Ryan Nordin | Scraps / 2024

how to build a board that might send you skating away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew Francis Johnson and Ryan Nordin (screenplay), Ryan Nordin (director) Scraps / 2024 [27 minutes]

 

The new boy in a Montana town, Gus Shepard (Peder Lindell), in a 2003 landscape, sketches the local skateboarder boys on the sly, drawing the attention, at first, of only the female skater girl (Julia Sparr), who warns him to keep away from the boys who, she argues, share only a few brain cells.

    Frankly, we know the story already, and might leave it there were it not for the absolutely wondrous skateboarding scenes in this wistful western drama located in a world we might otherwise seldom ever visit.

    It rains and thunders, sending most of the cute skater boys rush off into the back of a pick-up truck, while our amateur artist remains in the downpour. Gay boys are always in rained on, aren’t they? At least he’s now free to try out his own skateboard, falling in a “gnarly slam” observed by a skate boy left behind, Bridger (Dorian Girodano), who helps him up, and having left his cake in the rain it appears, immediately establishes a relationship.

    Sure enough, he discovers that the beautiful skateboard Gus is attempting to ride is something he made by hand. It’s obviously love at first sight, if not for the boy the object which the boy has been attempting to ride. Sexuality sizzles through the air like the lightening. Besides, he’s just created the magical engine from simple wooden “scraps,” hence the film’s title. Wow, how did he do this. Our cute skater boy simply has to try it out! And the former Minnesota boy is perfectly pleased to help his new friend to explore what he has to offer.

     I know nothing at all about skateboard boys, but even I could predict where the plot is inevitably leading us. Bridger makes a date to help Gus learn to skate and for him to help explain how he possibly created the “sick ass board.” Who can resist? Bridger’s dark hair dripping with the rain- drips draws any gay boy with an open eye into this this short movie.

     Long, blond-haired beauty Gus might not have a very fulfilling relationship with his uncle, but he certainly does know how to draw up a piece of wood to convert into another similar skateboard—he is, after all, an artist—and the next morning, after a lot of midwestern coffee, he is able to take his uncle’s sawed off woodscraps in hand, sand them down, and begin to create another of his handmade skateboards.

      Well, not immediately! First he needs to glue up the relationship with Bridger, along with the scraps he steals from his uncles’ workshop. Uncle and nephew are simply making a remarkable homemade chair, but Gus, privately, is seeking out someone to sit there. Gus invites his new friend to visit the “bigger” than imagined “shop,” where the boys agree to teach one another.

     We all know, of course, where this is going. Just hold my hand and I’ll take you there where, well, we also recognize it’s hard in this lovely Montana landscape to go skating with Bridger’s “crew,” not at all so welcoming as Bridger appears to be. Bridger goes skating off, and Gus feels lonely. And we’re only 13 minutes into the movie. Lots of catsup, fries, and a good burger save the day and make the American way as positive as it can be for two lonely Montana gay boys. I hate catsup, but I’d argue for these cute kids to go for it. When Bridger sticks out his catsup-covered, over-peppered fry for Gus to put into his mouth, well even I would “try it.” Gus blushes, “It’s actually good.”

      Discovering his new friend’s sketch book, Bridger demands a drawing of himself, which, of course, changes everything. The former voyeur is now required to be an active artist in their relationship. Boys beware, this little film is going somewhere dangerous in the isolationist Western world in which they exist.

    Time for the female best friend to reintroduce herself. Skateboarder Tara, having read the tea leaves of these boy’s relationship, one buying the ice cream, the other quickly sketching up a picture of the other, argues, quite intelligently that you don’t have to ask someone to be your friend, “you just feel it.” And suddenly, in a moment of unabashed sharing, she tries to tell the still so-innocent Gus that small towns just don’t accept “people like us.” Gus is picking up scraps of information that people like him don’t even quite fully register, but collect in the head, and make it impossible to move ahead. The skateboarding romance has suddenly turned into something else. The possible genre has deconstructed its own simple tale. “You’ll build your own crew someday,” she leans into his face to warn him, “Don’t settle for anything less.”

