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I have no doubt that within my lifetime - a span of years I intend to spend dating, falling in love with, sodomizing, and marrying whomever I damn well please (by which I mean a really hot guy) - I will witness the country grow ashamed of their petty, spiteful decision in the fall of 2008 to perpetuate the American legacy of discrimination.

But for now, sadness and anger and even a little hope.

And, of course, the inevitable speculation on whether the release strategy of “Milk” would have impacted the result of the Prop 8 vote. I stand by what I’ve already had to say on the matter. I don’t want to think about “Milk” just now. It’s too heartbreaking.

The movie that’s really speaking to me at the moment is an altogether ruder, brattier, sexier little number about melancholy gay zombies, radical Marxism, and the right to be an unapologetic artfag.

“Otto; Or, Up With Dead People.”

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Even the undead are obsessed with this election. Photo by Andrea Silenzi

I don’t know about you all, but I’ve officially given up trying to get anything accomplished until after the election is over. I’m throwing in the towel.

But I’m also trying to avoid spending the entire day obsessing over exit polls. Instead, I am making lists - lists for you, dear reader. Below you will find lots of little clickable tidbits, always handy when your boss, sick of obsessing over polls, wanders over and wonders why your computer screen is blank.

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You bemoan the dearth of old-fashioned grown-up movies and/or have a thing for Angelina Jolie: “Changeling”

The latest from Clint Eastwood recreates 1930’s Los Angeles to tell the somber, slightly lurid tale of a woman who loses her son and has a replacement forced on her by the police. When she protests, the Evil Patriarchy smears her character and throws her in the loony bin. Crazy! It’s all very handsome and boring and not nearly as much fun as the other “Changeling.”

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You want your eyes to explode with joy:

“Ashes of Time Redux”

Wong Kar-wai’s delirious wuxia reverie has been restored, re-edited, re-scored, and digitally pushed to the ultra-chromatic-max. I talked about this insanely glamorous memory trip - think A la recherche du kung-fu perdue - with the equally enraptured Melissa Anderson, film editor of Time Out New York.

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The month long (!) New York Clown Theater festival wraps up this weekend with a funeral procession. Converge at Bedford Ave. and North 7th Street (Bedford stop of the L Train) at 6pm on Sunday to join the parade. There is also another performance of Kill Me Loudly, a clown noir, at the Brick Theater tonight. I went last Friday and it not only made me laugh, but it cured me of all my blues proving once again that Clown beats therapy and Prozac every time. Here is a scene from the show:

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1. Heading to the Kitchen to see “ANGER/NATION,” the newest ribald Radiohole spectacle. It starts with the usual drunken shenanigans and ends with a brilliant send up of post-performance discussions, by way of an interview between John Cage and Glenn Branca from the 1980s. I know, I know, your parties usually take the opposite arc. Trust me on this one.

And consider taking notes, for comparison’s sake: Next week, the Kitchen will host Ann Liv Young, a post shock-art performance artist who is typically more associated with the dance world, though she occupies much the same theatrical territory as Radiohole. In “ANGER/NATION,” the Brooklyn collective conjures a far more sophisticated and layered world than anything Young has come up with yet. But give Young time; she’s still, er, young (just 27 or so) and she just had a child, which might well send her anarchic energy hurtling in surprising new directions. Interestingly, Young’s last performance at the Kitchen featured her naked and pregnant, much like Maggie Hoffman in “ANGER/NATION.”

2. Checking out the September issue of Artforum, some of which can be found here. Why? Because it’s the first Artforum, I am told, to EVER feature a dancer on the cover, and it’s pretty fascinating to see how ballet’s would-be bad boy, the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, looks through the lens of visual art criticism. For me, the view is pretty fuzzy and ahistorical, and offers further proof that art critics can have a hard time dealing with the body. But the first-person accounts, such as this one with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, offer some terrific context.

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1. Ordering a copy of the wonderful Mac Wellman’s book, “A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds.” Each story details life on a different asteroid. Yay!

2. Getting tickets to see “1965UU,” the stage adaptation of one of these stories. Directed by Stephen Mellor, a longtime Wellman collaborator, and starring the inimitable Paul Lazar, it opens tonight and runs through October 4 at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens. I went to a rehearsal earlier this week, and was utterly entranced by this alien world, which was more than two years in the making.

Lazar gets a little meshuggenah.

It has everything a girl could want: An underground society. “Inevitable fisticuffs.” Flatulence. “Clandestine polishing of a shameful sort.” And, at the quiet center of Wellman’s riotous rush of words, an obliquely beautiful attempt at understanding what it means to exist. Go.

