Joe, C, David and I attend "Broadway on Broadway", a spectacular free live sampler of all the musicals currently on Broadway (and a few about to open). PS: David just got a part in a production of "A Little Night Music"!
"Perge modo et qua te ducit via dirige gressum," said Venus to Aeneas.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Coney Island after labor Day
Joe's make-up contained no SPF, but his purple parasol kept away the crow's feet.
Last Day of Summer Camp - Central Park, Labor Day
We're calling it Sprite Hill, and I think C and I have the right to name it because we first staked it out. We brought Joe and a few friends there, and Joe invited others. It has been called Gay Hill and Blogger Hill, but the unifying element is the portage of wine in emptied green Sprite bottles so as not to offend Park policy.
Friday, August 25, 2006
The Extent of My Diplomacy
Earlier today I attended a “Change of Command” ceremony at a Navy base.
The artillery boomed, the band played sweetly and dignitaries were piped to the front with a color guard and an escort of sailors in strict formation.
After the speeches, the outgoing Captain strode to the center of the platform, and faced his replacement. He actually said, “Sir, I am ready to be relieved”. The incoming Captain read his orders and said, “I am ready to relieve you, Sir.” What followed was not exactly what I was hoping for.
I brightened, however, during the reception, when a dashing officer in dress whites offered me a tour of the facilities, including the gymnasium and the barracks.
It would have been rude to decline.
The artillery boomed, the band played sweetly and dignitaries were piped to the front with a color guard and an escort of sailors in strict formation.
After the speeches, the outgoing Captain strode to the center of the platform, and faced his replacement. He actually said, “Sir, I am ready to be relieved”. The incoming Captain read his orders and said, “I am ready to relieve you, Sir.” What followed was not exactly what I was hoping for.
I brightened, however, during the reception, when a dashing officer in dress whites offered me a tour of the facilities, including the gymnasium and the barracks.
It would have been rude to decline.
The Extent of My Economics
I attended an event at a nuclear power plant yesterday. In the afternoon, I began to have trouble keeping awake. I went to the back of the conference room and stood next to the remains of the lunch buffet. I inhaled fumes from the burning sterno cannisters. Eight of them.
At the opposite end of the room, the mayor of a small coastal city was delivering a rant about economic diversification. I leaned right and whispered to a member of the Governor’s staff, “If he’d legalize all the pot and prostitution in that town, they wouldn’t need to diversify.”
He touched my cufflink and asked, “Is that the state seal?”
“Yes. Rendered in 18 carat gold plate.”
He noticed the seven small pleats sewn into the cuff and said, “All my shirts are by Brooks Brothers.”
“Do you get the no-iron kind?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid to put them in the wash so I have them dry-cleaned anyway.”
“That is very wrong. You need to be punished.”
“How?”
I make no reply, and we turn to face the podium pretending to give our attention to the mayor.
At the opposite end of the room, the mayor of a small coastal city was delivering a rant about economic diversification. I leaned right and whispered to a member of the Governor’s staff, “If he’d legalize all the pot and prostitution in that town, they wouldn’t need to diversify.”
He touched my cufflink and asked, “Is that the state seal?”
“Yes. Rendered in 18 carat gold plate.”
He noticed the seven small pleats sewn into the cuff and said, “All my shirts are by Brooks Brothers.”
“Do you get the no-iron kind?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid to put them in the wash so I have them dry-cleaned anyway.”
“That is very wrong. You need to be punished.”
“How?”
I make no reply, and we turn to face the podium pretending to give our attention to the mayor.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
The Extent of My Politics
I attended an event at a nuclear power plant today. I ate mini-muffins and drank bitter coffee while speakers wrestled with wireless microphones and kept droning “Next slide, please”.
I ducked out just before lunch to make some calls on my cell in front of the building. The fourth estate vultures were gathered together waiting for the arrival of the Governor, the AG, and various nervous incumbents.
A highly polished car pulled up, disgorging Senator Joe Lieberman who straightened his suit and tie, smiled at the cameras rushing toward him and decided to shake some hands on his way into the building. I was the first person in his path. He greeted me by name after a quick glance at the ID fastened to my lapel, and just as he shook my hand, I shouted into my cell “No! Last year you gave us too many cookies and not enough beverage.”
The Senator looked puzzled for a moment and then gave me the two-handed grip that exudes sincerity while leaning in closely to whisper “I’ll try to do better this year.”
I ducked out just before lunch to make some calls on my cell in front of the building. The fourth estate vultures were gathered together waiting for the arrival of the Governor, the AG, and various nervous incumbents.
A highly polished car pulled up, disgorging Senator Joe Lieberman who straightened his suit and tie, smiled at the cameras rushing toward him and decided to shake some hands on his way into the building. I was the first person in his path. He greeted me by name after a quick glance at the ID fastened to my lapel, and just as he shook my hand, I shouted into my cell “No! Last year you gave us too many cookies and not enough beverage.”
The Senator looked puzzled for a moment and then gave me the two-handed grip that exudes sincerity while leaning in closely to whisper “I’ll try to do better this year.”
Comment deleted
At Jeff's request, I reviewed and deleted a comment on the previous post that he found offensive. I agree with him (and with C whose opinion I sought) that the comment was much too personal an attack and not focused on the topic.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
"Don't make me put my baby down."
Someone sent me this link to an opinion piece published in the New York Blade. The writer, a New York blogger, had just seen “Gay Sex in the ‘70’s” and felt moved to express some thoughts that clarify for those among us who ever gave him the benefit of a doubt the distressing way in which his mind turns.
I have stopped by his blog roughly a dozen times in the last couple of years. His writing always left me unsatisfied, but I returned perhaps because I am easily fascinated by men who are well educated but seem not to have fetched much truth or insight from their discipline.
I met him once, at a gathering of bloggers. We were introduced, and when he heard the words “farmboyz” and “Perge Modo”, he winced. He actually winced and grimaced, albeit briefly, and swiftly supplied a patronizing and pained smile in an attempt to cover his distaste for the introduction. It was the look I have seen on the faces of some archbishops when forced into contact with an unsifted and unwashed assemblage of laity.
I extended my hand, and he looked at it with horror as if I had just sneezed upon it all the contagious detritus of hell. To his credit, he did manage to shake my hand without fainting. He then avoided conversation by moving to another part of the room. Guess he had read a bit of my blog. Guess he didn’t much like it. Guess he had consigned me to hell.
I had never before had the experience of being judged in that way. Never had it since. It is not a good feeling. Throughout my entire life, I have never once felt judged in that way by God. Never once felt condemned or even disapproved of. There are church leaders who are swift to roll their eyes at what I write or do, but even they have never diminished their opinion of me an inch because of the choices I have made. They simply pray harder for me, but while praying, would never avoid visiting me, or calling me or consider cutting me out of their lives because of how I have lived my life.
Perhaps he would recall the moment of our introduction either differently or not at all. Perhaps the dissing was all in my head, imagined. It does not matter. In the New York Blade article, the excruciatingly odd thoughts he strings together about sex and disease and behavioral consequences seem to come from the provinces of childhood nightmares, or seem like lessons gleaned from a book of fairy tales intended for the small of mind.
It would be easy for me to list the possible reasons for his disliking anonymous sex, but I don’t know this man well enough to get it right. Were we to meet again, I would probably tell him that men who choose to spend their days perched on their sofas with their legs crossed tightly at the knees should not trash the Olympics just because they themselves choose to be unathletic.
I’ve been a runner all my life. I am sure this has done some damage to my knees and shins, but I am not about to start campaigning against marathons. I’ve tried not to run too much. To stay on forgiving paths. I don’t run drugged or drunk. These days, I keep to the right, letting the faster or younger have the inner track. But I would hate to think what life would be like without the exultation of the race, and I would never blame Nike for whatever aches and pains I’ve had along the way.
I could go on, but to what end? You can’t much reach men like that. They condemn the things they are afraid of. Things they might love too much. They cling to the safety of their convictions like mussels to rock in waves.
PS: - and perhaps a source of greater indignation – his characterization of the men of the ‘70’s as “unkempt” is simply ignorant. We spent most of our waking hours kempting ourselves into a look somewhere between Al Parker and Farrah Fawcett ( the opposite ends of the narrow bandwidth of beauty in those days). Would that we had had the luxury of the buzz cut, or clothes from the Gap and butch boots available at any mall. We might have had more time for sex.
I have stopped by his blog roughly a dozen times in the last couple of years. His writing always left me unsatisfied, but I returned perhaps because I am easily fascinated by men who are well educated but seem not to have fetched much truth or insight from their discipline.
I met him once, at a gathering of bloggers. We were introduced, and when he heard the words “farmboyz” and “Perge Modo”, he winced. He actually winced and grimaced, albeit briefly, and swiftly supplied a patronizing and pained smile in an attempt to cover his distaste for the introduction. It was the look I have seen on the faces of some archbishops when forced into contact with an unsifted and unwashed assemblage of laity.
I extended my hand, and he looked at it with horror as if I had just sneezed upon it all the contagious detritus of hell. To his credit, he did manage to shake my hand without fainting. He then avoided conversation by moving to another part of the room. Guess he had read a bit of my blog. Guess he didn’t much like it. Guess he had consigned me to hell.
I had never before had the experience of being judged in that way. Never had it since. It is not a good feeling. Throughout my entire life, I have never once felt judged in that way by God. Never once felt condemned or even disapproved of. There are church leaders who are swift to roll their eyes at what I write or do, but even they have never diminished their opinion of me an inch because of the choices I have made. They simply pray harder for me, but while praying, would never avoid visiting me, or calling me or consider cutting me out of their lives because of how I have lived my life.
Perhaps he would recall the moment of our introduction either differently or not at all. Perhaps the dissing was all in my head, imagined. It does not matter. In the New York Blade article, the excruciatingly odd thoughts he strings together about sex and disease and behavioral consequences seem to come from the provinces of childhood nightmares, or seem like lessons gleaned from a book of fairy tales intended for the small of mind.
