First, you need paprika.

On Saturday, we acquire coffee and pastry by means of a short walk that serves primarily to test-fly garments for the rest of the day. If this three-block excursion induces a desire for scarf or gloves, or, inversely, the wish to shed a layer or two, we are soon home with breakfast in hand and able to make adjustments before the major foray. (Is there anyone with a more self-absorbed Saturday ritual?)

Cold or hot, we collect Joe and Eddie. Joe is wearing a red jacket with a Union Jack sewn into the back. This jacket comes with a story involving San Francisco and a flat mate with zooshy clients, and a white version of the jacket. (There, Joey, in case you ever wondered if I really listen to you while you go on – and on.)

Every aspect of Joe has a story attached to it, sort of like a price tag or the washing instructions label. I swear if he were to sweep up his clipped fingernails, he’d deliver himself of ten epic histories, and then, there’d be the toenails to listen to.

C announces our tripartite Upper East Side plans. Eddie is delighted with the stores to be attended and Joe announces a need for deli food. I assure Joe that we will consume after we have consumed. We push through the door of our first stop, Waterworks, where it is our goal to examine shower faucets, heads and installations that have those extra jets that spew water at your sensitive regions. We are all four arrested by the sight of an immense and sloped copper freestanding tub priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. It is deep and coddling and obscene in its demand for space in a city where the placement of even a toothbrush must be weighed in terms of square inch efficiencies. We are however, attracted to a nearby tub of pure white resin. It looks like a shelled boiled egg cut in half the long way and with its yoke removed. Joe says, “I. Love. Deviled. Eggs.” Then, his hands go up in the air, and we all brace ourselves for the pronouncement that this always signals.

“I have never once eaten enough deviled eggs. Never once had enough of them. Same with shrimp. Put me at a buffet with all-you-can-eat shrimp, and I never leave without thinking I shoulda ate more of those.”

I agree with the shrimp part of this, and add that I always eat them with the shells on. Good fiber. I raise an examination of the concept of the deviled egg. Mom never made them, and I have a real fear of them. I avoid them entirely. Their coloration seems not to occur in nature. They arrive cradled by suspicious women with suspicious cellophane. They always need to visit a refrigerator for some secret fix before appearing on the holiday groaning board. They are evil. Eviled eggs. Joe overrides this and repeats the fact that he has never at any single meal had his fill of them.

“What goes into a deviled egg?” I wonder.

My comrades have no problem listing the basic ingredients and I begin to concoct a riff on the recipe that might involve the addition of garlic, lemon grass and perhaps a paper-thin membrane of peeled cucumber separating the white from the yoke. Also, I’d whip the yoke into something more chiffon-like. Lemonish. Meringuey. (OK, readers, I know you’re eager to share your deviled egg recipes, and, if we are lucky, maybe this gourmand will share his version of this American classic.

We leave Waterworks and head to The Container Store which mercifully presents itself before Joe can spot a deli.

Provincetown in Winter

I call this by an obvious name: January Thaw on Bradford Street. I always started too late in the day. The sun was running out and the cold was placing its hand on the back of my neck again. Had to take a photo and finish up back at the house.



If you go to the end of Commercial Street, you can walk the huge stones of the breakwater out to the end of the cape. In winter those rocks are treacherous with ice, and when you reach the end, the sand is brittle beneath your shoes and what had been lush and dazzling in July is now barren and magnificent.



Is it conceivable to have loved that town more in winter than in summer?

minton tiles

I would consider agreeing with New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp who thinks that The Mall in Central Park is the most beautiful place in the world. The Mall ends with the upper and lower Bethesda terraces and fountain, one of the most dreamlike places on earth. For the past few years, part of the lower terrace has been closed for the restoration of the ceiling tiles. This is finally completed. The following Times interactive feature tells you all about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20070101_BETHESDA_GRAPHIC/

I few years ago while rummaging through an industrial salvage yard in Springfield, MA, I came upon a box of old encaustic tiles which I bought for $15. The markings on their reverse clearly identified them as Minton and also verified the year of their manufacture, 1840, and the factory that produced them, Stoke-Upon-Trent. We'll put these into the new bathroom floor, in front of the sink. Their colors are identical to the Bethesda ones.

Kadhimiya?

This is an unusual blog.

A basically straight male atheist student in an all-boy school in Iraq who is writing about having feelings for some of the guys. If he stops posting, we should fear the worst.

(1/28 note: Iraqi Atheist claims subsequently to be 17 years old. Since I am not a reader of the blogs of minors, nor do I engage them in email or commentary, I am leaving him unattended to his destiny, while wishing him well.)

r

All right.

It is extremely and perhaps painfully obvious by your lack of commentary that none of you care a fig about art, even performance art of the more droll varieties, so I am going to revert to the sort of detail that you all really want me to deliver, you dirty little crotch-cradling gutteral children. (And you know I love you for it.)

At the end of our evening at Exit Art, I walked by two men as we were seeking the stairs up to the main level, to our coats, and to the door. The shorter one watched me in that way that makes one pleasantly feel like meat. I discarded his attention because we were not about that sort of foraging on this night. Also, we have become rather compartmentalized, forgetting that sometimes, men fix their gaze upon other men not solely for the purpose of undress.

Upstairs, while I contemplated a video of a stuffed red velvet armchair, the seat of which was replaced by the writhing and naked back of a man who was literally inside the chair, I heard a voice behind me. The shorter man was speaking to me.

