Lucia to Ricky Martin on... The Whole Gay Thing

MEMO: 11-24-00

TO: RICKY MARTIN, POP MUSIC IDOL
FROM: LUCIA TOLEDO, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

RE: THE GAY THING (SORRY!)

Ricky, honey, ya gotta stop fluffing the gay question the way you did again in Entertainment Weekly cover story. Granted, Jeff Gordinier's scrutiny-lite brand of journalism didn't make it hard for you to do so, but you gotta say either you are gay or you aren't. Your career is at stake. (And if you don't know what you are, that falls under, You're gay.)

If you are, Ricky, please remember that you're not Clinton. You can't say, OK, I lied but I'm still the most powerful man in the world. Your fans are eventually gonna decide that, Hey, he defiled love and his very soul by lying or at least misleading us about both of them, so how can we believe a word he sings? They're gonna say, I can't believe he didn't tell us first! See, it's not a penis thing, really. It's about truth and trust-- and I think you should be concerned about those things because, as an artist, that's where your power is.

Lemme give ya some advice. Don't keep thinking first about your fans. Most of them assume on some level that you're gay anyway, because science says that the only entertainers who don't answer the gay question, or bullshit around it with "What does it matter?" philosophizing, are gay. (Straight entertainers somehow never neglect to establish their straightness, even when delivering the same "What does it matter?" type stuff.) Try to think a little bit more about yourself, about how many spiritual and emotional resources you're sapping away from creativity (and your deeper happiness!) by maintaining that sanctimonious, shame-scented ambiguity.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I think you're a wonderful performer and I want to see you keep growing. I swear, if you're just another pretty boy who can't think things through, I'll be so disappointed. (Uh, question, if you are gay: Have you totally written off those larger opportunities for service to humanity that people like Ellen and Elton report lurk just beyond the shadows? You might wanna examine that-- because you seem like a well-meaning person who could maybe do something important if he got a bigger idea of what we're doing on the planet.)

Oh, and Ricky, you're only gonna make things worse if you hype this yoga thing too much, like you do in the EW piece. Correct me if I'm wrong, but yoga is about is about the connection between body and mind. It posits the body as a measure of truth, which is kinda the opposite of the message you've been sending by saying, What difference does it make if I'm gay." Think about it, OK?

(To tell ya the truth, I kinda hope you're not gay. Because if you are, after you come out the only guys who'll date you are the ones who don't care that you lied for so long, and I'll bet they're a pretty shabby lot....)

P4M MOVIE REVIEW: Being John Malkovich, by Spike Jonze

This is not a review. This is a warning. Skip this movie and you'll miss out on a turning point in the history of the American mind.

Spike Jonze's debut feature, Being John Malkovich, is the kind of sweet but poisonous meditation on the nature of existence that Woody Allen keeps trying to deliver but hasn't got the creative audacity to imagine. The premise is simple: loser-slash-puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusak) takes a shit job and finds, behind a lost door, a supernatural portal into the consciousness of actor-slash-cult figure John Malkovich. The portal allows fifteen-minute sessions in Malkovich's ongoing life, which Craig sells to people for $200 a shot, together with his business partner-slash-girlfiend Maxine (Catherine Keener). Meanwhile, Craig's wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) falls in love with Maxine when Lotte repeatedly visits Malkovich's body and Malkovich repeatedly fucks Maxine-- no more absurd, really, than those "trick" premises that begin Kafka's works, after which all proceeds with fucked-up normality.

Only this is not Modern European Literature 102. This is a commercial American movie that happens to be our era's most philosophically sophisticated look at incarnation: what it means to be ourselves. From the opening titles-- a preposterous but moving dream sequence of a puppet dance theater piece about existential discontent-- to the final credits-- in which poor Craig's curse of consciousness is mitigated by an unexpected form of baptism-- Being John Malkovich shows what happens when identity and desire are radically unhinged from the corporeal self and the blobby, bloody history of the body. Maybe a subject this big needed a director from the world of TV commercials and music videos (Bjork and Nike! The Pharcyde and Nissan! poetry and economy!) to make it fly.

Can a movie this modern succeed when basically nineteenth-century stories like The Sixth Sense are raking in millions? I'm telling you: Being John Malkovich is gonna do more than rake in dough. It's gonna help change the way we think.

