Categories
Love

Red Sofa

Dione Sofa

8am.  I didn’t go get the biopsy.  Something is stopping me.  I don’t want to know the truth.  Just like I didn’t want to know the truth about him.  Some truths are just too hard to face.

I am aware of the dull thump in my ball sack and in my lower back.  Like somebody is gripping my left testicle.

One of Jake’s friends wrote to me saying, and even though inaccurate, I really liked the quote, “We have all had diamonds thrown in our face.”   It was lyrical and charming.  He could have added darling to the phrase.  It would have worked perfectly.

Anyway, interesting day yesterday after I published the Irene blog.  She, of course, is threatening the IRS and an internet fraud investigation.   The problem is..I do my taxes, really thoroughly.  It’s not worth doing them any other way.   I am not feeling so feisty today.

I remain teachable.

Last night something rather remarkable happened.  I met a man a year and a half ago who is perhaps a dream of a guy.  That dream of that perfect man.  Beautiful in every way.  When we first met he explained that he was anxious about his sexuality, we had talked it through but nothing happened.  I had wondered about him occasionally, mentioned him to Jake even,  but had not contacted him.

Yesterday I received a blunt email from him asking if I wanted to explore his curiosity about men.

I thought about it for a nano second and invited him over.

So, last night we had a very steamy session with each other but I wasn’t engaged.  I felt distant, absent..and not really ready to have sex with anyone else.  I didn’t even want to kiss him. It is odd this morning to wake up with the smell of some other man on your fingers.   I knew that it had to happen sooner or later..somebody else but it’s still too early.   I tell you, I don’t envy men like Jake who can sport fuck but the healthy alternative is such a lengthy process.  We all agree that if I had been a sport fucker I would have been dead a very long time ago.

Why was his coming to see me last night so remarkable?  Because I was always warned in AA to be careful what I prayed for.  Getting what you want when God wants you to have it rather than when you want it can be very ungratifying.

Peter Doig painting in my bedroom 1982 Boom Boom Boom (The Sublime)

Is getting to know a man before you sleep with them so bizarre?   So when the moment happens, one is present and authentic?  After all,  Jake and I talked for months before we finally fell into each others arms.

Perhaps he can do that with anyone?  Perhaps a period of total abstinence is what I need?

I could have let things just stay the way they were, letting him tell me about his conquests but by the time we returned from Europe I just knew that merely having him in my life would be too disruptive.

I did not want that young man to stick around last night.  He left and I lay on the red Victorian sofa I have owned for twenty-six years.  I began to doze.  There was something very comforting about laying there.  The over stuffed arms, the familiarity.   The constant presence of that sofa in my life.  Dione bought it for me in Edinburgh in 1984.  It was on the street outside a junk shop and it was desperate to be loved.  I covered it in white ticking, the first of 4 times it has been reupholstered.  Jake was three when I bought that sofa.  Unexpectedly Dione’s daughter wrote to me yesterday.  She’s a sweet heart.

Things have given me more pleasure than the men I have loved.

So, the young man left the house at 2am.  I don’t think I’ll be seeing him again.

The picture at the top of the page was taken in my Whitstable house, the house that belonged to Peter Cushing.  The red sofa wearing it’s blue slip cover.

Categories
art Auto Biography

Picture Perfect

I wanted to post a few pictures. I want to remind myself that it has all been an incredible journey.

I wanted to include this one because I have a man’s legs wrapped around my shoulders. He is called Chris Boot. He was in South Africa with Tilda Swinton. Tilda came to the dinner thrown for me at Sundance when AKA played there. She came with Jamie Johnson.

Boom Boom Boom (The Sublime) 1982 Peter Doig

 You can see half of the Peter Doig painting I bought at his St Martin’s degree show.  It hung in my Furlong Road, Islington sittingroom until I was arrested.  At which point Doig decided to snatch it back and I never saw it again. It is probably worth in excess of $1, 000, 000 now.

