Category: Friends

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For Love and Glory

I stopped by Jack Fischer’s gallery in San Francisco last week, to see the work of my friend, Sarah Ratchye. Sarah led me and a delightful buddy of hers through the exhibition, For Love and Glory, which consists of graphite and silverpoint drawings, paintings, collages, and handmade wallpaper. There are images of lunar surfaces, octopus tentacles, ballet slippers, fabric, gems, floating astronauts, the Venetian lagoon, blood splattered space gloves… disparate images woven into a narrative that explores our interaction with the moon, both as graphic inspiration and potential living space. Well, and a lot more than that. Sarah explores the surface of the moon aesthetically and metaphorically, searching for meaning in our involvement and experience there.

Her eyes light up when she talks about space junk, the “final frontier,” and bloody moon shoes. Yet like not wanting someone to spoil the end of the movie, I don’t want her to talk too much about this stuff and upset the experience of discovery. I could look at those silverpoints all day, lost in the folds of lunar landscapes, and suddenly there’s an arm, or those ballet slippers. There’s always deeper to dig, always some delightfully enigmatic image that frustrates an easy reading.

A particular favorite of mine, DIvr, has as a backdrop a blurry image of a few buildings on the Venetian lagoon. In the foreground, in sharp focus, are an upside down astronaut, the sea reflected in his silvery helmet, and above him a woman’s bathing cap, one of those fabulous mid-20th-century architectural rubber floral helmets that Esther Williams would have worn, removing it to reveal a perfectly coifed shimmery Technicolor ‘do. The background image dissolves on the right side of the canvas into a different plane of reflected lagoon water. The slight shifts in focus and perspective within the same canvas create a kind of soft Cubist space, but instead of letting us view an object from many perspectives within one picture plane, Sarah fills her painting surface with beautifully rendered psychologically rich images of different cultural and technological signifiers.

You could call her a lunatic, hahaha… One painting titled Menas, presents the moon as menace, seemingly entering the earth’s atmosphere–the sky is pink, the clouds black and brooding–yet the moon has these red blossoms around it, like a flower a kid would paint, and the surface of the moon so beautifully bright and crisply clear. If she can’t get to the moon just yet, the moon is finally coming to her, and in humanity’s end, she finds nothing but delight and wonder.

It’s not the same old story, Sarah’s tales of love and glory. On that you can rely.

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Dinner and a Movie. And a Show.

Bob had me over to watch Babette’s Feast. He made beer bread soup, taking inspiration from a culinary corner of the film that isn’t the one that usually inspires such activity. He took some liberties with the recipe in the film (beer, water and bread), including the addition of pureed fresh peas, which provided some much needed vegetable matter as well as a not entirely pleasant green tint that brought to mind scenes from The Exorcist more so than Babette’s Feast. I brought over some plundered Pliny the Elder beer from a visit last week to the Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa. The beers there are lip-smackingly delicious, covering the entire breadth of tastebud sensation, from sweet caramel to sour cherry. After dinner and the movie, we went to Oddball Cinema on Capp to check out the evening’s show of vintage erotic films. One film from 1970 was a filmic equivalent of the sexual experience—lots of blurry red body parts, hair, and panting—and came the closest to creating a sensual and erotic atmosphere. But generally, the films were the stuff of stag parties in the 1950s and 60s, mostly titillation, except for a disturbing screwball comedy porn flick from the silent era starring a trio of scantily clad beach beauties, a horny little dude, and a goat. Another prescient silent film depicted the developing medium of television as a potential means of bringing topless women into the homes of frustrated adolescents.

David and I went to see Morgan James at the Venetian Room. She’s a young singer with a powerful voice who idolizes Nina Simone, one of the great song-stylists of the 20th Century, and while singing her tunes, channels instead that high-pitched Broadway belting style that is about as far as one can get from Nina Simone. She did deliver a few amazingly forceful interpretations of jazz standards that went slightly beyond her Jazzy Little Mermaid voice into the realm of soulful interpretation. I really should have taken notes, because I can’t for the life of me recall the particular songs, but if you like that kind of powerful high decibel singing free of burdensome emotional content, she’s the singer for you!

