Airport New Year

I am in the Atlanta-Hartsfeld Airport waiting on my flight to NYC to depart. There are LOTS of soliders here, carrying huge bags on their backs, cartons of cigarettes, stacks of magazines. It is easy sometimes to forget how young they are.

You can almost tell where the plane is going just by looking at the people in the gate area. The New Yorkers are dressed all in black, with dark jeans and expensive bags. Someone else has the same Jack Spade that I have -- which I only paid $40 for at the sample sale. That's another thing New Yorker's do: we have expensive taste, but like things to be cheap. Which means if, like me, you paid only $40 for the Jack Spade bag, you'll tell people that. And Jack Spade is so low on the totem pole of expensive taste, it's almost ridiculous. Relatively speaking.

The flight is (so far) a few minutes late, weather issues with the incoming plane. At first I thought that New Yorker's are better at waiting--since everyone in black looks to be so patiently waiting. I realized that we're not better at waiting, we're better at eavesdropping, and so everyone is listening to what's going on at the check-in counter, without having to get out of their seat. Hilarious.

The PA system here keeps reminding us that the "threat level is currently orange." As if that means anything.

Happy New Year.

Chattanooga

I'm here in Chattanooga, visiting the family and spending a late Christmas with everyone. My parents have gone off to the airport to pick up my brother, his wife, and my amazing nephew--who is the best nephew an uncle could ask for. Even if I don't see him much. "There's a tree in the house," he said the other day.

I'll be back for New Year's Eve in NYC....

New Novel Work

Last night, over a rather large boat of sushi at the infamous Taste of Tokyo with all the syrup folks, Stephan and I got to talking about the importance of marination in writing. I mentioned that I didn't like to give random deadlines to myself. Not random, exactly--but false. For example, I know the new novel is huge and almost impossible. (Almost, not completely.) And so I know to give myself plenty of time.

I often say that one of the troubles with being a writer is that it's happening all the time, whether you know it or not. Good luck keeping up. Once I was standing in line at Six Flags, waiting to get on Nitro, and something just exploded into my brain. I usually have a pad of paper with me wherever I go--but this time, I didn't. And of course, whatever it was, had been lost by the time I got home. One of the reasons I keep my landline is so I can call it from my cell phone and leave rambling, cryptic messages: "check light pollution levels in Memphis," I might say.

This lead to a discussion about how your writing can, and will, change while you're just doing nothing. Say, washing the dishes. You're answering your emails and poof, the plot appears. So, yes, it needs time. You need to write and then a week later re-write. And re-write again fifteen or twenty times. And it needs time to be by itself. Let the work get infected with everything else you're surrounded by: syrupmakers, farm co-ops, bad television, holiday cheer (and the occasional bah humbug.) But also know how much of all that to take out before it's finished.

I had a rather dramatic flash of narrative appear to me the other day while I was transferring at Times Square from the R Train to the 1 Train. Now--granted--I have pretty low taste in some things....a lot of things....so don't be surprised if, some years in the future, you come to the end of my second novel, to find that someone blows the whole place up with colorless, odorless gas....in a way that makes it a good movie starring Seann William Scott, taking a more dramatic, more action-centered role, who is mostly naked most of the time.

The moral of the story is: I'm still plugging away at it.

Briefly, Forever

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A Sesame Christmas

Last night, Kip and I went to the Sesame Workshop company Christmas party, which was held only 2 blocks from my house, at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios, on the set of the world-reknown show.

It was fun--all that insider vocabularly, door prizes, open bar and butlered hors d'oevres. Most company holiday parties are like this. What made this one particularly special was the performance--Elmo and Abby Cadabby hosted a "year in review" musical medly decidedly not for the regular watchers of Sesame Street. The other puppets all performed various higher-ups at Sesame Workshop. It was charming, funny and people loved it.

I also got to re-meet Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Tony-nominated former star of Avenue Q. She and Kip used to work together, and although I'd met her briefly after one Q show a few years ago, she did not remember me, and apologized profusely for it. There was no need to apologize, of course. At the first meeting, she shook my hand for about 1.5 seconds in a line of many other people. I was not offended.

Evidence of the fete you shall find below. Perhaps of all my readers, my nephew will find this most impressive.

Finished

The Rabbis for Human Rights conference ended yesterday. All of the staff went out to Marion's Continental for dinner, which was fabulous. I had the skate. The haricots verts were replaced with sugar snap peas, which was a welcome surpise.

I've hardly had any sleep in the last three days and all the adrenaline in my system makes you feel strung out and jittery. Thank god for the rain this afternoon. I can coccoon in my bedroom and watch movies.

Just Me (and Cindy) and the Rabbis

I am sitting here, almost 10:00pm, finally eating something since swallowing (nearly whole.....no blowjob jokes, please) a chicken-something-or-other wrap at about 4:00pm, while en route from one place to another. Those of you who know me, will calculate that six hours is too long for me to go without eating something, before turning into (even more of a) grump. And poor Cindy, she's still at the office. I know because she's sending me emails from there periodically. "Where's the sound permit?" she wants to know. "Who's doing the Literature Table from 4pm-7pm on Sunday?"

No, it's not Circus Amok, no matter how much you want it to be. It's the first inagural Rabbis for Human Rights Conference on Judaism and Human Rights! Cindy is the entire conference coordinator, and I'm just her humble minion. It promises to be a fascinating endeavor--assuming it all comes off, that is. And it will. At some point, things just begin to have their own life and you just swim along behind it. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, about 300 Rabbis and Rabbinic students will talk about human rights issues, and everything that surrounds all of that. I hope to sneak into some of the sessions.

Tomorrow, I'll be at the Greenmarket, where it is supposed to be all of 32 degrees. (Could be worse. I've stood out there in worse.) And so now I just chew my peanut butter sandwhich, lameting that I've run out of Beth's Farm Kitchen Jam (will have to get some more tomorrow,) and instead have to use the high-fructose corn syrup stuff to go along with my high-fructose corn syrup peanut butter left over from our Amok retreat back in August. The stuff never spoils. Right?

Ahoy, Doritos!

This article, which I found via Thomas Hobbs, has some amazing pictures in it. And to save you the click, here they all are -- brilliant captions included.


A cargo container that apparently fell from a ship washed up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Thursday and spilled thousands of bags of Doritos brand tortilla chips on the beach. People collected the chips, which were apparently still fresh due to their airtight packaging. It was unknown which ship had lost the cargo or to what port it was bound.






People gather bags of Doritos in various flavors.
(Photos by Donna Barnett)









The cargo container apparently fell off a ship at sea and broke open. (Photo by Barbara Satterthwaite)

Positively Naked

Last Tuesday night, I went to a screening of the documentary Positively Naked, about Spencer Tunick's installation of 85 HIV+ people for the 10th anniversary issue of POZ magazine. It's a lovely film, honest and funny, and touching and affecting--what all good movies should be.

It premieres tonight on Cinemax at 7:00pm, in honor of World AIDS Day. It's only about 40 minutes long, and you know how I love anything under an hour. But seriously. And it's also an opportunity to see how Tunick works--you've seen his stuff before, these huge-scale portraits of a hundred, three hundred naked people laying about in some landscape or setting. His work is so perfect for dealing with the issues surrounding HIV and AIDS: body image, public vs. private, vulnerability vs. strength.

The New York Times Review, which appears today, seems to think that "the only truly disturbing note in “Positively Naked” is one man’s revelation that he still goes to sex clubs and does not reveal his H.I.V. status unless asked." I have an issue with this argument. What the review does not say is that in the film the man explains that "people don't go to sex clubs to hear about people's status." He's right.

To disclose, or not to disclose? Well, it's not the other person's responsibility. It's yours. If you want to know, ask.

Whenever this conversation comes up, inevitably someone asks "Well, wouldn't you want to know if the person you were sleeping with was positive?" My answer always is: Depending on what sexual behaviors I planned to engage in with that person. Because--duh--the topic of STDs is a definite mood-killer. And so why not go into the room with a set of I wills and I wonts already established?

