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The Stuff That Dreams are Made of & Cute Puppy Paintings

This weekend Big Chris, Nemr, Dean and I went downtown to the Old Mint for an exhibition of miscellanea related to the subject of San Francisco in film. The show is called “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of,” after Humphrey Bogart’s description of the Maltese Falcon. There are several installations, including a reproduction of said falcon, encased in a plexiglass vitrine. Another room contains a reproduction of the great portrait of Carlotta Valedez that once hung in the Legion of Honor of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In front of the portrait is the bench that Madeline sat on during her daily visits to contemplate the portrait, her bouquet resting on the bench, as if she had just left.

And speaking of Madeline, Kim Novak’s paintings are also on display, luridly colorful pastels of cute little animals, dreamy verdant forest- and river-scapes rendered in a soft almost psychedelic palette. In one room, there are portraits of various celebutante visitors to the SF Film Festival, where you could also get your picture taken next to a wax effigy of Clint Eastwood on the Red Carpet. The show delves into the early years of silent film in the city, where Charlie Chaplin actually got his start, but film noir clearly dominates the show. One could look out the window and imagine Nick and Nora pulled tipsily down 5th Street by Asta.

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Horoscope

I’m not one to take astrology too seriously, if at all, but a few days after writing my previous post about Stavros, my friend AstroJane sent me this, which so eerily sums up my current romantic circumstances I’m wondering if the entire cosmos hash’t organized itself just for me:

Pluto transits conjunct Venus

Your romantic life, social life, and value system are undergoing complete transformations with Pluto transiting conjunct natal Venus. You are seeking depth of experience in your social and love relationships, or this kind of experience comes into your life now. Someone may enter your life, or circumstances arise that completely change your outlook, alter your value system, or consume much of your time, thoughts, and energy. Intimacy, passion, and intensity are what you seek (or these find you!). Anything less will not satisfy. Your relationships can have a compulsive quality to them, and you are unlikely to listen to reason or rationality. Irrational fears about your lovability and love in general come up for inspection now.

Your relationships in general will become more intense, but especially those involving love and sex. You will experience emotional extremes and, if a relationship is in a rut, you are likely to decide to break it off. “All or nothing” may become your motto, and the “all” includes a depth and intensity of emotional response. You want to feel your love to the very core of your being, and you want to play an important part in someone else’s life. Obviously, any relationship which only stirs lukewarm responses won’t be able to stand up under the demands that you make of it now. Keep your eyes open; someone you meet now may teach you some important lessons about love. You may have a love relationship with this person, or he/she could be someone who plays the role of teacher or guru. Your sex drive is strong and may find an outlet in either a new or existing relationship or through a creative medium such as writing or painting.

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The Dating Game: I’m Hard to Get, Stavros, All You Have to Do is Ask Me

It’s only been a week since I met this guy, and already, yes already, I can think of and see absolutely nothing but him. All day I think of him. I dream of him at night. I think in clichés. He’s the first person I talk to in the morning, the last before going to bed. If we don’t talk, I look at his pictures and smile myself to sleep. I say his name all day, out loud, trying to get that slight trill in my “r.” In the past, I’ve used pseudonyms in my blog for the guys that I’ve been interested in, perhaps a subconscious acknowledgment of participating in a kind of fiction. But this man’s name is Stavros, and he’s the realest thing I’ve ever known.

Except that he lives in Greece, and I actually haven’t met him in person yet.

I can see you all rolling your eyes. “Again??” Someone even asked me if perhaps I’m the one afraid of intimacy, and this is why I’m attracting these guys who live in other time zones and on different continents. Ma che dice! I am like an intimacy sponge! I’m so open to and craving intimacy that I’ll look for it everywhere, as the feeling that I want to experience isn’t tied so much to specific things like mutual interests or a common language or convenient transportation, but to a kind of emotional exchange that I’ve experienced a few times and just can’t get into a relationship without. It’s what you see between Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Not.

It’s there with Stavros. Just his voice pierces something deep in me, some emotional G-spot. I have nothing to lose in being my effusive self with him, he actually welcomes it, and returns it as fervently. There seems to be only one gear to shift into, and, damn the potential torpedoes to come, that’s full-steam-ahead.

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The Dating Game: GROWLr and the Foot Guy

So I’ve placed an ad on GROWLr. It’s this dating app for the iPhone that’s tailor-made for the homoesexualist looking for love, and without having to wander too far from home: it’s GPS based.

I, of course, am looking for significantly more complicated entanglements than most guys on the site, but I seem to have worked my way through all the other dating sites without finding my Mr. Right, and thought, what the heck, maybe Mr. Right is hidden somewhere among the Mr. Right Nows.

