BRANDON AGUILAR

J. Edgar (2011)

2012-01-19T11:51:00.001-05:00

"Well, that was a depressing tour through American history," one moviegoer snarked as we exited the Quad Theater, the only place left in town still screening J. Edgar, a film which seemed to encounter a dismal reception.

It was incredibly moving to watch. I actually cried a couple times. Strangely, I think this was one of favorite films of the year. It got such pissant middling reviews I was skeptical to see it at all.

And yet it had disquieting echo, which maybe is also partly the source of the negative reactions. Hoover weeps on the floor in a fetal position. Oh poor J. Edgar! It seems to present it's subject far too flatteringly, far too sympathetically. Hoover played by Dicaprio is very likable, even as he's obliterating one enemy after another.

Wasn't this man an abhorrent individual? His tactics of paranoia and surveillance antithetical to the spirit of American principles he ferociously fought for... protecting America from the Communists/traitors/infidels among us?

I'm uncomfortable liking this man, can't resolve the dissonance between the lovable fictional character Hoover and Hoover the odious historical figure. Therein lies the puzzlement this movie provoked.

I may have liked the movie more if I liked the character less, if that makes any sense. I wanted him to be more of a villian. True villiany has an interest and esteem beyond these feeble attempts at reconcilating the myth and the man.

Beyond that, I thought it was dizzyingly good. It has a narrative that jumps from the 60's to the 30's and back again.

The love story involving his companion Clyde Tolson is understated, intense. It's interesting how this was likely reality for gay men of that era. They didn't acknowledge "we are a couple," like the gays do now, even if, for all intents and purposes, they were. It was unspoken but understood.

Some of the makeup (Judi Dench's wig and Armie Hammer's face) is rather horrific and distracting. It must be hard to believably age people in movies. Sometimes it works here, sometimes it doesn't.

I enjoyed how it's revealed that much of what Hoover mythologized about himself was self-aggrandizing pulp fiction. Still, he's an awe-inspiring figure. Can't help but wonder how accurate any of this is? Is it based on letters, a book? What sources, beyond the filmmaker's imaginations, was this derived from?

Also, the movie ends pretty much with Hoover's collapse, slumping over onto his bedroom floor. His secretary shredding the files. A blurb across the screen saying Tolson moved into Hoover's house and accepted the flag at his burial.

It's kinda a downer way to end a film. Even if it is reality. What was his legacy? Is this where the story really ends? What happened to Tolson and the secretary? Couldn't there be any more of an "up" to end the movie on?

Why did I love it? It's a gay love story, at least to me. I could see how straights could watch it and not necessarily recognize it as such. It's not a buddy movie, not a romance. Very understated, but potent and poignant. Beautifully acted and shot and told.

And... Armie Hammer is the most gorgeous man I have ever laid my eyes upon in my entire life. That alone is worth the price of admissions.

These are the reasons why I liked this commonly derided film.

2011-12-27T20:36:00.000-05:00

George Stevens, Second Tier Autuer

2011-12-07T12:44:00.000-05:00

Stumbling into the theater, my bucket of popcorn bounces in my arms, spilling 1/4 of it's yellow contents onto the carpeted stairway. "Oh fuck!" I exclaim, the queens in the next row looking amused. Scott Foundas, the head honcho Lincoln Center guy, looking concernedly from the back of the theater.

Being the dutiful nurse I am, I crawl on my hands and knees, picking up most of the stray kernels, collecting them humbly. Depositing them in the trash. Borrowing the broom to finish the job. The barren audience amused at this pre-show show.

It was a rainy night. The occasion was "Second-Tier auteur" director George Stevens. Scott gives some introductory remarks about the double feature to come. And...onward to Ginger Rogers!

Except...footage of Dauchau airs, stark black and white WW2 imagery, with a sonorous male voiceover. Then color footage of concentration camps, no less. Hmmm. Did Ginger star in some grim super-realistic war drama I'm unaware of? Trying to make sense of this puzzling new development. Will I have to reassess my whole evaluation of the Ginger Rogers knowing this unheralded information?

Ah! Alas, no. Wrong movie. The projectionist fucked up and the audience sorta laughs at the buffoonery. And the lights dim again. And...Ginger and James Stewart.

A lightweight comedy called Vivacious Lady (1938). The brilliant Hattie McDaniel stealing the show with her one scene. She was so interesting, such an anomaly of Hollywood stardom. I cherish each glimpse, each time I stumble across one of her many performances.

Ginger is lovely. The script is kinda dumb. I go to the bathroom. In the two minutes I stepped out of the theater, James and Ginger have apparently married and are having a hard time breaking the news to his parents.

Ginger. Loveliness. Grace wit style. Watching her dance in the little bits she does is marvelous. You're rooting for their love.

But what will happen? Wil love prevail or the lecherous yet cute cousin sweep her away? Boarding that train leaving her man, tears are shed. Boo hoo.

Wait! James crashes his car onto the tracks stopping the train, boarding, declaring his devotion. In each other's arms, they embrace. Love is not lost.

Closing the door. The end.

(Jimmy was beautiful too.)

The second feature on the concentration camps was some of the only color footage of the horrors. Kent Jones (the editor of Film Comment) attempted to make the dubious link:

...the way George Stevens filmed Liz in A Place In The Sun, where she's ethereal staring off into the distance... Apparently, it had to do with Stevens' eye-opening times during WW2. Gazing into eternity. This is the theory, at least. A dubious connection... no?

2011-12-07T08:40:00.001-05:00

POSSESSION (1981)

"Eh, she was a good actress, in her own way," was the tentative praise by a mildly-delirious audience member describing the ravaged performance of Isabelle Adjani in the 1981 film Possession.

Filmed in West Berlin, it starts out as a distraught drama on the disintegration of a marriage. Sam Neill and Adjani are parents to a young boy, and are having dramatic conflicts. She attempts to cut her throat with the electric knife in the kitchen. He overturns alot of chairs in a cafe screaming match.

She has a secret lover. He follows her to learn of her shenanigans. Lo and behold, it is a monster who is making love to her. Tracking her to a desolate apartment, he finds her bloody and being fucked by a tentacled octopus-like creature.

It is at this point one realizes they're watching a horror film disguised as a domestic drama.

And..? It's lurid! It presents anxieties of female sexuality. To be generous, one could call it a meditation upon the demonic-feminine. Woman as monster. Male insecurity, jealousy, some personification of disharmony and discord. Presented in writhing agony.

However, the movie feel stunted, stilted. Somehow neither an enthralling drama nor a sicko monster masterpiece. The character's talk in a bizarre humorous epithet style. As if someone wrote it composing deep philosophical musings, with an ESL-dictionary nearby.

It has gratuitous car crash explosions and 80's electronic tinkling throughout. It is hilarious to watch this actress freak out. She definitely earned her paycheck on the day she squatted down with ooze flowing from her crotch (miscarrying the monster baby?). Her performance is stunning, visceral. The film is some unholy mishmash between Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (with a little of Kramer vs. Kramer thrown in).

It's sorta funny because you're embarassed for this actress. Googling later, one discovered she was awarded a prize at Cannes for her wrenching, monster-fucking performance.

It's a bit tiresome to watch. What is unintentionally endearing is Cold War West Berlin, before the wall fell. The apartments, the architecture, the scenic shots of the city, the panoramic vistas. The utterly brilliant and surprisingly 2011-esque fashion that sexy Sam Neill wears.

The divine Sam Neill in a lingering buttshot. And being a handsome father to his little boy. The odd strangeness. It's a wonderful movie. Unsettling, defying easy categorization.

Location:Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION (1981)

november

2011-11-27T18:06:00.005-05:00

an evening with jane powell

2011-11-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

"I had a pretty lonely life, actually. Up until about 30 years ago," the 80-something film queen confessed, seated on the stage, being interviewed. Her legs demurely crossed, the same legs which had made her one of the preeminent musical stars of her era. The legs were shapely and elegant, somehow defying the passage of time.

The pompous blowhard Robert Osborne (he of the TCM marathons) chimes in: "And a big reason for that, for you're not being lonely...is... in the audience tonight! Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Dick Moore, little Dickie Moore, who was one of the Little Rascals and played Dietrich's son in Blonde Venus."

"He's still a Little Rascal," Jane said, under the applause.

I almost fainted at this point in the evening. An old man in the back of the theatre waved his hand to his beloved wife onstage. Often I'd watched Blonde Venus and wondered what happened to this little boy? To be sitting in the same theatre with him was some stunning only-in-New-York, heart-pulsating moment.

Jane spoke about how lonely it was growing up, beholden to MGM. She always felt invisible, despite being famous. "I didn't think anybody knew who I was because I didn't know who I was," she explains philosophically, from a clarity of great distance.

One day Clark Gable walked up behind her and clapped her on the shoulder and said, "Hey, Janie, ol' gal. How're ya doing?" And she, flabbergasted, couldn't recall his name, floored that anyone knew her name, let alone an icon like Gable.

"It's like it was happening to somebody else," she said. When she wrote to her friends back home, she never told them who she'd met because she didn't want to seem stuck up.

The occasion at the Lincoln Center was a screening of Two Weeks With Love (1950) a film also starring Debbie Reynolds and Ricardo Montalban. Jane selected the film for the night's screening, it being her favorite film that she starred it.

It's easy to see why she likes it. A kind of Walter Mitty-fantasy on the hilarious, hopeful neurosis of a lovesick teenage girl. A girl who longs to seduce the hunky Mr. Montalban. It's vivid color palette is striking. A scene in which her young brothers set off a fireworks calvacade within a hotel is notable for combining animation and live-action scenery, circa 1950-style.

It's a delightfully charming movie, one that seems it should be regarded more as a popular classic than it actually is. A family film, but with heart, wit, intelligence and a minimum of sappiness. It recalls Meet Me in St. Louis, in that it's gently nostalgic for a more innocent era but doesn't condescend to it's audience.

They played a clip of Jane dancing with Fred Astaire prior to her speaking at the evening's screening. She explained she rehearsed the dance with a stand-in and only did the routine once with Astaire, while the cameras were rolling.

It's astonishing her longevity. That anyone who lived through this golden glorious age of cinema is still vitally present to tell stories about it. She explained that MGM only allowed it's performers to be musical comedy types, or straight-dramatic types. They didn't permit crossovers.

The pompous blowhard Robert Osborne in the midst of interviewing Jane, bellowed out an introduction, "And ladies and gentlemen, another MGM girl is in the audience tonight, Marge Champion!" A cantankerous old lady in the row behind me temporarily put on a wide smiley face, rose precipitously from her comfy chair and blew air kisses at Jane, and they waved.

I googled Marge Champion later that night. Such a joy to discover forgotten goddesses! She, too, was something amazing in her day!

alex

2011-11-01T14:46:00.002-04:00

the u.n.

2011-11-01T14:39:00.004-04:00

e

2011-11-01T14:10:00.006-04:00

patrick

2011-10-10T14:50:00.000-04:00

october

2011-10-07T18:52:00.001-04:00

september

2011-09-26T18:40:00.002-04:00

karim

2011-09-24T18:44:00.000-04:00

maritime

2011-09-19T16:32:00.003-04:00

scarface

2011-09-04T00:50:00.004-04:00

Scarface is too long. I'd only seen it once before, in a midnight screening audience of inebriated hoodlums who seemed able to shout out and quote the lines, the way queens can quote each epithet of Mommie Dearest.

Wednesday's screening of Scarface, at least at the Chelsea Clearview, was more subdued.

"There's no one here!" my friend said.

"Well, we're here." I said. Actually, there *were* people there it was just sparse compared to the packed-house turnouts of a Bette Davis flick.

Scarface is a trashy movie. It got no Oscar nominations. However, it is brilliant nonetheless. There are many reasons to love it but, to me, the chemistry between the two stars electrifies the movie. Beyond the crime and violence, the rags-to-riches Cinderella story and cocaine tirades, there's a love story beating at it's tachycardic heart.

Roger Ebert said it best, "DePalma and his writer, Oliver Stone, have created a gallery of specific individuals, and one of the fascinations of the movie is that we aren't watching crime-movie clichés, we're watching people who are criminals".

Also, to me it's endearing because it's a story about becoming a man. The challenges of masculinity, when you're not born as a member of society's elite. Having to use one's maleness as a force for empowerment. It's physical, aggressive, violent and testosterone-fueled, like war. But it is only one man's saga.

The fantasy of socioeconomic ascendency must be partly what inspires the cult of Scarface. How easy it seems to go from dishwasher to drug billionaire.

Tony Montana is heroic, triumphant, immensely likeable. His self-destruction is lamentable, but cinematically inevitable. Of course he must go down in a hail of bullets! A blaze of glory.

Could Tony and Elvira ever have retired peacefully with their misbegotten fortune, quietly raising the kids they dream about? Certainly not.

What becomes of Elvira?

Michelle Pfeiffer deserved an Oscar for this. She wanders off from the dinner table after a heated argument and is not seen in the film again.

I think, in my imagination, being a widow with Tony's millions, she has some problems with the IRS. She maybe does a little jail time of her own. She keeps up her coke habit for awhile but then stops. Eventually she has a kid, battles more drug addiction, marries some petty kingpin like a car dearlership owner. And lives relatively unperturbed by memories about the Cuban she once loved.

Watching Scarface this time, it strangely wasn't as violent as I remembered. What happens with the chainsaw exists mostly in your head, not onscreen. Maybe the shock factor is diminished, knowing what vicissitudes lie in store.

My favorite scene is the one where Al/Tony approaches Michelle/Elvira as she's sunning by the pool. She is living in a gilded cage, like a beautiful prisoner, belonging to Tony's boss, a crimelord named Frank.

He says, "Do you like kids?" And he tells her something like, "I want you to be the mother of my children. The first time I saw you I knew. I want you to marry me."

She is silent, in her big sunglasses. Fabulous and glamorous. There is a tenderness, a wide pause. "What about Frank, Tony? What are you going to do about Frank." It's an accusation, rather than a question. She says it flatly, in a kind of helpless despair.

What she's really saying is: of course I'll marry you, but first you have to kill my current man. "What are you going to do about Frank?" With this simple statement, she intentionally declares fatwa upon Frank's head. Frank is as good as dead.

To his marriage proposal, she doesn't say yes, but she doesn't say no either.

Anyone who stands in the path of Tony's sociopathic rage is annilihated. Of course he'll kill for love, when he's already done so for far lesser opportunities.

No one could've done this part better than Michelle Pfeiffer. I was reading about how scores of actresses were considered for the part, every starlet in Hollywood it seems.

The magic chemistry Al & Michelle have is rare to see in movies. They talk to each other with their eyes, it's fascinating to watch their love affair progress.

Electricity!

The romantic demise to it all. Gunned down by a team of assass ins sent specifically for you. It's easy to see why Tony Montana is a cultural hero for people.

exploring james ensor

2011-08-29T11:35:00.039-04:00

It's fun to investigate a particular artist, to spend time focusing on their output, analyzing the minutae, getting inside their head. Recently I met a friend who owns a print by James Ensor, prompting my curiosity into this strange body of work.

There's a story about how as a young boy, a big black sea bird flew into Ensor's room in Ostend, Belgium, crashing into his cradle, forever traumatizing him. After that he had a fear of birds.

This early incident could perhaps be linked to terror-in-the-skies themes in some of his later works. In "Death Pursuing the Human Herd" (1896) a skeletal death figure hovers and flies like a menacing angel tormenting the throngs. "Hop-Frogs Revenge" (1898) is another horror from above kind of visual. Based on a Poe story, depicting people who are chained aloft onto a chandelier and burned alive at a party.

Ensor had a taste for the macabre. Initially, his work seemed to me creepy and bizarre. With further analysis, there is a perverse humor, a black comedy to the phantasmagoria. An etching called "Doctrinaire Nourishment" depicts King Leopold shitting on the masses! A print 'Beach At Ostend' is a scene with men kissing and dogs humping and bathers mooning the viewer. He seemed to embrace a visceral sometimes-grotesque humor, which perhaps made his work less comprehensible and marketable in it's day. From a modern perspective, it seems an outlandish attribute that he depicted bodily functions like shitting or farting or vomiting, as in the etching called "Gluttony" (1904).

As a young man he was considered somewhat of a loser and his paintings were rejected alot, while his father alone seemed to recognize in his talent. In this sense it's inspiring that he had a long journey before becoming successful as an artist.

I tend to prefer his prints and pencil/charcoal works to his paintings. They have a clarity, whimsy and fluidity of line which is less apparent in his dense paintings.

I like how he used skeletons and masks, liberally sprinkling them onto his canvases like seasoning. He'd go back into already-completed interior domestic scenes and paint a skull onto it, changing the context. As if he was compulsed to remind us of mortality, which to him seems a cheery plesant sort of thing.

