Category: Uncategorized

I suppose I should do something mature like bang on the floor, or scream “AAAAGGGHHH,” instead, I’m listening to Pierre de la Rue motets turned up loud enough to drown out the sounds of the dreadful boyfriend of my downstairs tenant–excuse me, “sub” tenant. All night, he’s been babbling, just babbling nonstop, with a giggle thrown in every now and then. A non-stop stream of babbling nonsense. Perhaps you remember past posts about this awful person. It used to be the sound of boinking and water running all night. No more. I miss the intitimate relations. He has a very deep voice, with a Texas-y twang, that actually vibrates my bed. At least he sounds happy, but still, what is he doing and what topic could possibly be so engaging as to elicit this hours-long non-stop monologue at the equivalent of 4:00 in the morning? And why isn’t his boyfriend saying anything? Is he able to sleep through this? Are they doing drugs? Providing narration to a silent movie marathon? Sleep-talking? Translating a classical greek text? Help! What sluggards, what cowards have I brought up in my court, who care nothing for their allegiance to their (land)lord. Who will rid me of this babbling beast??

More poetic spam in my mailbox this morning. The author, Mr. Roscoe Baez, begins with what looks like a pitch to refinance, but then quickly digresses into neo-literate post-structuralist critique:

Good day to you sir,

The real – Estate was Never so easy to get.
Getting house and fixed assets refinanced is at its best right now.
These people are giving from 3.25–4.25% but for people who ask for re-fiinance.

You can take home USD 350,000 for $290pm.

Copy and paste the Below address in your internet browser:

asphaltene.anyarch.com/?ra=rock

Mark at 27 months looked ?normal?. He came from a good family who provided lots of stimulation. Mark had one word–‘ba’ as in ‘Ball.’ Everything was ‘ba.’ After a few days of orientation in the classroom, I presented the computer. The first day he sat at the computer for 20 minutes and pressed the ball, bus, bee on the IntelliKeys keyboard over and over again. He then looked at me and pointed to the ball and said ?Ba? Then he pointed to the bee and said ‘Be’ and the Bus and said ‘Bu.’ I was astonished and his mother started to cry..

Don’t you hate running carelessly?.

I am terribly hungry, do you want to get some food later on?.

THE PARENT arrived back on the scene. She gave me a tape by Dr. Laura Meyers from UCLA. I listened to that tape eight times. I listened over and over and heard the same thing again and again. Ms. Meyers said, ‘These kids may need to hear a word many times (perhaps 72 times) before they ever say a word. A computer can be patient and say it the same way every time.’ Now I understood. I was not patient enough. I did not allow the student to hear the words over and over. I was interrupting their learning by interjecting, when they were totally engrossed in what they were doing. I was asking questions they were not ready to answer. They were just learning language. They didn’t have the answers yet..

Bye,
Roscoe Baez

I just received one of the most entertaining and inventive pieces of spam:

Hi
We just interest will u read spam if
it will contain something like this :

1)First one

Lazy Sock Puppets
spacer

Why don’t sock puppets ever get anything done?
They always have a thumb up their a$$!

2)Second

Men and Women
spacer

I’M GLAD I’M A MAN

I’m glad I’m a man, you better believe; I don’t live off of yogurt, diet coke, or cottage cheese.
I don’t bitch to my girlfriends about the size of my breasts; I can get where
I want to — north, south, east or west. I don’t get wasted after only 2 beers; and when I do drink I don’t end up in tears.
I won’t spend hours deciding what to wear; I spend 5 minutes max fixing my hair.
And I don’t go around checking my reflection; in everything shiny from every direction.
I don’t whine in public and make us leave early; and when you ask why get all bitter and surly.

I’M GLAD I’M A WOMAN

I’m glad I’m a woman, yes I am, yes I am; I don’t live off of Budweiser, beer nuts and Spam.
I don’t brag to my buddies about my erections; I won’t drive to Hell before I ask for directions.
I don’t get wasted at parties and act like a clown; and I know how to put that damned toilet seat down!
I won’t grab your hooters, I won’t pinch your butt; my belt buckle’s not hidden beneath my beer gut.
And I don’t go around “re-adjusting” my crotch; or yell like Tarzan when my headboard gets a notch.
I don’t belch in public, I don’t scratch my behind.

