Seattle Gay News
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Issue 28, Volume 40, July 13, 2012
COURTESY WILLIAM WRIGHT
by Aiden Klein SGN A&E Writer BOYZ II MEN/EN VOGUE/ SALT-N-PEPA TULALIP AMPHITHEATRE July 7 I can’t help but smile whenever I think about growing up in the 1990s. That is the decade I graduated high school and be-
came a man. It was in those years that I first kissed a boy and felt the joy and heartache that comes with falling in love. I was devastated by my first breakup. I didn’t see SOUL page 30
COURTESY BOYZIIMEN.COM
Boyz II Men
by Dru Dinero Special to the SGN July 3, 10:06 p.m. In the wake of his official coming-out – one of the most anticipated (and unsurprising) admissions of Gay sexual orientation ever – Anderson Cooper is overshadowed by a 24-yearold sharing his own story about his first love, a same-sex relationship. This young man came out quietly (very fitting for his soft-spoken demeanor and creative personality) by posting a snapshot on his Tumblr blog of a note he had written on his TextEdit app. He wrote, “4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too.” He later says in his note, “On the days we were together, time would glide. Most of the day, I’d see him, and his smile. I’d hear his conversation and his silence. Until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with see OCEAN page 33
Visually audacious Beasts wildly uneven by Sara Michelle Fetters SGN A&E Writer
Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild
Broadway
Farmers Market
When the Emmy nominations for primetime TV are announced on July 19, the list of deserving no-shows could overwhelm those who do make the cut. I’m confident the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which doles out the awards yearly for the small screen’s best programming, will include the see EMMYS page 32
Jon Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men
FRANK OCKENFELS/AMC
see BEASTS page 33
by Albert Rodriguez SGN A&E Writer
JESS PINKHAM
Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) is a six-year-old girl who lives with her daddy, Wink (Dwight Henry), in the Bathtub. He is sick, probably dying, and intent on teaching her how to live and thrive without him. She becomes convinced she can somehow find the mother who abandoned them years ago, certain if she does so she’ll garner some insight into how to help her daddy in his time of need. There’s a lot more to Sundance and Cannes Film Festival favorite Beasts of the Southern Wild – I’m just not entirely sure how to describe it. The movie plays like myth, moves like fable, and is consumed with showcasing visuals utterly unique in and of themselves. It plays to the deepest, most base human emotions, delivering a family saga of a father and his daughter trying to survive in the bleakest of circumstances and the most barren of locations. It’s hypnotic, that’s a certainty.
Director and co-writer Benh Zeitlin, working alongside fellow newcomer and scribe Lucy Alibar, deliver as unique a cinematic experience as anything 2012 has offered up so far. But for all its floridly kinetic panache, for all its deeply felt originality, the movie as a whole had my scratching my head wondering what all the fuss has been about. Hushpuppy’s story was lost on me, her saga of personal triumph in the midst of massive poverty not one I could ever fully embrace or get behind. There are plenty of “wows” here, at least from a technical standpoint. Set somewhere in the middle of the Louisiana delta, in a flooded badland cut off from the rest of the world thanks to massive levies, and on the verge of disap-
Frank Ocean
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