CUSTOMIZED CEREAL AT MYCEREAL.COM-- BUT NOT FOR US

Cereal sales have been slumping, but our friends at General Mills have come up with an idea that may boost them: www.mycereal.com, where consumers will be able to customize cereals according to their own tastes and health needs. From among a million possible combinations of texture, taste, ingredients, etc., you'll be able to create your own custom cereal and have it shipped to your home for around a dollar per serving-- which is way more than most of the 250 or so cereals currently on the market, but worth it if you love the stuff, right?

Customized cereal sounds like fun. Only problem is: if you go to www.mycereal.co, right now, you're greeted by a warm picture of a loving mom and her little daughter, a prompt for an access code or password, plus a message saying that General Mills hopes we understand their need to limit users at this time. Oh, you think, I'm apparently not within the target market that General Mills hopes will respond best to this gimmick, or I would have received my access code in my December issue of Redbook, or something like that. But what the heck, you try to continue anyway, assuming that General Mills must be smart enough to have figured out a way to reward those who arrive at the mycereal site from beyond the target market-- say, as a result of positive word-of-mouth. But no. You get a screen asking if the company may notify you when "we're open to the public"-- meaning that they'll be happy to capture your email address but they won't let you play today. (Unlike the custom Nikes site, where you can play to your heart's content with silhouettes, color ways, and amusing personalized inscriptions-- a game that itself builds brand interest and loyalty.)

It's all done very politely, but at mycereal.com you wind up feeling a little excluded from the customized cereal adventure-- and exiled from the embrace of that loving mom. Oh well, you figure, guess I'll just keep to myself (and to my generation!) the great idea that I have for a new breakfast cereal: Eat The Parents, delicious little apron-clad mom and briefcase-toting dad morsels, formulated with higher protein and lower sugar than any other cereal, so it becomes the downright healthiest choice on America's supermarket shelf....

P4M BOOK REVIEW: 1000 ON 42ND STREET, PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEIL SELKIRK (POWERHOUSE BOOKS)

For a look at the authentic face of New York that will restore your faith in humanity, check out 1000 on 42nd Street, a new book of photo portraits by Neil Selkirk. The book consists of page after page of color head shots of ordinary people (plus a few famous ones), taken outdoors, during the day, against a white backdrop at the entrance of an old Times Square theater during the summer of 1997, just as plans were being completed for the renovation of the neighborhood by the 42nd Street Development Project, which sponsored Selkirk. The people were anyone who happened to walk by. They signed a release and wrote down where they were from and what they were doing there. Their portraits were then made into posters and hung in groups on fences surrounding the many construction sites that then filled the area.

The project was popular-- and it did a lot to popularize the Development Project itself: big-bad, naughty-bawdy 42nd Street humanized, for everyone again! The people in the pictures are smiling or not; they're posing or not; their hair, make-up, jewelry, clothing, headgear, and/or dental work are either interesting from a style point of view or not; they either seem to get a sense of historical specialness about the moment or not. Which was all part of the point, as envisioned by the philosopher-slash-art director who dreamed up the project, Tibor Kalman. Recently claimed by cancer while enjoying acclaim during middle age, Kalman served as the 42nd Street Development Project's "architectural and cultural guru" and had a way, in all his work, of making strong yet simple graphic and design statements that revealed vigorously de-cliched views of humanity. (Kalman was the creative director of the magazine Benetton used to put out, Colors.)

1000 on 42nd Street presents 300 full-size Selkirk portraits, plus, reproduced on the book's fold-out covers, hundreds more in miniature. Looking at the book one page at a time is like staring at one of those abstract pictures that's supposed to suddenly snap into three-dimensionality. You're looking, you're looking, then BANG!, you see something totally unexpected. And that is what warmly smirky Alexandra ("going to a meeting") and slyly reticent Doctor Dre ("making hits!") have in common. It's what unites sadly tearful Reggie, a guy from Brooklyn ("just walkin around"), and annoyingly self-promoting Nikki, the vitamin-peddling ex-celebutante from East 68th Street ("going to a GNC to buy Star Caps"). It's what obviously outgoing Raul from Astoria ("passing through") shares with uncharacteristically diffident New York Post columnist Cindy from Fifth Avenue ("because she loves the city"). And it's why tender little Julia ("trying to scalp tickets to The Lion King") and tough-looking Lester ("I don't know"), by the sheer fact of both having been photographed by Selkirk in the summer of 1997, enjoy only one degree of separation: the need to be part of the action, civilization's rawest material.