Because he is handsome and because I am deliberately shallow, I did not hear a word he said to me. I studied his features. Smoothly italianate, I guessed rightly. Straight DeNiroan brows. Nothing unmatched, dark eyes full of curiosity, a smile and a chin with no fear of reprisal.

I’m afraid I was rather inconsiderately unaware of his tall friend who seemed resigned to a somewhat ancillary role in the short guy’s overtures.

C drifted over from some other installation, and the short guy inspected him with favor. I wonder if he had seen both of us downstairs. I wonder what his intentions are. Introductions were made, art was discussed and the mechanics of future contact were exchanged. Before he left the country on a foreign assignment, he sent us some photos of himself that I have cropped to maintain his anonymity. He had also taken a half hour to read a bit of this diary and still he suggests that we “hang” upon his return.

As you know, I ordinarily describe the strenuosities of men-events had, rather than those anticipated, but I thought I’d try something a bit different today by posting a non-event that will surely become something more, but who knows what. Also, be assured that his input into my account may be considerable, and therefore, all that I tell you may be a complete fiction, and then again…

"Serious Games" at Exit Art

Loving it or hating it doesn’t much matter. Seeing art, or its excuse, is always fun. With this premise firmly in mind, we enter Exit Art, located at 475 Tenth Avenue.

Tonight’s program is called “Serious Games”. It is composed of several pieces of performance art. Some are hilarious, some are repulsive and some are inspired. The whole show made for an entertaining evening, akin to attending a high school science fair. I hope that does not sound condescending because really, I’d say the same about most of the overpriced dreck we see in the galleries of Chelsea. Exit Art, however, is devoted to giving exposure to new and unknown/emerging artists. This means that most of them are quite young and eager to express the themes that preoccupy young folks.

Here’s some of a performance called “Touch and Go” by Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow. She portrays a swimmer in training who is belittled by her nasty “coach”. Spectators are encouraged to demand that she execute various strokes. The whole thing worked very well. It made a strong statement in which the mechanics were not distracting. You want to slap the coach.



In her performance “Big Balls” , this sardonic lady simply positioned herself by the bar all evening. Loud and clear.



I’ll be posting more of these, and, the whole show will be repeated next Saturday, for those who might be in the city and looking for fun and an open bar.

Buxtehude and Bach

Didn’t have to go outside to know it was cold last Saturday. Could feel it through the window. The stiffened quickstep of folks down on the sidewalk. The stopped molecules of air between us permitting the passage of light with emergency. Simon says, “freeze”, and what had been a sweet maiden aunt of a winter did just that. We add layers in preparation for going out to fetch coffee and munch. My nose runs before we are at Starbucks and C knows what I am thinking. This is the last winter of my life. Starting next year, we’ll be in Fort Lauderdale for the cold months. All of them. Won’t miss this one bit.

We make plans for indoor events, selecting the first of a ten part free concert series at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue and 53rd St. The series commemorates the 300th anniversary of the death of Diedrick Buxtehude, a German organist I admire. The program tells us that Bach walked several hundred miles to meet Buxtehude and learn from him. He was his pupil for several months.

The organist of St. Thomas will use the small organ in the rear of the church rather than the behemoth over the choir. Treadles pumped by the guy who maintains the organ will operate the bellows! This non-electric mechanism will help deliver an authentic sound from this feisty welterweight of an instrument.

The music begins and I am reminded of the difference between Bach and Buxtehude.

In Bach’s mind, the notes rise up like birds out of a reedy marsh into a grey sky. One first, followed by a tangle of others until suddenly the sky is black with them, and then they all catch the wind, banking together in formation with the starter again in the lead.

Buxtehude is the opposite. The notes descend. Imagine a scullery wench standing at the top of a long flight of marble steps. She holds the handles of a wicker basket full of hundreds of silver spoons, which she dumps down the stairs, the echo after the clatter making perfect sense.

At the concert, I also realize a second major difference between Bach and Buxtehude. You can easily whistle a Bach tune, but Buxtehude’s stuff doesn’t really have a hook or a melody. Nothing catchy. It’s rather like flocked, gold-toned wallpaper for cathedrals, and hearing it within the stone walls of this gorgeous gothic structure is like lowering a hatbox lined with such paper over your head and letting the message-less shimmer sift into your ears.

Anyone who is interested can attend any of the next nine concerts (Saturdays at 4PM). Buxtehude aside, this church is magnificent. The blue glass of the windows against the soaring stone is wow.



Later, we acquire heat in the form of Maker’s Mark Manhattans at the Townhouse where a few glum men sit at the bar. The considerate bartender twice refills the bowl of salty munchies by our napkins, while C and I discuss the fact that when both of us first started listening to pop radio, there was no segmentation of the airwaves. You could hear Motown, late do-wop, rock, folk, Elvis, soul, the Carpenters, Rolling Stones, Pet Clark and everyone else (short of Perry Como) all competing for a place on the same chart. There was something great about that. To have grown up not differentiating among the songs you heard based on assigned categories. You either liked that song or not.

Our next task was to run down to MOMA to see the exterior video installation. Not good.

We stopped to admire the huge bronze sculpture in the angled space at Lever House. One of the better pieces of public art in New York City, it is also one of the few sculptures I can think of that looks better by night than by day.



(Hmm. Wonder how many "comments" will dispute my liking this statue, and what they'll say to convince me.)

Time for a nap before going to Exit Art (475 Tenth Ave.) for “Serious Games”, the fourth project in their series of “new approaches to performance art.” This merits its own post(s) with some video. Prepare to laugh/cringe. I think Bach might have laughed and Buxtehude cringe.

