Month: April 2011

Categories
Malibu

Robby!

Robby, the twin that hung around in the womb a full twenty minutes longer than Miles is urging me to go to breakfast at the bottom of the hill.  It is 9am and it is already very hot here in Malibu.

The dog is sprawled on his bed in the sun.

Miles is on set somewhere nearby.

Last night Armand popped in and we took Robby’s car and had dinner at Dukes.  Dukes, the restaurant of little culinary interest at the bottom of the hill.  Why?  Mainly because I found one of the waiters attractive.  I met him in Starbucks last week and he told me that he would ‘hook us up’.  I didn’t eat anything because the food looked so rancid.  They had burgers and Caesar Salad and calamari and beer.

We were not hooked up.

Yesterday afternoon, after my long walk with Miles down Rambla Pacifico, my Australian friend Daniel turned up with a bottle of white wine.  I poured him a glass and looked at it longingly.  Crisp white wine on a warm Californian afternoon.

We have many friends in common in Sydney and it was so nice to hear all the news.  I am sure if I just looked on Facebook I could have found out for myself but it was lovely listening to him tell me all about everything and everybody…the weather and the burgeoning Australian economy.   The drought has ended, the reservoirs are full.

We headed into Malibu where we ate lunch at the Deli.  The once very fat man who runs the Deli has lost 130lbs just by NOT eating white bread.  He looks so much happier.

After lunch, as we were wandering around the absurdly priced shopping Mall, a beautiful man with a bleeding dog begged me to tell him where the vet was.  His beautiful labrador had been bitten in her face by a Rattle Snake. My worst nightmare.

I pointed him in the right direction.

He had been sucking the poison out of her face.  I hope she survived.

Armand stayed long after I went to bed.  Teaching Robby how to use his synthesiser.

This morning I squeezed fresh grapefruit from my tree.  Ruby red.  Delicious.

Categories
Rant

Agave

Today I am staying at the house all day.

An Australian friend may come over but if he doesn’t it’s no big deal.

I like being here.  It’s a beautiful spring day.  The garden is blooming.  Sadly, the HUGE agave planted just as you enter the main part of the garden is beginning to send out it’s once in a life time flower spike which means that after it has bloomed it will die.  I am going to miss it.  It looks like a huge spear of asparagus.

The twins are out all day.  Robby is at an audition and darling Miles has a job interview with a production company.  I am so proud of them.  They work so hard, they are both so focused on making their Hollywood dream come true.

As much as I didn’t want the role of mother hen I actually quite enjoy nurturing them both.  Cooking, washing etc.  In turn they make me laugh and insist that I jump in the car and go with them when ever they go on an adventure.

This morning Miles and I walked to the PCH down the new road and had breakfast.  We met a couple from Carbon who had lost their dog.  My heart wept for them.

We earned our breakfast with that exhausting 5 mile walk.

Yesterday I watched Dorian Gray with Toby at his home in Hollywood.  I am thinking of recutting it.  We are going to recut it.  Parts of that film are so clever, mostly the parts Joel Plotch cut.

We ate lunch at Joan’s on Third with Miami Henri.  Roast chicken and grilled vegetables.  We ate some very unpalatable mushroom salad.

After lunch I sat with John who I had not seen for a month or so.  Not for any other reason that he has been on a long family holiday.  I have been in NYC.  We had a great deal to catch up on.  I told him about my session with Jill on Monday.  I found seeing her very rewarding.  I had forgotten just how a therapist can take the sting out of ones tail.

I told him what was going on in NYC with The Penguin, he looked very pleased with himself.  “I told you so.”  He never ever liked The Penguin.   The Penguin knew John didn’t approve.

Yet, for all of his self-congratulation he was compassionate and kind.   He doesn’t/didn’t want to see me suffer but equally he could see what was going on from the very beginning.

I talked with Jill about this next touchy subject and shared it with John.

Can I mention the touchy subject?

Nope.

Apart from the touchy subject Jill called me a ‘late bloomer’.  She said that my heart had been broken.  We talked about love addiction.  Making a person your higher power rather than God.  We talked about going into Pine Grove and getting my power back.  I talked about having no consequences…or at least any that scare me.  We talked about nihilism.