He painted himself as Christ, which is pretty funny and takes alot of hubris for any artist to do. "Ecce Homo/Christ and the Critics" (1891).

He seemed influenced to some extent by Eastern art, in that he often stacked compositions vertically, rather than horizontally. This is more a style of eastern painting and Indian miniatures (to indicate distance, further away things are placed higher up the picture plane rather than in the traditional 3-d western perspective, where space goes back and distance is indicated by diminishing perspective.)

That his mother ran a curiosity shop, selling knick knacks and tchotchkes, seems relevant to his art. Many of his paintings seem like collections of these kind of objects. His use of masks and skeletons is some kind of metaphysical drag. Skeletons are kitsch nowadays, the province of halloween and slasher flicks. Were they kitsch then too? Or were there other connotations? The Taschen book I read states there had been mass graves around where he lived, so finding skeletons was not that unusual.

"Death Pursuing the Human Herd" makes me think of the holocaust, mass termination extinction. The way of all flesh!

It raises the same question of horror movies. Which is: do you identify with the victim, the final girl, or with the killer? And if the audience identifies with the killer's gaze, what of the sinister implications of that? The moral complicity of the audience, enjoying the mayhem.

In his work, the skeleton "death" looks happy and empowered, dominating and soaring, whereas the masses look weak and cowering. There's an identification with the aggressor. Death is like a conquering antihero, a villian that you like.

Ensor portrayed himself as a corpse alot... such as in "My portrait in the year 1960" (1888) where he's a rotting corpse. Or the hilarious painting "Dangerous Cooks" (1896) where his decapitated head is on a silver platter. In "The Skeleton Painter" (1896/97) Ensor/Death is presented as a stately gentleman.

It's not a stretch to interpret "Death Pursuing the Human Herd" as something of a self-portrait. It could be said that Ensor "the artist" IS the skeletal death figure swooning above. The cowering mob is his would-be audience that often rejected him. Art is his power to slay the masses! "Death pursuing the human herd" could also perhaps be perhaps entitled something like "Ensor pursuing a reluctant audience"!

He was terrorized by that black bird flying into his room as a child. Psychologically people often identify with the thing which frightens them (i.e. children exposed to domestic violence often identify with the perpetrator because they're the strong ones and later these cycles can repeat).

Death seemed to hold myriad fascinations and rich metaphorical connotations. It is interesting that for someone as obsesssed with death as he was that he lived such a long time (1860-1949)!

lyonel feininger: at the edge of the world

2011-08-13T11:37:00.001-04:00

The geeky hot tour guide/docent at the Whitney was turning me on, as he babbled babbled for an hour about the splendor of Lyonel Feininger.

Feininger was an American, born to musician parents in New York, who as a teenager was shipped to Germany where he remained for 50 years before fleeing the Nazis and returning to his homeland with his half-Jewish wife and two sons.

He became famous early for his cartoons, wonderful pre-Disney imagery: children in floating bathtubs on a sea by the Statue of Liberty. Yawning windows on tenement houses. A kind of magical realism to the world, which seems to be a missing link between Disney imagery and German expressionism.

He married a wealthy woman and dedicated himself to fine art painting, which proved less lucrative. Though he became reknown for his Expressionist paintings in Germany. Personally to me, this is his best work. Van Gogh-influenced, riotous pastels, elongated bodied. Often using the theme of arcs, viaducts, trumpeteers and the woman as prostitute. This phase of his art also seemed to have a Matisse influence.

There is a sense of searching for his lost childhood within his art. His experience of a truncated childhood, being sent abroad, was signficant. His critical reputation as an artist suffered by this reverse immigrant aspect. Was he a German? Was he an American? Art historians really like to classify things!

His early works are vibrantly alive. Being a cartoonist prior to his "high art" endeavor explains alot! The sense of whimsy and imagination translates.

It's dazzling to behold, epic minty green coolness. Swaying structures. Distorted bodies. Stunning skyscapes.

Changing with the times, he later became involved with the Bauhaus, Cubism, a luminous architectonic minimalism and carving children's toys (though maybe not necessarily in that order). His output is varied, which also perhaps contributes to the challenge of classifying his work.

Some of his work was destroyed by the Nazis (which seems like a strange kind of honor). His reputation declined after his death in 1956, as Clement Greenberg declared the only painting worth looking at was nonrepresentational.

Perhaps he was a little too fashionable for his own good. I wish he had maintained some of the childlike imagery of his early work. His later paintings become a little too barren and somber and cliche-1950's for my tastes.

A person on our tour noted that he began painting massive figures against swooshing dwarfed buildings. He ended by painting enormous vistas with tiny people, as if viewed from a great distance! The world looms larger in his later work. People became less prominent than a grander whole.

It's important this artist is being restored to popular sensibility. There's a lot to be gleaned from his vision. I hope everyone goes to the Whitney to see the show! It's groovy!

pre-code at the film forum

2011-08-11T15:30:00.008-04:00

Lately I've been holed up in the Film Forum, taking in the summer retrospective of Pre-Code films. The Hays Code from 1934 dramatically changed the content and tone of motion pictures. Prior to this act of censorship, films were laced with more skin: flesh and titilation; characters and stories were allowed to possess a moral ambiguity of which they were stripped by this unfortunate white-washing policy. There is a realism to human behavior in Pre-Code films which was drained away by later Hollywood fare. Perhaps the freedom that existed pre-code was seen as threatening to those who would seek to control the masses.

Some thoughts on some of what I've seen:

THE PUBLIC ENEMY

The prologue draws laughs from the audience, where Warner Brothers tells us they're depicting a dire social problem. Today, in our age of irony, the concept that any movie could sincerely see itself as concerned with the public welfare is lamentably hilarious.

This scene were James Cagney smashes a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face is shocking. Wait! People in movies from 1931 aren't supposed to behave like this! It gives the impression that you're seeing something you weren't supposed to, that you're as shocked as Mae Clarke's character. It is graphic and violent and disturbing, but real.

(Mae Clarke is a kind of 1930's version of Michelle Williams. A kind of ordinary everywoman, but with poignancy grace and realism. Whereas, I think of James Cagney as an early version of Sean Penn: that sort of brutal yet sensitive masculinity.)

Jean Harlow looks astonishing. The way she wore clothes, arrayed and presented herself was stunning. It's not her acting ability so much, but her white-blonde style, the insane flair for glamour and the drop-drop, girl-next-door casualness with which she presented the extravagant fullness of her being. That contrast is what made her iconic.

BLONDE VENUS

A woman on the run. Dietrich has more chemistry with little Dickie Moore than she did with most leading men she was paired with.

She plays a mother and a nightclub star with an absent husband, so maybe this role was closer to Dietrich's truth than others.

Her daughter says Dietrich did not enjoy being a movie star, but approached it militantly, as if she was a Germanic soldier doing her duty. This lack of enjoyment is glaringly apparent later on.

Maybe being a soldier-actress was more tolerable in the early years, as here she seems to bear the weight of her fabulousness effortlessly.

Hot voodoo! Coming out of a gorilla suit in a blonde afro. It's enough to inspire legions of college thesis papers as to what it all means!

Her husband needs cancer treatment, so retired star and loyal wife Helen Faraday (Dietrich) resumes her onerous-yet-decadent stage performances to pay for his treatment. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Herbert Marshall returns and casts out his wife due to her liason with Cary Grant. (But really, who could resist?)

She hightails it from town to town, a lost soul. A wanted woman for abducting her child. It's a love story between mother and child. My favorite line is when someone says, "You don't look like you're from around her." She mutters bitterly: "Give me time..."

Von Sternberg is always interesting as a director, the way he composed space like a painter, creating depth with screens and veils and shadows, lights and darks. Foregrounds and backgrounds. It's fascinating to behold.

SIGN OF THE CROSS

The Sign of the Cross by Cecil B. DeMille contains the famous scene of Claudette Colbert as Empress of Rome bathing in asses milk. There are scenes where an orgy is taking place. Christians being fed to the lions. The fey Charles Laughton as Nero. It's exciting to watch for the bizarre and horrific sacrifical scenes at the end.

It can be read as an anti-fascist, anti-Nazi parable, though it came out in 1933 (the year the Nazis rose to power). The aristocratic Romans are like the Nazis in their fondness of pageantry, persecutory bloodlust and murder-as-entertainment aesthetic.

CALL HER SAVAGE

Clara Bow was kinda the pre-code equivalent of Britney Spears. High-strung but endearing, erratic but affecting. She plays the character with a bipolar zeal, though not sure it was called such a thing back then.

It's easy to see why this woman was a big star. Her lust for life is bracing. She
wrestles with an enormous dog just to say hello. She beats up other girls who offend her honor, just because she can!

This film is inadvertently racist, a product of it's times. Call Her Savage is the name of it. At the end of the picture Clara discovers she is half-Indian, born from a torrid affair her mother had. That explains why her Caucasian father never liked her much. And it explains her wild-woman behavior. (As she learns she's a half-breed you really expect Cher's "Half Breed" anthem to begin to play!)

The audience is meant to sympathize with noble tormented Clara. It's her genes that make her "savage": hence, the accidental racism!

The discovery for me in this was the gorgeously
handsome Gilbert Roland. The young Gilbert Roland was one of the most BEAUTIFUL men ever to grace the screen!!!!!

SHE DONE HIM WRONG

Gilbert Roland also plays in She Done Him Wrong, starring Mae West. Mae West always reminds me of Roseanne Barr. They have the same mannerisms, though Roseanne doesn't have Mae's smutty wittiness.

Mae is dripping in diamonds. One of the witty bon mots she speaks in this picture is: "When women
go wrong, men go right after them."

This is the first of two pictures she made with Cary Grant. I tend to like the other one, I'm No Angel, better than this one. They'd perfected their chemistry by then.

At the end he puts a ring on her finger and tells her he's imprisoning her, as his wife. They clutch adoringly. "You bad bad girl," he says and she coos "Mmmm."

Guess Mae West helped inspire this Code. She must've seemed threatening. There's no telling how far she could've gone with her smuttiness had the Code not intervened, neutering her scandalousness as an artist. Some of her jokes and double entendres are still provocative today.

THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS

Across town at the Anthology, I recently took in a screening of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, which is very "pre-code"-flavored in it's naughty innocence. Risque but not raunchy, with coy smuttiness and flashes of flesh. It's not explicit but revels in pushing the boundaries just a little. There's a happy suggestiveness.

Wrapped in a deceptively wholesome package, a heart-warming fable calling for sexual liberation and the legalization of prostitution. A madam's last stand!

This movie just has everything in it! Laughter and tears, sex and music, naked boys dancing, Dolly's enormous bosoms and Burt's hairy chest. Rebukes to the kind of hypocritical moral crusade which instituted the Hays Code in the first place.

Dolly is sorta the spiritual daughter of Mae West. They're both essentially writers who created a star persona which is like a literary fictional character. Exaggerations of outward femininity, while their inner essence is macho and manly. Like any good drag queen, their outrageous glamour is a kind of overcompensation for what they're not.

a black flower for amy winehouse

2011-08-08T20:43:00.005-04:00

My paintings are conflations of things, composites of whatever is in my imagination at the time.

This one I started shortly after I heard Amy Winehouse died. It began light blue and trippy-dippy happy but progressed with twinges of grief and sorrow. Eventually it occured to me, "Oh, maybe it's about her..." and seemed to make sense once I made that connection. The foof of her curls, the droop of her bouffant, the beehive retro swirls collapsing. A mad hairdo. A psychedelic black angel (vroom vroom!) motoring down the highway of the universe, onward to something else.

Golden and black, bright and dark, reflective and opaque. So maybe it's partly inspired by Amy's celestial transition. But also... our recent heatwave! Holy fuck! The hot concrete summer. The sweaty city night sweltering shiny.

And...all summer I've been studying anatomy. Day after day, reading about the systems. Organs bodies internal fluids, interrelationships. Biomorphic forms.

These influences seem to have found their way into my latest painting.

painting can be uncomfortable because...

2011-08-05T18:00:00.005-04:00

Painting can be uncomfortable because part of what is necessary is letting go of things. For example, there may be a patch of blue that you really like but it's just not cohesive with the whole.

The whole has to flow together. All the parts must hold as one. No matter how much you love something, if it isn't working with the rest, you've got to let it go.

This is what is hard sometimes, saying goodbye to what you like.

It's true in life as well.

It can be a kind of breathing, or reordering process. Exhale inhale. Though... if that little patch of blue is special enough, you *could* keep it and just instead rearrange everything else around it. Either way, there are changes in store.

It's what's exciting but also frustrating in the process of making something. It's not entirely an act of willpower and seems to involve choices beyond the personal and individual. It involves altering your vision and surrendering expectations, letting something become what it seems to want to be.

Sometimes I've spent endless hours or weeks working on a painting which I later decide I hate and must destroy. But that's part of the reordering process, too. Doing it changes your mind. Sometimes you have to go thru those experiences to get clarity. Knowing what you don't want is an essential step in identifying and getting what you do.

august

2011-08-02T14:56:00.004-04:00

encountering Joan Collins 2007

2011-07-29T14:12:00.001-04:00

BORDERS BOOKS @ THE TIME WARNER CENTER/NYC

There was fear in the air. Fear and electricity. The queen had arrived. The crowd was abuzz with anticipation, about to come face to face with the ultimate bitch goddess. There was a kind of mass seizure in silent hysteria as we waited.

A buzzing, everyone turning their heads. A mass of brown luxuriant radiant hair stalks through the crowd, surrounded by her entourage.

"Hi folks. It's me," she says, needing no introduction, upon reaching the front of the bookstore audience. "The remains of me," she corrects herself, sighingly British, "...after 6 weeks of Legends." The mere uttering of that word seems to exhaust her, like an admission of defeat. She would later write about what an unhappy ordeal it was working with Linda Evans again.

"Do you all want to get some pictures with the book?" she suggests first thing. It may seem an unusual statement for an author to say right off the bat at a book signing, but she is no mere author.

The crowd points and shoots. From photojournalists with heavy-duty Leicas to starstruck tourists with thowaway cameras, Joan takes it all in.

The indefatigable theater trouper is eclipsed by Joan the movie star. Rising beyond her exhaustion, she is beautiful. Vibrant and smiling, she poses with the book, moving it about for different angles, opening it up and pretending to read as if she's unaware that she's doing it for the cameras. She dallies a bit playing actress. This seems her favorite part of the night. She seizes the moment to shine, performing not so much for those of us assembled before her but for the people at home who may glimpse her photo later on in the press.

She had come to promote her latest manual of lifestyle advice and beauty tips and anectodes. Simon Doonan, the Barney's bigwig, is set to interview her.

A debacle ensues. She sits on the right, he on the left. Her mike doesn't work. He, the good homosexual he is, suggests switching places. So they do. She on the left with the working microphone, he on the right talking loudly out into the crowd.

Two unopened medium-sized bottles of water are before them. "May I have a glass of water? A glass. With a straw." Joan looks at the bottle as if it's unthinkable she would suck a beverage from plastic before an audience. It would mar her lipstick, which is a gorgeous fresh-killed blood red color.

The bookstore employee, a middle-aged harridan, looks frantic and dismayed. Oh no! Where am I going to find a glass and a straw at a moment's notice? Joan's question is more of a command. She appears bored by the incompetence of the staff (the non-working microphone, this atrocity of bottled water).

"Well, let's just move right to the questions from the audience," Simon says brightly, a dapper man who knows how to swim with sharks.

The Chinese woman in the back: "How you fine han-son hubby?"

Joan: "Percy was the theater manager in San Francisco when I was there doing a play."

An uninformed imbecile peon: "Will you ever do a Dynasty reunion?"

Joan: "We did it three months ago," referring to a tv special. Joan is indeed getting bored, swatting away the questions as if they were little gnats attacking her.

An audience member: "Do you ever just kick back and watch a movie?"

"Yes, that's what I did today. I watched Al Pacino."

An inquisitive man: "Are you still hoping to find the definitive movie role?"

Joan: "Who isn't?" Then on second thought, "But you know, they'd probably give it to Shirley MacLaine," she says, as if she holds no illusions of the vicissitudes of Hollywood.

Someone else: "I didn't hear that: could you repeat?"

Joan isn't going to repeat. She motions to Simon to take this one. The grueling henpecking questions.

"The question was," Simon enunciates like an attentive schoolboy, "Was she still hoping to find the definitve movie role?"

Another question: "What do you think of all these young starlets?" (At the time, Paris Lindsay Britney were all the news.)

At this Joan becomes philosophical, "I think it's as old as Hollywood. There've always been starlets. I was one myself back in my day. The problem is: you're going to have to do something else. There is a very short lifespan for that sort of thing."