Matt Rowe and Marie Palmer, we met at the Mercer Hotel in NYC with Mel C from the Spice Girls.  Matt had been one half of the duo who wrote all of their best tunes. New Years Eve 1999, Mercer Hotel with Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Alan Cummings and Fran Leibowitz. A cool very night.  Matt is still a great friend.

I’ve written loads about Jay Jopling in this blog. This is the night he met my sister Jessica.

Justin Lee-Aliston was my best gay friend in Whitstable. He was the sweetest boy. He killed himself a few months after he was gay bashed in Camberwell South London.  Here he is in happier times with my friend Tracy at the Island Wall, Whitstable house.

Celia Lyttleton, I can’t remember where we met but she is a doll and this picture was taken at a fancy dress party at the artist Glynn Boyd Hart’s house during the 1980’s.

Celia introduced me to the artist Ana Corbero at her Albermarle St gallery. She in turn introduced me to Colin Cawdor , the Thane of Cawdor-Macbeth. Duncan and Macbeth in NYC, in a sprawling apartment in Williamsburg. Long before anybody else was living there.

Our view.

Colin and Anna. Now, Colin lives in the North of Scotland in his castle, a castle he had to wrestle from his step-mother. Ana lives in Spain with her husband. I remember that he dressed Ana in Azzadine Alaia-and the moths ate clean through her fur coat.

I’ll post some more soon.

Categories
Rant

Renters

After yesterday’s blog purge I felt a whole heap better.  I can now concentrate on my lumpy testes and getting my life back in order.

I spent 30 minutes virtually decoupling myself from the timid Beast of Westchester.  Facebook, Skype etc.  Of course I forgot that he owes me money from the UK tax refund but hopefully he will just do the right thing and send it to me.

The number of people who read my blog doubled yesterday.  Why?  Very odd.

How exhausting!  The entire thing with him from beginning to end was exhausting.  Relationships?  Who needs them?  Well, I for one would like one that works.  As I said before, we packed a twenty-five year relationship into the last eight months.  I really had no intention of publishing yesterdays incendiary blog but he sent me such a vicious email the only way I could be assured of never seeing him again was to tell it as it is.  He’s an idiot, I was all washed up yesterday afternoon.  I really wasn’t feeling very mean-spirited in light of my testicle problem but he riled me into action and out came Anthony (my angry alter ego) to protect my honor.

After I published the blog I met Sharon and we headed over to the Pacific Design Center where the Weinstein Company were premiering their new documentary,  The Pat Tillman Story.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWmqogu3mZw].

Good God, if that couldn’t shake me out of my mad head nothing would.  What an incredibly sad story.

Pat Tillman the sporting star was used in life and death by the US government to support an unpopular war.  As the genius filmmakers made clear, the US Government probably wishes they hadn’t messed with the tenacious Tillman family.   You have to love them, the mother and father are probably the most patriotic, considerate, intelligent people you ever met.  They were the sort of people you want to believe all American are.

Watching their faces as they testified in congress, tangling with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and George W at the very pinnacle of government, laughing in the face of the toothless Congressional oversight committee.  It was a ghastly example of how ordinary, good Americans have been trampled and continue to be trampled by their very own government.

I will never forget listening to the young man who saw his best buddy Pat Tillman have his head blown off his shoulders just feet from where he stood.  The blood trickling out of Tillman’s neck like a drinking fountain.

I chatted with that brave young man after the film and was filled with admiration.  I have no reason to complain about anything when I meet a man like that.  He had the best line in the film, he said, “Afghanistan reminded me of Arizona but (pause) the people looked a bit different.”

I do hope that you all get to see The Tillman Story, that you get to meet Pat as his parents and friends remember him and hopefully be as inspired as I was after seeing this remarkable film.  It was very hard not to cry.