I don’t know if I can mention the touchy bit.  It is so freshly revealed.

I can’t.  All I can say is…it’s about grieving.

Dan called to tell me that the shelves I designed for his apartment look spectacular.

I was in bed by 10.30.   Up at 5.30 this morning.

Categories
Malibu

Happy Days

Categories
Malibu

BAFTA

Let’s not forget shall we that I was nominated for a BAFTA for my film AKA.  However insane you might think me now…there was a time when I could get things done and to a certain extent I still can.  I only mention this because some people would like to forget that it ever happened…rendering me and my life utterly useless.

So, I decided to fetch out all of my awards put them on my desk.

Last day of the vile tasting chinese herbal medicine yesterday.   No more foul-smelling pee.

There seems to be a small window of creative opportunity that I can mine the first thing in the morning.  Just after I have had my coffee.  If I am lucky I can spin this into a day of writing.  If I fail to act then I tend not to write a thing.

I bought a small publication at The New Museum called For Lonely Adults Only.  A pictorial diary by Regis Trigano.  It is very beautiful.  Documenting this gay artists various hookups.

I feel sad.

Set adrift in an ocean of self-pity.  FUCK!

I am often asked where one can buy my version of Dorian Gray.  Well, we only really played it at festivals.  When the cast becomes more famous (as they are doing) we may very well release it.  It is proving nicely.  One day it will be released.

I am in LA.  At the house.  Another huge rattle snake in the garden resting on the step.  I hit it with spade but it slithered away.   Thankfully the Little Dog didn’t see it.   He may very well have chased it.

The twins are a joy.  So sweet to me.  The house was perfectly well-kept when I got home.  The larder well stocked and the fridge full of things I would never eat but hey ho.

I bought the most beautiful new hat.  A Derby from Stronghold on Abbot Kinney.  Dinner at Nobu with Miami Henri.   He looked better in my hat than I did.  See above.  Damn.

Sharon S came by and I made cauliflower cheese and pasta ripiena.  The twins need to learn how to cook.  I taught them how to make a roux then showed then how to turn that into a delicious cheese sauce.  They don’t even know how to boil pasta!  Miles makes the most inedible, lumpy, often burned scrambled egg.

I forced them to watch Rachel Maddow.  They are self-proclaimed born again christian republicans.  Once they understand what is really going on they are amazed at how the world really is.

One of them said, “Obama is trying to cut funding for education.”  No, I grimaced, he’s not.

The other said, “Is there a Republican Rachel Maddow?”  I balked.

I think that they were anti-abortion.  Hmmm.  Not for much longer.  I feel like Socrates corrupting the youth of Greece.  Let’s hope that I don’t end up like him.  Oh why not?

Will be back in NYC in two weeks then Cannes, after Cannes I will spend a week or so in London and Whitstable.  I bought a ticket to Sydney for next winter.   I need me some Southern Hemisphere.

This is great!  Please listen to this lecture from the good people at TED.

Categories
art Gay

Cannes

I thought that you might enjoy this picture as much as I enjoyed creating it.  Inspired by Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.  My Hasidic Easter Bonnet.

Spent yesterday planning my trip to Cannes.   Of course, I love Cannes when everyone is there for the film festival.  I am deliberately revisiting all the places that we visited together so that I can expunge him from the memory of the locale.

As NYC becomes less emblematic of those painful days with him and more joyful as I remake this city with the other.  The streets are no longer associated with those miserable days of fruitless longing.

The sunshine is mine and mine alone.  I love the streets!

Could you imagine anything more ghastly than sitting in an office day after day for thirty years with minimal vacation?   Looking forward to retirement?   Eww.

My therapist and I are planning my escape.  An escape that will include the possibility of a return to what I used to enjoy:  peace of mind.

On Saturday morning I saw a young mother drop her baby on its face.   The baby was fine.  Mainly made of gristle they are more resilient than they look.  Sturdy little things.  The young mother, more from embarrassment, screamed out “My baby!”   The restaurant hushed, her other child started crying, her own mother with whom she was having breakfast, sat immobilized by fear.  There was, however, something about her scream that reminded me about the moment the Big Dog was hit by the truck.

The trauma associated with that ghastly moment lives with me, shapes my thinking and holds me hostage to the notion that I must never be hurt like that again.

