The Play of Magical Thinking

Last week, Kip and I went to see Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's stage adaptation of her much-beloved, much-sold, much-awarded (and much-deserving) book. It is Ms. Didion's first play; she has spoke of her newness to the process. I recall several months ago reading that she began asking Scott Rudin, the play's producer, "how long" a play is "supposed to be."

Ms. Redgrave is undoubtedly one of the finest living stage actors, Ms. Didion is one of the finest writers working in English, and the play's director, David Hare, has done a fair amount of brilliant writing and acting himself. So needless to say, the production arrives with considerable ...weight.

The play's stregths lie, aside from the performance, in Joan's ability to juggle the timeline of the story: where to start, where to give facts and figures, where to give the narrative the gravity it needs. And, of course, on Joan's scalpel-like insight into her own pain, and willingness to go there. There isn't much directing -- at least on the surface -- and I think that helps the show. You get the feeling that Vanessa is just talking, and periodically has been told to stand up, or sit down, or let her hair down--none of it seems distracting, or forced.

One of the things that makes the performance so amazing is Vanessa's ability to embody the entire play at all times. You just get the feeling that she knows the ending--and of course she does--but that's also what makes a great storyteller. To know all the details, all the outcomes, and still remain in the moment.

I think, frankly, it's about 10 minutes too long. And perhaps they'll shave a bit off before it opens tomorrow night. Toward the end of the play, Vanessa produces Joan's book itself, and reads from a page or two. I don't like this idea at all. It immedaitely removed the veil of theater from the experience. Of course, it would have been ridiculous to have Vanessa actually try to immitae Joan's physicality, her speech patterns. But the entire monologue up to this point is a direct line to her consciousness--that it is Vanessa doesn't matter, because the story is so immediate and so real. But as soon as we're given an image from the real world--a book waiting at home on my shelf--the magic bubble bursts and we're left with Vanessa's face pointed down, into the pages of a book which looks every so small on that big empty stage, reading words rather than experiencing the words. It was the only part of the show which, to me, fell flat.

The set is brilliant--and quite minimal. A chair set center. And scrims painted with great swaths of black, white and grey, which fall from the ceiling, disappearing into the slats on the floor. Thus, the stage becomes deeper and blacker as the play continues.

I would like to see it again, in a few months, when it's finally opened and the reviews have either burned off or quieted down. Seeing a show like this, something so anticipated, it certainly has an energy to it. The entire house was buzzing--although I was perhaps the youngest person there.

So: Congratulations, Ms. Didion.

Quote of the Week

"How do you cook bacon? I fuck up so much damn bacon, you would not believe."

--Greenmarket customer.

John Waters on Weddings / My Friend Michael on My Future

In this article, in the March 26, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Mr. Waters expresses my sentiments exactly:

"Weddings are never fun. You cannot have that much fun with your friends and your family all together, spending that much money. You are putting an unfair burden on your romance by imagining that this ridiculous Hallmark-greeting-card love thing is actually going to work. I don't understand the whole process: the poor girl has to go out and buy, with her own money, some dress that she will never wear again; you go out with the man the night before and he is allowed to get blow jobs from hookers. It seems to me that's a reason to break up with someone, not to marry him. And the idea that it's supposed to be the happiest day of your life? I had a big sixtieth birthday party. What's the difference? You pay for a big party and you have fun at it. But I didn't expect that it was going to make me fifty again."

Also, in an email sent to me this morning, my dear friend Michael, channels my future NPR interview. He wrote this:

NPR: So your … latest … book of essays discusses the time … in your life … when you worked 17 jobs, including shilling …. syrup at the Union Square Farmer’s …. market. What was that period …. like for you?

LH: What was it not like? It was everything and nothing. I barely remember it, yet there it was.

NPR: It’s really … powerful, the chapter on the sexy … syrup bottle. How did that change … life for you? Your … perspective …

LH: Sex changes everything.

NPR: Do you miss … that sense … of … chaos?

LH: Oh I have chaos now. In fact, I need to wrap this up so I can make my Howard Stern interview and my Annie Leibowitz shoot. Are we done here?

