Categories
Film Gay Hollywood Queer Rant Tivoli NY

Carol: Lesbian Love Story


Carol, the well written, well designed, well shot, well acted but ultimately turgid new movie by avant garde industry darling Todd Haynes has a fan base… an angry, indignant fan base.

Many beyond the film industry feel this mostly second rate film should have earned a place in the best film and best director categories at this years academy awards.

The vociferous fans feel the film has been ‘snubbed’.

There are blogs and op eds and blazing Facebook posts about this apparent injuctice. The fans blame homophobia, misandry, misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality.

Even though Carol has in fact been nominated in 6 categories including the prestigious written adaptation category this is not enough for many disgruntled Carol fans.

There’s plenty to complain about this award season.  People of colour are vanished from the awards. Female directors?  None.  The roles women are asked to play:

Best Actor jobs: Screenwriter, astronaut, trapper, inventor, artist.

Best Actress jobs: Mommy, lady, inventor, girl, wife.

I’m wondering if, after this so called scandal, members of the academy will bother voting for this slight film at all.

Wether they are directed by white men or not (Carol was directed by a white man, a man… why?) most of the other nominated films are simply more engaging and well directed.

Personally, I’m rooting for The Big Short. There, I said it.

2.

Tivoli is under siege this afternoon,  gangs of identically dressed gay men.  Fur trimmed Parkers and skinny jeans.

Identical white gay boys.  Vile.

They stare at me dressed in my tweeds and hunters like I’m a fucking circus freak.

Fuck off.

Categories
art Money Queer

Powerball

  
The lottery.  One and a half billion dollars.  Imagine…

Imagining, like millions of others this weekend, how one might spend a billion dollars… I learned something helpful about myself and my life goals.

Recently I met a psychic.  She told me my mother would win the lottery.  I told my mother to play… she won $50.  She was thrilled. I was thrilled for her.

Gripped by Powerball fever, everybody wants a chance at the big money.  Everybody wants the Powerball mega bucks payout.  I took notice of the rolling stock market jackpot indicator.  $700,000,000.  I baulked at the tax one would have to pay.  You wouldn’t see any more than $300,000,000 if you opted for the one time pay out.  Sad face.

Frankly, a crisp $20 would have done the trick. 

Everybody wants the jackpot.  Rich people were doing it, poor people do it every week.  With so much at stake, everyone everywhere in the USA contributed to the largest purse in lottery history.

I surreptitiously bought five tickets at Hannaford supermarket in Kingston.  I told the woman who sold them I’d never bought a lottery ticket before.  A ghost of disbelief flickered across her white  face.

“A psychic told me to buy it.” I lied.

She said, “I’ve sold so many tickets to ‘first timers’ this week.”

“Thank you, thank you for that.” I replied.

I felt better about buying a lottery ticket.  I felt relieved.  Affluent people don’t buy lottery tickets.  Poor, uneducated people buy lottery tickets.  It was essential she understood I would never usually gamble in the ghetto.

As I lay in bed that night, my ticket folded neatly in my wallet, I imagined a life with $500, 000, 000 in the bank.  What would I do?  

We are all limited by our imaginations.

I’ve seen some of my friends earn extraordinary amounts of money. The last time I saw JJ he told me since becoming very rich, very successful… rather than having a huge life his life had… shrunk.  The same faces, the same path around the world.  Holding onto his position at the top of the pile. Fame and fortune can hamper the inquisitive.

My current best friend is very rich.  Very, very rich.  He lives well but has worked the same job the past twenty years.  His money and his job are unconnected. He has a nice life.  I found myself wanting to ape him.  A lovely apartment in the city, a house in the country, a dependable car.  He gives money to charity, he is generous with his friends.

But… with his kind of cash, where would I want to live?  To my surprise, I knew immediately that I didn’t want to live in the USA.  I started my search for a dream home in Paris.  I found a sweet apartment in the 7th for 1.5 million euros.  I looked for a country house in the french countryside and quickly settled for something that cost 500,000 euros.  

After I’d made myself and my family comfortable… which charity might I patronize?  I decided to set up a foundation for poor British kids who can’t get into drama school.  I gave money to a bat charity and another that supports country skills and farming practices.  I gave money to beautify Whitstable, my home town.  I concluded that with the bulk of the money I wanted to help the motivated, stuck in poverty or prejudice, achieve their goals… to break through their own glass ceiling and… fly.

As I lay there I realized I didn’t need $1.5 billion to achieve my rather humble aims.  Everything I wanted to achieve was within reach.  I could already buy a place in Paris.  I could determine to raise money for all of the charities I wanted to help.  Maybe winning the lottery, for some one like me would be a curse?   Untold millions would merely inflame the disease of more that seems to blight me… blight us all?

Today I walked home with half a baguette in my pocket.  This simple action gave me so much pleasure.