P.S. mail to__@__.com

1) We do not unsubscribe anymore becouse abusses go to unsubscribe url.
2) If we unsubscribe u others spamers are not.
3) If u abuse this e-mail we will never make spam more useful.

So French and South African AIDS researchers have found that HIV infection rates are lower among circumcised men. In Africa, there’s a 5% infection rate in countries that practice circumcision, versus 30% in countries that don’t. Is male genital mutilation now going to be recommended as a deterrent to infection? Like, what about condoms or reruns of Donnie & Marie? I remember the good old days of 1984, when living in the Castro was like living on the set of a George Romero film. The horror aside, it was amazing how the community responded with explicit information about how the virus was at that time understood to be transmitted, and real ways to protect oneself. Okay, okay, I remember the stuff about fisting and French kissing, but still, the point is that the community responded very quickly, making condoms available for free, printing posters of hot naked men wearing nothing but condoms, handing out SAFE/UNSAFE lists, offering free HIV testing… The government, meanwhile, insisted that abstinence was the only way to avoid infection. In other words, pretend to be something other than a human, and you won’t get infected.

So this new bit of information about circumcision–which isn’t that new, since we’ve know about it for some time through smaller studies–doesn’t really bug me, science is science, but how it’s put to use raises concerns. I thought the government’s stance on abstinence was, and is, backwards in that it places morality before fact. Now we have facts that are going to result in the loss of countless precious pleasure neurons. Make condoms and information accessible so people can make informed decisions about how to avoid infection before chopping up our gentle-talia.

Not that I’ve entertained the idea, but if I were to kill myself, I can’t imagine a better ending than jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. For you out-of-towners, The Metropolitan Transportation Commission allocated $1.6 million Wednesday for environmental studies and preliminary design of a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. The barrier itself is estimated to cost between $15 and $25 million. It seems to me that if someone wants to kill himself, he’s going to figure out a way to do it, so why not let the poor guy have the best joy ride of his life and a once-in-a-lifetime view before splattering into the Bay. What if some person, intent on killing himself, not knowing about the barrier, gets to the Bridge to find out that he can’t jump–what’s he going to do? I’ll tell you what, he’s going to toss himself right into traffic and cause all sorts of accidents and unwanted deaths. Then they’ll stop people from even walking across the Bridge, and then where will he go? Well, if he’s from San Francisco, he’s seen Vertigo, and Fort Point’ll ring a bell, and some poor surfer’s going to get clobbered in that jump… There’s no way to protect people from themselves, so protect us from them, and let ’em jump.

I am now a cyber-outlaw. E-Bay has suspended my account and forbidden me from opening another one… It all started several weeks ago, when my visually impaired friend, Peter, asked me to post some of his Jens Quistgaard-designed Dansk pepper mills for him on e-Bay, using his account. I was to receive 10% commission for photographing and posting the items, 5 to 6 at a time, over a period of 4 weeks. It is obviously the Day of the Quistgaard Pepper Mill, for they sold for outrageous amounts of money. Eager to own a piece of Danish Modern magic for my own, I bid on one, using my own account, never imagining that my action could possibly be perceived as making a “shill bid.” Well, wouldn’t you know it, a few days after being outbid, I received an email today from e-Bay, a real one mind you, not one of the bogus ones asking for my credit card information, but a real cancellation of my account and a warning not to try to open a new one. They never warned me, or asked me what was going on or anything, they just decided that my actions were criminal. And 34 hours before I was to bid on the grooviest mod chandelier for my entry hall.

Why are you doing this to me, e-Bay? I’ve given so much of my money and prime porno-viewing time to you, and you cast me aside at the slightest hint of impropriety.

I am guilty until I prove that I am innocent. The letter that I sent e-Bay in response the the cancellation of my account, explaining Peter’s disability and my long unsubstantiated history of buying expensive utilitarian objects from him outside of e-Bay was so lame that even I wouldn’t buy it. Without e-Bay, life holds no value–only full retail.

So I’ve been thinking… Typically when I say this, BC says “Uh oh,” but lately it hasn’t been followed by “…this isn’t working for me.” BC and I have been having really good talks lately, and I’ve initiated a new way of considering the challenges in our relationship.