When we were interviewing old people last month we met an old man who told us that he couldn’t own pets any longer because he fears the depth of emotional pain that comes with a beloved pets death.

I know what he means.  The pain felt around the death of anything you love, the loss of anything one cares about (as one gets older) is without parallel.

In many ways I am more numb now than I have ever been.  Less able to feel for fear of being badly hurt.  How could I have got this far without…and then I thought back.  I remembered the excruciating pain of being dropped again and again as a small baby/infant/child.   Suck it up Duncan.

Sunday.  Birthday party with friends.  I ate too much cake.  I was wearing a lilac cashmere sweater that garnered some reaction.  “That’s risky.” A rather bland looking woman commentated.  I smiled and thanked her as if she had just complimented me.

The baby was fine.   A little redness on the forehead but after a few moments of crying he/she was smiling and gurgling.

Incidentally, after all my Jay Jopling bashing for not being political there is a show at Mason’s Yard called NEW ORDER that looks very promising.  This work looks very impressive though a little austere.  Where is Max Beckmann when you need him?

I am desperate to see this.  I hope it is as subversive as it looks.

I have included the gallery’s incredibly verbose description below.  Who writes this shit?  Look at the way they over use/mis-use the word polemical.

Masons Yard 8 Apr—14 May 2011

‘The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle.’
Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetics of Politics’ (2006)

The relationship between aesthetics and politics has been a polemical issue for much of the history of art. In particular, the late twentieth century saw an overt politicisation of critical discourse amidst collapsing colonial hegemonies, global wars and the emergence of civil rights movements across the world. This was coupled with artists questioning the principles of modernism opening up the debate as to what constituted a work of art. A number of key figures emerged on the international art scene, whose practice specifically dealt with issues of power structures, race, injustice, gender and dissent. The works featured in ‘New Order‘ share a focus on the transformation of social or ideological structures that shape experience, and in different ways they explore existing communal, political and physical constructs of the everyday.

The formal geometry and commonplace materials of Miroslaw Balka‘s ‘Kategorie’ (2005) lend the work a pared-down aesthetic generally connected with Minimalist and Conceptual art. A six-metre long, two-metre high tunnel is interrupted by five fine coloured threads, suspended from rotating motors on the ceiling. The work is rich in associative historical and political references, such as the traumatic memory of wartime atrocities in his native Poland which Balka has addressed throughout his practice. The colours of the strands – red, violet, green, pink and black – are the colours assigned to uniforms identifying different categories of prisoner in the concentration camps (red for political prisoners; violet for Jehovah’s Witnesses; green for criminals; pink for homosexual and bisexual men; and black for Romany people, alcoholics and individuals with learning disabilities, among others).

Part of Doris Salcedo‘s ongoing series in which found domestic furniture is used as a vehicle to explore the traumatic political history of her native Colombia, ‘Untitled’ (2008) features tables and wardrobes, conjoined and partially entombed in concrete. The re-assembled components of the hybrid form of the sculpture, each through use embedded with a material history, function as silent witnesses to implied personal and collective narratives.

Rooted in black urban experience, David Hammons‘ practice comments on the iniquities present within social, political and economic systems. Critiquing the relationship between high art and the street, his sculptures often feature found objects laden with cultural association. Hair clippings swept from the floor of a Harlem barbershop are fashioned into a cornrow hairstyle upon a smooth oval rock in ‘Rock Head’ (2000), while in ‘Which Mike Would You Like to Be Like?’ (2001), Hammons takes three vintage microphones that serve as surrogates for three prominent figures in recent popular culture – Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan – referencing the limited range of role models for young African-American men.

The densely-layered, collaged paintings of Mark Bradford also incorporate materials salvaged from an urban setting, including torn bill posters or newsprint. The abstract compositions reference alternative cartographies that burgeon within cities, such as the spread of an economic underclass, the movement of immigrant communities and race relations. In ‘Strange Fruit’ (2011), fragments of text drawn from the local ‘merchant posters’ Bradford frequently uses echo across the painting, while the title is taken from the protest song about the lynching of African-Americans in the 1930s, sung by Billie Holiday.

