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The Dating Game: New Revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7,300 Sunrises

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

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

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

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

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Impressionisms

Chrissy and I braved the chilly weather and hightailed it to the Camille Pissarro show at the Legion yesterday. I’ve never been particularly fond of Pissarro’s work, but appreciate his anti-establishment demeanor, elder Impressionist status, and for what he gave Cezanne. There’s a kind of tightness, or rigidity, that seems too perfectly confined by his framing, but when he does loosen up, the paintings are quite lovely, and at times the technique is just dazzling. But still, jousting with all those blue-haired ladies to get close to one of those things…

On to Impressionist offspring, Dean Smith and I saw Renoir’s Woman on the Beach, his last film in Hollywood, starring Joan Bennett, the darling of all the european ex-pats during those years, and who gave one of her most sensitive performances. “Go ahead and say it, I’m a tramp.” The story was pretty lurid for the time, with Joan married to a blind painter—she caused his blindness—but carrying on with Robert Ryan, who believes that the painter can really see, and is using his blindness to keep Joan from leaving him. He hoards his increasingly valuable paintings in a closet, the only record of what his eyes had seen. They all get along swimmingly and try to kill each other, and then in the sensational climax, the painter burns his work and, excited about the possibility of finally starting a new project and with flames leaping high into the sky, asks Joan to drive him to New York. She can do whatever she wants, he says, she’s free. Finally freed of him and the security that the paintings brought, she clamps her arm around him and off they go, destitute and with nothing but possibility ahead, just love and art in the city that never sleeps. Bye bye Robert.

How romantic. Sigh.

I would love to see the sequel, where they get to New York and discover how high the rents have risen since they moved to their shack on the beach and how impossible it is to get a show after all the galleries moved to Chelsea and painting became less about expression than cleverly manipulating the viewer and critic into embracing facile surface and commodity fetishism. They should have worked it out with Robert and stayed on the beach.

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Ricky & Toby & Eddie & Liz & Me

Ricky, an old buddy from high school was in town last week. A few weeks before he sent me a cryptic note on Facebook, using a different first name and 28 years after I’d frankly thought about him, asking if I remembered him. I said I didn’t know Ricky Blah-blah, but I did go to school with another Blah-blah. He was indeed that other Blah-blah. There were only something like 30 people in my graduating class, so it’s not that difficult to remember any particular one of them. He was a sort of Totoro, hovering in the background with his big smile and jiggly belly, occasionally saying something really smart or witty. I remember entertaining a brief attraction to him, but then he had an eye operation and disappeared before graduation, and that was that.

In the intervening 28 years, he’s sung with opera companies, unknowingly lived two blocks away from me for a few years, bought a house in Atlanta, was a steer-wrestling gay rodeo star, plays countless instruments, sustained an intimate encounter with Eddie Fisher, and is now a systems engineer doing one of those jobs where my eyes glaze over and I start thinking of the laundry I have to do when being told what it is. So what he does, despite his generously dumbed-down layman’s explanation, remains a slight mystery, although it is now taking him practically around the world, a world he’s never explored despite his extensive and interesting life experiences.

When he told me his Eddie Fisher story I nearly had a heart attack. “You had intimate relations with someone who had intimate relations with Elisabeth Taylor??” (I’m paraphrasing here.) He seemed so blasé about it, yet I fired question after question about the details and mechanics, about Carrie and Debbie, if Eddie was gay or just impaired… “I met him at a dinner party at Armistead’s.” Armistead again. Again, my mouth dropped to the floor. “???” “I don’t kiss and tell.” Well, it was a little too late for that, I was already blogging in my mind. His list of celebrity encounters was impressive, the closest I’ve come to intimacy with the stars.

So then he tells me that he had a crush on me in high school and, get this, lived alone! The clouds parted and the sun’s rays beamed me back to those sexually frustrated years and I imagined having sex every day, like, every day, with a real person and not just the imagined someone of the better part of my youth. Maybe we’d be married by now and I’d be a gay rodeo star, too.

Maybe I’d have left him for Eddie Fisher.

We spent a few days together munching and touristing around the bay area, and I developed such an instant and deep fondness for him. He’s from a part of my life that’s supposed to be over, how cool to have it resuscitated. He’s still a big teddy bear, only now he carries one around with him, a real one, named Toby, who’s accompanying him on his travels. Toby is a posturpedic, or is it orthopedic?, something -pedic teddy bear designed to be both furry companion and pillow. Sort of like a mini-Ricky.

