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Tag: Venice
I am obsessed with my Tumblr account.
Sitting with 12 year old Hannah learning how to do it properly.
Sitting up all night searching for images, videos, quotes from a long life.
Constructing a narrative where all events harmonize. Where color and texture blend from one image to another. Telling public and private stories simultaneously.
As for the rest? My other life?
I had tea with a producer on Friday ostensibly to talk about my new film…then unexpectedly he asked me to read a script which they are looking for a director.
It arrived immediately and it is beautiful. It will take me to Europe for a year. To Italy.
I drove back up the 10…happy, joyous and free. Perhaps the hell of the last two years is truly coming to an end?
Dinner in Venice, then bumped into my ‘friend with benefits’. He said, although drunk, that he was embarrassed to introduce me to his friends because I am so much older. I told him that was like me being embarrassed by his being a jew or gay…I walked away. He’s a kid. What do I expect?
He needs to learn to own his own life.
Today it’s lunch on the beach with British friends then tomorrow a magazine editor friend of mine from NYC is here.
I explained to Robby why I was feeling so optimistic, hours before the script was mentioned. Looking out over LA from the 13th floor.
I explained why seeing the man I once loved in love was so reassuring.
To be excluded from the life of one for whom I had been so instrumental…had driven me insane.
The emotional investment in another, even when that relationship changes into something else…well…one is always looking to recoup.
The dividend…was to see him happy. I saw irrefutable evidence that all our hard and painful, beautiful and passionate time together…was worth it.
I don’t need, nor do I deserve to have the enduring love of another to make me happy…all I needed to know was that he, he who I love…was loved.
It is very simple to me…though confusing for most.
My ‘failed relationship’ has meaning now. A context.
During the past two years I have written so often about finding peace. Peace and understanding. This is it! I announced grandly…this is the peace I have been searching for! Well, I was wrong.
It was merely an illusion. A false hope. The glaring eyes of many storms…a momentary peace…which I mistakenly assumed would last. The 100 foot waves continued to break over the bow and I was lost again.
Seeing those two men pressed together, harmonious, happy…well…who couldn’t want for them what I was never able to achieve?
I know what you think…that I deserve what I get, that I am not very nice, that I have been very cruel. Well, it’s true. I have been cruel and mean but I don’t think it was anything other than necessary for us to go through what we went through.
The only people, as I have written before who are deserving of my apology…are his parents and sister who I demanded into our violent storm, who I insulted and maligned.
For that I am truly sorry.
I have no idea, ultimately, if he intended for me specifically to see those things but he must have known. Wether he intended to try making me jealous..well..that’s another consideration and we’ll leave it at that.
What I have learned these past few years is that (in a quieter less public way) so many men and women are tortured by love…in and out of love. Choosing inappropriate partners, chasing hopeless dreams.
Sadly, there is no cure for curiosity.
Woke up early. Wanted to get the daub onto the stove. It’d been marinating all night.
Then, something about the process, the action of stirring the pot, as it began to simmer…broke something in me. Like I was having a rare moment of clarity, sanity…and I felt a terrible guilt for the way I had treated…not him…but his parents…drawing them into our drama. Collateral damage.
I wanted to write to them and tell them how sorry I was.
They were innocent.
Then I found that Avadon picture of Ginsberg and his long-term lover Orlovsky. And I thought about them ‘long-term’ and what they were thinking, or not thinking when they kissed for the camera.
I thought about the way they, we…I…describe what we have as long term.
Long term insists that we take what they had seriously. Ginsberg had not just met some man on the street and taken him into the studio. He had made some sort of commitment. Long term.
And I thought that marriage would be just that…long term. That our beards would grow long together. That I would never ever tire of looking at you. Kissing you.
Then I remember that I am here in LA. You send me a picture of Washington Square. It’s all I need right now. A picture.
The whole house smells of beef in red wine, fresh herbs, fresh garlic.
I had lunch with Robby on Monday. We ate a lamb burger at Gjelina. I drank ginger and mint italian soda.
He has been having a wonderful time. Earning masses of cash, loving his man and roaming with his homies. Yes, I wrote that.
On Wednesday I met a friend for lunch, a lunch that didn’t end until 3am. He is 23, he lied about his age. He told me he was older. A masculine dilettante.
We had lunch in Venice, tea in Beverly Hills, an odd party at The Sunset Tower (gays and girls), then dinner at Red Medicine on Wilshire.
Have you heard of Red Medicine? It’s that restaurant, Jordan Kahn’s place…that everyone is talking about.
We ordered far too much. Each baffling plate arrived covered in flowers or Dadaist condiment.
We ate: DUNGENESS CRAB / passion fruit, brown butter, black garlic, Vietnamese crepe, hearts of palm $32
We ate: HEIRLOOM RICE PORRIDGE / egg yolk, hazelnuts, ginseng, echire butter $17 and added Santa Barbara uni for a further $20.
