Tag: Facebook

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Travel Whitstable

Mudlark

The smell of damp tweed.  My collarless shirt and felt braces.

A mantle with fabric that may or may not be Bloomsbury.  Mismatched luster wear cup and saucer.  Chipped.  These things used to delight me. Treasures found at the edge of the Thames.  When did I cease to be a mudlark?

Is it Duncan Grant or Vanessa Bell?

  • I bought the fabric from a junk shop in Stamford a month ago. Would dearly love to find out who it’s by… 

  •  

    Simon I’ll check in a book on Bloomsbury textiles at work. It could be one of those designs they did for the Queen Mary that were then mass-produced. That would be v exciting! 

    7 hours ago
  •  

    Christopher It’s Bloomsbury I sure of that 

    5 hours ago
  •  

    Christopher My only other thoughts is that it could be by Cressida Bell but I do feel it has something of Vanessa about it 

    5 hours ago
  •  

    Ed How exciting! I think it’s possibly more Vanessa in style too.

White linen bed sheets, feather pillows, pale pink, satin, quilted, stuffed with down.  Hot water bottle.

Laying the table for breakfast.  Poached eggs.  Marmite on my toast.

That tribe of gay men still delight me.  I used to know them.

My cottage in Whitstable was full of tiny, beautiful things.  With more money came larger, expensive things.  Now I sit under a decade long avalanche of avarice.

More stuff.

Remember when we didn’t have radiators in the cottage?  Frost in the sitting room before we lit a fire?  The smell of coal and crackling kindle.  Wrapping up warm before we left the bedroom?

I think this is how one might start again.  Renting a room at the back of a house by the sea.  I don’t have to live in Whitstable.

I am wondering hard again.  Torn between two worlds.

The conversation from Facebook (above) that I have taken the liberty of reproducing made me feel homesick for small mercies…for a butler’s sink, for the sound of a mop bucket.  For the back stairs in a country house.  For sea views that may include the ghosts of women once dressed in white tulle and parasols.

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Rant

Feisty and Confident

The secrecy is getting to me.  I can’t bear it.

You can slag me off as much as you want but the truth is: I am mortally indiscreet so this is like shoving a red-hot poker up my ass and NOT in a good way.

After bleating this week about never going to have sex ever again well…an old comfort buddy called me yesterday morning and we lay in bed all afternoon kissing and stroking and showering together.  Someone I have known for years.  A sweet-natured Iranian man, 28..hairy chest.  There’s a picture of him in the blog I think.  Hidden.

It felt good to hold him in my arms.  It was very comforting.

The back of his neck reminded me of you know who so I looked him in the eye.

We scoffed a late lunch overlooking the sea.

As we ate two drunk people started a fight.  A bruised woman in her late 40’s and her madly attractive, much younger (20’s) blond, surfer boy friend.  Both chestnut coloured from lazing all year on the beach.  Her sun bleached hair tangled in dried blood from a recent brawl.  She threw two large bottles of beer at his head.  They smashed on the ground.  Later we saw this odd, violent couple being arrested.

Spent the rest of the day wrestling back control of the computer from Max.  His 13-year-old brain having got the best of his mum and dad’s good intentions.  Taking control of the family internet.  He was horrified by what I had done: limiting his internet usage to 3 hours a day, no iChat, no unfettered Facebook.  Every time he wants to do anything dodgy the computer emails me and tells me all about it.

Whilst they were out 10-year-old Hannah and I cooked dinner.  Moroccan influenced lamb balls.  Assorted vegetables.  Buttered rice.

I am feeling good.  Excited.  Fearless.

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art Gay Money Rant

How do you Solve a Problem like Amanda Eliasch?

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Amanda Eliasch is very, very rich.  She is the ex-wife of Johann Eliasch, owner of tennis racket and sports wear company Head.  Currently Amanda is trying to get me to remove a blog reference made last week after she posted some nastiness about me on Facebook.

Sadly, as Jake found to his dismay, even if I removed any or all evidence… the blog will remain in the virtual ether forever and ever. FOREVER.  Then, she persuaded some weird friend of hers to say that I only have 3 readers a day…that’s like telling a man he has a very small penis.

Let me remind you how I know this woman Amanda Eliasch…she was/is going out/hooking up/in confused hyper emotional ‘relationship’ with my old friend the genuine article… writer Tim Willis.  Poor Tim, the first time I was summoned to her house he was a quaking, smoking, drinking wreck. Exiled to the tennis court at her architecturally significant, now recently sold Beverly Hills house. His already weakened body covered in welts from Amanda’s sharp little tongue.

The 1st and least problematic of the litany of problems with Amanda: she is a bully.  In some lame attempt to stop me from posting anything about her on my blog she reminded me that she had let me visit her home. OK. So? I reminded her (pompous hag) that I let her visit mine. The next barrage of emails, no doubt, will include reminders that she paid for a couple of lunches.