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about World AIDS Day, and the film, is that we are still writing, making movies about, talking (and, of course, not talking) about safe sex. Because "uninhibited"--which appears so frequently in personal ads and sex ads--now means "I fuck without condoms" and not "free-spirited." Because testosterone is a fuckin' powerful thing and we all know what it can do to you in times of lust. Because gay men--and lesbians, and straights, and trannies, and bisexuals, and all the rest of the People Who Fuck (my new all-encompasing term) still need to hear about it.

Found Scrawled on the Bathroom Wall

I wipe
my ass
on
the political dictatership
of this fucking country.
the political statements
in the fucking bathroom.

Gooble Gobble.

After watching the parade on television, and then some of the American Kennel Club--the toy poodle, Vicki, won Best in Show I later learned--Kip and I moseyed on up to Queens, amid the rain and the wind and the other New Yorkers carrying covered dishes balanced on their laps. Thanksgiving would be at John & Edith's house in Jackson Heights, in their apartment that I have made them promise to turn over to me should they ever leave.

There was no turkey, but even better, there was fried chicken. There was a truffle Mac-N-Cheese, collard greens, tomato pie, Edith's homemade cheese rolls, and a sweet potato casserole which sort of exploded in the oven--but which still tasted glorious. Then there was pumpkin pie, pecan pie and an apple bundt. We started with dark-n-stormies, which is rum and ginger beer, then moved on to wine and more wine and more wine. Pictures from the evening can be seen here, and the even drunker ones here. It's not a very good picture of Kip, for the record. He's much more adorable in person. And somehow three of us ended up in plaid.

We went around the table, everyone saying what they were thankful for. I wasn't able to fully articulate the subtlety of what I was (am) thankful for. I tried to talk about how this entire year has been an experiment for me--new work, new writing, new boyfriend--all of it in ways I've never had before. I said that I was thankful for all the shit that you have to go through to learn life lessons. Not thankful for the shit, but the knowledge of yourself that--if you're fortunate--you can come away with when you're given the opportunity to learn stuff like that. I don't think over dinner I made myself very clear. (Have I here?) I should have just said, "this food, my family, etc."

On Friday we saw the new Christopher Guest film, For Your Consideration. It was, and I'm being kind here, rather bad. Dead on the screen, even awkward. As if the actors weren't exactly sure what they were doing, or how they fit into the bigger picture, or even if what they were doing was funny. Everyone's confidence was missing. Jane Lynch got the biggest laughs, as the Mary Hart-esque evening entertainment show host with the bizarrely calculated body language.

My brother and his wife are pregnant again, due in May. My nephew, the amazing, inimitable, inestimable, unfathomable Pryce Houck, has--I learned today--just been upgraded to a "big boy bed." I talked to him for a bit on the phone Thursday. He didn't say much, but he was really listening. He's a good listener.

New for 2007!

Cedar Point recently announced their plans for the 2007 season, and it's all about Maverick, the world-renown park's 17th coaster. Debuting in May, Maverick will feature one of the steepest drops in coaster history--95 degrees--and a one-of-a-kind original element, the twisted horseshoe roll.

Designed by Intaride, LLC, the American division of the Swiss company Intamin AG, Maverick utilizes several of their signature elements, including tiered seating for better sight lines, the linear synchronous motor launching system, and a magnetic braking system. At 4,450 feet long, with more than eight airtime hills, tight low to the ground design and a second 70mph launch, Maverick will give riders about two and a half minutes of pure, unadulterated joy.

There are a selection of videos on their website, including an on-ride POV, which you can see here. You can also watch a series of interviews with park people and designers here.

For James

Having read Baldwin today for the first time,
I know how the Pilgrims must have felt--
or was it the Dutch, or the Spanish, or the Vikings--
storming up onto the edge of what had already existed
in the world long before your sudden,
and perhaps tardy, arrival.
That there could be so much beauty
hidden from you for so long.
With the Native Americans--the longtime fans of
James--staring at you from the forest edge, saying:
"Yeah, pretty fuckin' brilliant, huh?"

Which only multiplies the distance between Ahab
and myself. I can't understand how you can
live in the shadow of something so huge,
someone so great, and only to want to kill it.

Instead, I will devour each paragraph, digesting until
it becomes part of me, feeding me,
growing in my belly like lichen on the walls
of a tomb, which Baldwin cracked open so the sun could
light the insides.

It is the same thing if you look close enough.
The killing, the eating: transformation.
The kind of words which dissolve
a man like me into poetry.

Notes from the Syrup Monger

It's pancake season. Which means that my days at the Greenmarket are busier than ever. The weekend before Thanksgiving, which is this coming weekend, is one of the busiest of the year, and already people are walking up to the table and buying six or eight quarts at a time. "Do you have a box?" they ask. I always do.

It's actually the last maple syrup at the market before Thanksgiving -- Kip said we should put up a sign, like gas stations in the West. "No Syrup for 7 days" kind of thing. I'm thinking about it.

I have seen people pick up the half-pint bottles back in the summer, and actually decide not to buy it because of the humidity in August. They want the syrup, but the idea of a hot griddle in the morning makes them queasy. And people don't understand that syrup is not just for breakfast. It's for coffee, tea, yogurt, ice cream, roasted meats, roasted fish, cedar plank salmon, salad dressing, stir-fry, lemonade, etc. I do this spiel a lot.

People will tell you everything you need to know about them in about five seconds. Some people are chatty, some are grumpy, and some just don't want to talk. I'm pretty good at figuring out who's who really fast. The most ridiculous are the people who don't want to be happy. They hem and haw about the price, they want to taste the syrup--sometimes we have a bottle open, sometimes we don't, and if you give one taste, and other people see you, then you'll spend the next 10 minutes doing that. These people who don't want to be happy--they need a lot of attention. "How do I know if I'll like it?" they ask. "Is it really sweet?" If you are asking these questions, maybe you don't want syrup. Some people are so risk-adverse. And it's not like I'm asking them to BASE Jump off of the Chrysler Building.

I think if the Market has a Christmas party--it won't because we're all so freakin' wrecked after standing in the cold all day dealing with idiots--we should play charades and all the answers are certain customers. Since the regulars tend to make scheduled appearances at everyone's stand on whichever day. The Bent Lady. The Guy Who's Mom is in the Hospital. The Old Punk Lady. Law & Order Family.

I do love my regular customers, though. The nice ones. I know only bits and pieces about them. They'll toss something into the conversation every so often: "My son actually likes this candy," or "I used to live on the West side," things like that.

A Phone Call from the Ferry

"I want to figure out what my work is about,"
someone said to me today, calling from the
Staten Island Ferry.
"This is your problem," I tell her, meaning
the boat, which is the joke that any New Yorker
would have made.
I forget to tell her that
the work will tell you what it is about.

But
there are times when
the books I collect begin to
glare at me from the shelves.
They jam their fonty fingers accusingly
into my sides, and complain.

And I turn to them, shouting:
"What more do you want?" and
"You did this to me!"
This is when they are their quietest.

Eyes or ears or nose or palm of hand,
sometimes you don't taste the fuel
as you swallow it.
I say: keep the flame low,
and hide it from the wind.

Preparing for the Holidaze

I have begun work on this year's holiday card. It's sometimes a year-long process, actually. I have been known to create and write the whole thing back in July and then wait to assemble it the first week of December. It's exciting, this one. Although I'm finding some challenges in the construction. No hints. Except that it's text-heavy. Hooray!

Kip and I are already choosing a date for his annual Tree-Trimming party, which, he tells me, is always of historic proportions. I do a card, he does a tree. So we're claiming a Sunday like 5 weeks from now. You have to. Someone claimed another Saturday two week ago. It's a very busy time. Sometimes when November 1 hits, I just want to fast-forward to New Year's. A friend of mine once moved her Christmas party to the third week of January, just so people could attend.

No gifts this year, either. Only some homemade goodies, I think.

I put too much pressure on myself.