3. Trying not to feel sad that you can’t draw as well as Mellor’s very young daughter, who sketched her interpretations of “1965UU” while attending an earlier rehearsal. Puts a critic to shame:

4. Enjoying Lazar’s thoughts on what it is like to hold the stage by himself for almost an hour (he does have an excellent, excellent supporting cast, but this is largely a monologue, and Lazar delivers the goods):

“It’s very challenging, to state the obvious,” he said, speaking in the factory’s homey little backstage/office area. “Ideally, you only hold it for a little while. And then it begins to hold you.”

Amen.

Flickr user vk photography

In Benjamen Walker’s report, How I Spent My Summer Staycation, he spoke with Suzanne Reisman. She’s the author of Off the Beaten (Subway) Track: New York City’s Best Unusual Attractions, a book that promises vacation-style getaways …. all reachable by subway. She shared with us three of her favorite Subway Road trips for adventurous New Yorkers on a budget.

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What have you all been seeing? Doing? Hearing? Running into on the street? Falling in love with or being horrified over having spent time and money on - o.k., that’s not really grammatical, I guess, but you’ll have to forgive: I’m going through a bit of NYC withdrawal up here in Maine:

(yes, this is really the view)

Trees and oceans are nice and all, but I am coming, more and more, to agree with this famous quip by the eternally fabulous Frank O’Hara (who, I’ve unilaterally decided, should be the patron saint of this blog, unless anyone out there disagrees and we need to have a Patron Saint Vote - the Culturist is now accepting nominations and there might be prizes): “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy.”

So … help a girl out and tell me what you’ve been seeing. Or go check out this talk tomorrow by the French scholar Annie Cohen-Solal at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. She’s writing a book on Leo Castelli and “will discuss the evolving sociology of the artist/gallery/collector system.” I wonder what Castelli would make of the current art world scene …

Or … if you missed the last Obamaerobics class, there is one tomorrow at 8 p.m., and another on the 19th at Teatro La Tea.

Or… go see “Arias with a Twist” at the consistently impressive little space HERE. Joey Arias meets Basil Twist - how can this miss? I wasn’t able to see it in the mad weeks before my vacation, and am planning to see the extended run when I get back - would love to hear from anyone who has seen it.

Or, maybe, you would rather stay in and read two very different posts about blogging: This from Gawker and this from the Guardian. Thanks, J, for pointing them out.

Whatever you do, please report back. Or I’ll be forced to watch yet another hour of “Law & Order.”

And you thought my very first post about this being a collective blog was all just claptrap…

1. Netflixing “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece. That is, if you’re not into watching it on YouTube:

The film has an eerie history. Its master negative was lost to fire the year of its release; Dreyer released a second film cut from outtakes, only to have that one be destroyed by another fire in 1935 (Joan, remember, was burned at the stake). Lots of versions have floated around since then, until, unbelievably, a print thought to be from the master negative was found in 1980 in a Norwegian mental institution (!), in a broom closet.

2. Checking out this review of the film on the The Criterion Contraption blog, dedicated to Matthew Dessem’s fabulous effort to see every DVD in the Criterion Collection

3. Reading “Burned Again,” Joan Acocella’s thoughtful essay on various treatments of Joan of Arc; originally published in the New Yorker in 1999, it is collected in “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, which you should own anyway.

4. Getting tickets for “The Passion Project,” which is running this weekend and July 17-19 at the 3LD Art & Technology Center in the Financial District. Part video installation, part performance, “The Passion Project” is the directorial debut of Reid Farrington (also its creator), who has been a video artist with The Wooster Group for the last seven years. He is the man behind the hypnotic video elements in the collective’s 2007 production of “Hamlet.”

Shelley Kay goes face-to-face with Maria Falconetti in “The Passion Project”

A friend and I went last week. It was magical, and sinister, and strange - one of the most satisfying theatrical experiences I’ve had in ages.

What made it so successful? Farrington is going up against some big, BIG historical heavyweights here - this iconic, apocryphal film, and the whole legend of Joan of Arc outside of that. We’ve talked about the idea of preserving art here, and how that can bedevil people’s best intentions. But Farrington has found a way of preserving while still going forward, a way of engaging with history and making this historical work contemporary by exploiting the very distance that exists between us and it - there is no official version being enshrined and set on a pedestal and protected by a trust. We get to see, instead, a contemporary artist/mind grappling with a mythic chimera. And we, as audience members, get to grapple right alongside. We get to be seduced by the grandeur of the original even as (literally, through some gorgeous video work) Farrington shatters it.

5. Brainstorming over how you can change the course of an endless war, piss off the priesthood in the process, get burned at the stake and martyred for your trouble, and later immortalized through art.