Happy Valentine’s Day!
Pre-Sandy New York
A few years ago, when Big Chris and I were here in the winter, a blizzard was predicted to hit a few days before our departure back to San Francisco. “Let’s stick it out and see how it goes.” Well, our flight was cancelled and the earliest the airline could book us out was on a flight leaving about 10 days later. People were skiing down 8th Avenue. This time we decided not to wait around and experience canoes on 8th Avenue, so we booked a flight back today, a hop, skip and a jump ahead of Hurricane Sandy, heading up the east coast to New York City. I’m back in San Francisco now, in my shorts, reading about transportation closures and flight cancellations and breathing a huge sigh of relief.
Thursday morning in New York, Chrissy and I visited Tatzu Nishi’s installation, Discovering Columbus, hovering above Columbus Circle. Around the sculpture of Columbus, in the center of the circle, about 6 flights up, Nishi has constructed a living room, with the sculpture of Columbus seemingly plunked down on a coffee table in the room’s center. The room has windows looking out on the cityscape below, approximating the perspective of the statue. There is no reference to Christopher Columbus, his voyages, Indigenous Peoples Day… just a statue in a modestly decorated living room, floating above Columbus Circle, and like what much of public art has become, a thrillingly vapid theme park ride.
And speaking of public space, it’s dominated in Rome by Bernini’s grand marble sculptures of larger-than-life saints, heavenly creatures and river gods, all ecstatic and contrapposto, swathed in lush folds of gravity-defying marble fabric. At the Met, we saw a wonderful exhibition of small-scale terra cotta mockups for many of Bernini’s major commissions. The malleability of the terra cotta shows his hand in a gestural way that is lost in the transition to marble. Thrilling! Also at the Met, we saw concurrent exhibitions of photography, Before- and After Photoshop. A hand-tinted daguerreotype portrait felt magically realistic, like a reflection. There were a bit too many examples of hand-tinting, but there were many cool pictures showing clever montage, staging, darkroom tricks, all demonstrating the pliable nature of photography and the elusiveness of representation.
At MoMA, we saw a retrospective of the Brothers Quay. Their films fetishize a kind of pre-modern turn-of-the-century-ness, and are filled with breathtakingly beautiful images of dust, broken dolls, wire, and anything that’s decaying. In addition to their films, the retrospective included sets, installations, photography, book and poster designs, and childhood memorabilia.
One of the screams is also on display, in a crystal sarcophagus upstairs at MoMA. This is one of four versions that Edvard Munch made, this one executed in pastel, and recently the most expensive painting sold at auction, to a private individual said to be a trustee of the Modern. $120 million. It is a pretty wonderful image, despite its intimidating price tag and bulletproof setting. It’s in a room that contextualzies the image within Munch’s Frieze of Life series, a body of work taking us from birth to death and all the calamitous tragedy in between.
The most touching show in town was another retrospective, at NYU’s Grey Gallery, this one of Frank Moore, who died of AIDS a decade or so ago. He created grandly eloquent allegorical paintings about the degradation of our planet and our bodies from AIDS and the miracle of modern chemistry. They’re almost fairy tales, painted by a gentle soul who found beauty and depth in decay.
Meanwhile, on Broadway, we saw Henry Winkler (the Fonz!) play an aging porn star, sharing the stage with Alicia Silverstone, in The Performers, a hilarious farce that takes place on the night of the Adult Film Awards. We saw the guy who plays Matthew on Downton Abbey in The Heiress. The set was beautiful, but it felt like everybody was Acting, with a capital “A.” I had recently seen the Monty Clift/Olivia de Havilland film version, so I didn’t really feel much, other than slightly bereft. How could any actor live up to those two performances? Which brings me to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which we saw last night. It’s really one of the great plays of the 20th century, the writing itself gives me goosebumps. But again, how do you follow up Mike Nichol’s cast from the 1966 version, one of the most perfectly cast films ever?
Yesterday the North American Mammal dioramas in the Museum of Natural History were opened to the public, after a lengthy restoration. They are just spectacular. Wolves, bison, spraying skunks… this is definitely a guy museum. I saw hardly any women, except in the gem section, which was all female. The other girls I saw were being pulled around by their boyfriends, or monotonously pushing perambulators behind overly-enthusiastic husbands. Boys, and mammals, everywhere.
On Broadway: Grace
At the end of the play, Chrissy said, “Isn’t he just the cutest thing?” and I replied, “Yes, he really is looking more and more like Santa,” wiping a small tear from the corner of my eye. Perplexed, Chrissy replied, “I was talking about Paul Rudd.”
