Tag: London

Categories
Gay

Birthday Party

Robby left this morning.  I was really sad to see him go.

The indisputable zenith of my birthday party was Lady Rizo singing Lilac Wine.    Seventy people in the room, you could hear a pin drop.   Such a disparate group of people with a magical spell cast over them…as only Rizo can.

The day was perfect in every way.    Dee emerged from her room at The Standard and we ate a delicious lunch with Toby and the super cute Joe.  When he took his clothes off and dived into the pool everybody watched him in awe.  A man not a boy.  A man with a perfect body.

Joan met me mid afternoon and delivered my birthday gift.  A BEAUTIFUL pair of sunglasses I had been hankering after for six months.

We all returned to Dee’s room at The Standard.  I love this hotel.  The finishes and detailing throughout the hotel are ravishing, the amazing view of The Statue of Liberty peeking over the horizon.

Spent the afternoon with Joe.

The weather has been stunning here.  Walking the streets has been inspiring.

Soho House did an amazing job of organizing my birthday party.  The food was excellent; the staff were charming and helpful.  The room perfectly appointed.

As well as Lady Rizo my friends Joey and Chase also known as the Black Soft and Rob Roth performed.  Rizo stole the night.  She sang a brilliant and very funny mash-up of Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend and Wannabee.  With the writer of the Spice Girls classic in the room it was especially poignant.

People really made the effort.  Victoria Whitbread, Matt Rowe and Charlie Parsons flew from London and of course there were many, many gorgeous boys to look at.  I had exactly what I wanted.

This was the birthday party I should have had last year but traded for a miserable time with the crazed fan.

We ended up on the roof by the pool with yet another blue balling straight boy called Sean.  Soft skin, perfect body.   As we were sitting there I saw Dominique Lomas from Sydney!  Of all people.  She looked gorgeous.  Here in NYC writing a novel.  If only I had known!

So, we all sat there in the balmy night looking down at the Hudson.  Dreaming of Sean’s face in my lap.

Sean headed off with Dominique.  We were invited to young FJ’s house.  We walked the few blocks to his huge Soho loft, stuffed with amazing art belonging to the boy’s step-father..a renowned art historian and personal hero of mine.

Tom, Robby, me and the boys.

We had the beautiful boys to take their tops off and then we took pictures of them.  It was honest (sordid) fun.  Note the Lucian Freud beside them.

I was surrounded by love last night.  Surrounded by people who loved me.   Serenaded me.  Friends old and new.  People had traveled a very long way to see me and I felt finally rewarded for these past months of painful growing.

I am determined that these final months in America will mean something to me.  Determined that they will be happy, joyous and free.  The glimpse of the Statue of Liberty reminded me why I came here, have made it my home but also why I must ultimately move on.

Categories
Gay

Poor White Trash

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yghncsxRs]

 

Matt Rowe arrived from London.  Lunch with Casey at Westville.  Steven and I ate an early supper and held hands in the street.  I felt my whole body tingle with excitement.  Late dinner at lil’ Frankies with my pride boys.  I love them.

Gave up after that.  Exhausted.

I found out that somebody for whom I had long-held a candle is in fact gay…

Much more to tell but have no time.

Categories
Gay

Transformers: Dark of The Moon

I can’t really write about yesterday morning.  Needless to say I will.  In time.  Maybe tomorrow.

Had lunch at the Mercer Kitchen with a friend.  There were many, many tired looking servers/shop assistants etc., in New York the day after Pride.   Grimly going about their working day at the mercy of rotten hangovers.

Only one of the twins arrived from LA.  Miles had to stay home and guard the fort.

Robby has never really been to NYC before; you should have seen his face!  He was delighted.  He had such a big Robby smile.  We wandered the East Village and as much as he complained that smokes were triple the price you could tell that no amount of money spent on ciggies was going to ruin his NYC state of mind.

We took the subway to 42nd Street.  Excited to see Transformers 3.  3D.

Tom’s film will have grossed more than 3 billion dollars by the time all is said and done.

I am not going to review the movie.   He’s my friend.  Watching a friend’s movie is not like going to the cinema and just sitting down and watching a film.

I am already invested.

OK, I’ll just tell you a couple of things.  Frankly the film was a bit confusing: the transformer goodies and the baddies melding into one heap of scrap metal with no clear battle, no defining heroic moment.

Even the casting was confusing; I thought John Malkovich was Gary Busey.  What has he done to his mouth?  His teeth?

There were too many quips and not enough story.

The special effects were remarkable and keep the tension levels high.  Somehow watching any well-shot fight captures the imagination even though in this case one might not know what they are fighting about.

The lead girl, a Victoria Secrets model, was appalling, all lips and hair and pout.   The camera fetishizing her lithe body.  The director forcing his camera into her face, her mouth.

