lover's war

Oscar nominees

2008-01-22T00:28:00.000-05:00

OK, folks, a difficult year but here are my predictions for the Oscar nominees in the major cateories. To be announced tomorrow morning!

BEST PICTURE
“Into the Wild”
“Juno”
“Michael Clayton”
“No Country For Old Men”
“There Will Be Blood”

BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood”
Joel and Ethan Coen, “No Country For Old Men”
Tony Gilroy, “Michael Clayton”
Sean Penn, “Into the Wild”
Julian Schnabel, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney, “Michael Clayton”
Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”
Johnny Depp, “Sweeney Todd”
Ryan Gosling, “Lars and the Real Girl”
Viggo Mortensen, “Eastern Promises”

BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Julie Christie, “Away From Her”
Marion Cotillard, “La Vie en Rose”
Angelina Jolie, “A Mighty Heart”
Ellen Page, “Juno”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck, “The Assassination of Jesse James…”
Javier Bardem, “No Country For Old Men”
Hal Holbrook, “Into the Wild”
Tom Wilkinson, “Michael Clayton”
Phillip Seymour Hoffman, “Charlie Wilson’s War”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, “I’m Not There”
Ruby Dee, “American Gangster”
Catherine Keener, “Into the Wild”
Amy Ryan, “Gone Baby Gone”
Tilda Swinton, “Michael Clayton”

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
“Juno”
“The Savages”
“Michael Clayton”
“Ratatouille”
“Lars and the Real Girl”

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
“Into the Wild”
“No Country For Old Men”
“There Will Be Blood”
“Atonement”

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
“Persepolis”
“Ratatouille”
“The Simpsons Movie"

Happy Days

2008-01-22T00:26:00.000-05:00

“Don’t overdo the bag,” says Winnie (Fiona Shaw), buried up to her waist in a pile of sand and rubble, possessing only a bag of simple objects – toothbrush, umbrella, pistol – with which to relieve the tedium of her constricted existence. Winnie is a master at rationing out her activities in order to create some semblance of variety in her life, a mastery matched by that of Shaw and director Deborah Warner in utilizing the limited theatrical resources bequeathed to them by Beckett during the first act of Happy Days, a transplant from London’s National Theatre now playing at BAM.

Winnie’s monologues are as rich as her possessions are economical and Shaw, her lilting Irish tones a perfect match for Beckett’s quotidian poetry, unpacks every bit of humor and pathos from within them. Shaw brings an almost impossible athleticism to this immobile role, emphasizing in lightning-quick succession Winnie’s hauteur and her vulnerability, her boldness and her fear. This Winnie is a determined winner, pluckily optimistic (or insanely delusional, take your pick) despite her desperate situation and the first act plays as a humanistic paean to man’s (or, in this case, woman’s) capacity to make bleakness bearable. In the shorter, more severe second half, with Winnie buried up to her neck, the production falters; Shaw, with only her expressive face in view, still evokes empathy, but the conception of Winnie’s brutish, subhuman husband (Tim Potter), who crawls out of his hole to share a final tableau, lacks assurance. At the production’s overly abrupt conclusion, one recognizes anew that none of us, even people as resourceful as Shaw, Warner, and Winnie, can fend off the inevitable blackness forever.

Man is Man

2007-12-21T00:46:00.000-05:00

Does it really take a war for New York theater artists to remember Brecht? We hardly needed a reason to pay some attention to the 20th century’s greatest dramatist, and certainly not one as costly the debacle in Iraq. In any event, the current climate has inspired a new generation to try their hand at the “alienation effect,” including a group of recent NYU/Tisch students called the Elephant Brigade, who are performing Man is Man at HERE. Fetchingly dressed in an assortment of military fatigues, they make an attractive group but their aesthetic choices end up making Brecht look bad.

The story, set in a Kiplingesque colonial India, concerns the transformation of humble porter Galy Gay into a robotic killing machine. This production suffers under a philosophy that Dutch director Paul Bellerts calls “real time” acting. According to the program, this approach is based on “the presence of the actors as themselves,” which unfortunately means that the cast comes off looking like a bunch of really earnest kids, excited by their own experimentalism (like the use of live video projections and remote-controlled tanks). The play may argue that mechanized warfare has made individuals virtually interchangeable, but Brecht’s dramaturgy of gestus demands great physical specificity from the actors in order to make Galy’s transition meaningful. (Brecht reportedly envisioned one of his favorite comedians, Charlie Chaplin, in the role.) Natalie Kuhn, as Galy, and her castmates speak most of the play’s lines in “natural,” uninflected tones and walk nonchalantly around the stage as if posing for a low-key Gap ad. These young Brechtians have yet to discover the fierce artistic clarity required to make his plays truly effective; meanwhile, the rest of us have yet to discover how we can bring this maddening war to an end.

Doris to Darlene, a cautionary valentine

2007-11-18T22:51:00.000-05:00

At its start, Jordan Harrison’s new play feels like an extended set of musical liner notes, exploring the journey of a stirring leitmotif (the Liebestod theme in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) from 19th Century opera into the bubble gum pop music of a Sixties girl group. Harrison’s characters frequently speak in the third person, explaining their thoughts and actions to the audience, underlining the parallels that connect the play’s three storylines. One of them remarks that great art can make an audience member “lose their lunch”; while clever, the first half of Doris to Darlene noticeably lacks that visceral effect. Scenes between Wagner and mad King Ludwig II play mostly for Bavarian buffoonery, while the story of Doris, the eponymous pop singer, and the producer who makes her a star has little more depth than Dreamgirls.

As an explicator of music’s mystical power, Harrison is no match for Mr. Campani (Tom Nelis), the buttoned-up high school music teacher in the play’s contemporary storyline who once trained to sing opera and remains under its spell. As the story focuses in on Campani and his young would-be protégé, the third person narration drops out of the dialogue and Harrison finds new juice in the familiar dramatic dynamic of homoerotically charged mentorship between teacher and student. Though the Liebestod seems to have been played ad nauseum, Harrison, like any good soprano, has saved something for his finale; in its emotional concluding moments, this intellectually artful play finally sings.

*For more about the play, visit the Playwrights Horizons website.

Queens Boulevard (the musical)

2007-11-18T16:01:00.000-05:00

Theater rarely conveys a vivid sense of place; unlike films, plays can’t be shot on location. Which makes it all the more impressive that Signature Theatre Company’s production of Queens Boulevard (the musical) actually feels like a walk down the play’s titular thoroughfare. Sure, Mimi Lien’s busy set is filled with tacky signage, vendors’ carts, and assorted ethnic knick-knacks, while the varied soundtrack mixes bhangra, Asian pop, and an assortment of other tunes from all over the global village. These carefully-observed details, however, combine to create an effect far removed from documentary realism. Davis McCallum’s frequently fun production, performed by a likeable multi-racial ensemble, defies naturalism to capture the essence of New York’s most diverse borough.

Theatrical collagist Mee typically works by reconfiguring classic works and other found sources, here using an Indian dance-drama about a bridegroom’s quest for a mystical flower to give his new wife. Mee and McCallum have gamely set out to imitate the ritual form of non-Western theater, giving precedence to dance, song, and picaresque storytelling. If only there were more ritual and less talk: our protagonist encounters a series of friends and neighbors who discourse with him (often at great length) about the meaning of love and the fabric of community. With its cheek-by-jowl juxtaposition of cultures, Queens offers Mee a brimming metaphor, but the repetitive episodes and speeches eventually succumb to the law of diminishing returns. Imagine walking down the street only to have every Tom, Dick, and Hrishikesh tell you what they think of your marriage; you'd be only too eager to get back home.

*The Signature Theatre Company, as is their wont, is devoting an entire season to the work of one playwright, Charles Mee. You can find out more about him.
**Mee's scripts are all in the public domain. He encourages people to produce and mess around with them.

1001

2007-11-18T15:58:00.000-05:00

The politically fraught romance between Alan and Dahna, an American Jew critical of Israeli policies and a Palestinian student activist, provides what amounts to a throughline in Jason Grote’s demanding new play. If the central characters sometimes seem sketchy, that may be deliberate: Grote’s main concern is the way that these lovers’ sense of their own identities is burdened, enveloped, indeed re-written by the stories that surround them. Framing narratives abound, generating one another like a never-ending set of Russian nesting dolls. An intrepid cast of six shift roles continuously, offering a prismatic portrait of Orientalism in its many guises, presided over by Scheherazade, the mother of all storytellers.

Director Ethan McSweeney, aided by Rachel Hauk’s inventive set design and a fluid soundscape provided by Lindsay Jones and DJ Arisa Sound, manages for the most part to make this impossibly complicated script stage-worthy. Though the play’s many truncated tales initially leave the audience (like Scheherazade’s listeners) hungry for closure, dazzling patterns of resonance slowly reveal themselves. Like Flaubert in the casbah of an Egyptian courtesan, Alan and Dahna have politically exoticized one another and their relationship breaks under the stress. The real excitement in 1001, however, comes from watching Grote construct a plot through transhistorical hyperlinks (it’s no wonder that one of his most effective scenes takes place in an Internet chatroom). While steeped in literary tradition, Grote’s structure captures a feeling of political and information vertigo unique to our globalized era. In a theatrical culture increasingly out of touch with contemporary life, that’s a story worth celebrating.

*Befitting its postmodern structure, 1001 has a pretty cool interactive website that riffs on the themes of the play.

new uses

2007-11-18T15:54:00.000-05:00

Well, since my blog has fallen into disuse, I've decided to make it a place where I can post some thoughts about my recent theater-going. If you're in New York, you can stop by here to see what I think about some current shows. If you're not, then you can still get a glimpse of the interesting theatrical work going on in the city -- which has not been shut down by the Broadway stagehands strike!

heresy

2007-05-22T21:37:00.000-04:00

It's a good thing no one reads this blog anymore, because this one could be a doozy.

I think I may have become a Mets fan. As anyone should be able to guess, I've always preferred the Mets to the Yankees -- I doubt there's any baseball fan from Boston who wouldn't say the same. The '86 series surely left its wounds, especially for fans older than myself, but the Mets have never been the bete noires for Bostonians that the Bronx Bombers have been. When I moved to New York, it was only natural that I would favor the team with the tacky blue and orange colors over the too-cool-for-school Yankees. Despite being a gay man, it makes no difference to me that the Yankees are renowned for their sartorial splendor, their impeccable pinstripes. Give me the Mets any day: with the holy trifecta of Beltran, Reyes, and Wright on the team, the Boys from Queens would win any beauty pageant that I was judging.

It's been a pleasant sensation this season to see the Yankees struggling, to hear a trembling note of real worry in the voices of fans and NY sprotswriters. Sure, the Yankees haven't won a series in while, but they've always been in the running. So far this year, though, they really suck, no question about it. And the Mets, conversely, are at the top of their game. This year they're the team you want to hear about.

I'm up in the Hudson Valley this week on a mini-vacation. As I ws strolling around the village of Cold Spring, I saw a Mets flag flying outside of someone's house and that aesthetically garish combination of blue and orange raised a feeling of pride in my heart. The other week, S. and I went to Shea to watch the Mets beat the Cubs, thanks to the benificence of S.'s brother "George," a much more authentic baseball fan than me but also one who supports Boston in the AL and the Mets in the NL. The three of us went last summer, too. In fact, the last few times I've been in a baseball stadium, I've been rooting for the Mets; they've started to feel like "my" team. So, after I saw that flag, I asked myself where my allegiance would lie in the (not that unlikely) event that the Red Sox and the Mets faced off this year in the World Series. It was at that moment that I realized how much of a New Yorker I've become.

My hands tremble as I type this. I'm not the first person who's compared Red Sox fandom to Roman Catholicism; the ethnic make-up of the Boston fan base only intensifies the analogy. Being a Red Sox fan, like being a Catholic, is the kind of thing you grow up on; it's inherited, with its own set of traditions, superstitions, anathemas, etc. That's what I've always loved about it. Gay man that I am, I have not a lot of patience for the nitty-gritty of sports, but the Red Sox' long quest for redemption was a drama I could get into. There was something mystical and redemptive about that amazing 2004 series, an alignment of the stars. Unfortunately, though, unlike one of Shakespeare's late romances, which end after the magically redemptive 5th Act, a baseball team's history doesn't stop after they finally win the World Series for the first time in 86 years. After winning the hearts of America as a scrappy gang of underdogs in 2004, the Sox have had to face the fact that, having finally won the series they were now... just like any other team.

It's been hard in recent years to feel the same sense of moral righteousness one used to feel about being a Red Sox fan. Their status as perennial underdogs, as the team that always almost made it, made rooting for the Sox seem like something worthy, a form of self-flagellation which would increase your spiritual purity. The Yankees won series after series and their fans repeatedly experiened the satisfaction of being told they were on top. Red Sox fans took pride in the fact that they remained steadfast in their devotion to the team, in the absence of any kind of satisfaction. Like the religion on which many of us Sox fans were raised, the Red Sox told us that our faith was greater for believing in what we had not seen. No doubting Thomases we. Can Sox fans feel that sanctimonious now? Hasn't the breaking of the curse revealed our team for what it is -- the second-highest paid team in baseball, one of two bullies who perennially dominate the AL League East? Sure, we are not owned by Darth Steinbrenner himself, but while the Yankees might be legitimately likened to Goliath, the Sox are armed with far more than a slingshot (unless they're selling slingshots for $103 millions dollars these days... maybe in Japan.??).

Today's Mets possess similarly attractive qualities to the Red Sox of yore. No matter how well they may play, no matter how many times they might beat the Yankees in a subway series, it's hard to imagine the Mets not seeming like the underdogs in the New York market. The Yankees have always owned New York, their logo is right there with the Empire State building in the pantheon of Big Apple icons. Perhaps because of that, the Yankees have always seemed to possess that air of entitlement which makes New Yorkers (or should I say Manhattanites) reviled by folks from smaller burgs. The Yankees may play in the Bronx but they've always seemed like the team of the elite. They are the Establishment.

The Mets, however, are the New New York, the New York of immigrants. Their fan base is built on the Caribbean and South American immigrants who live in the outer boroughs. They've got a Dominican manager (a rarity despite the fact that so many players these days are Spanish-speaking) and they've distinctly pitched their team to New York's growing Latino population. At a time when tourists to the city are now being officially encouraged to ride the subway out to Jackson Heights to experience the energy of its astounding ethnic diversity, it seems that more and more people are recognizing that New York is more than the island of Manhattan and that (thanks to prohibitive rents) most of the "real" New Yorkers are now living somewhere across the river. All of these cultural associations makes the Mets feel like the team of "the people" (as much as any group of millionaires can be considered proletarian). All of that, plus they're playing well. Is there any reason why I shouldn't be rooting for them?

One thing that automatically earns a New Yorker respect in my book is knowledge of the outer boroughs. I remember a time (embarrassingly, not that long ago) when I had to think long and hard before I could tell you whether a particular train was going to end up in Brooklyn or the Bronx. I'm still hardly an expert, but I've been out to the far reaches of most of the boroughs (not Staten Island - yet!), if only to visit the public schools when recruiting for my job. Most of my contemporaries (white, artsy, Ivy League, twenty-somethings) are transplanted New Yorkers. Everyone can quickly become an expert at the Manhattan street grid and anyone who likes to frequent chi-chi boites can pick up a working knowlegde of the labyrinthine streets of the West Village. But New York's business, political, and media elite (the kind of people I went to school with, who will soon be ruling the world) don't have much connection to the boroughs (and, no, Williamsburg and Park Slope don't count). We didn't grow up there, we don't send our children to the public schools (with good reason). All of this is understandable, but it results in a gap between the people who run things and the people whose lives are affected by the actions of these movers and shakers. This might be true of any city, but the divide seems starker here in New York. There's a reason why Mike Bloomberg makes a show of riding the subway to work every day, even if it is just a show. he wants to appear "connected."

One thing I love about my job is that at least it brings me into contact with the public institutions of New York CIty (not just the public schools, but also, in my pervious job, the New York City criminal courts and jails). It's amazing how little many of my friends know about the municipality they live in, though its perhaps not surprising given the minimal interaction many of us have with the agencies and institutions that working-class people know from daily experience. I do have a small amount of personal connection with the juvenile detention center on 138th St in the Bronx, I know at least what some of the rooms look like inside and I know some of the kids who are in there. I think about that every time I ride by there on the subway or read about juvenile crime in the news. That connection in itself isn't much, but it's the start of being informed about how our city works, which in turn can be the start of agitating for change, the start of trying to build new, more inclusive communities.

I'm not exactly trying to say that rooting for the Mets makes you an agent for positive social change. I'm just saying that I'm proud of my feeling of connection to the team, just as I'm happy that my knowledge of the communities beyond the Manhattan/gentrified-Brooklyn bubble is growing. It's good to be an informed resident in your own city; it feels, dare I say it, mature.

And I guess that's what this whole shift in baseball fan allegiance comes down to. I grew up in Boston, just as I grew up with the Red Sox, and with the Catholic Church. In some ways, all three of those highly parochial entities will always be in my blood. But I can't find my way around Beantown to save my life. I've never lived there as an adult - I don't know which streets run one way, which neighborhoods abut which other ones, where to find a good bar, or anything like that. What I know about Boston is mostly kid stuff. But eventually you put away childish things, you choose a place where you carve out your own identity. That place, for me, has been New York; it's where I've found a mission and part of that mission is getting to know the environment. That's not knowlede I'm acquiring second-hand, but knowledge I'm seeking out, concsiously and (I would argue) conscientiously.

I'm not exactly sure how or why I've stopped going to mass. It started to happen when I moved to Brooklyn and the churches were further away, but that also coincided with my finding a boyfriend who offered a very good reason to stay in bed on Sunday mornings, with my finally getting fed up with some of the Church's intractible teachings, and with the blossoming of an ever-increasing independent streak in my philosophical thought. Have I rejected the faith of my fathers (and aunts and uncles)? Not exactly, but I'd like to think that I see it now a bit more from the "outside"; you might say I see it more critically. The same could be said of my support for the Red Sox. I don't wish them ill, but I'm less and less inclined to believe the dogma which says they're the One True Team. The Sox are the team I was handed at birth, but the Mets are the team I found on my own.

some thoughts on hollywood

2007-02-27T14:43:00.000-05:00

Well, I suppose we should start with the numbers. I got 16 out of 24 right. Just about 2/3. In a year of quite a bit of unpredictability, that's pretty good, I'd say. (The best I saw on any of the major Oscar blogs was 18.) This was the year that proved you should go with your gut on those tricky smaller categories; when I did that (in Foreign Film and Sound Editing, for instance) it paid off, but when I went along with the Conventional Wisdom (Costume Design, Song etc.), it didn't.

More important to note, though, is that S and I somehow miraculously tied again!! I was not feeling very competitive this year, but still there could have been tears (or worse) had one of us bested the other. More than one party guest said, "This means you were meant for each other!" and I tend to think that that's true.

And major props to my friend Emelie who also got 16 out of 24, thus tying the hosts for best guesses at our party. Good work!

The Park Slope party was wonderful. Just the right size, just the right amount of food, and some very lovely people. But what about the ceremony itself? Ellen DeGeneres was fine. She barely seemed to factor into the telecast. As a host she reminded me most of Johnny Carson -- dapper, no ideological axe to grind, not trying to steal the spotlight, genial but not hilarious. Very old school.