A Problem Solved

While waiting in line to get into “Body & Soul”, a legendary dance event held at a club called Pacha on West 46th Street, we become annoyed with the cold air and drizzle. We are C and I, Dieter and Rog of Boston and Fort Lauderdale, Joe, Jeff and Aaron. A security guard moving along the line proclaimed that the delay was due to a slow down at the coat check. Ah, the coat check. Jammy nemesis of all club children. Once we were inside the building, and in that line, the wait was ever more vexing, given the reverb of music coming from the arena two floors above our heads.

The “coat checking” concept is not new, and yet, it is routinely bungled by event managers who ought to know better, and, who ought to be able to streamline the arrival and divestiture process which is, to say the least, not rocket science.

I recently described for you a coat-check insurrection at a DN party. Consider also the endless and loathsome lines of the Black Party, held annually in March at Roseland Ballroom. One resorts to leaving one’s sensibles at home or hotel, opting to dress only in the black skivvies selected for the dance floor, hailing a cab frantically in the cold night air, and emerging several hours later in full daylight in only the stained and abbreviated remnant of that same slight costume. The ensuing sight of thousands of semi-naked black-booted men taking coffee and brunch at mid-town Manhattan counters is a ritual like the appearance of cicadas or the migration of Monarch butterflies, and ought to be listed and billed as a “Don’t Miss” by the directors of bus tours from Dayton.

Let’s return to Body & Soul. Outside, we waited in line with buoyancy generated by Belgian beer and Manhattans. We devise distractions. Joe and I sing, “It’s My Dick in a Box” verbatim. Dieter, whose nipples are perpetually engorged, responds to Jeff’s desire for big’uns, by sharing his secret: a snake-bite kit which he often wears all day long under his suit while at the office. Jeff lifts his shirt and the test application is successful, making his left nip considerably larger than the right.



(I am disinclined to gush over artificially distended body features. Elongated earlobes with bullet holes? I’d rather trolls. Nipples like tough old Vienna sausage tips? Argh, not for these lips. Dicks injected with ass fat that makes them look like pigs-in-a-blanket hors d’oeuvres? Just un-nerves. A scrotum filled to bursting with saline? Yikes, I’m bailing.)

Anyway, at lunch the next day, we were able to solve the coat check challenge in less than fifteen minutes:

a) When ordering tickets in advance, the customer should be forced to pay for the coat check at the same time. These customers will be ushered into a separate and speedier line where the elimination of the cash transaction would result in a 25% timesaving.
b) The advance admission ticket, whether acquired in person at a retail outlet, or via the mail or even in the will-call line ought to contain the two matching and numbered sections needed for the coat check. As you enter, you rip off the bottom numbered section and retain it. The top numbered section is applied to the coat hanger. This would eliminate another 25% of the delay.
c) Upon arrival, attendees should be handed coat hangers to which they would apply their garments (and that perforated numbered section of their ticket, eliminating this cumbersome part of the process when arriving at the head of the line, and saving an additional 25% of the total time needed for this ridiculously simple business.
d) If the event organizers know, by dint of advance ticket sales, that their event will draw a huge crowd, hiring more “runners” to receive coats already numbered and on hangers, to hang them in order, and finally to retrieve them, would constitute a tiny financial burden heavily outweighed by customer satisfaction. At Body & Soul, an event that attracted several thousand revelers, the coat check team consisted of less than ten harried staffers.
e) Some usage of bar coding technology ought to replace the request for one’s initials made as one hands over the garment to the attendant. The idea being that when you depart, the attendant retrieving your coat will ask you to speak your initials which should match those written on the hanger tag. This is supposed to prevent theft or confusion, but in reality, the exhausted staff never bothers to ask you to speak your initials by the time the tide, which has come in, is pressing to go out. Bar coding, in which the two coat check stubs, and the admission part of the ticket, are tied to the reveler’s name, would, upon scanning, eliminate 99% of mismatches and disputed claims of ownership. Those glitches involve only a tiny percentage of the attendees, but can occupy a huge portion of staff time while those of us reliable enough to hold onto our tickets must stand and fume. Patrons with coat check problems ought to be whisked away and handled in a small airless room, as is the case at airports when one reports lost baggage.



Enough about efficiencies. Here’s a strange picture of us before we left our place for the evening. Scully? Scully, can you hear me? This is Mulder. Do these jeans make my butt look alien?

Au Revoir, Braindeadlia

Every vacation reaches a mental zenith at which point all tasks are accomplished, all socializations are fulfilled and all appetites are snuffed like burnt party candles. With luck, C and I reach that point together, having extricated from our heads both the memory of our worklives and the foreboding of their return, and we dissolve into the clear and perfect turquoise of deep relaxation. The markers are obvious. We actually sit in chairs rather than admire them. We laugh like wind chimes, at anything. We watch the iguanas watching us. We fuss over little things like stubble, or the application of a particular moisturizer C stuffed into my Christmas stocking. It made me smell like carrot cake.

On the last day of 2006, I think we shared that moment. What else could have provoked me to put down my drink and go back inside to fetch my entire collection of flip flops, arranging them on our terrace like a school of dolphins yearning for the sea?

"You should add your sandals", said C, looking up from a book of photographs by Pierre et Gilles, but I was already chin to the tiles, steadying the camera in a pushy urgent warm wind, gently reminding me that we ought to get packing as soon as this last bit of nonsense was done.