In Julie Mehretu’s ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ (2008), a swirling vortex of shapes and marks on a grey ground, overlaid with architectural passages, give the sense of a gathering storm. Made on the occasion of the inaugural New Orleans Biennial in 2008, the painting conveys the destructive power of uncontrollable nature within a stricken cityscape, mired in bureaucratic chaos.

In 1969, Anselm Kiefer photographed himself in a variety of imposing locations (often in settings evocative of German Romantic imagery) making the Nazi salute. The resulting series, entitled ‘Besetzungen’ (‘Occupations’), provocatively confronted the blanking out of history and questioned the collective guilt of an entire post-war generation in Germany. In the works presented in the current exhibition, ‘Heroische Sinnbilder’ (2011), Kiefer revisits the iconography of his own art history, as a means of investigating the resonance of totalitarian symbols across the passage of time.

Categories
art

New Museum

Aaron, my happy-go-lucky NYU side kick and sweet friend met me for breakfast at Veselka.  We ate scrambled egg and sausage.   I had the Chinese brew to fortify me.

We walked to The Bowery, stopping in at the Bowery Hotel for a nose before heading to the New Museum where I bought an ‘artists membership’.  We made our way to the 5th floor by elevator to the education suite then walked down the elegant stairs from gallery to gallery.

[wpvideo Ux78fqs5]

George Condo:Mental States.  George, never a great favorite of mine.   Too prolific.  Too gimmicky.  Unfocused.

I was wrong.

I actually really loved the great wall of work on the 4th Floor.   A huge salon type hanging, magnificent, bold and confronting.

I adored the Queen paintings, loved the monochrome line paintings, loved the magnificence.

Perhaps he deserves the great wall of work?  Few artists do.

Salon hanging?  What’s that?  You may well ask…

The Salon de Paris, established in 1725, was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Between 1748–1890 The Salon de Paris was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world.

Called `Salon hanging´or `Petersburger hanging´ pictures of all sizes are hung closely side by side and above each other, sometimes in several rows from the ground to the ceiling with no obvious curatorial rational.

This exhibition style was fashionable until the first decade of the 20th century when curators and academics like Julius Meier-Graefe suggested a more reduced and conceptual hanging method – leading to the gospel of the`white cube´.

Salon hanging never disappeared completely.

Nowadays curators choose it from time to time for specific presentations like the upper gallery of the George Condo show.

The lower gallery showed the work of Lynda Benglis.  I enjoyed this unusual, eclectic show presenting mostly work from the 1970’s.   I will go back and look at it more closely next week.

My great friend Maury Rubin has one of his very popular Bird Bath bakery/coffee shops at the New Museum.   We drank his coffee and ate his pretzel croissant.

On the way home we stopped in at Salon 94 to see the remarkably over priced work of SoCal photographer Katy Grannan.

I was moved by the video installation in the basement, by far the most interesting work in the gallery.

The woman who plays Marilyn Monroe lived near me in Hollywood and I would see her daily, pulling on her tatty wig, wearing her sad, soiled, Seven Year Itch dress, pan handling outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

If the picture of her as you enter the gallery wasn’t so absurdly priced I would have bought it.  The best thing about this show is just how much dignity art has bestowed upon these little more than fancy dressed vagrants.

The gallery boy…Jacob.  So sweet.   Worth going back for.

Later, Dan and I headed up town to see a preview of The Motherfucker With The Hat.  A very poorly staged, almost televisual play about Alcoholics Anonymous starring Chris Rock and that guy from Station Agent.  There were some good lines…when you could hear them.

The problem with these ‘actors’ from TV is that none of them can project.  All of them perform from their throats and I predict none of them will have a voice by the end of the week.

Live performance in a theatre (without a microphone inches from the mouth) needs technical training and rehearsal.  None of their voices were warmed up.  Consequently, many of the adequately written lines were lost.

Odd listening to a play about sobriety.  Odd.

Dinner at Italian restaurant.

Met up with Aaron and Woody and ended up at Bedlam on Ave C where Bravo’s Andy Cohen (of all people) was ‘spinning’.  Met Dana and her hot friend Matt who has a web site called www.fridaypuppy.com.  Had a great time.   Many intriguing men to chat with.

In bed by 3am.  I drank 4 (not very good for me) Red Bull.

I love New York!