There was not a single great acceptance speech. Not even a really good one. Forest Whitaker improved over his Globes performance but his speech was all over the map. And how come he didn't say anything about the political context of his film? You can't play Idi Amin and not comment about that... On the other hand what was up with Helen Mirren waxing all monarchist about Elizabeth Windsor's "consistency"? Sure, we can have some respect for the woman, but seriously do we really still need to genuflect in front of this outmoded institution? I expected more from Helen (but I guess she is a Dame, after all).

It seems to me that there was a much higher standard of acceptance speech 20 years ago. You had wit, sentiment, panache. I mean these people are supposed to be ACTORS for goodness' sake! Nowadays everybody just cries, thanks God, or rattles off a list of names. Maybe they should hold a special training session showing the great acceptance speeches of the past -- S and I would be happy to design the curriculum.

Overall, even if you didn't love the movies that won, the winners were a likeable bunch. It's hard to begrudge Forest and Helen, two very talented, very classy performers overdue for an award and who never exude any air of entitlement or snobbery. You couldn't really complain about oldtimer Alan Arkin or newcomer Jennifer Hudson either -- both were underdogs in their own ways and both were very humble. (That's probably why petulant badboy Eddie Murphy didn't win in the end, he's just not as nice as the other ones.)

And, of course, who wasn't rooting for the Most Overdue Man in America -- Martin Scorsese? It's interesting to note that the man commonly considered to be our greatest living film artist had lost in the past to three different celebrity actors-turned-directors: Robert Redford (1980), Kevin Costner (1990), and Clint Eastwood (2004). That alone should show you the Oscars aren't really about art. Marty's finally won (both Best Director and Best Pic) but it's for what is undoubtedly his least personal (and highest grossing) film ever. Other directors of his generation, like Spielberg and Oliver Stone, have interspersed their pet projects with much more commercial fare, but not Marty. I've said many times that Martin Scorsese has never made a perfect film, they're all gloriously flawed -- but their flaws result from too much passion (he's without a doubt our most Catholic filmmaker). The Departed is close to a perfect piece of entertainment (if pressed, I could have done without Leo's accent and the shot of the rat at the end), but it is almost completely lacking in passion of any kind. Even when Marty made a movie like The Age of Innocence, you could sense in it his love of William Wyler and classic Hollywd costume drama. The movie was an object of devotion.

He's said that with this latest picture he wanted to make an updated Warner Brothers gagster movie, the kind that used to star James Cagnery, Bogart, Edward G. Robinson. There's a sense of that in the wisecracks that get traded among the film's talented male ensemble, but the whole thing seems an empty exercise in style (Leo's and Matt Damon's roles are empty figures in a convoluted equation of double-crosses, rather than real characters). Marty did what he had to do to make a commercial movie and, as compromises go, it came out pretty good. He reined in the tendency towards chaos that overwhelmed Gangs of New York and delivered a tight little genre picture. If only more of our entertainment makers could give us more of those more regularly, we'd have a much more palatable movie-going environment (though I did think that Devil Wears Prada and Casino Royale were pretty damn good genre pics this year).

Which leads me to broader concerns. I'm still somewhat amazed that my favorite mainstream movie of last year, Children of Men, was so completely overlooked by Oscar (losing even its well-deserved nomination for Cinematography). Children of Men was a stunning example of a filmmaker taking a genre (the dystopian thriller) and making something truly unique and poetic out of it. Everything about the film is different than you expect -- though it is a big action film with violence and explosions and special effects, the scale of the film feels small, quotidian. Though it presents a vision of the apocalypse, its attitude could be hardly less bombastic. Where other films would make you dizzy with fast-paced cutting, Children of Men quietly astounds with some of the most stunning sustained shoots in recent cinema. Central characters (played by big movie stars) are abruptly killed (and not all at the end, Marty). There are absolutely no distracting subplots and a minimum of overemphatic psychological detail.

Cuaron takes one central idea from P.D. James's novel -- a world without children -- and extends it to miraculously support an entire film. The film consists of one single metaphor: childlessness as a representation of all the ways that the present generation ignores, screws over, and decimates the future. The film could be said to be about war, global poverty, environmental disaster. It is about all of those things, though none of them explicitly. It's sweep is grand without any need to announce its comprehensiveness (take note, Sr. Gonzalez Inarritu). The world of the future it presents is not exactly like our own, instead it exists on a continuum with it. Step outside the theater and you expect to find that the filmmaker's vision has spilled out into the streets.

Hollywood rarely lets viewers write anything into its movies. It rarely lets us choose where we should look in the frame or decide on our own how to make sense of the patterns of detail that its films offer us. It rarely asks a viewer to do any work at all. Instead, it serves up textbooks passing for works of art. Hollywood is beholden to the literal and the obvious.

The night after the Oscars, I watched United 93 on DVD. This film, the first cinematic recreation of the events of 9/11, did quite well with the critics and also with Oscar, snagging nominations for Director and Editing. It was widely praised for its realistic detail and its absence of "Hollywood" trickery. The film definitely aspired to a documentary level of verisimilitude, which was richly textured and quite convincing (reminiscent in many ways of Children of Men). What I liked most about it was learning (a bit) about how air traffic controllers work. When the movie kept cutting between shots of various flabby white men staring at computer screens, I respected them for their itegrity. I love it when movies show us how systems work.

Inevitably, though, we find ourselves in the cabin of Flight 93 with four crazed terroorists and a planeful of normal people. What ensues is a string of violent acts, perpetrated first by the terrorists against the passengers in order to gain control of the aircraft and then by the passengers in order to fight back, all of which results in a plane crash. And then (except for some title cards) the movie is over. Every one of these very ordinary people perishes senselessly. We are meant to understand their bravery in seizing control of the plane and presumably stopping it from hitting its intended target (the Capitol building?). If the film has any agenda, it is that the government failed us on 9/11 -- they were unable to coordinate their response in time to save the people on the planes and in the buildings. But a group of ordinary people (not even the flight crew, they come off as particularly ineffectual) were able to band together and do something. That's a story of American ingenuity and volunteerism that would ring true for Tocquville.

To me, however, the movie only served to underline the utter meaninglessness of 9/11. A couple of years ago, the 9/11 Commission apportioned out its recommendations for how our intelligence services should be re-organized in order to better respond to that type of situation in the future. That is good (and practical) and strikes me as a suseful response to the events of that day. Recreating the experience from a "you-are-there" perspective strikes me as antithetical to any insight.

I can't tell you how troubling the film's glorification of "realism" is. Maybe it does present us with as accurate a depiction as we'll ever get of what happened in that plane. But let's step back and ask ourselves, "Why do we need such a depiction?"

A documentary on the DVD extras further confirmed for me that the film is intended as a fetish object. This featurette goes to great lengths to show how the families of those who died were involved in the making of the film and supported it. In scene after scene we see the actors who played the passengers meet with the families. Inevitably, the relatives hug them and say things like, "Oh my God, it's just like seeing him again!" In one visit, a mother says that she's going to introduce the actress to the dead girl that she portrayed and proceeds to take out an urn of ashes and speak about it as if it were a person. What is it that makes excruciating rituals like this necessary? What goes on in the mind of a man who wants to see a filmmakers graphic recreation of his wife, an airline stewardess, getting stabbed to death by terrorists? That's supposed to offer "closure"?

I found it curious that so much energy had been put into representing a plane crash that happened over five years ago when we have people (Americans and Iraqis) dying in comparable numbers every day in Baghdad. Where are the Hollywood films meticulously recreating the details of those deaths? The Department of Defense does even attempt to track Iraqui civilian casualties.

Maybe it's the Marxist in me, but I look for art to help me re-organize the world, or at least to re-organize my vision of it, rather than to dump on me a leaden representation of past events. If Hollywood is going to create meaningful art, it needs to start challenging us more, not only in the ways that we view films but the ways we view the world. United 93 is a "difficult" film because of the amount of gut-churning violence it inflicts upon us. I await a new spate of films whose "difficulty" lies in the challenge they pose to us to make the world anew.

golden boys

2007-02-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

one track mind

2007-02-25T09:13:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit ashamed that I haven't written a single post since my predictions of the Oscar nominations and now here I am with my predictions of the winners. I promise that I think about other things! And some day I will post them up...

But on to the awards. Here are my predictions. This year is exciting only in the sense that Best Picture is a complete toss-up; I don't think anyone is really positive about their prediction in that category, which is very rare. However, there aren't many nominees that I'm really rooting for this year. I'll consider myself happy if "Children of Men" wins a much-deserved Cinematography award. In a just world, it would be winning Best Picture. And "Casino Royale" would have been nominated instead of "Little Miss Sunshine." Ah well.

One final comment: have you noticed how many of the likely acting winners are black? There hasn't been a lot of commentary about that, which I guess is a reflection of how frequently we've had black nominees (and winners) in the past few years. Which is great. Now we should all start raising a ruckus about there never being black nominees (let alone winners!) in any non-acting categories! Let's not wait until Spike Lee is 84 to recognize his unique contribution to American cinema, OK?

And now, my predictions....

BEST PICTURE - The Departed

BEST ACTRESS - Helen Mirren, The Queen

BEST ACTOR - Forrest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls

BEST DIRECTOR - Martin Scorsese, The Departed

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY - Little Miss Sunshine

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY - The Departed

BEST EDITING - Babel

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY - Children of Men

BEST ART DIRECTION - Pan's Labyrinth

BEST COSTUME DESIGN - Dreamgirls

BEST MUSICAL SCORE - The Queen

BEST ORIGINAL SONG - "Listen" from Dreamgirls

BEST SOUND EDITING - Letters from Iwo Jima

BEST SOUND MIXING - Dreamgirls

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS - Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest

BEST MAKEUP - Pan's Labyrinth

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM - The Lives of Others

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE - An Inconvenient Truth

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT - The Blood of Yingzhou District

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE - Cars

BEST ANIMATED SHORT SUBJECT - The Little Matchgirl

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT SUBJECT - West Bank Story

Now we just have to wait and see what happens. Will it all end with a "Crash" again this year?

P.S. S and I spent the morning on Saturday OD'ing on Oscar. We went to this promotional event in Times Square called "Meet the Oscars" where the public got to see actual Oscar statuettes (Clark Gable's for "It Happened One Night" and Bette Davis's for "Jezebel") and also got to get their pictures taken while holding an Oscar. I went a little bit gaga and encouraged (i.e. forced) S to reenact with me several Oscar acceptance speeches while we standing near giant Oscar statues. These are captured on videotape. I am lobbying for them to be shown to guests at the Park Slope Oscar party, but I may also be able to distribute them electronically, if you're interested. The speeches we reenacted were:

Louise Fletcher, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
Barbara Stanwyck, Honorary Award (my favorite Oscar speech EVER!)
Juliette Binoche, "The English Pateint"
Sophia Loren, Honorary Award
Jessica Tandy, "Driving Miss Daisy" (this was the briefest and ballsiest, we filmed it while I was actually holding the statue)

Why did we choose only women? Why indeed.....

going for the gold

2007-01-23T00:25:00.000-05:00

As some of you may be aware, this Tuesday is the announcement of the nominees for the Academy Awards. As you must know by now, Oscar Night is the night of the year that I anticipate more eagerly than any other. Last year, S. and I competed to guess who would win Oscars in every category -- and we tied.

This year, to raise the stakes, we've decided to bet on the nominations in the major categories as well. The following are my predictions for who will get nominated on Tues. Jan. 23. Let the games begin!

BEST PICTURE
Babel
The Departed
Dreamgirls
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen

BEST ACTRESS
Penelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Kate Winslet, Little Children

BEST ACTOR
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O'Toole, Venus
Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Adriana Barraza, Babel
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jackie Earl Haley, Little Children
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Jack Nicholson, The Departed

BEST DIRECTOR
Bill Condon, Dreamgirls
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima
Stephen Frears, The Queen
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel
Martin Scorsese, The Departed

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Babel
Little Miss Sunshine
Pan's Labyrinth
The Queen
United 93

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Children of Men
The Departed
The Devil Wears Prada
Little Children
Borat

OK, if you want to see how accurate I was, click here.

a life in the theater

2007-01-12T09:13:00.000-05:00

Irving Berlin wrote that "there's no business like show business," but I'm afraid I have to take issue with that. In very many ways, show business is a business just like any other.

Before the New Year, S. and I went to a couple of theatrical performances during which the economic realities behind the art we were watching hovered around the show (at least for me) and colored my responses to what we were seeing on stage.

The first was the Broadway revival of A Chours Line, which we went to see for our one-year anniversary (thank you very much). Having introduced S. to Cabaret over the summer, I was excited to expose him to another musical that I suspected he would really enjoy (in fact, getting tickets to the show was his idea). I felt like a grown-up, going out to a fancy Italian restaurant and ordering a bottle of wine, going to see the show, then walking through the streets of Broadway as the other theaters were emptying themselves of their elegantly-dressed patrons. It was a very romantic, exuberant night and S. really enjoyed the performance. To quote Jessica Tandy's Oscar acceptance speech for Driving Miss Daisy (as well as Caryl Churchill), we were "on Cloud Nine."

Such an evening is a common experience for the regular class of New York theater-goers, yet for us it was a treat. It was also a significant expenditure. Because the show is popular and is pretty much selling out each night, the cheapest tickets were $111 each. It was, in short, not the kind of experience we could afford to have all that often. And, I would argue, it was the expenditure of it, the luxury, that made the evening so memorable. This was the first time that I've ever, on my own, paid full price to see a Broadway show. It felt spend-thrift, a little bit foolish, but was more than justified by the occasion.

In fact, it was the experience of "going to a Broadway show" that I enjoyed much more than the production itself. As has been widely reported, this revival of A Chorus Line (except for some nods in the direction f multi-racial casting) has not been re-imagined in any way. It is set firmly in the 70's and was directed by Michael Bennett's original co-choreographer in an attempt to duplicate, step-for-step, the original landmark production. Because of that, the production feels a bit airless. Few of the fresh-faced young performers really seem to own their roles or numbers, they haven't been able to make them their own, which is disappointing in what was in 1976 the first real show on Broadway that was all about the ensemble, all about the quirky individuality of the performers onstage. It was the first big musical to be developed through an "experimental" workshop process. The original Chorus Line must have been, I assume, a uniquely visceral experience, with young performers playing roles that had been developed specifically for them. By applauding the show that's currently playing at the Schoenfeld Theater, the audience was celebrating the ghost of the original, a show that had thrived on freshness and youth and seeming spontaneity, rather than what they were actually seeing, which didn't really feel fresh, young, or spontaneous anymore.

A Chorus Line is arguably the ultimate "show biz musical." It's nothing more than a group of dancers singing and talking about why they're in this business, why they keep going despite the obstacles, about "what they did for love." It's ultimately as romanticized as every other musical about people putting on a show, glorifying the "magic" of the theater and the desperate hunger to perform. But more than other musicals, A Chorus Line emphasizes the notes of desperation. I was struck in the part where the young Puerto Rican kid, Paul, sprains his ankle by how immediately all of the other dancers react to his plight. They know that an accident like that means much more than damaged ligaments: it might steal from him the one thing he can do, the thing that he's been staking his life and his livelihood on, his dancing. As they rush him off to the doctor I thought about actor friends of mine who have no health care, people who take all kinds of economic risks to pursue their dream. It's a crazy decision and in a country like this one, which exists with a minimal social safety net, it's a decision that comes with very real economic risks.

I think one of the reasons that S. responded so strongly to the show was because he saw something of me in the characters. As we waited for the Q train in Times Square, he said something like, "Now I understand you better." Well, that's not exactly true. I'm not like the kids in A Chorus Line because I'm not a dancer, I don't have to present myself continually in judgment in rounds and rounds of auditions. There are certainly parallels to my life as a director and playwright, trying (and so far succeeding) to be able to support myself and to find the time and energy to keep creating my art. But as much as I enjoyed the experience of going to the show (and I really, really did -- primarily I think because S. was there with me), I came out of there with a profound awareness that projects like A Chorus Line are as different from what I do as night and day. That difference was undescored by the airlessness of the current production. In order to make it into a well-oiled, money-making machine, the producers had eliminated any risk-taking decisions, they were following the tried and true formula of what people expected (or remembered) A Chorus Line to be and people were paying them back for that. An article in the Times before the show opened revealed that the dancers who participated in the original workshops, the real people on whose lives the authors had based the stories and songs (many of whom acted in the original show), were receiving no money from this revival. Michael Bennett, when he was still alive, had looked out for them financially but the new prodcuers had decided not to. Again reminding us that the business of show business is business.

I don't begrudge Broadway its profits. There's nothing wrong with actors and playwrights making money. But we must always remember that when we're talking about a profit-making Broadway show, we're talking more and more about shows that are artistically compromised, unadventurous, unspontaneous. It's an entriely different enterprise from the kind of work that attempts to challenge people's perceptions of the artform and of society. Broadway is no longer the pinnacle of the theater in America, it's a commercial offshoot, a business venture. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Several weeks after our Broadway experience, S. and I went to see Pina Bausch's dance company perform their piece Nefes in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. Nefes was the hot ticket of the festival, the one for which there was no special discount available, because Bausch is one of those avant-garde now-superstars, a cross-over artist whose work has won favor with the sophisticated classes and been featured in maistream work like Almodovar's Talk to Her (which is where, I must admit, I first learned about her). The tickets were not as expensive as A Chorus Line but they weren't cheap either. And the theater was packed with a totally different crowd -- dance afficianados, wealth bourgeois liberals, young sophisticates. Again it was a pleasure to be among them, to survey the crowd during intermission and to feel oneself comfortably ensconced with artsy gay men in thick black designer glasses and willowy women in pashminas.

The show was really enjoyable. The piece has a joking casual quality that frequently prompted knowing chuckles from the audience. Nefes (which, apparently, is Turkish for "breath") is part of a series of works in which Bausch's company was invited by a different cities to set up residence there and then create a piece about that city. This time is was Istanbul: the music had a Turkish flavor and several of the early sections dealt (amusingly) with a hammam. But it wasn't a Turk-fest by any means. If the program notes hadn't told us of the connection, I'm not sure I would have picked up on it. Bausch's company of dancers is young, international, multi-racial, graceful, witty, and ironic. They had a lovely, casual rapport with the audience and the audience loved them right back. During the intermission, I overheard a fiftysomething gay man say, "I don't think it's about anything, but I love it!"

I enjoyed the piece a lot, too, though I thought it was far too long and repetitive. Couldn't Bausch have pruned the three-hour running time a bit, especially when so many of the dances and mini-skits (while enjoyable) seemed to recall bits that we'd seen earlier in the piece? What I think that man I overheard, and most of the crowd, liked about the show was this casual pace and attitude. It was, in short (from the opening hammam section to the part in the middle where the dancers just came out and had a picnic onstage) a glorification of leisure. We were approaching the piece like a fine glass of wine that we and the artists were going to take our sweet time with and really savor. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. And yet, I could detect underneath the enjoyment a tinge of jealousy, the kind of jealousy that American liberals often feel in relation to Europe, with its subsidized arts and generous vacation time. We long to be able to go on extended vacations, to sit around cafes digesting great food and pondering artistic and philosophical questions.