First Paragraph

This paragraph was the first one I wrote for my novel, Yield. It would have been written in the fall of 1998, or perhaps winter 1999. The paragraph has since been excised from the manuscript, but I've been flirting with it lately--wondering if the energy of these words, if not these words themselves, still comes through in the book's current incarnation. It feels early to me, crammed with ideas that aren't fully explored, that aren't finished. But I love something about it. Perhaps because it was the first time I ever read something I'd written and thought to myself: There's a novel in here somewhere....

When I began this it wasn’t about violence. It wasn’t about fear, or obsession, or compulsion, or sex, or digression. It was really about progress. One can’t always see where a thing such as this is headed, but one can easily look back and see what it is so far. I wonder about our capacity for violence, and our capacity for pain. Now, looking back, I see the limit lies far beyond the line you might draw for yourself and say: I refuse to go that far. Still, in the early morning hours, so still that even the birds are still sleeping, when I’m slipping out of his apartment, out of her fancy walk-in closet, out of the CEO’s office, I can smell the blood and I can smell the brown sweaty stench of soiled underwear, and I can smell the fear seething up and out from the hollows of my body. In the movies (I think) they say don’t look back. Mostly I don’t. But sometimes.

The Soundtrack of Your Life

I adore easily completed, vaguely meaningful, and technology-incorporating tasks such as this meme. Put your iTunes on shuffle, and let 'er rip. Now you've got the next 18 songs to underscore, literally, a series of scenes in the movie of your life. I've adopted Alex's additions, Coming Out and Leaving Home, but I've changed the order a bit, to suit my preferred narrative structure. We're taught not to begin with someone waking up, right?

Also, the role of me in the movie of my life will be played by a mostly-naked Daniel Radcliffe, who will perfect my East Tennessee accent, as well as gain and lose the same 15 pounds over and over, thus winning him an Oscar. In his acceptance speech, he will shout my name over the play-off music and everyone will say "Too Little, Too Late" in the papers the next morning.

Title suggestions, anyone?


Opening Credits -- Liar, by the Cranberries, live in 1994
This is from an unknown bootleg I have of theirs from back in the day. The intro is killer, perfect mid-90s pop, and at this point during the exercise I feel as if my computer knows how to excite an audience.

First Day of School -- Anticipate, by Ani Difranco from 2002, 11/04 Paradise, CA
"for every hand extended / another lies in wait / keep your eye on that one / anticipate." I cannot say enough about what Ms. Difranco has brough to my life. This blog post is the best I can do. This song isn't nearly one of my favorites, but I'll take it.

Coming Out -- Here I Am by Emmylou Harris
Perfection, I say! This further illustrates the symbiosis I have with my laptop. Something amazing is happening to Emmylou's voice as she gets older. It's becoming fainter, it cracks easily. It's so beautiful--nobody's recording like that anymore. In this scene, I go from place to place, coming out, and it has the look and feel of Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich when she was going around town to tell everybody how much money they won from the lawsuit.

First Love -- A Lack of Color, by Death Cab for Cutie
"If you feel discouraged / that there's a lack of color here / please don't worry lover / it's really bursting at the seams / absorbing everything / the spectrum's a to z." Here I am again, overly concerned about the way some emotion is perceived, and thus I have to process.

First Song -- Dawn, by Cinematic Orchestra
I'm not sure what sort of song this would make for your first. There is no beat, and no words, only a wonderous drone for about four minutes. Maybe this first song leads to a sex scene, which later leads to the....

Breakup -- Time Will Do the Talking by Patty Griffin
"I change the lock on the door / I learn how to take a little more / I can outrun all of the devils here / But never the doubt." All hail the church of Patty Griffin. It's an instant-conversion policy, I believe.

Prom -- Danger, by Erykah Badu
For some reason, at my prom I decide to go rob a bank or maybe shoot some people. "Thinkin bout lives that you've taken / All the love you've forsaken / Niggas gon' get they fuckin head blown."

Driving -- Alone But Not Lonely, by Mary Chapin Carpenter
Then I'm driving a long stretch of dark road, while on the lam. But I'm okay. I got my Mary C.C. to guide me: "There are moments in time that are meant to be held / Like fragile, breakable things / There are others that pass us, you can't even tell / Such is their grace and their speed."

