Gays in the Bush

My new favorite human being is Adam Sutton, a gay horseman and trick rider from Cooranbong, NSW, Australia. Adam was the horse wrangler and riding instructor for the film "Ned Kelly," and he became, and remains, good friends with Heath Ledger. At a New Year's Eve party in 2003, Heath handed him a script he was considering, and said "It's all about you." The script, of course, was Brokeback Mountain.

There is a lengthy article on him in the Sydney Morning Herald--detailing his struggles, including a drunk driving accident which claimed the life of another young man--which you can read here, and you can learn more about "Since Adam was a Boy," the documentary produced for Australian television, here.


"It takes courage," Adam says, in the Herald article, "and it takes strength and it takes that inner person to take hold and not worry what Tom or Harry down the road thinks. But it's hard, you're standing on your own island, singing your own song."

Attack of the WWW

See, the internet really does bring people together:

-Subservient Chicken
-Puke or Soup?
-The "She's Not a Christian" Lady
-Kitten Wars!
-Someone Keeps Stealing My Letters
-Stuff on my Cat

Attack of the Typos

I'm in the middle of (again) going through my manuscript and correcting tiny mistakes and typos. They weren't in there a year ago, but one of the ways I fixed the book--or at least attempted to make it more of what it was meant to be in the first place--was to break it apart, into chapters and narrative threads, tracing different imagery in different colored pencils, reading section by section out of order, and backwards, trying to find the blind spots, or the brownouts as they were. You sort of shake it into pieces until you can see it with new eyes.

After all this breaking business, I re-typed the manuscript into a new document, all of it, every page. I think that re-doing caused a lot of new mistakes. But it was important to re-order the book in my brain. The exercise allowed me to re-learn the book in the proper order, and I found some dramaturgy mistakes--conflicting weather, clothing that changes inexplicably--which I was suddenly able to see.

It's exciting--reading your book with such new eyes--but it's also infuriating, because you feel a little bit like a bad writer. You can't imagine why you missed all these things before. On one page I found I had written nowhere, as now here. Twice.

At some point during the revising, the revising and revising, you begin to see through the pages, and because you know it so well, your brain fills in the missing parts. It doesn't matter how many times you've gone over it, how many spell checks, how many hours pouring over it with a red pencil, on planes, busses, trains--even a boat at one point during the book's genesis.

All of this so important, of course, because the final product should look (and read) as if there was no work put into it at all. Or, rather that the seams are invisible. "Imagine you're frosting a cake," Alex Chee, said to me once.

Surprise at Lupa

About 10 of us gathered at Lupa for my friend John Summerour's Surprise 29th Birthday. He claimed (after a good ten minutes of genuine stunned confusion) that he'd always wanted a surprise party and what a gift it was to have finally been the reason for one.

The food at Lupa (a Roman menu by executive chef Mark Ladner) is beautifully presented, and it tastes even more exquisite. The chef had designed a four-course prix fixe for the birthday which started with a machine gun-firing of white beans 'al fiasco,' rosemary ciabatta, brussels sprouts with pecorino, glassine slices of prosciutto, octopus with black ceci (the only octopus I've ever eaten and enjoyed) and, my favorite, a light corn souffle-thing, with dill and grapefruit.

Then came huge white bowls with six (only six!) pillow-soft pieces of ricotta gnocci in a fennel sausage tomato sauce; the fresh cracked pepper moved the dish into another realm. There were three choices of entree: pollo alla Diavola (a kind of lemon-pepper chicken,) as well as a striped sea bass with lentils and spinach--both of which were excellent; and the third was the pork shoulder with rose petal glassato, which is essentially a clear glaze. The pork was my favorite, sweet and tangy, with the undercurrant of salty pork fat. Truly heavenly. Other-worldly.

Dessert was tartufos, a honey and laurel panna cotta and a selection of biscotti. And the best part of all was that we left without feeling overfed. The portions were tiny, but it all added up perfectly--something I know is really difficult to do; ask anyone who's eaten at my house.