I of course, couldn’t imagine that he wasn’t talking about Ed Asner. Chrissy and I saw him onstage tonight at the Cort Theater in a production of Grace. He’s at the age when he’s an “and Ed Asner” on the Playbill, but he’ll always be at the top of my billing. I was only 30 feet or so away from him, close enough to see the still barely visible forearm hairs that fueled so much of my teen and midlife crises, finally none of those pesky screen lines between us.
The play took place in two identical apartments, across the street from each other, but, cleverly, only one stage set was used, as if one apartment were superimposed on the other. So you see all the characters in one space, even though they’re in different apartments. The play opens with the characters dead on the floor of the apartment, and then the action proceeds backwards, the actors delivering the lines in reverse that they would repeat again in proper sequence at the end of the play. So the play was not about who killed all the characters in the play, but why.
Read Ben Brantley’s review if interested in the theological and philosophical thesis behind the play, it’s midnight and I’m turning into a pumpkin.
Weekend in Duncans Mills and Silly Love Songs
My friends Richard and Jim live in a glass house that overlooks the Russian River, framing a view of rolling grassy hills, the rear of the house nestled against a redwood forrest. Jim cooked one of Julia Child’s stews last weekend, accompanied by a deliciously crisp potato gratin and countless bottles of various Sonoma County wines. I made a pear upside-down cake. We drank until the wee hours of the night, which oddly turned out to be only 9:30pm, at which time we all passed out. I slept for 12 hours, returning to the city after a wonderfully relaxing weekend with my friends.
I hope they didn’t get bored with the constant subject of Stavros. I seemed to turn every discussion somehow back to him. Driving up there, through the vineyards and orchards and the colorful leaves and long shadows of autumn, I listened to a playlist of music that we listened to together over the summer. I howled mournfully and sincerely, tears flowing aerodynamically down my cheeks: There ain’t nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing impossible / Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing’s impossible / Oh no, nothing, nothing, for your love, your love, your love, your lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ove. Somehow, for me, connecting the most deeply with someone suddenly entails actually believing all those corny lyrics, to every corny song that was ever written. All those songs about love, they’re really acute observations of all this intense hormonal and chemical activity that has overtaken and overwhelmed most of my faculties and desires. I found a dream that I could speak to / A dream that I can call my own / I found a thrill to press my cheek to / A thrill that I’ve never known. I hear these songs and a little lightbulb goes off over my head. “Oh my god, he’s right! The moon does hit your eye like a big pizza pie!”
Tomorrow I’m off to the Big Apple with Big Chrissy. Stay tuned for details of our exciting adventures…
Naked Guys, Rosselini, White Teeth and Greek
The Board of Supervisors here has passed legislation making it now illegal to be naked in San Francisco. Except behind closed doors, or during the seasonal bacchanalias and street fairs. The mayor has a week or so, I think, to sign or veto it, so you can still be naked for a few more days without getting in trouble. For some time now, all the guys in my neighborhood with shaved pubes, after discovering that nudity by itself was not illegal, decided to hang out in the Castro Commons in their tenny-runners and nothing else. Seeing them walking down the street naked as jaybirds with backpacks was one of the great joys of living in this neighborhood. I’m really saddened that it’s come to this, enforced tan lines. When I moved here in the early 80’s, I remember a kind of “anything goes” attitude, our diversity and uniqueness celebrated. Now it seems all about melding into a mainstream. Where have all the sissies gone?? Thank you Sylvester that there is at least a RuPaul on TV. I’ll miss the naked guys and their golden leathery shaved skin and little button peepees. And that one very talented naked plein-air painter.
I’m trying to get caught up on my film viewing. I tend to see very little in the theaters now, only those films with really loud explosions and Bruce Willis. On Fridays I read all the film reviews and then add the interesting ones to my Netflix queue. By the time the film is released on home video, I’m usually about 3-9 months behind the rest of my film-enthusiast friends, but I get to watch movies in my underwear with a glass of wine and on a 10 foot screen. My dream as a kid was to have such a screening room in my house, and the accessibility of home theater projection systems and blu-ray has made the experience possible, affordable, and negligibly different from the experience of seeing something at, say, the Opera Plaza. Here’s what I’ve seen over the last week:
Jesus Henry Christ, The Sisters, Love Crime, Norwegian Wood, Guest of Cindy Sherman, Frankenweenie (at the cineplex), Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Belle de Jour, Belle Toujours, Looper (Bruce Willis, so at the cineplex), Roma Città Aperta.