Before I went to sleep last night I thought how beautiful Pat Tillman was, not just his beautiful face but what made him really beautiful was his compassion, sensitivity and unusual intellect..a perfect example of how one can never ever judge a book by its cover.

His beautiful face and brutal death make him an example of what a hopeless, desperate, unnecessary war this is.  The waste of life and resources and time and ideals.

Yet, the oligarchs continue sending these young boys to their deaths, profiting from sorrow, emotionally blackmailing an entire nation in the name of patriotism, trading on their love for the American flag and nobody will lift a finger to stop it…this absurd ‘war on terror’.  Such nonsense.

Before I got caught up writing yesterdays blog I had planned to write about the people who rent my Malibu house.  The good and the bad but after I received his vicious email events overcame me.  Here is a snippet of what I will take time writing about at a later date.

The renters.  When it comes to renting the house through VRBO there are far more Dodi, Richard or Jan’s (appreciative and complimentary) than there are Irene, Vikam or Dave’s (unappreciative and demanding).

The good renters love the house and realize that they are getting a great deal for their buck.  They write glowing reviews in the visitors book.

The bad renters, with exactly the same house, same EVERYTHING seem to feel duped.  They think the house is dirty, they complain about the modern art, that the TV is too small.  They complain that there are personal effects in the house, that a hose is not wound properly.  They demand their money back without ever checking their contract.  Worst, is when they break things and never ever like to pay for what has been broken.

They seem to forget that they are getting the house for up to 7 people for $250 a night rather than the houses they can see below them for $3,000 a night.  They also forget that I have rented that house to hundreds of renters and most of them are perfectly happy with their experience of the house.

There is one particularly insane woman in Hawaii who tried duping me…bad move.  As we know very well I am not easily crossed.  Bad boyfriends or bad renters..they are all the same to me.  More about Hawaii woman at a later date.

Listen, the complainers, thankfully, are not as frequent as the those who just love it there.  Who, when they leave, leave a sweet smell behind them, who obey the rules and don’t smoke or throw clandestine parties or break stuff or try claiming that the house was not as described.

It confuses the hell out of me when people just turn on their heels and leave the house without even staying one night.  Thankfully that has only happened twice in the three years that I have been renting.

I slept late this morning, made coffee, took the little dog for a long walk.

Jennie and I had a luxurious conversation.   She is in good spirits about getting into University.  And so she should be, she is a remarkable young woman.

Oh yeah, before I forget…who is Adam Patch you ask?  Don’t worry, I didn’t know either.  Check the Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald and you’ll understand the literary allusion.  A 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon’s fortune…you’ll see that the timid man and I had more in common than even we realized.

Am I being snippy?

Categories
Love

Fuck You Jake

Duncan and Jake Bauman

Well, that’s that. I ended it. My relationship with lying Jake is over. That would be Mr Darling NYC and the mysterious travelling companion. That would be the man I paid to take to France.  My literary agent.

He is gone and I am relieved. As relieved as they say you feel when you file for bankruptcy. The tension and holding on and making good is over. The plans, the desire, the moments of hope that things will turn out better are turned to dust.

The very fact that I want to call it a relationship is somehow absurd. He didn’t want a ‘relationship’ because he is ‘protective of his independence’ one can read that as: wants to do whatever he pleases, just like he always has. Before by deception, now by finding an idiot who’ll put up with his shit.

It seems to be true that sometimes you can’t be friends with those you have loved. There is simply too much baggage.

I really loved him and I loved making love to him. I loved holding him in my arms but I often wondered who he was really thinking about when we made love. After all, you were so often drunk or stoned or, on that one ghastly occasion, high on nitrate.

As the days passed since we returned from France my serenity began to slip away. I was less happy with our arrangement, with our situation, with our open relationship, with the just enough rope he let me have that tightened exponentially around my neck.

What I didn’t want, upon our return, was how things were before we left: a chasm that could only be filled with jerk off sessions on Skype, even though he was without doubt a genius at performing on his web cam. That was our staple until we got to France. Sex webcasting, firstly in his old place when he was with her then in his parents kitchen whilst they were out at work. Hygienic eh?