It would be easy for me to list the possible reasons for his disliking anonymous sex, but I don’t know this man well enough to get it right. Were we to meet again, I would probably tell him that men who choose to spend their days perched on their sofas with their legs crossed tightly at the knees should not trash the Olympics just because they themselves choose to be unathletic.
I’ve been a runner all my life. I am sure this has done some damage to my knees and shins, but I am not about to start campaigning against marathons. I’ve tried not to run too much. To stay on forgiving paths. I don’t run drugged or drunk. These days, I keep to the right, letting the faster or younger have the inner track. But I would hate to think what life would be like without the exultation of the race, and I would never blame Nike for whatever aches and pains I’ve had along the way.
I could go on, but to what end? You can’t much reach men like that. They condemn the things they are afraid of. Things they might love too much. They cling to the safety of their convictions like mussels to rock in waves.
PS: - and perhaps a source of greater indignation – his characterization of the men of the ‘70’s as “unkempt” is simply ignorant. We spent most of our waking hours kempting ourselves into a look somewhere between Al Parker and Farrah Fawcett ( the opposite ends of the narrow bandwidth of beauty in those days). Would that we had had the luxury of the buzz cut, or clothes from the Gap and butch boots available at any mall. We might have had more time for sex.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Reflections on a TV commercial
I am taking a keen interest in the fact that the Bally’s “health and fitness” chain is advertising on Logo, the gay cable TV channel.
I guess they want more gay members. I guess they want more gay men and women to go to their facilities. Just a minute! My logic is off a bit there. Major and minor premises not matching. Bally’s wants money, and does not mind selling memberships to gay people in order to get it. That’s a safe conclusion.
This has implications.
If a potential member presents himself (or herself, and for the duration of this bit, let’s assume I am including lesbians in the gender-unbalanced mascu-speak of English), at a Bally’s gym and states that he is gay and is responding to the commercial on Logo, we will have to assume that a smiling and commission-driven salesman (Bally’s calls them personal trainers) will brightly say “No problem”, and usher the prospect through the usual tour of the facilities.
The prospect will soon find that Bally’s provides a total health and fitness experience at facilities designed for a good amount of same-sex group nakedness.
The “men only” locker rooms contain rows of lockers with no demure barriers or opportunities for the modest exchange of street clothes for work-out gear. In fact, street clothes and gym bags are not allowed on the actual gym floors. One could, of course, arrive in gym gear and avoid the locker room entirely, but that is not what Bally’s is selling, if the tour is to be believed. The locker room, the gang showers, the steam room, the sauna (in many clubs not co-ed) are pointed out as part of what you get for your membership.
Since Bally’s also targets the heterosexual market, it is safe to assume that the company intends for gay and straight men to be naked together as part of the total Bally’s experience.
This intention is admirable, sophisticated, curious and hilarious, all at once.
I, for one, deeply enjoy the fact that I am frequently naked with many naked straight men at my gym(s). This experience is really much more erotic than that provided by the many venues in which I am naked among other naked gay men. Those events can be such a yawn. No tension. No mystery. No plot to unfold. No surrendering to desire. No furtive glances. No darting eyes. No wondering if or how. Just the accessible mechanics of sex. I frequently fall asleep on my feet in such gatherings and have begun to wonder if I should continue my attendance. But, whether at a sex party or at a gym, I am effortlessly under control and will rarely sport wood unless very caffeinated or until coaxed by extreme talent.
I am obviously jaded.
But what about those gay men who have not had my life, and who join Bally’s and find themselves under warm water with a handful of moisturizing foamy soap in the company of several well-built naked men whose muscles are distended and whose skin is glowing from a completed work-out? Should it not be expected that that they will produce firm evidence of their appreciation? Do the Bally’s salesmen instruct new gay members not to soap their privates at such a moment? Certainly the straight men receive no such instruction. And, if a straight man takes offense at the sight of an erection pointing at him in the shower room, and reports the offense to the club’s management, can the gay member really be chastised or suspended or revoked of membership? Nope. It’s to be expected.
Obviously, Bally’s can and should invoke an over-arching policy of “No sex anywhere in our facilities”. Fair enough (even though this rule provokes considerable snickering among all and any who have ever spent any time at those facilities, but that is another story, and one not exclusive to Bally’s). The facilities they provide do not automatically usher in the having of sex among members, but they do facilitate the experience of men being naked among those they define as sex objects, and among those who view them as sex objects. That is the presumption of the design.
If straight men were to take this presumption to its logical conclusion, could they not request of Bally’s the right to be naked in the presence of those they define as sex objects (i.e., women, for those not following this)? After all, why should gay men be granted a privilege not afforded straight men? I’d really like to see a straight man surrounded by a dozen toned foxes stepping out of their lycra learn to exercise the level of self-control required of a gay man in a group shower at his gym.
Let’s all hope that straight men never make this request. Bally’s would probably be forced to resolve the issue by establishing a “gay only” locker room to be used jointly by gay men and lesbians.
That, my friends, is an unsavory thought. Forget I ever suggested it.
I guess they want more gay members. I guess they want more gay men and women to go to their facilities. Just a minute! My logic is off a bit there. Major and minor premises not matching. Bally’s wants money, and does not mind selling memberships to gay people in order to get it. That’s a safe conclusion.
This has implications.
If a potential member presents himself (or herself, and for the duration of this bit, let’s assume I am including lesbians in the gender-unbalanced mascu-speak of English), at a Bally’s gym and states that he is gay and is responding to the commercial on Logo, we will have to assume that a smiling and commission-driven salesman (Bally’s calls them personal trainers) will brightly say “No problem”, and usher the prospect through the usual tour of the facilities.
The prospect will soon find that Bally’s provides a total health and fitness experience at facilities designed for a good amount of same-sex group nakedness.
The “men only” locker rooms contain rows of lockers with no demure barriers or opportunities for the modest exchange of street clothes for work-out gear. In fact, street clothes and gym bags are not allowed on the actual gym floors. One could, of course, arrive in gym gear and avoid the locker room entirely, but that is not what Bally’s is selling, if the tour is to be believed. The locker room, the gang showers, the steam room, the sauna (in many clubs not co-ed) are pointed out as part of what you get for your membership.
Since Bally’s also targets the heterosexual market, it is safe to assume that the company intends for gay and straight men to be naked together as part of the total Bally’s experience.
This intention is admirable, sophisticated, curious and hilarious, all at once.
I, for one, deeply enjoy the fact that I am frequently naked with many naked straight men at my gym(s). This experience is really much more erotic than that provided by the many venues in which I am naked among other naked gay men. Those events can be such a yawn. No tension. No mystery. No plot to unfold. No surrendering to desire. No furtive glances. No darting eyes. No wondering if or how. Just the accessible mechanics of sex. I frequently fall asleep on my feet in such gatherings and have begun to wonder if I should continue my attendance. But, whether at a sex party or at a gym, I am effortlessly under control and will rarely sport wood unless very caffeinated or until coaxed by extreme talent.
I am obviously jaded.
But what about those gay men who have not had my life, and who join Bally’s and find themselves under warm water with a handful of moisturizing foamy soap in the company of several well-built naked men whose muscles are distended and whose skin is glowing from a completed work-out? Should it not be expected that that they will produce firm evidence of their appreciation? Do the Bally’s salesmen instruct new gay members not to soap their privates at such a moment? Certainly the straight men receive no such instruction. And, if a straight man takes offense at the sight of an erection pointing at him in the shower room, and reports the offense to the club’s management, can the gay member really be chastised or suspended or revoked of membership? Nope. It’s to be expected.
Obviously, Bally’s can and should invoke an over-arching policy of “No sex anywhere in our facilities”. Fair enough (even though this rule provokes considerable snickering among all and any who have ever spent any time at those facilities, but that is another story, and one not exclusive to Bally’s). The facilities they provide do not automatically usher in the having of sex among members, but they do facilitate the experience of men being naked among those they define as sex objects, and among those who view them as sex objects. That is the presumption of the design.
If straight men were to take this presumption to its logical conclusion, could they not request of Bally’s the right to be naked in the presence of those they define as sex objects (i.e., women, for those not following this)? After all, why should gay men be granted a privilege not afforded straight men? I’d really like to see a straight man surrounded by a dozen toned foxes stepping out of their lycra learn to exercise the level of self-control required of a gay man in a group shower at his gym.
Let’s all hope that straight men never make this request. Bally’s would probably be forced to resolve the issue by establishing a “gay only” locker room to be used jointly by gay men and lesbians.
That, my friends, is an unsavory thought. Forget I ever suggested it.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
St. Sebastian (of Dallas)
CV is leaving us. Moving to Texas. To Dallas, and we are once more bowled over by the speed at which our lives fly, and by the pain of goodbyes.
CV is the easiest, most casual and naturally beautiful model a photographer could have, and one of the hottest men any of you should ever be lucky enough to find in your bed. More importantly, he is a friend of the highest quality.
A group of us took him out to dinner last night and had a rollicking good time reeling in our years.
We met him one summer evening at a gala fundraiser in the enclosed cortile of our local art museum (a stuffy place of pretense and nervous money). C and I noticed him as soon as we entered the event. He was wearing an enormous shimmering silvery headdress that fountained up three feet into the air. I said to C “Look. At. Him. We need to meet that man.”
Meet him we did. Several drinks and one conga line later, the three of us were asking a security guard for directions to the men’s room. We discarded his first suggestion, claiming that we knew the way to that one but that there was a line at the door. Could he point us in the direction of another men’s room? One further away from the event? He was helpful, and we made our way to an empty men’s room in another part of the museum.