Memento Braindeadliae

This is the entrance to Dieter and Rog’s place at “The Palms” on the oceanside of Route A1A.



As I’ve established in dustier posts, one of the most satisfying aspects of Fort Lauderdale is the constant visible collision between the old and new cities. For instance, directly across the road from “The Palms”, you can check into this place where the in-room movies are probably unspiced.



Or, walking over the bridge from our place to the fashionable Galleria Mall, we find this alluring display of a menacing hi-tech toilet contraption.



And yet, if we walk a stone’s throw in the opposite direction, toward the beach, we pass this moment of vintage beauty. Every time we do this, I want to try that latch. Want to press that painted-over doorbell. Want to see everyone who has ever passed through those doors. Want to know their stories. Where they are today. How they ended up. Wanna say to them, “Hey. Ever spend a night with anyone at the “Praise the Lord Apartments? Really? Whadja do?”

Draw Your Own Conclusions

When you’re ready to go out for the evening in Braindeadlia, you consult a smallish, greasy and muddling magazine called 411. It lists every option and includes some candid photos that offer guidance as you choose your venue.

Here are the photos on pages 57 and 59 of a recent edition. Where would you want to be when the next hurricane hits?

Braindeadlian Christmas Eve

Although disinclined to worship that which does not taste good, I attended, again, the gay Christmas Eve service held at the Broward Center. It has become popular enough to merit two editions. (We chose the later, so as to avoid the gays/lesbians-with-kids/strollers crowd.)

This event continues its devolution into less colorful respectability, and I bet it will emerge a full-grown yawn by next December. Nevertheless, I convinced C to attend it with me (He skipped Florida last year) with a promise of stirringly fine live Christmas music delivered by a sweet orchestra and choir. We were accompanied by our friends Dieter and Rog, and we snagged the same box seats we had last year, whence I could look down upon the head of the presiding “bishop” whose jeweled miter looked up at me like the gaping jaws of a hungry alligator.

The festive congregation was composed of smartly sweatered Clark Kentular gay men, with a sprinkling of leather daddies, some with holly sprigs pinned to their harnesses, and, one startling fellow about twenty rows from the stage who wore a red sequined top ala 1963 Judy Garland TV Christmas special.

We happily greeted Michael whom I had met at this event last year. He was again accompanied by his mother and sister. Michael remains the youngest gay man in America. (Even his mother is younger than me, despite the one prayer I made during this service which was that baby Jesus might not allow that to be the case, cruel savior of others.)

We would be with Michael three more times in the course of the week. Twice accidentally and once intentionally. We bumped into him at Macy’s in the Galleria Mall on the 26th, where he had selected a shirt, and deciding to wear it out of the store, he cast himself writhingly upon the counter of the sales clerk who needed to scan the attached tag. Our third meeting was for dinner at Alibi where it became frustratingly clear that men of a certain age do not share references with boys of another age. We had been to see “Dream Girls” ( a post in itself) earlier in the day, and discovered that Michael had only a vague idea of Diana Ross or the Supremes. (In the course of our fourth meeting later in the week, he actually said “Fay Wray? Who’s that?”) Consequently, I have promised to commence a regular feature on this blog, listing and explaining cultural references that I feel are essential equipment for any gay man. This daunting task, really the establishment of a kind of “Ecole Supplementaire’ for baby gays, will probably exhaust the already exhausted me, and will require regular adjunctive input from you more professorial gays who read herein.

For those of you who live a distance from a metropolitan gay church, I made this snippet.



Here is a photo of the curious but efficient item distributed at the “taking of communion” part of the service.



It looks like one of those single-serving jelly or butter containers you get with toast at inferior restaurants. Pulling off the top seal reveals the wafer, after the consumption of which, one pulls off the inner seal revealing a gulp of grape juice. This was a disquieting business, adding amusement and techno-ruminative public health speculation in whispers throughout the intrigued congregation that should have been focused on the symbolism of the Last Supper, or, as in the Roman tradition, the Transubstantiation wherein these commodities become the body and blood of Jesus. The nifty packaging made it rather more “brunch of Jesus”. I laughed, but realizing that I was on display in our box seats, affected a pious expression of meditation upon the mysteries of vacuumed freshness. Later in the evening, at the Club Baths, I found myself in the company of two queens from Milwaukee who had also been at the service and were, clad only in their towels, now delivering a hilarious send-up of the communion in an elaborate “Fabio/I can’t believe it’s not butter’ routine. Jesus woulda roared.

Braindeadlia

Airport transactions are less drab on the 24th of December. The “cheery” seems to waft up like static scuffed out of the undulating teal and salmon patterned carpet at your gate, out of the pile of newspapers you read and shed while clutching your boarding pass, out of the styrofoamed coffee, in the reassuring Morse code of overhead bin latches and safety belt buckles as we close our eyes.

Then, we are on the sidewalk, and that first intake of warm moist Braindeadlian air is like being hitched up to a morphine drip. We are sinking into Fort Lauderdale for a week, and we barely hear the horn of Gabe’s Lexus, and we demand open windows for the short trip from the airport, and we lunch at Fernanda’s with luggage still in the trunk, relieved to find that the calamari salad is still the best in the world.

Stepping off the elevator on the seventeenth floor of our building, I feel anxious as I fish for the keys, I open the door, and that mildly disinfectant scent that I have never been able to expunge rushes to greet us like a joyful dog left alone too long. So different from the scent of our New York place which is darker and oaken, toasted, and with hints of berries and plum. So different from our home in the Wretched Little City, where the scent of garlic in olive oil greets you like a bossy and illegal housekeeper.