Flashback -- Since You Been Hard to Find, Kelly Clarkson vs. American Analog Set
This a great mash-up by somebody. I "archived" it from the WWW.

Waking Up -- Spring Haze, by Tori Amos, 2005 Manchester UK
"i found out where my edge is / and it bleeds into where you resist / and my only way out / is to go so far in" Tori's music is like an IV line directly into her consciousness. Hook me up, and I'm following her, wherever she wants to go. Fun places, dark places. I trust her completely.

Leaving Home -- Star Guitar, by Chemical Brothers
Have you seen the video Michel Gondry did for this song? The versions of it on YouTube are all badly converted, so you miss a lot of the greatness. So check one of them out here, but then imagine me on that train.

New Love -- Black Heart Today, by Amy Ray, bootlegged from 2005 4/19, NYC
I'm not sure what these lyrics are supposed to mean in this scene. "Take this meanness out of me / Take this meanness out of me / Take this meanness out of me."

Wedding -- Both Hands (dance mix), by Ani Difranco.
Now my iTunes is laughing at me.

Birth Scene -- Irresistible Bitch, by Prince
It's still laughing. Only this time, The Gods are laughing, too.

Final Battle -- Here Comes the Flood -- Peter Gabriel
"When the flood calls / You have no home, you have no walls / Dont be afraid to cry at what you see." This scene will be played mostly in silence, except for Peter's voice. At the end of it, everyone would be breathless and regretfull.

Death Scene -- Another Part of Me, by Michael Jackson
This is the version from Captain EO, the 3D movie that was at Disneyland for years and years. I was (read: am) so jealous of Anjelica Huston as the Supreme Leader.

Funeral Song -- Any Way You Want It, by Journey.
Okay, this is getting ridiculous.

Final Credits -- Lay Down, by Floetry
Somebody's getting busy right after my funeral? I'm hoping it's a throng of sobbing queens, who have an orgy on the steps of the Capital Building, one final act of civil (and totally hot) disobedience.

Let's just spend a little time,
Do a little more
Share what's in our hearts
Give each other all
Nothing more to do,
Lying right here with you
Let's just lay down

Hey Mario, Amanda and Michael, you're tagged. And you too, Rob, because Ted already tagged you and I can't wait to see what fabulousness your iTunes churns out.

Open Letters, Vol. 4

Dear Gays, or anyone else otherwise uninclined to talk sports,

It's actually very easy to talk sports. For example, with strangers at the bodega, or your doorman, or whomever might engage you in such boring conversation. Here are some tips for how to get through it without embarrasing errors.

1) Ask a lot of rhetorical questions. If someone says to you, "Did you see the game last night?" you can just say something like "Man, can you believe that?" or "What was he thinking?"

2) Make sweeping, general statements about the future of sports: "Bah, I give up on the whole thing!"

3) Appear nostalgic for the past: "Nobody's playing like they used to."

Yours truly,

Lee

Rereading Holleran

One of my copies--I have two, of course--of Andrew Holleran's debut novel Dancer from the Dance bears an inscription which reads: "To Ray and Mark, Christmas 1978. From Curt & Jim." It's one of my favorite books, as objects go, for the love, the intimacy that shines through it--from one gay couple to another, written in the year that I was born. I wonder about those four men sometimes, about their togetherness and maybe their breakups. I wonder if they are even still alive.

I was inspired to re-read the novel, having recommended it to a friend in Paris, and later realizing that I hardly remembered it, save for the general direction of the plot, and the notion that it was perhaps the first book that I read after I moved to New York, and now, nearly ten years later, perhaps it was time to see how things might have changed.

I've written my own novel now, about processing violence in a culture where you feel like the prey--where you are the prey--and, ultimately, about learning to recognize yourself. So when I started reading Dancer from the Dance again, I was surprised, shocked rather, to see how much the novel had informed my early work on the book, my thinking about it, and maybe even--dare I say it--shades of character, and narrative.