      Something has shifted when Bridger returns, shocked by the fact that his new friend has gotten the hottest girl in the town to actually talk to him.

      Time to drop my hand and move on into the mist of this gay fantasy. The scraps of wood are beginning to designate, break into pieces and fall apart in the obvious reality of the world in which Gus now exists.

      The two take in a usual town party, drink a lot, and finally meet up in reality. When Gus asks what his new friend really wants, everything is laid out very nicely in a heteronormative reality that forces him to realize that despite his thwarted love, this beautiful boy is not the one for him. Even Bridger has argued that he needs to move away from the delimited possibilities of rural live. But Bridger’s own dreams make it clear that Gus cannot remain in the space into which he has by accident been dropped. Bridger’ dreams are when Gus asks him what would give his live more meaning: “I want to get a good job. Make some money. Buy a cool car. Probably a girlfriend too, right?”

     The “American Dream” has never before seemed so dreary. We are in Trumpland, and there is no escape.

     But even this lost boy has to ask himself, does he really want those things, trophies his parents have which apparently haven’t given them much happiness. Bridger knows what he really wants as he turns to Gus to say as the closeted males always excuse themselves from making the move they are so desperate to take: “Gus, if you were a girl, I’d kiss you right now.”

    End of story. Moving forward in small town USA is truly impossible unless you are, like Tara, a courageous being. It is an impossible motion for most human beings in a world, particularly, which doesn’t even want to admit to the full world of human and animal sex.

      If Nordin’s short film might first seem like a work made up of bits and pieces, the shards of wood of so many films left behind, I suggest you watch it more carefully, as I did this third time around.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

Rodger Mikhaiel | Lypsinka at "Boybar" in NYC 1993 / 1993

lypsinka at the boybar

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodger Mikhaiel (filmmaker) Lypsinka at “Boybar” in NYC 1993 / 1993 [10 minutes]

 

Rodger Mikhaiel is an amateur filmmaker who intentionally/accidentally captured some of the seminal moments of the early 1990s gay culture in New York City. In this 10-minute film we have an over-the-top performance by the famous drag artist Lypsinka (John Epperson) who in the famed Boybar sings her heart out in a rendition of Charles Strouse’s and Lee Adams’ famous song “But Alive,” from their musical based on the original story by Mary Orr that was filmed as All About Eve, a Broadway hit, Applause (the script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green). Lee Adams, in 2024 still living at 100 years of age, never wrote cleverer lyrics, playing off of Stephen Sondheim's and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story song "I Feel Pretty."

I feel groggy and weary and tragic

Punchy and bleary and fresh out of magic

But alive, but alive, but alive!

 

I feel twitchy and bitchy and manic

Calm and collected and choking with panic

But alive, but alive, but alive!

 

I’m a thousand different people

Every single one is real

I’ve a million different feelings

OK, but at least I feel!

 

And I feel rotten, yet covered with roses

Younger than springtime and older than Moses

Frisky as a lamb...

 

   And who might have imagined the lyrics?:

 

I feel half Tijuana, half Boston

Partly Jane Fonda and Fosse Jane Austen.

 

     Epperson not only gives us a credible performance of that number but after picks up several imaginary phones (in a time before the cellphone) to present an almost maniacal rendition of film-based conversations including melodramatic portrayals of figures such as Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Judy Holliday, and various other ingenues speaking out about their telephonic suffering from heterosexual and fellow feminine betrayal.

     Often film historians fail to see the value of these probably illegal recordings which attest to the gay scene that might otherwise be lost.

 

    As a publisher and creative artist myself, I truly respect the fact that artists, performers, and literary creators should be protected from illegal copyists and imitators. But I do truly feel that some of the current copyright laws block our attempts to perceive the full historical picture of what was happening in our society, particularly at a time when we need more than ever to reveal it. Films such as those shot by Mikaiel in his few years in New York City in the early 1990s ought to be revered and not slashed down as a copyright infringement.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).