Bausch's company was, in fact, performing that life-style for us on the stage at BAM. Her residency in various cities all over the world is a kind of vacation. "We'll pay you to come experience our city and then make a dance about it!" What artist would turn that down? I was struck by how different that situation is from the desperate dancers of A Chorus Line, who must struggle for each paycheck, who are never assured of their livelihood from job to job. American liberals, and especially American artists, have a romanticized view of the glory of European socialism. We love their nationalized health care, their social safety net, their state subsidies for the arts. How often have you heard young artists complaining about the lack of government funding, or cutbacks to the NEA, or the appalling fact that the United States has no "national theater"? And yet having those subsidies can be a double-edged sword, at least artistically. Might I play devil's advocate here and argue that arts subsidies breed complacency? That difficult as it may be to get work put on in our competitive marketplace environment, it also results in work that people are at least committed to, that they have some stake in. Because they're choosing to give up material comfort in order to get it made.

I've been reading the biography of Joe Papp, founder of the Public Theater (where A Chorus Line was originally developed) and I am totally charmed by his personality. A young, working-class Jewish kid, a 1930's communist, an idealist with a dream of bringing free Shakespeare to the masses -- he's my kind of artist. And yet, I must admit that as his life enters the 1960s and 70s I have increasingly less sympathy as he pleads with the city government to fund his theater which he allows to spiral into collosal debt. If he's not going to run a theater responsibly, why should the tax payers fund him?

These are just some undigested thoughts. I think there is room for subsidization of art, even in the American marketplace. Unrestrained capitalism would result in a theater scene composed of nothing but jukebox musicals and revivals starring Hollywood stars. But there is value in the struggle, value in the difficulty of mounting a play in America and making it work. That struggle can often make us better, and more committed, artists.

re-play

2006-12-22T08:47:00.000-05:00

I have more posts brewing, but thought I might turn some of you on to a "golden oldie." The "big theatrical event" of the New York theater scene this season (at least for New York's most affluent theater goers), is Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia" trilogy. I haven't seen the Lincoln Center Production and don't plan to (at $100 a ticket for each play, it's quite an investment!).

I did, however, catch the original National Theatre production in London back in 2002 and weighed in on it at some length back then. From the sound of it, the New York production is better directed and the script has been considerably revised, but I suspect that my musings on it remain relevant even to this new production.

Stoppard, one of the favorite dramatists of my youth (I directed him in both high school and college), doesn't make it into my top-ten list anymore and the 2002 review sort of explains why. It's kind of a critical "Dear John" letter. It wasn't you, Tom, it was me. But thanks for everything.

Everyone have a happy holiday and I promise to write more new posts soon!

linked

2006-11-30T23:13:00.000-05:00

You all thought this blog was dead, I know. Actually, I've had this post stewing in my brain for over two months. As more time went by, I kept adding more and more onto it, instead of just posting the damn thing. I still have yet to adopt the frequency of posting required for a really successful blog. Sigh. The irony is that, as the post relates, all the while that it's been waiting I've actually been getting immersed in reading a lot of other people's blogs.

Anyway. Here it is. Not my complete thoughts by any means on the subjects of theater, Internet communities, and my new job, but I'm sure I'll be covering all of that sometime in the future...

******************************

I started this posting as a response to this article (Can you still read it?? Damn! Why does the New York Times think it's such hot shit that they need to block access to anything that's two weeks old? Anyway, you can get some sense of it by reading here). In a nutshell, it's an article by second string Times theater critic Charles Isherwood revealing his conflicted feelings about not enjoying "political" theater. I got pissed off when I read it, thought of writing a letter to the editor, realized that anything I wrote would never get printed (I've tried before!), and then proceeded to start this little blog entry which has now evolved into something else entirely. But I have to post, if only to get all of this stuff off my chest. Here goes!

*******************************

Who would have thought that the Internet, of all things, would get me excited about theater again?

There were other factors, too: the fall chill in the air, the prospect of an exciting new job (which I've now started -- I'm being paid to make theater), but it's really the Internet that kick-started my excitement about theater and has been recently feeding that interest.

Excited about theater again? Let me clarify. You're probably thinking, "Isn't Brian that guy who's constantly yammering on about things like Brecht and the medieval mystery cycles?" You're right -- nothing gets me more excited than talking about theater's potential as a forum for community dialogue and self-representation, a place to imagine reconfigurations of our society. Just ask my boyfriend about the time he innocently asked about the aesthetic theories underlying Weimar cabaret and was treated to a crazed subway ride-long introduction to Brechtian theory. He stopped long ago counting the number of times a day I employ the phrase "building community." My interest in theater's potential has never waned.

Instead, it was my interest in the actual theater that gets produced in New York (or anywhere) that had been rather lackluster. I suppose that practitioners of any craft are inevitably the most critical consumers of it (don't sell shoddy shoes to a cobbler!), but I find that theater people, in particular, usually hate most of the plays they see. (This rule is not ironclad: many actors who perform in musicals seem to get excited about stuff on Broadway, but I suppose they are a generally more celebratory lot...) I don't necessarily think that most filmmakers hate most films or that most novelists hate most novels, but for some reason the theater arouses a different kind of response.

I think any serious theater practitioner (I'm talking mostly about wirters and directors here), though, ought to admit to him or herself that theater (unlike the film or the novel) is a dying artform and has been for decades. No one goes to it and no one cares about it. Which means that every individual performance that one sees is fraught with significance about the relevance of the artform iteself. (It's a bit like the pressure felt by a member of a minority group who breaks into an establishment industry, like Jackie Robinson in baseball -- every move the person makes is scrutinized because it reflects, for good or ill, on the group as a whole.) Imagine if every time you went to a movie you thought, "Well, that movie was all right, but does it offer adequate justification for the fact that movies exist at all??????" Your head would explode. But we theater practitioners are more self-lacerating types (at least I am). I can honestly say that I ask myself that question about theater a lot, certainly every time that I choose whether or not to work on a production. And while not everyone I know harbors such apocalyptic sentiments, almost all significant 20th Century theoretical wiritng on theater (from Artaud to Brecht and Brook and beyond) has begun with some version of the question "Why is theater necessary?"

In the face of such questioning, very little that I was seeing seemed to hold up. I've pretty much spent the past three years roundly dismissing everything on Broadway, off-Broadway and all the experimental stages. I've enjoyed certain productions and performers but I haven't seen much of anything that convinced me that theater had any relevance to the larger world. Everything, in my estimation, was either hopelessly enmeshed in the system of soulless capitalist exploitation (Broadway) or so rarified and self-referential that it had no hope of drawing in an audience beyond a knowing, self-congratulatory elite (most downtown stuff). I'm a member of that elite and I often enjoy that kind of thing -- but, I asked myself, why the hell would anyone else want to see it?

I can't say that my opinions have changed all that much. I still think that most theater that gets produced fails to advance the art much or to challenge the foundations of society or our collective ways of seeing. I haven't seen much that's been great lately.

However, I've started reading theater blogs.

Weird indeed that theater, that art form that most people think of as stodgy and retrogressive, should have a flourishing life on the worldwide web. I must admit that until recently I was unaware of it. Though I maintain this blog with intermittent regularity, I don't really read a lot of blogs. And then I started Googling for people's opinions on the Public Theater's Mother Courage and I came across this website, which led me to this one and this one. Not only do all these people write with a considerable degree of expertise on the current theater scene, liberally referencing personal favorites like Howard Barker, Caryl Churchill, and Richard Foreman, as well as BB, but they also all seem to know each other. Lo and behold, it seemed, here was the thing I'd been struggling so long to build: a theater community!

I'm not the only one who's recently been turned on to theater blogs; apparently, the editor of the Time Out New York theater section has been so impressed with what he's been reading out there on the blogosphere that he decided to start a blog of his own.

One thing about the theatrical conversation on the blogosphere is that it's strikingly anti-establishment. Certain topics inevitably recur, like the funding structures of non-profit theaters, the hegemony of the New York Times as arbiter of theatrical taste, the unadventurous decisions abut what plays get produced. Blogs are like David's slingshot; they project opinions much farther, they give power to the little guy. They offer individuals a chance to rave about stuff that is ignored, underappreciated, or misunderstood elsewhere.

Most exciting of all, though, are the links. It's lovely to log in and see how topics of debate and discussions of articles spread throughout the blogosphere. I learn daily about new sites and I add them to my list of bookmarks. Thanks to all this browsing, I'm much better informed about the interesting theater that's being produced, as well as the interesting criticism that gets written, interesting behind the scenes news. Everyone contributes their own little bits of knowledge and it gets disseminated all around.

In other words, it's not really the theater that's gotten better, it's that the dynamic of my relationship to it has changed. As I got plugged into the blogosphere I was also in the process of becoming a "professional theater practitioner" (at least in the sense that I get paid), which gave me a bit more of a sense of authority; it gave me a clear identity in the theatrical world. I'll be talking more about my new position in future posts. Anyone who knows about the theater I'm currently working at knows that it was built and has been maintained through grassroots organizing. I'm realizing now that the Internet provides a whole new way to conduct that organizing, to make those links. Even though theater is all about presence -- "real" experiences -- and the Internet is supposedly about "virtual" experience, there is incredible potential for the latter to feed and support the former.

And the theater that serves to benefit the most from the online revolution is marginal theater -- the anti-establishment, the experimental, the non-commercial. Today's virtually unregulated Internet terrain is close to something like a purely democratic environment (I know that's a pretty big statement and I know that corporations have their grubby paws all over the Internet, but still we can be a little bit idealistic about blogs, can't we? They're providing little guys with unprecedented megaphones. It's like Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, but with a potentially worldwide audience...)

All of which leads us back to Charles Isherwood's reductive idea of "political" theater -- he's saying that the content of a piece makes it political (a definition that fits for consciousness-raising docudramas or agitprop) and that its success can be measured in the ways that it changes people's minds or mobilizes them to take political action. But we all know that making a play is definitely not the most effective way to change anyone's mind about anything or to get them to "do" things (write an op-ed piece in the paper or hold a rally if you want to do that).

There is a way, however, in which the simple act of putting on a play -- outside the commercial environment, using a process that allows disenfranchised groups to perform, to experience the empowerment of creativity -- that is, in itself a form of revolutionary activity. Isherwood and the others in the debate about political theater's effectiveness are stuck analyzing a very traditional model of theater. In future posts, I want to lay out a vision for an alternative model, one that is not utopian (it actually exists) but does require a different set of values and a different kind of commitment to build. That's the kind of theater I'm working in. Just as blogging is a revolutionary form of media publication, one that bypasses established channels, this form of independent theater is revolutionary, too. And thus the two are made to be complementary.

But more on that later. I'm just whetting your appetite. May the conversation begin!

critical matter

2006-09-05T23:07:00.000-04:00

Here is the Village Voice assessment of the Public's Mother Courage. I find it to be perceptive in almost every detail, proving once again that Michael Feingold is the truly indispensible major theater critic in this town. Never starstruck or a mere peddler of puns, he writes thoughtful reviews that balance an assessment of a production's merits as a theatrical event with a thorough knowledge of its dramaturgical context. In short, he does what a real critic always ought to do.

The real shame of course is that once this review was published the run of the play was essentially over. Will we ever get a good, long run of a major Brecht production in New York? Sadly, I expect that this summer's Courage-ous experiment will not induce anyone else to try their hand at it any time soon.

I've been having a lot of passionate thoughts about theater. Expect more posts soon! (I hope.)

courage under fire

2006-08-10T23:59:00.000-04:00

Who says that Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage is the greatest play of the 20th Century?

Oskar Eustis, for one. I'd never thought about it, but I think it's probably true. I personally prefer the humor of The Good Person of Sezchuan and the generous amplitude of The Caucasian Chalk Circle but in terms of its iconic power and its relevance to the events of the Century, few theatrical images can compare to the sight of Mother Courage pulling along that Godforsaken wagon. (The only thing I can think of that might rival it is Didi and Gogo standing next to the tree in Waiting for Godot.)

And yet it is also commonly acknowledged that, despite its preeminent status in the annals of modern theater, Mother Courage has never been fully embraced in America. With the exception of The Threepenny Opera, there have never really been any great productions of Brecht in New York. How many American theatergoers can even remember seeing a Brecht production outside of a university? There is no tradition of Brechtian theater in America, though there are millions of Brecht admirers. Actors respect his work but don't quite seem to know how to approach it. Which means that when high-profile Brecht productions do come along, American actors and directors step in with very little concrete experience behind them. We can do Stanislavski. We can even do Shakespeare. But no one's ever really taken the time to learn Brecht.

Which brings us back to Oskar Eustis and the Shakespeare in the Park production of Mother Courage (which I saw two nights ago). As everyone knows by now, it stars Meryl Streep in the title role. The magazines tell us that Streep is "hot" this summer -- they lump her Mother Courage in between references to her roles in The Devil Wears Prada and The Ant Bully. Well, you can rest assured that I am not going to badmouth America's Greatest Living Actress; she's actually wonderful and incredibly charismatic in the part. She's a somewhat youthful Courage and quite sexy. She's very funny and very much the overprotective mother. Meryl visibly flubbed a bunch of her lines the night I saw the show -- the first two weeks are technically "previews" -- but even this barely detracted from the performance, which will no doubt grow as the month goes on.

Wonderful, too, were Kevin Kline as the Cook and Austin Pendleton as the Chaplain; their scenes together crackled with electricity. All three were made for Brecht - they're all very intelligent actors, very precise, very good observers of behavior. They have the necessary presence of mind to render the part and render the commentary about it at the same time. Several of the set piece speeches about the nature of war are stirring and provocative.

Those speeches, of course, are delivered in English written by Tony Kushner, who has done an excellent job. He's delivered an English Mother Courage that is both political and (more importantly) theatrical. There are big laughs throughout and the language has the right feeling of salty terseness laced with instructive irony. It's a testament to his achievement that one hears the language so clearly, despite the length and density of the text, and that so many of the sentiments hit home. The translation is probably the biggest strength of the production.

Why, then, is it ultimately disappointing? I suppose that it couldn't help but be, especially to a Brechtian disciple like myself. By choosing this play for Shakespeare in the Park, Oskar Eustis (Artistic Director of the Public Theater) was going for something big: the posters on the subway platform scream "WAR"! This is topical, he's saying to us. It's epochal. The time for this greatest of anti-war plays to finally receive it's definitive New York production is NOW.

For the past two days, I've been asking myself just exactly why it didn't work. I went back and read all of Brecht's notes about the play and perused his "Model Book" of the Berliner Ensemble production. The problem with this Mother Courage is in the direction. In most of the scenes, George C. Wolfe offers the kind of casual, sloppy groupings that would seem at home in a summer stock production of Oklahoma! There is no consistent approach to the presentation of the songs. Overall, there is a complete lack of clarity. Wolfe's last minute decision to project video images of soldiers marching and gunshot sounds as Kattrin falls in slow motion from the roof seems to say nothing beyond "War is Hell." And we're in a war, Wolfe adds, so that's relevant.

In fact, Mother Courage is more relevant than ever and the play has more to tell us than the fact that war kills people. In Eustis' Program note he tells us that the play examines one of the great unanswered questions of the century: why do people consistently make choices that are against their own self-interest? In this case, why does Mother Courage continue to collaborate with the war when it takes away her children from her, one by one? Who cares if war is hell? Brecht gets that out of the way early. "War is business" is the more important point and the smaller participants never see any of the profits.

Eustis seems to have felt, rightly, that this production offered an unprecedented opportunity. Here was a chance to introduce literally thousands of people to their first Brecht play. The venue is the most prominent in the city and the audience comes from all walks of life. The show is free for Christ's sake! Here's a chance to put on a great and truly public performance. Lure them in with Meryl Streep, but have them coming out raving about Brecht. Or, better yet, have them coming out raving about the way that all of us, like Mother Courage, are responsible for collaborating with war.

Instead, it was clear from where I was sitting that the production had lost almost everyone. Perhaps some changes will shorten the 3.5 hour running time before the press opening on Aug. 21 - but even a swifter show is hardly likely to win over converts to Brechtian dramaturgy. "I like Shakespeare," I heard one woman saying as she walked toward the exit at intermission, "but I guess I found out that I don't like Brecht!"

You know that something's wrong when I, who probably knew the play better than 90% of the audience, found myself straining to grasp the point of a scene. I was leaning forward, just as Brecht would like me to do, and trying to figure out what was being put in front of me; I wasn't trying to reconcile deliberately troubling contradictions in the action, however, I was literally trying to fgure out what the hell was going on, what did this song have to do with anything, why did that person just walk around to the back of the cart etc. etc.

Brecht's Model Book reveals the precision with which he and his actors worked through every detail of a scene: How would Mother Courage open her change purse? Where would she stand as she listens to the military recruiters address her son? More than in the work of some dramatists, this clarity of stage action -- the Gestus -- is the primary vehicle of meaning in a Brecht play and this production pretty much lacks a memorable Gestus or stage picture, by which I mean one that helps us realize the underlying dynamics and contradictions that Brecht has embedded into the script.

Discussing the movement of actors across the stage, Brecht writes:

Positions should be retained as long as there is no compelling reason for changing them -- and a desire for variety is not a compelling reason. If one gives in to a desire for variety, the consequence is a devaluation of all movement on the stage; the spectator ceases to look for a specific meaning behind each movement, he stops taking movement seriously.

I am not saying that Wolfe and Streep should have recreated Brecht and Weigel's 1948 production. Brecht would certainly not have wanted that. But he offers characteristically sound and open-minded advice when he writes this about the use of his model:

The aim must be neither to copy the pattern exactly nor to break away from it too quickly. In studying what follows -- a number of explanations and discoveries emerging from the rehearsal of a play -- one should above all be led by the solutions of certain problems to consider the problems themselves.

Wolfe's direction shows little evidence that he spent much time considering any of the problems of the scenes, or even that he and his actors could identify what they were. Brecht, famously, spent months in rehearsal, breaking each scene and gesture down piece by piece and collaborating with actors to find new discoveries. That sort of working method is nearly impossible to achieve at any kind of scale outside of the the state-subsidized European model of theater and that may be one of the reasons why Brecht has never been able to find fertile soil in America (It always comes down to moeny, eh?).

The fact is that this production feels underrehearsed, un-thought through. Perhaps every production of Mother Courage is underrehearsed but not all of them are compressed into a summer schedule to accomodate movie star schedules or performed for a mere 4 weeks (2 of which are previews). If this is really meant to be the ground-breaking production it announces itself as, why not do it in a way that would allow it to be done well? Of course, that would probably mean not doing it for free. It would mean that a whole lot fewer people would see it. Ah, money again.

Mother Courage has always had a powerful effect on audiences, but from the start responses to it have consistently simplified its greatness. Brecht lamented that, though it had been written in the early days of World War Two and intended as a warning to the people of Europe, implicating them in the disasters that were to follow, the celebrated post-War performance that toured the ruined cities of the continent tended to prompt sympathetic and self-congratulatory responses from audiences who saw their own survival mirrored in Mother Courage's "indomitable spirit." (The whole point is that she's not really courageous, she's self-interested.)

And in Central Park this summer we have yet another spectacle of self-congratulation. Without a doubt the lines in Kushner's translation that draw the heartiest response come during Courage's "political" conversation with the Cook and the Chaplain, when they refer to the difficulties of importing liberty to other countries. The audience laughs appreciatively and applauds; I'm sure they'll do it every night. "It's just like Bush!" they're saying, "And we're so much smarter than he is."