The emails after that will include homophobic slurs.

Well known to architects, and interior decorators as a person who loathes paying her bills, (I know two personally) She is currently working with ‘interior designer to the stars’ Martyn Lawrence-Bullard who told me he went to Eton… does anyone know if this is true? I met ‘interior designer to the stars’ Martyn Lawrence-Bullard with Chris “The King” Cortazzo the  realtor.  Why will ‘interior designer to the stars’ Martyn Lawrence-Bullard definitely get paid for renovating Amanda’s new home in LA? The simple fact is: ‘interior designer to the stars’ Martyn Lawrence-Bullard is far too well-connected not to get paid.

As well as converting Amanda’s brown Wimpy home (ex Janet Leigh) into a white clad Wimpy home ‘interior designer to the stars’ Martyn Lawrence-Bullard is also converting a small apartment in Sierra Towers Los Angeles as something ‘nice’ for Elton’s Nanny and child.

I really did not want to start the year slagging an old slag but hey, at least I’m not writing about Jake, eh?

The most perplexing problem with Amanda: she is totally bonkers… and not in a good way. She has no style, no friends and leaves a nasty taste in one’s mouth whenever one chances upon her.  Her conversation is limited and punctuated with barking noises… is this some sort of tick?  I have never once been able to get a reasonable opinion or for that matter ANY opinion out of the woman who wasn’t cribbed from some Daily Mail commentator/op ed…consequently her politics are slightly right of Hitler’s.  Amanda once complained to me, like many of her ilk, that there wasn’t a decent right-wing newspaper in Britain.

Now, I know that she will take issue with the ‘no friends’ claim but after her $500k fiasco of a birthday party last year where half her Facebook friends didn’t turn up… and, like an eastern European traveler, she tangoed for her startled guests then… to their growing horror played a sycophantic film ‘produced’ by her friends waxing ’bout how wonderful Amanda is. I wonder how she manages to keep the friends she has!

Good God! You can’t make this stuff up!

Amanda is surrounded by a certain type of woman, the ball breaking Aliai, Lady Forte, the ball breaking Tracy Emin and the drunk most of the time but harmless… unless sober when she too becomes a bone fide ball breaker… Kay Saatchi.  Throw a few insignificant men into the black lacquered pot and bob’s your uncle: Amanda’s World.

The unforgivably huge problem with Amanda (and British social-climbing women like her) she is ever so slightly homophobic. She likes to remind gays that in Amanda’s World they have no right to demand rights or equality ‘what ever that is?’… that we have no place in the army or in sport and she questions our integrity in the school room.  She tells us that we are of ‘no use’ to her… unless we are ‘decorating’ or ‘making things look pretty’.

Amanda, like her ball breaking friends, is also a low-grade racist and treats her black chef with imperial disdain.  Amusingly she has a desire to be close to film stars and celebrities but they are not eager to be seen with her.  Her life interminably chasing yet another film festival, film opening, red carpet event… is pathetic at best… tragic at worst.

Amanda, if she doesn’t mend her ways, will end up like Wallis Simpson who, though remarkably chic, died isolated and miserable. At Wallis’s funeral the bulk of the wreaths came from vendors all over Paris who, without doubt, missed her very generous patronage.

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art Rant

PUKE

Guess who I received a long letter from yesterday when I got back from the Emmy do at SHLA?  Yes, you guessed it…Jake. What a smarmy bastard..of course he couldn’t just let it all go.  He couldn’t leave me alone.  He had to reach out.  Just as I was NOT thinking about him, getting right with our situation.  DAMN.  I was in such a positive mood.

I went to bed feeling all confused and mushy again.  Thinking all manner of absurd things.

He timidly suggested that we don’t meet for the time being.  How about we never EVER meet?   Why don’t you just fuck off and lean on some of your other friends like you lent on me for support?  They’ll get sick of you too, bleating and moaning and missing her.

So, why was he writing?   He asked for his full name to be removed from the blog which I did ..then I re-read his letter.  It was all about him.  Blah fucking blah about his coming out and how much I meant to him.  Bullshit.  If I had meant anything to him he wouldn’t have contacted me.  Not once did he enquire about my continuing health problem..not once.  The more I thought about it the more annoyed I became.

He asked after the ‘darling’ little dog which nearly made me PUKE.

So, I called him and left a long message on his phone.  I told him never ever to contact me again.  That his mate had emailed me from Mt. Kisco to tell me that he was laughing at me with Jake and other friends behind my back.  That I hated him.  I wanted him to hear my voice.  That I meant what I was saying.  That I am serious.  Like when you call your dealer and tell them to lose your number.  Like when you tell your friends that you are not coming out for a drink.