The first week yielded no winner.  I wanted to see this through.  The Powerball lottery and I have a relationship now.  I could have gone elsewhere to have a second go. Instead, I went back to the reassuring woman in the supermarket.

“Didn’t win?” She smiled.

I bought ten more.

I didn’t win that week either but three people did.  The jackpot divided into three paltry $300,000,000 increments.  I found myself wondering, what would THAT buy you in the modern world?

 

Categories
art Queer Travel

Marina Abramovic Isn’t Coming

Hudson, NY 2015 winter.  I moved into the Princess Beatrix House, owned by Tanja Grunert and Klemens Gasser.   The ice so thick on their un-ploughed drive it’s almost impossible for the tiny Mexican movers from sunny California to negotiate the heavier items from the pantechnicon to the house.  They wear my Knole sofa like a huge hat.  It is bitterly cold yet these foolhardy boys brave the day dressed only in thin, grubby tee shirts and flimsy, cheap sneakers, skidding up and down the icy drive.  They are totally unprepared for the winter delivery.

Before I arrived in Hudson, NY I had never heard of Eric Galloway, Eleanor Ambos, Tim Dunleavy, Warren Street, Modern Farmer, Anne Marie Gardner, the Bonfiglio bakery… or the slew of slippery realtors wheeling and dealing all over town.

I didn’t know the Basilica or Helsinki or Etsy.   I didn’t know the darker side of hipster culture, the craving of desperate, lonely females and the clawing misery of gay men trapped upstate in search of a better, freer life.

The only person I knew ahead of my 9 months in Hudson was Marina Abramovic.  And it was she who piqued my interest the very first time my friend Tom Taylor showed me the building Marina had acquired, the building Rem Koolhas had been charged with transforming into a ‘laboratory devoted to performance art’ funded by 12 million crowd sourced dollars.

The Old Tennis Court on the corner of North 7th Street and Columbia Street in Hudson, NY owned by Marina Abramovic, stands forlorn, peeling and abandoned.  The windows boarded, trash blown under the grand portico.   It waits, warehoused like so many building in Hudson, for it’s owner to come renovate, repair or make good the myth of Marina Abramovic transforming this imposing building into her performance art institute.

Tom Taylor, stopped his beaten truck outside the building.  After several weeks of heavy snow and bitterly cold nights a wall of ice stood between us and the building.  He was excited to show me, telling a story I would hear many, many times from equally excited local people.

2.

Upstate New York .  Cheap, fertile land… derelict 18th and 19th century houses desperate for attention.  Abandoned red brick factories.  The promise of space and sanctuary.

My first visit to Woodstock, with cabaret star Lady Rizo three Christmases ago, my first real taste of life beyond NYC.  The thick white, blindingly white snow, the mountains, rivers and forests a welcome respite from 12 years of endless summer in Southern California.

I returned the following winter to the same charming stone house and started looking for a home to buy.  Property prices were very low.  As usual I was tempted by obscure, isolated locations but did not give in to that melancholic fantasy.

It was an invitation from Tom Taylor to Eleanor Ambos’s huge Victorian pile in Philmont that finally ignited my passion.  I’d met him on some dating app in the city when I spent that mad winter in the Captains House in Brooklyn.  After months of asking me to visit I finally bundled me and the dogs into the rental car and headed north.

Tom is the right hand man and beneficiary of Eleanor Ambos’s valuable real estate portfolio.  Her notable possessions:  the Pocket Book factory in Hudson and The Metropolitan Building on Long Island.

“It is as if she doesn’t hear the same music that everyone else is hearing,” says director Andrew Michael Ellis of 89-year-old Eleanor Ambos. In his documentary short Ellis follows the eccentric aesthete as she loses her eyesight to macular degeneration.

Eleanor bought the dilapidated Metropolitan Building on Long Island in 1980 as a cheap alternative to the area’s warehouses to store her vast and growing collection of salvaged antiques. The octogenarian owner caught Ellis’ eye while he was shooting there. “She had no intention of being a subject in a film at first, but eventually I became her friend, therapist, practically her lover. It was impossible to be a fly on the wall.”

The month I met her she had bought a 72,000 square foot mid century modern school in Claverack.    The day I arrived to see it she was laying a delicate floral carpet in the hallway.  “I like playing house.” she purred.  And that, my dear friends, is what attracts people to her and repels people from her.  I introduce her to the thin lipped owners of the Gilded Owl in Hudson, a most pretentious ‘gallery’ curated by interior fluffer Andy Goldsworthy and down and dirty art trader Elizabeth Moore.

THE GILDED OWL is an online journal exploring craftsmanship in modern and contemporary design, fine art, fashion, and music. Inspired by authenticity, ingenuity, and above all, quality, Andy and Elizabeth Moore continually investigate subjects of fascination and enlighten their readers as to what makes the beautiful beautiful.

