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The Roman Spring of Coco Poofter

Bob, Reese, Jocelyn and I have returned from two weeks in Rome. It was the perfect time to be there, warm, everything in bloom, not yet crowded. Bob and I frequently traveled there when we were together, and this was our first trip back, indeed our first trip anywhere since our breakup in 2003. We all worked together as a team: I the documenter; Jocelyn the navigator; Bob the cook; and Reese… well, the teenager.

Much has changed since my last visit, including a major cleanup of all the monuments, a reorganization of the national museums, and some new museums for contemporary art, including Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI. The food was exactly the same, consistently amazing. Even a simple dish like rigatoni cacio e pepe brought tears to my eyes. Highlights were the sculptures of antiquity fabulously exhibited in a former power station, the Museo Centrale Montemartini; a day in the country of the Sabine women, eating lavishly of the bounty of the surrounding countryside—prosciutto and pecorino, artichoke fettuccine, cicoria, grilled bunny, house-made wine; the hilltop town of Montopoli; the 7th century Benedictine abbey of Farfa; gelato at Giolitti; Bernini and Borromini’s staircases and Pietro da Cortona’s ceiling fresco cycle at the Palazzo Barberini; carciofi alla giudia; fiori di zucca fritti; the Caravaggios all over town…

I revisited my old favorites: Bernini’s slyly subversive Apollo and Daphne at the Galleria Borghese, Daphne’s twig gently brushing between Apollo’s legs; Stefano Maderno’s tender and brutal Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere; Bernini’s orgasmic Saint Teresa in Ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria; Raphael’s brilliant frescoes in the Villa Farnesina and his proprietary la Fornarina at Palazzo Barberini; all of those humpy river gods and my guys Hadrian, Silenus and Hercules, all over town; the mosaics, 1st century BC frescoes from Livia’s Villa and the poignant hellenistic bronze Boxer of Quirinal at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme; the delighful turtle fountain in the Piazza Mattei…

It’s very hard to come back home to houses that are less than 500 years old and public sculpture that wasn’t created around Augustus’ time, but I’m settling back in. I’ve recreated most of the dishes I ate there, including the previously-mentioned rigatoni cacio e pepe, asparagus leek risotto, bucatini all’Amatriciana, artichoke fettucine, but I haven’t been able to find fresh squash blossoms in the corner store like I could in Rome.
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Reese and Shakespeare

Saturday night Reese’s high school put on its annual Shakespeare competition and Elizabethan fest.  Reese competed, the first to perform.  He entered the stage, kissed the bust of the Bard, introduced himself, then laid down on the floor and performed Sonnet 44 and one of Edmond’s monologues from King Lear.  His performance was of such searing intensity and confidence. At one point he ripped off his shirt and strutted across the stage like a runway model.  A tear came to my eye.  Reese is no longer Little Reesey but an Abercrombie & Fitch ad.

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Lunch with the Shepherds

If you’re driving to Los Angeles from San Francisco and want to stop somewhere along the way for lunch, there is no more tummy-pleasing a destination than the Wool Grower’s Hotel Restaurant in Los Baños. Big Chrissy and I undertook a recent lunch expedition to this comforting Basque bastion of gustatory gratification. You go in, sit down, and they start bringing all this food to you, plate after plate. And a half-bottle of their housemade wine. A simple and crisp tossed green salad, white beans, vegetable soup, lamb stew… these are all just set in front of you. You do have to decide what kind of animal you’d like as your main course: beef, chicken, pork or lamb. A ridiculously huge portion, then rice, fries… and a little dollop of ice cream to finish it off. Everybody pays the same price, everybody goes away happy and unbuttoning that bottom button and loosening the belt a notch or two. It’s not just about the quantity and variety of plates, it really feels homey, real food, just like what maman used to make.

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The Dating Game: HoHo, Heff, Pinky and JB

Since my most recent paramour and I have separated, I’ve been flirting up a small tempest. I’ve lined up a gaggle of eligible bachelors to appear on my Dating Game, and thus far have personally interviewed four: HoHo, Heff, Pinky, and JB.