The fact of the matter remains that being smarter than our President, knowing he was wrong to enter this war, and feeling self-rightwously vindicated about your anti-war stance doesn't mean that the war stops. Mother Courage lost all her children to the war and still she learned nothing. Very few of the New Yorkers in the audience had lost any children in Iraq and it is probably that fact (the fact that the elite have suffered very little from our disastrous campaign) that has allowed the Bush administration to get away with so much. I don't have a solution to the mess we're in, but I do know that the only way to find one is to stop feeling so superior and asking what we've done to prevent the war from happening. (I myself haven't done all that much.)

Should you go see Mother Courage anyway, despite all my resevrations? Without a doubt. When else do any of us really get to see Brecht performed? Any work of theater that challenges you at that level should not be missed. But it might behoove us all to continuing asking even more challenging questions once the show is over.

food for thought

2006-08-06T21:34:00.000-04:00

I've learned recently that my foothold on sanity is maintained by a set of regular, simple rituals. One of them is (or was, and hopefully shall again be) posting on this blog. Before this summer I hadn't missed a single month, but I felt better when I was posting every two weeks of so. Hopefully, I'll get back in the swing of things.

My newest ritual is going to the gym (yes, folks, as in "I'm making an attempt to maintain my physical fitness"!). I find myself longing to spend those two or three hours a week focused on nothing but my own body (and, occasionally the bodies of those around me - wink, wink).

But perhaps the most significant of these rituals, the one that leaves me the most off-kilter when I fail to do it, is cooking at least one of my meals each day. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not preparing Martha Stewart-style goodies all the time. "Cooking at least one of my meals" means, at its best, making a dinner of pan-seared tuna steak with mustard sauce (tonight's calming concoction) but it also encompasses tossing some chick peas into a can of Classico marinara sauce in order to add some protein or, in its most minor form, slicing a banana into my morning granola.

As with the variable frequency of my blog entries, I don't always live up to this rigorous standard. More often than not and much to my displeasure, I have recently found myself eating on the go -- snarfing down a slice of pizza as I walk down the street (surely an experience that only New Yorkers ever have) or guzzling an iced coffee while I attempt to consume a muffin on the train during my morning commute.

[Footnote: Do any of my fellow New Yorkers eat on trains any more? Several months ago, it seems that the MTA instituted a newer, more comprehensive set of prohibitions against certain uncivilized behaviors on the trains, which (I'm told) includes eating. An elderly black man expressed shock that I was eating a bagel on the 2 train not too long ago and informed me that he'd been slapped with a $75 fine for doing so(!). I suppose understand the motivations behind such draconian policies -- I hate it when you enter a car littered with fallen french fries or riddled with treacherous rivulets of spilt coffee, but I don't think of myself as the type of person who "makes a mess" when he eats and I act as if I'm immune to the laws. I really have felt guilty, though, every time I pull out my muffin -- not only does no one else seem to be eating, but they all seem to be looking at me with scorn, as if they'd come face to face with Donald Trump or Newt Gingrich or some other arrogant, self-interested bastard. It's very unusual for New Yorkers to so consistently abide by restrictive regulations (when was the last time you obeyed the signal at a crosswalk, for example?), so I'm a bit perplexed. I can only assume that the fine for eating on the subway, like an arrest for marijuana possession, is the sort of thing that gets imposed much more frequently on ethnic and economic minorities and that by acting as if I don't have to worry about that, I'm simply asserting the inherent privilege of my race and class. I dunno.]

I don't like eating on the go; your digestion seems jostled. And I don't like buying prepared food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner -- my weekly purchased lunches tend to yo-yo back and forth between splurges on healthy things I like to eat (close to $10 for a big felafel sandwich at the local Yemenite grill or something with smoked salmon, mmmm) and cobbled together meals whose only redeeming quality are their relative affordability (egg salad sandwich from the deli with some pretzels). It's really agonizing to have to decide yet again where I'm going to buy lunch or dinner and to watch the $20 bills in my wallet dwindle to singles in the blink of an eye.

Like refreshing oases in this culinarywasteland come the nights when I can actually come home in time to shop, or the nights when I find in my refrigerator all the ingredients necessary for a healthy meal. Best of all are the (rarer and rarer) nights when I makes some kind of hearty salad (ideally featuring an unusual starch like cous cous or quinoa) that serves as an evening meal and doubles as a lunch for a few days running.

It's not just that I'm cheap. It's not just that I enjoy cooking and find the task meditative, calming. In fact, I've recently discovered that there's something else underlying my persistent need to be able to go to sleep and say, "Well, at least I prepared one meal myself today." It has to do with that all-American virtue: self-reliance.

I feel like a better person if I cook my own meals; I feel like I'm taking the reins of destiny in my own hands. It's as if I'm saying, "I ain't no fancy-pants city slicker that has to eat out all the time. Why, if I had to, I could cook up my own grub using some kindling and some flint. Don't need no retaurants to do it for me."

My choice of vernacular there is influenced by my lastest Netflix obsession: the American Western. Ok, so I've only watched two so far -- but I've been fascinated. I once had an English teacher who said that you couldn't understand America unless you were familiar with the Hollywood Western. I think he's right.

First piece of advice: rent Red River. I loved this movie. I think it first joined my queue around the release of Brokeback Mountain, since it's frequently cited as a "homoerotic" western. This has chiefly to do with the presence of Montgomery Clift, looking as cool and satisfying as a long drink of water. But Clift is incidental to the action; the main event here (as in every movie he appears in) is John Wayne.

I always thought that the "political" reading of the Western was something that had to be decoded, made up of unacknowledged subtexts of racism and imperialism that no one really picked up on until Roland Barthes and his boys started deconstructing things. Wrong. One of the most compelling things about Red River is how unabashedly it celebrates, glorifies the power of capitalism. There's a scene early on where some nameless Mexican disputes John Wayne's claim to a plot of land and Wayne shoots the man dead and calls the land his own. All property is theft (right?) and this movie moves on from there. It chronicles Wayne's single-minded pursuit of a trail that will allow him to move his cattle into uncharted territory. That's the main goal here: to promote commerce, move the heads of cattle along and increase the value of John Wayne's "brand" (the Red River "D"). Wayne will stop at nothing to achieve his goal, even if it means the death of some the men who are blazing the trail. Spring forward a few centuries and we have the Sam Walton story. At the same time that the USSR was churning out propaganda of its own, Hollywood (with no pressure from the state apparatus) was selling America the party line from the other side of the political spectrum.

Watching Red River is like having a political conversation with a charming, completely unabashed conservative. Such conversations can be incredibly stimulating, even sexy. That raw independence and libertarianism - that fundamental belief that the world is best run through a process of competition - may repulse the liberal soul but as a badge of style it has a lot to recommend itself. In the movie (and even more in The Searchers), there are people who doubt the John Wayne character's morality, his sanity, even his humanity. The critique of the philosophy that Wayne represents is written into the text of the film and at crucial junctures it is put in check (by Monty Clift, among others). In both Red River and The Searchers, Wayne is a monomaniac -- a man with no attachments, driven by a single idea. Men like that don't make good husbands, fathers, lovers, or even neighbors, the movies tell us. But they end up making damn fine countries. Men like that are a necessary evil -- they're the type of people who make progress happen.

The only other Western I'd ever seen before this was High Noon, a liberal allegory of the most simplistic variety, one of those thinly-veiled McCarthyite fables about standing up against groupthink. You can tell that the movie's supposed message of standing up for your principles in the face of opposition is pretty thin since it is cited as a favorite by Bill Clinton, of all people (he watched it 17 times during his presidency, apparently).

Red River (directed by Howard Hawks) and The Searchers (directed, much more portentously and ultimately less enjoyably, by John Ford) are far more interesting documents than a schematic picture like High Noon. And far truer representations, like it or not, of the American spirit. Disagree with them as you may, they compel attention. I would never want John Wayne as a father (Why in both movies is he saddled with pretty-boy surrogate sons -- Monty and lunk-headed hunk Jeffrey Hunter?); he'd have no time to talk things over with you, no tolerance for "sensitivity." As paterfamilias, he inspires respect and fear, but no affection.

How does all of this relate to my dining habits? Well, though the "foodie" movement in this country (by which I mean the advocacy of cooking from raw ingredients, the disdain for anything "processed") tends to manifiest itself among the liberal balsamic-drizzling urban elite, it is also in its own way conservative. It is anti-progress, looking back to traditional techniques. It's centered around the home and the family. And, like a Republican Senator who refuses to subsidize a welfare queen, those of us who insist on taking the time to prepare our own meals are proponents of the inherent value of putting in some work before you can get a reward. The fact that I feel guilty if I eat out for three meals a day is, in fact, the most conservative thing about me. It offers me that much-admired feeling touted by George W. Bush and other proponents of an "ownership society": a real sense of accomplishment.

Did John Wayne cook his own meals, though? Did Ronald Reagan?

mapquest

2006-05-30T08:40:00.000-04:00

Last Friday I went on an impromptu bus tour of Manhattan and the Bronx. I had organized a picnic for the tenants at the building where I work, thinking we would take a lovely Friday afternoon trip to Van Cortlandt Park. When we left, the sky was overcast and drizzly, so we told the bus driver to "take the scenic route," hoping that by the time we got to the Bronx the sun would be out and we'd have a lovely day. Well, when we got up to 242nd St., there was thunder and a downpour, so no picnic. But we came back again into Manhattan, taking the scenic route all the way down Broadway.

The experience was amazing. I always love riding through New York City in a motor vehicle. Somehow one's experience of the city changes; it is slowed down and put into a frame. It's an experience somewhat akin to Brecht's verfremdungseffekt ("making strange"), whereby that which is familiar is recontextualized and thus made strange or "new." As we rode across town, neighborhoods that I knew well started to blend into ones that I didn't. We rode along E. 23rd St., down which I used to walk every day when I went to work but haven't set foot on in months. No sooner did we turn uptown but we were in Murray Hill and then the Upper East Side, neighborhoods so unfamiliar to me that they might have been foreign countries. Why are there so many Japanese restaurants around here, I asked myself?

On the way back I dozed off a bit; when I awoke I felt a curious sense of impending familiarity. I looked around at buildings that I had never seen before but somehow I had a sense that we were about the enter a nieghborhood I knew. Then it clicked: we were back in Manhattan and about to pass by Columbia. No sooner had I realized this than the campus appeared on my left and I saw the gate that I've been passing through a few times a week for the past 6 months, to visit S in his Columbia dorm (but no more, he's in the real world now).

It's amazing how the areas that you know in a city, especially this city, sneak up on you like that. Amazing how the parts of town that you feel you have "claimed" interlock with parts that you have no interest in or no command of. Drop me off in some parts of midtwon (9th Ave. in Hell's kitchen, say) and I can tell you where to find a decent Thai restaurant, but drop me off a few blocks northeast and I would be in terra incognita.

Riding in the bus I started to think of new ways to map the city. I think the visual image of the five boroughs that most New Yorkers carry in their heads is this one, drawn up and conveniently scaled by the MTA. The map is deceptive: Manhattan takes centerstage; Brooklyn is drastically smaller, a suburban satellite instead of the vast metropolis you see on a correctly scaled map. Interesting, too, are the wastelands, the undocumented regions that are left blank or "blanker" because no subway lines run there. Someone is always talking about the "proposed Second Avenue subway line" that will open up the East Side, but there are also vast areas of Brooklyn, located between and beyond the branching veins of the subway lines that are quite literally unrepresented. Look at the map: what's out beyond the end of the 2 train?

I actually took the 2 to the end last weekend to go to my co-worker's birthday party in Flatbush. People out there in Brooklyn drive cars when they wanna get into the city. That seems so foreign to me.

For one reason or another, I've actually visited the terminuses (termini?) or quite a few train lines recently. I rode the L all the way out to Canarsie in April to pick up a wayward UPS package and discovered a hinterland of warehouses and liminal spaces, in which somnambulant voyagers from all across Brooklyn stood in line waiting to claim the items that had been mailed to them. In the past week, I rode the 4 train to it's end (origin?) in the Bronx in order to visit DeWitt Clinton High School, where I was recruiting students for the theater program I teach in; I rode past Yankee Stadium (a first for me) and emerged at the end of the line into a world of pastoral beauty on a lovely spring day, the high school building nestled into the "emerald necklace" of Mosholu Parkway and Van Cortlandt.

(Taking a train out to its extremity makes you ask whether the stop you arrive at is the beginning or end of the line. All depends on your perspective, I guess, your point of departure. Strange how the "heart" of every subway line -- except the G -- occurs about halfway through its length, when it passes through Manhattan. That is where much of the line's character is defined. Does is pass through Grand Central, Times Square, or Penn Station? And yet, it's possible to ride the train at either end and to experience none of this. How interesting it would be to watch a time lapse photograph or sped-up video and to see how the demographics of subway riders change and morph over the course of a single trip from end to end, how the cars start to fill up with white people in fancy clothes, and then how the process is reversed.)

Thinking of my city in this way makes me feel like an explorer, like Magellan. I think of the days when the "known world" had a finite stopping point, days when cartographers left blank spaces and said things like "here be dragons" (thank you for that one, James Baldwin). The other day, I happened to be in the first car of the C train and you do feel like you're at the prow of a ship, thundering into the darkness. (I stole this image, too, from the opening pages of Don DeLillo's Libra, in which the young Lee Harvey Oswald rides the subway lines from the Bronx all the way out to Brooklyn.)

What would an alternative map of New York City look like? One that disregarded geography and instead tried to capture familiarity, experience? There are certain blocks that feel as if they belong to you: the obvious ones, of course, ones that you walk down every day on your way from home to work, but also ones that -- for whatever reason -- you just know, ones for which you have instant mental recall of the storefronts that line the street (and you can test yourself on the A9 Yellowpages site, which serves as a sort of photgraphic walking tour of Manhattan block by block, though I've noticed that it doesn't get updated very frequently; a lot of businesses seem to have come and gone...)

Maybe one could start an experiential map of New York City by taking a highlighter to the map we already know. Streets that have been trod and trod again would be overlayed in bright neon yellow, whereas unctouched streets would be left blank. Everyone's map would be different. In my case, certain parts of town would be thoroughly filled in (by now, for example, I can pretty much claim to know the entire swath of Manhattan, between both rivers, from 23rd St. to Houston). In other parts of town, familiar routes would stand out like the Oregon trail, blazed through otherwise untocuhed territory. I walked and re-walked the path from the Lorimer St. stop in Brooklyn to Galapagos on N. 6th, but most of the rest of Williamsburg would be left monochrome.

But what about time? How to document the point of origin of "my New York"? Geography need not contain us in our attempt to show the city that my experience has shaped. The place where New York began, for me, my Tigris and Euphrates, for instance, is 1st Avenue and 9th St. in the East Village, the intersection where you will find P.S. 122 (site of my first New York job). That was the first location I could really call my own and it is from that fertile crescent that all of my subsequent experiences flowed. The temporal map would snake out from that crossroads in different directions, first to Washington Square and MacDougal St., then Union Square and Gramercy Park and now into Brooklyn where it would join with other mighty tributaries, like Fulton St. and Lafayette, Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush. Soon, with my new job, another branch of the experiential river will be flowing up close to Harlem (hello, again, James Baldwin).

I'm not the only one who's been thinking of New York this way. The other day I read the following in an email from one I love:

I've noticed that when you've lived in New York (or any city but for some reason it's more vivid here) for long enough something wonderful starts happening— streets and corners, bars and cafes, subways stops and parks all bring memories of times lived in them. I was thinking, as I kept walking, how in the course of a 2-hour walk there were so many places that reminded me of you either because we’ve walked by them together, been in them, or we'vetalked about them. It was quite moving to realize that this city that I love so much is becoming so tightly intertwined with the memories of the boy that I love the most in this whole world.

I don't know the answer, S. Proust mapped his experiences in the same way: he wasn't just about tastes and smells -- roads, like Swann's way and the Guermantes' way, had deep significance for him. But there's something about New York that makes this even "more vivid," as you say. Could it be that the grid system, which so democratically welcomes newcomers into the city, makes it that much easier for us to learn our way around, to become "experts" at Manhattan? (I spent my whole childhood and young adulthood in Boston and still couldn't tell you if Boylston St. runs one way.) In addition, since the grid lacks "personality" (what really dsitinguishes 16th St. from 17th?), we need to enscribe it with our own memories and associations, our own private signposts, to help keep from getting lost. All of this becomes that much more intense in summertime, I think, because we spend so much more time on the streets and sidewalks, we walk slower and we stop to look at everything around us.

I still haven't drawn my experiential map; if I was better at web programming I suppose I could try to show it to you. Unfortunately, you'll have to settle for someone else's attempt. A website called New York Songlines tries to do just waht we've described, to create a map of the city that digs deeper into the hidden histroy of the place; on the songlines map, what's below the streets is just as important as what's above...

On that site, there's a quote from Colson Whitehead that seems pretty a propos:

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.... You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Well, I wasn't around for Munsey's, but I am old enough to know that that Duane Reade on Bleecker used to be Kim's Video; I dearly miss the old 19th Hole bar on 2nd Ave. (me and probably only one other person!); I know, of course, where the old Cock used to be; I remember how you used to be able to see the Carl Fischer advertisement, with the musical note onthe side of the building in Astor Place before they built that ugly high-rise. This city may be built of steel and concrete, but it rests on far less tangible foundations.

so bite me

2006-05-14T20:39:00.000-04:00

I've finally gotten rid of the little bloodsuckers.

Bedbugs.

Bed bugs.

Bed. Bugs.

Yes, you may have heard of heard of the recent upswing in bedbug infestations in New York City. First the transit strike and now this! It's like my own personal reenactment of New York in the 70s.

Let me begin by saying that I never expected to blog about this and that I don't want this to be one of those typical "why meee!?!?!?" horror stories about some urban misfortune that has befallen the author. (Last time I came close to that was regarding the delivery of my sofa...). I don't really feel any anger -- not to my landlord, or my neighbors who more than likely unleashed the bugs on me, and certainly not to the bugs (everybody's gotta eat, right?).

The quick summary is that a couple of months ago our landlorad warned us that the "schmucks" upstairs were having a problem with bedbugs and that we should be vigilant. Our landlord pasted the blame squarely on our upstairs neighbors because of their supposed uncleanliness. (The neighbors are two creative writing students who seem to have conceived their decorating scheme around their Sony PlayStation; my Ivy-League roommate and I seem a bit more cleancut by comparison.) Now, I've actually done some research on bedbugs for my job at the low-income housing residence, so I knew that cleanliness had little to do with the problem and that the little guys spread notoriously quickly.

Months pass. Didn't think about it. Did sort of wonder, though, when little black spots started to appear on my sheets. Had I inadvertantly spilled some ink? Was my tattoo washing off? No, it turns out -- that was bedbug excrement (grooooosssss!!!!). I didn't put two and two together fast enough, though; it was weeks after I noticed the spots when I woke up in the middle of the night itching and discovered my new houseguests.

I'm actually quite proud of most of my behavior from this point on. "Oh," I thought. "Now it all makes sense. Bedbugs. I'd better sleep on the couch." So I showered, changed my clothes and did exactly that. The next day I took off all the sheets, wrapped them in plastic bags, and called my landlord. The exterminator wasn't reachable over the weekend, which meant several more days of sleeping on the couch or uptown at S's dorm. "Ah, well," I figured, "I'll just have to deal with this."