I realised that John was right..his ‘smidgen of compassion’ remark hit me hard. He saw that I was prepared to put up with not a great deal and be happy when actually I wanted and deserved a whole heap more.

You know, when the axe falls it falls swiftly and all communication must be cut. No more texts, no more Facebook, no more telephone call or emails. It is the only way I know how. I don’t hate the guy. Of course I feel used. I feel let down. The absence of reassuring emails before I went to have my testicular scan was evidence, irrefutable proof that he really didn’t give a fuck. Complete strangers seemed more interested in my health than he did.

More importantly I had enough. His final email summed it up:

I realize a large part of your life is devoted to confession and full disclosure but though honesty and directness are important to me, I deal with things differently than you do–not by speaking in front of large groups or blogging about my life…

He had seen me on TV then met me through my blog, deceived me into believing that it was my blog and not me that he was interested in then moaned when I wrote about what was going on between us. Suddenly privacy was paramount. You might be wondering why he went to France with me? Well, who in their right mind wouldn’t want a free trip to France with a doting fool?

As for honesty being important to you? I think others might think differently. When I challenged you in London during our street fight that you had lied to a woman for seven and a half years you kept on telling me that I was wrong, ‘I didn’t lie to her’ you cried, so deep was your denial.  Every time he fucked a man behind her back he lied to her.  A woman who expected to marry him.

He told me once that he was ‘addicted to lying’.  He certainly seemed addicted to drugs.  Using weed daily.  Crystal meth during sex.

He said that he didn’t want a hyper-emotional relationship yet the first five months were spent listening to him, willingly listening to him, divulge every detail..often in tears..of his coming out. He was always crying.

I lost my usefulness to him. he seemed to forget that I was there for him in his darkest hour yet he could not be here for me as I embark on what could be mine.

This morning was the final straw. “Why are we talking about me?” he whined when I asked about him. Suddenly he was off-limits. From the incredibly intense weeks of his ‘coming out’ where I made myself available to him 24/7 his story was suddenly secret.

Oh Jake, what a silly billy you are. You think ‘freedom’ means meeting endless fuck buddies on Manhunt. You thought that I would put up with that because just a smidgen of compassion would do. You thought that you wouldn’t bring two very different people to the same conclusion about you.

You were wrong.

I totally get why she doesn’t want anything more to do with you.

There was a moment in an airport somewhere in the world when I was irritable with you about something or other and you looked sad, sad that you had treated her like I was treating you.

My friend saw the pictures on Facebook that I posted of us and he said, ‘He doesn’t even like you.’ I felt sick because often I felt that, that I was doing the loving for both of us. That at the end of the day you would and did tell me I was too old and difficult and all the other reasons you gave me for not letting me have a hope in hell..then you’d come crawling back when things weren’t working out for you. A drunken text on the train home. I knew that when you were with the other Manhunt men I just became an irritation. Like she was when you met me. She was just getting in the way.

It is vaguely irritating that I let him so close to everyone I hold dear in my life. It is even more irritating that he has made friends with my friends yet I know not one of his. Telling isn’t it?

You met me here, we’ll say goodbye here.

For more information on JB please see Adam_Patch on Manhunt. He is looking, so he says, for good people. Oh yeah, and don’t be a cliché.

Avoid this man.   He will lie to you.  He’s cute but he’ll only be interested in you if you have money and let him get away with doing exactly what he pleases.

Categories
art Fashion Hollywood Rant

Balls

Smearing jelly all over my balls the radiologist made small talk about her daily commute from Marina Del Ray.

I lay on my back in a darkened room wearing a green hospital robe.  The moment I relinquish my control to a doctor I regress into the womb.  I feel safe and looked after.  I want to suck my thumb.