I’m still a little dazed from Rosselini’s neo-realist melodrama Roma, Città Aperta last night. First a pregnant Anna Magnani is shot dead while rushing to reach her fiancé as he’s being taken away by the Gestapo, and on the day that they are to be wed! And then, after our other hero is tortured to his death with torches and clamps and whips, the cute parish priest is tied to a chair and shot dead! Seeing Anna Magnani shot in the back was unsettling enough, but the chubby little priest… che roba brutale!
I had my teeth whitened. It lasted for a day, and then my diet of Trader Joe’s mini chocolate peanut butter cups and iced tea instantly re-yellowed them. The dentist was the only one in the office when I arrived mid-afternoon. And I was her only patient. Perhaps for the whole day? She told me cautiously that she was born “overseas,” and we hit it off instantly when I mumbled some Arabic that Nemr taught me. I was there for 3 hours. She talked the entire time, like she hadn’t talked to another person in weeks. She’d ask me a question and I’d gurgle a response. I had the feeling that she doesn’t have many patients. It really felt like the backdrop of a film, I mean the absence of employees, fellow dentists, hygienists, and patients, like if my Arab Dentist/Terrorista put me to sleep I’d wake up in a male brothel in Morocco. With white teeth, of course.
I’m starting to learn Greek. It’s all about rote memorization, as most words have nothing to do with anything I’ve heard before and seem completely disconnected from their meaning. At least now I can read stuff. At a five year-old level. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to pronounce the word for “the hotel.” It’s “το ξενοδοχείο,” pronounced like “to-xen-o-doh-cHEE-o.” It seems like way too many sounds for such a simple concept. The book that I’m using is really great, because they don’t have conjugation tables or declensions of articles, just dialogues, so you learn the language by absorption and repetition. I yearn for those days when I didn’t have to study, when my brain absorbed whatever it read. I remember once in 4th grade a student talking about studying for a test, and I was paralyzed that I didn’t know what that was or how to do it. I just seemed to grasp and remember everything. Already I’ve forgotten what that word was for hotel.
A Darker Shade of Pale
I’m back in San Francisco. After an unforgettable month in Greece, Stavros broke up with me, again, about an hour after getting home. I frankly don’t know how to move away from him this time (did I ever? lol) as he’s breaking up with me not because he doesn’t care for me, but because of some partially explained fears, nothing that I can quite understand. When people love each other, don’t they try to figure that stuff out? Doesn’t love have priority? Aren’t these fears actually a reason to stay together? I don’t mean that in a (I loathe this word I’m about to type) codependent way, I mean that it doesn’t seem necessary to eliminate potential bliss in one of life’s departments just because there’s unrelated stuff to deal with in other departments. I’m a compartmentalizer and a sensualist, not a codependent. I can hear the groan from my Chorus of Therapists, but you guys keep it down over there! But seriously, what’s better than love? It’s like I’m waking up in Backwards Land: I love you so much that I’m breaking up with you?
He sent me a note the morning after, saying he just needed some time, so a glimmer of hope to cling to. I’m trying to give it to him, but man, is it hard when we’ve been so intimate and close. The silence is almost unbearable, his absence a profoundly palpable heaviness that I carry with me all day. And he’s a pretty big guy, remember? I’ve tried to hide my disappointment and distress from him, thinking I don’t want to manipulate him into being with me, that he shouldn’t stay with me just because he doesn’t want to see me hurt. This is why I’m crying on your shoulder, Internet.
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My homies swept me away on Saturday, up the coast for barbecued oysters on Tomales Bay. We’re on very friendly terms with the staff, as we tend to pass by that way a lot, and they greeted us warmly with big hugs and even bigger smiles, which cheered me up somewhat. The oysters were monstrously large, vulgar really, and barbecued they were like…
Okay, stop the presses. I just FaceTimed with a drunken Stavros, and if I can’t tell a man in love then I’m a monkey’s uncle. Sheesh, I don’t even finish my breakup blogpost and we’re back together again. At least I think we are. I hope we are. He is tipsy, but it seems apparent that he’s struggling against some strong feelings for me. Turn the “no vacancy” sign back on and join me in a chorus of “A Wonderful Guy!” Hurray for love! But wait a sec—will he regret what he expressed when he wakes up? Until I have that ring on my finger, I’m going to be trepidatious. I wish this guy were in therapy. I can hear the therapist telling him to stop resisting and go with what he’s really feeling. (This is my blogpost and my imaginary therapist, so no corrective comments from the Chorus, okay?)