I remember a lot of veiny grey marble and a cool white tile pre-war floor composed of small hexagons, but mostly I remember the wall-mounted “baby changing board”. I clearly remember being up on that board and holding onto the cloth straps that held it in the open position. I remember the crack of industrial plastic pulling screws from their anchors in the plaster and getting up off the floor, laughing to the point of tears and seeing that there was now another man in the room, standing at the urinal with his back to us,pretending that the three of us were simply invisible and not half undressed and not using the wall-mounted appliance for unholy purposes. He was wearing the dark suit of respectability. Perhaps a museum benefactor or the husband of one of the museum’s lunching auxiliary ladies. We left laughing and not wanting to know who he was.
Was it years later during a Christmas Eve party at our place when I got the notion to have CV pose as St. Sebastian? We rolled a tall maple pillar out into a hallway. With some thick twine from opened gifts we bound his hands. I had a huge heap of mosquito netting acquired at a state surplus store for no particular reason. I tore off a piece and fashioned a loin cloth. Gave him a dark and curly Italianate wig. Asked him to point a finger toward heaven.
Heavy into Photoshop in those days, I later substituted a different background, my favorite section of the dunes in Provincetown, at the crest of one of its busiest hills near Herring Cove beach. On the distant horizon I added a shrunken photo of a Boston church I had snapped. I created the arrows and the wounds on screen using only Photoshop effects for ingredients. The toughest part was to draw the sand up over his toes realistically. When CV first saw the finished composite, he said “Ouch!”
“St. Sebastian of the Dunes” was part of a few different photo exhibits I had in those days, and once, in the showers at the Y, I bumped into S who was CV’s lover at the time. He had had that photo copied and applied as a tattoo onto his calf.
So now CV’s in love, and going off to Dallas with a brand new career and boyfriend. Our Wretched Little City will be quite a bit more wretched and even smaller because of this. All day at the office I’ve been humming that Carole King song about nobody staying in one place any more. We’ll miss ya, Carissimo.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Another Aside
Go here if you are tired of the "Are You Here for the Party" thing and would rather get my account of last Friday's Daniel Nardicio party "Jungle Juice".
Friday, August 04, 2006
Aside: lost comments
Just discovered that our Macs have been relegating some of your "Comments" to a "junk mail" file and deleting them. If you sent a comment which never appeared here, chances are we never got it. Working on fixing what Mac thinks is a smart feature. Meanwhile, email me if you feel you've been junked.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
20 yrs of equal rights
have given this man the right to wear fishnets, sneakers and fuchsia briefs draped with pink chiffon. As the sign says, "So much more to come". Can't wait.
together 48+ or - yrs
While I'm happy for Dick and Gary, I am even more delighted with the plus and minus signs after their proclamation. Classic dilemma. How do you fix the anniversary? First meeting? First night? Move-in date? I can imagine them nattering away at each other about this for more or less forty-eight years. C and I would never do that...
hot Pride cop
In a very real sense, the policemen stationed on the parade side of the baracades are part of the spectacle of NYC Pride. This one stood in one spot for nearly three hours looking heart-stompingly fantastic.The full lips of Fabian. The arms. The seething green eyes. The immense shoes. The big ole wedding ring.
Dance on the Pier 6/25/06 NYC Pride
I kept trying to count the number of times we have found ourselves in the center of a crowd just like this. How many men have we bumped into in this type of crowd and had sex with, on the spot? How many of those moments have produced friendships? The next day, a gorgeous Panamanian named Alejandro (dazzling teeth, brilliant black hair) text messaged us: "Did you have fun?". Our reply: "Still in bed". He had the decency not to respond.
Dance on the Pier 6/25/06
With the assistance of this fellow, I got up onto the bleachers to take a crowd pic. For a while we moved to the music and toasted each others' Bud Lite in metalic blue containers. We looked at the long lines in front of the Port-o-lets and I expressed my heartfelt need to piss. He pointed out a row of guys who were relieving themsleves through the chain link fence that separated the back stage area from the public area. I joined them and soon found myself pissing over heaps of wiring leading to the stage and the speakers. This can't be wise, I thought, and yet, these other men whose precedent setting streamage had overlapped mine, have not been fried nor has anything been shorted out. Back on the bleachers, I expressed my fear that a policeman might have spotted my transgression. He told me that his lover had been a cop. They had been together for eight and a half years. He was one of the victims of 9/11. He still wears his ring.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
not this year
"Do you always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it."
- Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby
- Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Folsom Street East 2006
Now that I am two days removed from the event, time has softened my memory sufficiently so as to make for sweeter words. I’ll not do any barking about the frightening amount of exposed and immense gut, nor will I draw comparisons between the bears of our overfed country and the lean men of Spain, for example. I will also not get all speculatey about the trotting out of black leather as a symbol of absolutely nothing in anyone’s actual past or future. Also, I’ll upfront my resolve to attend the 2007 edition of this event, despite its horrors, for it is finally just great fun.
Folsom Street East is an NYC copy of an SF street fair known for (so I’m told) the daylit display of fetishized sex in startling realism. The NYC version subtracts the sex, substituting the production of sweat and the drinking of bad beer. (Once again, I am reminded what a starchy, straight-laced Puritanical town this really is. Anyway, nobody sweats like a New Yorker, producing a slick and friendly crowd under a hot sky on the melting pavement of West 28th Street.)
Bloggers, like little boys in bumper cars at an amusement park, are soon happily gridlocked in front of a bar. Any bar. And so it is that we are swaying among the steamed with Dagon, Tom, Glenn, Neil and Bryce, Joe, Mark, Eddie, and Eric (who is in Fire-Island-worthy excellence of shape, not that he isn’t always). Among the blogless are Damian who confides “When I lived in Montreal, my daddy didn’t allow any soap in the house…” and Ken who says into my other ear “I really have to piss but I’m afraid to break the seal.” Someone tells a story involving the key question, “Is your dick always that big?” and I shout out a request to Joe that he tell the Linke story and then we get swallowed up by a wave of big shoulders and from a distance of twenty feet away, I crest to see that Joe is well into it with the rapt attention of three novice listeners. Ken and I trade stories about the first time a man took out his teeth while giving us head, and we both fondly recall a forehead-denting attic cross-beam at the baths in New Orleans.
These photos are indicative of the costuming of the day, which was varied. The “Utilikilt”, a recent garment that will probably never be popular, was shown in a variety of colors including camouflage (because one never knows when the need to pass unseen in a rainforest while wearing kilts might arise).
The man with the sweater-clipped jock should be reminded that a real lady always pauses at the mirror before going out for an evening and removes one piece of jewelry.
The man with the fuzzy butt clenching the American Spirit cigarette pack should be slapped sensible. Dear Lord.
And, here are some revelers unknown to me but sweet to review, including the token female, whose rack is, I suspect, God-given.
Folsom Street East is an NYC copy of an SF street fair known for (so I’m told) the daylit display of fetishized sex in startling realism. The NYC version subtracts the sex, substituting the production of sweat and the drinking of bad beer. (Once again, I am reminded what a starchy, straight-laced Puritanical town this really is. Anyway, nobody sweats like a New Yorker, producing a slick and friendly crowd under a hot sky on the melting pavement of West 28th Street.)
Bloggers, like little boys in bumper cars at an amusement park, are soon happily gridlocked in front of a bar. Any bar. And so it is that we are swaying among the steamed with Dagon, Tom, Glenn, Neil and Bryce, Joe, Mark, Eddie, and Eric (who is in Fire-Island-worthy excellence of shape, not that he isn’t always). Among the blogless are Damian who confides “When I lived in Montreal, my daddy didn’t allow any soap in the house…” and Ken who says into my other ear “I really have to piss but I’m afraid to break the seal.” Someone tells a story involving the key question, “Is your dick always that big?” and I shout out a request to Joe that he tell the Linke story and then we get swallowed up by a wave of big shoulders and from a distance of twenty feet away, I crest to see that Joe is well into it with the rapt attention of three novice listeners. Ken and I trade stories about the first time a man took out his teeth while giving us head, and we both fondly recall a forehead-denting attic cross-beam at the baths in New Orleans.
These photos are indicative of the costuming of the day, which was varied. The “Utilikilt”, a recent garment that will probably never be popular, was shown in a variety of colors including camouflage (because one never knows when the need to pass unseen in a rainforest while wearing kilts might arise).
The man with the sweater-clipped jock should be reminded that a real lady always pauses at the mirror before going out for an evening and removes one piece of jewelry.
The man with the fuzzy butt clenching the American Spirit cigarette pack should be slapped sensible. Dear Lord.
And, here are some revelers unknown to me but sweet to review, including the token female, whose rack is, I suspect, God-given.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Found Objects
C is forever trying to get me to go to Brooklyn with him. He’s Mayflower stock, and I think the need to Go-Forth is in his blood. I’m Mediterannean. We Sit-Back. We had energy a couple of thousand years ago. We built stuff. It got ruined. Five hundred years ago, we sort of woke up and painted stuff. What’s left is framed in gold. “Feh” to rushing about.
C will put down the paper and emit the solemn tones reserved for the announcement of an exhibit, performance, open studio, razing or even the non-eventfully simple need to trudge about in some neighborhood on the verge of being proclaimed “Hot”.
Sometimes the newspaper lands in front of me with a swat upon the table and a tohljahso “See?” open to an article called “Bushwick!”, and I am silently accused of neglect for having scorned his suggestion several months ago that we explore an area that has now received in-print fawning.
At that point, I know it’s safe for me to say “OK. Take me to Bushwick.”, because once the Times has un-cached yet another cranny of Brooklyn, C loses interest in its discovery. (Is Bushwick not in Brooklyn? “Feh” to the details. It’s across water.)
With this in mind, you will understand his easy agreement with my suggestion that we attend a Pride party in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn at the home of the drolly effervescent and retroswoonular GayestNeil and Bryce .
We met up with Joey at Grand Central station at the appointed hour having taken the #1 Train to Times Square where we got on the Shuttle.