Another Smattering, Which is How Things Are Lately

--I keep trying to listen to the new Indigo Girls record, "Despite Our Differences," as a whole, but I'm always skipping the Emily songs to get to the Amy songs. Those of you out there who are Indigo fans will immediately understand what I'm talking about. You're either one or the other, it seems--Amy or Emily. And you appreciate how the IGs as a unit make the songs stronger. Well, sort of. I still think Amy's two solo records are better than anything they've recorded together since "Shaming of the Sun," or maybe even "Swamp Ophelia." The last two Amy Ray-penned songs on the new record are perhaps the most powerful she's written in the last five years: "Dirt Roads and Dead Ends," and "They Won't Have Me." I've heard her talk about her struggles with the South as an entity, as a myth, and, obviously, as a reality. After all, she still lives there, in the backwoods of Georgia. She's talked a lot about the disdain she has--maybe that's a strong word that she wouldn't use, I don't know--for liberals who've left the South. Because if we all leave, like I have, then there's no one left to make the kind of change it's going to take. She sings: "Who's going to do the planting, and who's going to pray for rain?"

--I tried to watch the Halloween Parade on television, looking for Andrea, who was leading the parade as a stilting angel, but I felt so dumb for not being in it that I had to turn it off. I've done it with various socio-political contingents, as well as joined the Bread & Puppet Brigade, and Laura and I went as crying mourners, with thirty other mourners, the year that Matthew Shepard was killed.

--It's getting cold at the market. It's like a game: see how long you can go without breaking out the hot pads, see how long you can keep your fingers working.

--The new novel is back on the tarmac, waiting for clearance from the tower. You can get things done there, however. I'm reworking my notes, which is so important, as Joan Didion has said, "the ability to make a note is the difference between writing and not writing." Or something like that....I don't feel like getting the book down off the shelf to look for the exact quote. It's from The Year of Magical Thinking, if you want to look yourself.

--I have a lovely boyfriend. We watched "Stick It" last night, via Netflix. It was fun. Although it's one of those movies that has a really short arc, but takes a long time to get there.

--I liked "The Prestige" at the movies. Maybe we'll see "Volver" today, or possibly "Borat," but I doubt it. More likely the Almodovar.

Theater Series, Vol. 3: Doubt

Last October, I was fortunate to see Cherry Jones lead the original Broadway cast of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt. The play focuses on a Bronx catholic school in the 1960s, where Sister Aloysius struggles with a difficult decision. "Should she voice concerns about one of her male colleagues, even if she's not entirely certain of the truth?" as the play's literature reads.

It seems so rare these days that one goes to the theater and be expected to participate on such an intellectual level. Not just participate, but be challenged, to have your own ideas of right and wrong be so forcefully questioned. When the play ended, everyone had something to say. Families were broken up, couples were polarized. (Well, basically. I mean, not really.) Everyone was sure that they were in the right as to whether 1) Father Flynn was guilty, and 2) The mother of the boy was right or wrong, and 3) Sister Aloysius made the right choice, or was irresponsible. There are so many questions raised.

Ultimately, the play is not only about if he did or if he didn't. It's about the fragility of faith, and the strange nature of justice. Or rather, is there justice?

I heard Cherry Jones talking on the radio during the show's run, about the mechanics of acting in Doubt. She said that the director, Doug Hughes, had a private conversation with Brian F. O'Byrne about whether or not his character, Father Flynn, was indeed guilty or not. After all, as an actor, you can only play intention, you can not play "maybe I did, or maybe I didn't." Ms. Jones didn't want to know his final choice. She thought her performance would be more believeable if she genuinely didn't know.

It was more believable. She went home with the Tony, the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Lucille Lortel. Plus! Ms. Jones is an out lesbian, and she's from Tennessee.

Taken by Kip in Trenton, NJ

From Boys to Men: in Time Out NY

The little anthology that could--From Boys to Men--in which my essay, "Inheritance," appears, has just been featured in the Gay & Lesbian section of Time Out NY. Hooray for Rob & Ted, our delightful editors. Read the Time Out article here.

There are currently readings scheduled in Los Angeles on Nov. 17 at 7:30pm at A Different Light; and in San Francisco on Nov. 27 at 7:00pm also at A Different Light. New York readings to be determined at this point.

The books are flying off the shelves--I only have the two copies I bought because they're going so fast. And we're getting good reviews in Library Journal, Insight Out, and The Bay Area Reporter, in addition to this most recent Time Out article.

The Frenchies, Part 1

On Monday afternoon, I helped facilitate an apartment exchange for my friend John, who rents his place out to vacationing Europeans when he is on vacation. It basically means handing over the keys, taking the payment, showing them around the apartment, etc. No problem, right?

Philippe and Catherine arrived right on time, but with a minor glitch--none of their credit cards would give them money from ATMs. They could purchase things from stores, and even got $100 from a cash machine at the airport, but suddenly every bank was telling them they had insufficient funds.

They were mortified. They promised they were good for it. "I will stay in a hotel, is no problem." Of course, two hours later, all I wanted to do was go home. But I couldn't let them wander around looking for a hotel after they'd been flying all day, hungry and tired, thirsty, getting ornery. "I think now I am beginning to stress," said Philippe.

Back at the apartment, he made me look over his shoulder at his bank balance on line, as if to prove that with some fiddling once the banks in France were open again--the time change was certainly against us--all would be remedied.

They were grateful that I allowed them to stay--this was after getting the final okay from John, of course, who I called in Italy to discuss their plight. He agreed that they were most likely legit. And then I walked them to the grocery store and the drugstore, where they later told me they bought some kind of washing detergent that cost them nine dollars.

The punchline of this story comes when, on the way to the store, Catherine asked me "Do you have a girlfriend?" "I have a boyfriend," I told her. A look of excited recognition flashed across her face and she hugged her shoulders. "OH!," she spouted. "I am a hairdresser!"

A Suggestion

All elevators should have mirrors.

Mistaken: A Smattering

Over and over tonight, I keep mistaking the grey guitar pick on my desk for a cockroach. I want to move it so I can finally relax about it, and yet I don't.

How late is too late to call someone? Eleven? What if they are an hour behind you? What if they are over fifty? What if they are over fifty and adhere to the status quo--at least on the outside? (I'm not talking about you, Mom, in case you were wondering. I'd call you whenever I needed, despite.)

My first New Yorker arrived today, a magazine I used to read all the time, borrowed from friends, from office buildings, from street corners where they lay in trash cans. Now my very own. What a treat. And yet. Another something to throw in the garbage.

Still no job. And the gnawing contiues. One wonders what else to DO. Because I've always gotten by from doing. And relying on the friendship of italics.

And then this, an old Ani D song which creeped its way out of my hard drive and slid into my ear as I listened to the rain on the sill: "and did i tell you how i stopped eating? when you stopped calling me, and i was cramped up shitting rivers for weeks and pretending that i was finally free."

Pissed

A photograph appeared in this weeks' issue of Entertainment Weekly which pissed me off considerably. It's a picture of John Travolta in the film version of the musical (based on the John Waters film) Hairspray. He's dancing and singing. (This isn't that picture, by the way.)

In 1988, John Waters--a cinematic genius, and a queer--made this incredibly entertaining movie that was actually about bringing people together, about moving society foreward, using the integration of a popular television dance show as the backdrop. Then in 2002, a musical version of the film opened on Broadway to critical and audience acclaim. The musical starred Harvey Fierstein (a queer,) with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Whittman (queers who are married to each other and who proclaimed their love for each other and even kissed on the Tonys.) The whole thing is just crawling with gay from beginning to end.

And the musical was about being who you are, to the fullest extent, your race, your class, your size, your sexuality, embracing the whole of everyone. It filled the theeater with love over and over again. It was sheer joy. And now we have Travolta, who I refer to as John Trevolting, playing the role of Edna Turnblad--and he's one of the most closeted people in the history of history. The whole thing makes me want to puke.

I've looked throught he IMDB message boards and Googled the hell out of it, but I'm not sure why Harvey's not in the film. He's an icon, a supreme talent. He's got four Tony Awards in four categories from only four nominations. He's a hero. Oh, and he's out.

So here's this other picture, which appeared in the Enquirer about a month ago, just because I can.

Theater Series, Vol. 2: Mythos

In October 1999, my then-roommates and I went to La Mama to see the Odin Teatret's original production of "Mythos," which they have described as a "performance about the value and death of the myth." It was one of the most extraordinary evenings of theater I've ever seen.

The entire floor of the stage was covered in gravel, smooth river rocks. And at some point a banquet table appeared, maybe it was there from the beginning, I can't exactly remember--one of the most amazing things about the performance was the way objects and scenes somehow appeared out of nowhere, like in a Richard Foreman show, or in the opera.