Following the lead of most guys on the site, I posted a picture of me with my shirt off, during the buffest moment of my life, which mercifully wasn’t too long ago. I said simply that I was looking for love… short and to the point. Immediately the incoming message tone started blinging, woof after woof, grr after grr. I heard from several guys who had completely ignored me on other sites where I had my shirt on and all serious about looking for a relationship. I tell ya, take your shirt off, don’t say much, and they will come. My next door neighbor even hit me up with a woof, not recognizing my chest. Men are this shallow and this predictable.

So this morning I got a very heated request from this one guy in New York who wanted pictures of my feet. Just my feet. I don’t have or share the kinds of pictures most guys on those sites are after, but I was waiting for my oatmeal to cook and had finished the paper, so I thought, what the heck. After the first photo, he texted back excitedly, asking for more pictures. I took another, and another. His requests became more and more specific, of the soles of my feet, just the soles. But not cropped, he wanted the entire foot in the image. And the other one, too. He even texted me sample pictures. It was not easy, with my oatmeal boiling on the stove, but I endeavored to oblige. I had never met a textbook fetishist before, just the weekend ones at street fairs and such. This one was so demanding, more more more. One picture was not enough, please just one more, and then one more. And only one angle of view seemed to satisfy his insatiable craving. I sent him a final picture, exhausted, and sat down with my oatmeal.

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Fear and Self-Loathing in Southern California, or Only Love Can Break Your Heart

He hides his head inside a dream
Someone should call him and see if he can come out.
Try to lose the down that he’s found.
Only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
Yes only love can break your heart

And thus, my dear readers, ends another thrilling chapter of my Dating Game. Señor Grant gave me the boot, a few days ago, about 3 months after our initial flirtation, although actually I think I scored the technical KO by telling him first that I didn’t think it was a good idea to be seeing him anymore. After his swift affirmative response, I quickly tried to jump back into the ring, painfully aware of my impulsivity, but it was too late, he had already moved on, perhaps just waiting for me to do the dumping all along.

So how did I blow this thing? Well, it all started when I told him I cared about him. As soon as I shared my feelings he suddenly ceased any kind of affectionate or romantic exchange. Remember he lives in another town, so we didn’t get to see each other that much. When not in physical contact, we had only language, our courting conducted via phone and text. He was romantic, attentive, responsive, excited… until the moment I told him I cared. I was so completely discombobulated, like waking up in Backwards Land. I tried talking about it, which only frustrated him. For the last month we’ve been tussling over this, while simultaneously feeling more and more physically connected. I couldn’t make any sense of what was going on.

Finally, he confessed that he just wasn’t ready to open himself up, that he was drawn to me initially because I represented something that he’d always wanted, the potential for a mature relationship. Somehow his plan didn’t include me feeling anything and certainly not expressing it, my enthusiasm welcomed like the swine flu.

He related my behavior to his own personal experience—pining after someone not interested in him, and still carrying around the shame of his actions and ultimate rejection. It unnerved me to be compared to this version of himself that he described as being “emotionally crippled,” and I feel wrongly rejected because he closed his eyes to who I am and where my actions were coming from. I made no demands and had no expectations of him other than welcoming my feelings in whatever way he was ready for, and treating me in a way that was appropriate to what our bodies were doing.

But, alas, he just wasn’t ready to feel or express anything beyond fear, and steadily and unwaveringly turned from my advances, Daphne fleeing from Apollo, Eros’ golden arrow having pierced my heart, the lead one his. I went from A Date With Judy to feeling like Liam Neeson in that movie where he wakes from a coma and his wife (was it January Jones?) denies even knowing him, his identity erased.

I’m really disappointed that I couldn’t have been more respectful or even aware of his boundaries, and that I screwed this up because of feeling something and not knowing how to contain or express it appropriately. I’m deeply confounded by the notion that I pushed him away by loving him.

But what can I do? I have to accept that I can’t make him feel anything he’s not ready for, or just not feeling. Whatever the reason, I don’t have to understand why, just to accept it, and henceforth to navigate more carefully through the treacherous waters surrounding Emotionally Crippled Island. Arr…

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Dean & Emily Shows

Dean Smith and Emily Wilson are two of my closest friends, and two of my favorite artists. They have concurrent shows on view now, across the street from each other, on Geary. Dean spends months making these meticulously hand drawn markings and squiggles on paper that eventually become something visually transcendent, topographies and landscapes beyond reference to anything specific. The expressive quality of his work is defined by an almost mechanical interaction with surface.

Dean’s show at Gallery Paule Anglim consists of three pieces, titled “three manifestations of anaglyphic space.” I know… but that’s Dean, be serious, he always has titles like this, he always makes us work. Each piece is reproduced from an original drawing that has been manipulated digitally to produce a three dimensional image when viewed with 3-D glasses, on hand in the gallery. One piece acts almost like a mirror, another zooms out in a rounded mound towards you, like a giant coconut but with a big “t” cut into it. You see fantastic geometric and biomorphic forms that seem convincingly of some other dimension, a dimension not only of sight, but of imagination… and at times even orifices.