I do love the Shuttle. It’s my favorite line. You don’t have to think. It does only one thing. A to B and back. If you lose your umbrella, you turn around and there it is. If you fall asleep on the Shuttle, well really, what’s the worse that can happen? Not like some lines whose final destinations are places of mystery. I see their names posted on schematics in the safer stations of our routine. End-o’-the-line stops such as Far Rockaway. That’s an un-manned stop, frequently underwater, where packs of snarling dogs live off candy wrappers snagged in tumbleweed. If C should propose a visit to the Rockaways, I would agree, having set our affairs in order, and packing hard cheeses and ale. Later, I suggest this excursion to Joe who glazes over, this being only his second venturing out of Manhattan. (C popped his outer-borough cherry with an earlier trip to Brooklyn to hear absurd music.)
Joey is in high spirits, and we note our recent cosmetic inversions: he is newly beardless, and I have grown it in, and darkened it to effect the air of a convict newly released by dint of DNA. He is also displaying formidable calves as big as those turning cylinders of steaming meat one sees in the windows of some Turkish restaurants. These calves will be required for the schleppage of thirty copies of a Pride-related magazine and an industrial sized bottle of Bud Lite, a commemorative one-gallon collectible novelty which he intends to open at the party.
While Joey and C caucus about the itinerary and determine where we ought to exit, I am left to ruminate, having exhausted several sexual fantasies about the other riders. I think back on the dozens of Pride events I have attended. Some moving, some loud, some lame and some brilliant. Last year, at NYC Pride, we were with BJ and his boyfriend. That was their first date. A week from now they’ll be celebrating an anniversary.
Pride, naturally robbed over time of its defiance, has evolved into a celebration tempered by respectability. Glitter, made permissible, loses its glit. These days, we march not so much to establish our frontiers, but to patrol our borders, and that is OK for the moment. As I’ve said, there are times when it’s good to Sit-Back and catch a bit of breath. The clarion call of battle reaches us soon enough and without our seeking it out.
We are walking several blocks from the subway to the party house in warm sun while Joe explains that he is carrying his goods in a flight bag that he had thrown out because of a broken zipper. He retrieved it from the trash to give it one more outing and after emptying it, he entirely fills Neil and Bryce’s kitchen trash can with it.
I proclaim New York to be the best place in the world for finding great stuff in the trash, not to denigrate trash in other cities yielding some of our most cherished furnishings including a candlestick with a big brass ball encased in iron and wooden rings, an art deco washing machine agitator, a high chair, a Canadian officer’s chest and so much more.
The party is full of shiny happy people. Some are men. Some are women. Some are doctors. Some are DJs. Some are young. Some are younger. I am looking into a bowl of guacamole as big as the sandpit of Jabba the Hut. There is only one bed in the apartment. As I think Neil and Bryce use it simultaneously, I begin to suspect that they might both be Queers, but I assume a sort of delirious British denial about the whole sordid possibility.
With the sun dipping into the west, we all scamper up onto the roof armed with beakers of pink fizz invented by Tim and Mark and a blender. A bright yellow feral parakeet stitches swags and festoons into the pink clouds overhead and finally comes to rest on the parapet. We fall silent as Joe tiptoes toward it with a hand extended. The bird seems to regard him without fear as he moves closer. At the last moment before contact, it flies off, and we exhale. A survivor, uncaged and high above it all, golden, elusive and having its season, just out of reach, maybe gone tomorrow, maybe back next year.
Later that night, we fall into step with those who march. I sing to the melodies prescribed. In the new darkness of an outdoor table I look across at the brilliant smile on the beautiful face of C. I bump shoulders with Joey who, seated beside me, is charming the pants off the guys on the sidewalk. I accept the card of a young stranger who has jumped the fence and claimed the fourth place at our table. I hold no green card in the future. With no franchise, I often make myself useful, gathering up the empty wine glasses of the snoring gods who have the power to let me stay awhile. I do so love being alive.
Friday, June 09, 2006
juego de la oca
An apartment on Pelayo in Madrid was emptied of its contents which ended up on the street in a dumpster. Maybe the resident died, or disappeared.There was a gorgeous wooden trunk, a very old wall mounted hat rack and lots of desirable furniture and vintage household items. All of it disappeared before sundown. Only one thing fit into our luggage: this odd game board that looks to be pre-1950. Parchesi was on the reverse.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
C Spain
C doesn’t mind my posting these two sketches of him, and that is a sure sign of his opinion that they don’t look at all like him. I’d have to agree, as will, I suspect, those of you who know him.
And yet, didn’t I get that certain slide of shoulder and his distinctive unwillingness to sit in a chair in accordance with its design?
They say it’s difficult to render the faces of those closest to you, and in these cases, my first strikes at the paper were to the limbs. The faces came last and were rushed while calling for la quenta over empty espresso cups. Complicating the process is the fact that he won’t sit still, not even for a photo. Further, during both sessions, he was looking down at his writing, and squinting in the full sun, having not packed sun glasses and unwilling to wear the extra pair I packed and never giving over enough time to select a new pair from the many street vendors he stepped around.
I should have simply blocked in the face, the same way I color-blocked the other areas first. I was thinking Milton Avery at the onset of each sketch. He certainly never fed much detail into his faces, and he’d raise one of his vaguely drawn eyebrows at the comparison.
Also, I never know when to quit. Had I photographed these when they were, in my estimation, half done, or, had I been arrested by some guardian angel who’d have stayed my hand before screwing things up, the result would have been nicely sophisticated rather than passably jaunty.
I’ll put these away for ten years and then we’ll see what better evokes the memory of those moments, the photos or the sketches.
And yet, didn’t I get that certain slide of shoulder and his distinctive unwillingness to sit in a chair in accordance with its design?
They say it’s difficult to render the faces of those closest to you, and in these cases, my first strikes at the paper were to the limbs. The faces came last and were rushed while calling for la quenta over empty espresso cups. Complicating the process is the fact that he won’t sit still, not even for a photo. Further, during both sessions, he was looking down at his writing, and squinting in the full sun, having not packed sun glasses and unwilling to wear the extra pair I packed and never giving over enough time to select a new pair from the many street vendors he stepped around.
I should have simply blocked in the face, the same way I color-blocked the other areas first. I was thinking Milton Avery at the onset of each sketch. He certainly never fed much detail into his faces, and he’d raise one of his vaguely drawn eyebrows at the comparison.
Also, I never know when to quit. Had I photographed these when they were, in my estimation, half done, or, had I been arrested by some guardian angel who’d have stayed my hand before screwing things up, the result would have been nicely sophisticated rather than passably jaunty.
I’ll put these away for ten years and then we’ll see what better evokes the memory of those moments, the photos or the sketches.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
madrid what?
We happened upon this group in one of the many small squares that allow some light into the narrow streets of the Lavapies neighborhood. At first we thought it was a child's birthday party brought outside, but our assumptions were jarred by the picture displayed against the window. It's a precocious child whose Dia di Nacimiento is celebrated by the display of a pair of disembodied black stilletto-heeled dominatrix boots
Sunday, June 04, 2006
barcelona from the Hotel Axel
In the rare moments when we are not in motion, perhaps on the train, or finally in bed at 3:30AM, C says to me ¨So. Which do you like better?" Sometimes I say Barcelona, after a walk down one of its incredibly gracious boulevards or an afternoon on the shore and back through the sinister but promising Barceloneta neighborhood where the men sing while they walk, or while being groped by a handsome young lurker in the uppermost woods of the Parc Gruell near some Roman ruins. Sometimes I say Madrid, where the short dark Spaniards glow under the benevolent light of the back room of the Eagle, and make us think of how much the Chueca has the energy of the Village in Montreal during its emergent years. Full of hot young men wanting sex at all hours. Usually, I structure a compromise. In a perfect world, we´d have an art nouveau apartment in Barcelona with frequent jaunts to Madrid for respites from the graciousness. C reminds me of all the antennae we saw in Barcelona. Cable is not an assumption there. Wouldn´t I miss my HBO? Just a little.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Cat on a hot tile roof
Back in Madrid for the last leg of our trip, we shop at El Dia, a terrifically downscale mini-supermarket where a small horde of Asians are purchasing hundreds of bottles of Fanta, Coke and Fairy (a Procter and Gamble dish detergent), producing hundreds of expired coupons and arguing successfully for their value. We guess they own a restaurant. This is not exactly the DIA Center for the Arts on W22nd Street, but we find what we need: Vichy Catalan water, Diamatik laundry soap (a gel!) and the prettiest rainbow of multicolored clothespins imaginable (the turquoise ones will match my Eddie Bauer sea foam T shirt that has some questionable stains acquired at our visit yesterday to Barcelona’s Boyberry, a multi-chambered place where the glory holes are controlled by sliding panels that generate anxiety in that they could act as blunt guillotines during an interaction gone awry.) We collect a 3 Euro bottle of Rioja before the check out. What a delightful boutique!
We dump the goods at our apartment on Perez Galdos in the center of the bull’s eye of the heart of the gay Chueca neighborhood. We run up Fuencarral to Colby’s where we teach the cute bartender how to make a Manhattan. Learning the formula, he produces them in beakers big enough to please Richard Serra! Food must be had to tame these, so we order the Colby pizza which is a surly thing sporting a fried egg and some cheesy bits. It erases hunger, which is about the highest praise we can offer for Madrid cuisine. We roll down the hill to the internet café next to the Eagle on Pelayo where we teach another cute bartender (this one wearing a wide black webbed belt stenciled white with “Play stupid with me”). He doesn’t follow the formula, going heavy on the Vermouth, but we follow his belt.
Back out on the narrow sidewalks, I miss the wide boulevards of Barcelona, a brief sentiment that evaporates with the sight of more beautiful men per square foot than can be found anywhere on earth, and 90% of them under 5’6”. (Shopping for T shirts here is a joy – and we will thank Eric for recommending Zara – because we don’t have to put up with or cut off that extra several inches that are always included in American T shirts, making them fit more like a Greek tunic.)
We are laughing as we turn left onto Hortaleza, but are worried by what we see when we turn the corner onto Perez Galdos. Police cars with lights flashing, and much commotion on the street between our building and the entrance to the convenient “Cruising”, a bar with an immense labyrinth of dark rooms. C suspects a raid, having had altogether too much fun there earlier in our trip. We enter our building and take the elevator to the fifth and top floor.