We ate: BEEF TARTARE / water lettuce, water chestnut, nuoc leo, chlorophyll, peanut $15
We ate: AMBERJACK / red seaweed, buttermilk, lotus root, tapioca, succulents $16
Then, after dinner, we lay in the back of his SUV by the beach and kissed each other until my face was raw, my heart was racing, my legs were trembling. I was so completely overwhelmed that I could not drive for ne’er a mile before I had to stop and beg a cigarette from a passer-by.
He is beautiful. He gnawed at my neck until I could not bear it any more.
So, that’s what love looks like in a warm climate. For a moment. Not long-term. Not to be taken seriously. Just a moment. I have trained myself not to yearn for more.
So, the daub will cook for four more hours until it is tender. We will eat it with home-made noodles.
Categories
LA Portraits
Categories
Plein Soleil
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dFDX5Gozzk&feature=related]
Mel picked me up from the house at 6.15am and we drove into The Palisades for the 7.30am AA ‘bank’ stag meeting. I could only endure a few moments then I left.
I wandered around the Farmers Market looking at the organic vegetables, cut flowers, the smell of fresh samosas baking in the early morning sun.
I felt like Ripley (played by Alain Delon) at the fish market in the original film version Plein Soleil (see above starts at 9 mins and 9 seconds) of the novel The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
He has no idea what is waiting for him…
I first saw this film in Spetses, Greece. The open air cinema, when I was 21. Ironic huh?
If you don’t know this film…see it. It’s available in its entirety on YouTube.
I couldn’t sit in that meeting facing those scoundrels. One of them told us that he had called his wife a cunt and the other laughed heartily. He was trying to confess his wrongs, the others behaved like Rush Limbaugh. They thought it was sooo damned funny.
So I went for a walk in the now blazing sun. The hottest day of the year so far.
I chatted with a good-looking man and tried to take my mind off the meeting.
Mel and I walked the dogs down to the ocean. After he dropped me back at the house I tried writing, attempted to eat.
A friend dropped by and we meditated. Yes, we did.
Dinner with Anna in Venice, met a Greek friend, bumped into Rufus. Bed by 11.
Categories
My Faith is Restored
The dog sleeps by my side, I worry that I might roll on him in the night and kill him. Or, in a dream, I dismember him then wake up and he is dismembered.
As a very young child I worried that I had torn a dress to pieces that belonged to my mother.
I convinced myself that I had stolen the dress from her wardrobe, torn the dress, trying to make it fit me.
The shame of shredding it lived with me for decades. One day, some time in my 40’s, I confessed to her. I told her what I had done. She laughed, the dress had been her sisters, she had returned the dress.
The woolen crepe feel of it, the silk lining, the dark blue flowers lifted like brocade on the darker blue surface. The dream, the scissors, the cutting, trying to make it fit….me.
It was a dream.
You know that every word I write is being read by the police, by the brunette DA? By the ‘victim’s’ lawyers? They trawl this blog for evidence. Did I just prove how ‘dark and creepy’ I really am?
In another dream the DA is wearing suspenders and a bra, panties (crotchless) a wet gash, slipping herself onto her much older husband’s giant cock. She glances at the bible that sits primly on the bedside table and kicks it off. Her ankle bracelet (an anniversary gift) catches the light, her Christian name written in gold.
Her children are sleeping in another room. Oblivious.
These are the dreams I didn’t have in jail. I could not dream.
Another marathon press session yesterday. This time a fearless woman made it up the mountain. Blond, slim, attractive. I asked her who would play her in the movie of her life. Jodi Foster. Good choice.
I often wonder, when I am having an out-of-body experience, out of my life for a moment experience…what the hell is happening?
A four-hour interview. After she left I fell into bed and slept deeply until Kevin arrived. He chauffeured me into Venice, for dinner with Anna at Axe (where I once made a beautiful boy wear agent provocateur underwear and blow me in the bathroom…) We ate everything on the menu: the flat bread and the crab and the boiled beef with polenta. Anna drank a bottle of wonderful white wine, I envied her so much. I wanted to taste it. To feel the effect of the wine on my body and mind. To take a few hours off.
When the sun sets, the nights are chilly, cold enough for a scarf.
After dinner a Mormon arrived from the internet. We could not keep our hands off of each other. I slipped my hands up under his coat onto his warm belly. I kissed him on his lips. He smiled coyly. 28 years in the closet, 28 years yearning for this. Yes, he was the Mormon boy you see dressed in a suit wearing a badge, looking like a talent agent.
He’s out there experimenting, meeting men, feeling his way into a gay life.
At home we fell into bed and I found myself giving into him, becoming uncharacteristically submissive. He came three times. He didn’t lose his erection in between. I couldn’t stop kissing him. I made him mark my neck. I made him bite me.
