Month: February 2012

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Posh Ruins, Architectural Trysts & Cowboy Love

Continuing our exploration of architectural Phoenix, Big Chrissy and I visited the Biltmore Hotel, designed by Albert Chase McArthur and opened in 1929. It’s a gorgeous building, let’s call it Streamlined Aztec Moderne. Frank Lloyd Wright consulted with the builders about the masonry, briefly, over a four month period, even sold them a patent for a concrete block system that he didn’t own. The current owners of the property have capitalized on his more popular reputation, and named several of the restaurants after him, placed sculptures made for Wright’s Midway Gardens Project on the property, and scattered reproduction Wright furniture here and there. Even our tour guide mistakenly described the bricks as representing a Wright design of stylized palm trees, but in fact they are based on Albert Chase McArthur’s signature stamp. I asked the tour guide if any of Warren McArthur’s furniture had survived, and he said that he never designed any furniture for the hotel. Warren indeed designed thousands of pieces of furniture for the hotel, which were removed by an owner who thought the design of the building to be Wright’s. As a record of the McArthur brothers’ design and architectural collaboration, sadly, the Biltmore is a posh ruin.

Our next stop was the old Jefferson Hotel in Phoenix. Currently, it’s the Phoenix Police Museum, but as featured in the opening scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho, it was the site of the lunchtime tryst of Marion Crane and Sam Loomis, played by Janet Leigh and John Gavin. Much of the detail of the building has been stripped, and unlike the bullet-braziered Leigh in that scene, not very stimulating architecturally.

Our final stop of the day was The Sunflower RV Resort and Age Qualified Community, where Chris’ mom and her husband winter. RVs and double-wides are parked next to each other in neat sardine can rows that fan out from a delightful central social space built around a glistening pool. There’s not much relation to the desert or outside world, just isolation from shivery midwest and northern latitude climes. And of course lots of fun activities.

Big Chris’ family and I went to dinner in Cave Creek, at a mexican restaurant where I saw a pair of real cowboys. They were bowlegged, with full white beards, ten-gallon hats, and sort of clanked when the walked, even though they weren’t wearing spurs. They didn’t speak to each other at all, they just radiated an incandescent virility at each other. Of course I imagined them an old gay couple, just rustling up some grub after a long day of roping and lassoing. I wish I had taken a picture of them toddling off into the sunset, clanking, their arms sticking out from their bodies as if in preparation to draw. As such I was left with only an image that I snapped with one of them in the background, and one imagined picture of them arriving at their ranch, taking off their hats and finally those beautiful beards entwined.

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Grand Canyon, Sedona, Little Frankie Wright

The Grand Canyon is so big. Now you’re supposed to say “How big is it?”, but I don’t have a witty punch line, it’s just big, on a scale that’s a bit hard to grasp. The 10 mile view to the other rim, for instance, was so clear and seemed so close, but it was 10 miles away. When I built a deck in the back of my house in San Francisco, I was required to put up a guardrail because the drop was a little more than 3 feet. The balusters had to be no more than 4 inches apart so that a child couldn’t tumble through and fall the 3 or so feet to his or her unsupervised death. There are only a few guardrails around the Grand Canyon, at various points, but the rest of the rim is dizzyingly vertigo-inducingly open. And with a mile drop to the floor. A San Francisco building inspector would make them take it out. Or fill it in.

On the way back to Phoenix, we stopped for dinner in Sedona, just in time to see the city’s backdrop of red sandstone rock formations gloriously illuminated by the setting sun, a spectacular show, like stepping into a hyper-saturated Maxfield Parrish painting of a John Ford vista.

The next day we visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and school, Taliesin West. It’s set amidst the Scottsdale lunar landscape, on the “brow” of a hill. Taliesin was a renowned bard who sang at the courts of several Celtic British kings a very long time ago. His name in Middle Welsh translates to “shining brow.”

Wright’s design abstractly incorporates visual references to the surrounding landscape, the hills, even the cacti. The whole venture was meant to function as an experiment of sorts, except, it seems, for water- and weatherproofing, which seem to be the most obvious challenges of the new caretakers. Wright, 5’8″ tall, is quoted as saying something about buildings for people over 6 feet tall being a waste of material, so anyone requiring this extra material has to stoop upon entering any room. I like the feeling of being squeezed through a narrow entry that opens into a larger space, like wiggling back into the womb.

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By the Time I Got to Phoenix…

I’m in Arizona, with Big Chris and his jaunty relatives. The landscape here is beautiful, like the moon with shrubbery, and Republicans. Our hosts have books—hardback books—by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Bill O’Reilly. Unironically.

Tonight we went to a local sports bar and ate fried things: onion rings, cheese. Fried cheese! And the best turkey burger I’ve had in ages, charred, with so much flavor and juice. Mmmmm… There was a guy sitting at the table across from us who looked exactly like Mr. Johnny Cammareri in Moonstruck.

I just want you to know no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.