Categories
art

jekyll/hyde

Stephen Petronio and Hamish Bowles

Yesterday:  an interesting day of fascinating contrasts.   At 5pm I had the first of what I am sure will be many conversations with the mean (read aggressive) litigator.

Regardless of what I now feel about The Penguin I don’t really want to see this strange litigator man unzip his Penguin belly and scrape out the rancid innards.   But, I suppose, that’s what has to happen if we are going to get me some settlement.  Evisceration.

I woke up feeling like Dr Jekyll and went to bed as Mr. Hyde.  Or vice versa.  One wonders, when one wakes up, who will be driving the bus.  Will I be in a good or bad mood?  Will I feel vindictive or conciliatory?

Earlier in the day I had a brief conversation with CP who thought I was grumpy and urged me to go to a meeting.  I went to the 12.30 University Place AA meeting and felt markedly better.  Good call CP!

Derek Lloyd Saathoff and I met with ‘A List’ Executive Producer at Elmo.  Charming man.  He drank lychee with vodka which was a somethingtini?  Can’t remember the name.  I drank 5 double espresso.  It was the first time I had publicly stated or engaged publicly with D.   I will, unless told otherwise, start writing about this oddly satisfying, burgeoning ‘fake’ relationship.

By the time we got to the Joyce Theatre to see the premiere of Underland we were all over each other.   Well, he was all over me.  He is a really good kisser.  Though, I must admit…public kissing is not really my thang.  In this rarefied NYC milieu we seemed to know just about everyone.   Kim Light, Hamish Bowles, Cyndi Stivers…and others.

Stephen Petronio’s Underland is a vividly surging work, inspired by the dark, bittersweet songs of Australian balladeer Nick Cave.  Dancers hurl through space with razor-sharp precision, fiercely energized one moment, sensually lyrical the next.

After party at Hotel Griffou organized by old friend Mandie Erickson.   “Everything I touch turns to gold!”  She poked me in the chest.  Delicious dancers from the show and glamorous men with names like Tito and Phillipe.

Derek drank two cocktails and became immediately drunk.  I pushed him into a cab and went back to the party.  What a mess.

The food at the Griffou was excellent though the roasted cauliflower made the dining area at the back smell like farts.

Stephen Petronio on good form.  I told him that the show obviously reminded one of  Michael Clark’s work from the 90’s and he told me that they dated for 4 years.  I didn’t know that!

I refered to Stephen’s BF but was corrected…”My husband…”

Hamish and I discussed the Balenciaga show in San Francisco.  He seems really happy with it.  More space and access to better gowns.  I will make the effort to see it and take my poet friend Randall Mann.

A sparkling night out.  D home early to bed as has to work final day today.

Dropped in at Bowery Bar on way home.

[wpvideo 2MgHXX7U]

Categories
Rant

The Penguin


Torrential rain.  Lightening.  Veselka.  East Village.  NYC.

Every day in NYC is unusual.  Most every day in LA is usual.  NYC, Paris and London are cities where one is forced to expect the unexpected.

So it was that yesterday, after I walked the dog, I made my way to China Town to find sulphur soap.  I popped into the Family Court to get a feel of what to expect next month.  Another tawdry location.   It takes a long time to file a petition.  It can take all day.  The Penguin must have sat in there for a long time.  It would have given him ample time to reflect on his shortcomings.

Again I had to walk up Varick St risking bumping into him.  The Subway at the back of my building must surely disgorge him every single working day.  I had a late breakfast with Pierre.  I met with my lawyer who was on sparkling form.    This evening we discuss strategy with the very expensive litigator.   The expensive, mean litigator.

The Penguin is forefront in my thoughts.  I spoke to Jill and Drew the day before yesterday when I was feeling less stable.  Thankfully I feel good again.  Apparently it often happens that TV people are ensnared by crazed fans.   Drew was so helpful.

I sat in the steam room for an hour.  On my own.  I lay naked on the black marble, sweating and groaning in pain from the searing heat then, enduring a different agony, under the icy cold shower.  My heart pumping.  I lay resting under thick, white towels.