Just seeing this work exhausted and disoriented me. All great work should make you sick like that. But get this, after Dean’s show, Big Chrissy and I made our way across the street to see the Adam Fuss show at Fraenkel, photograms made from animal intestines. And then a giant daguerreotype close-up of female gentle-talia! Ahhhh! Enough with the viscera! Get me to Emily’s soothing randomness!

So Emily’s markings are as expressive and seemingly random as Dean’s are calculated. She also creates abstractions, but with big sloppy dripping gestures. She finds inspiration in the cinematic expressions of Antonioni and Nicholas Roeg, and I think most apparently Godard, creating wordless narratives of emotional punch. But these guys rarely crack a smile, and Emily’s obviously having fun, with color, form, paper and canvas. Visiting her studio, you experience this work as it should be viewed, stapled to the wall or crumpled on the floor, stepped on, smushed, glued to the ceiling. Thankfully, Sweetow has resisted trying to contain this work in frames. Like following Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau around Milan in La Notte as their marriage crumbles, the viewer of her work stumbles through a sort of tapestry of graphic encounters, culminating in that final confrontation when Moreau reads Mastroianni the tender love letter he wrote to her before they got married. “Who wrote that?” he asks, not remembering. With Emily, though, we don’t forget who wrote it, or the sincerity behind the expression.

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A Walk In the Park with Peter

Chris and Peter, May 1987

Thursday I went for a walk with Peter. Peter’s my oldest extant buddy in San Francisco. We were twinkies together, our friendship going back to 1985, when we shared the coolest apartment in town with his cool black cat Francesca, who’d occasionally fall off the ledge of our living room windows. “Reeeee-OOOWWWWwwwww” we’d hear as she took the two story plunge.

Peter’s been losing his eyesight for years now, slowly, and is adapting to a distorted, gradually disappearing world. But rather than withdraw from life, he’s developed the wisdom and compassion of a contemporary bodhisattva, although I’m sure he wouldn’t like me using that term, but that’s what he is to me, someone bound for enlightenment, parsing out advice and wisdom to all who cross his path.

He’s such a vibrant presence, a 21st century Oscar Wilde, as smart as he is silly, immediately accessible and immediately intimate. When we were in Paris a few years ago, walking down a street in the Marais that he and Luis, his partner, had been down a few times already on their own, seemingly every shopkeeper, barkeep and waiter leaned out of his doorway and shouted “Salut Pierre!” “Bonjour Pierre!” like in a Minnelli musical, every one of them already bonded with this bon vivant. In a taxi, Peter engaged our driver using a vocabulary of about 10 words, “Paris… ah! Quelle belle ville! l’architecture! les musées! les gens! C’est magnifique!” and on and on, exclamation point after exclamation point. Because he couldn’t see our husky-voiced female driver, he kept addressing her as “Monsieur,” while she kept unsuccessfully and comically correcting in her deep manly voice “Madam! Madam!”

Peter has what my friend Steve calls an “outdoor” voice. In museums, he is allowed to view sculptures with his hands, and since he’s often not aware of the volume of his voice, or the proximity of his fellow art enthusiasts, after he’s fondled a statue’s privates and when he thinks he’s whispering to me “Oh my, those Gauls were really hung!” he’s actually addressing an entire room of people who then all turn to look at my deeply red, but delighted face.

Having lost so many friends over the years, I’m so grateful to have him in my life, a life that flickers in Technicolor whenever I’m with him.

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The Dating Game: Herb Ritts & The Cult of Celebrity

On Sunday, Señor Grant took me to the Getty to lunch with his cute girl buddies, Liza and Kim. They’re sisters, almost identical, smartly dressed with glowing white teeth. They finish each other’s sentences, refer to each other as “my sister” and are just a delight to observe. We walked through the Herb Ritts show, which left me with nothing. Unless you call emptiness something. He was a great technician, or the people who printed his pictures were, who masterfully appropriated the visions of countless other photographers—Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Edward Weston—to create beautiful images of beautiful people that are completely without depth, all about surface. But oh those surfaces. Black skin in particular is rendered as a sumptuous textile.

Luckily, there was another teeny little show nearby, Portraits of Renown, consisting of celebrity portraits from nearly the dawn of photography to contemporary times. Each portrait conveyed an essence of the individual, the spark responsible for their fame. A portrait of John Barrymore as Hamlet by Edward Steichen had Barrymore in profile, slightly blurred, but his body sharp and in focus, the fiery energy in his head not to be contained. Lewis Morley’s iconic portrait of Profumo Affair strumpet Christine Keeler was shot in 1963—but printed around the time that the film Scandal was released—a publicity shot for a proposed film project, of her naked, confident, straddling a chair, her nudity hidden by her arms and the back of the chair. The show lusciously demonstrates how the photographic image has shaped our perception and experience of celebrity.