I'm not saying this solely to pat myself on the back for my stoical acceptance of the vagaries of existence; in fact, I'm trying to figure out why my natural response was so level-headed. When I told people about the bugs many of them became incredibly alarmed, consoling me profusely or expressing how horrible and disgusting it must have felt. The uproar seemed misplaced to me: yeah, it would be horrible if I had to replace my mattress, but I would have to wait until the exterminator came in to examine the situation before I knew how bad it was. So why get upset now?

I guess I'd heard stories of people waking up to discover little bites on themselves; that hadn't ahppened to me. There art thou happy, as Friar Laurence once wisely said. My sofa (the one that took so long to get delivered!) is also reasonably spacious and comfortable. And I had enough personal time accrued to easily take off a Thursday morning from work to meet the exterminator. There and there also art thou happy.

The day of the extermination was rather incredible. My room is very, shall we say, compact. A bed, a desk, a dresser -- these things fit in the space just so, with very little room to spare. In order for the exterminator to get under the mattress and to spray along the baseboards, my entire room had to be dismantled. Furniture was brought out in the hall, things were pulled out and turned upside down, revealing an unseen universe of dust and grime. Cracks were discovered where the walls met the floor -- that's where the little buggers had broken in!! Poison was stuffed into the cracks and then they were sealed with preventative putty. Meanwhile, though, the entire environment was soaked in bug spray. He was hosing it inside the bed, soaking the mattress with it, dousing it on the floors, the walls, the surfaces of everything. By the time he was done, the room had been pulled apart and it was wet and stinking.

I felt like the characters in Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends, staring at the slime that was lurking under the stone. Here were the cracks, the mess, the uncleanliness that was normally papered over in the tidy order of my everyday life. Bedbugs weren't only something that plagued the formerly homeless tenants at my job. My room could use a good dusting.

And then it was time for the purification ritual. The laundering of every sheet and item of clothing. The dusting, the wiping, the drying. New sheets were bought. The room was reconstructed and it looked noticebly spruced up. I'd been meaning to do a spring cleaning, I told myself -- maybe this bedbug problem wasn't all that bad if it got me to get up off my ass and clean. Yes, my beautiful Turkish bedspread looked a little faded from the wash and had probably shrunk a bit, too, but every growth experience leaves its scars. Hadn't I emerged from this trial stronger than before?

It was not until that night that I finally snapped. Sleeping on my pristine new sheets I felt a bug and I woke up to find him crawling across my pillow. This was too much for me. I jumped out of bed, threw my new sheets into the wash, and paranoiacally began to bathe myself. It was then that I felt like a diseased human being, then that I finally felt like Job. The final tiny bug (just one!) arriving to destroy completely my sense of calm security. This is where all the irrational feeling of guilt and frustration broke loose. I spent one last fitful night in the other room, wondering when I would get a good night's rest.

Well, it turns out that that single bug was probably the last. The spray had been flushing them out of the walls, the exterminator said. It would be natural to see them for the next couple of days. Having now slept on the bed two nights without single itch or unwelcome visitor, I think I can safely say that the plague is gone. I lost some sheets but my landlord has promised to reimburse me (I like my new ones better anyway). Everything's back to normal.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say about all this. The internalized guilt that finally burst out of me -- the worry that I would somehow infect S's bed or the rest of the apartment -- that feeling represented for me, in miniature, the guilt and shame that must be felt by all diseased persons. It's partly a feeling of self-pity and partly a feeling of isolation, stigmatization. The weariness that comes from feeling as if you alone have been saddled with a burden that no one else understands.

It was just some bugs and a week of lost sleep. When you think about it, it could have been a whole lot worse.

future perfect

2006-04-09T19:22:00.000-04:00

In one way or another, the subject I've tended to write about the most in this space has been my fear that I'm not readical enough. Ever since I lived at the Catholic Worker but continued to withdraw money from my ATM and then started protesting war at Oxford while living comfortably off Cecil Rhodes's trust, I've felt distinctly inauthentic because of a perceived gap between my convictions and my economic circumstances.

I suppose I enjoy cultivating a perception that I'm living "against the grain." This was certainly the case when I was at Menno House, living in a "commune" (of sorts) in the midst of upper-middle-class Manhattan. Now that I've joined the ranks of run-of-the-mill apartment renters, I cling to the cachet conferred on me by my less than lucrative position working for a non-profit. As people my age start to think about "settling down" and raising kids, I've always been able to brush aside such bourgeois aspirations by saying, "Well, I don't know if I'm ever going to have that kind of money, not doing the kind of work I do..."

There's a certain perversity in a young man with an Ivy League education and a Rhodes Scholarship under his belt taking pride in his lack of material comfort. Viewed in a more positive light, it seems like I'm opting out of a game in which I have no interest; viewed more pejoratively, you might say that fear of competition in the big leagues has prompted me to retreat self-righteously off the playing field, to make a virtue of my "underachievement."

Anyway, I turn 27 in a couple of weeks, which still doesn't seem very old to me but apparently does to a lot of other people. Even my 64-year-old aunt, who was visiting this weekend, responded, "Wow, you're getting old," when I reminded her which birthday of mine was just around the corner. What does it mean to get "old" and how does it change one's habits of mind?

We're all told that conservativism is a trait of the old; that's what accounts for bead-wearing hippies who've become SUV-driving suburbanites in their 50s. I like to think that my politics are less likely to be influenced by the onset of middle age. I like to think that I hold certain principles, particularly about the relative value of material goods, that are based on firmly held and well-thought out convictions, not just a transient state of mind. I doubt that I will ever be the type who goes in for excessive personal spending; I come from pretty Spartan stock.

What troubles me a bit more, though, is that phrase invoked by insurance agents throughout the centuries: "planning for the future." In the past few weeks, I've looked at my older role models, people who now in their fifties and sixties who've certainly never chosen material comfort over their personal and political ideals, and I've seen them becoming crippled by age, out of breath or bed-ridden, awaiting hip replacement surgery. When my aunt, a woman who has devoted every fiber of her being to serving others, talks about retiring and not being able to afford where she lives, having to move into "senior housing," the reality of what the future holds becomes more distinct.

There are consequences to not having health coverage and not buying into the company returement plan. Though Dorothy Day expounded the spiritual benefits of living "precariously," as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field do, those sentiments sound a lot different to the old, as their bodies break down.

It's not simply that "retirement" seems a long way off; it's that the very notion of "retirement," as traditionally envisioned, seems completely unappealing to me. I'm someone who really thrives on, lives for, work. So much so that I don't just work a job, but I also do unpaid work, and consider that work my real work. Somehow, I resist the idea of passing away gently in a comfy armchair, enjoying my twilight years, and profess to prefer dropping dead with my hand still on the plough. Is that idea over-romanticized? Is it reasonable? Is it selfish?

Unlike a lot of Americans, I am inclined to think of "saving for the future," as some kind of self-interested, greedy stockpiling. Live off of what little you can, I profess! Such sentiments are easy to spout when you're a young man, unencumbered by family "entanglements" -- but what about children? or a life partner? How ethical is it to persist in performing below one's earning potential when there are others, dependents, whose lives are yoked onto your own? I'm thinking of looking for a new job soon and, only two years on from when I was last looking, I find myself much more inclined to prioritize a higher salary, a pension plan, etc. over the intangible satisfactions of doing work that I value.

When I spoke to my aunt this weekend, she told me about a contemporary of hers, a married woman who is now living in a big private development, luxury housing for retirees, where seniors have a pool and activities scheduled for them and take cruises and the like. My aunt instinctively dislikes all of that. "Just think what we could accomplish if all of those retirees spent their time doing volunteer work!" she said. Politically, I agreed with her. But on a personal level, as I looked at this aging woman who already does too much for others, who never takes a vacation, who never thinks of herself, I wanted to say that maybe what she needed was to be a bit more selfish, to take a cruise or something, to treat herself.

The people living in those luxury developments are simply a different breed from my aunt and me, I guess. There are a great many people out there (the majority, perhaps?) who don't think of work as their "life's work" but rather as a means to material comfort. The idea of working in order to build up their nest egg doesn't just seem natural, it seems like a a pre-destined path, the only possible end point on that familiar roadway we call "The American Dream." Retirement is their utopia, their promised land where everything is provided for and one can face the inevitable in comfort. The revolutionaries (and I would count my aunt in this camp) see something else at the end of the line, another kind of utopia. They work and work so that all people can be clothed and housed, or free, or so that society is more just, or so that wealth is more even distributed. They work towards an equally idyllic vision but one that is, inevitably, illusory, at least in its perfect form.

We all work towards our dreams, but the conservatives, the pragmatists, have theirs within reach. Their dream, limited as it may seem, can be achievable, and not without its benefits. Isn't the person with his or her material needs met more likely to be a good parent, a well-read person, even a better citizen? Dorothy Day may say that poverty ennobles us, but surely that's only when we've chosen it after having known comfort in the first place, right?

One of the ironies that always flummoxes me is that the dreams of the working class, the dreams of the very people that so many activists want to help, are often the most "establishment" dreams of all: a house, two cars, disposable income, a retirement fund. How does my rejection of all that help others achieve prosperity? In my desire for social "levelling," am I not just trying to bring everyone down?

I'm not thinking of taking responsibility for children anytime soon, or of buying real estate, but who knows? Someday I might. Can I really expect everyone to be like me, or like my aunt? Like Shen Te in Brecht's Good Person of Setzuan we are all trapped in the bind created by the market economy: try to be good to others and you will inevitably short-change your own survival. At what point does one's own self-interest tip the balance? When (and why) do we downsize our dreams, trading them in for more concrete comforts?

misery loves company

2006-03-06T23:20:00.000-05:00

Nathaniel R. of The Film Experience liked Brokeback a lot more than I did, but I think his explanation of the greater sociological significance behind the loss is a good one (and right in line with my own analogy:

In the context of the Academy Awards it feels like a gilded knife in the back. After all, who loves the Oscars more than gay people? That may read as a joke. But it's also a truth. Last year's Oscar host even made a joke about this. In my thirty+ years on this planet I have met hundreds of people who are obsessed with the Oscar race and Oscar night itself. Most of those people were gay. So for those readers who've bravely made it this far but are still scratching their heads wondering why all the drama? hair-pulling? tears? Picture this: The man/woman who you love. They don't love you back. In fact you've just discovered that they'll bend over backwards to avoid acknowledging your existence; the bending over backwards being the breaking with 77 years of past voting habits.

heartbreak mountain

2006-03-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

Well, how did you think it was going to end?

As we all know by now, Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash in the final award of the evening. I guess what made it so shocking was that there was no buildup. Matt Dillon didn't win or anything like that. Brokeback won all the awards that I expected it to win and then, just when everyone was getting sick and tired of the whole ceremony and was glad that everything was over, Jack Nicholson said the word "crash." And that's what it felt like, a car wreck. I never expected to care this much.

I had my reservations about Brokeback; as a film, I think it went off course towards the end and failed to sustain the really very powerful emotional impact of the movie's first two-thirds. It is not quite, in other words, one of the great Hollywood weepies. But it is in many, many respects a very fine piece of filmmaking. Crash, however, in my humble estimation, doesn't have an ounce of art in it.

It deals self-righteously with Issues of Race with about the same level of depth as a Lifetime TV-movie. I fail to see a single insight that it offers the viewer beyond banalities along the lines of "Not all racists are bad people. Some good people are racist" etc. When one thinks back to an impassioned, inflammatory and yet deeply humane movie like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (which was made seventeen years ago!!), you have to ask yourself has the national conversation on race advanced at all if Crash is the kind of thing that people say pushes boundaries? We ought to remember, though, that the same Academy which honored that film last night also saw fit to include the 2004 Diane Keaton vehicle Something's Gotta Give in a montage (along with Do the Right Thing!!) commemorating films that addressed "controversial issues." I'm sorry? What "issue" does Something's Gotta Give address? Menopause? The dilemma of Botoxing???

Normally, I am neither surprised nor upset by the Academy's obtuseness (A Beautiful Mind's victory taught me, in fact, to expect it), but this turn of events caught me off guard. Perhaps it was because Brokeback had not only won every single critics award and every single industry precursor from the Golden Globe to the Directors' and Producers' Guild Prizes but was also the highest grossing of all five Best Picture nominees. In addition, it was not an "issue film," as I wrote before, but a sentimental tear-jerker that seemed, to me at least, emotionally accessible to a wide audience. All of these reasons seemed to indicate not only to me but to virtually every Oscar prognosticator (except Roger Ebert) that Brokeback was golden.

The shock of the loss was not dissimilar to the feeling that grew upon us slowly over that long night of Nov. 2, 2004 as we all owned up to the fact that John Kerry never had a chance at being elected President. And just as pundits then chalked up that loss to the "values vote," to the idea that Red Staters could never accept gay marriage, the immediate response to this Oscar selection was that it was inherently homophobic (a smattering of responses can be found here). I don't think that homophobia explains why Bush won (Kerry was a crappy candidate with no interesting message, we just all pretended he wasn't), but I am inclined to say that there is some kind of internalized homophobia at play.

Objective as I try to be, I find it hard to believe that a significant majority of Academy voters actually felt Crash was all that good. In other words, I think they voted for it because it wasn't Brokeback. But why? Do Academy voters have trouble with gay people? Probably not in their real lives, I suspect. But I think they think their audience might. In other words, they're worried about being as "out of touch" as George Clooney praised them for being last night. They were worried that the choice of Brokeback wouldn't play in the heartland; they were afraid to blaze a trail where they felt the mainstream audience was not going to follow.

It's no wonder that Brokeback broke, what with all the pressure that was heaped upon it by the media, pressure for it to be a crossover movie that proved our tolerance for gay relationships, pressure to be the movie that embodied our cultural zeitgeist. It's no wonder voters got sick of that -- the movie wasn't just a movie anymore.

Unfortunately, the result follows the familiar outlines of so many painful gay relationships themselves, outlines that Brokeback Mountain itself illuminates. The Academy flirted with Brokeback, flirted with the idea of acknowledging their unspoken belief in the dignity of people to choose whom to love. But they couldn't make that final definitive profession; like Ennis himself, they couldn't come to terms with their desires. How else could this picture possibly have ended?

Brokeback Mountain is an austere and painful film, a movie about love that is repressed, hidden, truncated, never allowed a chance to flower. It comes to us from Ang Lee, a noted poet of self-abnegation and it seems fitting that, even after he was finally rewarded individually, his work was dismissed. If Mr. Lee in real life is anything like the directorial persona that comes across in his films, I doubt that he was that surprised by the outcome. He's told us before that life is pain and self-sacrifice, with very little reward. He doesn't expect happy endings (Sense and Sensibility is a notable exception; one senses that Lee himself would have jumped off the waterfall with Ziyi Zhang in Crouching Tiger).

Which leads me to think that maybe it's OK that Brokeback was denied; so was Jack Twist after all, denied by the one he loved. There's something fitting about it, something right in line with the movie's own wallowing in bathos. The real question is when we'll see a movie about two gay men who can speak to one another about their love and share it with the world. I think that day is a long way off...

That should be the end, but I can't be too downbeat. Cate Blanchett never showed, but something even better happened. If you look at my predictions in the previous post you'll see that I got 18 out of 24 -- certainly respectable, but not as well as I'd have hoped. BUT.... it's exactly the same score that my boyfriend got! Yes, S and I were spared the painful predicament of one of us beating out the other. It was a beautiful, mutually supportive tie.

Maybe there is hope for same-sex couples after all.

uneasy lies the head that wears the crown

2006-03-05T17:35:00.000-05:00

I get competitive about some things more than others. (Just play against me in Taboo or Trivial Pursuit!) Strangely enough, though, until the past couple of years Oscar betting was not one of them. I usually take pride in the fact that I can predict many of the winners (it all started in high school when my prognosticating powers won my aunt a free year of video rentals from our local video store), but I don't usually feel that bloodthirst to beat everyone else.

As some of you may remember, I got all the big ones right last year. This puts me in the unenviable position of defending champ. There are quite a few locks in the top categories this year, but also some notable toss-ups. Love is also in the mix, too, as I am in unofficial competition with my boyfriend. As Terence Howard would say, it's hard out here for a pimp...

But, it must be done. These picks will be posted very soon before the broadcast on March 5. (I don't want to give any advantages to a certain Colombian competitor.) Also, at the behest of my bf, I'm going to go for the whole enchilada this time, not just the top 8 as I did last year. Wish me luck!

BEST PICTURE: Brokeback Mountain
BEST DIRECTOR: Ang Lee
BEST ACTOR: Phillip Seymour Hoffman
BEST ACTRESS: Reese Witherspoon
BEST SUPP. ACTOR: George Clooney
BEST SUPP. ACTRESS: Rachel Weisz
BEST ORIG. SCREENPLAY: Crash
BEST ADAPT. SCREENPLAY: Brokeback Mountain
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Brokeback Mountain
BEST EDITING: Crash
BEST SONG: Crash
BEST MUSICAL SCORE: Memoirs of a Geisha
BEST ART DIRECTION: Memoirs of a Geisha
BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Memoirs of a Geisha
BEST MAKEUP: Chronicles of Narnia
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: King Kong
BEST SOUND: Walk the Line
BEST SOUND EFFECTS EDITING: King Kong
BEST FOREIGN FILM: Tsotsi
BEST DOCUMENTARY: March of the Penguins
BEST DOC. SHORT SUBJECT: God Sleeps in Rwanda
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Wallace & Gromit
BEST ANIMATED SHORT SUBJECT: The Moon and the Sun: An Imagined Conversation
BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT SUBJECT: Six-Shooter

p. s. No word yet from Cate. I'm sure she's planning a surprise entrance!

special invitation

2006-03-03T12:02:00.000-05:00

This isn't news exactly, but Emma Thompson has been de-throned. Not perhaps as brutally as Mary Tudor was superseded by Elizabeth I, but there is (and has been for quite a while now), a new queen of the film acting universe.

My special affection for Emma will, of course, never die. There are certain types of roles at which she is unsurpassed: need understatement? need wry wit? need a tactful witholding of emotion that eventually erupts in an impassioned outburst? Then Emma Thompson is the actress for you, as she has proved in dozens of performances. She is witty, humane, sympathetic and subtle. She is also very funny and a truly literate individual. A recent re-viewing of Sense and Sensibility reaffirmed her accomplishments as a screenwriter.

But Emma has been all too inclined lately not to push herself, to play the moments that she's always played, the ones we love her for. Love, Actually demonstrates this most clearly: the role is hand-crafted to provide us with all the moments an Emma-lover covets, up to and including the "I'm-just-going-into-the-bedroom-nothing's-the-matter-but-when-I'm-by-myself-I-will-heave-big-gut-wrenching-tears-and-then-come-into-public-and-compose-myself-as-if-nothing-has-happened" moment. She perfected it to a science but it is in danger of becoming a formula.

I encourage Emma to keep taking risks; Nanny McPhee, which I'm sure few of you saw, was one. In it, she's done up like a crone and the film is truly, uproariously horribly comic -- the opposite of "in good taste." She also wrote the screenplay. It's not entirely successful, but I'm glad to see her keeping loose, playing around. Emma, I will always love you.