She must have taken 100’s of pictures of my testicles.  The offending lump is black and solid.  She reassured me that the blood was still pumping through my testicles so thankfully they were not dead.

She said that the ultra sound wouldn’t really tell us anything, that a biopsy would.  I wondered why I was laying there.  Spending unnessesary dollars when all I would eventually have was a biopsy.   I will do as I am told and wait for the doctor’s opinion but in my head I am already at the Whitstable health center.

Dinner last night was delicious, the conversation lively.  We talked Michael’s upcoming film projects and Sharon’s book ideas.   I sat stonily quiet about what I want to do next..I really have no idea.  Michael lives in the Baron De Meyer’s house..De Meyer died in it in 1949.  Isn’t that cool?  Adolph de Meyer, the great fashion and portrait photographer, famed for his dreamily elegant portraits of Mary Pickford, John Barrymore, Lillian Gish, George V and Queen Mary.   In 1913 he was made the first official fashion photographer for American Vogue.

The producers called from CNN again.  They asked me to appear on the same HLN show as yesterday, giving me only a couple of hours notice.  This time I had to have an opinion about the season three winner of American Idol Fantasia and her ‘overdose’.  As I pointed out..if you are serious about killing yourself you throw yourself under a train.

I am sitting eating a full English breakfast at SHLA.  One of the waiters is particularly beautiful.   The tragedy is: I don’t want to sleep with strangers, look at pornography, flirt or intrigue because I know what it feels like to be with just one man..and whether it is THAT man or someone completely different I want to know who I am with.

Categories
Gay Rant Rehab

Doc Day Afternoon

Cooking for eight this evening.  I’ve not cooked properly for months.  I have cooked like an American..thrown things together but not cooked properly..like I am want to do.

I am going to find a huge shoulder of lamb somewhere and stuff it with rosemary and garlic.  It has been so chilly here that a good gigot and roasted root vegetables makes perfect sense.   Perhaps a summer pudding?  I wish I could find gooseberries for a summer crumble.  I am going to make custard.

Lunch with Joel at SHLA.  I paid.  Why?  Bumped into Drew Pinsky and Tom Arnold.  Lovely to see Drew.  I mentioned the CNN thing, Tom said that Montana Fishburne has no money from her father and Drew concluded that her decision to do porn was probably based on her giving her father the finger.  Montana on the next rehab show?  Perhaps.

After lunch I had a lump on my testicle checked out by a very nice doctor in Beverly Hills.  I must have an ultrasound tomorrow.  I could be castrated by the weekend if things don’t work out.  Hmmm…then I could become a transsexual.  My secret desire for so many years.

This morning was, of course, Wednesday therapy at 7.30.   I shared that the companion had referred to us as we yesterday in relation to my doctor’s appointment..as in, ‘we’ll get through it’ rather than, ‘you’ll get through it’.   I felt a tear welling up in my wizened eye.  When I mentioned that to Jon he said, ” A smidgen of compassion?  Is that all it takes?”

Strangely it was the companion who mentioned just how cynical, bitter and washed up most of the gay men he met were.    He should try hanging out with addicts.

I read a Newsweek article by Howard Fineman that made me so sad.  Sad because I agreed with his miserable assessment of America’s standing in the rest of the world.  I’m not an idiot, I can see the rich tearing down anything they can lay their hands on, plundering this country while the poor cling to their huge cars and wars and patriotism.  Clinging to their tatty bill of rights, their eviscerated constitution.

I was sad because I have never felt more like an American as I do now and wish it wasn’t so that the roads are fucked, that the Christians are in charge, that the gays get infected with HIV because they think it’s like living with diabetes.

I was sad because my miserable and oft mocked USA is a Third World Country prophecy is coming true.  That my pessimistic assessment of the American Economy coming back from the brink is even worst than I expected.   Please say it ain’t true.

Even my rich middle class manufacturing friends are limping from one foreign order to another, limping but believing (as they have always believed) that the unregulated free market and not government will make everything better.