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Pesca-vegie-occasional-bacon-itarian Homobots

Last night Dean & Mike came over for dinner. I inadvertently made exactly the same thing that I made for them when I had them over last time. In my baby-gay days, my older buddy William would have me over for lunch and always make the same thing for me, a sort of flavorless broccoli pasta and a green salad. Always. And he’d always ask excitedly how I liked the pasta, as if it were the first time for me to experience it, and I’d always find something positive to say, like “the broccoli was cooked perfectly!” I got a kick out of it, each time wondering if there would be some kind of variation. I attributed it to the onset of senility, normal for people over 45, I thought. And now I am William. The thing is, these guys are vegetarians, well, sophisticated pesca-occasional-bacon-itarians, and I’ve run through all my veggie standards, so maybe I’m seized by a lack of culinary exploration and not some nascent middle-aged senility… not quite William. I hope.

I wonder if I’ve already written a post about this?

We watched Funeral Parade of Roses, Toshio Matsumoto’s wild inversion of the Oedipus myth, set in the gay subculture of late-60s Tokyo. The fractured narrative and visceral imagery and occasional shots of the filmmaking process and interviews with the actors were simply electrifying. Nothing else is like it, well, I should say that nothing else that’s like it is terribly watchable, and certainly nothing as engaging from or about the gay community lately. Except maybe the lesbotic but more mainstream Blue is the Warmest Color, which so profoundly and intimately captured erotic awakening, and Concussion, examining the other end of the erotic timeline. The thing I love most about those two recent films is that homosexuality is incidental–no coming out stories, no suicides or conflicts over their sexuality, no tidied-up sexless made-for-primetime-viewing homobots, just real people struggling with real issues who happen to be gay. The queens in Funeral Parade of Roses put on the masks of another gender in order to simulate acceptability, and despite the artifice and posturing, seemed so sadly real, like killing one’s mother and sleeping with one’s father were not only plausible, but inevitable.

Earlier in the day a new buddy from the east came over for tea, let’s call him Bill Cosby. I had met him only earlier that morning online, and because we hit it off so swimmingly and he was leaving town the next day and I had but a teeny window of availability, I abandoned my cardinal rule of meeting in a public place where I could easily escape from, and asked Mr. Cosby up to the CocoPlex for a spot o’ tea and conversation. What a story he told me! He’s married, and to a woman(!), and has all these kids, and only came out of the closet a few months ago and is staying with his wife as they transition to whatever is to come. I admired his honesty and openness, and could sense the relief and enthusiasm he must be feeling to finally express a side of himself that’s been dormant for so long. He even blurted out that he’s a Republican. We were sitting on my back deck at the time and I quickly glanced around to make sure there were no neighbors passing by who may have heard his pronouncement, briefly fearful that my leftist credentials would be tarnished by association. I didn’t directly tell him that I’m a Prius-driving ultra-liberal socialist, but I did chastise him for supporting a fascist regime whose backward fantasy-based environmental, social and fiscal policies are going to take decades to unravel if the public ever wakes from its brainwashed tea party stupor.

Anyway, he’s sort of exactly the kind of middle-aged guy that I always went after during my halcyon twinkie days (balding, furry face, dark eyebrows, hairy forearms, yadda yadda, you all know my type) and now he’s, like, my age! I felt an instant affinity, having experienced the same thing with Bob, realizing I was drawn towards something else but not wanting to end such a beautiful relationship and eventually deciding it just wasn’t fair to anybody. He’s at the beginning of this process, and like a bad therapist, I told him what was going to happen by telling him what happened to me. A delightful man, starting a new life in middle age. Lou Grant said, “You’ve got spunk,” and so does this guy, a lot of spunk. Lou also said “I hate spunk,” but I love it, and am eager to follow this developing story.

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Broadway, Burglary, and Sergeants Bert & Ernie

Big Chrissy and I took a trip to New York City for Christmas.  We had our luggage stolen from our hotel room, but we saw some great shows, were photographed by Bill Cunningham buying bananas in Brooklyn, and got to ride in a cop car!

The night our luggage was stolen, we made our way to the local precinct to report the burglary.  It was just like in Barney Miller, a shabby interior filled with wise-cracking, heavily-New-York-accented helpful cops.  They drove us back to our hotel in a real NYPD cruiser, but somehow the back seat was pushed forward taking up all the legroom, so Chrissy sat side-saddle and I in a lotus position.  Looking through the rain-smeared windows at the blinking lights outside I thought of Taxi Driver and Bernard Hermann’s haunting score.  “This is totally worth being burgled,” I told the cops.