She says it thoughtfully, as if she's pondering the costs of growing up, weighing the impossibility of remaining a starlet forever. Having assumed this burdensome responsibility of being queen.

towering inferno: the painting?

2011-07-26T23:59:00.001-04:00

I try to not think when I make a painting. Thinking only detracts from the experience.

You make a mark, then another, and another. One choice transmogrifies into something else and then something else.

What was in your head somehow finds it's way to the canvas, what was in your imagination becomes represented.

A week or two ago I watched The Towering Inferno, the best disaster movie ever. I didn't mean to make a painting related to that, but then again, I didn't mean not to, either.

The fire was flickering in my imagination. The golden night. The blackness, the sharpness, the explosions. The oh wow! factor. The hot flames. The boom boom spectacle. The cries for help. The shattering glass. The cartoonishness of it all.

It's all here, for me at least. In retrospect I recognize it. Though I didn't try to conjure it so much as paint what was floating around my unconscious.

Painting abstractly allows for more of a surprise for me than if had I addressed the topic directly by painting, oh say, a portrait of the devastating Miss Dunaway. I like the surprise of it, seeing your thoughts externalized. Sometimes midway thru a painting, I have an ah-ha moment and realize what it's about. Or sometimes much later on you realize the meaning of what you did.

I enjoy art being coded this way. Not sure anyone would ever look at this and think about the movie I was thinking of when I did it.

In that sense, painting is like a private autobiography, a veiled visual depiction of what's in your head. It reveals things. But I guess it's obvious why most people wouldn't "get" it or bother to care or attempt to understand. Maybe it's not even important what's "behind" an artwork.

Maybe it's just, you know, something to fill the blank space on a wall.

There's also some Guernica in this one. I always loved Picasso's open grasping mouths.

night

2011-07-26T14:12:00.000-04:00

la taza de oro

2011-07-24T15:29:00.000-04:00

Like Petula Clark said, when you're alone and life is making you lonely you can always go... to... La Taza De Oro!

You will instantaneously feel like you have friends. It is like church. Come as you are, all are welcome at this air-conditioned hacienda.

It's just a hole-in-the-wall, a wood-paneled diner seemingly out of place on the obnoxiously trendy gay 8th Avenue Chelsea strip. But it's a neighborhood institution, a coming-together of souls for a bite to eat. Unlike most restaurants, there's never a dire vibe no matter how busy it gets. The employees do not act like they subconsciously hate their jobs, or you. It is grungy decrepit "old New York" at it's best.

I love it because they serve authentic Mexican, the way my grandmother made. The place even vaguely smells like my grandmother's house (though she would be appalled by their state of cleanliness as she was a freakishly meticulous housekeeper). The food is not "tex-mex" or some bastardized tourist version of Mexican cuisine commonly found. It will not induce gut-wrenching food poisoning! It is Mexican by and for Mexicans, or rather: for everyone!

The old men unintelliglby chortle among themselves. Intently engaged in their chortling dialogue, about the eternal events of the world. It has a kind of timeless air. The folks at La Taza De Oro are in no rush to kick you out, and seem happy to have you stay as long as you like.

The food is delicious. Moist chicken breast. Black beans and yellow rice. Everything savory. There's a vibe of communal warmth and breaking bread in peace with your fellow man.

There are not very many vegetarian options, but you can get a wonderful dinner for $9. Mmm mmm.

billy elliot

2011-07-18T19:07:00.001-04:00

We're treated like visiting royalty backstage at the Imperial Theatre. The show was stunning. While watching it, had no idea moments later I'd be onstage chatting with the cast.

I was close to tears through much of the performance, a heart-rending story of becoming a man against all odds. Being misunderstood in the world from which you come; the power of art to shape life.

There is an exquisite skill and artistry to the young man playing Billy Elliot.

He's like a bird, a black swan, a dinosaur that can fly! An angel on wings wowing the crowds, atonishing the masses. His grace, strength and agility as a dancer seem otherworldly.

We chatted with him briefly. He says he'd traveled with the show for two years and just recently came to Broadway

"I would like to stay in New York. What am I going to do in Switzerland? Milk cows?" says the precocious (Swiss) lad.

Perhaps I should backup and begin at the beginning:

The usher who led us to our seats, a haggard late middle-aged queen named Ron, gushes superfluously, "Oh Giuseppe! You're in for a treat. He's fourteen years old and speaks 5 languages. Oooh, you're going to love him!"

The enthusiasm feels a bit NAMBLA-suspect, at least initially. How fabulous could any kid be? The voice of a wee lassie comes over the intercom, some chipper English 5-year, announces perkily: "Please check that your cellphones are turned off..."

Not having seen the film, wasn't sure what the play was about? A friend explains: "A boy is supposed to be going to boxing, but instead takes ballet class. His father does not approve."

The music by Elton John & friends is adequate, though unmemorable. But the dancing, what a glory to behold! Watching Giuseppe Bausilio dance is a magical experience.

Giuseppe has a movie star aura, like a miniature Gene Kelly or a young Travolta (had Travolta been a excellent ballet star). Sweet and soft-spoken and good-natured, a handsome kid with devastating charm. Graceful even when not performing. Impossible to not wish him all things good.

When we were standing on the street fans walked by.

"He hit them with the Giuseppe smile!" chortles one jolly cast member. 'Giuseppe' becoming an adjective, not a noun. Describing this particular brand of effortless charm-devastation.

"He loves it," his mother says.

"Are you in school?"

"I go to Term 4," he says as if we know what this means.

"He goes August to September. Home school. On the computer," his mother clarifies. Faced with the effusive compliments her son inspires in everybody, she says simply, "He's a good one."

times square

2011-07-18T19:01:00.001-04:00

dinner at grand central

2011-07-18T18:57:00.000-04:00

Dinner at the Michael Jordan steakhouse in Grand Central, with chilling ornamental lights dangling above. Obsequieous ethnic waiters to scurry when we beckon.

He had made a reservation. "Who the hell makes dinner reservations?" I ask rhetorically. We arrive to sparsely populated tables on the Grand Central mezzanine, overlooking jolly travelers coming and going.

I order diet coke, a steak, mashed potatoes, and key lime pie.

He mentions in passing off-handedly that he had recently met Ann-Margret. I backtrack the conversation. "Whoa. Stop! Did you just say ANN-MARGRET? The "Ann-Margret"???"

He's like, "Do you know who she is? Most younger people don't."

"Do. I. KNOW. WHO. Ann-Margret is?!" I say, flabbergasted that anyone could not. "She is so iconic." It's uttering the holiest name of the highest gods.

He said she tottered on high heels. Ann-Margret wobbled as she walked down the carpeted corridor of the hotel, flanked on each side by a strapping man, there just in case she required some propping up.

"She must be close to 70 now. But she can still walk in high heels," he says, skeptically.

He said they put together a class on Ann-Margret to teach the youngsters who she is.

"This could be a college dissertion: who Ann-Margret is! You could write an encyclopedia on the subject. I would like to teach a class on WHO Ann-Margret IS!"

"Well, it was only 45 minutes. We showed clips of her films," he says.

He asked me how or what I knew of her. I said, "I have not seen her entire body of work, but I have seen quite alot."

It began for me as a child, watching The Two Mrs. Grenvilles with my grandmother. Thinking AM was impossibly fabulous in that. I detailed to him how my appreciation grew as I discovered one classic after another: Tommy, Bye Bye Birdie, The Outside Man, Pocketful of Miracles.

She has a visceral physical presence and florid exuberance to everything she does, leaping off the screen with such magnetic force.

He said he was impressed, "Because you don't watch tv, your references are more film-oriented. That's very unusual. Almost everyone watches tv," he says.

My pulse races faster anytime I think of The Ann-Margret. Endorphins rush. What a woman!

Throughout the dinner my head was swirling in the painted green clouds above the Grand Central terminal. I took my leftovers home with me in a brown paper sack.

lower east side

2011-07-18T18:50:00.000-04:00

the towering inferno (1974)

2011-07-17T08:28:00.004-04:00

Faye's antics are kept firmly in check. There's no crossed eyeballs or wire hangers, just DISTRESS! in a plummeting barely-there dress.

She's not given much to do beyond look fabulously worried and smooch on Paul and descend in a glass elevator like a goddess.

It's a kind of pieta with the women and children clutching one another in the elevator. There are Biblical references: fires and floods, heaven and hell.

Oh Paul! I keep a framed picture of the young Paul Newman beside my bed. When young guys come over, they're like, "Who's that? Is that a young George Dubya?"

I laugh and say no, telling them it's Paul Newman, which draws a blank. "You know, he has salad dressing!" I say, by way of explaining, trying to offer something they may be familar with, i.e. his picture on the grocery shelf.

This only produces further consternation. Why would I have a picture beside my bed of a man who is on salad dressing bottles? Hmm... how to explain the wonder of Paul Newman, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof onwards...?

Part of why I love The Towering Inferno is because of the "bro-mance" between him & Steve McQueen. An alpha bonding brotherhood of icy blue-eyed blondness.

Faye once said something like, "The Towering Inferno didn't do much for any of our acting resumes. Not to say it was a bad movie, just that the fire was the real star of it."

The fire is like a character in the film. The orange-blue flames flicker and dance, simmer and soar, engulf and ensnare.

Robert Wagner dying with his secret lover, the alienation of illicit romance. Hidden from the world, dying together!

There are many thrilling moments in The Towering Inferno. One's brain reels from the constellation of stars, their fantastic trajectories before and after this hot moment.

Fred Astaire and OJ Simpson? Could any pairing be more bizarre? OJ was once a kind of black folk hero, which is forgotten today. Maybe this is why he was hard to convict? His name on the screen elicits cheers, boos and hisses.

What became of the cast? Faye went to the surgeon's scalpel and Paul to salad. Steve to cancer and OJ to homicide. And some (Susan Blakely, anyone?) just vanished entirely.

Bobby Brady, aka Mike Lookinland, went on to eternity in reruns and endless reunions with his tv family. He is a kind of everyboy/muse, immortalized in his beautiful youth.

Chanteuse Maureen McGovern still performs her jazzy cabaret act. "We may never love like this again..." she warns us in song. The catastrophic loss of innocence. Parallels, foreshadows of 9/11. The hubris of humanity, defying nature. This building couldn't burn! They say as it burns.

The fun of watching Steve McQueen "act" is figuring out when he's baked and not. Everyone loves the stoned movie star. It's subtle, but once you watch for it, blunt-affect mannerisms reveal themselves. Sometimes Paul looks at Steve with a bewildered look in Paul's eyes like, "Who the fuck is this pothead movie star? Is this stoner for real?"

I love the part when Fred Astaire asks Jennifer Jones, "Do you believe in destiny?" "I believe in all good things," she says, spoken like a woman running out of options.

tribeca night

2011-07-13T15:14:00.001-04:00

summer school

2011-07-11T22:02:00.001-04:00

My psych teacher is a sensitive man, the kind that were popular in the 1970s. Like Alan Alda, only puffier.

A girl cried after class, after our bantering yet brutal discussion on sexual assualt. (She said later she was having post-traumatic stress!) Our teacher clutched her consolingly and muttered details on female genital mutilation in Africa and other travesties committed against "woman". Hear her roar!

I graciously apologized for whatever remarks in the discussion I made, not intending to elicit sobs. Surprised I could be interpreted as mysognist (?)

Abnormal psychology is pretty fun to study, crisscrossing with reality as it does.

Thursday I almost fell asleep, despite the morning adderall and fascinating subject matter. My blood barely flows as I Iisten to the droning lectures.

We were highlighting the vagaries of schizophrenia. My teacher telling of olfactory delusions, where people think they smell odors: blood or urine or feces or vomit.

The Rican stoner next to me chimes up, in earnest stoner-concern: "Man, this be a terrible disease! Everthing be smellin' like shit."

Dr. Marcus assured us olfactory delusions are quite rare. By far the most common delusions are command auditory hallucinations. Voices in your head telling you to do stuff! Or saying mean things to you!

I couldn't help thinking of little Linda Blair tied to the bed, spewing pea soup, "Fuck me, Jesus! Fuck me, Jesus!" This nostalgic memory brought a gentle smile to my face.

Dr. Marcus is sublime.

I hadn't planned on taking summer school, but at the end of last term, I said to him, "I'd really like to take you again." He said he's leaving our fine institution, annoyed at remaining only an adjunct professor. He said I could come to Abnormal Psych in the summer.

"It's already full," I told him.

"Just come the first day and I'll sign an override waiver."

So I did. It required a gruff man, the department head, approving. "Brandon's one of my best students and I don't mind the extra work," Dr. Marcus told him.

Still, the gruff man acted petulantly like it was an ordeal for him to sign a slip of paper. I smoothed his ruffled feathers, batted my eyelashes and scampered down to the registrar's office.

Class time can be a droswy, early-morning mutually brain-dead interlude. But we all seem to enjoy each other's company.

One morning Dr. Marcus came in wearily and said, "I need to stop gettin to sleep at 3am. Last night I went to the Pearl Jam concert, and sat in front of a celebrity. Guess who! I'll give you a hint...there's two of them..."

Somebody guessed it. "Uh, the Olsen twins?"

"Exactly. How did you know?" He said. He explained they were small in real life and surrounded by leggy fashion model-friends who towered above them. Dr. Marcus said he slouched over to the side, kindly not to block the view of Mary-Kate or Ashley.

"One of them's anorexic," somebody said, gossipily.

"Yea, Mary-Kate!" I chimed in, surprised this random fact lurked somewhere in my skull, suddenly accessible.

Dr. Marcus was concerned/intrigued by this development, being the sensitive male that he is.

2011-07-11T00:23:00.004-04:00

"It's like shooting fish in a barrel," my hot Australian friend says of his knack for seducing twinks, effortlessly. They're impressed by his ability to pay for dinner, among other attributes.

I tell him, "Oh! I just don't have the energy for seducing twinks anymore. What work! Ugh. To have to CHARM someone."

He says everyone wants a daddy. I say, well it speaks to the dearth of nurturing males in our culture. We both relate to being little boys sans a father figure. I tell him, "I always wanted a dad. And people who had them just seemed to take them for granted. Like they didn't appreciate them enough."

Now here we are, in the pinnacle of our manhood, practically daddys ourselves. Making up for lost time!

We also engaged that age-old gayman's discussion: Tiffany vs. Debbie Gibson, compare and contrast. (This should be an SAT essay question.) I said, "Well, Debbie was like a real musician. Whereas, Tiffany was more bubblegum."

My friend says Tiffany has leveled the playing field. He saw a recent performance and she seems to have at last surpassed her rival as a powerhouse vocalist. It's hilarious we're even having this conversation, and the queens at the next table are eavesdropping.

2011-07-08T19:07:00.009-04:00

earthquake (1974)

2011-07-08T00:26:00.001-04:00

"Preposterous!" says a fat woman leaving the theater. Preposterous, indeed. It's a joy to see LA destroyed. Fantasies of disaster. What are they really all about? In the 1970's, the disaster genre was prominent.

Could it have something to do with landing on the moon in 1969? Humanity realizing the fragility to civilization. In the disaster genre, disparate individuals must overcome their differences and work together for a common cause. Elemental survival, the rainbow of humanity.

Disaster fantastic is rather gratifying. There's a wish fulfillment to dreaming about the rupture of civilization, a reprieve from mendacity. Soap opera trivialities contrasted with life-or-death scenarios.

The special effects in Earthquake are thrilling, given a pre-cgi era of filmmaking. The sprawling ensemble cast lends only the thinnest of characterizations: typologies rather than fleshed-out people.

Oh Ava! As Hedda said, "Ava Gardner didn't care where she was as long as there was liqour close by. Really. To go from, you know, The Barefoot Contessa to this must be really hard on a girl. Really. Big Hollywood actress and then you're in a shit movie in the 70's....At the end, Charlton Heston has to decide between Ava Gardner, old dried-up drunk, or young snatch with firm bosoms. Old dried-up snatch, tits down to her knees, alcohol problem. Young tight firm. Stupid but firm. Smart but drunk. Who does he decide, people? And how does he decide? And what happens at the end?"

painting thought # 1

2011-07-06T23:28:00.001-04:00

when i paint, i feel like something new is capable of happening. some surprise in store. often we move through life semi-catatonic, not really here nor there. painting makes me be here! vividly. it's a call to life. rise and shine. that's what it says to me.

be here now! live in your body. the eternal present. be alive! that's the pleasure and joy and reward.

even if no one ever likes the end product, just the process of doing it lends my overall life a focus and clarity which it does not have otherwise.

cosmic cavern

2011-07-05T15:55:00.009-04:00

Here is my conversation with Kenny Scharf at last month's Cosmic Cavern dance party:

"Glad you made it! You're almost as hairy as I am," he says.