Categories
Money Rant

Montana Fishburne

Yesterday I was on HLN with Jane Velez-Mitchell debating whether it was cool or not for Montana Fishburne to have released her own porn film.

My point, contrary to the other more morally confused commentators, was that it is perfectly OK for Montana to make a pornographic film.  That her father Laurence Fishburne‘s career will not be hampered by difficult questions on the red carpet.  That as far as I was concerned Montana’s decision was a ‘feminists dream’.  Of course I was being deliberately incendiary but it’s a news entertainment show.  That’s my role.

Seriously though, we are only ‘shocked‘ and ‘outraged‘ because a rich girl decides to make a pornographic film.  Why are we shocked?  Because our preconceptions about pornography and women in pornography are blown out of the water.  We still believe that women who make a choice to go into porn have no choice at all.  That they are the naive victims of unscrupulous men and to be sure, there is some truth to this on some occasions but not all porn is the same.

I am perfectly sure that when my friend Jenny Ketcham made porn she knew exactly what she was doing.

Montana Fishburn legitimizes pornography and scaily, for some people, may encourage a different sort of woman to make pornography a legitimate career choice.

Montana’s choice blasts the lie of the ‘sex tape’ out of the water.  Let’s face it, both Paris and Kim knew exactly what they were doing when their sex tapes were released.  They were complicit.  The tape would never have been released without their consent.  To be sure Rick Hilton never lost any sleep about the impact on his career after his daughter’s tape was released.

We live in Hollywood, fame and celebrity (even notoriety) is the goal for most people who live here.  To live in your father’s shadow when you too crave what he has but your options are few…what’s a girl to do?

Porn has become a legitimate way for a starlet to reach a mass audience and become a star.  The press is more than willing to collude with the associated lies.  That both Paris and Kim shot their sex tapes covertly merely attempts to disguise the truth.

I take my hat off to Montana Fishburne.  Let’s hope she makes a whole heap of cash.  The kids of the rich and famous are notorious wasters.  If this girl is as clever as she seems to be she’ll never ask her father for another cent.  For the time being Montana Fishburne will glory in the spotlight that until now has been reserved exclusively for her father and my guess is that more people, in the long run, will see her film work than his.

Categories
Love Rehab

Are You OK?

Are you OK?

We say that to each other in the UK all the time.  It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just the way we check in with each other.  I check in with you and you check in with me.  Even if I am not OK I thank you for asking.

When I taught him, the companion, what it meant he played at asking me if I was OK but the effect was still the same.  I felt good, checked in with, placated.

Americans, when you ask them if they are OK, worry that something looks wrong with them.  It worries them, disrupts their day.

So, don’t ask an American if he/she is OK unless you think that there is something wrong.  You’ll do more harm than good.

It’s Monday morning.  I have just been to therapy.

The weekend was a delicious blend of fun, laughter and me feeling better than I have for 8 months.  I am just so happy.  Happy doesn’t necessarily mean well-behaved. I have been delightfully rude.

Ivan Massow is in town, such an unpleasant man who was the ‘source’ in the Caroline Roux article about me for the Guardian.  The source who was too scared to be openly vicious about me.  Anyway, there he was yesterday having lunch, slimeing all over my straight friend Ben.  Who in their right mind gave that man the ICA to run?  WHO in their right mind thought he should stand as Mayor of London? Crazy!

Anyway, supposedly he is sober so I am trying not to hate him too much.

Thankfully he is losing his looks.

Saturday spent nearly all day in Malibu.  Lunch in the Lumber Yard with Jon Aubry.  I went to bed early Saturday night.

Breakfast on Sunday with Will and his dog Rocco.  Stephen popped by at about 11 and then lunch with Sharon Swart.  Delightful.  She attended a flower arranging class and brought to lunch a huge bouquet of roses and hydrangea.