There, we are shocked to find the door to our apartment open and a crowd of strangers talking excitedly in our kitchen. At first, no one bothers to greet us as we enter, and I have a several-Manhattan-induced-fear that we had forgotten about a party we had scheduled. Then, I suspect a fire. C finds the laptop intact on the kitchen counter and eliminates the possibility of a break-in. A lady whom we recognize as one of the building staff rushes up to us and delivers a rapid fire explanation in undecipherable Spanish. She indicates two uniformed (and hot) men whose shoulder badges read “Cuerpo Nacional di Policia”. One of the windows is open, and the metal security grate has been unlocked and swung aside. A third policeman is climbing through it, out onto the sloping tiled roof.
The animated lady produces a Martha Grahamular interpretive danceload of gestures that explain what has happened. Soon after dark, a cat burglar was seen prowling the rooftops of the adjoining buildings. The police were called, and it was decided that the best access to the roof was through our kitchen. Looking through the window, to where the building next door has been demolished with only the historic stone façade retained, we see that another officer has handcuffed a man to the pipes of the scaffolding that is supporting the façade, just a few feet from our bedroom. Suddenly, strong lights are played against the building across from us, and a bucket on a crane zooms into view from the narrow street below, collecting the villain and his attending officer. For a moment, the handcuffs remain attached to the pipes, swaying in the breeze and catching moonlight on the upswing. We wonder if they will let us play.
More men who had been out on the roof pile into our kitchen and I decide it is too late to hide the various gay guide books and flyers (including one for Cruising that features a Tom of Finlandian police officer in aviator glasses and tall boots) that cover our kitchen table. Oh well. No one seems shocked, and I run for the camera just in time to immortalize the heroic butt and pistol of a real policeman on our roof making the Chueca safe for yet another night of fun.
Our guests depart, and we scamper across the street to Cruising where nobody inside is aware of what was happening outside the door. They have other business in mind, and I find the same to be true at the Eagle where the manager whom we call the Christmas Tree, as he is so heavily ornamented, asks me if I agree with him that the Barcelona Eagle is superior. After an hour in the backroom of his establishment in the shady L-shaped passageway that contains a very thoughtful overhead rack for one’s beer bottle, I deliver my verdict: Barcelona is elegant, but Madrid is hot.
We dump the goods at our apartment on Perez Galdos in the center of the bull’s eye of the heart of the gay Chueca neighborhood. We run up Fuencarral to Colby’s where we teach the cute bartender how to make a Manhattan. Learning the formula, he produces them in beakers big enough to please Richard Serra! Food must be had to tame these, so we order the Colby pizza which is a surly thing sporting a fried egg and some cheesy bits. It erases hunger, which is about the highest praise we can offer for Madrid cuisine. We roll down the hill to the internet café next to the Eagle on Pelayo where we teach another cute bartender (this one wearing a wide black webbed belt stenciled white with “Play stupid with me”). He doesn’t follow the formula, going heavy on the Vermouth, but we follow his belt.
Back out on the narrow sidewalks, I miss the wide boulevards of Barcelona, a brief sentiment that evaporates with the sight of more beautiful men per square foot than can be found anywhere on earth, and 90% of them under 5’6”. (Shopping for T shirts here is a joy – and we will thank Eric for recommending Zara – because we don’t have to put up with or cut off that extra several inches that are always included in American T shirts, making them fit more like a Greek tunic.)
We are laughing as we turn left onto Hortaleza, but are worried by what we see when we turn the corner onto Perez Galdos. Police cars with lights flashing, and much commotion on the street between our building and the entrance to the convenient “Cruising”, a bar with an immense labyrinth of dark rooms. C suspects a raid, having had altogether too much fun there earlier in our trip. We enter our building and take the elevator to the fifth and top floor.
There, we are shocked to find the door to our apartment open and a crowd of strangers talking excitedly in our kitchen. At first, no one bothers to greet us as we enter, and I have a several-Manhattan-induced-fear that we had forgotten about a party we had scheduled. Then, I suspect a fire. C finds the laptop intact on the kitchen counter and eliminates the possibility of a break-in. A lady whom we recognize as one of the building staff rushes up to us and delivers a rapid fire explanation in undecipherable Spanish. She indicates two uniformed (and hot) men whose shoulder badges read “Cuerpo Nacional di Policia”. One of the windows is open, and the metal security grate has been unlocked and swung aside. A third policeman is climbing through it, out onto the sloping tiled roof.
The animated lady produces a Martha Grahamular interpretive danceload of gestures that explain what has happened. Soon after dark, a cat burglar was seen prowling the rooftops of the adjoining buildings. The police were called, and it was decided that the best access to the roof was through our kitchen. Looking through the window, to where the building next door has been demolished with only the historic stone façade retained, we see that another officer has handcuffed a man to the pipes of the scaffolding that is supporting the façade, just a few feet from our bedroom. Suddenly, strong lights are played against the building across from us, and a bucket on a crane zooms into view from the narrow street below, collecting the villain and his attending officer. For a moment, the handcuffs remain attached to the pipes, swaying in the breeze and catching moonlight on the upswing. We wonder if they will let us play.
More men who had been out on the roof pile into our kitchen and I decide it is too late to hide the various gay guide books and flyers (including one for Cruising that features a Tom of Finlandian police officer in aviator glasses and tall boots) that cover our kitchen table. Oh well. No one seems shocked, and I run for the camera just in time to immortalize the heroic butt and pistol of a real policeman on our roof making the Chueca safe for yet another night of fun.
Our guests depart, and we scamper across the street to Cruising where nobody inside is aware of what was happening outside the door. They have other business in mind, and I find the same to be true at the Eagle where the manager whom we call the Christmas Tree, as he is so heavily ornamented, asks me if I agree with him that the Barcelona Eagle is superior. After an hour in the backroom of his establishment in the shady L-shaped passageway that contains a very thoughtful overhead rack for one’s beer bottle, I deliver my verdict: Barcelona is elegant, but Madrid is hot.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Colors of Barcelona #6
C gets a salad delivered to our table on the roof of the Hotel Axel. It is delivered by one of the interchangeably gorgeous staff. I think the surest way to have a breakdown would be to try to manage this staff. The waiters squabble with the bartenders (who have to consult a booklet in order to make a Manhattan, which in this case included a glaced cherry, hence the albeit delicious scum on the surface). Whenever the managing queens are out of sight, the staff produce cell phones and duck into utility rooms. But we are definitely not complaining about this place and will stay here again when we return. It will be interesting to see whether or not the chip in the rim of the glass in the photo is indicative of a lack of attention to detail while the owner opens up a chain of Axels starting with the next one in Buenos Aires later this year, or if it is just incidental. Truth to tell, this is the second chipped glass I was served. All the same, what you want from a gay luxe hotel is exactly what they deliver: a happy international group of gay travelers who meet and socialize at the Hotel spa and make plans for dinner and bar later in the evening. This was great fun, with a room/bathroom/balcony that were delightful.
Colors of Barcelona #5
Just when you think there could not be another one of these in the city, you turn a corner and find one even more fabulous than the rest. To have the eye constantly filled with this sort of exuberantly elegant lineage, alters the mind in a good way. There is no inclination to litter or to deface. No need to campaign against those sorts of antisocial behavior which seem to be disarmed by the simple assertion of the fantastic in public view.
Colors of Barcelona #4
we spent a good amount of time speculating about how they got these fantastic finishes on the buildings of Barcelona. We decide that over the painted rough concrete base, one sets in place a thick (half inch?) stencil which is in-filled with a layer of plaster. This layer is painted (in this case, blue) before the stencil is removed.
Colors of Barcelona #3
The de rigeur shot of candy heaps at the local mercado/food bazaar. I could have done the fish, or the skinned rabbits...
Getting food in Barcelona, as in Madrid, has been an adventure, and not always successful. There are a zillion storefronted cafes and restaurants and bakeries. Their metal curtains are raised or lowered at various hours of the day so that whenever we left the hotel, it was as if the selection had been shuffled. ("They're heading down D'Aribou. Quick! Shut down the pastry shops and open the ham/cheese sandwich places.") We were almost never able to get back to the same place twice. The one exception was a wonderful little restaurant run by a charmer named Alex who made a superb fried camembert entree, and perfect gnocchi Putanesca. The name of the place is Sazzerac. It is in the heart of the Gayxample ( on Carre Conseil de Cent). The music was also great there. Vintage disco, George Benson, and the wallpaper was flocked with gold glitter ovals.
Monday, May 29, 2006
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
The Neighbors (view from our apartmento in Madrid)
Madrid, despite being conjoined by common currency to the rest of Europe, retains its passport in the arresting detention of the faces of its men to whom we have happily surrendered our credentials.
We are walking in the deep shadows that drape the swerving angustine streets of the gay Chueca neighborhood, where sunlight sifts down through the filigreed wrought iron balconies and the brilliant red geraniums of the top floors of the old apartamentos.
Local men fill our eyes with their fallenangel-beards held in fastitious check by third-day clipping. They toss us only the mildest brand of urban defense with their onyx koala-eyes while stepping across our path at a stone curb, or darting in and out of shops, always pausing long enough to inventory our appearance.
These men are narrow and lithe, with little butts, seemingly the product of selective breeding geared to allow for their stuffing into snug and hipless jeans. Pampered little butts that seem to converse in whispers among themselves or with the precious little dogs always at heel just below them, while their owners make equally subdued but forward-facing bavard through frequent cigarettes and stops to inspect the myriad racks of flash gear spilling out of shop windows.