I had lunch with handsome Philippe and at 6.30 I met Ross at cafe Gitane fresh from his weekend in Barcelona.  He is such a funny little dude.  We ate their ‘signature’ avocado on toast and I drank hot chocolate.  A drunk, homeless man started talking to us.  He must have been 70 years old.  He shook my hand.  He told me that he respected those who could care for a dog.  My patience for humans is worn quite thin.  My compassion for any dog is evident.

I had my head shaved at the barbers on 9th Street.  Boris trimmed my beard a little too extremely.  I look like a Spanish conquistador.  I wanted to look good for my trip up town.

UP TOWN!

I have not been north of 30th Street for many years.  Remember when I first lived in NYC I found myself on Columbus and 86th.   The day I arrived was the only time I ever saw a man raise a firearm in anger.   That was years ago.

I took a cab.  That part of town looks less salubrious than it did when I lived there.  A bit broken.  Dinner with an Armenian friend of my lawyers at a greek restaurant on Columbus.  Lamb shank.  It was passable but nothing special.  We had a nice time.  After dinner he showed me his apartment: a few rooms carved out of a giant mansion that was once very beautiful.  Thick architrave,  cornices,  creaking stairways.

I fell asleep on his bed whilst he collated his resume.  Woke up at 1am.

On a whim I decided to walk home.  I walked via the Ace Hotel.  Thumping music.  Pretty boys.   Pretty girls.

82 blocks to contemplate.   An 82 block contemplation.

I thought a great deal about what The Penguin and I will say in court.  I was torn between two stalls:  pity for the boy and derision.   The more one finds out, the more one realizes that he mixed a catastrophic cocktail of deception/desire and would not stop until he got what he wanted.

He chose the wrong man to fuck with.  His timid, delicate, winsome, coquettish facade masking the hard assed sociopath that lay within.  He compartmentalized his life: home, family, perversions/drugs/drinking.

If only I had been like the others and just seen things his way.  Poor boy, trapped in a heterosexual relationship that he didn’t know how to escape from.   That girl paid half his rent so he could live an East Village life, cheat on her with endless men.

My heart bleeds for him.

I kind of blame his hapless parents.  No…I do blame his parents.  They are not idiots.

Then, when I am done being angry, I imagine how embarrassed he must be that the whole world knows that he chose me of all people to come out to, to tell that he loved.  To be involved with.   What an idiot!

He doesn’t want you to see the picture I have of him sucking my cock.  My fat white cock in his mouth.

At least with most/all of my ex’s they were equally abnormal.

He wants to re-write the past so I am no longer in it.  The Penguin will even attempt to censor this blog, challenge my first amendment rights.  Tricky, if you work for a publishing house that must surely enshrine the values of FREE SPEECH.  Nice press angle…for me.

Dinner conversation inevitably turned to him.

Almost every gay will ask if his ex gf suspected that he was cheating on her, then congratulate him for an excellent piece of deception.

The view that all women are essentially worthless to gay men, indeed maybe even a threat…is a view commonly held but very rarely articulated.  The Penguin’s relationship with his ex ‘best friend’ (how do you treat your ‘best friend so?) was an excellent example of how gay men abuse women.

He had no regard for her.

One might say that all men who cheat are the same…but I am not interested in what heterosexuals get up to.  I am interested in the way gay men treat women.  Since interviewing so many of them for our film I understand better that gay men still have little or no respect for women.  They treat them like brood mares when going through the surrogacy procedure.  They are expunged from the surrogacy story.

They might have fag hag friends who dote on them but to me that is the most lethal symbiosis.  A no win situation.  Like marrying Jesus.

By the time I got home it was late, late, late.  I took the dog to the park.  I cadged a cigarette and smoked it.

The Penguin was bullied as a child for his short stature and beak-like nose.  His fingers are fused together, resulting in flipper-like hands.  He waddles like a penguin when he walks.  He was forced as a child to always carry an umbrella by his over-protective mother.   In keeping with his pretensions of being a refined gentleman, he prefers to wear formal wear.

Categories
Fashion

High Line

A dreamily beautiful day in NYC.  Mother’s Day at home in England.  My Mother’s sweet bf texted me so that I didn’t forget.

Met Ian for lunch.  Discussed press strategy for next month.   After lunch we walked the High Line which was such a treat.  We continued our afternoon in the West Village window shopping.  Marc Jacobs Men has moved which I found oddly disconcerting.