We find the installation of new hurricane windows and door to be completed. The crew has left no debris, but there is a thin film of white dust on every surface. Before we unpack, we clean the place, top to bottom, shedding northern clothing as we work. This dust has ignored the restrictions of cabinetry. Even the Motrin bottle in the medicine cabinet needs a rinse.



Yes, Eddie, the chairs are vintage Saarinen (even the red vinyl cushions are original). I found them roadside in Connecticut, housing spiders. The table is a Raymond Loewy design with matching chairs that are in storage because their slick seats make naked sitting adhesive.

Cleaning a place that you’ve been away from for awhile is not so dreary a task. Not unlike a re-acquaintance or a resurrection staged by carpetbaggers. I pause to admire my own modest design coup: a diamond plate truck box from Home Depot. I drilled four holes in its base and added the wheels. It functions as coffee table, extra seating, and, as locked storage for special things that need security while we are away: our favorite mugs, the in-line skates, leather flip flops acceptable at the Ramrod on a week night, our Club Baths membership cards, a favorite Dolce and Gabbana bathing suit, bitters, Maker’s Mark, vermouth and poppers.



With a huge sunny stretch of afternoon left for divertissement, we cross the street to Hugh Taylor Birch Park and do eight miles on our skates. A restorative jump in the pool, and we begin to think about the night to come.

An anniversary

Twenty-three years ago, perhaps to the day, I first met C in a bar called the Chez Est, here in the Wretched Little City.

That bar has been torn down and recently replaced by a tall sand-colored Marriott in which none of the surfaces are what they attempt to suggest. Last night we attended a gathering of two hundred local men held in a glitzy reception room of that fauxtel, and we took a moment to stand in the very spot in which we first met.

We were delighted to find that the party included a few men who were at the Chez Est on that night twenty-three years ago. One of them, Donald Funk, recreated his famous imitation of Hazel, the maid, running to get the door, while screaming “Mr. B! Mr. B!” (We will never know how many potential boyfriends he may have scared off over the years with this dramatic bit. He was a handsome and hot man way back then, and he’s the same today.)



Later in the evening, Donald and I performed an “RBF”, a bar maneuver invented by Donald and practiced to perfection by the two of us at the old Chez. It consists of walking backwards side-by-side through the bar at its most crowded, proving the point that we could go unnoticed from one end to the other no matter how absurd our movements. “RBF” stands for “Reverse Beauty Float”, and whenever Donald suggested one, it was a sure sign that we were bored, and that the night was not going well. The standard “Beauty Float” was what one did when one felt the need to break away from one’s friends periodically in order to cruise the crowd for new arrivals, as in “I’m gonna do a BF. Back in a minute.”

The night I met C, Donald had suggested we attempt a one-footed hopping RBF. This seemed preferable to his suggestion of a week earlier that we attempt the RBF on our knees in order to see the bar from the refreshing perspective of dwarves. We performed the hopping routine, which resulted in joint pain and a headache, all of which evaporated the instant I saw C.

Someday I suppose I’ll write about the rest of that night. It almost seems a little too valuable to me for the telling. Maybe I’ll get to it next week when we are in Braindeadlia (Fort Lauderdale).

Here is the earliest picture of us. We moved in together one month after we met. Seems like five minutes ago.

What I learned this year

1) I do not need 90% of the supplements I have been taking for the past few years. I have stopped enriching GNC and The Vitamin Shoppe.

2) I do not need my AOL account. I need to figure out how to cancel it.

3) The mysterious lyrics to Jamiroquai’s 1994 release “The Return of the Space Cowboy”. The word that gave us trouble turns out to be “Cheeba” which means pot.

4) I can and will continue to publicly and loudly chastise parents who scrape my ankles with their tank-like Maclaren strollers on the sidewalks and in the retail establishments of the Upper West Side of Manhattan (Maclarendale, of thee I sing). Some of those strollers hold school age kids who seem to be drugged.

5) How to find and change the fuse that controls the CD player, clock and rear view mirrors of my car, making me a certifiably butch auto mechanic.

6) How to arrive at the doors of the Madrid and Barcelona Eagles without a map, and, the merits of each.

7) Any taxi driver who says he can get you to JFK in time for your flight is a liar.

8) I am not successfully atheistic, although God knows I’ve tried, and it really doesn’t show.

9) The meaning of the following words, some of which I have avoided for years (I kept a list):

brinkmanship
prolix
adumbrate
samizdat
ruching
thaumaturge
aceldema
inexorable
COBOL
carapace
bloviate
proximo
auto-da-fe
occlusion
hegira
inchoate
sedulous
captious
escheat
bespoke (the trendiest word of 2006)
spagyric
desultory
extant
redoubtable
crenelated
prehensile
abrogate
termagant
lycanthropy
exergue
tarboosh
protean
permutation
traduce
testatrix
skep
and my 2006 favorite: tarantism, meaning “a malady characterized by an uncontrollable urge to dance”.

(I have not yet performed the induction ceremony that will add “melismatic” to the list before the end of the year.)

Next to this list, I have kept on my desk the usage rules governing the following sets of similar:

affect vs effect
foundered vs floundered
immanent vs imminent
scrimmage vs skirmish
discomfit vs discomfort

Reviewing these words and these sets shows me that I still avoid most of them and have an oddly natural resistance to the retention of their definitions.

10) Urine, as sexual currency, does not interest me at all.

Solandra Maxima

solandra maxima, originally uploaded by farmboyz.

Our Solandra Maxima bloomed this week as if to defy the freezing temperatures just outside the windows. When I came home from work, its scent rushed to greet me before I turned on the lights. (It is like the Night Blooming Cereus in that way, but not nearly so poisonous.) Commonly known as the Golden Chalice, this wonderful flower will send out ballooning buds wherever you prune it. The blossoms are eight inches long and turn a deeper golden color as each day passes until they droop and fall to the floor after about two weeks. left to its own inclinations, this plant would form a huge shrubby mass, but it does not seem to resent being kept small. A wonderful bonus: I once pruned off several branches and shoved them into a clear glass cylinder of tap water in which I watched them sprout roots. I kept postponing their transplant, and after a year, they went into bloom anyway. I gave them to a co-worker who has a degree in botany and a large greenhouse. She potted them up properly and they are performing gratefully as foster children. Our Solandra Maxima is over twenty years old. Next year at this time, we will have sold this house, and we will be full time in NYC and Fort Lauderdale with no room for our tropicals. We'll have to find good homes for them, and will miss them dearly.

White Christmas

Go to Starbucks to obtain a copy of their DVD issuance of the movie “White Christmas”, complete with the usual interview and trailer frills, and, a CD of the soundtrack!

Be forewarned. This soundtrack is not literally the soundtrack, but the original studio recording of what was delivered in this 1954 polonium 210-laced ginger house in which I am doomed to dwell for life. The four walls of “White Christmas” are my orphanage, my prison, my asylum, my boyhood home, my aerie, my palace and my sarcophagus.

Rosemary Clooney, under contract to Columbia at the time, was not allowed to do the soundtrack, and was replaced by Peggy Lee. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are there, as is Trudy Stevens who was the voice double for Vera-Ellen in the film. PL delivers an imitation of RC so accurate as to make me fish out the liner at several points just to make sure they had not snuck in a bit of RC’s own voice here and there. (Less slavish and highly delectable is PL’s rendition of “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me”.)

The other three are glorious in the delivery of one jazzy number after another. In song, they pretend joyfully to climb the post-war American temple steps leading to the civic duty of marriage to a member of the opposite sex. This culminates with a reverential offering of America’s own Forever Song, “White Christmas”.

They are accompanied (sometimes assaulted) by Joseph J. Lilley and his orchestra and vocalists, the sound of whom, as a teenager, could make me literally nauseous. Now, as I hear them merrily chugging alongside the stars, their arrangement makes me simply happy, and nostalgic for a childhood I never really had, and for a country in which none of us ever really lived.

I have always felt uneasy about the fierce fascination I have for this movie. I have tried to hide it over the years, but friends, including one who gave me this original movie poster, could easily read the fact that I become immobile when it is shown on TV.



In the early and giddy days of videocassette, when classics were at last released from the imprisonment of annually scheduled network showings, several gift-wrapped copies of this movie came my way. I soon discovered that my addiction to it could not (unlike chocolate) be happily indulged at home, privately and whenever the mood struck. The tapes gathered dust on top of the VCR.

I needed to come home after dark, flip on the TV, and find that it had inconveniently already started. I needed to turn the TV so that I could prepare dinner while watching. I needed to run to the bathroom or to the washing machine during the commercials. I needed to annoy C by singing along loudly enough to force his attention. I needed to stop whatever I was doing to give my full attention to certain curious scenes that still make me squirm:

a) Crosby, Kay, Clooney and –Ellen make a snow scene out of a napkin and condiments in the club car of a train en route to Vermont.
b) Rosemary Clooney slams the sheet music down on the top of an upright piano saying that she does not like the song, that she won’t sing the song, before briskly walking out of the rehearsal hall.
c) The general gets bad news in the mail and takes up a horseshoe.
d) The housekeeper at the inn, honking into a giant handkerchief, admits that she is a busybody and has listened in on a telephone call.
e) The shot lingering on the face of the General’s granddaughter when she sees him in his uniform.
f) The anorectic Vera-Ellen in a gigantic round rug of a dress placing a hand on Danny Kaye’s thigh while asking him to affirm that she is not exactly unattractive.
g) The long gloves and lightening bolt neckline of the black gown worn by Rosemary Clooney in her post-flight-to-New York solo night club act.

These scenes are deeply etched into my soul’s hard drive whence they color and guide my every utterance and reaction to the world around me, come what may.

Of course, the elephant in any room in which this movie is viewed is its homosexual over and under tones. Danny Kaye is oh so gay in his worshipful “buddy” relationship with Bing Crosby, in his obvious enjoyment of their drag version of “Sisters” and in his recoiling from the advances of Vera-Ellen. One never questions the fact that the General is a sexy unmarried widower who wants to re-enlist. It just seems natural that a man like him should live with other soldiers now that he’s done his civic marital duty. The housekeeper at the inn is a frighteningly mannish thing. Rosemary Clooney’s performance as a man-hater is entirely convincing. There is Vera-Ellen, a weird species unto herself (famous for having the smallest waist in Hollywood) whose mimicry of female sexuality in “Mandy, There’s Minister Handy” still makes my skin crawl a safe distance from the TV screen. Finally, those songs by Irving Berlin. “Gee, how I wish I was back in the army” includes the line “The army was the place to find romance” quickly reeling itself in to mention women in slacks. The “Choreography” number mentions “Queens with routines”. “Sisters” speaks for itself.

Ultimately, there is no such thing as Christmas outside this movie. In its final scenes, in which ballerinas flit in front of a decorated tree on stage at the inn where the two couples have sufficiently but unconvincingly overcome their instincts to Velcro themselves into hetero-coupling, the back walls magically open to reveal a new snowfall traversed by a sleigh. Cue the big song.

At this moment, the viewer should feel warmth of heart. Instead, as a child watching this on TV, I hear my parents in another room, tearing apart their marriage. We feel the grim realities of the 1960’s ripping apart the entrails of 1950’s romance and duty. We imagine Danny Kaye on his knees servicing the General and the two of them talking about it decades later on Oprah. We see in the frightened face of Rosemary Clooney her spiral into emotional undoing followed by years of therapy, obesity and a broken voice hawking Coronet bathroom tissue. Are those Vera-Ellen’s little arms embracing porcelain while practicing the bulimic arts? Have you read what his kids say about Bing?

White Christmas is a strong eggnog of unintentional cinema verity and the grandmother of reality TV set to the gorgeous music of Irving Berlin. What’s not to love? Perfection. Home.

Gore Vidal

I am caught up in Gore Vidal’s second volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation. A welling up of sadness overcomes me in waves as I complete each short chapter. He has lost his partner. He has sold his house in Italy, and, he is missing his deceased editor, Barbara Epstein. This third mancanza is the one most severely felt by his readers. (He always said he never cared much for writing, that he did it only because it presented itself to him as the surest way for the making of money.)

He is eighty-five years old. He seems to have been rushed through this book by a publisher who was perhaps worried that death might rupture certain contractual obligations. I mitigate this suspicion with the realization that once GV had finished the draft of it, wouldn’t the publisher have calmed down and taken the time needed to clean it up? To fix the rough parts no more refined than scribblings produced at 3AM while just having sat up in bed with a freshly caught dream in hand?

The book’s title, needing too much explanation, seems to be an excuse for not producing something more skillful and finely wrought. Who among us has not resorted to melismetic rambling when our daily schedule does not permit the disciplined ordering of thought?

His first volume, Palimpsest, was much better, and I am left assuming Ms. Epstein provided the shake-and-bake to that earlier raw material. In the second volume, on page 173, we find the following baffle:

Goldwater fans were angry because when I had noted that as a public-relations man for his family’s department store, he had also invented a line of men’s boxer shorts decorated with red ants.

Aren’t we rather missing a second half to that thought? Perhaps some junior editor reading the draft while trying to negotiate a pastrami sandwich simply assumed that GV knew where he was headed and had arrived there intact.

On page 176, we are reminded that the comma is our friend whose absence makes us grind teeth.

Some years before he had entered, at the last minute, a presidential primary against Carter.

There are other similar moments. You get the point. Still, his valiantly restrained recounting of the death of his partner moved me to tears, and his loathing of Truman Capote is to be understood with salt and consumed with amusement, as is his need to be associated with famous names.

He lived a short walk from me in Rome, but I could not talk any of my professors who knew him into an introduction. They knew he would devour me. They also must have known how much I wanted to be devoured by him. Sometimes, on my way home from the Gregorian University, I would swing by the Piazza Argentina and look up at his building, trying to guess which set of windows was his. I wondered if he would step out of the shadows and onto his balcony to observe the famous cats that swarmed the ruins of that sunken square to see me there among them, eating an orange, licking its juice off my fingers, a winsome and young seminarian, pretending bravado, ready to know the man behind the words. (Instead, my superiors offered to introduce me to Muriel Spark…)

Despite his lack of focus, which I deeply hope is not caused by some loss of faculty, he remains frequently brilliant and provocative. I share his lack of memory for the personal paesaggio of one’s past, and, as he points out on page 111, must rely on what I have written to recall much of what I have lived. C is frequently astounded by my having totally forgotten places, people and adventures we have shared. Like GV, I grind them up, making a pate, spiced to enhance itself, and ready to be shared.

Finally, there is his frightening conclusion to Chapter Twenty-Two:

It has been my experience that writers, myself included, often forget what they have written since the act of writing is simply a letting go of a piece of one’s own mind, and so there is a kind of mental erasure as it finds its place on the page in order to leap to another consciousness like a mutant viral strain.

Where was I?

Chopsticks on a Renzo Piano

The New York Times is building itself a new temple of self-worship. “The Gray Lady” will dwell in a heavy gray building (despite rapturous descriptions of the design team as to how the new building would be reflective of the color changes of light and sky, and despite renderings that make it seem to glow).



This building is the product of the prominent Italian architect, Mr. Renzo Piano, who has provided mid-town Manhattan with a building that is trapped in a trellis of tubular ceramic and steel, the effect of which is exquisitely and literally grating.



Italian design has certainly plummeted of late. Even Missoni, now in its second and third generations of ownership, is devoid of inspiration. Their zig-zag weaves are akin to Mr. Piano’s trellis and are to be considered good examples of what people do when they lack good ideas. Instead of producing something with integrity and good bones, they cover their mistakes with contrivances and gimmickry that they hope will distract the viewer from the basic weakness of their designs.

I wonder why I am so annoyed by this. Is it the colossally wasted opportunity to add something of beauty to the mid-town landscape? Is it the incredible stupidity of the design selection team assembled by the Times? Is it the obscene amount of money Mr. Piano undoubtedly received for this inferior product and the fact that it will bolster his resume and make other stupid design teams more susceptible to his snake oil?

At the gym earlier today, as I was flogging my needlessly sturdy thighs into submission with a punishing extra mile around the track, I had a bit of a revelation. I am descended from southern Italian peasant stock. We are not an aerodynamic people. We are short and thick. Our limbs are wide and we who have mirrors are chagrined to look as we do. What could have been the evolutionary purpose for thighs like a Maytag washer-drier set? Surely they did not help our ancestors ride broad backed mammals. That skill belongs to the bow-legged. They are not much good at running across the veldt while being pursued by a lioness whose den we might have accidentally disturbed. They don’t possess the simian spring that might have granted us the fruit of the highest branches of the mango tree or the snatching of the magenta flower of the lofty jacaranda for impressing a potential mate. We cannot even cross them comfortably as would a Nubian supermodel, hooking a foot behind an opposing ankle.

These are thighs that seem to be good at doing exactly one thing: sitting on chairs in village squares. Perhaps this trait anchored my people; teaching them the value of leisure over movement, the value of pruning the grape vine and the fig tree lest either grow beyond easy reach. But here in America, these thighs are unreasonable, and we who are forced to trudge among the spindly develop a heightened appreciation for smart furniture, for sleek cars, for elegant architecture, for good bones and for the long muscles that propel them. (Mercifully, there are whole cultures of men who find our little gypsy bodies very attractive, or we’d still be trying to hail cabs at Ellis Island.)

I began my thigh resentment in kindergarten. Our teacher gathered us into a wide circle and chose me to stand in the center to sing a song she had recently taught us. I was delighted for the opportunity to perform, and began a pert, almost saucy rendition.

“I’m a little teapot short and stout,
Here is my handle. Here is my spout.”

(I half considered changing the indication of my spout from left hand to crotch, but I decided to hold onto that blue bit for maybe twenty years and an encore at the Apollo.)

Suddenly my voice caught in my throat. The lyrics hit me like bricks and I realized that she had selected me for this song because I was indeed a little teapot by dint of genetic victimization. I looked at the smug faces of my classmates sitting comfortably cross-legged on the floor. Their little limbs already lithe and quivering with the greyhoundy promise of slender tubular growth, while the chafed inseams of my Osh Kosh By Gosh corduroys were already throwing sparks whenever I ran in the playground. I continued the song slowly, in the broken and haltering whisper of Nina Simone or the end-of-the-road Garland.

“When the water boils, hear me shout.
Tip me…over...Pour… me… out.”

My teacher put a hand to her throat, awed by the pathos of my delivery. I saw my future: today a teapot, tomorrow a Bunn-o-matic 75 cup coffee pot plugged in at PTA meetings and church socials next to that big tray-o-Danish. I’d grow up to be Nathan Lane, not Tommy Tune. Costanza, not Seinfeld. Oprah, not Gail. Cho, not Paltrow.

I said “Excuse me”, and walked through the silent circle with my chin held up, until I got to the little boys’ room where I slumped to the cold tile floor and wept. (All right, so that last part never really happened, but if I were shooting it today…)

Anyway, I’m really upset by this building, by its architect and by the company that chose its design. I’ve done the best I could with my thighs, and they’ve earned me a good amount of favorable attention (including that of a man who bit the insides of them relentlessly for an hour in a Montreal bath house some years back), but when one has the opportunity to build something from scratch, there really is no excuse for choosing the inelegant.

The Big Voice: God or Merman?

Have you been wondering where they went, those brilliant men who used to write the great musicals, the kind that reached into your heart, pouring into it that pure cheer-and-shout kind of thrill that sent you home happier and wiser for having been there? Oddly enough, they went to California, and their names are Steve Schlachlin and Jim Brochu, and if you are planning a trip to New York City and intending to get tickets to something, you should choose their Off-Broadway show at The Actors Temple Theatre, “The Big Voice: God or Merman?”. (And, if you are coming with your parents, aunt, niece, nephew or straight friends from college, bring them along, assured that they will love this just as much as you will love this.)

For a long time, I’ve been feeling restless and dissatisfied as a paying member of the American audience, wondering why the shows of recent years cannot seem to get out of the way of their own material. Why they seem contrived, wooden, unsure of themselves and vaguely not up to the business of delivering entertainment. Having attended a preview of "The Big Voice: God or Merman?" last night with C and Joe and Eddie, I can tell you why. Steve Schlachlin and Jim Brochu handily supply the ignition needed to start the blaze that consumes their firewood (God, Merman, boyhood and religion), transforming it into a fabulous show about love, romance, survival and hope.

Because I strongly hate reviewers who map out for you in detail the terrain of a show, like someone driving you to a party while previewing the foibles of the guests, the table setting and the menu, you won’t get much more about their show from me except the promise that the music is gorgeous in that leave-you-humming-and-gotta-have-the-CD way, and that you will laugh and maybe tear up a bit and definitely poke the ribs of whomever you are sitting with several times before the final curtain. The show also made me wish we had Steve and Jim as neighbors and friends here in New York, and left us in awe of their talent as writers and performers who sooo do not need the glitz of a big techno theater to deliver their goods. Here is a show that could have been produced in the proverbial barn with one piano, a bare bulb and just as much success. I hope you see it.

PS: I can’t resist this one disclosure. The Roman Catholic Church is in its current threadbare, misguided and hobbled condition because men like Jim Brochu chose not to become priests. None of the gut-twisting hand-wringing anguish of Andrew Sullivan comes close to expressing the truth of this matter as well as does any five minutes of “The Big Voice: God or Merman?”.