There are two areas in constant need of discussion; expectations and desires. Typically when either of the two is under siege, my frustration leads me to want to just throw in the towel and move on, to find it elsewhere. Well, this hasn’t really worked, creating a mutual distrust and tension that we dance around until the next crisis. Our challenge is what to do about those failed expectations and frustrated desires–how to manage them so that resentment doesn’t build up.

One area of frustration is related to how much time I’ve put into helping D. I spend the bulk of my time with him, even if it’s just him being around watching me while I work in my studio, but with no intellectual dialogue, no dialogue at all really, just proximity, so when I’m with BC or my other friends, I want stimulation, I want to talk about things, I want to learn, I want to see… Beth called me on improperly assigning responsibility to others, so I need to be more in control of my intellectual growth. I’ve told D. that I need Wednesdays-Fridays to myself, my own creative time, and then to BC that I may need to spend less time with him to be around artists and writers or to watch the films that he considers unwatchable or to engage myself with culture that he might find frightening and certainly unentertaining. Essentially I’m saying that I need things that I’ve typically relied on the relationship to provide, so while it’s new to me, I’d like to try it.

Dealing with the built-up resentment is harder, but I’m not caving in to the old me, not assigning blame, but bringing things up as issues that both of us could address–“What do you think?” “What can we do?” “How do you feel?” I know it sounds like common sense to a lot of you, but it takes a long time to unlearn bad communication.

Turning 40 and coming to terms with failed expectations on a grander scale only complicates matters, and I’m trying to maintain a distance between the two sets of expectations. My life might be half over. Really. Already my body is showing signs of stress, my gray hairs multiplying exponentially–maybe I won’t marry Bob Hoskins after all and my movie will be tossed in the trash along with the rest of my art when I die. Maybe I’m insignificant. I don’t know if artists have a different relation to life in general, but this artist feels compelled to communicate something of my experience that is going to last, that’s going to show a future generation what I saw, and how I saw it. Maybe it’s why people have kids, or build libraries, to feel some comfort from knowing that something of them is continuing. If mediocrity and anonymity are my future, then how do I want to be in the present? Thus far there’s been the promise of something happening, whatever that is, it’s just something that’s out there, that I’m striving for and never quite reaching. Every achievement brings on more desire, but never contentment. If this is all there is, then I should experience the most that’s possible with it, right?

Questions, questions, questions… and is the answer really 42?

I am really digging not having a beard. Yesterday I bought a pair of purple velvet hot pants and today a deep blue fitted shirt that I don’t think would have matched the beard, or me five pounds ago. Wait, could my beard have weighed that much? Anyway, I think that the whole beard phase was fun, not shaving and everything, but it never seemed to really fit–I’m so powerfully drawn to men with body hair that I couldn’t imagine anyone being attracted to me without something visibly furry, hence the beard-age. It’s about opposites, right? and not being narcissistically drawn to one’s reflection? Somebody, take me someplace fancy so I can wear my new clothes!

And I shaved off my beard today.

Here are a few. I…

1. Was introduced by my lover to Polly Bergen as “Gloria.”
2. Was passionately engaged in the closet of a bar in Japan by the owner who used the time-worn ruse of asking to exchange clothes with me while my friends waited outside the door to view our new outfits.
3. Went mushroom hunting with the wife of either Komar or Melamid on an island off the coast of Maine.
4. Took a Korean ginseng bath with Lawrence “Morpheus” Fishburne.
5. Had one ex-lover pay a witch to place a curse on me.
6. Appear in the still photos featured in Marlon Riggs’ film Color Adjustment.
7. Have a brother who was dumped by his girlfriend for Robert Conrad.
8. Had a stalker break into the San Francisco Art Institute to steal my student photographs of myself in my underwear (I was a student) who turned out to be someone I worked with at Marcello’s Pizza who told me about the theft and his mad love for me as he laid out a picnic for me during my 15-minute break and then wrote me a letter on a barf bag telling me I destroyed his life and then fled to Los Angeles never to be heard from again. It happened again 3 months later, from a different co-worker.
9. Had a famous New York critic and writer prepare his special place in my studio before meeting his Rent Boy.
10. Was introduced to Edmund White as the one who didn’t leave Bob for the Vatican priest.