To tell you the truth I was less than great company.  Ian left me to my massage.   90$.   I sat in the steam room on my own sweating out the poison.  Maybe the Scientologists are right about the emotionally therapeutic effects of sweating.  I certainly felt less toxic after my stint in the steam.

I am being IRONIC about Scientology.

I had organized to meet Sean at 6pm but he was late so, thinking he had flaked, I started walking east.  He finally called as I was passing the O’Toole Building on 12th St near to where Joe and I lived when we lived in New York.

I have always liked that building.  It was designed by Albert C. Ledner in 1963.  Even though it now looks, from afar, terribly grubby…and from the street like something impregnable..it is a charismatic building up for demolition, that some are seeking to preserve.  Is it worth preserving?

In as much as it was one of the first buildings in the city to break with the Modernist mainstream it maybe deserves a second chance.  It is a significant work of architecture.

It was built to house the National Maritime Union, as the era of longshoremen and merchant sailors was nearing an end. Its glistening white facade and scalloped overhangs, boldly cantilevered over the lower floors, were meant to conjure an ocean voyage and a bright new face for the union.   Its glass brick base, once the site of union halls, suggests an urban aquarium.

Perhaps, as else where, the recession may end up saving this building if the West Village historical society doesn’t.

I digress.   I found myself standing on that corner at 7pm on a Sunday night.  After a few minutes everything around me just melted away.  The people, the cars…I found myself enjoying a rare moment of city silence.  Peace.

Sean arrived and we walked.

Dinner with Woodrow and Dan at Takihachi on Ave A.  I made a paper man out of the wrapper a straw comes in.   See above.

A cranberry and soda at that gay bar opposite.   I forgot the name.  Apparently Anderson Cooper’s boy friend owns it.  Or, is that an urban myth?  Anyhow, the experience was decidedly lackluster.  I looked at the vintage gay porn on the TV monitors and wondered why we play gay porn in gay bars.  Do we just want to remind ourselves why we are there, or…why we should be there?  The images of great gobs of cum shooting out of glistening penises seared into my brain all the way home.

Date night tonight.

Do you want to see something funny?

Don’t they look terrible on me?  Those severe glasses?

Categories
Gay

Pies and Thighs

Yesterday was fun.  Lunch with friends.  Met with my lawyer.  Drank far too much coffee.  I feel excited, a bit apprehensive, occasionally sad.   Compared to this time last year…who would have guessed?

Aaron dropped by at 8pm and we headed into Brooklyn for dinner.  I had underestimated the time so,  as we were ultimately headed for a gay bar thingy called The Metropolitan,  it turned out that we were in Brooklyn far too early.

So, we explored and ended up  in a sweet coffee shop further up Lorimer called the Second Stop cafe which served delicious coffee and good-looking baked goods.  It was nice to be out of Manhattan.  The scale and detail of Brooklyn somehow makes it feel as if it is a lot further from the city than it is.

We found a bar full of trendy straight people and Aaron ordered a whiskey and raspberry cocktail that smelt ok.  I found myself wondering what it would taste like.   I found myself congratulating myself that throughout this debacle I didn’t drink or take drugs.   I found myself hankering after a time when my head was less clouded.   I found solace in my continuing sobriety.

We ate a late dinner at Pies and Thighs.  It was OK.  Does it deserve its cult status?  I don’t think that the fried chicken is better that the 101 Thursday Fried Chicken Special in Hollywood.  Nor is it any better than Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles also in Hollywood.   It was just ok.  The deep fried pickles were inedible.  The home-made cherry pie was again..just ok.  Not a great deal on the plate and a bit mashed up.  I think our server was stoned or had spent the day surfing.  Tousled blond hair and vacant expression.

After dinner we walked back up Riggs to The Metropolitan.  We met some friends and their friends and had a fun night out.

This morning Aaron left and I walked the dog.   Jenny called and I called Hilary, Jess, Manu and John.

‘Just for Today’ is the mantra we repeat in AA.  Today and only today I am going to stay sober.   It can be applied to anything.

I am writing and in between writing I am trying to stay present.   I was looking forward to going into rehab next week.  I am not allowed my lap top or my phone.  I am not allowed anything that will distract me from the work I have to do.  Never mind.  I will check in after the 19th.