And if that description isn’t enough to make you puke… Elizabeth, Andy and I visited an Ambos property (they were both eager to see) namely the magical Summit Mill in Philmont with Eleanor and Tom.  After the visit Andy and Elizabeth couldn’t wait to kick the snow off their moon boots and rip into Eleanor’s aesthetic, her hoarding and wonder how other people could find her so fascinating.

3.

Hudson has a rich history of despair. The ghosts of a thousand hookers, gamblers and dismembered whales join those native American souls murdered here for their land. Something very bad happened in Hudson, something catastrophic… something that has scarred its psyche, blighted the land and poisoned the air.  Those who spend a weekend in Hudson seldom notice it, those who live there become irradiated… toxic.

Resentment and vitriol.  The Hudson cancer… is much reserved for one successful Hudson businessman: Eric Galloway.

I visit Hudson only occasionally.  I walk Warren Street, much of it owned, to the chagrin of those impoverished white people who live there, by the stately Eric Galloway and his billionaire boyfriend Henry Van Ameringen.

At the very heart of the contempt for these acquisitive gentleman is racism.  Eric Galloway is an angular, elegant black man and the despair white people have (who are not benefiting from his patronage) often descends into barely concealed racism.

‘Educated’ white folk who think they know better about architecture, who keep tabs on each purchase Galloway and Van Ameringen make all over the world.  Tanja Grunert and others could barely contain themselves when Galloway bought much loved and recently deceased (owner of the fanciful store Rural Residence) Tim Dunlevey’s iconic Union Street home.

“That disgusting man bought Tim’s house.” She said.

Yet, who was Tim’s ex boyfriend meant to sell?  The poor white people who couldn’t afford it?  Or, the contentious black man who could?

4.

This past year Hudson’s ‘revival’ (one of so many) has continued with renewed vigor.  The expensive, beautifully designed River Town Lodge opened at the top of Warren Street.  Farmer’s restaurant on Front Street spared no expense on its warm and elegant interior, bravely situated in a less salubrious part of Hudson and lastly the airy bar Or on 3rd and Union Street enjoys enormous success in a beautifully renovated 1930’s garage.  All quality establishments, some owned by Eric and Henry.

These small businesses are the future of Hudson.  Other larger businesses are sniffing around.  Soho House are discussing the possibility of opening in Eleanor Ambos’s Pocketbook Factory.  A whirl of invesment and optimism… yet, The Old Tennis Courts on the corner of North 7th Street and Columbia Street in Hudson, NY owned by Marina Abramovic remains forlorn and empty.

As painful as it is, it’s time for everyone in Hudson, NY to accept the truth:  Marina Abramovic isn’t coming.

 

Categories
Queer

Christmas 2015

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Categories
art Queer Tivoli NY

6 Fragments

 

Categories
Queer

This Little Piggy

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I am a carnivore!  I am a carnivore. The decisions I make around meat… the purchase and consumption are based upon the farm where the animal was raised.

Yesterday we ate a pig for dinner. It was really delicious. It came from a friends farm. It fed 10 people. However, the picture of me carrying the pig home seemed to upset some people. Some of them stopped being my social network friends.  Some of them… fellow carnivores.

I was accused of ‘lacking empathy’ for posting the pic above.

Many meat eaters pretend the meat they’re eating doesn’t come from a living animal. They are divorced from what they are eating.  This, my friends, is the tragedy of our age.

If you eat meat but cannot bear where it comes from… perhaps you shouldn’t be eating meat?  Most animals, most people eat are farmed in terrible conditions. Most carnivores blind themselves to this fact.

For those of you who eat meat but hate the idea that it was once a living thing.  Perhaps you should tour an abattoir? Perhaps you should pet a pig or cow or a sheep? Look into its eyes?

Maybe I am a cold hearted man for posting a picture of my dinner before it was cooked? Frankly, I think it’s far more honest to do that… than sanitized, pretty pictures posted on Instagram after the fact.

2.

Tamer Rice, 12 years old.  A child, playing with a toy gun (in an open carry state) with his sister in a public park was shot dead by two discredited Cleveland cops seconds after they answered an emergency 911 call.  They have since been absolved of their crimes by a corrupt prosecutor after a secretive and wholly inappropriate Grand Jury ‘trial’.

We know all about corrupt prosecutors.

Few of the ‘friends’ who were so animated by my photograph of me and the baby pig were moved at all to comment on the death of an innocent young black boy.

3.

Late one night, feeling under the weather after a bout of this particularly pernicious cold, I wrote a note to that ex.  Yep, I’m that guy.  Fuck. FUCK.

It was another misguided attempt to put the past behind me.

What is it about feeling sick that weakens ones resolve as well as ones body?  Keep me away from my lap top when a nasty cold makes me vulnerable to nostalgia.  Please.