"Hmm." I pat his fur. "I like your mural on Houston," I tell him.

"It's over. It was finished yesterday."

"It was too bad what they did to it. But nice how you repaired it. Seemed darker the second time around. There was some 'evil eye' in it."

"You fuck with me and I'm gonna win," he announces forcefully, like Michael Corleone.

And with that, we boogie.

Kenny's parties are always so much fun. Like everything he touches. A warm basement, dayglo everything, happy souls, funky music.

When I biked home at 4am there was a light rain.

4th

2011-07-04T22:34:00.002-04:00

the leatherman

2011-07-04T02:16:00.003-04:00

The Leatherman on Christopher Street is one-stop shopping for all your kinky needs.

I'm something of a "presence" when I come thru the doors. "Nice tan," says one admiring-bitchy queen. "I like your profile," says a fuzzy bearded dad. Their customers, piggy dads and slutty lads, are perhaps the demographic to which I appeal.

I'd gone there to purchase--or replace--the neoprene cockring which the dumbass maid at the hotel threw out. It was sitting on the counter before she cleaned and it had vanished after. "She probably didn't know what it was and thought it was garbage," my friend explains, consolingly. "Mental note: in the future, hide the cockring from hotel maids!" I retort.

A cockring is a cockring is a cockring, and yet these circles of metal/rubber/plastic gain sentimental value to me. They are my magic horseshoes, my lucky charms. I think about all the wonderful boys a particular cockring has met and I want to cherish and treasure these obects forever, the momento left behind after the ephemeral encounter.

I ended up also purchasing a "cocksling" cockring today (like the kind they sell on Fort Troff) with one slot for your balls and one for your shaft. "They break," a fellow customer at The Leatherman warned me. "I'll be gentle," I say. "Never!" he says.

The store has a dungeon-like appearance. There's always a convival atmosphere, like a party is just about to break out. Of course, occasionally you'll run afoul of a clerk who seems to be coming down from her drug high and is in a very irritable mood. Fortunately, that was not the case today.

I enjoy browsing the paraphernalia. It requires a sleazy yet enterprising imagination to behold: the blindfolds and ballgags, the wrist and ankle cuffs, the spreader bars, the enema kits, the leather belts, the latex jockstraps, the assortment of things to insert. The contraptions.

Most of these posessions I do not own. Perhaps someday if I have a dungeon I will come here to stock up. Already, as it is, guys can be a little weirded out when they come over to hook up and see all my accoutrement laying about!

nude beach

2011-07-03T06:27:00.003-04:00

Gunnison Beach is a beauty. Where the breasts flop openly, the appendages dangle and swag sensuously, where the burning sun turns us purple.

It's a hike out here. A wonderful ferry trip on the glistening water, people having chugging-beer contests: who can poke a hole with a key into the can and swig it down the fastest?

The bodies are interesting. A demure mousy librarian-type with the best tits ever. Grandmas with sumptuously fat curveous udders smacked onto her, knockers that would put any flat-chested aspiring starlet to shame. A million-dollar bubble butt on an apparent straight boy, so white and cushiony it seemed as if it'd never been exposed to the light of day. A wide-open banged-out cunt on a whitetrash lady laying splayed open on a lawnchair, as if she was anticipating a gynecological exam.

A stud plays with his hole, while his boyfriend is positioned facing the other way. Stroking his cock discreetly, not glaringly apparent unless you have eyes for him. He likes to show off.

The heat and the long day in the sun make for an erotic energy. The crowd is laid-back. I watch a guy stroke the asscrack of bikini'd brunette, who didn't seem to mind. Laughter on the beach. When I arrived I finally found my friend S., camped out with his muscular buddy. The obnoxious squawking Hispanic heteros he is seated near cause me to relocate.

Finding calm gay brothers to position myself nearby, admiring the beauty all around. The beer bodies men sunset! When the crowd thins out later in the day there's less voyeuristic tension, we all seem to experience a tranquil benign appreciation for one another.

sandy hook

2011-07-02T19:34:00.004-04:00

marry you off

2011-07-02T06:20:00.002-04:00

"Someone should be appreciating you. I'm going to marry you off," my friend announces grandly. "I'll buy you a ticket to Hawaii!" He says like a game show host.

I laugh. "Like I'm a mail-order bride? You're going to send me away to a man!" It's amusing to consider. But I sigh in resignation. Like when Ava Gardner said to Mike Nichols, declining the Mrs. Robinson role, "Everyone's already tried! It's useless. I can't act."

"I am going to marry you off" sounds vaguely ominous threatening. Dark clouds on the horizon like "I am going to sell you into white slavery." Or perhaps, "I shall offer you as a present to our King Kong."

Yet my friend's sentiment is strangely endearing, a protective instinct gone awry. Like when my grandmother wished for me to devoutly worship Catholicsm. It's a noble plan! She saw Catholicsm as a philosophy that could save and shield me, even later on in life when she couldn't. Religion was her solution, while my friend suggests the answer is a hubby.

While I'm alone later, D's words echo in my head: indeed! Someone should be appreciating me. Yet wherefore art my Romeo?

D. knows all about R. a stud in Hawaii who is always on my mind. A blond stoner with a genius-level IQ. "Ugh!" More trenchant sighs.

D. tells me all about his Laotian husband, who as a child fled a refugee camp and arrived in Minneosta in the dead of winter, stepping off the airplane in summer clothes. Taken in by a benevolent church group. His gay American ascendency. Their marital bliss.

"That's quite a story!" I tell him, as I'm lounging on the couch on the 10th floor.

I've taken a hands-off approach to these matters. Destiny will be what it will be. Yet perhaps destiny sometimes requires a gentle push on my behalf.

I am reading Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving. He says love is an act of will.

myrtle beach

2011-06-30T14:44:00.009-04:00

Along came a spider and sat down beside her. Along came this hottie and sat down next to me, while I was sunbathing at Myrtle Beach.

New York! I often feel alone. Ironic anyone could feel alone in a place so densely populated. Yet when I go to places where the people are more spread out, I feel more connected to humanity. Even in the land of heteros, I feel more united with my fellow humans.

I pointed this out to a friend. He said, well in New York people acknowledge each other less, moving about the city. There's more an invisbility-factor somehow. Sometimes it feels oppressive, the pent-up stress of being here.

When I leave town I feel human again.

The best thing I did in Myrtle Beach was going to the aquarium! Sharks!

It's a whole new appreciation for what the world and what life really is. When I was there I remembered what a biology teacher told me, "Life began in the ocean. And something crawled out onto land. And something eventually became man."

2010-12-13T03:23:00.003-05:00

mental note: a couple vodkas and a tab of X, a bit o' viagra (just for fun) followed by a smidge of xanax and a crunched half of lunesta (just to come down) will REALLY knock you on your ass.

"i wanted to put a mirror under your nose to make sure you were still breathing. i had to shake you for like 4 minutes to get you up," M announces at 3 in the afternoon, when he's cooked a pancake breakfast he's requiring me to eat.

i trudge into the kitchen, pour some apple juice. dourly nibble the plate set before me: sausage, then eggs, only a couple pancakes."you can put the rest of these back in the fridge to eat later," i say about my leftover pancakes. before trudging back to bed, enveloping myself in blankets and passing out for about 5 more hours.

oh! what fun the previous night was. i thought of nomi malone as i was having sex in the bathtub, half-covered in water, flailing about. it was warm and wonderful.

hellos via grindr

2010-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

A beautiful stud. Random hellos via Grindr.

I sat alone in my apartment painting contentedly, daubing on dabs of white, touches of lavender.

I'm at a bar would you like to come have a drink? the chatting progresses. I'm trying to find an encouraging way to say no, to decline despite his allure. He nudges on. We talk about workout routines. He's headed back to his place soon, which isn't far from me.

Ok I can bike over. I resolve. It's not far. I'm only into cuddling, he says. Fine by me I say.

So to his place in Bushwick, the night feels calmly warm riding there. Desolate neighborhood despite the residential squeezed houses lining the block.

I realize I don't have is number once I'm there, so I text him via Grindr im here. I'm coming down. he says.

He's beautiful in real life too. Leading me up the steepstaircase to his second floor apartment I notice the packed mounds of ass vibrantly wriggling in front of me, through his tight jeans.

I enter and wash my hands to get the bicycle grease off. He seems kinda reserved or nervous or uncertain. I say, you wanna sit down somewhere? He leads me to his bedroom in the front, cooled by a huge AC.

We lay on the bed and talk and talk and talk. He's an xray tech in Stamford. Isn't that where the chimp attacked that woman? Yes, I was working in the hospital that night.

2010-04-11T00:34:00.002-04:00

The psych ward at Bellevue. If you weren't insane prior to checking in, just being there would do the trick...

baby jane

2010-02-16T19:01:00.010-05:00

I am going to force myself to do this, regardless whether I want to or not. I think it will be good for me.

What to write about? Last Thursday I went to the Chelsea Classics screening of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Like any good fag, I had seen this flick innumerable times.

Baby Jane. Of course the theater full of fags undergoes seismic upheaval when Davis snarls, "But ya are, Blanche! Ya are..." That delicious epithet. I think we all recognize Davis, despite her so-called psychosis, grasps reality better than her sister, who's in a quieter delusion.

But it is one of Davis' final lines that always brings me to the edge of tears: "You mean all this time we could have been friends?"

The revelation, too late, of what you could have been. The joy and love you could have shared. The way misunderstandings solidify into animosities and...life rolls by. The illusion of separateness. The corrosive effect of things left unsaid, poisoning life, destroying relationships. And the way truth lifts the veil, revealing these fractures were never real in the first place.

What's real is, to me, what the movie is all about. Living in reality vs. make-believe. Attempting to cross over from one to the other. Davis wants to be a star again, hiring a musician to help her. Hollywood would be the place to drown in delusion. She lives in her blond curls, and hideous make-up 24/7, ravaged by time. Unchanging, time turns her into some kind of freakshow. Unrelenting of surrendering the spotlight, though it's long since left her.

Trying to make your delusional dream a reality is an almost impossible task. Almost. But when Davis twirls to life again on the beach, surrounded by spectators, she is rapturously fulfilled. It seems everything she ever wanted and more. The interior and exterior have merged.

Joan is a "liar" as described by her sister. Joan's lies are more in what she has withheld. Joan, of course, seemed the lesser light of the two. She's a exquisite as Bette Davis, matching her punch for punch. She perhaps doesn't get the credit she deserves for this film.

"I made you (pause) waste your life thinking you'd crippled me..." Joan gasps. That pause seems rich, portentous with meaning. I. Made. You. The sad responsibility for the pathology you helped create.

nurses eat their young

2009-12-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

NURSES EAT THEIR YOUNG: a final 112 mini-paper by Brandon Aguilar

A major problem for nurses working in the profession today seems to be, simply, other nurses. Based on personalities I met this semester, talking with other young nurses, it seems bullying is part of the culture in nursing. Ironic that a caring profession either attracts or somehow cultivates abusively hostile, psychologically violent personalities.

A recent cover story in RN magazine stated, “…workplace bullying and related disruptive behaviors are commonplace, and on the rise”. The article continued: “The combination of a busy healthcare setting, difficult patient situations, and the requirement for interdependent relationships can serve as a breeding ground for incivility and bullying behaviors.” [i]

What causes this dynamic? Does serving an ungrateful public cause pent-up rage over time? Is the terrorizing just part of the initiation process young nurses must go through?

Perhaps bullies think of their intense behavior as somehow protecting the public good. Nurses who are convinced of their own rectitude (with job security and longevity) care little about how they are perceived by others. They can lose the veneer of human politeness.

Part of my reservation in becoming a nurse is the gender element. Do I really want to join a profession which is over 80% female? It’s a woman’s world, seemingly full of castrating tyrannical mothers and dragon ladies. Being a man in it seems a unique challenge.

But of course, the bullying culture transcends gender. My sister is a RN in OB at Menorah Medical Center in Overland Park, Kansas. Bridge and I talk on the phone a few times a week on her drive home. She tells me about a fellow nurse named Angel, who is anything but. Angel is an older lady who has been a nurse for 50 years. “She is such a bitch!” my sister says. “The clients fire her all the time. If she was my nurse, I’d fire her too. Plus she wears crocs, what ugly shoes….It’s long past time for her to hang up her crocs. Hopefully she’ll retire soon.”

Once Bridge and I were talking as she left the hospital and she said, “Oh no! I forgot to chart something. I have to call back.”

I said, “Do you really have to?”

She said, “Yes,” commiserating, “Oh no! Now I have to call and talk this bitchy lady. Ok. Gotta go.”

Jason is a friend of mine who works at Beth Israel. He graduated recently and has been working there for 6 months. He hates his job due to one of his co-workers, a bully who takes him into a private room to scream at him. I forwarded this article. He emailed: “I didn't read the whole thing yet but yeah - that's a lot like what I am going through with the bitch.” Then he later texted: “lets talk this week. actually spoke to my boss about her.”

Bullying, like all forms of abuse, thrives on secrecy and shame. Pretending it’s not happening doesn’t solve it. Bringing it to light, confronting the bully and exposing the behavior to others makes it harder to exist.

I was midway through writing this paper when last Thursday at the tube feeding station I came across Professor Lynch. Once again, I asked one simple question, to which she responded belligerently.

I said to her, “I don’t like your attitude. I think you are rude. And I bet a lot of people here will agree with me. Working with you at the nursing home was an unpleasant experience. You mentioned that phrase, ‘nurses eat their young’. Well, you exemplify it. You are in a position of power and you use it to intimidate people.”

She seemed shocked and yet almost relieved that anyone confronted her, that someone dared to mention the elephant in the room: her bitchy behavior. Lynch said she just wanted the students to do well and sometimes maybe gets carried away. I actually felt sorry for her: bullying indicates some fundamental inability to connect with other people. We had a good conversation. She said, “This is what you wanted to do. Don’t let people take it away from you.” Meaning, she understood her demeanor and behavior as a strengthening exercise, toughening us up for the real battles which lie ahead.

[i] Olender-Russo, Lynda. (2009 August). Reversing a Bullying Culture. RN, vol. 72 (No. 08), 26-29.

Retrieved Nov. 30, 2009 from www.rnweb.com/bullying

clinical journal 11-19

2009-11-19T13:21:00.000-05:00

An 82 year-old man with suicidal ideation and a busted hip. “I wish I could jump out that window right there,” he moaned in despair. Suicide threats are taken seriously in the hospital. He was on “increased surveillance” which consisted of a worker performing a half-hearted suicide watch. She sat, bored in the corner, examining her nails, ignoring as best she could, gossiping riotously in a Jamaican accent on a cell phone to her girlfriend.

Tatianna and I gave the client a bed bath. Being extremely gentle. The RN came in, tilted the bed backwards, tossing him around like used furniture. She seemed to have little regard for the agony she exacerbated.

Later in the day Mark, the male RN, stopped by to give meds. He did this by picking up pills with his fingers and inserting his fingers into the client’s feeble mouth.

I thought: someone needs to write a textbook entitled The Lazy RN’s Guide To Nursing, compiling all the various shortcuts for every occasion. It would be far more accurate as to what actually transpires. Erica, my fellow student, said, “They don’t do 15% of the things we learn in class.”

This elusive best-of-care model starts to seem like a fairy tale. Tatianna’s says, “It’s no wonder people get bed sores and infections in the hospital. They don’t even move the patients.” She described the CNAs as being lazy and shiftless. They hang around doing nothing until you say you need them; then they claim to be busy in the middle of something and will get to it, though doubtful whether they actually will.

How much of the skyrocketing cost of health care is a direct result of people not performing at the maximum of efficiency and capability? There seems to be widespread yet subtle institutional laziness. How many people in a hospital work hard and how many maintain the illusion of working hard?

Lately I’ve seemed to notice stories people tell: so-and-so went to the hospital and soon died. I think, “Well, yea.” My view of hospitals has shifted this semester. Previously I’d assumed they were an oasis of serenity and cleanliness. Now I know them for the treacherous places they are.

Anyway, McCluskey gave us a big demo and lecture on IV drip bags, killing people with air embolisms, and the time she had a client who’d broken a needle off inside himself. She wished us a happy Thanksgiving and we wished her one too.

clinical journal 11-12

2009-11-12T13:28:00.001-05:00

McCluskey has a print-out from WebMD, quizzing us on asthma. “What is asthmatica statis?” she queries. No one answers, and she expresses her perpetual disappointment. Expectations of us meeting reality.

Her mini-physiology lessons, canned as they are, seem unorthodox but amusing, a noble fight against the woeful tide of our ignorance and inertia. When she’s gone Victor says, “She is so fucking dumb. She’s asking me what asthma is? I had asthma all my life. Let me tell her what asthma is.”