We spent several hours with them at the hotel, as we waited for the fingerprint guy.  I told them that we had already fouled the crime scene and that fingerprints weren’t necessary and that in San Francisco the police would have never taken the theft of our underwear and socks so seriously.  “Aren’t there other crimes in the neighborhood that you guys should be looking into?  Rapes?  Murders?”  Sergeants Bert & Ernie looked at us gravely, “We take every crime seriously.”  Chrissy and I just melted.  New York cops are indeed the finest.

We saw Isaac Julien’s ridiculous but sumptuous installation at MoMA, supposedly about some tragic drowning, but really about Maggie Cheung flying over gorgeous Chinese scenery, the subject matter seemingly of no real interest to the artist or anybody there.  The Margritte show was just a delight, completely amazing the dazzlingly mature and inventive body of work that he produced from the ages of 28-30.  Walking through Mike Kelly’s retrospective at PS1, the only thought that came to mind was that suicide was inevitable.  Ah, Wangechi Mutu’s show at the Brooklyn Museum was the show for me.  First of all, nobody goes there, to the Brooklyn Museum, so you can really spend time with the work with no one taking pictures over your shoulders.  She creates collages and sculptural pieces that are simultaneously lovely and disturbing, two qualities that I strive for but rarely achieve.  I’m totally going to steal from her this year, so watch out…

On Broadway we saw two Pinter plays, No Man’s Land with Ian McKellan and Captain Picard, and Beyrayal with Rafe Spall, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Pinter can create scenes that have nothing to do with plot or story, just language, how we use it, what it does… Of course there usually is some kind of story, but the dialogue is about the essence of communication and words liberated from silly things like narrative. We also saw the awesome Laurie Metcalf and Jeff Goldblum in Domesticated, which takes as its thesis the basic inessential and catastrophe-prone nature of the male of the species. We saw a couple of other things, but I don’t think they were all that memorable, so let’s move on…

We met up with Emily for a traditional Ukranian Christmas Eve repast at Veselka’s in the East Village, followed by American Hustle. As we left the movie, and once again Jennifer Lawrence was dynamite, after having eaten all the same things and with Chrissy and I about to explode, Emily announced that she was going out for dinner. What a metabolism! And she’s like this super skinny chick. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

We spent Christmas lunch eating Swedish meatballs in the West Village and seeing Jia Jiang-Ke’s completely depressing A Little Sin on those stupid little IFC screens that they should really only charge $5 entry to see, then meeting my brother Paul and sister-in-law Debbie at their hotel near Grand Central. Chrissy and I didn’t want to leave their room–unlike ours, theirs had a window. And a view. Not that ours didn’t have a window, or a view, of sorts. Our window opened onto a narrow eternally dark alley that only a pigeon could squeeze into, our view the filthy building windows next door, mounded with pigeon poop dating back to the early days of Broadway. We enjoyed a really great French dinner in the West Village, laughing and stuffing ourselves silly. The next morning we met at the big tree in Rockefeller Center and toured the murals in the GE Building, imagining what Diego Rivera’s mural there would have looked like. It was ordered destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller after Rivera refused to replace Lenin’s portrait with that of an anonymous face. The subsequent murals, by Josep Maria Cert, form an almost homoerotic allegory depicting big beefy white guys constructing modern America in loin cloths–just like I’ve imagined it…

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Mefistofele

My opera-enthusiast friends S+E invited me to the opera the other night, to see Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele. It was my first time to sit in a box, and thus my first time to experience real air flow, perfect sight lines, actual leg room, and a comfy seat to boot. Not to mention completely charming and intelligent company. And my first time to stay completely awake during a 3-1/2 hour opera.

This was Boito’s only completed opera, yet he was an accomplished man of letters who, among other literary accomplishments, wrote libretti for several other composers of his day, including Verdi’s late masterworks Otello and Falstaff. Based on the Faust legend, the opera was a complete thrill, with opulent over-the-top sets that evoked a kind of 18th century La Fenice set in heaven, and this being San Francisco, gratuitous full-frontal (and plenty of dorsal) nudity and lots of lascivious behavior. The libretto was lusciously illustrated by the music, with trilly approximations of the emotions and subject matter, plus a few truly gorgeous arias and an ending that musically lifted us out of our seats toward redemption, right along with the repentant Faust.