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The Dating Game: Mickey, Señor Grant and Me

Last weekend I flew down to southern California to spend some time with Señor Grant. On Saturday, he took me to Disneyland, after prohibiting me from participating in any planning. Always content to submit to the agenda of others, I happily surrendered. This guy knows his way around Disneyland like I know my way around a pint of Häagen Dazs Dulce de Leche. We spent about 12 hours running from attraction to attraction, with hardly a moment of rest, except for the brief corn dog respite.

Now, my experience with corn dogs has pretty much been limited to Trader Joe’s Meatless Corn Dogs, which are more like a medium for the delivery of ketchup. The Disney ones were like the Trader Joe’s ones plus about 1500 calories, a lot of grease, and seemingly real meat products. I wolfed down two and then was rushed off to the next ride.

I think that my favorite ride was Soaring over California. You sit in a ski lift-like buggy in front of a massive screen which effectively fills your entire field of vision. On the screen a film is projected from the point of view of Superman, or some gravity-defying Disney character, flying over the Golden Gate Bridge, through Yosemite, and various other parts of California, except I think Sacramento, our capital, which didn’t seem to make the cut. They raise the seats and blow air at you, and even pine scent as you pass over the timber line, so that the effect is like you’re really soaring over the state. It was simultaneously completely convincing and completely artificial, like being tossed into a giant movie.

I also loved the Hollywood Tower of Terror. You get in an elevator in this old hotel and suddenly you’re dropped 14 stories. And then the elevator goes up again and you’re dropped again. And again. I screamed and screamed. Aaaaaaaah! I nearly lost my corn dogs.

We dined in Ariel’s Grotto, outside by the water, romantic, in the only table with no heat overhead. So I shivered through my meal, warmed visually by Señor Grant’s fiery countenance. After dinner we made our way through several heated indoor attractions and then, suitably warmed, hopped over to the other side of the lake to see the World of Color show, “the WOOON-derful world of COOOOOO-loooooooor!” in which scenes from recent Disney films are projected on eruptions and sprays of water. Despite the signs everywhere warning that the area we were in was a “wet” zone, Señor Grant insisted that it was “only a mist.” When our neighbors expressed concern about getting wet, he calmed them with “it’s only a light mist.” The show was dazzling, the colored jets of water zigging and zagging, the fountains growing higher and higher… and then came the deluge. Which didn’t stop. Everyone around started screaming, I ducked behind Señor Grant but to no avail. We were soaked. I tried to avoid the angry stares of my wet neighbors, glaring at Señor Grant.

Actually I loved all the rides—the roller coasters, the singing animatronic critters, the Haunted Mansion—except for the Finding Nemo submarine ride, which was pretty lame. But to be fair to the Disney designers, by the time we got there, it was close to midnight, the corn dogs were wreaking havoc with my GI tract, we were wet, tired, kids were crying, everybody stank. It was time to go home.

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Pinson with the Parents

My parents are amazing. Their mid-80s are like the new mid-60s. I spent a few days with them last week, in Alabama. Mom is still like a merry squirrel, always moving, always talking… my dad at times seems like a grumpier parody of Walter Matthau, although he has this really entertaining habit of reading aloud road and business signs. “Abundance Love Christian Academy” is delivered as if he were addressing a Toastmasters Meeting, his roadside recitations allowing for no gaps in conversation. We went for a hike in the hills near Turkey Creek—my 80 year old parents, hiking up a mountain—and then explored the old swimming hole where my brother and I used to cool off during those hot Alabama summers. The creek winds through this beautiful forrest, off the road to the Turkey Creek Landfill. For a while there was going to be a prison built on the site, but the locals got together and came up with partners and funding to make it a nature preserve. As a kid, I remember the road on the way to the creek always littered with bags of trash, people too impatient I guess to drive all the way to the landfill. Now it’s all cleaned up, just pristine forrest and burbling water, conveniently about 1/4 mile from the dump.

Later in the week, my mom and I did some further exploring and found this cool old cemetery, The Red Hill Cemetery, off Tapawingo Road near Pinson Valley High. It’s not like Pinson is this big town, so it was somewhat surprising that I hadn’t stumbled across this place in the years I lived there, or that I had forgotten about it. The gravestones date from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. Behind the graveyard an old road leads to an abandoned house with a tin roof and field-stone chimney, slowly being swallowed by the forrest. It’s the perfect setting for a horror film.