Tomorrow we get up early to drive to the Grand Canyon, so I’m not providing much in the way of exposition, you’ll have to tune in later, my dears.

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The Dating Game: A Date with Judy & Señor Grant


Let’s call him Mr. Right. Well, to distinguish him from all of my other Mr. Rights, for now, let’s call him Señor Grant. If the casting director of the Mary Tyler Moore Show had called for a softer, Hispanic version of Mr. Grant, this is the guy who would have gotten the job. He came up from LA Saturday night, and was back home only 24 hours later. We had been chatting online over the past few weeks, and he impulsively bought a plane ticket to come up for a quick visit. I was a little nervous, as I’ve never done this kind of thing before, that is, welcome a relative stranger into my home. Well, except for the one from Palestinia, who moved in. So yes, Señor Grant was the first person whom I had never actually met—and not already invited to live with me—before inviting to stay the night.

When I picked him up at the airport, he was wearing a black sweater and a black checkered button-down shirt, a black driving cap, dark jeans, and matching black eyebrows. Not just cute, but handsome, dapper. As soon as we got to my house, our lips were just sort of pulled towards each other, like big pink magnets. After an hour or so I pried him off of me and off we went to dinner at a basque restaurant, Piperade, which sadly was little more than a nice-tasting blur as I was so impatient to get back into a comfortable horizontal configuration.

Finally thus configured, we successfully prevented each other from getting any kind of sleep. When morning finally came, we watched A Date With Judy in bed on his iPad. Jane Powell, Liz Taylor, and Señor Grant’s furry white chest, an absolute perfect date.

He and I seem to be after the same things: companionship, substantial physical intimacy, engagement… He’s smart, well-traveled, a dapper dresser, with a job that provides access to the most glamorous of Hollywood, he articulates ideas that are complex and original, with squat hairy legs, those black eyebrows that drive me crazy, lips so soft that I keep puckering like a hungry fish…

“Be” and “let” are my magic new age hippy relaxation words for the day. And if anything, I’ll remember a really great day with a really great guy.

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Retrovores

My bears and I have been playing retrovores over the past few weeks, dining at classic establishments known for serving pretty much one thing one way for years: Falafel’s Drive-in in San Jose for falafel sandwiches; House of Prime Rib for prime rib; and Original Joe’s for Rat Pack Italian. A martini and a steak at Joe’s is one of my favorite comfort meals, although we went for lunch, so I had a grilled vegetable panino and iced tea, kind of more my high-fiber speed these days. The waiters, all male and Italiany, wore dressy black jackets and bow ties. At House of Prime Rib, the waiters were also dressed in black, slacks and vests, evoking the same era’s idea of casual. There’s only one thing to get there, and that’s the prime rib. It rests in a cow-sized stainless steel casket table side, waiting to be sliced and served. The waiters perform individual salad tossings, twirling the bowl as they dribble the 3-week aged dressing in a steady confident and dazzling stream from above. This is a man’s meal: meat, potato, some kind of creamed vegetable and a salad encased in creamy fatness. Vegetables don’t shine here, they serve as vehicles for more fatty pleasures. While fun to experience, my tastebuds are left wanting a little more. And a little less. But still, a whole lot of comfort.

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Meat Rack and Manpower


Tonight the Major and I saw a vintage soft-core porn film at YBCA, The Meat Rack, a sort of cinéma-vérité style homage to, believe it or not, Who Killed Teddy Bear, but minus an Elaine Stritch or Sal Mineo. I don’t even think the actors were listed in the credits. Aside from some great location shooting in San Francisco, it was exactly the kind of movie that I expected someone to make in 1968, and disappointing for precisely that. All of the gay characters are retched people: a chubby cross-dresser moaning about having to pay for sex; renegade drag queens shooting porn at knifepoint…

The depictions of that underbelly of society have always annoyed me, primarily because there’s no balance, so few positive portraits. And this was by the underbelly! I’m reading a book now, Full Service, by Scotty Bowers, about his experiences as a hustler in post-WWII Los Angeles. He has sex with, arranges for his friends to have sex with, or claims to have had sex with all the usual cast of Hollywood characters (and Walter Pidgeon, which was a surprise for me). I got read the Riot Act this morning from a friend who said he was sick of these kinds of tell-all books and invasions into private life, but I disagree. I love hearing about gay people enjoying their sex lives during a time that we associate with so much repression, finding ways to express themselves within the restrictive structure of the studio system and the public condemnation of homosexuality. I think it exposes the hypocrisy of the time and normalizes gay experience.

I watched Manpower last night, starring George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, Eve Arden, and Alan Hale, directed by Raoul Walsh. Yes, I bet you’re thinking the same thing I thought, What a cast!, but man, what a stinker. It was interesting to see a drama centered around the men of the electric company, (“Power and Light”) which I’d never seen before—maybe this is the only one of this particular genre—but Marlene Dietrich just can’t act and Walsh unfortunately is no Von Sternberg, he gave her actual things to say, and without fuzzy closeups and smoke billowing out of her half-opened mouth. All the guys were drunks, all the dames stoic and motherly. I guess that heterosexuals, too, occasionally suffered the indignity of unsavory representation.