Sunday night Michael and I went to a party in Silverlake.  There was a performance piece for us to watch.  Three 10 minute sections of a larger work about a man accused of burning down his house and killing his daughters.  The first part was indecipherable.  The second and third part, although messy, were much better and had good, strong ideas.  The director asked what I thought..so I told him.  Bad idea.  Nobody wants to hear the truth.

We were meant to meet Jamie Lee Curtis after that party but we did not.

Taka came by late on Sunday.   He is a funny one.   Editor, Japanese..chatty.

Oh, before I forget..the new Malibu renters arrived on Saturday and are very happy in the house.  They are the SWEETEST people from the UK who loved the house the moment they stepped through the door and from whom I have not heard since..no news is GREAT news as far as renters are concerned.

I made a ‘to do’ list for Monday that includes all the boring stuff I have been putting off for weeks but essential if I am going to stay on top of things.

I went to therapy on Saturday morning and shared my good news.  My only worry about therapy is that I am surrounded by so many miserable, desperate men.

It’s now Monday morning and I am positioned at my ‘desk’ at SHLA.  Papers and briefcase open and ready for action.  My list of things ‘to do’ is already half eaten.  THICK lines scored through the things already done.

Listen, I have no idea why I am so happy but one thing is for sure..it has nothing to do with anyone else.  In fact, I was briefly annoyed by the actions of the other last night but after a few seconds ceased to be.  There was a time in the very recent past when the other could ruin my entire evening by being snippy.  Not anymore.

Whenever one has a meaningful relationship one tends to ignore when things don’t add up.  Denial gluing disparate parts of one story into something believable.

I am not annoyed with him..a little disappointed in me.

Disappointed that I have been so desperate to make our relationship work.  Just writing that down makes me feel sick.  That I would have done anything to make another man love, want and care for me.  For the past 8 months I have devoted my time, energy, love and money to a stranger who bust his way into my life after seeing me on TV.  It is a testament to my own low self-esteem just how much I was prepared to ignore in order to feel loved.

I am grateful that I fell in love and really got to know a man, be seen by another man. You may think that I have been foolish but in fact the last few months have been some of the best of my whole life.   I miss him.  I do.  But what I miss doesn’t really exist.  I miss being cared about, thought about, fantasized about, included and lastly, but most importantly, I miss being loved.

Every decision I made these past few months has been inspired by my love for him. Consequently I now have to make decisions based on my needs, my desires and my career.

I have vowed not to work out our stuff here in my blog so I won’t.

All you, my readers, need to know is that I am ok..are you ok?

Categories
Auto Biography

Kuros Khazaei

My friend Sebastian’s father was my father’s very best friend.  When Sebastian first met me he knew exactly who I was.

My father was his hero.  His description of Kuros almost perfectly matches how I have heard myself described.  He cut quite a dash, he was impeccably dressed and when he entered a room people took notice, he could also be very, very bad-tempered.

Not many people have very nice things to say about my father.  My mother, his business colleagues, some of my brothers and sisters and their mothers all of them seem a little too ready to condemn him yet, strangely, I am not.   Even though he wanted nothing to do with me and treated my Mother very badly I am still willing to forgive him.  It is touching that he had such a profoundly positive effect on Sebastian.

We are without doubt very similar in temperament but unlike when I die…when he died he died very, very rich.

He was without doubt a colourful/controversial figure.

Sebastian’s father owned a restaurant in London where my father met all of his wives.  I still don’t know a great deal about him but I know for sure that his second wife disappeared one night with her children never to see him again.  I know that his third wife had a terrible time with his temper and cavorting.  I know that he loved backgammon and opium.  I have been told, although these might be myths, that he was thrown out of a second floor window by the notorious gangster Kray twins causing him to have a life long limp?  That he wrapped a sports car around a lamp-post severely damaging his eye?  That he was implicated in a massive robbery but never formally charged?

He certainly owned a restaurant and an antique shop and his big break came when he met a profligate Saudi Prince who bought everything my father could lay his hands on and sold to the Prince at exorbitant prices.