For sheer versatility, however, there's a new queen in town (and she is, literally, in town -- more on that below): Cate Blanchett. I saw Elizabeth long after it was released and was hugely impressed. It was not until I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley, however, that I realized Cate's range. She could do this towering lead performance and then also inhabit this hilarious, richly drawn comic supporting part. Blanchett is the only film performer I know of who has literally never received an unfavorable review. Can you ever think of reading one? I can't. She is impeccable, unflappable and unpretentious. She's a brilliant technician, in the manner of Meryl Streep, but she hasn't had to wait until she was 40 to find the humanity that it took Streep decades to unlock. Cate will be better than Meryl. She was crowned with an Oscar last year and I know there will be another one, for Best Actress this time -- if Sally Field and Hilary Swank can both get two leading actress statuettes, then Cate deserves at least one!

Which brings us to this weekend. Cate Blanchett is, as we speak, living in my neighborhood(!). I actually have no idea where she's living but she's appearing in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler two blocks from my house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. I'd gotten wind of this and, of course, bought tickets. I also noticed, though, that she was performing a matinee on Sunday, Mar. 5 -- Oscar Day!! Could this possibly mean that Cate Blanchett would be in Brooklyn on the night of my biggest party of the year????? The answer is: yes.

So, I sent her a note. I debated the best way to do it. Just mailing it to the theater seemed like a bad idea, since it might not ever get to her. Waiting by the stage door seemed too creepy. So, at my stepmother's suggestion, I sent her flowers, with a note attached. The note went through about four different drafts. The first was way too effusive. I also decided to drop some info that would reveal my affection for her was not sexual in nature ("My boyfriend and I are coming to see Hedda on the 23rd..."). In general, I tried to adopt an attitude of cool collegiality: Hey, welcome to Brooklyn, yeah I work in the theater, too. You're awesome. Wanna swing by my party if you're in the neighborhood? Cool.

I sent the flowers today. We'll see what happens. I doubt that she's going to actually come but maybe a note in response? a phone call?? an invite to visit her in her dressing room???? Unlikely. But a boy can dream, can't he?

I do have this thing for cool, intelligent women from the British Commonwealth. Maybe I wish I were one... Nah

Anyway, this is the big weekend. I will keep you updated on Operation:RSVP and I will also post my complete list of Oscar picks on Sunday night. Keep your fingers crossed, folks!

found objects

2006-02-26T16:36:00.000-05:00

In case you didn't pick up on the subtext, yesterday's post about how busy I am was (in part) an apologia for not blogging much throughout January and February. What can I say? These things are cycical. I think my blogging energy may have been boosted by the looming prospect of the Academy Awards ceremony next weekend. Those interested will see my predictions on this page sometime (late) on March 5.

It's hard to believe, but I have been blogging for over a year now! I'm not sure that it's really changed my life, but I am impressed that I've kept it up. I feel best when I average one posting every couple of weeks, but I don't think I've ever fallen below one a month. And I've been happy to have built a tiny following of readers and commenters -- it makes me feel good to know that you're out there and I'm sorry if I've left you hanging recently.

I go about my life these days formulating blog entries in my head. When I haven't written in a while, it doesn't mean that this blog is off my mind. Far from it! More than likely, I've been mulling (pun intended) over a subject for a few days, trying to figure out just exactly how I'm going to crack it. I may even have begun a draft that won't be posted until weeks later. Which means that I have a "blog idea queue" in the same way I have a Netflix queue and a book queue. I know I blog differently than many people -- this is not a daily journal of my thoughts or experiences. These little essays are worked out and pondered over, which may make them less amenable to online digestion, but c'est la vie! This blog is not in the same family as those little news tickers that scroll across the bottom of the screen on CNN or FoxNews; it's more like those "Comment" pieces by Hendrik Hertzberg in the front section of The New Yorker -- topical but not immediate, up-to-date but not breathless. I take a few breaths (s0metimes quite a few) before I write.

This motif of a "queue" has been with me for the past few days. I love to think of new paradigms and ways to categorize experience (which is why as a frehsman philosophy student I was so weirdly enchanted by the "catgeories of understanding" in Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, for example). The queue model does indeed reflect the way I think about a lot of different activities in my life. I did want, though, to calrify one point in particular.

There is a very important way in which my "book queue" is different from Netflix and I think it's worth unpacking. I've got a list of books on my shelf right now, waiting to be read during my subway rides: after I finish Edward P. Jones' collection of short stories, I've got Don DeLillo's Libra, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and 1491, a history of the Americas before Columbus, to read. What's interesting, though, about the books that I've been reading recently is that I haven't paid list price for a single one of them: they've been gifts or, increasingly, they've been used books that I've picked up on second-hand book tables throughout the city. My favorite places to browse recently have been along Broadway up by Columbia and on the weekends outside the Starbucks on Astor Place. (The two freckled, pierced and totally hot straight guys who sell the books at the latter location are also appreciated!)

Because I'm not choosing these books at will from a hugely comprehensive database (as I am when choosing discs on Netflix), there's a stronger element of serendipity involved in the selections I make. I'm sort of proud of myself that I've been "subsisting" on books borrowed, donated, or purchased at a cut rate. I've always felt a kind of moral imperative towards thrift and, of late, I've kind of bent my standards when it came to clothes or food. I never was able to buy only used clothes (as I once tried to do) or to shop only at food co-ops. Maybe I should be beating myself up about that, maybe not. But the not-buying-market-rate-books thing has been surprisingly easily achieved, without even conciously deciding to do it.

Acquiring my reading material in this way makes me less prone to posessiveness, too. Having finished a book, I'm more likely to lend it to a friend and not care if I ever see it again, or to donate it to the library at work. It feels nice to have sampled things and decided not to hold onto them, not to have them taking up space on my shelves.

It's also wonderful to experience those little serendipitous moments when you find that book, the one you'd been looking for but hadn't realized you'd been looking for, the one you'd been meaning to read but hadn't set out to find. The other week it was Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locust. Two novels I'd long wanted to read but ones I never would have set out to buy; and not, it turns out, ones that I particularly enjoyed or want to keep. That volume will probably be given away to someone else quite soon, but I will always treasure the memory of the afternoon I bought it (from the sexy Astor Place guys). I was riding the Q train home above ground across the Manhattan Bridge (easily the nicest stretch of subway on the whole MTA), with the late afternoon sun shining in across the windows, a new book in one hand and some pastries in another (I was bringing those home as a surprise for S who was working diligently in my living room). It felt nice to know that one could rely on Providence to supply the things one needed. To have discerned what it is you needed and then remained open to the possibility that sometime, when you least expect it, that thing would appear.

eight days a week

2006-02-24T18:42:00.000-05:00

In the afterword to "Against Interpretation," Susan Sontag claims that during the years when she was writing the essays that eventually came to be collected in that book (roughly 1962-1965), she saw at least one movie a day and on many days two or three. (And remember that that would have been in theaters!)

That claim has been on my mind the past couple of months because I recently activated my gift subscription to Netflix and have found myself watching DVDs with frightening regularity. I'd delayed and delayed joining Netflix because I worried that it couldn't possibly make financial sense: why, in order to get my money's worth, I would have to watch at least one movie a week!

During certain periods of my life a-movie-a-week would hardly have seemed like a stretch. I spent most of my weekends during middle and high school systematically renting every title in the canons of Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese (among others). When I wasn't watching videos, I was probably reading coffee-table books about the Oscars or classic Hollywood and memorizing statistics.

Though this early binge of movie-viewing earned me a reputation as a walking encyclopedia of Hollywood film, my actual rate of movie-watching dropped considerably once I began higher education and fell off precipitously when I moved to New York. In the slightly more than two years that I've spent in New York, I've actually spent very few "quiet evenings at home" (which, one assumes, is when all those DVDs would have been watched) and instead could have been found much more frequently running a play rehearsal or a late night event at work or out carousing.

Therefore, something must indeed have changed for me in January (when the first discs arrived), because I've been notching well over my targeted movie-a-week goal. (NB: evidence from the past couple of weeks seems to indicate that this may not last long!) What's strange is how, where, and when I've been watching these. Almost every Netflix DVD I've received has been viewed on a weeknight between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am, on the small TV in my bedroom before I go to bed. Now, I'm the type of person who hates to turn on a movie and not devote full attention to it; I've never been one to watch part of a movie and then turn it off for later. And yet, here I am trying to cram these movies into my schedule somehow, watching them even as my eyes are drooping and I know I should be asleep. Why?

Of course, Susan Sontag didn't just happen to to go to a movie every day for three years either. No matter how good the downtown repertory and art house cinema programming might have been in those days, she didn't just happen to open the paper every day and see a movie (and sometimes two or three) that she wanted to see. She made an effort. She was trying, I suppose, to educate herself. To get up to date.

My Netflix queue works in much the same way. Certain people had insinuated that my DVD selections would be hopelessly highbrow and, indeed, it is populated with a lot of European directors whose work I've always meant to see (you can't always find that stuff at video stores!). But I'm also trying to catch up on other things, like those seasons of The Sopranos I missed and those chick-flicks and teen movies that everyone says were much better than you expected. (Case in point: this film, which I can say unequivocably is one of the best written comedies since the days of Billy Wilder. See it.)

The satisfaction one gets from watching films in this way is rarely recreational; it's more like the satisfaction you feel when you finally clean the toilet -- at least you don't have to worry about that anymore! It's been difficult to be as well versed in movies as I am and yet to have squandered years of movie-watching. I have opinions, for example, about Godard and could surely name most of his movies and give a summary of their critical reception but I'd never seen Breathless until a few weeks ago. This project, I suppose, is partly about transforming all of that acquired information into first-hand experience.

I've been hard at work, too, at the list of authors I've been meaning to read. While the movie cramming tends to happen in the wee hours, the reading happens in the mornings, on my way to work. My hour-long commute provides the perfect span of time during which to polish off a few chapters of a big novel (I read Moby-Dick over the past few months, for instance, and don't think I ever cracked the book open when I was not in transit).

For a while last month, I could also been seen in the subways of New York with headphones on, speaking under my breath in an effort to teach myself conversational Spanish one half-hour lesson at a time. Since the language tapes I was using called for the student to do one lesson every day, I sometimes found that the most convenient time to knock off a lesson was during the time it took me to ride the train from Ft. Greene to the Upper West Side.

Which leads me, I suppose, to what this post is all about, sort of: love. The fact is that being in a relationship has joyfully rescheduled my life. For one thing, I spend a lot more time in bed than I used to! I truly never expected that having a boyfriend would make time seem to stretch out differently. I spend happy hours now talking to S on the phone or going to visit him up at Columbia, hours that at one point would have been spent reading The New Yorker or writing in my journal or (finally!) getting started on a new play.

The time I spend with S feels like a wonderfully expandable pocket in the fabric of my life; when I'm with him, clocks slow and experiences seem to linger. I suppose that means the other portions of my life are now more densely packed with my other pursuits, but this has actually seemed to make life more fresh and full, rather than more frustrating. (I always have a "project queue" to be working on, as well, whenever I have an unscheduled moment.)

S and I are reaching the stage where we're able to spend time in one another's company accomplishing all those other pursuits in tandem. The stage of uncontrollable infatuation is shifting into something else. All of that early effusiveness is sometimes a symptom of the suspicion that there might be a time limit on your happiness, that you'd better get the most out of it while you can. When you start to feel secure in the fact that it's not going anywhere, though, you can share space together comfortably. He can write a response paper or prepare for a job interview while I send emails about a production meeting or try to edit some lines of dialogue. We're coexisting confidently, supporting one another, both in our nerdy glasses, and getting things done. It's the quiestest way of saying I love you and also the nicest form of multitasking I know.

love means...

2006-02-24T17:17:00.000-05:00

I haven't yet read Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus caritas est, but I plan to soon. For now, why don't you check out this ad I saw in the subway the other day...

advances in science!

2006-01-30T20:29:00.000-05:00

It seems that Japanese scientists, like me, have been thinking a lot about ear wax lately. Far from being irrelevant, it may hold the key to explaining racial difference! Wow, get out your Q-tips.

Thanks for turning me on to this one, Pickle.

waxing poetic

2006-01-12T17:53:00.000-05:00

I took a class on Existential Philosophy once when I was in college (what a great way to begin a blog entry!) in which I had to read passages from Sartre's Being and Nothingness. This is a dense book and incredibly convoluted. Perhaps because of that, the little gem that I remember most from the book was an observation that seemed particularly un-Sartrean. I have no way of verifying that this remembered quotation is accurate (a recent Google search yielded nothing), but I'm pretty sure that somewhere in B & N Jean-Paul says something like:

Before the age of forty, there is no correlation between your outward appearance and your inner one. But after the age of forty, your inner character is written on your face.

Could he really have said that? Why would Sartre make such a completely unjustifiable claim? Well, I don't think I just made it up, but if I did, there just might be something to it. After all, it's stuck with me after all these years.

Despite the distinguished, Clooney-esque grey hairs that have been breaking out with ever-increasing frequency on my head, I am not all that close to age forty. But in the past couple of years, I have come to have a subtly different relationship to my body, one that recalls my supposedly Sartrean insight. The older I get, the less "generalized" my body becomes, the more its particular peculiarities seem to stick out, to announce themselves. The older and less resilient my body becomes, the more it starts to seem like mine and mine alone.

When I went for my first post-collegiate physical a little over a year ago (the first doctor's appointment ever covered by a health plan that was in my own name!), I got excellent reports on my blood pressure, cholesterol, weight etc. -- just what you would expect for a young man of 25 (as I was then). In fact, the only thing the doctor identified as a source of concern was, in fact... ear wax.

"I'm amazed that you can hear what I'm saying!" my doctor exclaimed after examining my ears.

Apparently, I had a disproporitonately high amount of waxy buildup in the ear canal, so much so that he felt it was significantly cutting off my hearing. He recommended some over the counter eardrops, which I took and which offered some relief. Wax came out, I could hear better. But I must not have got it all because in the past few months I started thinking to myself, "Wow, my ears feel blocked again, maybe I should take more ear drops." Murine didn't do a thing this time -- in fact, it seemed to make the blockage worse! I've spent the last couple of days feeling almost entirely deaf in my left ear!

Well, today I went to the doctor again and he took drastic measures. Using what I can only describe as a high-powered soaker syringe, he blasted my ear with streams of water that made me dizzy, then groped around inside with some tweezers. When all was said and done, he dislodged (accompanied by a squishy gush of air) a thick ball of brown wax that was approximately the size of a partially-meleted Hershey's kiss! I'm not kidding! I'd been going around for months (years?) with that in my ear.

As ailments go, this was an odd one. I asked my doctor whether there was anything I could do to prevent further waxy buildup and he said there wasn't really. I could try and clean out my ears more regularly -- maybe using ear drops once a month or so -- but other than taking preemptive measures, there was no way to stop this buildup at the source. "Some people are just more susceptible to ear wax," he said. "No one really knows why."

When I heard those words, my first thought was: "belly-button lint." That's right, folks, I'm really letting out all the skeletons from the closet here. Much to the amusement of my virtually hairless boyfriend, I am one of the millions of people world-wide who suffer from persistent belly-button lint, which I have discovered is one of the great unexplained phenomena in modern medicine. Despite extensive research, no one has been able to advance an airtight theory as to how belly button lint collects. Does it have to do with body hair? Lint from clothing? Why is it almost always bluish grey? We may never know...

And now you can add ear wax to the list of unsolved anatomical mysteries I am prone to. These are not really grave medical problems, really more like amusements. I've thought of collecting my BBL in a small box by my bedside, in hopes of kitting it into a scarf or sweater or (perhaps) a funeral shroud. Being prone to BBL doesn't cause me much anxiety and now that my ear canals have been cleansed I'm no longer worried about going deaf.

But these physical conditions do make me think not just about growing older, but growing simultaneously odder. The bodies of most young people are essentially all the same, they are generalized. Even up through college, most of our faces are unformed masses of adorable fat and dimples, our bones may break but they quickly heal. We might have deformities like buckteeth or freckles but everyone deals with those and for most people they go away. This pervasive "sameness" of appearance is one of the reasons why extreme physical distinction among children -- from obesity to a shrivelled limb -- is so striking and causes such anxiety. Dealing with physical difference earlier in life rather than later becomes a test of character -- you are set apart from the crowd, forced to be distinctive.

The truth is, though, that all of us will get there eventually. Everyone's body will break down someday and it will happen in a completely unique and personal fashion. The older we get, the more of the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" we have felt, the more we build up a history of odd physical conditions and quirks that define us as ourselves. First it's ear wax, then it's diabetes or a hyperractive thyroid. Physical imperfections are embarrassing because they are so completely our own, they prevent us from blending in. What is physical "perfection," after all, but complete blandness? One has only to go to a trendy gay nightclub and see the scores of men taking off their shirts to realize that objectively "hot" bodies can be curiously unappealing when they appear generic, a dime a dozen.

So, I have belly-button lint. And ear wax. I also have dry skin, but that I'm working on (trying to moisturize more). Loving me into longevity means loving these things, because these are the things that are going to stick with me. They're signs of what's to come.

epiphany

2005-12-22T18:15:00.000-05:00

It's January 6th (i.e. the feast of the Epiphany, i.e. the Twelfth Day of Christmas, i.e. twelve lords a leaping etc.)! In Spanish-speaking cultures, this is "Three Kings" day, when children wait for the visit of the three magi (with their camels!) and leave food (and grass for the camels) under their beds at night and awake to find gifts.

I'm at home today, waiting not for a camel but for a lovely boy to return from Bogota, which will be the nicest gift I can imagine (sorry, folks, I got a bit mushy while I was away!). I've been meaning to write another blog entry for weeks and even started one on the last day of the transit strike (more on that later), but even though I've been off of work since Dec. 23(!) I never got around to doing it.

Since this is the feast of the Epiphany and I typically devote these blog entries to long, thesis-based mini-epiphanies, how about a change of format? Instead of providing a nuanced analysis (at great length) of some topic, here are some random jottings with which to begin 2006:

The transit strike! I miss it, sort of. It's probably irresponsible (or, to use Mayor Bloomberg's word "thuggish") of me to say such a thing, since it cost the city millions (or was it billions?) of dollars in revenue right at the height of the consumerist shopping season, but I was actually glad that we had a strike. Yes, I was inconvenienced -- not as much as some people, of course, but I did have to arrange for rides from three different sources to get back and forth from Brooklyn each day, and I also squatted one night with the Mennonites (thanks, guys!). One day I even trudged out the door laden with all my Christmas presents and the belongings I needed to travel to Boston, fully expecting to have to cross the Manhattan Bridge on foot, when a serendipitous car of complete strangers drove up and gave me a ride. I was at work before 9 that day!

Yes, if I lived far out in Queens, say, and had no car or friends with cars, if I had an unlenient boss who wouldn't be flexible about my hours and my pay, if I had had to pay $30 for each cab ride to and from work, I would not have been so cheery about the strike. Mayor Bloomberg's line about the "criminality" of the strike was that the real victims were the average commuters (people who earned $10,000-$20,000 annually) and who would lose pay or maybe even lose their jobs because they couldn't get into work, when the striking workers had a starting salary of (I think) $30,000 (which is higher than the salary I started at at my job). Mike had a point, but that remark, like so much else in the cultural conversation surrounding the strike failed to take into account the larger context. The transit workers have a decent wage because they've unionized -- perhaps the appropriate response shouldn't have been to pity the suffering low-wage workers but to encourage the solidarity of the entire working class, encouraging more people to organize.