The funny thing was he didn’t want to demonize me..well Jake, that’s very reassuring.   I am having NO TROUBLE demonizing YOU.

So annoying!  I had been really getting my head together.

Saw George Clooney, said Hi.  He seemed to remember me from the evening Sharon introduced us at Chateau Marmont.

Had dinner with Toby at Pace..his steak cost $50.  My soup $8.  I drew these:

Categories
Money Rant

Just Not Into It

CNN wasn’t much fun this evening.  I just wasn’t into it.  I was on for the entire programme.   I prefer to spar a little and no amount of coffee was going to lift me out of my sowhatness.

What the hell am I doing here having opinions about Tiger Woods?

Therapy this morning.  Huge English Breakfast.  Chatted with my Mother.  Lunch with a friend.

I forgot to mention that yesterday on the way back from letting in the new and adorable renters I chatted with Nicola H all the way from the PCH to Robertson.  We hadn’t spoken for years.  Lost each other.  She lives in France.  Dione’s daughter.  Trying to have a baby.

She found me via reading my blog.  It was a perfect example of just how this blog works for me rather than against me.   Occasionally full disclosure has its benefits.

Back to the renters..the ones that left Sunday morning at 10 had broken every single rule but I handed back their deposit.  I could have so easily kept it.  Smoking, under age, party..etc.  I just smiled as they tried concealing their tracks.  Nothing broken, no stains.  Used their own sheets.

The new renters were charming.  A middle-aged man and his wife and small dog.  Very sweet.  They leave on Thursday.  I am going to fill the truck with stuff and take it over there.

Facebook etiquette.   Jake’s great hobby (other hobby given his obsession with online hook ups) is Facebook where he regularly trawls through the lives of others, mocking his old school friends and their marriages and babies.

As if to prove my famewhore monika I now discover that pearshaped Jake made the right move by Facebook defriending people he met through me yet, I notice, not everyone..he kept hold of friends of mine on Facebook who he considered useful..including my talented chanteuse friend who, upon meeting him, wondered why I had chosen such a ‘dull man’ to make my lover.  Mind you, it was one of those scintillating evenings when he just could not get off his iPod or texting on his phone.

I realize now that when he is so intensely involved with his phone/iPod/laptop he is busy with other fuckbuddies.

I begin my small claims action against him today.

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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
Gay Hollywood Rant

Gay Pride?

Today the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is burning. Added to the slick of heavy crude oil toxic, jet-black smoke polluting the air we breathe.   The azure, pristine water marred with acrid plumes of shit colored oil.  The marshlands and beaches painted brown, the life there dying because we refuse to doubt our dependence on oil.  It is officially one of the worst man-made environmental disasters ever.

Yet, the massed people of the United States, indeed the world, politely ignored it.  Until now.  Blame is being apportioned, asses are being kicked yet today I will fill my truck with gas and think nothing of it.  I am complicit; I am responsible yet I do nothing.   Nothing.

It is maybe just the analogy I need to explain the human disaster caused by religious based homophobia that causes pain and suffering to those who live in it’s shadow.

Frankly, I don’t give daily thought to the fact that I am part of a community that is routinely demonized just as I choose to forget that hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spew into the sea.  I have learned to live side by side a huge number of people encouraged to hate me and people just like me because of the way we were born and the sexual preferences we have.

Politically I have sat motionless on the sidelines whilst living in the USA.  I have not demonstrated like I did in London, I have not written to my representative in Congress expressing my outrage at how my rights are diminished or devalued.   I put up with things just the way they are because I feel powerless, that I am just one man with one lone voice against the angry mob.

Nowadays I am resigned, whenever I am with men who do not know that I am gay and say things that are blatantly offensive, to keep my mouth shut.    I do not blame myself for their views but as I grow older I am less likely to defend my community or myself.  It simply isn’t worth it.  I am tired of being the uppity gay.

I am exhausted by confronting inequity and hate in my life and I am scared.  Scared that I will not be able to fully defend myself against their physical abuse.

My entire career as an artist has been to serve the gay community.  My plays and films aimed at men like me.  I have been hugely admired (and reviled) as a filmmaker but even my gay friends do not respect that I describe myself as a ‘gay filmmaker’ a gay man who makes films for and about our community.  They muse that I could have done so much better for myself if I had abandoned my principles.  If I had gone ‘mainstream’.

All I ever wanted to be was a gay artist who uses the language and locations of our gay lives.  I am proud to have done so.  I am proud to have served my community thus.

I wonder how much damage we do ourselves in the way that we choose to be seen?  How can we expect those who loathe us to accept us when we do so little to let them know who we are?

What is my part in the public relation disaster that still prevents fellow citizens from owning and celebrating my existence?  What am I doing in my community to help those angry people understand who I am?   How can I expect the mainstream to accept my demands for equality when I essentially live in a hermetically sealed ghetto?