The students have bonded this semester of endless clinicals together. Like veterans of combat we have a special appreciation for the joys and horrors inflicted and survived. We strengthen each other along, against the many potential pitfalls and personal trials. Undoing the bomb of McCluskey’s nit-picking, berating style of criticism. Wild camaraderie ensues among us the second she’s out the door.

I was the team leader this week, taking notes from the RN about the conditions of patients on the floor. The RN spoke in this rapid no-nonsense delivery, speaking medical jargon (this foreign language known only to the medical profession). I jotted notes down as fast as I could, maybe missing a few things. Learned about pyelonephritis. Spent the day observing, floating, helping.

Mr. S was an elderly man with a history of schizophrenia. He spoke like a raving wild-eyed prophet, with a sense of grandeur and doom. We were skeptical of his verbalized history, though surprisingly it was confirmed by his chart. Indeed, he was from Colorado and had hobo-ed to New York City. Being homeless, they were keeping him at St. Vincent’s a few days though minimally seemed wrong.

He’d tried to attack some hospital workers the previous night. He’d ripped out his catheter. Causing blood in his urine, pink water in the toilet bowl, blood on the floor (which Victor cleaned). His id band was missing, which McCluskey sent me to replace. Before wrapping it on I explained, “Mr. S., it’s important to keep this on. This is how we know that you are you.”

Like a gruff but curmudgeonly and agreeable grandpa he says, “Well, ok, but I need to have it on me before I can keep it on…”

We were giving him his medication. His phosphate was missing from the cart so I took a slip to the nurse on duty to acquire it from the pharmacy. The man wondered about the commotion. “We need to give you phosphate, and it’s not here,” McCluskey said.

“Phosphate! I don’t want no metals.”

“It’s important for your electrolytes,” McCluskey says, guilty of speaking medical-ese.
“Electricity?! From that there socket! I don’t want no electricity.” A strange kind of logic, a window into his mind. If you don’t know about electrolytes, it sounds an awful lot like someone wants to give you electricity.

“Uh…ok,” says McCluskey, upbeat and pleasant, realizing he’s in another reality. Later back in the room she says, “You don’t want to challenge them.”

clinical journal 11-5

2009-11-05T13:25:00.000-05:00

McCluskey. Everyone in our group seems to hate her more each week. Though we all agree what a nice sweet lady she is. Her chainsaw-like drone, the endless rambling lectures do little to endear her to us. Everyone complains wishing they were in the Kilts group.

An old lady’s enema. The metallic rancid stench of blood. People announcing they think they’re going to throw up. I wholeheartedly concur. The vile slaughtering blood scent.

I said, “It’s like in Cleveland. People thought it was the next-door sausage plant stinking up the neighborhood. When in fact, it was the local mass murderer and his 11 rotting corpses.”

So… that was the morning.

Being a nurse I suppose part of what terrifies me is the ick factor. The horror-movie-come-to-life aspect. Body fluids and feces and blood and gore and grotesqueries unimaginable. Ooze and odors and icky things. Ugh!

We gave a bed bath to Ms. W. Though unlike the textbook, the towels we had on hand to do the job were enormous. The bed got just as wet as the patient. We had to change the bedding.

Tatiana’s whiny insistence, begging the patient to comply, is truly obnoxious. It’s exhausting for me to watch Tatiana cajole a nonresponsive dementia patient. Expecting Ms.W to be responsive when Ms.W clearly isn’t responsive. I’m like, just fucking do it already, as the Nike slogan says.

The problem with student nurses is this wishy-washiness, not being authoritative enough. They treat patients like delicate dolls who will break at the slightest touch. This overly-cautious, inhibited approach is annoying and ineffective. While in the classroom setting, they behave like big babies (reviewing the tests: debating each minor point). Unfortunately, this lack of personal buck-stops-here leadership extends into other activities as well.

I wiped away Ms.W tears as she seemed totally traumatized by the experience. I would be traumatized too if these bozos were all over me. Victor’s too loud around patients, and while his car salesmanship demeanor may be effective in a jocular getting-to-know-you sense, it’s hardly the gentle presence I would want if I were an ailing patient.

Fortunately we got to leave around 2pm, by which point everyone was starving and mildly irritated.

clinical journal 10-29

2009-10-29T13:09:00.000-04:00

At least it was an interesting day.

The most memorable event involved McCluskey (attempting to) insert orange fluid into the feeding tube of contractile, inert Ms. W. The syrupy orange goo went splatter-splat all over dementia victim Ms. W’s face. The doused patient was roused from unconsciousness; she couldn’t speak but her flashing brown eyes communicated everything.

McCluskey rationalized about some backward force pushing forth from the abdomen, as if this caused a spewing eruption (when in fact it seemed just an unsteady hand).

There was something enjoyable and oddly reassuring in the disgrace of it. Not that poor Ms. Wilson gets soaked, but the humbling of our teacher. It lets you know: everyone has off days, even the experts. McCluskey simply declares in good humor,“That was a disaster,” grateful that the patient’s daughter enters just after the show, not before.

Nursing can be a humbling job. But McCluskey demonstrated the aplomb of getting through, going with the flow even if you flub. The courage to persevere, acknowledge mistakes and move on to the next task at hand. Obviously, nursing can’t be an exercise in perfectionism. Humans and their health can be messy.

The fat man assigned to me had cellulitis and big swollen legs. He is the subject of my first concept map. He has a laundry list of ailments: diabetes 1, pancreatitis, neuropathy, obesity, arthritis. The assessment went well, he was kind and seemed to enjoy speaking with me. He said people can’t usually find peripheral pulses on him because he is so fat. My student-grade cheapo stethoscope doesn’t make listening easy, and I’m thinking of investing in a Litmus.

Each week I’m more exposed to the essential need for preventative care throughout the lifespan. It seems many people in the hospital are being treated for states which didn’t have to be. Not random freak occurences, but slow debilitating (partially self-induced) maladies.

As far as my patient: we pricked his finger to get a blood glucose reading which was “through the roof”, whereupon we all realized he hadn’t been administerered his morning dosage of insulin, which led to my getting to inject him with 6 units of insulin. It was all good.

My first injection seemed like a virtuouso performance compared to McClusky’s disaster earlier.

nursing clinical journal 10-22

2009-10-22T13:07:00.001-04:00

Tension and confusion on the 7^th floor. The unsettling presence of another nursing school on the premises and talk of shutting this section raises questions.

A woman named Barbara comes into the conference room. She has amazing brown bouffant hair and a kind of old movie star glamour. She says she was, until a few years ago, the chair of the nursing department at BMCC and retired because she felt it just wasn’t something she could give her best to anymore. And once you start collecting your pension you can go back, she says. (Though it seems she’d like to.)

It’s a lively informal talk in which she shares about her life as a nurse. Later on, it seems like the highlight of the day. Working at Mount Sinai was the worst, she says.

Victor made the day pleasant. We were assigned a patient assessment together and it helped me feel much more confident approaching a patient with another student in tow, to help balance the interaction.

The patient had cellulitis of the lower leg with some yellowish drainage. The real nurse came by to peek under the dressing. “You’re not putting that back on?” said the client, so she ended up changing the wrapping though actually a doctor was supposed to. It was exciting to help with this task.

The man’s teeth seemed ground down into nubs, like meth users sometimes get. I was interested in looking at his mouth, but didn’t.

The CNA asked Victor and I to assist with moving another client. An obese lady was supposed to stand out of bed and sit in the chair which looked like wheelchair except with a bedpan attached. Victor’s like, “Why don’t you just roll a bedpan under her?” This seemed like a good idea and that was what we ended up doing on the count of 3. Teamwork made it less of an ordeal than it could have been.

This was my first day of actual physical hands-on contact. Seems like each week it’s a lifting of the many myths surrounding the nursing profession and exposure to more of the real-world actual way things are done.

nursing clinical journal 10-15

2009-10-15T12:57:00.002-04:00

Professor Lynch is a drill sergeant barking orders and demanding questions. I thought she was going to kill me for arriving with a blue ink pen, not a black one as mandated. Stab me through the jugular vein with the dull tip of my ink pen.

“Why are you unprepared?” She snarls. I’m like, “Uh, sorry.” “I got no Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts today?” She seethes, frothing at the mouth, angered by everyone arriving without the NANDA list of diagnoses, (not that anyone suggested bringing this). “My daughter says I’m intimidating,” she cackles, as if declaring it somehow lessens it.

It takes only an hour or so at the Mary Manning Walsh facility to begin to see the place as many of the clients seem to. An Upper East Side prison. The residents are confined within their bodies: voices that cannot speak, limbs that cannot move. But also, caged within the institution itself.

An old biddy valiantly rolls her wheelchair to the open mouth of the elevator, huffing and puffing, staggering to an illusion of freedom. “Wait!” Yells the nurse manager, “Stop her!!!” And so grandma gets snagged back to luckless reality, the captivity of Mary Manning Walsh. Several minutes later, surreptiously, she breaches the metal doors and inches her way aboard the descending elevator. “Aw, let her go,” says the weary nurse manager, tired of babysitting the ungrateful. “They’ll bring her back anyway. That chair’s got an alarm on it.” The students look a bit quizzical at this laissez faire attitude. The nurse says, “And they WILL too.”

A widespread ailment among the sad frozen faces seems depression. We’re given a lengthy lecture by Professor Lynch (in which she seems almost nice) on why depression is not a nursing diagnosis. My patient is 94 year-old former school teacher who loved the opera. He occupies a corner room, shared with another man across the curtain. The loud television remains on throughout his day of intermittent napping. “Are you going to be here after today?” he asks me hopefully, encouraged by the prospect of a human connection. I didn’t want to say. “No,” (the correct answer) so I offered, “Well, I don’t think so but there’ll be other students.”

One thing I realized it’s that I have trouble finding pulses, especially on my 94 year-old. Does he have one? I guess I need practice on this. In retrospect, I wish I would’ve talked to him more. It seems the nicest thing I could’ve provided, as he seems beyond lonely.

I wasn’t always sure what to do with myself, as I didn’t want to hover in his room and bother the client every 10 minutes. Fortunately, Professor Lynch assigned us drug cards to write, an activity which can occupy endless hours if one lets it. I enjoyed reading the patient’s chart, a War and Peace sized tome of his duration at Mary Manning Walsh.

“How much Lisonpril does he take?” Screeches Professor Lynch. “Uh, I think 20 milligrams a day,” I answer tentatively. “Don’t think,” She hisses. “Don’t think: KNOW.” I’m astonished by her abusive behavior. She likes to boast about being from the “class of 72” but one begins to wonder about the corrupting effect of longevity.

At the end of the day, walking out in the rain, another student says optimistically, “Well, it’s only one day”.

a moment with cheyenne

2009-10-13T13:15:00.000-04:00

Cheyenne Jackson in his fitted black suit appeared gloriously after the screening of a tedious 1968 film called Finian's Rainbow. Led onstage by the bewigged Brini Maxwell.

"I love your coat," Cheyenne cooed.

"I wore it just for you," Brini offered. "It's a rainbow."

It was a question & answer period. "Do you have any good Xanadu stories to share?"

Cheyenne was stumped.

"Did Olivia Newton-John come?"

"She was there the first night. She sat right in the front middle. But Keri Butler kept her cool."

He says he and Michael Feinstein are "bosom buddies", but I wonder what that means? I wanted to raise my hand and ask the only pressing question, "Top or bottom?" but that seemed inappropriate.

Someone in the audience asks, "Is Cheyenne your real name?" He perks up, happy to be asked something he knows the answer to. He says yes! it is, though people think it's a stage name. His mother was inspired by some tv show, which led to his unusual name.

He pulled my number out of the popcorn tub. It took a moment to grasp the reality of what had descended upon me. Many times have I attended Chelsea Classics, never winning. Let alone winning on a night when Cheyenne Jackson is presenting the prize.

He shook my hand. "How did you like the movie?" Brini asks me.

The crowd was butt-numbed from the unendurable saga, the tedious spectacle. "Oh, it was very long," I say diplomatically, and the audience politely chuckles in agreement. "It could've been condensed, but I guess they had to remain faithful."

I told Cheyenne that I'd seen Xanadu and that I even had a t-shirt. He said, "Oh! You were the one!" amused at his own stock reply.

And I thought this must be what he says to all his fans, all his lovers. That sharp retort: "Oh! You were the one."

Ms. 45

2008-08-27T11:57:00.000-04:00

Director Abel Ferrara came to the Anthology last Saturday night. Bounding from the back of the theater, he says glumly,"That was the pink and white version". Referring to the degraded quality of the film print, which casts a post-disco 1981 Manhattan in glowing pinks and soft ochres.

The crowd is in a state of rapture after the screening of Ms. 45. Abel Ferrara, a scruffy scraggly demigod spins tales to the late-night crowd of devotees. He calls the Anthology, "The Ziegfield of the Lower East Side," comparing that storied movie palace to this stark cavern, frequented by cinema junkies.

"It's bittersweet," he says.

He laments there was never another girl like Zoe Tamlerlis, the queen of the film. “She thought heroin was the elixir of life,” Abel says. “She’d say, I’m so glad we’re to the point of our relationship where I can shoot up in front of you.”

“And she’d stand there with a needle hanging out of her arm. She wrote the script of Bad Lieutenant this way. Other people would say, oh, we’ve been writing for eleven months, we should have a first draft by the end of the year. This kid wrote one-third of the movie in the time it took ‘em to drink a beer. She’d sit down, and oh, the pages would come flying out.”

Her brilliance still radiates through Ms. 45. “She was 17 when she did it,” he says, like a proud parent. He explained the challenge of the casting process: to find a girl who could convincingly play a deaf-mute on a killing rampage. "We looked and looked at girls. Probably saw hundreds. But then one day, she was out in the waiting room of our office. And I looked through the window and saw her and said, we've found our Ms.45. I knew instantly."

Zoe Tamerlis emanates a mysterious presence. Unfamilar with her legacy, I thought perhaps the actress really was a deaf mute. Her beauty conveys an inner depth, a sense of self-possession, worlds within.

He clarifies: "She didn't die from the heroin. She was weaning herself off it. And switched to coke instead to get off the heroin. But it was the coke that got her."

The film Ms. 45 is part so-called “exploitation flick”, part black comedy/slasher film. Rarely have I seen a movie that blends genres this seamlessly, or a low-budget movie this intelligent and entertaining.

Watching it I didn’t know what was going to happen next. After having seen thousands of films, overly familiar with cinematic tropes, an all-too predictable parade of plots and characters. This film subverts the genre, a sophisticated defying of categories.

Audience sympathy turns against Zoe/Thanna when (it seems) she’s killed the neighbor’s dog. Everything else, we forgive her for. Strangely, she’s sympathethic as she bludgeons a rapist with an iron, as she hacks up limbs, deposits body parts across Manhattan. She’s our gutsy antiheroine as she blasts away at Central Park thugs. A thing of beauty stalking Manhattan in fashionable black, a murderous angel. And, yet, killing the pooch is too much to take. Audience identification with the character ends there.

This must explain the audience’s elation when the dog comes skipping up the stairs at the end, returning to it’s rightful owner. Disney reunions. The order to the universe restored.

After Abel spoke about the tragic life of the star, I viewed the film in a new light. Death and beauty. It’s has an biographical element. I’m always interested in the criss-cross of truth with so-called fiction.

Jezebel/A Stolen Life

2008-08-13T19:43:00.000-04:00

A Bette Davis double feature on a rainy afternoon in August. The Symphony Space theater sounds like it would provide better ambience than the crowded, makeshift basement with the smallish screen.

Jezebel was the better film though the audience broke into applause at the end of A Stolen Life (maybe if only to have survived it). A Stolen Life is perhaps from Bette's "box office poison" period, before she rose from the grave as Margo Channing.

Bette in Jezebel, eyes of fire, flashing venomous stares and billowing clouds of cigarette smoke. "I can fight better than you can," Bette tells her rival, pleading for permission to venture into the sick-land, determined to save the ailing Henry Fonda.

In the final scene she rides off into the plague territory, the final image is crackling flames. Into the hellfire Bette went and for this she got Oscar #2.

A Stolen Life is wholly unsatisfactory as a film. Perhaps this is why it was essentially remade almost twenty years later by Bette with the title Dead Ringer, a superior version in every way.

Bette plays twins, the good sister and the bad sister. One who offs the other, rather convoluted and nowhere near as pulpy and entertaining as Dead Ringer, which I can't help comparing it to.

Ends with a syrupy reveal, in which Bette admits the impersonation but gets her man anyway. Puke. Nobody likes happy endings. Don't they know?

Purple Noon

2008-08-13T19:37:00.000-04:00

Alain Delon, superstar. A sexy killer. Gorgeously evil. The windswept seas. Identity theft was easier back in 1960.