Mostly, they inspect us, the Americans, the ones whose style they are maniacally working to copy. In fact, we have never been in the midst of a gay tribe so overwhelmingly curious about a particular culture, and so rabidly (and so needlessly) seeking self-Chelseafication. I want a soap box at the corner of Hortaleza and Perez Galdos from which I might exhort them to rest, to let their hair grow and to trust the deep saturations of lime, ochre, and bleu–de-travail slashed with blinding white that are the colors of their natural inclination. There would I also cheer their fondness for metalized leather footwear and their wearing of boldly striped euro-team sport shirts.
I am granted some exemption from their relentless study because they assume I am Spanish and are genuinely surprised when I speak in transaction with them like a returned Sabrina. C, on the other hand, is turning heads in this town, as the only natural blonde in attendance. What months mark the influx of Germans or Dutch? Obviously not Mayo.
We set aside sleep deprivation acquired during the Air Iberia flight during which, despite the fact that the seats fully reclined and even had a delightful massaging feature as one of the option buttons, we were kept awake by the crew’s constant offering of aperitifs, wine, lobster ravioli, endless rolls with seasoned olive oil for the drizzling, mango chutney on mixed greens and artisanal cheeses with guava jam and delirious desserts followed by more tonged hot towels for draping over one’s face to hide the shame of having eaten well beyond desire.
We unpack our carry-ons and decide to head out into the city where we fall into a lasting appreciation for the its public spaces. Our initial meandering lasts longer than we had planned, using the sun as an indicator of need for return to the apartment, shower and night owling. That sun was still up at 9PM, and was rather still in evidence at 10PM. Can’t figure this out. Not like we’re on the equator or one of the poles.
We had read that dinner often occurs here at midnight, and that attendance at bars can be earlier or later with no need to follow a rigorous herd-driven horario. (Recall the emptiness of the Lure at 11:45 followed by its being mobbed at 12:01 followed by its sudden desertion at 1:59 when the influx and exflux repeated itself at The Spike.) We look directly across the street from the entrance to our building and see a grey sign for something called “Cruising”. Two heavy metal doors appear to be locked but give way to a couple of happily disheveled young men making wobbly egress. We cross the street and push open one of the heavy old doors. We are briefly inspected by the proprietor and motioned inside. So begins Night Numero Uno.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Sketching Madrid (at the Plaza de Chueca)
C wants to move to Madrid. It's wonderful for many reasons:
a) Despite traffic in streets not designed for it, there is very little horn honking. The Smart Cars are so smart.
b)Fewer Maclarens on the sidewalks assaulting your ankles. Kids walk, run and kick balls through the pedestrians with skill.
c)The back rooms (no need for Visharas and Unicorns and Bijous)and discretionary door policies, especially the one(s) at the Eagle (long story which I might be able to assemble on the train to Barcelona tomorrow). Madrid sex is fun and easy.
d) the public spaces, cafes and parks everywhere. No need for artifically designed "playscapes" for kids. They seem to be actually using their imaginations.
e) This is a city in transition that has begun to discover itself in recent years. Construction everywhere. High energy.
f) cell phones? Not here. People on the streets are actually talking to adjacent humans.
g) Affordability.
h) Perfect weather.
i) Good coffee, bad food. Hence everyone skinny.
i) The men. Beautiful and friendly. Long long stories.Train. Tomorrow.
Friday, May 19, 2006
The foolish virgins
You will recall the gospel story Jesus told about the foolish vrigins and the wise ones? The wise ones kept their "wicks trimmed" so that when the Master arrived, even if in the middle of the night, they'd be ready, and would be brought by him into the wedding feast. The foolish ones became lazy and leisurely, shopping on 72nd street to get just the right sketch book, packing slowly while trying on various T shirts, and finally trusting the word of a taxi driver who said he could get us to JFK in an hour. Two hours later, eventhough we have arrived an hour before departure time, Delta is telling us that they have closed the flight. We have managed to get on an Iberia flight, but at extremely great cost. I cannot even say the number. In fact, I may never again be able to speak that number. The only seats available were business class. And so we are in the Iberia lounge waiting for the flight, and still, we are on stand-by. This is a picture of their open bar which, MarkofKane, did not contain bitters or cherries so I altered our Manhattans by adding Southern Comfort. (Roughing it). I'm pleased to see the number of wine glasses provided, because we may have to down several hundred drinks to recoup the outrageous price of the tickets. Nearby, is a nifty pyramid of perfect apples, each one individually wrapped in cellophane, and the whole Aztectural display spotlit from an amorphous "frozen paper" halogen pendant. We may have to chomp down several thousand of these to recoup the ticket price. Since there are only a hundred or so apples on display, I've set my sights instead on a rather fine Sol Lewitt print outside the mens' room which I'm guessing might fetch on EBAY a bit more than the price of our tickets...maybe.
News. C has just returned from the counter where he was told that the flight has been delayed an hour and a half. He's off to get a massage which is one of the standard LOUNGE amenities. That may give me enough time to cruise the Iberia Lounge Men's Room. Given my hourly rate, in order to recoup the ticket price, I'd have to do...
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Busy
new Mac operating system being installed, new browser, and above all else, prep for Spain. Departure Friday. Two weeks of laziness in Barcelona and Madrid! Schlepping laptop. Will post from the Hotel Axel.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Keeping Their Secrets
Yesterday at the gym,I bumped into a friend who has booked his time in Fire Island. One of four bedrooms in a house of strangers.
His announcement made me look at this painting when I got home, remembering our garden in Provincetown and one week in which our three house guests went their separate ways, brightly chatting each other up at moments of intersection, keeping mindful of shared bathrooms, conspiratorially winking while quietly passing in and out of their bedrooms at odd hours, relentlessly pursueing distinctly private agendae.
I'd gather them together for the grilling of dinner in the garden after which each would spin away into a night visible perhaps to the neighbor's cat, but not to us.
During the day, they'd spend some time with me in that garden, speculating about whomever was absent at the moment, and receiving tending among the old roses that flowered that week. Tool in hand, I would indicate a set of trussed canes heavy with bloom, and I would announce the name of each one as if it were my rather brilliant child just returned from a Swiss boarding school. Dorothy Perkins, Fantin-LaTour and the Alchemist.
Stepping into the center of the patio, I would look up into the full sun and then back at my friends, now seeing only the golden outline of their flashing coronae as they announced their plans for the day before heading off to beach, book or bar. In the silence of their departure, I would again fill my eyes with sunlight, and looking back at the roses, I would find them drained of color and rocking thoughtlessly in the breeze.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Expeditrix
In New York City, there is a layer of resident that facilitates the lives of those too busy to actually live their own lives. This layer is larger and its owners more successful than one might suppose.
Rarely, for instance, do we enter or exit our building without finding an interchangeably short young Mexican with a bag of warm edible studying the intercom for a name that matches what is scrawled on his delivery receipt. The dispatchers who prepare those receipts have worse handwriting than doctors, a fact that furthers my belief that the delivery business is lucrative. The Mexican boys never wear glasses. The buttoned roster of the intercom is two feet above their heads. The listing of its seventy-five names is as random as the sequenced selection made by C’s ipod. (“Did you hear that? The ipod felt that Good Morning Baltimore should follow Ella’s Love For Sale which followed Ramblin Man. I so get it.”)
I flinch at the sight of delivered food. Even the prospect of sitting in a restaurant makes me itchy with guilt. The only reason I can countenance going to Jiffy-Lube for an oil change is the watching of the outrageously attractive crew of young black mechanics through the glass of the waiting room. Someday, I’ll be last in line at 5PM, and they’ll yank down the overhead doors and walking toward me as they unzip their greasy jump suits, they will say “We got your car covered, but you look like you might need some work”.
I am just the kind of guy who doesn’t like to spend money on services that I can perform myself. When my grandparents would describe the extreme tactics needed on 164th Street to scrape by during the Depression, I, a pre-schooler, made rapturous mental notes.
This has led me into some disasters, and maybe into some savings, and constitutes an energy that C, who mostly accepts the premise of the service sector, finds curious.
I once decided, after receiving a quote for sanding and urethaning five rooms of old oak floors, that I could save thousands by renting the sander and doing the job myself. We lived for years with the resultant bucolic hills and valleys of that floor, and I accepted, as the price of thrift, a two-month back injury and two lungs aspirated with dust from Depression era varnish.
There was the time I rented a roto-tiller with tines powerful enough to loosen the clay in front of our 1925 row house, allowing us to improve the soil and plant a perennial parterre. The neighbors were amused. More months of back pain. Nothing grew.
In that same house, rather than spend six hundred dollars for a skylight, I hacked a hole in the ceiling with a borrowed Sawz-All right up through the roof tar, and hammered together a plywood box topped with two layers of Plexiglas and silicon caulk. This cost one hundred and forty dollars. It may have leaked a bit, but only during rain.
Before installing that skylight, I thought it might be a good idea to insulate the ceiling while the gash was open. We discovered that the flat roof was composed of the original oak stretchers and a second set that ran a foot and a half above them. I learned that some dollars might be saved by blowing loose insulation into that space rather than rolling out the usual pink fiberglass batting. I rented the blower and got dozens of bags of the loose fluff. Oddly, the hose supplied with the blower might have been long enough to reach the roof of a hamster cage but it demanded the hauling of the goatish machine up onto the stepladder beneath our newly carved opening. C was assigned the task of squeezing between the rafters tangled in the hose while I steadied the ladder, and tore open bags of the sneezable grey shredding, feeding it into the howling machine while grumbling irritably and shouting things like “Be sure you reach all the way into the corners” and, “Are you finding any antique jewelry up there?” or, “Hurry it up. We are about to lose sunlight and we don’t have any more extension cords for the work lamp.”
In that same house, I scored, steamed and removed old wallpaper. Most of it. Some of it. The remains gave the dining room a postmodern palimpsest that no guest at our table was clever enough to praise. As Scripture says, a decorator is never appreciated in his own house.
In that same house, I tried to replace an old toilet.
When we sold the place, I triumphantly explained to C the concept of sweat equity and why this buy/fix/sell pattern might have to be repeated many times over the next several decades. We developed a script: I would propose a strenuous money-saving activity and rent the appropriate contraption. I would turn it on and within a few minutes injure my back. C would finish the job. Sometimes I would injure my back just getting the thing into my car. C got wise.