I know very little about contemporary labor relations, but as I see it the decks were really stacked against the union. The only bargaining chip that workers have in these negotiations is the right (and it is a right) to withold their labor, but a 1960s law makes it illegal for "essential" workers to do so, imposing incredibly burdensome fines (in addition to their lost pay) on each of the workers on the days that they exercise this right. Of course I can see the rationale, but I also strongly object to such a biased law. Where are the penalties imposed on the Transit Authority if they are simply intransigent in their negotiations? Without the specter of a looming strike what pressure is there on management to make concessions?

It was amazing to me how the media covered the story -- watching the television coverage you would have been hard pressed to hear anything that explained or analyzed the points of dispute. Instead it was all about traffic pileups; the media love a disaster because they know how to frighten people, but not how to raise their consciousnesses about the world around them. Bloomberg and the MTA went to great length to keep referring to it as"the illegal transit strike" and also to subtly try and isolate union president Roger Toussaint as if this one man had mulishly ("thuggishly"?) decided on his own to created mass chaos. Where was any consideration of the justness of the law that made the strike illegal? Why not depict Toussaint in the position he actually holds, as the representative and spokesperson of a large collective body? Getting people to think collectively is not in the interest of the state or of the media, especially not during the holiday season!

The education came from the experience itself; whenever the world goes topsy-turvy, you're bound to learn something. How many of us ever sat around and realized quite how dependent we are on public transit before it was taken from us? How many of us have ever chosen to band together with our co-workers or indeed with complete strangers in order to make the most of a difficult situation? Dealing with the strike was (for a brief period) an education in collectivity, it was an occasion on which many of us had to rely on others in new and unexpected ways. Going to work and being at work seemed different on the days of the strike, the very air of the city seemed somehow crisper as if it had been caffeinated. I'm not saying we should take away essential public services on a regular basis, but the deprivation was definitely a wake-up call for those willing to heed it. Too bad our society is set up to isolate the striking workers and to foment animosity against them, rather than encouraging us to consider the ways in which we can all begin to develop a sense of solidarity.

I've read very little interesting commentary on the strike, but here's a nice little blurb from (of all people) Squid and the Whale writer/director Noah Baumbach on the way the strike made the city feel. "Uninviting"? "In turmoil"? I share his nostalgia.

I guess I promised you some tidbits and then I went on a rant. Oh, well! There aren't a lot of coherent thoughts in my head these days (being away from work for so long really does a number on you!). One thing I did yesterday was to sit down with my new 2006 daily planner, dutifully copying in already scheduled appointments, classes and meetings, which brought me all the way up to next Christmas! (Most of them had to do with the three semesters of classes in the community-based performance school I work at; some others had to do with a show I'm directing in April.)

Scheduling appointments in January for events in December may seem like the height of hubris. Who knows what contingencies will intervene between now and then. It's entirely possible that my life will change in some drastic way -- I might have to find a new job or a new place to live. Maybe another transit strike will be called. A year ago, did I ever imagine I'd be sitting in this apartment awaiting the return of a 22-year old Colombian boy? It's human to look forward, trying to set things in stone, but important to recognize that you can never be certain what the next day will bring. (Don't you love how I always tie everything together, even when I'm not even trying to? There's something unexpected for ya!)

Speaking of the limits of human knowledge, I think I will end with an excerpt from W. H. Auden that I discovered today when perusing some love poetry (why on earth would I be doing that?). I'd link to the whole text (the poem is called "Heavy Date"), but I haven't been able to find it online. It's a nice reminder, I think that we never quite know what we're getting into, in love or anything else upon this mortal coil:

Slowly we are learning,
We at least know this much,
That we have to unlearn
Much that we were taught,
And we are growing chary
Of emphatic dogmas;
Love like Matter is much
Odder than we thought.

just another love story

2005-12-18T20:58:00.000-05:00

It seems like I ought to have an opinion on Brokeback Mountain, so here it is. S and I went to see it last night in Chelsea and predictably every type of homosexual couple was in attendance: preppy gays, muscle-bound Chelsea boys, overweight middle-agers, Gaysians, over-fifties each reading their individual copies of HX magazine (turned to the back pages which advertise escort services), skinny Ivy-league types (that was us). BM had been on the radar screen of the gay community for years but it seemed to hit the mainstream media like a bitzkrieg about three weeks ago and it has emerged rapidly as the movie of the year, ensuring (along with Capote and TransAmerica) that we'll all have a gay old time at the Academy Awards this year.

Each pair of gay men in the audience (and they were mostly in pairs) seemed to want something different out of this film -- they wanted to be turned on by two hot pin-up boys making out, they wanted to have their lives reflected back on the big screen, they wanted to see their political agenda advanced, they wanted to finally be embraced by that town so beloved by the gay community which has also so excluded us: Hollywood. As for me, what I really was hoping for was the pure aesthetic pleasure of seeing another expert cinematic exploration of director Ang Lee's favorite subject: repression and release. My expectations were only partly rewarded.

Despire all of our desires being pitched up their on the screen, I concluded by the end of the film that whatever the gay community thought about BM matters very little. The significant response will most likely come from straight viewers in middle America, people who have never heard of Beautiful Thing or Yossi & Jagger and the countless other gay love stories that have abounded in indie cinema in recent decades. BM is not groundbreaking for its treatment of homosexual love; the story of young men falling in love and coming to terms with their sexuality has been told time and again in the very movies that helped nerdy cinephilic young men of my generation find a language to express our repressed longings. What's significant is the end of ghettoization that this movie represents, the bid for mainstream status. This is, after all, a movie in which one major Hollywood heartthrob is shown sodomizing another.

BM is significant, too, I think, in that it is not an "issue movie," like Philadelphia -- a movie in which the gay characters were so sanitized, saintly and generalized that they ceased to be characters. This is not a movie that has any argument to make about AIDS or gay-bashing or gay marriage, though the last two topics are certainly relevant to the story. It's not about those issues any more than Terms of Endearment was about cancer. No, this is a gay love story, just like any other Hollywood love story -- from Gone With the Wind to The English Patient -- in which the protagonists are passionate, tortured, selfish, at times hurtful and we are meant to weep big tears.

So, if it must be judged by that standard, let me admit that I cried (my boyfriend would add that I cried more than he did). Ang Lee has a way with tension (I've read that he looks at each film as a sort of Taoist mixture of yin and yang) and there are amazing sequences where he, abetted by a fantastic, completely natural performance from Heath Ledger, really unleashes the floodgates. Lee has turned his talent for unobstrusively precise and balanced photogrpahic composition to a new terrain (the American West), having already shown us his take on Restoration England, American suburbia, and feudal China. The film makes its strongest claims for true "art" status in the first hour or so, when the boys are up on Brokeback Mountain. The introduction of the characters and the situation is spare, nothing is extraneous. There is a minimum of musical scoring, a minimum of words. The tilt of every stetson emphasizes the constricting masculine roles these men have been forced to play, even as the natural beauty of the background urges them to let loose.

The balance, hoewever, doesn't hold. The film is flawed (not fatally, but seriously) by some infelicitous casting and production choices. Jake Gyllenhal is no match for Heath Ledger; his Jack Twist is supposed to be more open and eager, but Gyllenhal overplays every moment to the degree that the viewer is often embarrassed for him, we are always acutely conscious of the effect he's going for. He also looks about as comfortable as I would in boots and a ten-gallon hat. Unfortunately, his whole plotline is hampered by other details that clank unharmoniously with the picture as a whole. Ann Hathaway is forced to wear hideous wigs (apparently in an effort to match the ridiculousness of Gyllenhal's moustache) as the characters age; their domestic drama has none of the gravitas of Ledger's parallel story.

The last third of the movie is weighed down with plot and the whole tone of the picture seems less assured. These men can only be themselves, of course, when they are up on Brokeback Mountain (just as Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence or Francesca and Robert in The Bridges of Madison County must mask their love when they are under the watchful stare of the civilized world), but the movie itself starts to feel as constricted as its characters. Lee doesn't seem to know where his emotional releases are -- we get a big one on their final fishing trip, when Ledger tells Gyllenhal that (even after all these years) he can't run away and live with him. Lee elegantly cuts to a shot of their younger selves, easy and comfortable, holding one another, and the effect is powerful. The demoument that follows, involving death and remorse and mourning, takes too long to play out and (for the most part) left this viewer emotionally cold.

There are other quibbles to make with the film, especially with the handling of the protagonists' wives. Michelle Williams' pain is shown, but that's about it -- she only seems to suffer, not to have any independent life -- whereas Hathaway is blithe and apparently accepting from the start of the romantic emptiness of her sham marriage. I'm glad that in one of the most gorgeously romantic shots of the movie (as Ledger runs down the steps of his house to see Gylenhall for the first time in four years and cannot prevent himself from passionately kissing and craessing him) also shows us the betrayal felt by Williams as she witnesses it from the sidelines. But we can't really feel for her because we are never let into her psyche. Having shown us the smallest piece of these women's lives, they are pretty much side-tracked.

In short, I don't think Brokeback Mountain (considered in its totality) is the greatest love story ever told. It's not even the greatest movie Ang Lee has made (try Sense and Sensibility or, if you want a gay storyline, The Wedding Banquet). Like his characters, Lee seems at home with the sheep but when he's back in civilization his story falters. Clint Eastwood's Madison County is, for my money, a more elegantly realized and moving depiction of love stifled by small-town mores. But, of course, that film didn't have the inflammatory political baggage of BM. It's trying to do an awful lot of things at once -- to harness the power of classic Hollywood tropes of masculinity and romance, even as it asks us to reconsider them. (For a typically insightful analysis of the cinematic historical context of the film, see the invaluable Mahnola Dargis in the New York Times.)

This movie is the first mainstream attempt to tell a gay love story with charcters who are not emblems but roles, to apply all the Hollywood gloss and glamor and heartstring-pulling to the lives of men who profess to love other men. If it doesn't fully succeed, perhaps all we can say is, let there be more attempts.

false premises

2005-12-14T22:11:00.000-05:00

We're all sick and tired of hearing about my personal life, right? How about a nice thought-provoking entry about politics, or art, or better yet art and politics!

I've been reading a fantastic book, one which I think everyone in America should run out and get. I'm half-way through the essays and I've already dog-eared half the pages. It's funny that a book published in 2001 (just after 9/11) and featuring pieces that were originally written from 1988-2000 should seem like such imperative reading to me. There's nothing "current" about the topics of Didion's essays (Jesse Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign, the Reagan Administration's meddling in El Salvador, Newt Gingrich), rather it's her stance on these issues and her analysis of them that so compels me. It's as if she's tapped right into the thoughts that have been formulating in my brain over the last several months and has given voice to them, the thoughts of a disaffected Leftist who has (finally) decided that he is no longer a Democrat (because the term "Democrat" is now an empty concept).

Strangely enough, Didion -- the high priestess of the extended essay, the doyenne of the New York Review of Books -- here speaks for all kinds of "marginal" Americans who are never catered to in American politics, rarely even considered, notably the urban poor and those whom she calls the "largest political party in America": those who choose not to vote. Rather than condescendingly lumping these non-voters together as "apathetic," Didion takes them seriously as a disenfranchised class who've come to see that voting in late 20th and early 21st Century America doesn't actually give you a voice in the American political process.

I encountered this dispiriting view back in August of 2004, when I ran an open at a voter registration event I conducted with the formerly homeless tenants at the building where I work. I responded to their cynicism with the traditional platitudes of the high school civics student ("Well, if you don't vote, you're definitely not going to let your voice be heard...") I don't think I would respond in quite the same way today. People should vote, I believe, they should say something, but voting alone in this country is never going to make any fundamental changes in our society -- not when we have a choice between two parties that in such essential agreement about core issues (or worse, core "values") that the purported "opposition" party can't even bring itself to articulate a challenge to the philoophy of the party in power. I consider it relatively clear-cut that any truly sentient, ethical person ought to be against the agenda of the Republican crusaders, but does that mean that they have to be "Democrats"? In the voting booth, it does and until we organize to create an effective alternative to the two party system, maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to vote.

Our electoral system is currently configured to make it really hard for anyone outside of the two-party system to meaningfully participate (unless they happen to be a billionaire). That's where the disaffected tenants in my building have it right: voting is not going to solve their problems. It only would if every disaffected poor and minority citizen decided to mobilize one day and vote -- but that doesn't happen without major work, by which I mean grass-roots organizing, political education, "empowerment." You've gotta put in time, build a meaningful constituency whose votes will seem to matter to the big guys. And that's an uphill battle.

Even back in 1988 (a year in which both of the parties' candidates were noticeably uncharasmatic), Didion saw clearly that our fixation on the personality of the President served as a narcotic that occluded the real issues of import (I would argue that liberals' active personal disgust for Bush creates similar results and brought us the horrifically failed candidacy of John Forbes Kerry):

In other words, what 'it came down to,' what it was 'about,' what was wrong or right with America, was not an historical shift largely unaffected by the actions of individual citizens but 'character,' and if 'character' could be seen to count, then every citizen -- since everyone was a judeg of character, an expert in the field of personality -- could be seen to count. This notion, that the citizen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a 'difference,' is in fact the narrative's most central element, and its most fictive.

It doesn't surprise me that many of the early reviews of Didion's book, coming on the heels of 9/11, stress its "irrelevance." This book, for all of its skewering of conservative targets, challenges a lot of notions that mainstream liberals desperately want to believe in, most importantly the essential "fairness" of our political system in general. But that collective myth is the chief "fiction" that Didion is documenting.

Three years after the book's publication, it's the simple-minded victim rhetoric that so overwhelmed our national discource after the terrorist attacks which now seems irrelevant. Where is the irrevocable break with the past that so many armchair pundits spoke about in the aftermath of our national "calamity"? As we live on in the post-9/11 world, everything actually seems more continuous than ever. One only has to read Didion's "The West Wing of Oz" (her account of Reagan's passivity, his buying into the rhetorical fictions on which his Presidency was predicated) to see its immediate applicability to our current President and the fictions he seems to buy into (even as his Machiavellian aides try to sell those same fictions to the public to support more pragmatic but nefarious ends).

9/11 hasn't changed anything; we're grappiling with the same disconnect between our political class (by which I include not only policy-makers, but also the media that report on them and frame the stories) and the endemic problems that are truly destroying our society as a whole. The liberal media (and it is liberal, who cares? "liberalism" is about as bankrupt a political stance as they come...) makes it easy for the right to control the discourse by continually taking their bait, by ofcusing incessantly on superficial issues instead of talking about the underlying dynamics of inequality and injustice in this country.

What's the worst class division in this country? It's probably the division between most of us and the "political class," the people who have the influence, who have a chance someday of calling the shots. I have some experience with this distinction, having spent most of my Rhodes Scholarship among young people actively training to join that class, whether as actual politicians or journalists or think-tank policy wonks. This is a narrow field, not necessarily defined by wealth and education, though certainly so in large part. How "robust" is our democracy when of the last three Presidents two were father and son and the wife of the other is poised to become the leading opposition candidate to succeed the son? There are not a lot of people who "break in" to American politics these days -- there are very few Shirley Chisholms. Those who rise, no matter what they're economic background, must do so by appeasing the interests of the moneyed elite (either the liberal moneyed elite or the conservative, take your pick). There is no such thing, really, as an "insurgent" in American politcs anymore, no chance of rising to power from the bottom up.

And the hard truth about this "political class" is that their jockeying for power seems to have less and less to do with ideology than with a hunger for power. There was more ideological distinction in a Yankees-Red Sox playoff series than in the 2004 Presidential election. What do Democrats really want to say anymore but "See, we were right!" "Gotcha!" or "Isn't it our turn yet?" When winning the Presidency becomes a goal unto itself, then the Presidency is no longer about being an employee of the people. It is about being a successful charlatan.

Where does Joan Didion (or me, for that matter) get off saying things like this? What does she (or I?) know about how politics works? Therein lies the problem, and maybe the solution. Didion is known as an essayist, but not a "political insider." She's no Bob Woodward. But her outsider's perspective serves to constantly remind us that politics in America has become an insider's game. This is no longer a democracy on the Athenian model (if it ever was!) in which a man may set aside his plow for a term and head up to Washington to represent his fellow citizens and then return (like Cincinnatus) to his private life. We ought to rethink the idea that one must be a politician in order to govern.

Harold Pinter delivered an address when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature that touched (somewhat more crudely than Didion, it must be said, but, hey, Pinter's penchant has always been for terse, spare dialogue) on some of the concerns I've been covering here. Pinter says essentially what I've just been saying about politicians' self-interest and contrasts it with the artist's pursuit of truth (in all its ambiguity):

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

Pinter goes on to bludgeon his audience with the assertion that the invasion of Iraq was predeicated on a web of lies about WMDs. That argument, while worthy and necessary, has been heard before but the paragraph I've quoted above is more thought-provoking. It's an example not of political grandstanding (as, no doubt, many people took Pinter's address to be) but an essential explication of the dangers of entrenched political power in general. (Interestingly, Pinter later refers to the massacres conducted with American support by the Alcatl regiments in El Salvador, to which considerable space is also devoted in Didion's book.)

Whenever I hear anybody bemoaning the fact that Pinter (or Susan Sarandon or Kanye West) shouldn't be talking about politics, or worse "imposing their political opinions on the public," I'm going to ask them why they think politics is such sacred ground. We need more outsiders who can see through the fictions and challenge the unacknowledged assumptions. If we think too highly of our politicians, then only politicians will be involved in politics.

begin with the beginning

2005-12-07T01:14:00.000-05:00

For someone who's never been in a relationship, I've certainly had a lot of opinions about them. I've given my friends tons of advice about them over the years and then, as I started dating and getting within sniffing distance of the real thing, I started opining about how they didn't have to be the center of one's life etc. etc. And I still believe all of that.

But things feel different on the other side. I have a boyfriend now (yes, folks, in case you haven't heard it in person, it's "Sammy") and I must admit that there's a hell of a lot of difference between a "boyfriend" and "this guy I'm dating." This is one matter that I will not claim to be an expert on, having only experienced boyfriendhood for slightly more than a week. The difference so far is not in what we do or how often we do it (there were times when I was seeing guys I was dating more frequently than I'm seeing Sammy; because of our schedules, he and I are lucky if we see each other twice in a week).

I guess the difference starts with the mutual declaration, the admission really, that this is what you both want. In the past, it was always me who wanted this or that person to be my boyfriend, while their wants always remained elusive. There was a gulf of silence between me and those other boys, the gulf of my longing to have something from them and their witholding it from me.

For approximately three weeks, though, it's been clear that S and I didn't operate by those rules. Where silence reigned with other boys, with us it was all talking, telling one another way too many things about how we were feeling towards one another. And when the word "boyfriend" finally broke the nighttime silence (that word that I've thought about and typed so many times but rarely spoken with any kind of personal relation to its meaning), it felt exciting and surprisingly unfamiliar.

I wasn't prepared for how long it would take me to adjust to the new nomenclature. Surely, it was just a word to describe something that had been going on for a while already: we'd been spending more time with one another, becoming intimate, enjoying one another's company, sharing things. All of that felt natural. And yet, when it came time to declare a new state of being, a start to something, I who'd been longing to do just that for so long was unprepared for how that rupture, that starting point, would feel.