Take this, from the opening pages:

Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don't want to know WHAT THEY DO.....And the story of a boy's love for a boy will never capture the world's heart as the story of a boy's love for a girl. (Or a boy's love for his DOG--if you could tell that story again, this country would make you rich as Croesus!)

And a few sentences later:

"So (a) people would puke over a novel about men who suck dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would demand it be ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give in to them?

I must have taken this as a challenge, an immediate directive. Because I've now written a violent and/or tragic novel of men who do Other Things, and when asked by friends and boyfriends what I really planned to do with my novel, as uncommercial as it is, I basically recounted this same speech about a boy's love for a girl. And lord knows (somehow) the goddamn Marley and Me sold plenty of copies.

(None of these speeches actually answered their question. But what else can one say, except: I wrote this thing. It came out of me. I had no choice in the matter.)

It's fascinating to read a gay novel about desire--is there any other kind?--that takes place before AIDS. But something about the novel isn't sitting right with me.

I have, on another shelf, Larry Kramer's Faggots, published in the same year. Kramer's view of homosexuals in NYC at the time is far less romantic, and yet how is it that I still believe Kramer loves gay men more than Holleran does. That he loves being gay, everything about it, the beauty, the tragedy, the mundane. Take this, from a speech he gave in November 2004: "I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all these things." 'Nuff said.

But sometimes, when I look at all of Holleran's work together, the novels stacked against each other on my shelf, as beautiful, as important, and as singularly enjoyable as they are....they all feel somewhat like an apology. I can't help but feel the regret in between the lines. With Grief, Holleran's most recent novel, I think he finally shakes off that pity, that sad world of loss in which all the other of his books float. Ironically, the book is about loss and death and sadness.

I can't remember how Dancer ends, except I know what is given to the reader on the first few pages: that the narrator is going to clean out Malone's Fire Island apartment after he has died. Or disappeared.

So, I read on.

Nominated!

From Boys to Men, the anthology in which my essay "Inheritance" appears, has been nominated for a Lamda Literary Award for Best Anthology. Hooray! Big Time Congratulations to Rob & Ted.

It's really quite an amazing collection, including great essays by Alex Chee, Joe Jervis, Mike McGinty, Eric Karl Anderson, and, of course, many others.

You can buy your own copy here.

The Unexpected

I have a friend in Chicago who told me that she's started painting. Some time ago, her apartment was burglarized--thankfully, she said, the only thing they took was the laptop, which, in my case, would be the pinnacle of horror--but when the policemen were there writing up the report, they paused to comment on her new work. How strange it was, she wrote to me, that the first people to see the paintings were strangers, and she hadn't even given herself enough time to sit with the idea.

I'm always interested in the combination of faith and uncertainty that artists must put up with. Or, rather, maybe uncertainty is part of faith--that's what faith is, right? Either way, you have to trust yourself, trust your process, and trust your instincts. All of this, of course, in the back of your mind as you push the paint across the canvas, or pull the clay up from the table. Or push the keys to make the words. There really is no difference. Meanwhile, our self-doubt is also creeping in from all sides, pooling like water anywhere it can collect.

Another friend of mine, who's now living in Seattle, was showing me some pieces from this new series--Shannon's a photographer, but not always. She works in all sorts of media, and is even devising a massive community-centered event on her home street in Brooklyn which, if it ever actually moves through the urban bureaucracy, could manage to really amaze. This new series she's doing--it's pictures of films taken with her cell phone camera. Only it's a million times more interesting than that sounds. The grainy-ness, the removal, the intimacy and immediacy. Tonight, over my fish and chips and her bison burger at Fanelli's, she showed me a few of them. "I can't decide what size they should be?" she kept saying. "Bigger," I said. "Eight by ten." Then I had to clarify. "Feet. Eight by ten feet." I always want photographs to be huge.

Last weekend, Kip and I end up watching a new documentary about Sally Mann, "What Remains," and I'm loving watching her figure things out. I love watching her look. Seeing the way she looks at something, framing it, cropping it, creating focus.

How is it that the art-struggle is so universal, and yet so personal? So mystical? What is the universe trying to tell me by giving me all this evidence?