My tan in Greece just looks like a darker shade of pale, or a muddy tone of pink, when compared to the gorgeous golden olive brown skin of the Greeks, but here in San Francisco, where only tourists wear shorts in July, I’m actually tan. I’ve never been this color!
It’s a happy day. A happy happy day.
A Crop of Lips
I visited the Acropolis yesterday, completely wowed by the intensive reconstruction and restoration work that’s happened since my last visit in 2001. It’s like the ultimate jigsaw puzzle up there, chunks of Parthenon everywhere, slowly being fitted into place. I managed to arrive just as everybody else did, at the time that every guide book says to avoid, late morning before lunch. The place was packed for an hour, and then everyone scurried down the hill to his air-conditioned tour bus.
While Stavros has been at work out of town the past few days, I’ve turned on GROWLr, the iPhone hookup app that is my principal means of communication with my slutty friends around the world—seriously, to talk to my friends. If I were a different kind of bunny, that is, a hussy, I would be entertained daily by quite a number of almost desperately available Athenian men who text me throughout the day offering all sorts of varied opportunities for live bunny action. Two cab drivers, perhaps independently of each other, each asked to pick me up in his cab, one for a particular activity in the car itself, the other for a get-to-know-me rendezvous with his boyfriend. I thought it might be the new-kid-in-town syndrome, but actually, I think it’s just that they’ve all gone through everyone else in town. Oh. The new-kid-in-town syndrome, then. It’s certainly nice to be getting all this attention in my steadily-advancing state of decay, but I’d prefer a crop of marriage proposals tossed at me all day, instead of all these pictures of Greek underparts.
Chrissy always gets mad at me for chatting with these strangers. “You don’t have to respond,” he’s always telling me. I was raised in the south, where my friends all called their dads “sir,” I just find it hard to be rude. “Thanks for the nice picture of your substantial appendage, handsome, have a great day.” This response invariably is followed by “You’re welcome, stud.” And that’s that, end of conversation.
Today I had coffee with a new friend, Costas, a really sweet and gentle soul, who seems a bit frustrated by the ease of sexual possibilities around town and the difficulty of securing more substantial commitments. We talked about our various relationships, past and present, the current financial crisis, and racial unrest in Athens.
The neighborhood I’m staying in has a large percentage of African immigrants. Most people I’ve spoken to about it are negative about their presence, citing falling home prices and shuttered businesses in the neighborhood, crime, drugs, white flight. I can’t see the negative stuff, though, I see really beautiful people who probably suffered horrendous atrocities in their country and are now forced into degrading menial jobs, if they get jobs at all. I haven’t seen a single black person in any visible job—except selling trinkets near the Acropolis or on the beach. Now I’m speaking in almost complete ignorance of the day-to-day reality of the immigrants, and am confining my observations to a fairly limited area, so don’t go quoting me anywhere.
For the past three nights, outside of Stavros’ apartment building, the Golden Dawn neo-fascists have gathered, loudly, and taunted the neighborhood black guys, sometime chasing after them with pipes. Car windows have been smashed, fist fights have broken out. I and all of Stavros’ silver-haired neighbors gather on our balconies in our underwear to watch the activity on the street below. I have no idea what’s going on, as Stavros has been away since the nightly gatherings started and I don’t understand the Greek screams, like watching a foreign action film with no subtitles. Tonight they broke into an African cultural center below my balcony window and destroyed it, while the neighbors and police did nothing.
I leave Athens on Friday morning, heading back to San Francisco. I’ve become so enamored of Stavros, enjoying his wit and delightful presence, his grand beauty, his scrumptious Banoffee, his sort of trumpet-sounding melodious voice. This must be what it feels like the night before going to prison, the last taste of pleasure before isolation and deprivation.
Welcome. Pause. To Andros Island (In Ricardo Montalban’s Voice)
Stavros and I spent last weekend on Andros Island, in the Greek Cyclades. Most of the island is terraced with beautiful stacked stone walls, zigzagging up and down and across the hillsides. The landscape is mostly mountainous, with cute villages clinging to steep slopes, the slopes gently rolling down to the sea and encircling coves with fine sand beaches. The center of the island is lush and green, with many trees and springs. Spring water spews from old fountains and drinking spouts, and winds through the villages down little gullies.