I’d read somewhere that he has a fantastic new job and I wanted to congratulate him.  Why would I think my congratulations would be wanted?  It’s absurd isn’t it?   Congratulations.

4.

   

 

 

Categories
Gay Hollywood Los Angeles Queer

Trevor Project Trevor Live 2015

Last week a very young gay friend attended the Trevor Project’s Trevor Live 2015 event.  My friend is a proud member of their youth advisory council.  The Trevor Project remains one of the most ambitious and honorable LGBT organizations currently available to at risk LGBT young people, providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 in West Hollywood, California, by James Lecesne, Peggy Rajski, and Randy Stone. Creators of the 1994 Academy Award-winning short film Trevor, a dramedy about Trevor, a gay thirteen-year-old boy who, when rejected by friends because of his sexuality, makes an attempt to take his life.

Before this brave film aired on HBO the filmmakers, realizing that some of the program’s young viewers might face the same kind of crisis as Trevor, searched for a support line to be broadcast during the airing. They discovered that no such helpline existed and decided to dedicate themselves to forming an organization to promote acceptance of LGBTQ youth.

My young friend flew from the east coast to attend the event and by all accounts had a very enjoyable time… until he was sexually assaulted by an older gay man in front of his friends who thought it appropriate to cat call and high five each other when they saw my young friend being inappropriately groped.

It was not the only time that night he was sexually harassed/assaulted.

“I don’t understand why people think it’s ok to grab my ass and say crude, sexually charged comments.”  He said.

When I urged him to write to the Trevor Project and let them know what happened he was worried that they wouldn’t take the complaint seriously because the rich white men who had assaulted him were big donors to the Trevor Project.

I could write endlessly about gay white men, their pink privilege, their resistance to the notion of sexual consent and a widely held gay belief that men can’t assault, harass or rape other men.

My friend has (as of today) not written to The Trevor Project to report these incidents at their Trevor Live event.  It’s very hard for a young man, recently out, to articulate his disgust for this kind of behavior.

The assault did not take place in a bar or club where these assaults occur  all the time… more often than not overlooked by victim and perpetrator.  It happened at a fund raising event for at risk youth.

 

Categories
Queer

AA Upstate NY

 

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I woke at 5am.  It’s still dark.  The wind roars through the maple trees. The last of the leaves scoot up chilly North Road.  The dogs lay under the covers, they know the drill:  every morning I get up at 5am, I take a bath, I drive to Rhinebeck in the beaten up Mercedes the crazy artist gave me.

I sit with the same kindly, sober men and women in the cozy church basement.  I toast raisin bread and drink mugs of black coffee.  I sit at the back, close to the piano.  I am knitting another fragment.

I like morning AA meetings.

Remember the Palisades?  That 7am meeting over the bank?  The fat agent?  The lawyer who couldn’t stop looking at porn whilst this wife lay sleeping.  Remember the good doctor, the beneficent politician who by the ‘grace of god and this program’ stays sober today?

Recently I woke up and had a radical, disturbing thought.  I had a crazy AA cult thought: that if I dared be late for the meeting, dared miss the AA meeting in Rhinebeck something catastrophic would happen.  That I might die.  That I might not be able to depend on God to keep me safe.  Even though I have committed to the path he has chosen.

They say in the rooms of AA: if you desire anything more than AA you will never achieve your desires.  That putting things ahead of AA means putting them in jeopardy.

I waited for a moment.  I thought more about the crazy catastrophic thought.  It made me angry.  What was I thinking?  I wondered how I’d ever achieve anything ever again?  How could I escape this ‘sober’ thinking?

The sober life they promised when I walked through the doors of AA was a ‘bridge to normal living’.  But my normal living has become enslaved by Alcoholics Anonymous.

I understood momentarily that living a fearless, hand it over to God life… has become inert.  The furrow God has ploughed for me, the one I dare not leave.  They say in the rooms that he’ll never put anything in my path I cannot handle.  As long as I hand my will and my life to him.  My will and my life.

Sometimes I’m willful.  Occasionally I want to take my will and get something achieved in my time.. not God’s time.  But I fear those thoughts.  Immediately I run back to the safety of a prayer, God Grant me the Serenity.  I am once again taken care of by the benevolent force.

Sobriety is no longer about not taking drink or a drug. I am committed to a way of life. So I might not make the same mistakes, create chaos, or harm those around me I commit daily to a strict routine of making lists, taking inventories, I pray and meditate, I reach out to the newly sober, I practice the principals of Alcoholics Anonymous in all my affairs.

But…

Where’s this leading me?  I’m on my own, and rather than invest in a robust social life with similarly healthy souls… sobriety causes me to think twice about any and all interactions.  I no longer desire the normal friction that casually brushing up against another human being causes.