Purple Noon is a telling of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.

It's magnificent. Lushly photographed. I loved it. The world slipping away. A successful crime. Perhaps we've all dreamt of becoming someone else: how easy to slip into the skin, into the life, of someone not you. Erasing your life in favor of another. The aspiration seems understandable.

Luckily, our hero seems he's going to get away with the misdeeds. And he does. Until the final minute of the movie. The reveal. A dead body, awkward revelations.

I love movies that use their running time efficiently. If you had exited the theater one moment before the finale, you would completely have missed the point.

"He's too smart for a poor man," is one line I enjoyed, about the Delon character. There's an old French blond lady, who, upon learning of a death mourns, "We dance, cherie, we dance. And for what?"

La Piscine

2008-08-13T19:29:00.000-04:00

Romy Schneider burning up the screen. A golden goddess in love.

A black bikini which keeps coming off.

Alain Delon, weathered but sexy as ever. The romantic chemistry which only genuine lovers could offer. These two are not acting.

A drowning scene and a suspicious investigator.

I loved the langorous pace of this film, the dreamy, submerged-in-water quality.

I came home and wikipedia'd Romy, sadly to discover her early perhaps self-induced death.

Wet and gentle days in the sun. Hockney swimming pools, a lecherous record executive, mod 60s decor. Afternoon love, midnight drownings.

This was beautiful movie, a period piece, a casual way of life, a sodden murder, a perishing love.

showgirls

2006-09-20T12:07:00.004-04:00

"You can't touch me but I can touch you. And I'd really love to touch you." The rules are laid out, but somehow don't apply where Showgirls is concerned.

Showgirls was screened at the IFC last night. Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter, was there to speak afterwards and receive our belated praise.

Showgirls is the greatest movie ever made. It captures something about our culture that no other movie does. It is bold when most movies are timid. It is a miracle. It seems astounding that it ever got made. Perhaps it was a serendipitous accident. I'm not sure you could plan to create something this alive.

One wonders about the actor's embarrassment, as if they revealed something far more than they meant to. A deeper intimacy than is comfortable. Everyone associated with it seems to have had their careers go into the crapper for awhile post-Showgirls, as if the film was too much of a shock to comprehend. Eszterhas called it an "epic disaster".

It is only with time and distance can we see Showgirls for the joy it is. Perhaps people were frightened or repulsed by it initially. People are often disenchanted from things which reveal truths.

Showgirls exists beyond "good" or "bad". It is the story of Nomi Malone, a lap dancer who dreams of glory. She's a desperate girl who wins big in the Vegas entertainment world after struggling to define herself.

Nomi is disabused of her naivete, one shock at a time. She has flailing orgasms in midnight pools. She encounters predators and emerges heroic. She outshines the star.

Eszterhas said that Elizabeth Berkley was having an affair with the director at the time, which might explain the aggressive performance. She's assaulting her lover through the camera lens, and vice versa.

I was surprised by how accurately it depicts life in the adult entertainment industry.

Nobody thinks working in adult entertainment requires any skill, talent or dedication. They think anyone willing to disrobe could be a success at it.

Showgirls destroys this myth, showing adult entertainment as hard work, not glamorous. Nomi struggles to maintain integrity, though seduced by glitz and aggravated by pervs. She has a determination to rise, but ambivalence about what it means. It's a mixture of pride and disgust.

Who are the good guys and who are the bad? When does our heroine cross over?

The orphans working in the adult biz form families of their own. But it's a brutal family, and can turn lethal. "I can't use you if you can't sell. I can't use you if you can't show," says a producer.

It seems strange that Nomi, a realist, perpetually insists she's no whore. Cristal Connors reminds her "we're all whores". Not that the rules of realism apply.

A friend of mine suggested that films like Showgirls succeed because they possess an "internal logic". That is, perhaps when compared to other films, they may appear "bad". Yet, judged from within, if you're able to enter the world of the film, compared to itself...it's a brilliant fucking masterpiece.

I think of Showgirls as having an emotional truth. That's why we respond to it. Because we believe in it. It is honest about the way people are. The audience believes in Nomi Malone. Elizabeth Berkley gives a passionate performance. The audience cheers for her loudly, clapping at the immortal line: "It must be weird, not havin' anybody come on you."

Showgirls lets us visit this world of enchanted sleaze.

It's a beautiful experience. It feels like having really good sex. An unbridled letting go, like getting naked yourself.

Showgirls exalts in naked bodies. Not erotically, but just as bodies. Prior to the advent of the camera, this is what art always was. Mainstream Hollywood suppressed nudity. But this is what art, historically, always was. For centuries painters mostly painted the naked female form. It is classic. Timeless.

Showgirls is linked to a tradition that goes back centuries. It seems to yearn to burst into fullblown pornography. Yet it also retains innocence. The audience laughs at almost everything that happens. The movie's innocence is like a child throwing a temper tantrum. It is serious and earnest, but we, the audience, are not. We sit back detached and amused, riveted and rippling with laughter.

As I exited the theater, people were comparing it to Citizen Kane, the way both movies were first greeted as failures and over time became recognized as true masterpieces.

i walked into the party

2006-09-14T06:43:00.003-04:00

You know you're in for an interesting talk when someone starts a conversation with you with these words:

"Look, I know you're heavily into drugs."

It's like...what? I am? ....uh, ok.

I suppose when you live publicly, people are encouraged to use their imagination about you. Flights of fancy are encouraged.

If everybody knows you're a whore, it's a small leap to assuming you're a crack whore. But I could never deny anything. Every crook says, "I am not a crook."

Anyway, I walked into the party with a guy beside me. I suppose they thought he was my drug lord/pimp chaperone/ mack daddy/ lord and savior...but uh, anyway...

Elvis Aaron was there, my rock star muse. The hottest boy in Manhattan. He makes the room vibrate when he comes in.

Hooking up was like a mercy killing. He took me down, but he didn't have to. It's like when an animal is wounded, and you shoot it in the head, instead of calling for the doctors.

Instant healing, instant ecstasy.

fuck all ya all

2006-09-10T19:41:00.004-04:00

I watched the pathos unfold in this wonderful film called Factotum. It presents a series of vignettes in the life of writer Charles Bukowski. The fallible animal known as man.

A legacy of painful situations, one fuck-up after another. The lovable loser.

He reminds me of my father. He inhabits that netherworld, daytimes in bars, a man of leisure, smoking, gambling, sleazy women.

Actually, Mr. Bukowski reminds me something of myself. I am something of a bum myself. A bum on the fringe. I couldn't hold down a regular job either. Either. Someone explained to me that being talented and being able to access that talent are entirely two different things. Sometimes they intersect, sometimes... not.

Before I did porn, it was a challenge to find something(?) that I could do. Productive work. Yes, I could write poetically and paint a pretty picture. These were not skills the world is throwing money at.

I took a poetry class once in college. The teacher forced us to read our works aloud and then offered nit-picky advice. At my final review at the end of the semester, I sat across from her and she said distastefully, "Mmm... Hmm..you are... something... of a...hmm...poet?"

I looked at the scrawny bitch and thought, it took you all semester to tell me this? My friend Karla said, "Gee, I coulda told you that 5 minutes after talking to you." Anyway, I'm glad I did not major in poetry in college. I may be dumb, but fortunately, not that dumb. To get a college degree in poetry. What a prank!

Having a degree in painting, as it is, seems like an arcane joke. Ha ha! People laugh when you tell them. Painting! You get it: how to waste your parent's money. Painting! How to fuck your life. Shall we wear a beret and speak with an accent? How to say FUCK YOU to the world a world of sensible shoes and safe choices, plodding in the name of progress.

Fuck you, practicality, and your stable jobs in your sleepy towns. Fuck your 401Ks and snappy business suits, and go-getter mentality. Sometimes I think this attitude has not served me well. Rebellion seems a dreary teenage thing, it's not supposed to continue into your thirties and beyond. Is it? Sometimes I think if I had parents who gave a damn, my life would've turned out very differently. My contrary nature stems from watching the wrecks of their lives unfold, as they aspired to be nothing-much-middle-class.

But usually I think, it's genetic. My father, the career criminal.

life at the movies

2006-09-10T19:34:00.004-04:00

In college I almost got a minor in film criticsm, inadvertently. I kept taking classes. Who knew you could write a paper on The Blue Angel. And. Get AWAY with it. Passing off as intellectual plundering and keen scholarship what seems more like a gay man's cocktail chitchat.

Many an afternoon growing up I spent with MGM, in "glorious black & white" or widescreen Technicolor. Before I took film classes, I already saw the icons.

My earliest memories of movies are going to see Star Wars, age 3 or 4. We ate hot dogs first. I don't remember the movie; I remember the hot dogs.

As a kid I always watched Jerry Lewis comedies on Saturday afternoons. They were my favorite. I liked Elvis movies too. My mom and I watched The Birds together. She was frightened; I protected her. And of course there was that memorable movie where ants attack Suzannne Sommers. (As a child you aren't aware of highbrow critical opinion; you just like what you like.)

Horror movies always fascinated me. I was always trying to watch things I wasn't supposed to see. The allure of an R rating was intense. I remember the burning feeling of longing I had as a kid to see blood and gore. Nothing so exotic and thrilling as girls getting chopped up. I was banned by my mother.

In 1980, for awhile, we had cable television, which came with a clunky remote control, a plastic box with brown woodgrain laminate on it, to look like wood. It was connected by a cord to the television. How wonderful to not have to walk across the room to change the channel! We felt like kings. A remote control, what a novelty.

Forbidden also was Indiana Jones (something about skulls the my caretakers were concerned was inappropriate.) Especially forbidden was Tootsie, I was already faggoty. A story about a man dressed as a girl could only exacerbate this unfortunate condition.

The movies which fueled my imaginative life most were the Irwin Allen disaster flicks, When Time Ran Out and The Towering Inferno. I liked the soap opera-ish narratives. Playing outside I imagined I was Paul Newman crawling across the mouth of a volcano or perhaps Faye Dunaway in a descending glass elevator.

Somehow I managed to watch The Shining on cable a few times. It was terrifically boring, until about the last 20 minutes. When Jack Nicholson starts coming through the door with an ax. I didn't understand it at all. I could relate to the little boy who's chased through the snowy maze by his father who wants to kill him. That image never left my mind.

When I was a teenager, I worked in a library after school. I had access to videocassettes of any old movie that existed. I brought them home from the library to watch, educating myself about Hollywood.

By this time my mother was married and I never seemed to see her anymore. I would bring old movies to my grandmother's house and we'd watch them together. "Oh, everybody's dead already! Who cares! What's the point?" my grandmother would say. (Once you were dead, in her book, you were irrelevent and might as well as have never existed in the first place.) We watched them anyway. She told me about when her and Papa used to go downtown once a week to see a movie for 10 cents. But now he always fell asleep so they didn't go as much.

It was thrilling being a young person and stumbling upon classic cinema for the very first time. Sometimes I miss the newness, when you hadn't seen any of the classics yet.

In college film classes, I learned about world cinema, the avant garde. The history of the world, as told through dreams.

This was a thrilling time of discovery. Only lately, I seem to be going through a similar process with gay x-rated films. Sometimes on a set, a director will ask me if I've seen this or that obscure title and I have to answer, "no". I was not a huge porn fan prior to starting. And so now I am educating myself about the history of porn cinema. My current favorite stars are Blake Harper (who I met once) and Aiden Shaw. I am systemically working my way through their fimographies, watching everything they've done. I buy their dvds on ebay and have allocated a shelf on my bookcase to their oeuvres. I am approaching it like a mystery to be solved. I'm the detective looking for clues, trying to figure out what makes them so fabulous?

my joan collins beauty book arrived!

2006-08-29T01:45:00.003-04:00

My Joan Collins beauty book arrived in the mail from ebay recently.

It's wonderful. Helpful advice for anyone. All her girlfriends, erstwhile movie queens and washed-up starlets of yesteryear, gracious hostesses and dames with names--they all expound on the subject of (gasp, sigh) growing older.

I wondered who ghostwrote it. But then I noticed... it's written in prose extravagant yet stilted. Romantic yet an admonition, the petulant voice of Alexis herself. Could it be Joan took pen to paper? I love this book. Someday I am going to write one just like it and reveal all my friend's secrets.

Here's a few things I learned:

Angie Dickinson says it's important to smile as you get older, because otherwise your face looks too harsh. (I'm going to always think of this each time I'm photographed, the camera can be a bit more forgiving to a smiley face.)

Thin people don't drink Diet Coke. What's up with that? We don't know, but it seems not in your best interest.

Exercising too much is just as bad as not at all. Our bodies aren't meant to look like superhero comic book characters. It can cause joint problems for yourself down the road.

Shirley Maclaine says, "Let go of the actressy thing." Which seems like good advice for all of us.

the train

2006-08-27T13:06:00.002-04:00

Something about riding the train clears my head. I can see forever. Some people gaze into melting sunsets to get that feeling, looking at eternity. I just ride the train.

A lot of my blog posts are jotted down while I'm sitting there. A passive detachment, your mind wanders elsewhere. It's a combination of, forced to be conscious, but without a demanding focus. Aware, but with nothing to preoccupy. Having an external source of stimulation, yet ignoring it, produces profound reveries.

When I sit alone in my room, often I feel braindead. Too mindless somehow to compose words, or to even read. I can't think all alone. Like a green flat line saying, "brain dead...pull the plug". So it can be maddening to try to overcome this lack of stimulation. When you want to write something, but feel to too caught up inside yourself to produce anything but gibberish. Bored with yourself.

Humans are meant to have activity swirling around us. It comforts and calms. We're not meant to be isolated or not have stimulation. This must be why prison seems an excruciating punishment, the feeble nothingness forever.

So my mind comes richly alive, on the train. My life unspools as I click-clatter down the track. An entrance to clarity, reverie, fantasy. There often seems a spirit of sexual tension in the air on the train. Riders glimpsing each other. How many others are wondering about ripping off clothes? Sometimes I wonder about how big each man's penis is (I can usually guess accurately). Daydreaming about how and who every man around me would fuck.

I can read books on the train and absorb the material. Engrossed. If I'm trying to read a novel I can't get into, I think I should ride the train for 5 hours.

I wish I could finesse the art of cruising boys. My friend tells me to brush their leg accidentally on purpose. My friend claims he's fucked guys in the little rickety open-air passageway between cars. He used to ride the NRW line to Astoria, which carries all the homos to Queens (appropriately enough). The fruits are yours for the picking.

When I was young and guys checked me out, I used to wonder how far it could go. I usually eventually ignored their gaze, having better things to do. But then I thought, what if I didn't? What if I followed and matched every suggestion of theirs with one of mine? How far could it travel? Would we wind up fucking our brains out?

I've seen all sorts of strange theatrical tableaus playing out, a one-act play the universe constructs for your personal viewing pleasure. Entering a train car is like coming to a party filled with people who don't want to be there. There's that destabilizing moment, upon first entering.

I saw two black broads duke it out last weekend. They got into a "yo mama is...this and that," debacle. I thought they were going to rumble right there. Occasional schizophrenics wander through. There's the Aileen Wournos lookalike making her nightly tour. She gives a speech (in a heavy drone): "You people have stolen everything I've ever had. COULD YOU PLEASE GIVE A LITTLE OF IT BACK?" She then walks through with her hand out. Having emitted her threats into the air, like a skunk. And the women clutch their handbags a little closer.

There's the one-armed harmonica player, managing to clutch his harmonica to his lips and hold out his cup for change. There are the boys selling M&M's. They sometimes say, "I'll be honest I'm not selling these for charity. I'm just trying to support myself and stay out of trouble," as if we, the captive audience, should applaud their tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds.

Sometimes it's hard to have sympathy for the beggars. They'll give a hardluck story, and once this chirpy black princess answered back. "Oh, girlfrien'. I was once homeless. Here you go to this place in Williamsburg, they hook you up." She starts to give out the phone number, but the derelict scowls and slinks away. It's not help they want, but a handout.

The train can be a psychotic ward, the parade of the mentally ill. Drooling on themselves. But I also once saw Debbie Gibson (or Deborah) riding in Brooklyn. I didn't bother her. Sometimes I doodle inventive graffiti on the posters as I'm waiting for my train, adding to the collection already there.

New York's trains provide a physical closeness with random strangers, which I think people like. LA is not like this at all, and it leaves you lonelier. So there you are on the train smelling a tourist's armpit, pressed against someone's thighs.

I can't stand it when some big-boned chica smears her nasty hair all over me. Flinging it around like a frisbee, ratty split ends brushing all over you. I'm like: Get. Your. Hair. Off. Of. Me. Girls give me cooties. As a true homosexual, I wretch at contact with these bleeding dickless animals who carry slabs of fat hanging off their chest. Girls. Eew!!

