on Friday my work laptop notified me that the automatic upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 was available. I did a little reading online, found that no one was having major problems with it and then set to downloading it. This took… a long time. I got it done, though, and during our weekly staff meeting my laptop chugged away and turned itself into a 10.04 laptop instead of 9.10. When all was said and done everything seemed to work as expected only faster. Nice! Or so it seemed.

This morning I noticed that what was happening some on Friday was continuing to happen: Outlook 2007 under Crossover Linux was frequently locking up and dying on me. Great. My work is changing over to Exchange and the Outlook calendar is going to be our single calendar as of a few months from now. Some people are already using it, too, so I had no option but to figure out a way to get this working. Nothing I did – downloading and installing the latest build of Crossover Linux, etc. – seemed to make a difference and I was starting to get a little concerned.

Further reading let me in on the fact that the most recent release of the evolution-mapi plugin for Ubuntu’s native Evolution mail client was included in 10.04. I had tried an older version of evolution-mapi a few months ago and found that it choked on the calendaring side. My only hope – after hours of fiddling with Thunderbird and Lightning and all sorts of crap – was to give the newer evolution-mapi a shot.

Initial testing showed that the calendar was working fine – just great, in fact – but Evolution kept croaking when it had to refresh my rather overstuffed inbox (about 6,500 messages, yes, I know). One manual inbox clean-up via webmail later, I had my inbox down to about 1/10th its starting size and now Evolution is having no problem at all. So, I guess the latest version of evolution-mapi works. If you, like me, were finding that Evolution would hang when trying to load your mailbox, try cutting the mailbox down to size first. It doesn’t seem to like large inboxes but it does seem to handle all the Exchange stuff just fine.

The Renwick: On March 13 & 14, The Boyf and I were in DC for the going-away party for some friends. We happened to stay a block from the Renwick and went twice in two days.

Wake SPCA 3K Dog Walk: Katastrophes, Mr. Pink Eyes, Pants Wilder, Anna, Busty and I participated in the Wake County SPCA 3K dog walk as Team Awesome. We raised hundreds of dollars, because awesome is what we do. We also got to see hella cute dogs, though none could hold a candle to our own leader, Dante.