I think twice about driving to the city.  I think twice about having my hair cut.  I think twice about leaving the house.  I think twice because I don’t want to think at all.

I say to myself, “Sit silently in the coffee shop.  Do not live in fear.”  I crave the promise that I might effortlessly know how to deal with problems that used to baffle me.  I take the route that most likely avoids any and all people.    My fantasy is: with God’s help I am a slender ghost who haunts my own life.

The following morning I went to the meeting and told them my doubts.   I explained the crazy thought.  They were very kind.  They have the same thoughts.  They reach the same conclusions.  They keep coming back.

I get home at 9am.  I let the dogs out.  They chase squirrels and deer. The day unfolds before me.  Sober.  A ghost.

Categories
Alcoholics Anonymous art NYC Queer

Tanja Grunert Gallerist

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The rain, interminable. Cats and dogs. Great lakes puddle over the marshy back land.   Ominous clouds scud over the Hudson Valley.  Tom the gardener ploughs trenches down hill, unplugging the dams. Thirty years of fallen oak leaves dredged from soggy trench and damned culvert.  Branches thrown over the fence into the once vacant lot by lazy neighbours, removed. A scribble of dead bramble, removed. Now, on the northern perimeter, a pile of rotting vegetation – we might have burned on November 5th if we lived somewhere sensible.

However.

“There’ll be no bonfires in the village.” She said. The woman at the Mayor’s office. So. No wood smoke drifting over sparkling, frosty fields, no Guy Fawkes. No baked potatoes wrapped in scalding tin foil found amongst the dying embers.

I call friends in Los Angeles, they ask smugly if I’m prepared for the winter. They have no idea. Windows, insulation, boiler… thick curtains thankfully saved from other draughty, Victorian mansions. The winter months do not scare me. Come winter, come freeze the air, let the first snow fall.

How many pairs of gloves will I lose this year?

I am happy in Tivoli, so are the dogs. They chase squirrels, rabbits and deer.

The Little Dog has been skunked twice. Good God! The second time I took him to the vet, where they washed him with some magical solution.   Better than being savaged by coyote or bitten by a rattlesnake… I suppose, cheaper to remedy. He’s such a brave, curious, foolhardy Little Dog.

Dude hasn’t been skunked once, he hangs back from anything mildly threatening. He learned to climb the steep stair in the new house, laboring one step at a time he finds us in bed then dances on two legs until I fetch him up.

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I drive my old Mercedes into Hudson once a week. It’s a lovely town to visit but I hated living there. I hated it.  Frighteningly, I can’t remember the name of the road where I lived. Let me remember. Bellview, Fairview… PROSPECT!  Prospect Avenue, Hudson, NY.

So many irrelevant details scrubbed from the hard drive.  I will never forget that house.  That vile, ‘English Tudor’ house on the optimistically named Prospect Avenue. Overlooking the hospital; and a busy, dirty road.  The worst place (by far) I ever lived. Badly designed, badly renovated, so badly insulated: incapable of keeping heat in the winter or cool in the summer.

The house was haunted, not by angry ghosts moving things around or waiting in the corner… but melancholy, lonely women, dragging themselves up and down the stairs.  Most evident, the ghost of an elderly school teacher who spent twenty years peering from the sitting room window, equally scaring and delighting passing school children like a Halloween ghoul.

The house attracts lonely women.

Tanja Grunert, the current owner,  is the last of a long line.

So, I dedicate this blog post to her. To lonely Tanja whose life is more treacherous than a Hudson pavement in mid January.

The night I met Tanja she was wearing a huge black and white fur coat.  Like a skunk.

IMG_9720A short, stocky woman, she wears baggy jeans and tailored jackets. Her cropped, gray/mauve hair… cut hard around her masculine, pudgy face.   A smear of red lipstick, the only evidence she might be a heterosexual woman.

The night we met (by accident over steaming bowls of Asian broth) I should have run away.

Sadly, I have never had the resolve to run from a catastrophe.  As the towers came down I ran toward them.  There is something immediately alluring about Tanja, something fascinating.  From the moment we met I was hooked.  Some people are.  I’ll not be the first and I won’t be the last.  She crafted a first class art world career from a scintillating  first impression.

That night Tanja focused her all on me, seducing and melting… gasping and fluttering, roaring her huge laugh.  After dinner she invited us to the house… that house.

Much later I understood the only time she threw back her head, roaring that infectious laugh, was used as part of a sinister, well rehearsed routine.  A carefully constructed formula.

We discovered we had many people in common, Jay Jopling, Samia Saouma and Benedict Taschen.

She told me how beautiful I was. Told me I was her ‘type’. I was clear about my sexuality, “I am a gay man.” I said, as she coquettishly batted her eyelashes, grabbed hold of my hand, inviting us back to her cold, empty house. “Oh I’m so sorry.” She bows deeply into every apology. She is a committed apologist. “English is my second language.”  During our cohabitation I must have heard her say a million times, “Excuse me if I don’t understand.”