Isn’t it odd that whilst he owned an antique shop in London (only feet away from where I would one day live with JBC)  I was trawling through the antique/junk shops in Whitstable and Canterbury.   That his restaurant was only a block away from where I would settle with Phil.  That we may very well have passed each other in the street and never known who one another was.

I met a man on the train to Shrewsbury I was convinced was my father.

He was not my father.

I felt as if I were not allowed to ask Sebastian questions about my father, as if the topic were still off-limits, disallowed, forbidden.  There is still a huge amount of shame surrounding his name.  As if even the barest mention of him a terrible catastrophe would somehow happen.

Yet, there is nothing more I need to know about him.  I know that I am his son, that we are cut from the same cloth and that it scares me to hear about him because in some way I am forced to accept my own flaws/defects/shortcomings.

That, my friends, is incredibly uncomfortable.

My father died in 1998 of pancreatic cancer.  I never met him although I feel as I have.  A protracted and messy financial battle ensued after his death.   There are all sorts of stories about who stole what from whom but my four younger siblings seemed to do OK.   He left at least 8 children behind, two ex-wives (did he ever bother getting a divorce from any of them?) and a widow.

It was a pleasure discussing him with Sebastian because Sebastian has fond memories and…I believe him.

Categories
Hollywood

Naomi Campbell

I must lay my cards on the table.  I like Naomi Campbell.  Perhaps I am indeed the lone member of her fan club as someone suggested yesterday.

I am not in the business of mob justice, or Facebook kangaroo courts.  Wether she has been a silly cow in the past or not is none of my business.  I am sure that for her past misdemeanors and indiscretions she has paid the price.

Since she hasn’t thrown a cell phone or punched an air stewardess for some time I think it best that we give this woman a break.  Perhaps by walking in her stilettos for a mile I might understand where she’s coming from.

Frankly, if I were a model diva on vacation on a yacht in St Tropez forced to fly to a dismal courtroom in the Hague I too might find taking the stand at the war crimes trial of the President of Liberia, as she is now mocked for saying, ‘very inconvenient’.  She has been embroiled in a situation that was not of her own making.  I, for one, am not buying into this new wave of press generated ‘Naomi is a Bitch’ sentiment.

The way she is described in some quarters one might think that she is the one accused of war crimes, that she is somehow a war criminal by association.  Naomi Campell may have briefly accepted a bag of blood diamonds but this does not make her in any way culpable for the crimes of the murderous Liberian President..she is naive at best, greedy at worst.  Whatever she is she is totally undeserving of the vitriol presently coming her way.

Whenever I have chanced upon her she has been sweet and kind and desperate to deal with the well documented problems she has with both her temper and substance abuse.  When Lee McQueen died she called everyone she knew he knew even if they didn’t know her particularly well.  Friends of Lee’s found her unexpected comfort calls at that very difficult time very reassuring.

I had dinner last night with a wonderful producer friend of mine who knew everyone in the restaurant.  I ate a large and delicious salad nicoise.   We popped into an art event/installation that included a ten foot pile of pancakes and a naked man in a glass box with a pancake covering his face and genitals.   Later we ended up at a young Hollywood party on La Cienega.  The next generation of real managers, producers and actors all crammed into a tiny bar.

The best part of my day was spent in Malibu with the little dog.  We walked down the hill to see how the Rambla Pacifico road construction is progressing.  They are making a massive amount of headway, grading the land over where the land slide happened all those years ago and preparing to back fill with huge polystyrene blocks which apparently will lighten the weight of the construction.

On my way back I met two Armenian brothers who have moved into a house at that end of Rambla.  One of them is dreamily good-looking.  Instead of fixating on him however with his brown eyes and hairy chest I felt sad and missed my NYC friend.

My favorite restaurant Axe in Venice has burned down.  Fuck.  I loved that place.