In the patron lounge area, there was one woman who was just absolutely fabulous. She had to have been someone important, or rich, or both, for she was wearing those big bug-eyed black glasses that only the ultra-wealthy seem to wear, a fashion sensibility of a world far from my own. She could very well have been Cindy Sherman dressed up as a society matron, if she wasn’t the actual society matron that Sherman aimed to replicate. Her bronzed face was framed by a perfectly shellacked conch of a hairdo, the bodice of her embroidered dress clinging tightly to her slim figure and hanging from a stiff collar that rose behind her head like those on silver-suited spacemen in the 1950s.

Most everybody else was dressed elegantly in black, except for me in my Mossimo corduroy jeans and Zara gold velvet jacket. I was going for the look of someone–maybe a film director or famous artist–for whom fashion is irrelevant, yet I fear that all I pulled off was Country Bumpkin.

The image above is “Witches Going to Their Sabbath” (1878), by Luis Ricardo Falero.

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Birmingham New York

Big Chrissy had to meet with a client in Birmingham, so I tagged along to visit mom and dad for a few days, in Pinson, about 20 minutes northeast of the city. Chrissy is the first of my friends in San Francisco to go back home with me, so of course we had to get fried green tomatoes at the Irondale Cafe, barbecue at Dreamland, a trip up to the Vulcan to get a closer look at that big iron butt, and drives past the countless predatory lending establishments along Highway 75 between Centerpoint and Pinson.

We even saw a praying mantis at the 16th Street Baptist Church. My friend, Susan, who endearingly calls Big Chrissy “sir,” pointed out that it looked like it was praying. Language and meaning coming together on the site of one of the most tragic incidents of the civil rights movement, we all three looked at each other, “Oh, that’s why it’s called a praying mantis.”

A schoolmate of mine has been the mayor of Pinson since 2004, when the city was incorporated, paradoxically following the near complete disappearance of much of what was a quaint old town. Susan assures me that Main Street is experiencing a sort of mini revival, but the shopping centers that have displaced the little old businesses there are eyesores, with nothing to distinguish them from similar such symbols of American convenience that have destroyed the old small town urban experience across the country.

It is sort of overwhelming, coming from arid golden-hilled California to drive through acres and acres of lushly verdant rolling hills, hysterically chirping cicadas, green grass. It is a beautiful state. Fireflies twinkled on and off in the forest behind my parents’ house at sunset, dogs meandered by without leashes, it rained.

On the way home, we stopped in New York City for a few days, seeing a few plays, including Tennessee Williams’ rarely produced The Two Character Play, and the awesome and inimitable Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams and an adorable Cuba Gooding, Jr in The Trip to Bountiful. We also saw The Weir and Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike with David Hyde Pierce and not Sigourney Weaver.

At the Met we saw a dynamite photography show about the American civil war. My favorite image was a portrait of Frances Clalin Clayton, by Samuel Masury. Frances fought alongside her husband on the Union side, until his death in battle, disguising herself as a man named Jack Williams. In the picture she’s sitting with her leg crossed over her knee, suggestively (to this contemporary viewer) holding the hilt of her sword between her thumb and index finger, a hauntingly contented sliver of a smile on her face. She could be the subject of a Cathy Opie photo.

We also saw yet another Edward Hopper show at the Whitney, this time drawings and studies for paintings, as well as paintings. An obviously gifted illustrator, Hopper is just plain boring. I love his work, though, precisely because it’s so boring–just paint, light, space, location, depth, masterfully conveying a sort of intimate blandness. I like just not thinking sometimes, you know?

James Turrell’s show at the Guggenheim was thrilling, just a few pieces taking up the entire museum. He converted the central atrium into a theme park art ride consisting of giant concentric rings of color extending down from and around the naturally lit translucent window in the center of the ceiling, the rings slowly shifting through the pastel corners of the spectrum. While the colors of the room shifted, people laid on the ground looking up, their friends all changing colors, taking unauthorized photos with flash, the guards yelling constantly to stop taking pictures…

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The Major and the Mogul: Hearst Castle

The Major and I took a little road trip down south earlier in the week, to visit San Simeon and Hearst Castle. William Randolph Hearst worked with architect Julia Morgan for 28 years, starting in 1919, designing an estate to showcase his vast collection of European decorative and fine art.

The castle is the only structure visible from the coast road, enshrouded in fog and ringed by tall palm trees that poke out conspicuously from the surrounding landscape of dried grasses and live oaks. Driving up the windy road, the castle is glimpsed every now and then, looming closer and closer into view. The landscape is beautifully untouched. A mile-long arbor runs alongside the road, once covered in grape vines and espaliered fruit trees and flowers. Inside the castle gates, the formal lushness of the gardens contrasts delightfully with the spare natural features of the encircling hills, peppered with clean white marble statues–original and reproductions–from Ancient Egypt to the early 20th century. “The statues are white because we don’t have air pollution down here,” our tour guide emphasized while looking over her sunglasses into the eyes of the scruffy Parisians standing next to me.