It was a lie.  I knew from the beginning she understood everything very well. Yet, I chose to ignore her lies. I chose to ignore, that cold winter, her lies, her homophobia, her racism, her alcoholism and her delusion.

Tanja is an alcoholic.  She is the kind of binging alcoholic who convinces herself that because she doesn’t drink in the morning she doesn’t have a drinking problem…. but she drinks in the morning. She is the kind of alcoholic who convinces herself that because she doesn’t drink alone she isn’t an alcoholic… yet, she drinks alone. She is the kind of alcoholic who convinces herself that she isn’t an alcoholic because she doesn’t black out and wet the bed…

She drank wine by the bottle, chain-smoked cigarettes; listened to opera so loudly on her record player that good conversation became impossible. Drowning in Wagner, drowning not waving, into misery.

That night, my first visit to her house, she lit a fire in the huge, totally empty sitting room.  Her husband was gone. He had taken flight that summer. Taking with him the money (his fathers) and the possibility.  She told him: “You cannot come to the house in Hudson.” He said, “You can’t have money to furnish it.”

I said: “You have an empty house and I have furniture.”  She said “Yes!” immediately.

Listen for a moment. Stand back.  Re-read my offer and tell me what could possibly go wrong?

Obviously it was terrible mistake. Half measures avail us nothing. I had no right making a deal with this devil. She started texting and calling all day and all night.  She would introduce me to her friends as her boyfriend or her husband.  She’d tell everyone who would listen that she loved me.  I was living in the East Village. We had dinner in the city. Tanja tried making me pay for her expensive wine habit… I refused.

Instead, I moved in.

So began a slow, interminably slow, head on collision. Two cold, stubborn alcoholics buckling, catastrophically into one another.   I spent nearly a year at the house, firstly because I was entranced… then the doors began to slam behind me. The furniture arrived and she took what she wanted from my things. “Each thing more beautiful than the last.” She cooed.

My Gary Hume disappeared.

Because she is an unapologetic racist she made me hide my African art because black people do not interest her. They make her ‘think of slavery’. They ‘make me sad’.  “I would never sleep with a black man.”

She buys five tickets for the Bjork concert but can’t find anyone to come with us.  Finally she invites people who barely know her.  They say, “I don’t know her at all.” At the will call she’s told very clearly that her tickets are being exchanged for better tickets.  Tanja starts screaming. Screaming at everyone.  Kicking the theatre.  I stand back and watch her disgusting spectacle.  I take the tickets, tell her to shut the fuck up, lead her into the theatre.  We take our excellent seats at the front of the theatre.

Shocked by her behavior we walk in silence back to the car after the event, unable to discuss Bjork like normal people.  Like the normal people around us, happy and grateful to have seen Bjork.  Her tantrums, her temper, her screaming, her crying fits of righteous outrage and indignation became so regular I learned to ignore them.

The winter was long and hard and cold.  Minus 23 degrees.  Unheard of upstate New York.  I found myself held hostage by the masculine German woman in the unfriendly house.

She refused to fill the oil tanks. The house froze.  The pipes burst.  The tiles fall from the bathroom walls. I fill the oil tanks myself, ferrying 10 gallon cans from a filling station five miles away.

The chaos, her unmanagability became easier when the sun began to shine.

Spring came suddenly this year.  The original deal she reneged.  She wanted money.  Always desperate for cash.  Another good idea blown into a million pieces. I handed it over.

Her grasping, fat fingers.  Her solid, bruised, Teutonic arms quaffing wine, passing out, laying naked on her bed until she leaks yellow stinking piss all over herself.   Naked on her bed, not sleeping but unconscious. Laying like the dead waiting for the autopsy, naked on her back.   Acres of white flesh.   “We are always naked.” “We always talk to ourselves.” “We only eat from Fish and Game.”

She tells everyone that an important publisher has commissioned an auto-biography. She says that the money will come.

“We only write in the kitchen.”

“We hate mood lighting.”

She spends hours under the harsh light at the kitchen table tapping on her keyboard, claiming to write a book some grand publisher might (or might not) have commissioned. She says she’s researching but she’s on the internet trying to fill the consuming void her younger husband left when he scarpered last June.  Filling the gaping, suppurating wound with Internet dates on match.com, okcupid and other… less salubrious sites. She shows me a thousand pictures of penis she has been sent.

Her less sexually ambitious female friends think she is a pioneer. This old queen knows she is a lonely, sleazy woman on the cusp of suicide.   In and out of Belleview. Unable to accept the truth.   Popping pills. She is poor, illegal and single.