After two bottles of prosecco between us as soon as we sat down, the sommelier (the only one I've ever seen with muscles) suggested one of his favorites, an amazing Lugana Cantina DiCustoza, which also happened to be one of the cheapest bottles on the list. A few other reds went around--I was not the only one drinking from two different glasses--but, perhaps needless to say, I don't remember them as clearly.

Easter Sunday

Today Kip and I layed around in Astoria Park for a while, watching people practice swordfighting, play with their dogs, celebrate the holiday, and get their kites miserably stuck in the budding trees. One of my favorite things about the park is that you can get on the grass all year long--something you can't always do in the Manhattan parks; Central Park's lawns aren't open until next week, and some will be another two weeks before they're fully walk-on-able. I like the grass on my toes.

Throughout the neighborhood, people were gathered in groups, wearing pastels, the girls in dresses tied in ribbons, the boys in suits too big, too bulky to make them look like anything other than children whose parents would prefer they act like adults. Girls just grow up faster somehow. Like their adulthood is already present within them when they are born. Like they hide it.

This week I had a rather unexpected breakthrough with my second novel, (are all breakthoughs unexpected?) which, though going ever so slowly, is still cranking away in my mind all day, all week, all the time. It's the way novels are written, I guess. At least it's the way mine are. Shazam, it just comes to you, like that.

Some Recommendations

Highly recommended:
Francis McDormand in "Friends with Money"
"Thing a Week" Podcast by Jonathan Coulton.
Queen Anne's Lace jam by Beth's Farm Kitchen.
Cruiserweight's new record "Sweet Weaponry."
Springtime in NYC.

Recommended with reservations:
Cyndi Lauper in Roundabout Theatre's "Threepenny Opera."
Queens branches of the United States Postal Service.
The R Train.

Not recommended:
The rest of Roundabout Theatre's "Threepenny Opera." All 3 hours of it.
Making coconut ice cream with all the proportions off.

More Money

New York Magazine succeeded in writing yet another article about rich people, while wrapping it up in what they've diagnosed as an "emerging issue." In this case, Grups: the forty-something cool dude who still dresses like he's twenty-two, and makes his kids listen to The Hives, messenger bags and Death Cab for Cutie also intact.

The post-1992 Alternative scene (once an adjective, now its own category, with a capital A,) has somehow frozen these people in time. But not a time in the past, more on the ever-evolving (yet never really evolving) cusp of coolness--at least according to their own circles.

These coolest-on-the-block kids (with the impeccably-sloppy Grup parents) will probably grow up wanting to go to church and become accountants, they'll loathe irony, and when they turn forty themselves they'll lament to their therapists that they never got to be captain of the football team; they never got to have a normal childhood.

I wonder what the Grups thought about the article. Because, if you read between the lines, what they're talking about is basically a new status quo--something I would imagine the Grups assume they've thwarted. They're just more of the middle-class. Plus, of course, money.

A B C

In the Bronx, about a 15-minute walk from the Whitlock Avenue stop on the 6 Train, is the outlet store for ABC Carpet & Home. On Sunday, a few of us went up there so that Michael & Calvin (see friends to the right) could buy a new TV stand. Or something that would look enough like a TV stand to work as a TV stand. What they ended up with was a "marriage table" from Indonesia, which was labeled circa 1900, and which the salesman, Dean, explained wasn't necessarily from 1900 since things simply arrived, he said, "on the boat."

ABC reminds you that, in New York City (as with many other cities,) money not only buys you nice things, but, more importantly, it buys you lots of space. Who buys the antique rugs that measure 20' x 20'? The runners that are forty feet long? I should have taken pictures.

I wondered, as the four of us were walking by the gas station, over the Harlem River, down the gravel road next to the bodega which sold (according to its awning) "Eggs - Paper Bags - Provisions - Drinks," if the locals were used to little groups of queers hopping off the train and swishing through their neighborhood. None of us are that swishy, but taken out of context, I'm sure we looked, simply, wrong. Perhaps just as wrong as the rich white women, with severe faces and statement jewelry, who arrive in the parking lot with their drivers. Or maybe they send their designers out to do the shopping for them.