It also aggravates me when someone walks up and starts playing a polka acordian full blast in your ear (while you're trying to talk on the cell phone). Though some subway musicians can be sublime and endearing: off-tune riffs of "Last Dance" set to a karoke machine. The mournful lady who sings, "Don't go chasing waterfalls..." An old black man singing "Against the Wind" and you know he's lived every line of it: "We were young and strong and runnin against the wind." But most subway musicians are pipe-dreaming losers defeated by the record contract that will never come their way.

The ghetto'ed, the blinged, ranting riff raff, the clueless tourists, exhausted mothers, business types and the occasional stud. It's a Noah's Ark. The rich, I've heard, never ride the subway. They think it's unsafe and filthy. Who can disagree? Yet it's an education and entertainment in itself. The journey is the destination.

2006-08-21T09:39:00.001-04:00

At the sex club, I am Christ among the lepers. Unleashing the light. Bringing magic to men in the dark. The roaming souls need me. I am available. There for you.

I wore my 2xist briefs, tighty whiteys bring good luck.

Eating the ass of a hot boy is my all-time favorite sexual activity. Tossing salad, they call it. The wrongness is oh so right. The squash of the buns as I press in. My face in an ass. Wolflike.

I love the smell of a crotch. There was once a boy I sucked, his lap smelled like fucking heaven, animal, musky...better than... Pheromones (they call it). Animal scent stimulating behavior. Moments like that, I would give anything just to keep being there. I could die completely satisfied.

Thank God for hot boys.

I guess it fulfills our evolutionary purpose. Sex. Passing along our DNA, making babies but not.

I love gay boys. No other group has that...the physicality, the readiness to fuck, the willingness to share, the dire acceptance. It can be good to be with another, alone together inside your body. Anonymous lovers seem to understand. No explainations necessary. They can sense the joy and the pain. The truth is evident.

When you make lovefuckingnoises, you get a sense for what it is like to be the other person. You become alike, even if only for a little while.

Sex puts me in a trance. Deep thinking.

Sometimes fucking backtracks the imagination, a remembering those who knew me when. Endless days of childhood. Uncles, daddies, grandfathers. I'll bet my daddy never suffered like this. Do they know what became of their boys?

Little boys who became gangbang toys. There is a beautiful symmetry to it all, leveling out decades of our lives. Little boys...turning into dungeon maidens, gangbang triatheletes, leather floosies who just can't stop.

Driven mad by sex. I like to think that everything else is madness and this is the sanity. This is the antidote, not the affliction. The world is the lie, and our grinding bodies are the truth. Our lives are only truly ours, belonging to us entirely, when we fuck.

Sometimes it feels like a crime, or a dream. What if...? What if you fall in love with darkness? What it you invite it home and give it a place to stay? The wrongness that the world will not understand, a light that makes it all alright. A light that floods your past, illuminates everything, turns your orbit around.

When I'm at my raunchy best, it's...just you and me. "Society" is not in the room with us. We have shut the door. All the yap yap yapping voices, gone. So-called experts have been banished. Good advice won't help you.

Sex can be like communal voluntary self-destruction. You can accept the consequences of the unknown.

every jihadist's wet dream, or "boom boom! it's so easy!"

2006-08-12T04:17:00.003-04:00

My friend wants to send bouquets of flowers to the Pakistani & British intelligence officers who foiled the plot. 10 aircraft blowing up in succession, fireballs over the sky. Can you imagine how horrific that would be? We would never want to fly again.

She says of the terrorists, "To them, 9/11 was fabulous. Every jihadist's wet dream. Boom boom. It's so easy." Dancing in the streets. Jubilation.

Last 9/11, I rode the boat around Manhattan, the city a glittery jewel. A shiny capitol, but that only tells half the story. The other half consists of Muslims in black, praying on the ground, worshipping, slithering, thanking their gods for our destruction.

On the jungle gym of the Al Qaeda training camps, every girl wants to be a star. To slit a throat, to steal a spaceship. Into infinity; it's ours.

Why airplanes? Why don't they just open fire at a rock concert? You could take out thousands of drunk teenagers before anyone would notice. My friend explains, "When any artist finds a new way of doing something...and it's a masterpiece, they can't think outside of that box and keep doing the same thing over and over. They are in love with planes. Planes represent modernization, and that's what they despise."

Bombing the world must be the easy way. Living is hard. "Hell, it's hard enough if you're a white person in London." Let alone being a brown-skinned dreamer with a thirst for vengeance. "You're stuck in this hovel of Old Europe. Their ways are not your ways. You're in France--and you don't even like stinky chesse. Yet still, it's better than the land you came from."

Strapping a bomb onto yourself must be ultimately easier. It's harder to live within the world, and attempt to change it. It's more challenging to come to the capitol like a proper working girl, than arriving in glittering Manhattan by commandeering a highjacked hellbound spacecraft-missile. Murder is faster, the thrust of instant gratification, short-cuts to everything."The killer in me is the killer in you," as the Smashing Pumpkins said.

She says, "Human beings haven't progressed that much. It wouldn't take too much to convince people...ethnic cleansing, oh, what a great idea! Why did that ever fall out of fashion? They'd give it a new name. We're stuck on the crazy train and we're never going to get off."

About the war in Lebanon, "It was overreactionary of the Jewish people. Sorry, but a handful of dead soldiers isn't equal to destroying a nation's infrastructure, killing civilians, elderly and the little children."

How is it that Pamela Anderson's wedding merits the same world press coverage as Hezbollah and Al Qaeda? World shattering events, of equal magnitude. Side by side, bloodied casualties and Pam's basketball-sized boobs. Crushed baby's skulls. Wearing a white bikini to her wedding...each cancelling out the other, into tabloid fodder, trashy and ludicrous.

World annilhation/Pam's wedding. Should we feel guilty if we'd much rather read about Pam first?

2006-08-09T18:04:00.002-04:00

A long conversation with a guy who is lovesick. We met at a party, went out and got Chinese, talked for hours. He was blue oh so lonesome.

The boy he's crazy over doesn't like him, (driving him crazier). His "love" is taking out restraining orders against him, in fact. You know when this happens that something has spoiled in the fridge, a foulness, a stench.

When it comes to this, you are not sharing the same dream. Or whether you ever were. Perhaps reality is not an experience that is shared.

Now, my new friend is fucking each thing that moves. Sluttiifying himself as a defense, to forget the rejection. I said, maybe you just secretly want to fuck everything.

Preposterous, he says.

I tell him. You're meant to spread your seed far and wide. It's the way of nature. And if the only way to accomplish this is through romantic devastation, so be it. Biology doesn't care.

You're given yourself a license to kill. Sometimes the only way to be free is through a kind of nihilism.

My sad friend goes on about the guy he's obsessed with: Joe's this and Joe that. I'm like, it's not about Joe. It's about you. How did you get here in the first place?

Anyway, lately I seem to be playing The Naked Therapist. I come over, take off all my clothes, sit on the bed and dish out philosophical wisdom. Playing Dr. Phil. I don't have all the answers, but I'm constantly fascinated by the wide array of mental disorders the average person seems to have.

my chart

2006-07-20T23:13:00.002-04:00

Since everyone offers me copious amounts of unsolicited advice about my life...I thought I should ask you something I want to know.

Here's my astrological chart. If anyone has zodiac know-how, feel free to clue me in. I'm not sure what it means.

I am a Libra, an air sign ruled by Venus. I was born on October 10 1974 at 10:11 am, central time in Kansas City, Missouri. It was the tenth day of the tenth month at ten in the morning.

I had an astrologer once tell me it's unusual to have 5 of your planets in the house of Libra, as I do. I seem to be a textbook Libra. They describe me to a T, things like...

"a joy on the social scene...prone to mood swings...brings out the protective nature in others...can be overwhelmed by sadness...often brilliant...associated with thought and communication...innate sense of beauty...diplomats of peace and justice..."

It's a portrait of me. My little niece Anna was also born on October 10th, a family coincidence. Alot of the people I'm close friends with are either Cancers or Leos. (Happy birthday everybody!) The Cancers I know are emotional and funny. The Leos I know are spiritual. It seems like Libras are often sensual, skilled in romance, ruled by Venus.

I have a doctor friend, who explained that he thinks there's a scientific explanation for what we call astrology. When a baby is gestating in it's mother, the conditions the mother experiences are vital to determining the genetic makeup of the baby. We don't know the exact effects of sunlight and weather changes on a pregnant woman. If a woman has a Leo baby in August, she was pregnant starting in December. Perhaps the change in light and temperature of seasons has an impact on creating individuals who exhibit traits of being powerful and passionate, like Leos. Or some hormonal shift could create Libra babies who end up being sex pigs.

Perhaps astrology was invented to explain genetic differences which are influenced by external factors.

It's an interesting theory. Maybe it's science afterall?

quotations

2006-07-12T16:48:00.002-04:00

I've been compiling quotations since I was a teenager. I have this once-blank volume which I add to whenever I encounter something memorable. Taken together, it's kinda the portrait of a person looking for wisdom. A philosophy to cope through the world, a theory of life. It's filled with advice on how to best live, from disco singers to ancient philosphers.

Here's some good ones:

Whatever you are, be a good one. Abraham Lincoln
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. Willa Cather
In my opinion this is the truest love--but it is certainly fatal...so it is with art. Eleanora Duse
Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately. You rape it. Edgar Degas
He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals. Benjamin Franklin
Who would be free must themselves strike the blow. Frederick Douglass
It is not enough to conquer; one must know how to seduce. Voltaire
Never trust a survivor...until you find out what he did to stay alive. Kurt Vonnegut
It's better to have love that's forbidden, than to hate with permission. Gloria Trevi

madonna 7/3

2006-07-04T10:42:00.003-04:00

Again last night. A friend wanted to see so I got tickets.

I am not a psychotic fan, but I can't think straight before the show's about to start. It seems to be a faggoty who's-who of New York gay society. Everyone was there.

My throat hurts from yelling so much for two hours.

It was a different experience the second time. There's always 3 or 4 epicenters of action simultaneously; you can't see it all at once.

She said, "It's almost the fourth of July. We should celebrate our freedom. We're free to do or be anything we want, within reason." The audience seemed to be wilder this time than last. "There are some of you who are still sitting down. My front row bitches aren't liking that."

When she says, "The night is young, and the show has just begun,"it seems a bit hokey, like she's reading a line out of Body Of Evidence, "Have you ever seen animals make love?"

I noticed the careful choreography, the movement tied to the lyrics. Singing Like A Virgin,"when you hold me," is at one point on the stage, "when you touch me," is at another, and "when you love me," is toward the center. The show is always the same, but always a little bit different.

The song "Isaac" seems the only moment which didn't work. You could forget the world's greatest star is there. Mania evaporates for an instant. You start looking around the auditorium, ho hum, what's next?

During Live To Tell, sad faces of children flash across the screen, a la Sally Struthers footage. Then comes the quote from Matthew 25:35: "For I was hungry, you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethern, you did it to me."

Those words linger: you did it to me. YOU DID IT TO ME.

Ouch. We have crucified our queen. We have let our children perish. We are killing each other. It's an indictment of man's inhumanity to man. There is the theme of time running out, and we need to save ourselves. "Tick tick tock it's a quarter to two..." Bombs juxtaposed with orphans. "You'll wake up someday and it'll be too late."

She seems to have a adversarial relationship with her fans. "You motherfuckers!" she'll yell. Mock confrontation, ironic sass drives the crowd crazy. A sadomaschochistic love affair. Madonna's the dominatrix top; her fans are the bottom bitches who need abusing.

"I'm tired of waiting on you," are the last words she speaks to the crowd. It seems to mesh with an earlier song in which she asked, "Should I wait for you? My substitute for love." Are her fans her substitute for love? She's saying she cannot wait for us. Life goes on, as she sinks under the stage. She cannot live for her fans.

"I'm tired of waiting on you," echos. She needs the real thing, not the substitute. It's about departure. Betraying the lover who left you hung up. Saving yourself.

At the beginning she comes from the sky, descending from the ceiling, and at the end she sinks into the underground, like a grave, the trajectory of life from birth to death.

But when that disco ball opens, and she is standing there like a machine robotic, lashing her whip. The crowd hemorrhaging, blood vessels bursting.

A robotic Dietrich. But the real Madonna emerges a few songs into the set. When she's sweaty, her hair disshelved, scrounging the floor; earth mothery. That's when she's the most beautiful.

madonna 6/29

2006-06-30T01:10:00.002-04:00

"Put away your past. Love will never last if your holding on to a dream that's gone."

The whiplash force known as Madonna emerges from a disco ship, commanding future lovers rise. I'm going to tell you a secret. Dita in black lace, boots, riding crop. From the skies, a hurricane. Shocking. Electromagnetic waves ripping through the crowd. I feel love, I feel love, I fe-e-e-eel love.

The performance roars with a fighting vigor. Life is worth fighting for. Art is worth fighting for. Resist. She could raise the dead. She could lift the planet, and has. If no one believes in religion, Madonna can make you a believer. Her devotion is afire.

She trots like a pony, dancers in brigade formation, galloping a formal waltz tiptoe traveling skipping across the stage. Very tongue-in-cheek.

She dons a crown of thorns and presents herself crucified on a mirrored cross (martyred to disco?), rising from the floor like a vampire. Campy, but incandescent. Comedic the way her Sex book is: comedic but no one's laughing.

African orphans flash across the screen. Flames, Saddam, Bush, hell. She is singing as the brown-skinned children, "If I ran away, I'd never have the strength to go very far. How will they hear the beating of my heart?"

She addresses the audience in impromptu remarks, "Everytime I do my show I die a little. But nothing's worth shit unless your willing to die a little bit for it," she says.

The energy is what humans felt a million years ago, when we were all still one ball of light. Ancient earth cult that somehow manifests today. The pulse of our blood. Primal, the past is the present. There's not many public venues in our culture where you're allowed to scream and worship simultaneously.

She does not merely make an appearance (like an apparition of the Virgin Mary). I imagine this woman has been in the bowels of Madison Square Garden since the crack of dawn. Horseback riding her dancers, yogaing her legs to splits, practicing electric bull gyrations, feathering her Farrah hair, overseeing gypsy roller skaters.

Does she never stop? Does she never know exhaustion? Ruled by tireless compulsion. She announces, "I am so fucking tired. I slept for 3 hours this morning. But your energy and your happiness is contagious."

Lights exploded everywhere when she sang I Love New York. She changes the lyrics to, "You can fuck off. Just go to Texas and you can suck George Bush's dick." The song is Dada. It soars like skyscrapers, "I love New Yooooooork..." and echoes like wind on sidewalks, "Get off my street, off my street, off my street."

Oh, Madonna...life goes where she goes. Addison says in All About Eve, "There never was or ever will be another like you, Eve. There couldn't be." Madonna's power is eternal, an intricate artifice. The artificial lasts longer than the real.

Gays recant her obscure trivia like straight boys proclaiming baseball scores. The obsessive fans around me seem grotesque, carnivorous. They think they are her. "Oh, I will be so glad when this tour is done,"a friend of mine once lamented to me. He was a groupie who globetrotted in her wake, pretending he was the suffering superstar.

If you appreciate Madonna you shouldn't be a groupie. Instead, you should be yourself. Take up your disco cross and follow her example by ruling your own life. She would not be a groupie. She inspires one to light the torch and fight for themselves.

Oddly, much of the audience watched the screen, not the stage, eyes fixated. This is our TV age? The living embodiment is right before your eyes, and you look away? So you can watch the flickering image? We're trained to think that the screen is more alive than the flesh. We're trained to not believe in reality.

The final number: high heels, a white-purple sequined bodysuit. A cape like a prize fighter that reads Dancing Queen, the vanquishing superheroine. Metallic balloons fall from the ceiling. Phantasm. "It's an illusion...I can make you feel better," she had sung.

Now, prancing off, "I'm tired of waitin on you,", the final thundering defiance from Hung Up. The stage descends, the cast disappears. I peer in with my opera glasses and I can still see her. The moment she is offstage in the dimness underground, she slumps against a column, as if unable to walk or move an inch. One of her female dancers (Nikki? Donna?) hugs her shoulder and props her up to carry on; sauntering off, surviving the battle.

gay pride

2006-06-26T15:28:00.002-04:00

Rainbow flags, they make me gag. Gay pride is like school spirit, something I never had. And yet, gay men are the only place I feel at home: hence, my sex career. Am I supposed to feel solidarity? Chanting in the streets, sparkled and spangled. I strive to be as apolitical as possible. The show can go on without me.

Is New York Gay Pride not a redundancy? Who in Manhattan isn't a faggot? It seems like the queerest place on the planet.