Gay men seldom share the cache of penis we’ve been sent on line. Maybe the largest or the smallest. Maybe the most beautiful. She indiscriminately shows me every one. She wants me to know she is still relevant, that her menopause hadn’t knocked her through a hoop. (Like Samia before her.) But her boast falls on deaf ears. I look at her poker faced, disguising the pity I have for her.

There’s a young art dealer in town with a cool gallery, I buy art, he delivers the art to the house. He knows who she is. Curious to see where Tanja lives, he is surprised that the house is so clean. He expects to see a mountain of empty bottles. He tells me that she owes everyone money, him included.

“There’s a joke art dealers tell each other. They laugh about how long they’ve been in the art business. They say, I’ve been selling art so long… I remember when Tanja Grunert was hot.”

I reserved the most sympathy for her children who instinctively knew how selfish, self-obsessed and self pitying she and her ex husband are.   Both so eager to flee from her, like the men she meets on-line. A French man meets with her and tells me “Within a few minutes of phone conversation she offers to lick my ass.” to be his toilet. When he meets with her he says he could not fuck her because fucking her would be like “Fucking grandma.”

After meeting him she text messages twenty times an hour. She sobs, howls… when it becomes apparent that he is not interested in her. She wrings her hands and bangs her head into the wall, she blames everyone for her distress.

She meets another man and calls at 1am to ask where they can find a woman for some three way. I terminate the call.

Her teenage daughter watches as every man her mother meets on the internet lets her down. Steals what little she has left.  She has learned to keep quiet. She is biding her time, waiting for the day she can turn her back on them all.

Tanja boasts that during her second pregnancy with the girl she was high on cocaine, drunk on alcohol every day for the first trimester.

Her insufferable, precocious, entitled, blue-eyed son lives with us for the summer. He leaves chaos and mountains of trash infested, after a few hot days, with maggots. He said, “You are the room mate, you must clean up after me.” I refuse.


I video the mess and send it to his mother. He is now at an expensive college in SF exploring his homosexuality, thankfully a long way from his gentle, yielding girlfriend who was often heard plaintively asking the teenager why he needed to hurt her to express his love.

The boy barely conceals his contempt for the girl. Like his mother, like his father, like his grandmother. Generational dysfunction.  Violence. Violent to others, violent to herself, Tanja told me her husband would beat her in the bedroom.  Not because he loved her… because he hated her.  The provenance of the son’s fledgling misogyny evident for all to see.

The son drinks until he passes out.  Naked on his bed.  His father drinks himself into a black out… she wets the bed. I could smell the piss before I saw it.

Her son wants to stay with me at the hotel.  I cling to the edge of the bed.  As far as I can from his yearning adolescence.  Tanja wants to know why he is so interested in me.

For all of her gay friends, she is an unapologetic homophobe. She makes sneering jokes about ‘Your side’ and ‘Your people’ she tells me that I am ‘No use’ to her.  They are not jokes, they are evidence of her deep-seated homophobic resentment. For all the extraordinary gay men she surrounds herself, delighting them with her drama… she hates gay men. We are good for loans and art purchases. We loyally turn up at the hospital every time she half-heartedly overdoses.

When I brought that beautiful boy Spencer home, she asked if he was my boyfriend, then slandered me in German.  My school boy German catches every word.

Gay men know this: we all know that those determined to kill themselves rarely fail. The rest, like Tanja, merely crave the attention: cosseted in hospital beds, prescribed medicine, given the benefit of the doubt.

The gays around her provide the Greek entertainment.  The chorus.  Picking up the pieces.

At dawn, when she finally let me sleep. Before she falls into her bed, Tanja became sexually abusive. When we are on our own, if I’m the only person in the house she focuses her sexual violence on me.  Keeping me awake until dawn, drinking and smoking. Trying to touch me.

When, at the end, I mention that she is sexually harassing me and I could sue her… she smiles a smile only a torturer could have smiled and I saw very clearly into her rotten, stinking soul. She looked like the devil. I saw the devil smile. I will never forget that smile, for it was quite unlike anything I had seen before.

In the morning, by way of apology, she reminds me again that her mother had abused her. That she had hidden from the Nazis by living in a box under a mill, like a fairy-tale troll. After the war her mother had children and beat them. This was the excuse she gave for abusing me.

The same excuse. Again and again.

Excuses: excuses not to pay her artists, why the house would freeze and the pipes would burst.  Excused for not having insurance when Sandy hit Manhattan and filled her Chelsea gallery with raw sewage. Excuses for not paying her taxes, for not bothering to renew her visa.  Excuses why she never made a better job of killing herself. Excuses and apologies. One after another. A crocodile of dead infants snaking their way to hell.

After my painful pancreas operation, drowsy on meds she made me drive to the bank, fetch her $3000 and then punches me when I burst into tears. She apologizes immediately; she tells me that she was abused by her mother.   It’s too late. The summer is coming to an end. I hate her with such vigor. I hate being near her, I hate her voice, her smell, her proximity.