Here is a description of the show's action and content, from their website:

"Oedipus appears. The protagonists of the ancient myths--Medea, Cassandra, Daedalus, Orpheus--meet him in order to arrange a ceremony, the Great Funeral of History, which is thus transformed into myth. They prepare to bury the last representative of the twentieth-century dream of Revolution. And make it immortal. The wake takes place in Colonus, in Canudos, in Kronstad, on the remote shore of an ocean, at the end of a millenium.

During the vigil, the mythical characters relive the dark night of history, the lies and the horrors which made them eternal: the incestuous and murderous son of the couple who ruled hebes; the slaughtered children of Medea; the rape of Cassanda, the clairvoyant; the shadowy kingdom of death and the headof Orpheus singing as it floats downstream; the deadly wings of aedalus, the inventor of flight. While the petulant Odysseus comments with doubts and mocking remarks on the blind vitality of the living.

What is myth for us today, and what could it be? An archetype? A voice from the unconscious? A tale full of wisdom? A dark and dazzling clot of contradictions? A value to be desecrated? Nothing?

The darkest enigma shows itself through the contradictory survival of the myth, the enigma of its absence-presence. Where does a myth hide? Where do we bury it? How do we keep it alive?"

The audience was sitting on steep bleechers on each side of the long central stage, so that we could see eachother, and so that the action all took place in this kind of trough. I remember there was text in different languages, different scenes happening at the same time, and it took work to follow along--something I like. There were real elements in the show: fire, water, earth. There was an immense sense of breath, of watching actors--athletes--doing the best work they can do.

At the end of the play, the actors pulled huge white scrims, like curtains, in front of the audience, so that the stage was then shrouded, the candles still flickering behind it. It was one of only a few--a very few--times that theater has created for me an actual catharsis. There was love and there was a great warning, and I was there to witness it all.

Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 6

--Daniel paused a moment, lingering in the past, in the bed with that man he could hardly recall. If memory could be extracted as matter, culled out from our tragic brains, what would it look like? If you held a vial of the clear, vital liquid, full of everything you remember about all the men you had loved in your short, desperate life, would it spray colors across the wall, splitting light into rainbows? Would faces appear, scents and textures? Would it be too heavy to lift?

--He stood on the platform watching the airplanes come into LaGuardia to land, watching the separated by hundreds of feet of airspace, hanging like Christmas lights on an invisible thread.

--Helena hires a driver with pock-marked face. A small man with a bulbous forehead and eyes spaced just slightly too far apart.

--They went home together, to the most recent banged-up house ??? was inhabiting for the time being. They laid together on the bed, so close that they were breathing the same air. Then they spent hours talking. In the morning, neither could remember who fell asleep first.

Super Celebrity Friday

Today at the Greenmarket, there were celebrity sightings one after another, it was like some strange alternate dimension where they were the norm.

Appearing today were:
-Frances McDormand
-Lee Anne Wong
-David Rakoff
-Parker Posey
-Will Arnett
-Tracy Chapman
-Kate Valk
-Whoopi Goldberg

Heard on the V Train Tonight

"Ladies & Gentlemen, this is a reminder that it is illegal to panhandle on the Subway. Please do not give to criminals, and instead give to the charity of your choice. That includes anybody playing horrible music."

Theater Series, Vol. 1: The Symptom

In the past two weeks, I have twice had the conversation I sometimes have with theater people, which is the conversation where you talk about the five theatrical experieces which affected you the most. So over the next few weeks, I'm going to chronicle them here, starting with the smallest.

In the spring of 1998, Clare Dolan, Meredith Holch and Susie Dennison created a show called "The Symptom," which was based on Checkov's "Three Sisters." It was performed at the now-drastically-different Los Kabayitos Puppet Theater in the CSV Community Center on the Lower East Side, then parented by Michael Romanyshyn. I hadn't been in New York for very long--a few months maybe--and here was this quiet, intimate show, so full of desire and feeling that surely would eclipse any standard "Three Sisters" performance.

Each sister was portrayed by a doll made of wood and fabric, and each actor was similarly dressed, so that as they spoke the lines of the play, they moved the puppet. The men in the play were played by lifesize dummies made of crumpled brown bags filling dusty suits. And what followed was a dreamy, setlist-kind of acts which showed the sisters in all their malaise-filled glory: staring into the snow, lamenting their lack of love, and in one ridiculously luminous scene, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing to the point of...dare I say, catharsis? Haven't we all struggled to find meaning? Isn't that struggle so narcissistic sometimes?

I spoke to Meredith Holch about the show recently, rather accosting her with my memories while we were talking about my Collection, among other things, and I'm not sure I was able to express to her what the show meant to me at the time. And now.

Orlando Ahoy!

Off to Orlando today with Kip to visit my brother and his family--which includes my two year old nephew, who is amazing. We're doing Sea World on Friday, I believe. Despite my mixed feelings about places like that. Be back at the end of the week. In the meantime, I leave you another of Shehani Fernando's pictures.

The End Has Come

Last Sunday in Washington Square Park, Circus Amok ended its 2006 season with two amazing shows. We had to stop the first one in the middle for the rain, but we waited 10 minutes and after it passed, we continued. The four o'clock show went beautifully. Olympia Dukakis and her husband, Louis Zorich, were in the audience, looking surprised and delighted and she looked totally Oscar-winning. Also there were Cynthia Nixon and her partner, Christine Marinoni, along with their children. Several weeks ago, at Union Square, Debra Messing was in the audience. How exciting.

I thought the shows this year were extremely sucessful. At the St. Mary's Park show we were introduced to Louis, a 16 year-old local kid who explained that he'd been coming to see Circus Amok in that very park for the last ten years. After the show, after Cindy does her juggling act bit about the LGBT-Q-456-N-R Fund for Justice, Louis asked Michelle if that was, um, how everyone, uh, identified. "I'm gay too," he said, "but my mother doesn't accept me." He thanked us for coming. It was all bigger than the words.

Someone asked me once "But how do you know if you're changing people's minds?" and I told them that I didn't really care about that, because it had changed me. It is easy to forget when you're a part of it, that Amok is really an extremely subversive, renegade, and although sometimes we feel like we have to move the damn crash pad one more time, we're actually--ACTUALLY--bringing theater to neighborhoods which otherwise might not see something like that. It's a beautiful kind of activism.

It's sad when it ends, and yet you're left with all this accomplishment. (And banged up toes and knees and scratched elbows, but that's another story. Don't even mention the lower back stuff.) Plus we tend to see each other throughout the year in other contexts. But it's not the same concentration, which is what people will miss. It's what I miss.

Best. Birthday. Ever.

After the Amok show in Rufus King Park, everyone -- all 26 of us it turned out -- went to have dinner at Tangra Wok, an Indian/Chinese fusion restaurant in Rego Park. Jenny, the musical director, and I have the same birthday, which is the best way to have a birthday if you're a person like me who doesn't really like to celebrate his birthday. The energy isn't all focused on you, and you actually have someone to share it with.

Everyone was starving, still covered in glitter and make-up, and the delightful waiters at Tangra Wok, were ever so willing to push together basically EVERY one of their tables to suit our party, which kept growing as the night went on--as other friends poured in from other circles.

Then the food began to arrive. It was truly a banquet. A huge long table, with fifteen people on each side, bowl after bowl of incredibly spicy food, with flavors so layered, so elegant. There was much oohing and ahhing, and grunts of satisfaction all around. There were Spring Rolls and Chicken Lollipops, Papaya Salad and spicy sesame chicken, incredible garlic noodles which were so spicy that the same bowl of them went around the entire table. Manchurian sauces. Thai Curries. Lemon Coriander soup. There was Chili Cauliflower, Honey Lamb, Ginger Lamb, Chicken with the chef's special sauce. Beer after beer after beer.

The Amok crew bought me a massage at the Nickel Spa. Kip brought some Sesame Street stuff for us to wear/play with/enjoy. We sang Happy Birthday to each other, and there were two other birthdays in the restaurant, so we sang once more for each of them. They stood, they laughed. We all stood and laughed. Jenny and Susan and Jessica sang the Chowder Song, and people looked at is like we were all crazy--and we might be.