HoHo is from the midwest and has a warm welcoming smile, a big furry body, and twinkling eyes, like something Hanna-Barbera would have created for me to snuggle up to. Tonight we met for drinks at Sens in the Embarcadero Center, with a spectacular view of the Bay Bridge. We spoke of blackberry jam, gin, stepdads and gardening in a mild-winter climate. He’s cautious about steamrolling into a new relationship, so it’s an unpressured delight to be with him as he slowly reveals more and more of himself. Little Heff is everything but little, with a bounteous reservoir of wit and intelligence. This weekend we Kabukulated* and noodled** in Japantown. He’s a great guy to talk to, and it’s always about something that no one else is talking about, or even thinking about, actually. Pinky I thought was going to be this sex-crazed pervert, but he’s a mellow former hippie type who is sensitive, politically and socially aware, easy-going, and just a complete pleasure to be around—someone your mom would love to smoke pot with.

JB is married, which in the San Francisco bear world means that his heart belongs to his husbear, but the rest of him is up for grabs. Well, he is so cute I couldn’t resist grabbing some myself, and spent the better part of yesterday afternoon and evening with him in a mostly non-vertical configuration. And what a lot to grab onto: milky white skin as soft as a baby’s butt peppered with downy black fur; a full black beard on a solidly square jaw; and those big dark eyebrows that absolutely drive me crazy. He was very anxious and self-conscious and at times I wanted to shake him and scream Don’t you realize you’re one of the most desirable men in this time zone, and quite possibly in this hemisphere? What on earth do you have to be anxious about? Just relax and let Dr. Coco treat this nervous tension with his magical elixir of love! but instead performed my thoughts in an arduous four-hour interpretive belly dance.

After the elation of our ecstatic encounter, and upon dropping him off at home, a deep sadness overwhelmed me. He had been very clear about the parameters of our encounter from the get-go, that he was in a serious relationship and nothing, not even regularly scheduled get togethers, was possible beyond our limited engagement. Of course, during our brief relationship we had talked for hours, sharing a depth of experience and ideas, aspirations… oh, and he did that porn talk, you know “Yeaaaah, uh huh… oh yeaaaaah…” but anyway, so there we were, with all these restrictions, but completely open and vulnerable, sharing everything there is to share. I could have easily told him I loved him. I could hear my heart splinter as he shut the door. Whoever coined the term “little death” got it right.

* To kabukulate: to partake of the communal baths and steam facilities at Kabuki Hot Springs
** To noodle: consume mass quantities of Japanese noodles in a sophisticated urban eatery

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Back in ‘Frisco

I’m back in San Francisco. ‘Frisco, my dad says. We’re supposed to cringe when we hear those two syllables, but I don’t think I understand why. I imagine Edward G. Robinson talking about his ma’ in ‘Frisco, or Ida Lupino pouting through a smoky halo about the man that ruined her life—back in ‘Frisco…

So getting here wasn’t that difficult, despite how hard Virgin Airlines wanted us to stay on the east coast. The morning after seeing the rowdy and raucous Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a very entertaining and educational emo-rock opera that positioned the 7th president as a sort of rock star, our flight back to ‘Frisco on the 28th was canceled. We were rescheduled to depart on the 6th, a week and a half later. Lucky for us, my family is scattered all across this great big land and my big brother Paul lives just a little train ride away in Connecticut. We hopped on the train and spent a few days with Paul and his family, nibbling and imbibing in wintery bliss. Big Chris and I found a flight out of a little airport nearby and used his frequent flier miles to get us back home on the 30th. The only space left was in First Class. I’ve never flown First Class before and could not believe how many beverages we were encouraged to ingest—and all for only 100,000 frequent flier miles. I was finally one of those unpleasant people that every schmuck leers at while schlepping back to Coach. Finally.

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New York: Lunch at del Posto

So the only reservation we could get for lunch on Monday at del Posto was at 11:30. We hiked through the snow-capped peaks of the West Village and arrived on time for our freshly-demoted-to-one-Michelin-star lunch. The restaurant was virtually empty, due to the blizzard the day before and the mounds of snow still in the streets, the entire staff devoted to crafting a most memorable lunch for just the two of us. It was an amazing feast, the tasting menu inspired by the season and featuring a (to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas) panko-encrusted partridge with a poached pear and foie gras mousse; lobster with ice lettuce and cauliflower; a shaved-truffle topped cod swimming in a beef broth…

I don’t know what they could have possibly done to lose that star, or what else they’re going to have to do to get it back. The waiter did mispronounce the name of my wine—I didn’t correct him—but still, a one-star demotion? Were the Michelin tasters deprived of something as children? What more do they want? I couldn’t imagine a more pleasurable, delightful, and tasty experience. Thank you del Posto.