Shia looked worse for wear and has certainly lost that youthful vulnerability that carried him and us through the first of this blockbuster franchise.

The parents who amused us and grounded us in the first film have become irritating non-secateurs.  Great actors and not so great actors deliver cheesy lines that segue into another well-crafted fight.  The disparity causing some general merriment in the room

Regardless of what Transformers has become Tom’s initial idea had integrity and poise.   It is important to remember that.

For the second time in as many days I wished I could have gotten fucked up.

This is getting crazy.

Everybody falls in love with Robby.  Robby, quite rightly, drowning in positive affirmation.   I am proud of the way he handles himself in these situations.

My big birthday party on Thursday night, there are people flying from Hong Kong, London and LA.  It’s going to be a blast.  I am really looking forward to it.  100 people.  Entertainment.  Hootenanny.

I have now re-written the end of the novel and await notes.

Determined that my party will neither depress or stress me.

Categories
Gay

Pursuit of Beauty

Stayed over at the Lake House.  Woke early.  Made coffee.  Fed Max.

Two sets of novel notes arrived yesterday…both were extremely promising.  One from the publisher in London and the other from my friend who teaches at NYU.  Very positive.  I am still undecided about the end.   Wish I could write about it without spoiling it.  Something good is finally emerging from my time with him.

That pustulent, suppurating, festering, odious, limited…ugly little man.

Something beautiful is being born.  From out of the shadows I will make something glorious!  Eh up lad.  Where there’s muck there’s brass.

Today I am in pursuit of beauty!  In all its many forms.  A row of freshly planted melons.  A perfect cup of tea. A beautiful penis.

I have a friend on FB who takes the most beautiful photographs and yesterday he shared a picture of Thomas Heatherwick‘s Beach Cafe at dusk.  Too perfect.  This man Heatherwick is a genius.  This is exactly what Whitstable needs.  A fantastically bold architectural something.

I met a boy yesterday.  A brief assignation with a 22-year-old from Maryland.  A hotel room in Santa Monica.  He was on vacation with his parents.  He was my height, muscular, masculine.  He had the most enormous penis.  Incredible shape, thick.   He wanted to ‘role play‘ but I refused.  He was deaf.  I did not want to know his name.

Robby waited outside until we had finished.

After I left the beautiful boy we headed to Home Depot where we bought plants.

Spent the rest of the day planting neat rows of cantaloupe, honeydew and water melons..we planted far too many.  We also planted far too many ‘heirloom’ tomatoes.   There are other bits and pieces in the raised beds in front of the house.    Squash, pumpkin etc.

I am perplexed.  There is a bare patch of land where the huge Bougainvillea used to be.  Needs filling.  Needs something.  What?

We weeded and watered and dug compost into the dry earth.  We trimmed the grape vines.  The sun began to set.

Joined the Piettes at The Malibu Community theatre for Hannah’s performance of Tweedle Dee in Alice in Wonderland.  The play was great fun.  The girl who played The Mad Hatter (Sage?) was not only very beautiful but incredibly talented.  Ate pizza during the interval.

We stayed until 10pm.  Hopped straight into bed when I got home.

Tom suggested that I reprise my stage version of The Baron in The Trees.

Related articles
Categories
Malibu

Max

My god daughter’s brother Max wants me to adopt him.   He spent the past few days here.

At home he is, as Zack would say, a hot mess.  Once he gets here he is calm, attentive, polite and charming.   He is the right size.  He washes dishes and clears up after himself.  He chats animatedly to the twins and one would never imagine that this is the boy who is facing all sorts of trouble at school and at home.

He is very much like I was when I was a kid.   I just loathed my parents and took every opportunity to make them aware of it.    At school he doesn’t really fit it so over compensates with lies and boasting.  Consequently he has a horrible time.

Whereas I had good reason to hate my step-father his parents try their best to accommodate him.  I know that this will end badly because as much as he tries to be a stand up guy he is now cast in the ‘bad boy’ role-and that only has one conclusion.  The authorities are aware of him, the school doesn’t want him, his peers are frightened of him.  His parents, poor things, are at their wit’s end.

When he is with me he understands the boundaries.  We speak the same language.  The language of the addict.  I wish I could take him to an AA meeting but he’s 13 years old.

Yesterday Max, Miles and I planted melon seeds and watered the garden.  The Little Dog found a young rattle snake and we killed it.  It has been snake crazy up here.  Rattlesnakes, California King and Garter snakes.   A huge California King Snake dozing on the path.  It looks worse than it is.  Apparently non-venomous.   Unless you are a small mammal.

I guess there are many more snakes this year because of the rain we had all winter.  More vegetation means more rabbits and gophers which in turn feed the snakes.