I skipped the parade & attended the market in the evening. Remants and ephemera clogging the wet gutters. At it's best, Gay Pride is a celebration of world peace, universal brotherhood. At it's worst, it's drunken louts having too much fun, proving gays no more enlightened or advanced than straights, though more grandiose in their debauchery. Straight people are not what's keeping gay people down. In fact, half the people at New York Pride seem to be straights.

Where's the edge? The danger and marginalization? We liked being gay back when it was outlawed. The dirtiness has been sanitized.

Times in my life when I've loved Pride are when I'm alienated. I come to the party and surprisingly discover I am not alone. The ball is ours. Gay Pride is a symbol of acceptance, like floating on The Love Boat: "Love won't hurt anymore. It's an open smile on a friendly shore."

craigslist

2006-06-16T04:23:00.004-04:00

I read the m4m craig's list ads like great literature, a record of fantasy and tragedy.

Is Your Toilet Bowl Dirty?-30 (Park Slope)
Abduction Roleplay (Chelsea)
Throatpussy for Married/BI guys to use -38 (Rego/Kew/FHills)
Sweaty Gym Ass.......-33(ues)
Looking 4 JACK OFF Buddy -str8 porn- no oral- no kissing -36 (midtown w)
Need Breeding NOW & all weekend...-33 (Brklyn/Ft.Greene)
you want to get stoned and make out; so do i
wanna show off my panties for you-23! (NYC)

It's the menu at a restaurant for lonely horny anonymous souls. How does it get to this point, when you're leaving the front door unlocked? When you're waiting with your ass greased, blindfolded for unknown lovers to unload inside you?

Perhaps you could stop for a moment to contemplate what led to this path, and what you are hoping to achieve. Could there be a different model for how we could exist in the world? Is craziness a necessity? Do we need this? Are there no fulfilling alternatives? What if the choices are A, B, or C and you want none of the above?

In sex you visit other people's erotic imagination. It can be a disappointing peek behind the Wizard of Oz's curtain. Drearily, the fantasies are all the same.

selina at the bunny ranch

2006-05-20T03:19:00.004-04:00

Selina made it to Reno, where the tailpipe fell off her car and she became stranded in the land of whorehouses. Her car died at last, having driven thousands of miles these past weeks on a manic spree. "How perfect," she exclaims, far from despair. She asked me to look up directions to find her way to the local brothel. She called me later and said she'll be working at The Bunny Ranch, beginning Sunday.

I told her I thought that was great. "How exciting," I gushed. "I wish I could work in a whorehouse. You'll probably make lots of money."

She said she wants to find out exactly how they work. "I know people who are investors," she declares madam-ly. I told her to find out why there aren't any gay brothels in Nevada and what we should do about it; it would seem a prime market.

She met a man in Kansas along the way (isn't there always one?). A pot-bellied businessman who threatened to take care of her. "Don't go to the cathouses," he squabblingly pleaded (like a cat himself) upon learning of her plans. Men are always falling in love with Selina, offering refuge which she denies. "I don't want to be stuck in Kansas, the mistress of some businessman," she says. "Brandon, you're the only one who thinks this is a good idea. Other people are warning me not to join The Bunny Ranch."

"You can earn you're own way. You won't have to rely on anyone else. It's a good feeling," I told her. Prostitution is a noble calling. It has been given a bad name by those who aren't good at it. Done properly, it can be an exquisite practice.

She checked into a Days Inn, awaiting her new life as the new cunt in town.

weddings can be depressing

2006-05-12T19:44:00.002-04:00

Weddings can be depressing. I'm not sure why. I felt like sobbing throughout this one. There's a line that Marilyn says in The Misfits, "All the husbands and all the wives are dieing. We're dieing, and we're not teaching each other what we know."

Life is going too fast. Being in a church is alienating, like I'm from another planet than these people. Where's my fairy tale?

The wedding was short. There wasn't a Mass because the bride wasn't catholic. She met him when my cousin went to a job fair recruiting new college grads for his company. She got the job, and the man.

Anyway, my sister got up and did a reading. Some nonsense about Eve springing from Adam's rib. Hetero guys really like to congratulate themselves with that one.

I used to shun family gatherings. I felt like the proverbial bastard at a family reunion. Always an outsider. But then one day I had an ephiphany. I thought, "I've been coming to these for 30 years, why should I be an outsider? Actually, I'm as insider as it's possible to get." From that time on, I've loved family get-togethers. Everybody else is just as fucked up as me. There's the divorcees, the alcoholics. We all have a scandal we're trying to suppress.

At the reception afterwards, there's the multi-generational disco. You know the one, when grannies boogie beside toddlers to music everyone knows. I will survive, YMCA, We are family, get up everybody and sing. Moments like this it can feel like you are at the end of a Julia Roberts movie, and the credits start to roll up. And there you are on the dancefloor. If only for a moment, there's cohesion and unity and a feeling that everybody likes each other. We've somehow gotten through our whole lives together.

And that it's a good thing, being alive.

pot brownies

2006-05-11T20:24:00.002-04:00

My friend gave me a pot brownie as we sat around the campfire. Innocent-looking, a gentle brown square of kindness.

I took the dare, eating it up. I announced my victory like George Bush declaring mission accomplished, "This is doing nothing for me...nothing...noth..." And yet a strange lightness crept over me, a heavy stillness, like the sky smashing down, collapsing like a Hyatt Regency onto my head.

The world gets smaller, until it's a tiny pin prick and I travel through. There I met all my old friends, waiting for me. Flashbacks to 1980, yesterday once more. I felt clarity, like the consciousness of my childhood, when life made sense. I could connect the dots and things were funny.

I told my friend Greg to watch over me. Hot boys wanted to jump me. They said I was half-comatose, zonked out of it. He put me to sleep, and the sky was still immensely heavy.

I used to be "anti-drug". I gave lectures to my boyfriend about the nullity of marijuana. He would smoke up and I would suck his cock. Ah, those were the days.

Anymore now, I think drugs are a good thing. If you want to blow your brains out, go for it! Why not? What are you saving yourself for? Who's to say it makes a difference? I'm all for expanding consciousness.

I guess my view of the world has changed. Life is painful for everyone. It's but a Vale of Tears.

Honey, kick back. Get some comfort. We're only here on earth for a little while. That's my philosophy now. Do all the drugs you want.

amongst the radical faeries

2006-05-09T19:57:00.002-04:00

The homo hippies. The pothead pagans. The transgender vegans. The sex magickians. The ganja lovers. The Al Gore aficionados. These are the radical faeries, where attitude is everything and hair dye helps.

On a mountain, under the sky, flourishing in the forest. What a blessing running water and electricity is! You never know until it's gone. Yet it's easy enough reverting to primitive instincts, becoming again the animals we once were.

At night the forest was black, deep. Torrents of rain dampened our spirits and possesions. The wind hisses through the trees. One night, I got twisted around, my sense of direction failing. Feeling with my fingertips through the woods, unable to see the hand in front of my face.
Isolated in the woods it's easy to believe in magic spells and mysteries untold. Phantoms of the past: the woods are millions of years old, but we are temporary.

I spent a lot of time ignoring people, even those who knew me from porn. There were campfire rituals and morning circles I skipped. Spirituality in groups is not for me. Though pagans and witches, any form of group spirituality is to me but a short stetch to the odious shackle of The Church.

And I didn't engage in sex follies until my stay was almost over. Post-sex, I like to pat my lovers on the rump goodbye and send them on their merry way. Not encounter them breakfast, lunch and dinner. I waited till twilight fell on my journey.

I exhausted my appetite for vegetarian cuisine. Greg & I took his SUV to town one afternoon. I ordered steak and potatoes at the restaurant we went to, glad to be a carnivore, sinking my teeth into dead flesh, as the music of Bob Seger wooed us.

Everything on the commune has a bedraggled dusty look, yet a utilitarian optimism. The maypole is a ceremonial tree wrapped in bright colored fabric, like a giant candy cane towering in the sky. Peasants frolic about it. Everyone has earthy names like Starflower Moonshine Orbithoney.

The 1960s never ended; at least here they live on.

the impassioned eye

2006-02-05T04:58:00.002-05:00

I saw the film The Impassioned Eye, about photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, who shot this image of Marilyn. It was a documentary about his life. It is nice to know that even in a person's late old age, they can remain interested in life and their work. He was still very vital. Arthur Miller came on and spoke about how Cartier Bresson captured Monroe's intelligence when he photographed her. You could tell that Miller still loved her by the way he talked about her.

It was a good movie, and makes me want to break out my Nikon and go snapping pictures.

what about me?

2005-12-28T10:46:00.002-05:00

I had a good session with my therapist last night. He's like a gay Barbara Walters, with the rapt quality of his attentive listening.

I told him I hadn't bought anyone a Christmas present in like 10 years. I couldn't care less. I don't have the adoration of material possessions that everyone in our culture seems to be in thrall of.

He says I built a wall around myself and isolated myself behind it.

I told him that everyone thinks I'm gentle and soft, but my essence feels cold and efficient. Making everyone think I'm such a sweetheart is just part of my survival mechanism for getting along in the world.

He says I need a good way to channel my anger because anger is vital. I am not sure what you are supposed to do when people treat you badly? I like to make people feel good. But who makes me feel good? Who gratifies me?

rebellious youth

2005-12-13T21:04:00.003-05:00

When I was a teenager, I was definitely a problem child. For awhile when I was 14, I got sent to the principal's office nearly every single day. I thought I was surrounded by morons, and I made sure everyone knew my opinion. (My shrink now says maybe I was seeking parental attention.)

Of course, they were difficult years for me.

At home, I was ignored. Nothing I did roused my parents interest. Except when it did. My stepfather would punch me and knock me down and throw me out of the house. Later I would have to apologize to him for him hitting me. My rage only grew with time.

While at school, often I was the butt of jokes. I was faggoty, there was no denying it. Among a certain sect, this was anathema. The poofy-haired suburban conformist teenagers would be no friends of mine. Of course, among a different band, my homo chic had a sort of cachet.

The other social rejects and I got along splendidly. The so-called alternative crowd was welcoming with their black makeup, ripped pantyhose, and combat boots. Goth or granola. I would wear skirts to school sometimes and change my haircolor on a daily basis. I delighted in startling people. The artist crowd, who truly appreciated style.

I transferred to a school for smart people, which was the best thing I ever did. My behavior problems stopped. Other kids didn't make fun of me anymore. I made good grades, though I still had attitude adjustment issues.

As a young person, I was stranded, adrift. Young people often feel this way. No respect for the pathetic world which they came from. No mentor to guide them to make good choices about the rest of their lives.

It's not to blame. But as I've gotten older, I realize my whole life would've been different if I'd had decent parents.

he no longer wished to be dead

2005-12-01T23:42:00.002-05:00

"He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him--as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life." Paul Auster

the kids in williamsburg

2005-11-20T01:45:00.002-05:00

The kids in Williamsburg wear Bjork hairdos, haute couture from thrift stores and an air or arrogance. Walking like they own the place, though only in the recent past the neighborhood belonged to poor Spanish people. They are virtuous in their middle-class psuedo-alternative consciousness. They bought their rebel status from the store, just like everything else.

They have an air of entitlement, strutting down Bedford Avenue as if they were brilliance personified. Each one thinks he/she is ravishing the cutting edge. Of course it is just a mask for their ordinariness. An extended post-adolescent fantasy that bland twenty-somethings indulge in. They are like babies having a tantrum, but no one cares.

Someone said they should rename this neighborhood Urban Outfitter-ville. Here you can proudly flock together with peers in your storebought identity. I want to be "different", just like all the other "different" people.

Of course, maybe their homely homes and educational systems have failed them. Maybe it takes this kind of bravado just to be a young person, usually from nowhere, attempting to scale the walls of Manhattan. Williamsburg is rehearsal for real life. You can pretend you're still in high school and that the world cares what you think. For all it's so-called funk, Williamsburg is safely sanitized, and curiously dead. No real angst or counterculture could ever flourish here, because there is no strife, no danger, no threat and no possibility. It is shopping-mall America, with shabbier clothes.

In it's own way, its as fake as Las Vegas but nowhere near as glitzy and delicious. This is why I will be delighted to bid adieu to the rapist hipsters and their home called Williamsburg.

when he sleeps

2005-11-05T01:46:00.002-05:00

When you are sleeping, I am loving you. I close my eyes and love you. There's a river of light I am sending to you.

I watch him sleep for hours. I look at the pores of the skin of his face, the golden hairs of his eyebrows, the curious scar on his right shoulder. Somehow the whole history of his life is written there on his body, if only I could decipher it. He is the whole world, boiled down to a drop. Sometimes he sleeps with his eyes partially open, but not seeing, like a dead man's eyes. I wonder where his soul goes when he sleeps. Does it fly up to heaven for a few hours?

I feel a sense of sacredness about it. I am standing on the edge of a terrific void, there is a vastness before me. Like looking at the Grand Canyon or something. I think about the miracle of evolution, that it took a million years to create this mortal. I think about his Swedish ancestors and wonder what they were like.

It's like what Sister Helen Prejean says: what a human being is, is far greater than even the worst thing they could ever possibly do.

the hopeless realist

2005-09-22T16:53:00.002-04:00

Greg described himself as a hopeless realist. I explained, we live in a world of infinities. How can you be hopeless about anything?

Greg and I are a lot alike, however we have different philosophies which shape our lives.

I've always accepted the premise that reality itself is subjective. There is no one absolute reality that we all share. Rather, "reality" is a shifting multi-hued thing. And it should be shaped by what serves your highest interest, with what works for you and the rest of the planet.

Greg despises capitalistic imperialism and seems to regard me as an emissary of it. It is not my fault that Starbucks and Walmart have overrun the world, I plead. I don't shop there!

The problem with being truly intimate with someone is that it stirs up all kinds unconscious complexes and idiosyncrasies. It awakens you. Things about yourself you might rather not examine. Too much light makes the baby go blind, they say. Your childhood, your past, your fears, your hurts, it all comes to the surface.

it almost rained today

2005-09-14T23:17:00.002-04:00

I came across a contingent of Elvis impersonators today near Times Square.

I also went to see the re-released The Outsiders. There's a ton of beefcake in it. I sobbed like a little girl when Ralph Macchio died, and then Matt Dillion. It was a double whammy. Bring the kleenexes if you go.

Greg and I had a heart-to-heart talk tonight, as the heavy grey clouds soared over our heads. It's not looking too promising. He's moving to Montreal in the near future anyway. I like to keep things light and somehow this has gotten heavy.

I started reading a book called The Vagabond by the French writer Colette. She describes herself as a "woman of letters who's turned out badly". I can completely relate.

poems

2005-08-31T01:26:00.004-04:00

when we divorced, we split half of everything
(or actually you took a bit more)
you got the left coast and i got the right
you got the daytime and i got the night
i got times square neon. you got pacific light
yea babe you took the light
you took the light

**

the love that was leaking
the juices were seeping
the boy was destroying
the bodies were whoring

ouch!

2005-05-10T23:45:00.002-04:00

I went to a Japanese girl today for a haircut. She hissed and cackled and called my current 'do "80's hair", (whereas I preferred to think of it as Joey Stefano-esque). She then proceeded to make origami shreds out of it. I got a silky pedicure from a Russian lady and I walked out looking like a sex god.

Another memorable person I met over the weekend was porn star Tony Bishop.
Tony seems such a wholesome boy. He's packing an enormous tattooed cock. The tattoo is indecipherable when shriveled, but upon inflation, becomes a cryptic celtic design. His cock resembles a medeval sword of armor. I tried to take the whole instrument in my mouth. "Sorry, I tried," I said.

We had eaten dinner together the day before, he ordered some Chinese noodle dish and shared gossip. He wanted to push Bobby Williams, his future co-star (next week), into the swimming pool. But Tony didn't feel good over this weekend. He was sick, though he still looked like a million bucks. At the Inappropriate Behavior party, he wore a black jockstrap emblazoned with the words "Nasty Pig". When I left the party, Tony was shackeled to a wooden cross, much like Christ himself. Naked, his backside exposed, his flesh being flogged. I watched him submit to this discipline, meted out by a lecherous old man, his skin turning rosy red under a burning sun. To the enraptured audience, he stuck out his tongue, like a naughty child at play. I wanted to run my tongue all over his beaten body. I wondered what strange pathology leads such a seemingly good boy down this life of strife? But then I remembered that I should know these answers well enough myself.

my trainer

2005-05-02T21:43:00.003-04:00

His blue eyes are bright, his eyelashes glimmer, his veins pulse in his arms. My personal trainer is a god among mortals, an Adonis in sneakers, striding through the debris. A man of dreams, but also flesh.

He's straight. Unfortunately.