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New York: Christmas Weekend

So Big Chris and I schlepped over to Chinatown for Christmas dinner with our Jewish friends at Joe’s Shanghai. It was like being in a Woody Allen film—we waited in line for an hour, the PhDs in front of us discussing their research funding, the graduate student nervously interacting with his visiting mom and dad, someone reading Dostoyevsky, lots of yarmulkes. In addition to our main course, we accidentally ordered two plates of soup dumplings. Of course, we ate them all, having watched a video on YouTube earlier about how to not eat them like a caucasian, and perhaps overeager to display our advanced dumpling handling techniques:

And then the snow came. Like lots of it. So we went to the Whitney to snuggle up with the Paul Thek, Charles LeDray and Edward Hopper shows.  I just love Edward Hopper.  He’s so breathtakingly boring, all those desolate exteriors and empty storefronts, but so of his time, and such a great handler of paint and shadow.

Also engaged with the mundane, Charles LeDray’s show featured dynamite manipulations of scale: miniature hand-thrown and painted ceramic pots the size of thimbles, thousands of them; tiny outfits hanging from tiny hangers… what a nimble and inventive craftsman.

And then on to Paul Thek, who made sculptural installations before all those crappy scatter art things that we keep having to  wade through in all the galleries these days.  In the context of the museum, detached from the environments and performances that the artist staged, the works felt like, well, like the hunks of meat that he created out of wax—parts of something once very much alive.

Back up to Times Square that evening, we got tickets to see Jeffrey Wright in A Free Man of Color, John Guare’s boisterous new play about a pre-historic (1802) sexually charged, racially progressive New Orleans, just prior to the Louisiana Purchase. I was just happy to see Jeffrey Wright and to thaw out my feet.

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New York: Friday

Yesterday I and Big Chrissy dejeunered with Davide at Gobo, a very veggie eatery on 6th Avenue.  Davide’s looking great, with the coolest glasses, but I wish his strict fashion sense would expand to include something warmer for this weather.  I shivered looking at him in his handsomely tailored feather-weight overshirt—that is, looking at him through my scarf- and muff-wrapped head.  We saw the Coens’ True Grit after lunch, a perfect Christmas family retribution film.  I think I enjoyed their version more than the Henry Hathaway version, although Kim Darby still holds a special tiny place in my heart.

After the film, we walked over to Vaselka’s, in the lower east side.  BC and I had a traditional Ukranian Christmas eve dinner—12 courses, one for each apostle.  By the time I got to Thaddeus and Bartholomew, my tummy was singing a Ukranian folk hymn of blessed contentment.

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New York: Thursday

Thursday Big Chrissy and I hopped on the train to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Collection and the Philadelphia Museum.  The Barnes will be moving soon to downtown Philadelphia, and we wanted to see the collection on-site, as Dr. Barnes intended.  I got a little tired of all the Renoirs—really, 10 good ones would have been enough, but there are over 100, sheesh—but peppered here and there among the Renoirs were Van Gogh, Modigliani, Cezanne, Matisse… and on and on.  The collection is hung is a very idiosyncratic way.  Dr. Barnes spent years arranging the work according to content, the way paint is handled, use of surface, etc.  The Foundation assures us that the new building will retain the layout of the current museum, but I fear it will no longer have soul, and certainly no longer as Barnes intended us to engage with this work, in a Disneyfied facsimile.

At the Philadelphia Museum, there was a knockout Michelangelo Pistoletto show, from his self-portraits of the 50s to collaborative actions of the 60s and 70s.  And finally, to see all those Duchamps!  And Eakins’ Gross Clinic!  And another moody stunner of a Van Gogh, of diagonal slashes of rain pelting a wheat filed glimpsed from his window at the clinic of Saint-Paul-de-Mausolée.