The Little Dog did something very funny.  We were listening to the coyote deep in the valley screaming and howling, when ever they do that the Little Dog hears his call from the wild and barks frantically.  Robby started howling like the coyote and to our amusement the Little Dog started howling too.  It was a revelation, I had never seen him howl.  It was so sweet to see him lift his little head and howl.  The howling dog.  I will try to film it next time it happens.

When we finally took Max home via the ice cream store at the Lumber Yard he reverted to his usual surly, frightened self.  Rude to his parents, unhelpful, aggressive to his sisters.  It was sad to see.   The twins and I adore Max when he stays here with us.  Now he wants to come live here full-time.  When I get back from the East Coast this autumn we will think about it.

I really think that this may be the only way he holds onto his family, his liberty and his sanity.

I spent the rest of the day plotting the final chapters of my book.  It does not turn out how one might think.  However, crafting a sting in the tail is my aim and that is harder to write than it seems.

Thanks for all of the helpful Novel feedback.  Thanks for those of you who took the time.  Thanks especially to Joanna in London from a certain niche publisher who liked it enough to want to read it all.

Categories
Malibu

BAFTA

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

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

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

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

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

I feel sad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Rant

The Penguin


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UP TOWN!

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

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

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

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

82 blocks to contemplate.   An 82 block contemplation.

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

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

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

My heart bleeds for him.

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

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

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

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

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

Dinner conversation inevitably turned to him.

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

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

He had no regard for her.

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

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

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

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

Categories
Malibu

Spring

We picked lemons and grapefruits and cleaned out the plunge pool.  We cooked dinner.  We walked on the beach.  I wrote more of my film.  I met another DOP.  I wrote more of my novel.  I am presently writing a thousand words a day.  More if I count this and the film.  We planted a tree and swept the paths.  The days are full up with life and laughter.

The twins are incredibly funny and kind.  Their Mother called me yesterday and thanked me for looking after them.  It’s a treat to do so.  They are honest.  They give more than they take.

I don’t want to go back to NYC so perhaps I won’t.  There’s nothing there for me other than sadness.   Disaster.   Therapist Jill gets back this week and hopefully I can get myself into some sort of rehab by the beginning of May.   It’s the only way I can imagine dealing with everything that has happened.   The pain and the resentment.

I can start again.

He was wearing the jacket that I picked out for him in the most recent picture I have.  Staring at a near empty pint of beer.  I hope he chokes on that fucking beer.  I hope that every time he pulls on his jacket he thinks of me and London and APC and how much I tried to help him.  What lengths I was prepared to go to make his new gay life better.

You see?  When you let a liar into your life what havoc they cause?  What pain and suffering they inflict?  Oh get over it I hear you say…but I am not like that.  I can carry around a resentment for years.   Some relationships take years to get over.  Especially when you know in your heart that you will never love like you loved, feel what you feel, be what you were with the man who you loved…ever again.  Even if he was a liar, even if he is impossible to forgive.  Even if I want so badly to put things right and be at peace with the world.

The twins are off out to Santa Monica.  They are leaving me here to write and ponder.

Life cheats us with shadows.   We ask it for pleasure and it gives it to us with bitterness and disappointments in it’s train.  Oscar Wilde.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w_szN3uuIY&feature=related]

Categories
Hollywood

Research

The past ten days we have immersed ourselves in the ‘project’.  I am learning to be collaborative which is unusually hard for a man like me who largely expects to get things his own way.  The more we explore the clearer the picture becomes.  Have you heard of a film called Cathy Come Home?  I am drawn to it.

I like my life right now.  Doing what I feel I was put here to do.

We are running all over town.  Dane drives me.  His sweet face lightening the mood of the day. Last night Charles stopped by and the twins arrived.  Miles has been in Australia filming Whale Wars on a boat for three months.

Youth and enthusiasm.

Meeting writers, first ad’s, lawyers and the like.   Hanging out in obscure offices and community rooms.  Have to be discreet here.  Agreed not to write about any of it but I wanted you to know darling that I am safe and well and we are working hard to make things better for you.

The garden is desperate to be planted with vegetables.  On Saturday we were in Santa Barbra and met a lively old lady with great looking baby tomato plants.

The goats need to be bought.

I dreamt about Jake again.  Again, it was conciliatory.  There are times that I wish I could share what is going on with him because I know he would love it.  Isn’t that odd?  Perhaps I am close to totally forgiving him?  The last time we spoke was in July which means that we have not spoken for longer than we actually knew each other.

My NYC bf understands my predicament.  It seems that we have all experienced mad love, crushing obsession and the like.

Do, if you want to, look at the DEATH AND LOVE IN PATMOS blog because, at your request, I have transcribed the diary entries.

Also, my current ARTIST TO BUY pick of the week is:

Carla Busuttil

who opens tonight at the Josh Lilley Gallery in London.



Categories
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.

Related Articles
WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com