Finally, there were cupcakes and candle-blowing, and the waiters brought this huge ice cream bombe with mango, pistachio, rose and coconut ice creams. We sliced it up into about 30 pieces and passed it all around. And for a moment there was only the sound of spoons on melamine.

One for the history books.

103rd Precinct

I wouldn't know if the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica, Queens, is a particularly busy one. If it's violent, quiet or maybe odd. My guess would be that it is not. I guess this because for two days in a row I've been trying to secure a sound permit for the Amok show in Rufus King Park on Thursday--also my birthday.

As I sat there, glancing at each policeman walking past--oh, yes, some of them are dreamboats--a woman came into the lobby. "I've been kidnapped," she said. Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, none of the officers did much of anything. One of them, a woman, came around the front of the desk and began talking with her. The woman--the potential kidnapee--hadn't actually been kidnapped. This, I gathered from the reactions of people around her. No urgency. No paperwork. Probably she was homeless--they acted as if they knew her. She was one of those egregious displays of irony that NYC offers: an unwashed, maybe crazy, maybe unmedicated, disheveled old lady carrying her belongings in none other than a Takashimaya shopping bag.

Night Court, I kept thinking, even though this was the police station--that ridiculous sitcom from the late 80s, which I always watched after school. With Marsha Warfield as the bailiff. I always liked tough women on television. We watched it at my grandparents sometimes, and Empty Nest, which I think came on Saturday nights at 9:30, and after it was over we had to go to bed. That or the Golden Girls, which was when I really started to figure out what exactly a gay sensibility was. This is what happens when you sit for long periods of time watching all this--your brain drifts and doesn't stop. Memories are like that--you can connect one to the next forever if you want to. You don't even have to want to.

Someone came to lead me upstairs, and so I didn't get to see the end of the possible kidnap situation. Then, sitting at the second desk in the community affairs office, Officer Lowe was finally writing up my permit--a truly nice guy who seemed like he'd do anything for us, despite his inability to help me out the day before, because, simply, there was no hard copy of the park permit form him to Xerox. "Daddy's Girl" written on a mini NYS license plate, thumb-tacked to the corkboard behind him.

"What happened to the bearded lady?" he asked. "She's still around," I answered. "She's off in Battery Park today trying to get that site settled." "Okay," he said, "well, tell her I said hello. Maybe I'll see her next year."

Where I was sitting--someone else's desk, someone who was, as he said "in the field"--there was a Post-It note stuck to the monitor which read: "Mary needs wigs for prostitution."

Buy the Book!

You can now hold in your very own hands, your very own copy of my new book: Collection. It's a limited edition anthology of essays and excerpts, and you can only get it directly from me or my website LeeHouck.com. It's arty and underground like that.

At the site, you can read the introduction, click around to other parts of my writing life, Paypal over the mere $12, and I'll send you a book, signed just for you!

For those of you who live in NYC: you can also buy the book directly from my very own hands for only $10 Please let me know if you want me to reserve one for you.

Hooray, just what you've always wanted.

September Resolution

I've decided that this fall's project will be to stop biting my nails. The winter air wreaks havok on my fingertips, so much that last season I resorted to sleeping in those creepy gloves, first slathering my hands with vaseline, or some Origins stuff, or some other concoction--I've tried everything. It's not bad, but I'd still rather fix the habit.

I do it primarily when I'm thinking about something--in movies, watching TV, in pauses between writing. People have suggested that it's anxiety--which I'm certainly not short on--but it's more a way to focus, and at this point I've made it almost impossible to shift my brain into that analytical mode without stuffing a finger in my mouth. How childish.

So if you see me out in the world, eyes glazed over, somehow distant, moving from one finger to the next, in obsessive maniacal despair--remind me that I'm supposed to be giving it up.

The Ruins

I want to write a bit about Scott Smith's new novel, The Ruins, which--according to dopey reviewers on Amazon.com--isn't particularly worth reading. Totally unbelieveable, they cry. Not scary! Not scary enough! But they're wrong. The novel is dark, brutal, almost without any hope. It is merciless.

What I keep reading in one inane review after another--except they aren't reviews at all, but really a few sentences about what the reader thought the book should have been like--is that the plot is unbelievable. I never understand this arguing with the writer thing--I do it myself, but I also know that I have to back off.

Take a brilliant, sad and redemptive novel like Ian McEwan's Saturday. At one point, the plot begins to turn--the burglary--and I remember distinctly saying to myself: Stop! I don't want things to go this way! But I'm not the decision maker, I'm just along for the ride. I have enough respect for McEwan to go with him where he wants to take me. Because one thing always leads to another, and sometimes the only way through is the unpleasant way through. And good writers know this.

How did the democratization of reviewing turn into readers not trusting writers?

It frustrates me--well, it pisses me off--that people look for novels to be so true to life. I think the main tragedy is that people--the general Amazon reviewing public--thought they were going to be eating popcorn and soda pop, but what they got was richer and meatier, bitter and difficult to digest. And they felt cheated.

But that's what I want from art--I want to be surprised. I want to be put somewhere else, somewhere outside of my regular existence, where the colors are a bit more saturated, the characters a bit smarter, or not smarter, and the flowers just too red to be true. I think of Toni Morrison saying that she didn't want her novels to be books you dipped into for fifteen minutes before bed. You know, if you want a slice of life, look out the fucking window.

Amok Pics

This year we are fortunate to have with us Shehani Fernando, who is doing a photojournalism masters at a university in London--with Circus Amok as her subject. She is as lovely in person as her photographs, and has blended seamlessly into our Circus family. Here are some of her pictures:

Sick Passenger

On the way home from Coney Island on Monday night, as the F Train curved around the tunnel between Church Avenue and Ft. Hamilton Parkway, I started to feel a little sick. No, not a little sick, but really sick. I had that feeling you get just before you throw up--that body awareness that says "You have about 30 seconds to get ready for what I'm about to do to you."

Then, moments later, as the train passed through the 7th Avenue station and out onto the above-ground station at 4th Avenue, I found myself being held up by Kip and Amy, slowly taking my own weight again, the train stopped, a policeman standing there, everyone staring.

I had passed out. Or fainted. Or something like that. Later, on the couch at Kip's house, with my toe raised and iced--I had slammed my fourth toe on my right foot into part of the ring curb during the 5pm Circus Amok show, while wearing this ridiculous goat mask which obscures basically all your vision, and we wondered if it might be broken--I realized that since breakfast, I'd hardly eaten anything.

Stranger, however, was that I have no memory of losing consciousness at all. In fact, in my mind, I was alert during the whole thing. I remember feeling nauseous, I remember telling Amy that I felt really sick, and then I remember thinking "Wow, this train is really shakey." What was really shakey, of course, was the three of them--Kip, Amy and a stranger--lifting me out of the seat and carrying me onto the platform. Even though there was a disconnect, my brain was still quite alert.

This makes me wonder about what happens when you die. No wonder people see a tunnel of white light, or hear voices around them. Thank goodness I was with friends, and thank goodness some stranger lept to the rescue.

I felt fine later that evening, and still today I'm okay. I'm sure it was the combination of the not eating and the strenuous task of doing two shows in the hot Coney Island sun. It's odd--when have you known me to skip a meal?

New Anthology

I have an essay, "Inheritance," in the anthology From Boys to Men, recently published by Caroll & Graf.


Here's some of the jacket copy: "More than an anthology of coming out stories, From Boys to Men is a stunning collection of essays about what it is like to be gay and young, to be different and be aware of that difference from the earliest of ages. In these memoirs, coming out is less important than coming of age and coming to the realization that young gay people experience the world in ways quite unlike straight boys. Whether it is a fascination with soap opera, an intense sensitivity to their own difference, or an obsession with a certain part of the male anatomy, gay kids — or kids who would eventually identify as gay — have an indefinable but unmistakable gay sensibility. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it is harrowing, and often it is deeply moving."

From an Interview with Joan Didion

"The whole California story as it was told to me had to do with the difficulty of getting here. Once you got here you were redeemed. Nobody ever talked about what you were redeemed for. The survival, the getting through the mountains before the snow fell was the big, big value. And if you had managed that then you were home free, as it were.