We drive back to the gallery where an angry artist is waiting for cash. Arms crossed.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.”  She pleads with the angry artist.

At the end of August I empty the house of my possessions and I am free. 8 months of hell finally comes to an end.  I move to Tivoli.

Even after I am gone she demands money.  I have learned not to respond or engage.  A good lesson in restraint of pen and tongue.

Categories
Queer

The Corner, Hotel Tivoli, Tivoli

Tivoli HotelDevon Gilroy

There are many wonderful things to recommend a visit to The Hotel Tivoli or The Corner Restaurant in Tivoli, Duchess County.   The exquisite decor, the art, the many celebrities who visit this tasteful oasis created by the sensationally successful artist Brice Marden and his imposingly chic wife Helen.  Adding The Hotel Tivoli to a burgeoning chain… they also own The Golden Rock Inn on the Caribbean island of Nevis.

Together with landscape architect Raymond Jungles, Brice and Helen have turned Golden Rock into something extraordinary: a jungly hideaway, with the artfully overgrown botanical gardens of a fantastical world. It’s impossible to tell where the gardens end and rainforest begins. Curious plants grow on a grand scale: giant palms, like fans of the gods; elephant’s ears so vast you can use them as parasols. On this island-in-the-sun you can almost hear them growing.

Without doubt the Mardens’ have exquisite taste and an eye for sensitive restoration.

The Hotel Tivoli, once the Hotel Madeleine is an imposing Victorian building on the corner of North Street and Broadway in the heart of charming Tivoli.  Apparently, when they bought it, it had seen better days.  The Mardens’ transformed the building from dull… to glamorous.  The startling restoration of this fine building has attracted many new faces to what was becoming a Bard dormitory town.  Indeed, the younger staff at the Hotel are all Bard attendees.

These optimistic, wealthy students who flush through the town every year, year after year lend the place a Southern Californian hippy vibe.  Youngsters hang out on stoops, out of windows, laughing and singing.

Tivoli HotelTivoli Hotel

The whole operation would be perfect were it not for the chef at The Corner, Billy Gilroy’s errant son Devon Gilroy.  Covered in Tattoos, clipped hair… I met him through one of his many, many ex girlfriends who he dumped unceremoniously… but continued fucking.

This good looking, bearish, slightly over weight young man is single handedly the fly in the luxurious ointment at The Corner Restaurant.  Despised by his wait staff and many of the women in the hotel, he bullies anyone and everyone in his kitchen.  Perhaps he thinks he needs to behave like Gordon Ramsey to be a great chef?  In fact, this screaming, shouting and abusive behavior has more to do with his insecurity than some mad, uncontrollable genius.

Only today one of his ex staff bemoaned how he treated her disrespectfully, reducing her to tears…  then, after a couple of days, Devon makes a simpering passive/aggressive faux amends.

Devon Gilroy is a very lucky boy.  Helen and Brice Marden sent him to Morocco to learn the ways of North African cuisine.  He came back with a lame Tagine and a recipe for ‘Moroccan street bread’… what ever that is.

During the Spring, after the harshest upstate winter,  I made a great effort and spent a lot of money supporting The Corner Restaurant, well before the summer rush.

There were occasion when my friends were the only party in the restaurant.

I introduced fancy architects, I took my celebrity dot com friends. I took artists and art collectors and gallery owners.  As the restaurant grew busier the food shrank in portion, the plating messier and the quality dwindled.  I took my very best English friends and a clumsy waitress spilled a bottle of beer on his head and over his white shirt.  No apology.  Nothing removed from the bill.

My early Yelp review raved about the place.  I wished it every success.  I have stayed in the Hotel twice.  The rooms are wonderful (I really wanted to write wonderful in Caps) and The Hotel remains without any serious competition for 100 miles.  I urge you to break the bank and stay in the Hotel Tivoli, eat the amazing breakfast (divine almond cakes and home made jam) but please don’t bother with dinner at The Corner, unless… you’re drinking at the spectacular marble bar.

(Hungry?  Drive six miles to Gaskin’s in Germantown for dinner.  A class act.)

Oddly, my later… less complimentary Yelp review was removed at the The Corner’s demand.

Pity they forgot my blog.  I didn’t.

Brice and Helen Marden run a money no object operation at the Hotel Tivoli.  It is a beautiful gift to the people of Tivoli.  Stuffed with iconic, contemporary furniture and millions of dollars of art.  A true gem.  There is a huge portrait of Helen at the top of the stairs by Francesco Clemente.  It is without doubt one of the finest hotels in the state of old New York.

I’m sure that with well trained servers and a new, less tyrannical chef, (working along side Nancy the excellent GM and Jeannette the elegant maitre d’)  this star restaurant will rightfully sparkle in the local firmament.

Brunch Hotel TivoliHelen Marden by Clemente