We had dinner one night at the Balcony of the Aegean, a taverna in Ano Aprovato, high on a hill overlooking the sea, a truly spectacular view. The food was solid Greek taverna food, everything fresh, tasty and nicely prepared and presented, served with local cheeses and housemade wine.
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We drove inland one afternoon for a late lunch at another beautifully situated taverna, this one surrounded by tall trees, across from a burbling fountain from which our table water was procured. We were the only guests, the town empty. The proprietress appeared, a kind witchy looking woman with a crooked nose and big moles on her face, and told us that there wasn’t much available—a rooster, skewered livers, Greek salad, cheese pie, eye of newt… We ordered it all. Half of the lunch was delicious, the cheese pie of tangy local cheese, the village salad fresh and tasty, but the rooster, which looked spectacular when brought to our table, smothered in grilled tomatoes and peppers, was raw, the inside chilly, red, and with a pulse. We sent it back, and it was thrown back on the grill, as served, and returned to us quite well done, the delicious sauce and vegetables now forming a solid black crust on the bird. The poor bird that gave its life for such an unsavory fate. And the liver thingies were like leather hockey pucks, probably left over from the previous night’s grill, inedible. Not wanting to offend our hostess, Stavros slipped them, one at a time, to the cat under our table.
Just outside Gavrio, the port of the island, is the tower of St. Peter, a 65-foot tall circular stone tower from the Hellenistic period. There are other towers around the island, dovecotes, leftover from the period when the island was under Venetian control. The architecture in general is a mix of traditional Cycladic stucco houses, 19th century mansions, built during the heyday of Greek shipping, Venetian era buildings with elegant porticos, and the remains of medieval castles. In Andros town, the capital of the island, there’s an elegant old Venetian mansion opening onto a large square at the edge of the town, overlooking the sea and the remains of a medieval castle, destroyed during World War II. In the center of the square is a Social-realist sculpture of an Unknown Worker, a fabulous Soviet-era presence. Bag slung over his shoulder, one arm waving, jauntily sauntering towards the sea, this guy’s happy he’s got a job.
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Montserrat at the Herodion
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Hearing Montserrat Caballé sing at the Herodion in Athens was like listening to your grandmother sing in the shower. A pretty amazing shower, mind you, of marble, an open air amphitheater on the southern slope of the Acropolis, built in 161 A.D. by Herodius Atticus, and restored in the 1950’s. Montserrat is a legend, but really, your grandmother. She’s 79, and her voice, while still strong, was of a depth that allowed for few of the ornate embellishments that she’s known for, the former light playfulness of her voice now just heavy, sluggish. Bless her for still performing at her age, but when a voice fades, often it’s replaced by some kind of emotional or stylistic intensity that make up for the lost strength. I’m thinking of Billy Holiday’s spectacular Lady in Satin, released a year before her death, specifically “I’m a Fool to Want You”—I’m getting goosepimply thinking of it—her faded higher register replaced with such emotional devastation. There was no encore after Montserrat left the stage, nor a call for one, not one brava!, everybody just went home.
The Stavros Chronicles: Schinias
Marathonas is the site of the famous Battle of Marathon, when the Persians were defeated by the considerably smaller Athenian army in 490 B.C. The 192 Athenians who were killed are buried in a massive burial mound, surrounded by olive trees, not far from the ancient battlefield. Actually, pretty much everything in Greece is surrounded by olive trees, but here, it’s particularly poignant to see a source of sustenance so close to those memorialized. Marathonas gets its name for the Greek word for “fennel,” and means “a place with fennel.” The long distance race, marathon, gets its name from the town. Legend has it that a single runner ran the entire distance from Marathonas to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated. Another legend says that he ran from Athens to Sparta to seek help. The legend about the announced triumph over the Persians is the one that seems to hold the most traction with the public imagination, but whoever did the running and to where, it was quite a hike.
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Schinias Beach, near Marathonas, is a long stretch of sandy beach surrounded by whispy umbrella pine trees, about 45km northeast of Athens. The water is tranquil, the sound of the wind in the pines mesmerizing, and a few nudists are kind of tucked away in the shrubbery and sand dunes, adding to the sensory experience.
South of the beach, there is a temple dedicated to Egyptian gods, currently closed due to archaeological excavation, and a museum with artifacts and sculpture from the area, which I hope to visit before heading back to San Francisco—if we make it back to the beach. With just a week left on the trip, I’m kind of content just to stare at Stavros, my favorite visual experience.