"As I started thinking about it, or as I passed on through not thinking about into some kind of adult life, survival as an answer in itself began to seem a more and more doubtful value. Survival leaves you more aware. California had always been about, had always celebrated the act of survival. In some ways, I think we were left with no higher value."

Circus Amok!!

Ladies & Gentlemen, Boys & Girls, and the rest of us!

Tomorrow we leave for Chestertown, New York, where we'll do intensive rehearsal for about a week, then return for the opening at Riverside Park on Friday, September 1. The show this year is really conceptually together--I think it works well as a piece of theatre, not just as something fun and free to see in the park.

We've got a huge boat, yards of blue fabric water, dancing goats, eight-count 'em, eight!--pogo sticks, a return to the burning building clown act, and much, much more. Oh, the teacups are back, too. And it's all coming to your park, all alive, all real, always FREE.

For those of you who live in New York, you can see our full show schedule here. Or check our website, CircusAmok.org, for more info on the troupe, Amok history, and everything else you'd want to know--you can even make a donation.

For still even more excitement, check out a 5-minute piece on a show from two or three seasons ago on YouTube, here.

Talking to Her

My friend Ashley, a dancer and Circus Amok ring performer, asked me yesterday if I could marry someone who spoke to the dead, would I want to? I knew what she was asking. She was asking, If you could talk to Meg, would you?

I told her I wouldn't. What would Meg have to say to me, I thought, that she didn't already say when she was living? The things I want to know aren't things that she, specifically, would have to tell me (although I would appreciate them from her sensitive yet removed perspective): What is the journey like? Is there a tunnel of white light? Do the angels play harps? And, as I've written before, did you get all the text messages I sent after you died?

What a scene at your memorial service, I might say, with that long strange painting hung on the curtain, and the very colorful...quilt?...shawl?...draped over the podium. When you-know-who said you-know-what and I thought you might send lightning down to smite her--but I knew you wouldn't because you're like that. Or you're not like that.

I suppose I would want to talk with Meg. But if I can't, that's fine too. The last words she said to me were 'Happy Fucking Birthday,' which I cherish unlike anything else in this world. So--in our many nights laying awake in my bed together, stacks of letters, phone calls so long both my cell phone and cordless land-line went dead--we said basically everything we needed to say to each other.

I won't write "as if we knew." Because we didn't.

A Meme About Books and Such

1. One book you have read more than once:

I'll have to say Run River by Joan Didion. I read it when things in my life have gone suddenly askew. Despite its plot and subject matter--the novel begins with a murder on the banks of the Sacramento River-- it brings me a sense of calm. The rhythm of her prose, the sentences, the repetition. Sometimes reading it feels like meditation.

2. One book you would want on a desert island:

I never know what this means. A book that I would read, or that I could burn to make smoke signals? How about I'll go way out there, and say the Icelandic Sagas. Not modern printed ones, but the originals. They were all made of hand-bound cow's hide, and therefore could be boiled in soup if there was nothing to eat during the long winter. A book that feeds you mentally and physically, now that's the book for me.

3. One book that made you laugh:

Most recently it was This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. It's so brilliant the way she sets the most ridiculous plots into motion and you just go right on with it like it's the most normal thing. A horse shows up in a sinkhole and the celebrity neighbor flies his helicopter over to help get it out. The absurdity is ultimately appropriate.

4. One book that made you cry:

There is a moment in Dan Choan's book You Remind Me of Me, where a child has been abducted and his grandmother is wondering where he might be. Choan writes: "She has never been a superstitious person, but she is certain at this moment she can sense the presence of the child. His little soul. It is a small, steadily blinking pulse, like the light of an airplane moving across the sky at night." I lost it right there.

5. One book you wish you had written:

I don't covet other people's work like that. I sometimes say, 'I wish I could write like that,' but I never think it terms of having written a particular book myself. One would always do something differently. So, I'm going to steal Ted's idea (genius!) but I'm going to go with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, only because she's probably richer than she'll ever need to be, but people will still be reading her book in a hundred years after Dan Brown is forgotten about.

6. One book you wish had never been written:

Was this list made by someone who doesn't write? I hate it when, like in personal ads on the internet, people don't really answer the question, but wittily prance around it, but oh well. My feeling is that even a book like The Turner Diaries or some assinine sack of garbage by Ann Coulter would be defended by other writers if it came to whether or not a person could write what they were passionate about. On second thought, maybe not the Coulter shit.

7. One book you are currently reading:

In 1969, Tobias Schneebaum wrote Keep the River On Your Right, which was a series of letters he wrote in his journal during his time spent in Peru, living with the Harakumbut people, (then called the Amarakaire,) where he, among other things, ate human flesh. He was also a painter, a lecturer, a teacher, an AIDS activist, and homosexual. He's sort of my hero.

8. One book you have been meaning to read:

I have this stack of Joyce Carol Oates books that I keep trying to get through. And since she writes like four books a year I'll never catch up. Currently, Wikipedia lists her published book count--including novels, plays, short stories, etc.--at 102.

9. One book that changed your life:

I always tell people that for me this book was Barbara Kingsolver's triumph of a novel, The Poisonwood Bible. It was just so clear to me what she was doing, both with language and voice, but also what she was doing artistically and politically. Other books that also got it right are Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy.

10. Now Tag 5 bloggers:

Witold, Mario, Michael, Amanda, and Tucker.

We Has Risen!

Last night at the Helen Hayes Theatre, Herb tore up the keys while Kiki drank herself into angrier and scathier, even more anarchic rage, in Kiki & Herb's last preview before opening night of their new show, "Alive on Broadway."

Watching this more polished, more directed show, I kept thinking that somehow Kiki's world had finally arrived. She's survived countless tragedies and disappointments, with only a drink and a song to carry her on. As war, disasters, and political stupidity continue to haunt our present, when has Kiki been more relevant? When has the fundamental truth of equal parts outrage and apathy been more exact?

Although the comedy is darker and more deranged than anything I've ever seen, even their old, more chaotic shows at Fez and P.S. 122--Kiki's sloshed banter includes stories of her daughter, Coco, who drowned; her two other children who refuse to acknowledge her existence; child sexual abuse; abandonment; AIDS; and more, more, more--there is real pathos in the theatrics. In fact, I don't know of a more empathetic character.

Kiki is our melancholy, she's our ragged skeletons in the closet. She's our vitriolic disgust with the state of the union, and with the state of our own miserable selves.

During the standing ovation, Kiki becomes, momentarily, Justin Bond, her creator; Herb becomes Kenny Mellman. They have surived their own alter-egos, and--somehow--there is redemption. The world is always separating itself into us against them. But for Kiki, everyone is us.

Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 5

This was recently excised from my first novel. Perhaps it will find a new place, who knows?

The neighborhood is mostly Greek and you can walk down Broadway and not hear anyone speaking English. ATMs are fluent in five languages. There’s the Old Greek Captain Restaurant, a florescent-lit patio furniture-filled dump where the deep fryer bubbles all night and the cook smokes cigarettes out on the sidewalk, still wearing his hygienic gloves. The more popular, but far more repulsive, Uncle Niko’s Restaurant, which is the one that the tourist guides suggest—it is forever full. There are nightclubs and coffee bars: Olympia 21, The Cave, Exo, others that I don’t know the name of, and which probably won’t last anyway—this city eats businesses like candy. Even a gay bar, Playa, which though mostly a black and Latino dyke hangout is often filled (on Sunday afternoons at least) with tight-lipped white men from Long Island who come into town to suck some cock, or to get fucked. They’re generally not very experienced, but they’ve all been nicely hairy, and most of them have had pleasantly average-sized dicks. Size matters, but not when you fellate for a living.

Project Podcast

Anyone who's a fan of Project Runway must immediately go to their iTunes and subscribe to Tim Gunn's podcast. Each Thursday, you can hear Tim talk for about thirty minutes about what really happened on the episode you just watched the evening prior.

For example, who would ever have known that (perhaps) the reason that the judges kept Robert Best over Bradley Baumkirchner was because when Robert designed the modernized outfit for Jackie O. that the judges decided she just wouldn't wear, it was Diane Von Furstenburg who came to the rescue, finishing the dialogue about the garment. Tim explains in the most recent podcast that Diane said "I did know Jackie, I knew her very well. And I think she would wear it."