Sucking the spit out of his mouth. The cum out of his cock.
The twins arrived home at 2.30am. He had long gone.
The silent house. I lay in bed and listened to my breath fill my lungs. Enjoying the sensation of being alive. A sensation I have had often since I left the jail. I have been so alive since they shat me out of the MCJ. Walk through that door and you’ll be free.
The jail has restored my faith in humanity? You wanted to know how so?
Because I met men in there, undeserving black men, paying the price with dignity. Because it made me re-evaluate everything.
(He brought me a bunch of hyacinths, the pungent fragrance fills the room.)
I have met extraordinary men and women since I left the jail. Men and women who restored my faith in America. The USA. Brilliant, humblingly brilliant minds working to free the men I knew (and men like them) from a barbaric life in an American jail.
This is the Newtonian ‘equal and opposite’ reaction to the life I had before I passed imperceptibly into my dotage, my serious…third life.
“Picasso was hot, even when he was 70.” he said.
The people I am meeting, the places I am visiting are so startlingly different from the life you thought I aspired. I find myself in dingy offices down town. Understanding obscure laws. Recasting myself. Relishing the next interview. I am useful at last. I am useful to them. Useful for changing laws, illegal protocols…and people are listening. I am being heard…it feels good.
You see what they did to Julian Assange? They will try to do that to me. They will discredit me. They will try. Scurrilously, meticulously, evidentially. They will tell you that I can’t be trusted. When the moment…that moment we have all been waiting for, the moment before the curtain rises, when the audience hushed, the lights have dimmed.
That moment is fast approaching.
Unusual and wholly unexpected events witnessed at the Men’s County Jail included two weddings held in the gay dorm.
The first within days of my arriving at dorm 5300.
Madeleine and Oscar were married before first count one Saturday evening. A popular couple. There was a great deal of excitement in the dorm from both the incarcerated and the deputies.
Madeleine, trans, 23 years old, white skinned, full-lipped, long dark hair, sexy voice marrying Oscar, a madly jealous, beefy Mexican boy with a huge bull-dog under bite.
Hedi Slimane…this is the sort of thing you should be photographing.
Madeleine wore a long white dress and veil made for her that week by a gaggle of excited trannies. It was fashioned from two shredded tee-shirts. It looked like a Vivienne Westwood gown. Madeleine held a bouquet of toilet paper flowers as she walked between the bunks toward her nervous groom. The rings were woven for them, their names inscribed on both. Oscar had re-purposed his pale blue jail uniform to look like a prom outfit from the 1970’s…complete with bow tie.
The ceremony was very moving, the deputies videoed it and then took pictures of the happy couple through the bars of the observation booth.
The House Mouse officiated.
Later, I discovered that Oscar had married 4 other boys whilst he had been in dorm 5300. On the streets he’d also married two real girls and had several real children none of whom he was allowed to see. This was Madeleine’s first time.
After they married they fought all the time. Domestic violence. “We fight hard and we love hard.” Madeleine told me. They sure loved hard…you could hear them all over the dorm huffing and panting.
The second wedding, held a month or so later in dorm 5200, was very different. A double wedding for 4 black boys, Juan and ‘Baby Boy’, Reggie and Steve. The service was very moving. Ex Marine Juan and ‘Baby Boy’ really loved each other. Reggie and Steve…not so much.
Juan and ‘Baby Boy’ made their vows and cried. Juan read an extravagant love poem. “Baby Boy’ cried some more. A huge cheer erupted as they were pronounced husband and husband.
After the short ceremony we ate a huge nacho spread on an abandoned top bunk. I was the only white guest.
That night bunks are pushed together creating comfortable double beds, illegal ‘tents’ made of old sheets are hung around the bottom bunk for privacy and voila, the happy home is complete.
Reggie and Steve separated after a violent clash. Bleeding noses, being torn apart by opposing groups of friends, then separated for ever into different dorms.
‘Baby Boy’ was released, leaving poor Juan to mope about the dorm until he found another boy to bunk with.
As I mentioned before, the bond that exists between these jail house gay boys/trannies can lead to unexpected consequences. Unable to leave their loved ones behind couples reunite by forcing an unnecessary arrest. Occasionally, however, by the time the released returns…their boy friend, the love of their life, has found someone else.
There sure was a great deal of fucking in the dorm. The craziest couple, Kenyatta and Andrew, could not keep their hands off each other. They fucked all day and all night. She was a fun, feminine black trans accused of hit and run, he was a masculine latino boy with no personality. She fucked him. He couldn’t say no.
Coffee in Venice yesterday. Lunch with lawyer. Cooked dinner, boiled brisket, Brussels sprouts, snap peas and quinoa.
Ate a cup cake at midnight…bad mistake…up all night vomiting. Can’t eat rich food yet.