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Burgers+Pasta

Umami Burger is the burger joint that I’ve dreamed about, a chain restaurant that’s not necessarily reinvented the burger, but wrapped it in a new sensory experience. I departed still licking the truffle oil dribbling down my cheek and my fingers that were caked with the cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top of the crispy sweet potato fries. Chrissy and I shared their namesake burger, a thick juicy puck of beef, cooked rare and embellished with shiitake mushroom, caramelized onions, roasted tomato, a parmesan crisp, and umami ketchup; and the Truffle Burger, the beef garbed in truffle cheese and a truffle oil-brushed bun. Everything is house-made, house-pickled, house-ground, and house-processed. I know I’ll never love this way again.

The staff at Umami Burger are so welcoming, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable that you want to ask them to sit down and have a burger with you. Quite unlike my experience the other night at Flour+Water, where the staff, except for the über helpful sommelier who gently informed me that the wine I was asking about was actually a beer, were just plain unpleasant. One of my dinner companions was 10 minutes late, and they wouldn’t seat us, despite having reservations, until she arrived. We stood and waited, hovering on the periphery of the half-empty room. No, internet, I don’t want to hear your justification for this psychotic policy, there is none. What, you’d rather not have us sit down and order drinks and appetizers while we’re waiting 10 minutes for our dinner companion, a Chinese woman driver, to park in this notoriously difficult to park in neighborhood? It set an awkward tone to the evening, like we were intruding. The food, though, was pretty spectacular, really some of the best pasta I’ve ever had: radiatore with roasted hen, speck and parsnip; squid ink spaghetti with clams, watermelon radish and chili oil. We had their funghi pizza, with chanterelles, hedgehog mushrooms, nettles, fior di latte and sage cream… each ingredient delectable, the combination exquisite. Clone the staff from Umami Burger and Flour+Water would be a perfect restaurant.

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The Chilly Apple

Chrissy and I went to New York last week, for legitimate theater and really super-crowded art shows. We saw Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett in The Mountaintop, a fantasy about Dr. King’s last night in the Lorraine Motel. Jackson played MLK doing a Samuel Jackson impression, and Angela Bassett a foxy maid at the motel sent to tempt and comfort him on his last night. The next night we saw Relatively Speaking—three one-act plays by Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen—a rollicking delight, Woody Allen’s farce snowballing to epically outrageous hilariousness; then we saw the powerful family drama Other Desert Cities with Rachel Griffiths, whom I can’t believe isn’t from southern California, Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, and a radiantly burned-out Judith Light; and our final play, Seminar, with a crusty Alan Rickman sexually and verbally amusing and abusing himself and his students.

MoMA is like a zoo, with kids snapping photos of their buddies next to Starry Night and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I spent much of the afternoon arguing with my dear old buddy Michelle about whether de Kooning was misogynist or not. As someone who slices up photos of hairy butts and makes flowers out of them, I thought the notion preposterous. He adored women, and that’s why they’re all exploded, slashed and fragmented, the center of the canvas, like he wanted to dive into them and be surrounded by those big balloon boobs. It’s the way that someone engaged with paint and expressionism would inhabit and represent beauty and desire. Where she saw rape, I saw love.

And I just love Michelle.

Brancusi dust

Nemr Poochie and Inna joined us for a foot-fatiguing day-long march through the Met. We saw a fabulous Renaissance portrait show, with countless Boticellis, well okay, like 5, and delightful portraits by Bellini, Dontello, Masaccio(!), and a portrait bust of baggy-eyed and full-chinned sex bomb Niccolò di Leonardo Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole.

The Guggenheim has a retrospective of just about all of the work ever made by Maurizio Cattelan, called “All.” The pieces are hung from the central rotunda of the museum by ropes, a dizzy assemblage of witty fabulosity experienced as your spiral up and down the ramp. He says he’s not going to be making sculpture anymore, and I am going to really miss this guy.

Nemr’s living in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, right across the street from Thighs ‘n Pies. Or Pies ‘n Thighs. It’s classic southern food the way you rarely get it in the south, fresh, inventively prepared, not cooked to death. I snarfed everything that came close to the table.

Big Chrissy warming himself by the fire
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New Years Ramblings and Rumblings

Turning 46 has been a little strange. Actually, turning 39. Then 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 and now 46. It seemed for the longest time that so much was to happen in the future: having a gallery in New York; getting my MFA; lunch at el Bulli. Prior to 39, failure hadn’t mattered that much to me, there was always time…

Last month I dined with a group of delightful, erudite, charming, and, thankfully, mostly older A-gays. (You can read an older post here for details about this particular society.) I sat next to the real life inspiration for the Tales of the City character played in the television series by Bob Mackie, “Rick Hampton.” His manner was the perfect combination of bitchy and clever—engrossingly intimate and effervescently droll. Nestled in the comforting fine wine and witty banter of the previous generation, I was temporarily relieved to feel not yet old guard myself.

