Last night, I saw Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. It was a bloody spectacle that I shied my eyes away from during certain scenes, but those moments were brief because something somewhere inside of me was captivated by this display of pain, by the spectacular beauty of it, and the seemingly contradictory feeling of sadness that it inspired. I don't want to be the jackass that talks about every scene of a film that just opened, but oh boy, some of those scenes are haunting. Little satanic children, a demonic bird, a maggot slithering up Satan's nose.

I am also wondering, what, if anything, Gibson is saying about homos in this movie with his depiction of a decadent King Herod adorned by half-dressed young males. Gibson took lots of heat for his faggy gay prince in Braveheart whose gayness/sissiness prevented him from being anything other than a whiny little baby incapable of leading. Herod, not femme at all, but definitly into the dick, refuses to condemn Jesus and turns the case back over to Pontius Pilate. He is contrasted from the blood-thirsty Pharisees, as too concerned with the flesh and wine to think that this man, Jesus, did anything wrong.

And how exactly do we read that? Do we read that as Herod being too concerned with matters of the flesh and not enough with matters of the spirit to be concerned with the fate of Jesus? Or do we read this scene as evidence that the libertine lifestyle is not so different from the life that Jesus proposes? A life concerned with loving everyone, and Herod just cannot understand why these stuffy Jews have a stick up their ass about this man Jesus? But that is probably my own singular reading of that since I have far more liberating ideas about what to do with those teaching of Jesus advocating boundless love than most people. It's a difficult scene to examine, all the more so because of its shortness, but neccesary in light of Gibson's previous representation of gay royalty.

On an impulse, I bought the JC Chasez CD yesterday. Today, I am wondering why. I blew off Lamda Legal today because the thought of filing did not appeal to me, and I tried to schedule for tomorrow, but was unable to do so, so will pick up doing boring work for a cool orginization next Thursday. This afternoon, I am going to try to go hear Judith Butler talk at CUNY. And Matt is supposedly going to want to hang out later tonight, which makes me so happy. The message he left on my phone yesterday I played more than a few times and maybe have most of it memorized. "I just had a really lame day. I maybe want to get a drink. Maybe with you. I want to ruin all of your plans for tomorrow." If only my stupid phone did not crap out yesterday afternoon, I would have gotten that message before today and would have had good cause to blow off Lamda Legal today.