By the time we had acquired a top floor condo in Montreal with exclusive rights to the roof, C raised a brow without looking up from his Gazette and coffee when I announced that I could see no reason why we couldn’t build our own roof deck.
Two months later, with sketches in hand, at a lumber yard on the far side of Rosemont, I surrendered to the possibility that building anything in a foreign country, other than a reputation, might not be easy. Is that board ten feet or ten kilometers? C was visibly relieved when I asked one of those scruffy types who are always carrying things about such places with cigarettes clamped in their lip corners threatening sawdust if he could recommend someone who might want to build our rooftop deck. That is how we acquired the phone number of, and soon made the acquaintance of Monsieur Adelard Deslauriers, a stocky man in his late 50s (early 60s?) whose thick calloused hands had built lots of stuff and were now working a pencil stub as we stood in front of our building. This seemed to have been his first visit to this part of the city since it had become the Gay Village. He spoke no English and held his opinion of us in check, but the estimate he wrote on a scrap of paper and now handed to me made it clear that he saw accessible gold in the pockets of these two Americans.
He did not know with whom he was dealing, but one wordless and withering glance from me after I had seen his estimate made him snatch back the paper and express surprise over the extra zero he had mistakenly affixed to the number. We swiftly came to terms, and during the first week of July, Adelard and his crew of gorgeous Frenchmen fashioned hoists out of thick long rope and drew lumber up onto the roof for the construction of a fabulous deck while we slept from sun-up to noon just below the sound of their boots on the roof. Getting out of bed, and stumbling naked into the kitchen for coffee, made our sordid bourgeois lives transparent, as the toolbelted men peeked inside while passing by the sliders that led from kitchen to terrace to the stairs they had built to the deck. I heard one of them mumble “Ah, la vie en rose”, as we left the building dressed just like them but ready to promenade Ste Catherine Street, in search of more sociable “viande rose” indeed.
Those years (C laughs when I call them the hungry ones) are over, and as we begin a total renovation of our New York City pied-a-terre, I am watching with horror as money gushes out of my pockets, like blood from the wounds of a suspended savior or berserk water besting a southern levee.
Because we are there only on weekends, the project demands management that does not come cheaply, but really, given my convictions, I would protest forking over even a nickel for this Doing-by-Others. Here, I have no choice, and I have particular guilt over the fact of having to pay somebody for the demolition part of the project. Is there anything easier than the tearing down of stuff? Shame on me.
I protested the latest demand for cash, which came in the form of an email from a lady referred to us by our architect. Her name, which sounds like a rodeo cheer or like the sound kids make when their parents announce a trip to Orlando, is composed of two parts with no clues as to which one, if any, is the familiar half. She will expedite the approval of our application to the city building department. Apparently, without her service, an application might languish for months. What she does, in a nutshell, is walk the package through some offices, collecting the required rubber stamps. For this, she proposes the payment of exactly $1,000.
I am outraged, but feel impotently distanced from those offices during their weekday hours of operation. I jump on the net in search of others who provide this service, convinced that her price is inflated. I find them listed under either admissible spelling of “Expeditor” and “Expediter”, one fellow using both versions in his ad. I contact a few of them, but none of them return my call. These guys must be very busy, have ample work, be careless entrepreneurs, or, only take clients through architects’ referrals.
I call our architect to complain. He offers a justification.
“She’s really very good. She’s the only one I’ve used for years. You may find somebody a couple hundred dollars cheaper, but a lot of them just drop off the package and make excuses for the delays. She actually gets your approval in two days.”
His words make me feel confident about her delivery but inflame my resentment about paying a huge sum of money for a brief and mindless task. I calculate her potential annual income, figuring in the cost of kick back to architect and lunch for the rubber stamp guys, and I resolve that within a year, once we are full time in New York, I will become the fastest, most sought after Expediteur in the city.
So I knuckle under, but am buoyed when C comes home and tells me that he had spoken with her and that she had no problem knocking a hundred dollars off her price. I recalculate her annual income and it is still fantastic. Even better when you realize that she can carry more than one package at the same time. I'll start out as her apprentice.
Once this final approval is granted, the work will begin. The project management company we have selected is fine-tuning its proposal after a series of meetings at our place in which the project components are outlined.
“Please take out that section about painting the walls. If there’s one thing I know I can manage, it’s paint. And the metal clad doors? I’m going to want all their layers of paint removed, but it’s really something I can do myself with a can of Zip-Strip and some steel wool, so could you delete that as well, please? Same with the radiator covers. Why sell us new ones when I can take down the old ones to what is probably the original chrome finish.”
C gave me a look he has perfected over the years. I got up, opened a drawer and tossed him the checkbook, as I walked out of the apartment.
“I can’t watch this. I’ll be at Starbucks. Meet me there when you’re done spending Ourbucks.”
Rarely, for instance, do we enter or exit our building without finding an interchangeably short young Mexican with a bag of warm edible studying the intercom for a name that matches what is scrawled on his delivery receipt. The dispatchers who prepare those receipts have worse handwriting than doctors, a fact that furthers my belief that the delivery business is lucrative. The Mexican boys never wear glasses. The buttoned roster of the intercom is two feet above their heads. The listing of its seventy-five names is as random as the sequenced selection made by C’s ipod. (“Did you hear that? The ipod felt that Good Morning Baltimore should follow Ella’s Love For Sale which followed Ramblin Man. I so get it.”)
I flinch at the sight of delivered food. Even the prospect of sitting in a restaurant makes me itchy with guilt. The only reason I can countenance going to Jiffy-Lube for an oil change is the watching of the outrageously attractive crew of young black mechanics through the glass of the waiting room. Someday, I’ll be last in line at 5PM, and they’ll yank down the overhead doors and walking toward me as they unzip their greasy jump suits, they will say “We got your car covered, but you look like you might need some work”.
I am just the kind of guy who doesn’t like to spend money on services that I can perform myself. When my grandparents would describe the extreme tactics needed on 164th Street to scrape by during the Depression, I, a pre-schooler, made rapturous mental notes.
This has led me into some disasters, and maybe into some savings, and constitutes an energy that C, who mostly accepts the premise of the service sector, finds curious.
I once decided, after receiving a quote for sanding and urethaning five rooms of old oak floors, that I could save thousands by renting the sander and doing the job myself. We lived for years with the resultant bucolic hills and valleys of that floor, and I accepted, as the price of thrift, a two-month back injury and two lungs aspirated with dust from Depression era varnish.
There was the time I rented a roto-tiller with tines powerful enough to loosen the clay in front of our 1925 row house, allowing us to improve the soil and plant a perennial parterre. The neighbors were amused. More months of back pain. Nothing grew.
In that same house, rather than spend six hundred dollars for a skylight, I hacked a hole in the ceiling with a borrowed Sawz-All right up through the roof tar, and hammered together a plywood box topped with two layers of Plexiglas and silicon caulk. This cost one hundred and forty dollars. It may have leaked a bit, but only during rain.
Before installing that skylight, I thought it might be a good idea to insulate the ceiling while the gash was open. We discovered that the flat roof was composed of the original oak stretchers and a second set that ran a foot and a half above them. I learned that some dollars might be saved by blowing loose insulation into that space rather than rolling out the usual pink fiberglass batting. I rented the blower and got dozens of bags of the loose fluff. Oddly, the hose supplied with the blower might have been long enough to reach the roof of a hamster cage but it demanded the hauling of the goatish machine up onto the stepladder beneath our newly carved opening. C was assigned the task of squeezing between the rafters tangled in the hose while I steadied the ladder, and tore open bags of the sneezable grey shredding, feeding it into the howling machine while grumbling irritably and shouting things like “Be sure you reach all the way into the corners” and, “Are you finding any antique jewelry up there?” or, “Hurry it up. We are about to lose sunlight and we don’t have any more extension cords for the work lamp.”
In that same house, I scored, steamed and removed old wallpaper. Most of it. Some of it. The remains gave the dining room a postmodern palimpsest that no guest at our table was clever enough to praise. As Scripture says, a decorator is never appreciated in his own house.
In that same house, I tried to replace an old toilet.
When we sold the place, I triumphantly explained to C the concept of sweat equity and why this buy/fix/sell pattern might have to be repeated many times over the next several decades. We developed a script: I would propose a strenuous money-saving activity and rent the appropriate contraption. I would turn it on and within a few minutes injure my back. C would finish the job. Sometimes I would injure my back just getting the thing into my car. C got wise.
By the time we had acquired a top floor condo in Montreal with exclusive rights to the roof, C raised a brow without looking up from his Gazette and coffee when I announced that I could see no reason why we couldn’t build our own roof deck.
Two months later, with sketches in hand, at a lumber yard on the far side of Rosemont, I surrendered to the possibility that building anything in a foreign country, other than a reputation, might not be easy. Is that board ten feet or ten kilometers? C was visibly relieved when I asked one of those scruffy types who are always carrying things about such places with cigarettes clamped in their lip corners threatening sawdust if he could recommend someone who might want to build our rooftop deck. That is how we acquired the phone number of, and soon made the acquaintance of Monsieur Adelard Deslauriers, a stocky man in his late 50s (early 60s?) whose thick calloused hands had built lots of stuff and were now working a pencil stub as we stood in front of our building. This seemed to have been his first visit to this part of the city since it had become the Gay Village. He spoke no English and held his opinion of us in check, but the estimate he wrote on a scrap of paper and now handed to me made it clear that he saw accessible gold in the pockets of these two Americans.
He did not know with whom he was dealing, but one wordless and withering glance from me after I had seen his estimate made him snatch back the paper and express surprise over the extra zero he had mistakenly affixed to the number. We swiftly came to terms, and during the first week of July, Adelard and his crew of gorgeous Frenchmen fashioned hoists out of thick long rope and drew lumber up onto the roof for the construction of a fabulous deck while we slept from sun-up to noon just below the sound of their boots on the roof. Getting out of bed, and stumbling naked into the kitchen for coffee, made our sordid bourgeois lives transparent, as the toolbelted men peeked inside while passing by the sliders that led from kitchen to terrace to the stairs they had built to the deck. I heard one of them mumble “Ah, la vie en rose”, as we left the building dressed just like them but ready to promenade Ste Catherine Street, in search of more sociable “viande rose” indeed.
Those years (C laughs when I call them the hungry ones) are over, and as we begin a total renovation of our New York City pied-a-terre, I am watching with horror as money gushes out of my pockets, like blood from the wounds of a suspended savior or berserk water besting a southern levee.
Because we are there only on weekends, the project demands management that does not come cheaply, but really, given my convictions, I would protest forking over even a nickel for this Doing-by-Others. Here, I have no choice, and I have particular guilt over the fact of having to pay somebody for the demolition part of the project. Is there anything easier than the tearing down of stuff? Shame on me.
I protested the latest demand for cash, which came in the form of an email from a lady referred to us by our architect. Her name, which sounds like a rodeo cheer or like the sound kids make when their parents announce a trip to Orlando, is composed of two parts with no clues as to which one, if any, is the familiar half. She will expedite the approval of our application to the city building department. Apparently, without her service, an application might languish for months. What she does, in a nutshell, is walk the package through some offices, collecting the required rubber stamps. For this, she proposes the payment of exactly $1,000.
I am outraged, but feel impotently distanced from those offices during their weekday hours of operation. I jump on the net in search of others who provide this service, convinced that her price is inflated. I find them listed under either admissible spelling of “Expeditor” and “Expediter”, one fellow using both versions in his ad. I contact a few of them, but none of them return my call. These guys must be very busy, have ample work, be careless entrepreneurs, or, only take clients through architects’ referrals.
I call our architect to complain. He offers a justification.
“She’s really very good. She’s the only one I’ve used for years. You may find somebody a couple hundred dollars cheaper, but a lot of them just drop off the package and make excuses for the delays. She actually gets your approval in two days.”
His words make me feel confident about her delivery but inflame my resentment about paying a huge sum of money for a brief and mindless task. I calculate her potential annual income, figuring in the cost of kick back to architect and lunch for the rubber stamp guys, and I resolve that within a year, once we are full time in New York, I will become the fastest, most sought after Expediteur in the city.
So I knuckle under, but am buoyed when C comes home and tells me that he had spoken with her and that she had no problem knocking a hundred dollars off her price. I recalculate her annual income and it is still fantastic. Even better when you realize that she can carry more than one package at the same time. I'll start out as her apprentice.
Once this final approval is granted, the work will begin. The project management company we have selected is fine-tuning its proposal after a series of meetings at our place in which the project components are outlined.
“Please take out that section about painting the walls. If there’s one thing I know I can manage, it’s paint. And the metal clad doors? I’m going to want all their layers of paint removed, but it’s really something I can do myself with a can of Zip-Strip and some steel wool, so could you delete that as well, please? Same with the radiator covers. Why sell us new ones when I can take down the old ones to what is probably the original chrome finish.”
C gave me a look he has perfected over the years. I got up, opened a drawer and tossed him the checkbook, as I walked out of the apartment.
“I can’t watch this. I’ll be at Starbucks. Meet me there when you’re done spending Ourbucks.”
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
chumatz?
I am familiar with the Jewish prohibition of work during certain hours, but what is chumatz? I'll look forward to googling it when I get to the office where I maintain my own perpetual prohibition of work.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Cheap, Easy and no Flashlights
From the left, you have C, me (I didn't get the "light-blue jeans memo"), Dieter and Rog, our Boston friends who brought us out to a notorious and well established bar near the Fens, assuming that we wouldn't be happy with our weekend unless provided with local dick. (Actually, we were in Boston to see the "David Hockney Portraits" show at the MFA and to visit D & R who have settled into their mighty spectacular new condo.)
The bar is really a complex of many bars on two floors., all of it quite crowded. Some of the rooms are not leather-oriented, and feature dancing, with the attendees wearing colorful rugby shirts and white cross-trainers.
The leather/levi rooms were loaded with talent. I get us drinks. Two vanilla vodkas with diet coke (yeech) for D & R, and two Blue Moons for C and me. The bar tender explains that it would be to our financial advantage to buy a pitcher of Blue Moon if we intend to drink more of it, and that he would hold it at the bar for our refills. This we do, and the whole charge came to $14! Now I know we are not in NYC.
We enter the large backroom which is about fifteen minutes away from peak time, and is filling up rapidly. The furniture motif is "black painted oil drum", stacked and arranged to create piggy areas with limited access. Walking to the rear of one of these cul-de-blacks, I am pursued by three men brandishing poppers and dicks. The usual piles-up evolve and multiply, and much beer is lost or tumbled. I reconnoiter with C and we make the identical observation about Boston guys. They get busy, but not in a playful way. They are the same guilt-ridden men we remember doing at The Safari Club (sadly closed down a few years back). However, the place gets gridlocked with a couple hundred moderately attractive men who are not shy, and there is no flashlight wielding monitor to slap their hands.
That was Friday. On Saturday, we went to Club Cafe. Extremely crowded. Younger. Hot. Friendly. Not sleazy. Well lit. No visible dick. We bump into a guy we had met at Alibi in Fort Lauderdale. He is freshly without his partner who had been developing a secret Manhunt life. (Manhunt lives are OK, but don't keep them a secret from your partner.) The guy yanks up his tee shirt,inviting me to stroke his chest which is dense with soft fur. We discuss his stalker, a mutual acquaintance from Ptown. We make plans for the Black party weekend. Dieter hands me one of the vanilla vodka diet coke drinks they like and I make the mistake of actually drinking it. Things grow fuzzy. There was mouth on mouth contact while D & G speak into my ear their plans to walk home and to watch Crash on DVD. They give us keys.
Oh right. the Hockney show. You didn't really think I'd be talking about that, did you?
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Pausing, may I say that
I always appreciate the email I receive about matters Pergemodoular, but yesterday I opened three delectables in a row, all worthy of a word of thanks.
The first, discovered on my site meter, which overnight seemed to have become that house invaded by Gremlins, was from ErosBlog regarding my help for the writer who wanted to become a shooter rather than a dribbler.
The second, a comment from a Californian Gordon, deposited on "A True Vocation" (which I posted last December) was refreshingly mitigated at its onset:
gordon baldwin said...
What a briliantlly organized dialogue (!) even if the underlying placement/disposition (placement in its French sense) of the characters is perhaps a little too good to be true. The writing, the plot is so seductive and so lethal as the reader, in this case me, is torqued into a vortex.
This and the four earlier months of your blog, that I've read this early evening in California, have given me great pleasure, much laughter, some envy, and deep respect, that you're managing to get it all into words and available to the collective consciousness, shoulod there be one. Bravissimo!
And finally, one of my favorite bloggers (and someone I've probably never met), after a few insomniac hours spent rummaging through my archives, sent me a photograph of his statuesque dick as a "token of thanks". Token, indeed. It is the sort of thing that would make a trawler full of Japanese tuna fishermen drop their nets and run for their Nikons. I've never posted a dick shot herein, but if I were looking for a first, this'd be it. Maybe I'll ask his permission to post it in sections. Y'all could collect him over the span of a week and then reassemble the parts, making the veins meet and the neatly partitioned halves of the underside of the glans match up. A sort of Cracker Jack/Ovaltine approach to dick.
Anyway, thanks, Bacchus, Gordon and XXXXXXXXX.
The first, discovered on my site meter, which overnight seemed to have become that house invaded by Gremlins, was from ErosBlog regarding my help for the writer who wanted to become a shooter rather than a dribbler.
The second, a comment from a Californian Gordon, deposited on "A True Vocation" (which I posted last December) was refreshingly mitigated at its onset:
gordon baldwin said...
What a briliantlly organized dialogue (!) even if the underlying placement/disposition (placement in its French sense) of the characters is perhaps a little too good to be true. The writing, the plot is so seductive and so lethal as the reader, in this case me, is torqued into a vortex.
This and the four earlier months of your blog, that I've read this early evening in California, have given me great pleasure, much laughter, some envy, and deep respect, that you're managing to get it all into words and available to the collective consciousness, shoulod there be one. Bravissimo!
And finally, one of my favorite bloggers (and someone I've probably never met), after a few insomniac hours spent rummaging through my archives, sent me a photograph of his statuesque dick as a "token of thanks". Token, indeed. It is the sort of thing that would make a trawler full of Japanese tuna fishermen drop their nets and run for their Nikons. I've never posted a dick shot herein, but if I were looking for a first, this'd be it. Maybe I'll ask his permission to post it in sections. Y'all could collect him over the span of a week and then reassemble the parts, making the veins meet and the neatly partitioned halves of the underside of the glans match up. A sort of Cracker Jack/Ovaltine approach to dick.
Anyway, thanks, Bacchus, Gordon and XXXXXXXXX.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
I see the Priest coming.
Right, be polite, but don't leave his room without a C-Note and a good DNA sample.
Mr. Parker
A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday evening, I'm in a booth at the second floor Sri Lankan speakeasy on 80th, with this black muscle number who pauses and says "You know who you look like? I just figured it out. You look just like Al Parker. You ever see him?" Now I've seen plenty of Al Parker, and the compliment startles me, so later in the week, I email The Expert who sends me this pic and says that maybe the eyes are what moved him to make the comparison. Anyway, the guy gets back into gear, and he can't seem to go fast enough, so I say "Whoa! Hold the Acela, fella. What's your hurry." He checks his watch and says "Gotta get home in time for Desperate Houswives".
Monday, February 27, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Near the Staten Island Ferry Station
C took this rather perfect picture last week while we were wandering lower Manhattan.
Color. Composition. Texture.
What's not to like?
Friday, February 24, 2006
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