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The Dating Game: New Revelations

There was a new contestant on my Dating Game last week. Pablo. He’s like a slightly oversized munchkin, you want to just hug him. I want to emphasize that You would want to just hug him, I would want to roll him down the Yellow Brick Road and into a field of poppies and smother him with kisses. We had a great day together, first tea at Samovar, then walking out near the old Sutro Baths, then munching down the overpriced munchables at Louis’. He kissed me when he dropped me off, and I felt a really nice connection forming. Very easy-going, uncomplicated…

The next night he came over for dinner and a movie and after-the-first-date possibilities, and noticed a picture of my Foreign Correspondent. “Hey, do you know Blah Blah?” I answered yes, and immediately felt it coming, the moment I’d warned my Foreign Correspondent about during my several edicts of General Amnesty issued after the discovery of each successive indiscretion, the ones he wouldn’t tell me about and whom I warned him would eventually pop up. I felt no validation in having my long-held suspicions confirmed—yet again—just a profound sense of disappointment. I had tried so hard to create an atmosphere where honesty could flower, so sensitive to his issues and needs… but my own needs just kind of discarded. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. Plus Pablo and I had just watched the world end. In The Rapture, Mimi Rogers’ faith—and, let’s admit it, slight impatience to get to heaven—lead her to kill her child (who keeps begging, annoyingly, to go to heaven anyway, Pleeeeease mommy!). By the time He does come around—and it’s just like in the Bible, with the Four Horsemen and trumpets and stuff—after she’s killed her child and lost her husband (David Duchovny, in a senseless office killing), she’s so shaken by what she’s been put through, that she says No to God. She just couldn’t be with someone who could do that to her. The film ends with her alone, in darkness… forever.

I would have tried to work it out with God, told him how his behavior made me feel, see if he could change. We’d be friends for a while, but every once in a while I’d succumb to that deep voice and let him have his way with me, then we’d fall back into old patterns, Listen, God, I really just want to be friends, then he’d beg me over and over and over to stay and not leave him, that he could change, just give him once more chance…

So Pablo left, and then sent me a message saying he looked forward to being my platonic friend. This kind of annoyed me, that he couldn’t relate to what I was feeling, seeing red flags instead of potential. But what can you do? He feels what he feels. I suppose this told me more about him than I could have learned talking to him: that intimacy, real intimacy, that is, sharing what’s really going on, isn’t something that he can relate to or seems to be particularly interested in.

Giancarlo restored my faith in men in general, briefly, the following weekend, with a fabulous lunch at Camino, then a tour of the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. The columbarium is bathed in a rich golden Pre-Raphaelite light, the architecture a delightful early-modernist take on gothic themes, arrayed in a multi-level labyrinth, each room landscaped with flowers and babbling fountains. Giancarlo is a sweet man, really a treat to be around, but I can’t tell yet if there’s any heat there. He has adopted a visual style reminiscent of another time, a style that unfortunately for me conjures an image of the emasculated middle-aged man of early 60s TV sitcoms—more Ward Cleaver than Don Draper.

The Major is still around. I’ve made it clear that I’d like to just be friends, but every time we’re together I have so much fun and just want to have sex with him. In the movie of my life, we’d probably end up together. But we’d only have to spend 120 minutes together. Not being able to share Antonioni or Fassbinder with him makes it hard to imagine any real life-partner compatibility. I mean, he walked out on The Romantic Englishwoman—that kind of guy. I am very glad to have him in my life, though, as the corner that he occupies is a very sunny happy place to visit.

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7,300 Sunrises

20 years ago, around this time in the morning, Manny died. Manny was my first lover, my great obsession. We had been together for 8 years. Over the years, I’ve tended to recognize these markers on the day we met, or his birthday, rather than the day he died: Manny would have been X years old, Manny and I would have been together for X years, etc, etc… But this morning I can’t avoid observing the immense span of time that’s passed since his death, particularly since the pain associated with his loss seems, suddenly, so fresh. The whole time he was dying I comforted myself by saying that I’d forget this time, I wouldn’t remember him like this. I remember his beauty and vibrance, but I remember the horror of seeing his body covered in lesions, his legs swollen from edema, the indignity of dying so young.

Young is a relative term. He was 34 years older than me, so today he would have been 80. I can’t honestly say that I could imagine that sitcom, but I also can’t imagine loving him any less.

Every day I think of him, his voice is so alive in my head. I can still feel him and smell his hair. How can he not be here, when my sensory perception of him is so acute? Here comes the sun, just as it did after he died, just as it has every day since.

In the movies, when someone dies, it’s like the end. The music swells, the tears fall, and the screen goes black. Finis. But the theater lights come on, you dry your tears, and walk out of the theater into the blazing light of day.