Tim also puts to rest (well, not really) those questions about Bradley's sexuality. Tim assumed he was queer as the day is long -- but when it surfaced that Bradley didn't really know who Cher was, well Tim noted, what kind of self-respecting gay man doesn't know Cher?

Any self-respecting Project Runway fan must also peruse the Store, where you can buy limited edition t-shirts designed by each of the designers, in addition to bidding on the ACTUAL winning (and losing) looks from each episode.

Starting Over

I am so lucky. At Kip's house this morning, after we ate our bowls of strawberry/banana Cheerios, I got to watch most of today's episode of the syndicated daytime cry-fest "Starting Over." I was shocked (or maybe not so shocked) to see that some of the women who were in the house today, had been living in the house back in January, when I discovered how much I loved watching it. (I've not figured out yet, however, if we're watching reruns now, so maybe this was an old one, I dunno.)

Back in January, when things were really heating up, one woman had to wrap herself in ace bandages, replacing the fat self she used to be with this fake fat, because even though we may lose the weight, unless we've changed who we really are inside, what good does it do, right? Right! Not only did she have to walk around the house for who-knows-how-long covered in this fake fat suit, she had to then write in black marker all over the bandages things that she was holding onto: "Mother didn't love me," "I feel ugly," "Lack of intimacy," and whatever else.

At the same time there was a woman who had been relying on so many crutches. A-ha! The brilliant life coaches (or maybe it was the producers?) gave her some real crutches to walk around with for a while, so she would see what it REALLY felt like to rely on crutches. She had to write things on these tags which hung off the crutches, more "mother didn't love me" and stuff like that. The whole house was full of women in these ridiculous costumes taking themselves so seriously.

From their website, here is today's "Life Coach Tip:" "Call a thing a thing. Call your pain your pain. Call your hurt our hurt. Your anger our anger. Your joy your joy. Call everything what it is so that you'll know what is going on in your life." (Brought to you by Easy Off Bam, of course.)

I love you Starting Over--I call my joy my joy. I can't wait to see what masochistic psychobabble you dream up for the ladies next!

Warnings

First it was Joyce Carol Oates,
talking about watching whole nations live
in a state of denial.

Then it was a widow, who lost her husband
in The Vietnam War--the same war, which
the Vietnamese call The American War--
who said that on the day before he left for duty,
she wanted to smash his hand with an iron skillet,
breaking his bones, so that he could not go to war.

Later, someone says "You would be amazed
at how many would go when their name is called."
The train lurches forward, shudders, continues on.
"People you thought you knew."

The whole world is of warnings.
Generations of foreshadowing, so delicate
and deliberate that only the very old can see it.
What is left, then,
after everyone has said "I told you so?"

There is only the lingering weight.
Of boots on sand and marsh.
Of children on the actions of landmines.

Hot Hot Heat

This always happens in New York in August--the heat arrives, as if no one had expected it, as if we had forgotten what it was like this time of year. Con Edison fucks up some neighborhood--in this year's case, the north part of Astoria, where some customers were without electricity for eight days--and then makes apologies in the news and in the papers.

I splurged yesterday in taking a car service to Jennifer's house--not so bad, only $18 with New Enrico's, my car service of choice for the last 8 years--because I had to transport 5 pogo sticks to her loft, but also because, as I later saw on the light-up sign at the bank that flashes the time and temperature that it was 1:42pm, and 106 degrees. Nuff said.

I'm also battling a sinus something-or-other. Congestion, mostly. I'm not sure if it's allergies, actual sickness, or just my body revolting against the constant hot/cold of going from air conditioner to outside and back again over and over.

Tomorrow, Sam Champion says, we'll be in a better "pocket of air." It sounds so much like space travel.

PS - Don't rush out to see Miami Vice. It sucks.

Political Bullshit

On July 25, 2006, New York State Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Tom Suozzi and Eliot Spitzer, participated in a televised debate held at the Schimmel Theater at Pace University. In his opening introduction, moderator Dominic Carter, explained that during the latter part of the hour-long debate, "we will end...with a series of lightning round questions where the candidates can only answer yes or no to the questions that I will ask them."

The audience, both at the Schimmel Theater and at home, would therefore be treated to the simplest of answers when it came to difficult questions. There would be no fuzzy unclear babbling on, no talking around an issue. The audience would accept only the most direct of answers.

On the contrary.

Take this exchange during the "lightning round," with Carter, the questioner, putting a rather complicated issue in front of Suozzi:

Q. Mr. Suozzi, can you achieve universal health care in the state — again, universal health care in the state — if you are elected governor?

SUOZZI. You want a yet or no for that?

Q. Yes or no.

SUOZZI. I can’t say I’ll try?

Q. Yes or no.

SUOZZI. Could I say —

Q. Yes or no.

SUOZZI. Uh —

Q. Yes or no, Mr. Suozzi.

The audience awaited an answer. Suozzi was essentially given two options. The first, the more rational, would be to admit that it would be a huge, near-impossible feat to provide universal health care to the state of New York, and that the least he could do would be to attempt, given the limitations of his power as governor, to implement such a system. Or, he could take the easy way out, the "political" way out, and answer that yes, he would succeed in providing universal health care.

SUOZZI. I’ll try. I can’t answer that.

Q. Yes or no, Mr. Suozzi.

SUOZZI. No.

Q. Mr. Spitzer?

SPITZER. Yes.

At this point the audience cheered, roaring in support of Spitzer's positive answer, indicating that what they indeed wanted was to be delivered empty promises by men in suits. What they wanted was some old school political bullshit.

Open Letters, Vol. 3

Dear People Who Sign Mailing Lists,

1) Have better handwriting.

2) Include your zipcode.

3) Use the standard address format: Name, address, apartment, city, state, zip. Please do not go all weird and throw your apartment number just wherever.

4) If your name is something like Riznia DiSpiczewicz, you already know how hard it is to spell your name, and therefore you should print accordingly.


Sincerely,

People Who Work with Mailing Lists

Righteous Baby

I should have guessed it. She's glowing with happiness, awash in love, writing songs like she never has before, with bright, wistful lyrics: "We can jump around like monkeys/after the paparazzi have gone home/having let go forever/of the phallacy of ever being alone." Ani Difranco announced on July 21, upon receiving the National Organizaion of Women's "Woman of Courage" award, that she and current boyfriend and "Reprieve" producer, Mike Napolitano, are going to have a baby in February 2007.

In 1995, I had a friend who decided she was a lesbian. Because of this temporary shift in her sexuality--she's dated men exclusively since then--she started buying Out Magazine. In the back pages of that summer issue of Out, there was an ad for a record called "Out of Range," by singer/songwriter Ani Difranco. We'd never heard Ani before--who knew what the music would sound like--but she looked, from the picture at least, like she was once of us.

We listened to that album a thousand times, driving oursevles around Chattanooga--surely a place where there were no other Ani fans at that time--our rollerblades in the trunk, drinking strawberry malts. The tape (Ani on cassette!) would turn over, playing one side after another, and we'd listen again and again to the same songs we'd heard not an hour before. There was a song called "Overlap," an acoustic ditty laid right in the middle of the record, so quiet and so powerful that it forced you to listen, and when you did it broke your heart. Ani sang "I build each one of my days out of hope, and I give that hope your name," as we drove to the top of Signal Mountain, where we hiked up and down the trails, off the trails, and swam ourselves silly (and cold and tired) at Rainbow Falls.

Later, after Dilate and Little Plastic Castle, my then-lesbian friend fell off the Ani bandwagon, (and Ani fell off the lesbian bandwagon, a place she never claimed to be anyway) but I've remained there ever since. I have all the records, even the odd one-offs and international releases. I have the stuff: people have given me the coffee mugs, the headshots, I have some clothing. None of it I really have any use for, but it's here. As evidence.