The grandeur of the architecture and the exquisite craftsmanship and clever integration of antique european ceilings and structural elements are overwhelming. There’s nothing modest here, except a complete absence of art or architecture of Hearst’s own time. It’s a Disneyesque museum of european architecture, decorated with artwork purchased at a time when Europe was recovering from a World War and selling off its shattered cultural heritage. A guide told me that Hearst saw himself as a protector of sorts of these objects that he feared would have been destroyed in the wars. Lord Elgin on a shopping spree.

On the drive down, the Major played the music of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the soundtracks of Glee and Smash, and several of those really loud screechy singers of the early 80s who paved the way for other even louder screechy singers like Whitney Houston and Jennifer Hudson. He gleefully accompanied every song. I intervened urgently at one point with some Nina Simone, but after two songs and fidgety silence from the Major, he blurted out, “Could we listen to something happy?”

The Major’s general insistence on being surrounded by happy-making stimuli is what makes him such a pleasure to be around, a walking Disneyland exhibit. After stuffing ourselves silly in Cayucos one night with fried things from the land and sea, and complaining about how uncomfortably full we were, the Major suddenly commanded “Let’s get dessert!” It wasn’t just any dessert, either, but an olallieberry (“ollieberry” as he endearingly calls it) cobbler about the size of a full pie, topped with a quart of whipped cream and a pint of ice cream. I was in awe at the gustatory prowess of my dear friend, the idea of the pleasure of dessert cutting off any signals from his stomach to cease and desist. Calories are to the Major what Renaissance Spanish ceilings were to Hearst. Our little vacation seemed guided by this dual lack of resistance. Once again, sensation reigned supreme!

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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…

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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.

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.

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The Stavros Chronicles: Shirley Valentine The Sequel

Well, here I am, back in Greece. I don’t know why the tourist season ends exactly when it’s the most pleasant time to be here, but I’m enjoying the empty beaches and not sweating. Stavros and I have been alternately at each other’s throats or adhered in liplocked bliss. Thankfully, mostly liplocked bliss.

A lot of our confrontation stems from his notion that a long-distance relationship, including this one that seems to be going so well, is impossible. I’ve told him that he doesn’t have to decide that it’s impossible and then so actively pursue not making it possible. If it’s impossible, it just won’t work out, he doesn’t have to do anything. But if something is possible, stop resisting and let it happen. I feel him holding back—words that aren’t spoken, thoughts not articulated—and I know it’s not because of some stupid macho cultural thing, or that he doesn’t care about me, it’s because of his fears and anxiety. He’s dealing with what all Greeks are dealing with, how to survive in the current economic climate, and let me tell you, the Greek people are being asked to sacrifice so much, you can almost see how some of them could be brainwashed by the right-wing extremist Golden Dawn fascists and their anti-austerity proposals, the closest they’ll get to “read my lips.” One United Nations official has already warned that the current austerity measures could represent a violation of human rights. Against this dire economic backdrop, he asks, how could romance be possible? Well, it is, and it’s blossoming, so sit back and let it flower. To paraphrase Auntie Mame, “Love! love! love!!”

We spent last weekend with two of his friends, Giorgos and Filios, guests in their home in Methana. They were delightful hosts, very well-read, each actively pursuing artistic endeavors, truly a pleasure to while away a weekend with. Methana is a sub-peninsula of the Peloponnesus, attached by a tiny sliver of land. It’s almost an island, entirely of volcanic origin, the smell of sulphur still in the air. The area is only sparsely populated, but with lush vegetation and dense forests, boulders everywhere, like the volcano just erupted. Giorgos and I hiked up to the peak of the highest volcano, enjoying beautiful views of the mainland and the islands of the Saronic Gulf.

Swimming in the sea, it felt like we were the only people in the entire Gulf. For a moment I thought of the housekeeper’s warning in the original The Haunting (not the stupid remake) “No one can hear you scream… in the dark… in the night…” but the water is so inviting, and so comforting. It doesn’t seem like you’re going to be sucked under by a giant sleeper wave or frozen to death like when swimming in the Pacific. Even when there’s a volcano above you and teetering boulders on the hillside ready to tumble down.