Everybody seems very excited by Steve McQueen‘s new movie Shame. Apparently about sex addiction. Let’s hope that he got it right. Strangely this was the theme and title of my sex addiction memoir.
The one that JB and I were working on.
It got me to thinking about shame and how most people (some people) have done things that they are ashamed of, unwilling to admit to, unwilling to own. Even my Christian aunt admitted an unspeakable horror (to her mind) from which she still reels.
That’s how organizations like the Scientologists enslave their members…by getting them to admit their darkest secrets then threatening them with unsightly revelations unless the game is played their way.
I know a sex addiction ‘therapist’ like that. He knows a little bit too much about powerful people…and lives a good life on the back of their venal sin.
As I have mentioned before…gay people tend, once out, to jettison or rather speak more freely about subjects others may find taboo. We must have always been like this…hence shame based organizations like the church…out lawed us. If they can’t shame you into submission…well, what’s the point of your existence?
Gay people in the christian warrior church, the republican party and signing up for the super chic nazis. I am being ironic.
I never really understood the appeal.
Anyhow, lets hope that the film Shame is good…and not sensational or stupid. I think Steve is the kind of guy who can get this right. The trailer is very worthy….very serious.
Sex conduct is a touchy theme…as we found out.
I spent the day with beautiful Robby… out and about. Firstly in the garden spreadingcompost around the fruit trees and the grape vines.
After lunch we headed into Venice for expensive Intelligentsia coffee.
We had tried returning a Mighty Mule 500 automatic gate opener at Home Depot but they refused our request claiming that I needed the ‘box it was sold in’. Who keeps every box for everything they ever bought? When I asked the manager this questions he said, “I keep all my shoe boxes.” It was a lame reply.
I called the Mighty Mule people, the Southern man at the other end of the fractured cell phone line told me that my Mighty Mule 500 was still under warranty but I would have to pay the expensive postage to return it.
Frustrated with his reply I said, “Oh God!”
The man at the other end of the phone said, “Don’t swear at me.”
“I didn’t swear.”
“You used the G-O-D word.” He spelled out the word God.
“Since when has the word God been a swear word?”
“If you don’t stop swearing at me I’ll terminate this call.” His southern drawl smearing the words into a verbal paste.
“I’m not fucking swearing.”
“Sir!”
“You fucking cunt.”
Click.
The Home Depot security guard who had been listening to me speaking on the phone stepped tentatively toward me. We left. The defective, un-boxed Might Mule 500 gate opener in the back of the car.
Apparently today is blasphemy day.
Later that afternoon as the sun began to set we were in the car driving over the Santa Monica Mountains and I said, “Do you think it’s odd that I enjoy spending my time with a twenty-one year old than with almost anyone my own age.” He said, “Do you think it’s weird that I enjoy spending time with a fifty year old more than people my own age?”
We laughed at how our perfection would always be denied.
He is perfection.
I spent another night at the house of the troubled child who had, earlier in the day, run away from home. When he returned home late that night he was ashen, fried, wasted…what could his parents do?
Art Platform, Pacific Standard Time and most other LA art events start today. I am attempting to get to most of them. Will keep you in the loop.
The decorators started work repairing the huge mess left by the renters yesterday. I will tell you more about that tomorrow. It’s a story I have been keeping under my hat. Now is maybe the time to reveal all.
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I had no idea yesterday was Monday. That’s embarrassing isn’t it? I genuinely thought it was Sunday.
Robby and I kayaked for a mile or so with the Little Dog. It was beautiful. From the Piette’s Malibou Lake, up an unnamed tributary. Our navigational skills left a little to be desired but we had a great time. It was beautiful paddling under the weeping willow to the Paramount Ranch and back again.
The rest of the day I hung out with the twins. Trying to finish my novel. Jennifer’s mother kept trying to talk to me as I was writing.
Max came home from school. The previous day three squad cars came to see him after he smashed the stained glass window in their front door. When the police arrived he escaped on a boat across the lake. My kind of adolescent.
He took the boat, hitched a ride to the local CVS where he bought himself a sleeping bag thinking he could sleep rough. Sadly, for him, it began to rain so he called his parents and they came and scooped him up.
Rather exciting adventure for a 13-year-old boy? A bit distressing for the parents but I rather like watching the adventure he is having. It reminds me of my own. I KNOW that I shouldn’t encourage him. I really hope that he comes live with me in September.
Later the twins and I went to Trader Joes where mama bear bought his lil family food for the week. Everybody thinks that the boys are my sons. Funny.
I was meant to go into Venice for dinner but stayed at home instead. I wanted to sit on my own and watch HGTV. I had spent most of the day murdering three people in my novel so I was exhausted.
Cary Fukunaga and Michelle Williams are dating. Wow, isn’t that odd? My friend Heath’s ex and the director the Penguin and I hung out with last summer. Perfect match I think.
A couple of pics from the w/end:
