New Yorkers party to fight HIV

Aside from enjoying the fact that this was a gathering of very pretty people, I was amazed at the way fashion seems to have moved into a new creative and pandrogynous permissiveness in which you combine all sorts of diverse elements to create an arresting and intriguing persona of often indeterminate sex and sexuality. Hot.

Christina's World (after Wyeth) by Josh Agle aka Shag

Star Quality

This kid's got it. Something tells me we haven't seen the last of Mario Nguyen.

Extremely Strange

National Equality March Song Finalists?

What? Where did this come from?

I am not the only one surprised at the unveiling of four finalists in a contest that seems to have been unpublicized.

Anyway, you can go here and have a listen to them. I am not going to review them because it would be too easy to...Let me just say that...Given that an anthem should be...Oh hell, I can't find anything nice to say about this unfortunate moment.

(PS: In 1978, a priest friend and I were finalists in a national songwriting contest for a handily forgotten entry called "Cheatin' On Myself". We were awarded $25 and, as the letter said, "The respect of the music industry".)

Subway Gibberish (September 19, 2009 Part VII)

Going downtown on the D train.
The driver announces crucial changes in the route.
When we got home and replayed this a few times, we figured out that when he says "Twenty-thirty Street", he means 23rd Street. Other than that, we have been able to decipher almost nothing.
Who hired this guy?
I can't imagine what the poor tourists with limited English were thinking?

Today on Bilerico: "Queers Who Surrender Their Lives to Needful Parents""

You will have to go to Bilerico this morning after 10:30 to read my response to the following:

Dear Father Tony,

I find myself on the cusp of a personal reinvention. Or, a mid-life crisis, if you prefer. I believe both are apropos descriptions.

When I graduated from college in 1985, I reinvented myself by moving to the opposite coast. I became an up-and-comer at a high-tech company that served me well. I experienced my first relationship and later came out of the closet into an open and diverse community that offered the ability to become any type of queer one wanted to be.

Twenty years later in 2005, I left a relationship and returned home to the house I grew up in. This time my reinvention was born of personal and familial necessity. I became the full-time primary caregiver to my mother who was increasingly affected by the ravages of Alzheimer's disease.

This summer, four years after I arrived, my mother was moved into an assisted care facility to provide her with the proper amount of constant attention and medical help that I was unable to deliver. My reason for being has disappeared, and I find myself a middle-aged single gay man whose life stands before him as a blank canvas.

What of a relationship? I spent several years in my previous relationship with his AIDS-related maladies at the top of my mind. The following four years have been spent with an Alzheimer's diagnosis as my focus. After so many draining years, do I really want to be with someone else? How will I ever find someone here in this small town where the gay community is practically invisible except for gay pride day?

Trying to find a date has been nearly impossible. It was a friend that gave me a bit of eye-opening counsel when I was bemoaning my plight. Asked where I was trying to meet people, I replied, "In the gay.com chat rooms." He raised his brows. "That's your problem,' he declared. "You're too old for gay.com. You need to get a profile up on silverdaddies.com." And that's when it hit me. I had been unceremoniously moved from one gay demographic to another and no one, until now, had bothered to notify me!

Reality has slapped me in the face and the need for another personal reinvention has become clear. So here I am. Directionless. I feel like a boat sans rudder; a swimmer treading water. Where do I go from here? I wish I knew. Sure, that would spoil the fun of the journey, but it would also assuage the fears of the unknown that lurk around every corner.

Nobody

Update: It's up. Get on it.

Bronx Skateboarders (September 19, 2009 Part VI)

I had forgotten what it's like to be a resilient and trash-talking boy. I tried to remember. Was I ever one of these? Stopping to record this during our bike tour of the Grand Concourse made me realize that I am living on another planet. I wonder if any of these kids will ever get there. If not, what will become of them? Will they ever land it? What eventually distracts them from this, their summer?

A Gourmet Moment (September 19,2009, Part V)

And He keepeth me safe from the clutches of mine enemies at the FDA.

Johnny Bizarre Coney Island Freak Show (September 19, 2009, Part IV)

While walking from the Scooter Laforge show to the opening of Roam, we encountered the shy and endearing Johnny Bizarre and his demure assistant, The Poison Puss.




The murky quality of this video is probably for the best.

Sol Lewitt underground (September 19, 2009, Part III)

To go downtown, we got down into the subway at the 59th Street station and were delighted to see that the new Sol Lewitt mural has been unveiled. (We sold our Sol Lewitt last year and have always felt a bit of kinship to his work. If he were alive, I wonder how he'd feel about the carved out sections for access and infrastructure. It's an energetic and happy piece and we are glad it is there. I believe that the pairs of yellow safety treads are an unintentional harmonic.

Coco Avant Chanel

My review, with private interviews with director Anne Fontaine and hot male co-star, Alessandro Nivola. Coco Before Chanel opens Sept. 25th.

Roam (September 19, 2009, Part II, in which we attend the opening night of a new straight(!) club)

When we approached the velvet rope, we were greeted with deference and were ushered through the door in advance of the line that stretched down 19th St. Why? Because it was clear that anyone of my obvious age would be reviewing the event rather than attending it.


When I told the Baad Lamb that after the Scooter Laforge show we would be attending the opening night of Roam a new hot spot on East 19th between Broadway and Fifth, he wondered about my state of mind. "Come on" I said. "It'll be fun. We haven't been to a straight bar in years. Let's see what it's like."

I am pleased to report that Roam is your classic New York watering hole for the young, very pretty and well-groomed boys and girls eager to compare their beautiful hair.


Not that anyone was rude to me. On the contrary, the staff was exceedingly accommodating and brought me up to the DJ booth in order to better photograph the room. That is where I met the prestigious DJ Claudius Raphael who roared with amusement when I told him that although his music was terrific, I am always displeased whenever I am in a nightspot that does not include Morning Train by Sheena Easton in its play list.


It's good to know that Roam is there because our visiting nieces and nephews who are now young and pretty adults deserve to be taken to a place like this rather than subjected exclusively to that elephants' burial ground of leather daddies known as The Eagle. In any case, we had the good sense to say good night just as the doors began to open up to the first few fresh-faced hopefuls. Ah youth.

Scooter Laforge and his innocently homoerotic t shirts.(September 19th, Part I)

This is not the first time I've seen erotic art by Scooter Laforge. I knew what to expect, but I attended his t shirt/sculpture/painting installation at Envoy Enterprises on Chrystie Street hoping to figure out why I liked his stuff which, on the face of it, could be easily dismissed as not-serious.


I think I've figured out why I like it. Obviously, if one wants to see depictions of the penis, there are millions of far more realistic and glorified editions available at the click of the mouse, so that can't be it. Also, it isn't the street-naif/Basquiat quality that he works. I'm not really a fan of that dialect. It's something else. And our attendance gave me the opportunity to figure it out.

His unabashed homoeroticism is playful and entirely forthright. He seems to be uninflicted with any guilt that needs resolution or repression against which one must revolt. It's as if boldness has no home in him. He simply depicts what he wants to depict. Sex is a non-issue. It is something that we think about and seek out because we are sexual beings. That is the refreshingly short extent of his agenda.

The Baad Lamb, who paints his own t shirts, one of which he wore to this opening, snagged one of Scooter's.


Oh by the way, if you're at work in one of those places where folks run to supervisors complaining about being subjected to offensive visual images or sounds when they walk by your cubicle, this video and these photos are entirely NSFW, in a very innocent way, and, for you more high brow types, yes, I know this isn't Sargent or Homer or Caravaggio or VanGogh, or even Stuart Davis, and you will claim that I just like it because Scooter is hot in that way that I like men to be hot. Just can it and let your inner child out to play for awhile.

Scooter's words in the video explain it all.

What sets us above lesser creatures

Maybe what makes us human is our ability and willingness to confound ourselves.

Another New York City Moment: Regis and Kelly Pie Fight

This is why I go out for coffee rather than make it, and why I always schlep my camera. There's always something going on in my neighborhood. Today, "Live with Regis and Kelly" staged a Guinness world record breaking pie fight outside their studio. Don't be horrified at the waste of food (coconut custard pies from Stew Leonard's). They made a sizable donation to City Meals to compensate for the stunt, and 67th Street never smelled so good.

Today on Bilerico: "My Offended Reader in Maine"

You'll have to go to Bilerico after 10:30 AM EST today for my response to this:

Dear "Father" Tony:
Your fanatically anti-Catholic efforts sadden me and I will pray for you because I think you need it desperately. Have you not asked yourself why you are attacking our clergy? Isn't it self-serving? Don't bother responding, you will have to answer to God our Father, not to us.

Yours in Jesus Christ,
Maine Catholics who follow the teachings of the One True Church.

Update: It's up. Get on it.

Mary Travers' Bitter End.

I am amazed that the New York Times seems to have gotten caught off guard with nothing prepared. It was widely known that she has been battling cancer for years.

In her older and zaftig years, she became a Connecticut fag hag with cache, but she was not really a nice person. The word bitch was a frequent descriptive. I look forward to the officially trotted out obit to see how any of that is handled.

Meanwhile, I have to say, she and Peter and Paul were my earliest music teachers. The first album I owned in this life was Peter Paul and Mary Live at the Bitter End. When they were not tutoring me, I was studying melody and harmony a la Joan Baez and John Phillips and Cole Porter, all infused with Gregorian chant. Not a bad school.

Update: Full obit.

Bea Arthur Remembered

Today, Joe and I attended the star-studded memorial service for Bea Arthur at the Majestic Theater on 44th Street. Angela Lansbury hosted, and participants included Adrienne Barbeau, Zoe Caldwell, Norman Lear, Rue McClanahan, Ann Meara and Jerry Stiller, Rosie O'Donnell and Chita Rivera. Two hours of ribald recollections, funny stories and videos. The incredible Angela Lansbury, an octogenarian who moves with the coltish fluidity of a sixteen year old, opened the celebration by wonderfully belting out the song from Mame that was Bea Arthur's big solo, The Man in the Moon is a Lady.

I also had a chat with Michael Buckley from "What the Buck", caught up with Michael Wilson of the Hartford Stage Company, traded beauty secrets with Coco Peru and met a very handsome young man named Eric Garcia who plays piano and sings several nights a week at Chez Josephine on 42nd Street, the location of the after-party where I got the picture of Anne Meara seated across the table from Norman Lear.

The good news announced at the celebration by Executive Director Carl Siciliano is that the Ali Forney Center is naming its first housing facility the "Bea Arthur Residence"

Here are some stellar pics.

(Update: I've added some of Joe's pics to the batch, and here is his report.)

The Revson Fountain Waterworks at Lincoln Center

Whenever you tinker with something whose primary purpose in this world is to delight, you are bound to irritate some folks. (Check out the links and read the various comments at Curbed.)

Now that the scaffolding is beginning to be removed, like the bandages wielded by the husband of Muffy Potter Aston, we see what has been built for us as a replacement for the fountain designed by Philip Johnson for the center of the plaza in Lincoln Center.



I am so very satisfied with this photo that I am posting this now, but I've more to say about Diller Scofidio Renfrew, the architects of the renovation of Lincoln Center, and WET the people behind the fountain.