Bud, 2011

I understand that the mid-life crisis is supposed to peak around this time, and that for most of us, mediocrity suddenly becomes fun. I’m kind of stuck in wanting all this specific stuff to still happen, but am getting really nervous about it not happening now. Do I shift my expectations and just continue what I’m doing, or do I do something entirely different with more realistic and actually achievable goals?

On the left is a photo of one of my new pieces, hanging in my studio—Bud. It’s of my Foreign Correspondent’s head, the day he bleached it blonde and ran off to the Folsom St. Fair in leather chaps and a rash.

deKooning’s first New York show was at age 44 Raymond Chandler started writing at 45. This is my “nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” my soothing mantra. In a few years, I’ll be chanting something about Grandma Moses…

A few weeks ago my bears and I took a drive up the coast for a hike and lunch in Guerneville at Boon. Boon is a gem of a restaurant, a foodie oasis in a desert of hamburgers and iceberg lettuce. The ingredients are from local farms, and are integrated into dishes that vibrantly highlight individual flavors. We had brussels sprouts deep fried in olive oil; a salad of calamari, white beans and arugula; macaroni and cheese with wild mushrooms; truffled french fries; a pork belly panino; and a chocolate brownie wading in a little balsamic reduction puddle and topped with sea salt and whipped cream.

My family came to visit for Thanksgiving. I jammed 24 of them into my living room for a sit-down dinner. My nephew Nathan slaughtered the turkeys a few days before, two free-range moderately buxom beauties who, during their eventless lives, enjoyed the Sonoma County air and grass in blissful gobble-gobble obliviousness to their digestive fate.

I saw Le Quattro Volte the other night. What a satisfying film, probably my favorite of the year, after Wong Dong-Li’s Poetry. It’s about the transmutation of a goat herder into a goat, a tree, and ultimately charcoal. Each stage is so attentively and patiently observed. A scene of the townsfolk presenting a Passion play in the streets focuses on a dog poking around, aware of absolutely every person, animal and thing, the goats looking on as if viewing a theatrical production with the dog the absolute center of attention. A lot of critical attention has been directed towards The Artist, another film that uses no dialogue, but I feel like this film brings to mind the true essence of silent cinema, where the narrative unfolds visually and the audience reads by observation. An understanding that people are—or can be—intelligent guides the film’s narrative, kind of like what the Republicans don’t do.

My niece and nephew had a baby. It’s one of those perfect little babies that squeaks and smiles and gets everybody talking about poop and breasts and flexibility.

My Foreign Correspondent moved. He got a job in New York and sold his possessions and moved within a week. His ability to shift gears so radically and decisively left me dizzy. And a little angry. Like, why couldn’t he do that with our relationship? Sigh.

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Armistead sighting!

Dean Smith came over tonight for dinner, dish, and Silent Film Night at the CocoPlex. We walked down to Molly Stone’s to pick up some pecorino for my fava bean and basil pasta, and turning the corner to pick up some fettucine I bumped into Armistead pushing a cart down the aisle. “Hey Armistead, it’s Chris!” I said, as if we were old friends. Realizing quickly that I had only been introduced to him once about 15 years ago, I quickly added “Bob Glück’s old boyfriend” and stuck out my ice cold hand, chilled through and through by the frigid pecorino. While shaking his hand, and thinking of Bob’s advice on finding something positive to emphasize in a critique, I told him how impressed I was with how efficiently his books had been scrunched into a 2-1/2 hour musical. He was generous and sweet, and just so adorable. Why didn’t I go after HIM when I had the chance instead of Bob? I thought… Back to Dean and the checkout line, I saw Armistead again on the other side of the store and ran across and blurted, “It was the pecorino.” “Huh?” he asked. “My cold hand, I was holding this pecorino, I’m not the walking dead.” It all didn’t come out quite right and through his befuddlement did I see him glance at my crotch?

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Commonwealth

BC, Hong-Xi and I had dinner at Commonwealth last night. The interior is white, the wall facing the street all windows, half frosted to eliminate the outside distractions of passing autos and hipsters. There’s not much to distract from the food, which is fresh, flavorful and inventively prepared and presented. We had the fixed price menu, 6 courses, plus an amuse-bouche of corn and basil that amused our bouches, and set the tone of the meal to come: a delicate melange of vibrant flavors. Our first course was salmon tartare with beets and sorrel, presented under a frozen dome of horseradish. You break the frozen dome and mix the pieces into the tartare, chilling the salmon with a breath of chilly horseradish. It was stunning, visually and sensually. The whole meal was like that, dish after dish of colors and flavors and textures that delighted the tummy and the eye. Molecular gastronomy intruded only a little bit, with a few foamed and frozen things, including yummy frozen popcorn flavored nuggets served with the peanut butter semifreddo, but this restaurant is where you go to experience food transported, not transformed, transported into the realm of extraordinary.