I've got so many bootlegs that I juggle the playlists to include not just my favorite songs, but my favorite performances of those songs: the never-released "One More Night," from that Rochester gig in 1992; "Independence Day" performed on the radio show Acoustic Cafe in 1997--I listened in my dormroom, laying in bed with my then boyfriend, it was my birthday; the 1999 version of "Firedoor" from the Stockholm show; "I Know This Bar" from that year's Falcon Ridge Festival; tons of stuff from the full-band years; and now, after "Evolve" and "Educated Guess," and "Knuckle Down," and more and more live recordings, I'm listening to the unreleased new stuff: "Round a Pole," "Alla This," and the slow, twinkling medley she's been playing in concert so often lately: "Red Letter Year/Star Matter."

Do you speak the same language?

What if I tell you that I've got 19 versions of "Shameless?" 17 versions of "Evolve?" 14 versions of "Gravel?"

Ani is one of those artists that seem so completely transparent in their work, like Tori Amos or Fiona Apple, whose rabid fanbase wants to own the musician like they own the records. I've long wondered when I might tire of seeing Ani in concert--not her performances, but the audience: the ridiculous teenage girls, the long-haired hippie children bouncing and swaying and screaming every word. It comes with the territory.

Already the pregnancy chatter on the message boards is ridiculous: "can you imagine what an amazing mother ani will make?" and "or how cuuute she'll look when she starts showing???!!" Ani speaks to the alienation, to the love, to the otherness, to the angry, invisible line between the personal and the political, and it's impossible sometimes not to see yourself in her.

In some ways, that was me--only without the technology, or the community of people to feel a part of. And I like to think that, for me, it's always been about the music. Back in 1995, in that white Buick Celebrity, tearing down Highway 58, the backseat full of towels wet with lake water, Ani sang "I know I can't be the only/whatever I am in the room/so why am I so lonely/why am i so tired."

We stared our sunburned faces out the window and sang with her.

Incongruities...or something more?

--Listening to Brian Greene discussing String Theory while I fold my laundry.

--Working on the Circus Amok mailing list while watching the Barbara Streisand film Nuts.

--The Q101 bus refuses to arrive, it's late, it's later, and when it arrives, it's...empty.

An Inconvenient Truth

I have just returned from seeing what I've been referring to as "The Al Gore Movie," or as it is actually called, "An Inconvenient Truth." Aside from how important the film is--globally, nationally, locally--it is a shining, inspiring example of what can happen when a person with as much passion and (dare I say it) downright likeability, doesn't have to kowtow to the lowest common denominator to score votes, or to appear to fall somewhere in the middle.

I'm not sure how you make a 100-minute "slide presentation," as Gore calls it, as exciting as the movie is, but it works. And despite the material--global warming, ice caps melting, millions of refugees--the film feels less like doom and gloom than it does an impassioned call to action, from someone whose been calling for it since the before anyone knew what it all meant, or what it all implied.

There are the scenes of a young Gore, learning farmy stuff from his cattle-rancher father; a yearbook photo showing a bright eyed, nerdy Gore (not so different from the Gore we know today,) during his impressionable school years; the scenes of Gore walking through airport security--alone, which I doubt occurs very often--carrying his laptop, working away on his Keynote software, tweaking the presentation here and there, in hotel rooms, in Lincoln Town Cars. But it doesn't feel like political blather. It feels genuine. And there's nothing in the movie but him talking.

Certainly President Gore (had things gone another way) could never have made a film like this--full of ideas, impassioned pleas for understanding, critical of big business. He talks of the disappointment in 2000. He's emotional, he's vulnerable. It's like he's finally found himself. But, watching the footage of him in the late 80s, the early 90s, it would appear that he was always this exciting. Who knew?

Play It as It Lays

I'm reading Joan's second novel, Play It as It Lays, for what must be the tenth time, or more. "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask," is how it begins.

A few paragraphs later, this appears:

"NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune."

Then this:

"I try not to think of dead things and plumbing. I try not to hear the air conditioner in that bedroom in Encino. I try not to live in Silver Wells or in New York with Carter. I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?"

Some of What You Can Have Delivered at 11:00pm in My Neighborhood

Souvlaki
Moussaka
Penne Polo Pazzo
Baklava
Carne Asada
Chorizo
Sopes Cesina
Cabeza
Chilaquiles con Huevos Estrellados
Nopales
Halloumi
Lahmajun
Guayaki Yerba Mate
Puro Turco
Milanesa
Pasha Mundo
Coxinha
Bimbimbop
Chirasi
Tekkadon
Gyoza
Sunomono
Negimaki
Kimchi
Burek
Pastichio
Taramasolata
Tzatziki
Takuwan
Pad Mee
Tom Kha
Larb
Mee Grob
Pla Tod Kateem
Num Tak
Rad Naa
Seftalia
Zalatina
Keftedes
Loukaniko
Kaseri
Insalata di Mare
Pilatte di Pesce
Lengua a la Plancha
Chow Mei Fun
Aloo Gobi
Chana Poori
Shag Ponir
Sujbzi Jalfrazi

Still Working

I actually have been working on my new novel, somewhat secretly. If the first book is say, a piece of shiny sheet metal, I'm trying to make the next one like brocade velvet. Not stuffy, not overdone, just richer on the tongue.

It's kind of a wreck right now, in some ways. But I like that about how novels take shape. I like to see how the strangeness first emerges, then it's not so strange, then eventually it works. This part is somewhere in between those first two things:

She masked off some squares, six or eight small sections she could surely do without tiring. She pushed some paint around on a piece of wood—a makeshift palate that she preferred over anything formal—and the blue mixed with the darker blue until she had what she wanted. At one time she could paint the tiny squares without tape or even a straight edge, perfect straight lines that defied logic (and enraged the critics.) She was famous for it. But, like other things, that skill vanished with menopause. Specifically the patience. Or maybe she gained another kind of patience—and what she let go of was the need to paint everything freehand, of having to prove that she was a good painter. Getting older doesn’t really change you; you simply exchange one thing for another. Ambition for confidence, vigor for exactitude. You learn a new kind of precision—with words, with relationships (if you’re lucky,) and with your art. In her thirties—no, before that, her twenties, the loud years before Daniel—there was a kind of circular drive: you have to show them that you’re a great painter, and so you become a great painter; they want to believe you’re a great painter, so with their help you become successful; they want to believe that great painters still exist. Art is a closed community, full of all the shit you see on nature shows: cannibalism and infanticide. But—if you could manage it—what it all boiled down to was, thankfully, the pure solace that comes from one tiny square after another. Pushing the brush into a puddle of color. Blue against dark blue. Darker still until it is nearly black. Until it shines like a crow in the late day sun.

I Saw a Pigeon Eating Puke

That's all. I just thought someone should know.

4th of July

Today, as I write this, at my parents house in Chattanooga, people are arriving for their annual 4th of July breakfast event. My dad says this year he expects about 175. He always makes the joke during his short welcome speech that the party goes on "whether I live here or not." People laugh. They raise a flag, parade around the block, then everyone eats. This is after prizes are given out for the best costumes, of course--everyone comes dressed in red, white and blue. Some people overdo it--crazy hats, ridiculous outfits, stars and stripes in every conceivable concoction. Those people are rewarded.

When I moved to NYC and tried to explain the event to people here, I realized how genuinely original and somewhat bizzare the whole thing is. "Do you grill hot dogs?" they ask. "No, it's breakfast." "And how many people do you have?" "And people just show up?" The looseness seems to make them uncomfortable. They can't configure a celebration without booze.

What also makes them uncomfortable, I gather, is the honesty of the event. It's not a commercial enterprise, it's not sponsored, it's not the Macy's Fireworks Spectacular. It's just an idea my dad had twenty-something years ago. Neighbors invite their out-of-town guests, they bring the new grandchildren, the old folks who rarely leave the house, the fire department brings a big red truck for all the kids to sit on. The antique car club rides their rides down the street to lead the parade. We've been in all the local papers--now just one paper--for many years. I remember feeling nonchalant about having my family on the front page, in color, all decked out, smiling in the yard.

There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand, pictures of the party all over the place. In some ways, every picture looks the same. Some years ago, I attempted to make sense of the stacks of pictures, shoebox after shoebox. It was impossible. How old are the Mackey's children? Is my grandmother still alive? You spread all the pictures around you and look for those signs. Did my dad build the railing five years ago, or six? Old mailbox or new? What color is whats-her-name's hair?

I miss the parties. I'm going next year.