How can I expect my gay fellow travelers to start reaching into their pockets and paying for a PR campaign that somehow celebrates our diversity when all we are seen to want is the right to fuck?

Call me old-fashioned but the love I have for another man always felt far more subversive than the act of fucking.

How do you say ‘I love you’ to another man?  What does it mean when two men say that they love each other?  Having sex with a man is easy-isn’t it?   That’s why we all do it as often as we do..don’t we?  But to say ‘I love you’ to another man is perhaps the most shameful phrase I ever uttered.   My tongue, swelling in my mouth, choking me..rather than say those three tiny words to another man.

I love you.  I love you.  I love you.

What I know for sure about love between men is that others condemn the sanctity of that love.  That I still feel a vague embarrassment when I am seen to hold another man’s hand in the street.

We, as a community, do not promote ourselves as hopeless romantics but as half-naked sex maniacs.  By doing so we have become unwitting witnesses for the prosecution.   By publicly sexualizing everything we do we devalue what we have.  On Facebook the majority of my gay friends are shirtless in their profile pictures.  When questioned why he was bearing his chest in his Facebook profile picture one erudite gay friend said that he was ‘proud’ of his body and wanted to show it off.  It seems like a simple enough answer but is this what gay pride has boiled down to, our very own hard-fought perestroika reduced to this?

It seems so..undignified.

In West Hollywood there is a large poster on Santa Monica Blvd for a gay removal company; two half-naked men carry a small box grinning broadly.  At the premiere LA gay bar The Abbey there is another huge poster celebrating it’s twentieth year.  Three massively built and tattooed men, one of them mixing a martini on the rock hard abs of another; their naked truncated bodies engaged in what may be fellatio.

It was past this very poster out walking one evening last week when I had a full beer can thrown at me that very narrowly missed my head and landed squarely on my chest.  The accompanying homophobic insults are not worth repeating.

I hated the smell of beer on my clothes and the pain in my heart but I hated that poster far more.  It’s as useful as a picture of happy, smiling Jews counting dollar bills outside the Jewish Community Center.

The way we choose to be seen is the way we will be perceived.  I am told constantly that there are thousands of gay men who do not go to gay bars, who live happy lives in monogamous relationships who work quietly and steadfastly beyond the glitz of the gay ghetto but, amazingly, I have never met those men.  I don’t know what they look like.  I have never seen them, been introduced to them.  If I have never met those men then those who misunderstand us certainly never have.

The acrid smoke and crude oil are coming ashore; it destroys almost everything in its path.   If we do nothing perhaps nature will deal with it, break it up over thousands of years so I don’t have to think about it.  But, irritatingly, I am not that kind of man.   I worry about the herons and the oysters and the dolphins.   I am outraged by the incompetence and greed, just like I am every time my community is attacked because we do so little to let them know who we are, what we are, how we are.

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Death Dogs Love Malibu

Crying

The Sex Rehab show effect has been cumulative.   When it first aired I expected to be immediately recognized.  As the weeks and months pass more and more people come up to me in the street and introduce themselves.

Shown daily on VH1, making it easier for old ‘friends’ and acquaintances to reach out to me.  Long forgotten, now reminded by Sex Rehab re-acquainted on Facebook, twitter etc.

Reality TV is truly life changing.   Opportunities include film projects,  book deals,  lovers-I am anywhere but where I thought I might be at my age.

Outside, this rainy afternoon, the gardeners are pulling out tons of weeds.  It is good to hear them chattering away in Spanish.  So, that’s what life will be, a life of chattering Mexican gardeners until Dorset Mary pitches up in her airstream and tends the goats and the chickens.

I have to call the bee man today about getting the bees up here.  I know where I want them to go.

I wrote yesterday about crying, a commission for a new magazine.  There’s been a great deal of crying during the past few months as my focus shifted from the big picture to just one man.   Ones view narrows exponentially when one falls in love and at the same time balloons into something huge.  My tears were not often for him but for past traumas and relationships and deaths.  My focus became very shallow and as I retreat from love I seem to be more aware of the horizon.

I cried when my Darling Big Dog was killed. I sat in my bed for a week and sobbed like a child.  I am still prone to sink into that deep, black well of sadness, tears  flooding my eyes and my heart.

If I had not witnessed that terrible moment I would be a lesser man today.  In many ways to have suffered like that unleashed all I had been denying myself throughout the years.  So many times I should have, could have, would have cried but remained stoic and dry-eyed.

The architects have just been to the house to check out the layout.  She was a rather wonderful, practical woman with a great attitude.

My film is taking shape, the garden continues to give pleasure and I am getting into my creative groove.  Although I am still mourning the death of love I am looking forward to a brighter, leaner future.