Looking at my altered Friendster profile (which, of course, brought S and me together in the first place), I felt like I was looking at a different person: no longer "Dating Men, Relationship Men" but "In a Relationship." That preposition makes all the difference. It's not the warm, fuzzy feeling of a prospective, theoretical relationship we're talking about but a real (and really specific) one. Here was this online profile that I'd spent nights tweaking (perhaps most significantly on the night when I kept all the text the same but removed all capitalization!) in an attempt to both capture my essential nature and make myself seem enticing, to present myself on the marketplace and arouse interest. The profile began as an advertisement and here I was declaring that the sale was over.

It can feel arbitrary to pinpoint the start of something. The night I changed my Friendster profile felt important because the word was finally there in black and white. But I'm starting to think that any relationship worth being in keeps starting all the time. Even in the brief week that it's been "official," I feel as if the relationship has started numerous times, each time in a different way. It almost ended, too.

Without getting into all the details, I stupidly behaved in a way that was totally opposed to the special openness and honesty that S and I have between us. Ironically, it happened on the very night we first used the word "boyfriend"; honest as I acted like I was being, there was something I didn't tell him. We've been dealing with it the past couple of days and I think it's going to be OK. The experience only made me value more what is developing between us and it made me grateful that I still have a chance to work on it.

Maybe anything that endures always begins in difficulty, even if we thought it started well before. It's only in difficulty that you know if it's substantial. When I was first getting to know S, he joked with me about the name of the color he'd chosen to paint the walls of his room: "Endurance." That was a long time ago -- he and I know each other a lot better now, and yet we still don't know each other well at all.

Anything good keeps starting again and again. It's always new. In a sense, my relationship began again in a new way when I told S about this blog (anybody that I'm close to ought to know about it, I thought). And this blog starts anew by me bringing him into it. You may or may not hear much about him in the future, I don't know. I don't know how inclined I'll feel to set down the details of our relationship here. But I thought you all ought to know that it's official -- and getting more official every day.

rebel without a crew

2005-11-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

Is anyone out there?

I'm referring, of course, to my readership. Rule #1 of blogging is "Post daily" and there I have sinned. I like to think that some of you have been checking the site obsessively since Oct. 28, hoping for more pearls of wisdom from me, but I fear those that were may have given up in frustration. For what it's worth, I'm back, my play having opened last weekend.

For once, the question "Is anyone out there?" does not carry any overtones of frustrated romance, but I'll get to Sammy in the footnotes...

First and foremost these days, the question "Is anyone out there?" refers to a life partner or partners even harder to find than a lover. I refer to a band of comrades, a cohort, a movement.

Just before Halloween, I was poring over the Village Voice's 50th Anniversary Edition. Once I started reading it, I literally could not stop, finding that somehow the New York I'm really in love with is not the New York I've ever known: it's the Greenwich Village of Bob Dylan and the Beats, the Stonewall riots, the ACT UP movement, the days of squatters and abandoned buildings in Alphabet City. A New York that almost certainly would have been no safe place for little conventional me who has never used drugs and can hardly protect himself against physical aggression.

That New York is part of a history that I want to feel like I'm a part of, even though I grew up in a Northeastern suburb and went to an Ivy League school. The history of the counterculture offers me an alternative history that I can adopt as my own. And as I walk down the relatively clean and indisputably safe streets of Giuliani/Bloomberg Manhattan (the only New York I have ever known), I seek out the traces of that history that have mostly turned to tourist ploys.

Looking at historic retrospectives like that is comforting, I suppose, because you're able to position yourself pretty easily somewhere on the spectrum. With the benefit of an historical viewpoint, most of us have no trouble figuring out which events of the past we found to be generally good things and which generally bad. We know which historical figures "got it" and which ones were just trying to beat back the tide. When we read those sorts of things, we all become Hegelians.

How often is it that one is conscious in the present day that "history is being made"? A few recent examples stand out, primarily because the news media relentlessly inform us of the events' historical significance: 9/11 is the big one, but another recent example is the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts and, for some of us, the curse-breaking World Series victory of the Boston Red Sox. It's on days like that that one saves the newspaper because you know the headlines will be valuable someday. They will be landmarks in the history books.

But much of the history that attracted me in the Voice pieces was not "big event" history but rather the movement of culture: groups of artists and activists or even groups of party-goers gathering around certain places to explore certain ideas. A sense of Zeitgeist, the "spirit of the times." What passes for Zeitgeist these days are shamefully shallow pastimes like reality TV or obnoxiously simplistic political statements (by which I mean both neoconservativism and the carping cant of Bush-hating liberals). Where is the sense of something building up below the surface, the sense of Benjamin's (and Kushner's) "angel of history" flapping its wings, ready to make its descent. Who around us is working towards the revolution?

It's funny that the most penetrating social analysis in the Voice retrospective comes from gossip columnist Michael Musto, admittedly a longtime favorite of mine. Writing about the 80's club scene, he says:

This was before the Internet and hundreds of cable channels helped the mainstream subsume the underground, allowing the alternative to become the norm and shock value to virtually disappear. At this point, the underground existed, and as annoying as some of its habitués could be in all of their aggressive edge-of-the-brinkness, they certainly never threatened to lull you to sleep.

The mainstream has subsumed the underground in more than the mere appropriation of a countercultural aesthetic posture. It has subsumed our need to revolt as well. That's partially why the current attempt by Senate Democrats to force an investigation into the possible doctoring of intelligence during the buildup to the Iraq war leaves me cold. Is there anyone who really believed back in 2003 that the Bush team wasn't doctoring intelligence? I thought we'd moved beyond that. One amazing difference between the war we're currently fighting and the Vietnam War is that this time around it took virtually no time for the intelligent, well-read segments of the population to discover that our leaders were occluding the truth. Has there ever been any need for "consciousness-raising"? We knew that from before Day One of combat operations that there was no link between Sassam Hussein and Al Quaeda, knew that Colin Powell's speech at the UN was probably bullshit. People, some of them quite prominent, said such things at the time (especially people in the UK), the opinions were all out there for everyone to see (thanks to the Internet) and we all just sort of nodded our heads and thought, well, yes, they are probably lying, but not much we can do about it, is there?

We're still doing that. Everyone has accepted the truth of certain critiques about society, but that understanding no longer prompts large collective action. There are no movements in America. We have ideologues, we have talking heads, we have lobbying groups and political action committees. We have whole organizations of people who are paid to oppose things like the nomination of Samuel Alito or the teaching of evolutionary science, but these are interest groups trying to push an agenda. Where are the groups of people gathering together to change the structure?

I think I accepted a while ago that truly revolutionary activity these days has to happen on the local level, pretty much below the radar. To certain extent, it's revolutionary just to pay attention to the local level at all, to value the rehabilitation of neighborhoods and the strengthening of communities. I've known for a while that that's where my mission lies and I've found some people who are doing that.

One group of them is the theater community where I've been teaching and directing for the past two years or so. I have truly been inspired to learn from the people I've met there, committed activist who (through the strength of their organizing) went from soliciting money on street corners to building a huge multi-theater complex that accepts no corporate or government money, one that still embraces marginality as a virtue. In so many ways, the work that I've been doing there is my life's work and I'm completely in sync with their philosophy.

And yet, it's weird. Without getting into all the details, the theater (like all insitutions built by a band of committed individuals) has its quirks and odd interests. I couldn't care less, for example, about radical trends in psychotherapy (which many people in the wider theater community are involved in). It's not that I disagree with any of the theories or models that are espoused, just that they don't really interest me; I don't want to channel all my energies into them. This theatrical community grew up around a few people who had backgrounds in philosophy and psychology and its natural that these tendencies emerged. They've been at it for over twenty years, so these tendencies are deeply ingrained.

That's what weird about my position there, I guess: though I'm a sympathizer and a respected colleague, generationally I will never be part of the club. In certain key ways, I'm closer to the 18-year old kids that we teach in the school than I am to my 50-something mentors there. And when I recently attended an international conference they sponsored on performance studies, I felt like a man without a homeland. Here were hundreds of people from around the world engaged in theater and social change, people who belonged to theater companies. Where did I belong? The people there that I knew were mostly middle-aged Lefties that I'd been working with, but that was hardly my demographic, nor did I have any real decision-making power amongst them, influencing their priorities or anything like that. My contemporaries, the people I feel most at home with on a personal level, the college friends that I collaborate with even, don't really "get" me on the political level. I can talk all I want to them about my revolutionary activity and they get a glazed over expression. They hear the phrases but not the substance of what I'm saying and they aren't trying to do anything like it.

I left the conference wondering where, if anywhere, I would ever be able to find any young people who shared precisely this vision. People I could not only speak to and know that they hear me but people with whom I could build something. "Let those who have ears hear!" There are plenty of "hearers" out there (most of you who read my blog and post comments, for example!), so I never feel like I'm talking in a vaccuum, only that I'm working in one. That I'll never find someone else to put on the show with me, on our own mutually-felt and comtemporary terms.

Which made it all the more weird that I started emailing with this gay union organizer guy I met on Friendster and both of us found ourselves describing our career goals to one another and seeing how they seemed remarkably, almost unsettlingly similar. Here was someone who spoke about creating a non-profit whose mission was revitalizing inner-city communities. How? By the creation of a "public space," a community center for the new millenium where people could gather to create their own culural projects, to organize, to debate, to meet one another, to engage in cooperative enterprises. We met for a beer last week and found ourselves envisioning a space in Brooklyn that would be a food co-op, performance space, legal assistance center and neighborhood hangout. What was so exciting was how little I had to explain, how I could speak in shorthand only to discover that he had been having exactly the same thought. It felt weirdly dreamlike and I'm almost not sure it actually happened.

The other weird thing about meeting this guy (whom I'll call Engels), was the uncertainty on both our parts as to whether our meeting was a "date" or not. I was definitely attracted to him physically and I think he was to me as well but the torrent of talk that came out of our mouths seemed to swamp all of those comsiderations. I found my head spinning with ideas about the next five years, trying to actually set up some kind of organization, of trying to secure property in Bushwick, and then found myself asking, "I wonder if I'm going to kiss him tonight?" I didn't and it was probably all for the better since I was exhausted from long nights of rehearsing, was still overcoming a cold, and moreover was more interested in the prospect of this guy being another kind of life partner, a co-worker, a co-builder, a comrade.

We haven't met since (I've been insanely busy), though we've briefly emailed. The confirmation that another twentysomething (and a gay one to boot!) exists out there who has independently developed the same ideas for how society needs to be reformed leds some credence to my life choices. It makes me feel like I'm not totally on the wrong path. And that's what everyone wants to hear, isn't it? I don't know when my next meeting with Engels will be, don't know whether we'll jot down a momentous manifesto on a cocktail napkin or wind up in one another's bed. I do feel something stirring, though.

Is that a revolution in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

**I promised a footnote about Sammy (you may remember him as the coy boy who was keeping me in a Beckettian waiting game). Well, a lot has changed. He's become a lot more forthcoming, effusive even, calling me a lot, wanting to see me. Things have gone relatively far and I decided after eating dinner with him last night that I actually like him, as in I think he's a cool person. It's really rather sweet (he made me a mix CD!) and that's not what I'm used to. Are these things supposed to feel so genial?

nine to five

2005-10-27T22:57:00.000-04:00

I was reading The Catholic Worker newspaper on the C train home from work tonight (those unfamiliar with The Catholic Worker movement have probably never met me; all revolutionary-minded people should subscribe to their newspaper -- it costs one penny a year!). I wondered if the other people on the train thought I was a religious fundamentalist or something (I guess I am one, sort of, just with a different understanding of the fudament...)

Anyway, I was reading an article by my friend and old Haley House-mate Amanda which included this quotation, attibuted to a book called Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry by Eric Gill (further investigation reveals it to be from a lecture delivered in 1939):

Work is the means to living. The two things are inseparable. Recreation is a means to working and not the object for which we work. The object of recreation is to enable us to return to work refreshed, renewed, revived... But, in order to take such a view of work, the work must be good, it must be worth doing. Moreover, it must exercise our personality. It must be the work of persons.

I'd been on the C train about a couple of weeks before reading a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (it was one of those books that people are always pressing me to read, kind of like Atlas Shrugged or Jonathan Lvingston Seagull; I turned out to like it -- it's essentially a flowery self-help poem). This is one of the passages that jumped out at me:

But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret...
Work is love made visible.

I'm thinking of leaving my job. More than that, I know that I can't last in this position much longer. Once Christmas is past, I am going to very seriously begin working to advance to another, more desirable position in the agency where I work or start looking for something else altogether.

When I say that it is time to leave my job, though, I don't say it in quite the same way that a lot of people do. I love my job, or at least the essence of it, its core. I still can't believe that my position really exists or that I was able to find it. Despite the fact that I am ready to leave it, my job was and, in a sense, remains the perfect job for me.

I work for an affordable housing agency that develops and manages residences for low-income New Yorkers, primarily people with histories of homelessness, mental illness or other disabilities. To be working for such a good cause is, in itself, great. In every one of their residences, social services are provided for the tenants on-site. Brilliant model: it promotes independence but also provides a much-needed safety net for the vulnerable. What is my position, though? What's my role in all of this?

I build community. Those words are from my department's mission statement (which I basically wrote; my department consists of me). Through a variety of different methods (anything I can think of, really), I am supposed to connect the tenants in the building to one another and to the world outside. This could be anything from a big party (like the one I threw tonight) to exercise classes, a drama group, karaoke, a short story discussion society, a trip to a museum or a baseball game. I'm a social director with a slightly more high-minded mission; I facilitate healthy and growthful interaction and development among many different people.

I'm going through all of this at length because I need to remind myself how remarkable it all is. When I came to New York just over two years ago, I had no idea how I would be earning my salary. I knew that I wanted to do just work, honest work, work that I could be proud of. What I was more clear on was my "life's work": which was to create a space and a venue for community creativity. I wanted to find work that would contribute to my life's work. And I did.

The other night, my friend (and another former housemate, though from a different house) Kate, who works as a designer for a socially-conscious fashion firm told me she'd had an epiphany when someone said to her, "Wow, it sounds like you're doing exactly what you said you wanted to be doing." My friend Ben said something not dissimilar to me a year ago August, upon visiting me in New York and seeing my workplace, my living situation, etc. He said that, given the goals I'd set for myself while I was in grad school, it was hard to imagine me doing anything else that would come so close to achieving them.

It's important, I think, for me to step back sometimes from the day to day frustrations I have with my job, with non-profit bureaucracy, and with my unsupportive supervisor to say how rare and wonderful it is to be doing something that so clearly falls in line with my stated objective in finding work. Every day at work, at least three things (and usually several dozen) occur that reaffirm my certainty that I am makign a difference with what I do.

When I look on online dating profiles, the most telling category for me is always "occupation." (It amazes me that the new Friendster format places this field further down the page so you have to scroll before you see it.) I think this field tells you at least 65% of what you ought to know about a person, which is why I get frustrated by people who put down evasive answers like "bon vivant" or "pot-smoker." The challenge for me is to find a term that encompasses btoh my paid and my unpaid work. For a while, I was going with "theatrical activist," but that came off as too self-righteous; now I use "playmaking" (which is probably an oversimplification).

I'm not gonna lie to you -- the person's picture is the first thing I look at in an online profile. Sometimes, I don't even get past the picture. And I've certainly bookmarked a lot of hot people with jobs like "finance" or "public relations," but mostly because I'd like to have access to their pictures in case I want to masturbate. Moreso even than their taste in movies (a big one) I think a person's work reveals my potential compatability with them.

And I don't just mean paid work. I mean "life's work," which (as we've been exploring) is not always precisely the same thing. One prerequisite for me, I guess, is that someone have a life's work or at least be able to articulate what one might be. When I look back on my recent failed relationships, my partners would rather clearly have failed this test...

Marx's primary gift to human history was the concept of "alienation," particularly as it applies to one's labor. By this, I don't just mean that the modern worker doesn't have ownership of the product he manufactures, but also that he has no sense of ownership over his relation to work, his choice of vocation. The need to earn, to achieve a certain standard of living, drives most of us into employment situations that we would otherwise find tedious and uninteresting. In a world where complete and perpetual leisure was possible for everyone, how many of us would continue doing the work that we currently do?

In such a world, I would certainly re-balance my schedule to be able to do more of my "life's work" -- that is, to write and direct plays, to develop collaborative theater projects, to build a space for collective community performance and development. The amazing thing, however, is that I do all of those things now! Not from 9 to 5 (or on days like today, 9 to 9), but in my evenings and my weekends. I work a lot. I don't know about the latest reality shows on TLC because when I'm not working, I tend to be working. (Which is also part of the reason why I don't always find time to write on this blog.)

If I want to leave my current job, it's not because the fundamental things I love about it have changed at all; they haven't. It's rather that ingrained institutional structures have increasingly created obstacles that prevent me from regularly and most effectively carrying out the aspects of my job that I'm most committed to. I don't feel a lot of support from my immediate co-workers which can become exhuasting after a while. It's hard to be paddling your own boat when you're expeced to a certain degree to do everyone else's work for them, too.

If I leave my job, it will be to find the same job I am doing now, just a more purely realized form of it. There is a part of me that aches already as I contemplate leaving the tenants whom I've come to know and love and whose lives, it is impossible to deny, I have impacted hugely. For a significant number of them, I am the only person in the building that they feel they can have a human interaction with. The position bears a lot of weight. That feeling of connection is what keeps me there and it would be what I would have to find in anything else that I would do.

I think through things so much. I deliberate about most choices, at least the big ones. And yet, for as long as I can remember, I've eventually been happy with most of the major developments in my life, from where I've lived to what I've decided to do. I don't know if that satisfaction is a direct result of the degree to which I've thought through each situation or whether it has to do with some personality trait that inclines me more often than not towards acceptance. When things change in my life, it tends not to be because I need to do something new, but because the thing I'm doing has developed. What I've been doing has been just right for me, it's been perfect. And then it becomes time to do something more perfect.

is this blog annoying?

2005-10-13T01:26:00.000-04:00

It's amazing how the whole nature of experience can change so rapidly. Was it really last week that I was still worried about moving into the apartment? Our housewarming party finally happened last Saturday and it was a success. The culmination of over a month's worth of deliberating and fretting and shopping. We received uniform raves about the layout and the furnishing, the decorations, the hors d'ouerves. Whatever it was that I was trying to prove to everyone, I guess I did it.

I recognize that my obsession with this apartment has been equal parts a legitimate anxiety about putting roots down someplace and a competitive, self-promotional need to have everyone recognize the superiority of my setup in life. Things were in flux for me and I needed some kind of validation to verify that I'd made all the right choices.

Well, it's over and done with. So, hopefully, you all will never have to read another word about my sofa (which still has not been fully repaired, by the way!). What annoys me in retrospect about the blog entries I wrote last month is their pseudo-philosophical tone. It doesn't really matter to me that I was obsessed for a month with my furnishings (especially since I am so contented with the fruits of that obsession). What's disappointing is that instead of just saying, "Yeah, I'm being a little bit silly, a bit superficial, a bit materialistc -- who cares?" I went through an elaborate process of self-justification, written in self-righteous, all-knowing prose. I have a tendency to sermonize. One astute reader of this blog has described how when reading it her response is always, "Oh, look, Brian had another epiphany!" And that must get annoying after a while right? After all, how many epiphanies can one person have?

I have some ironic distance on all of this right now because of how hard I've been working myself for the past week. Life has been a relentless cycle of job-rehearsal-coming home-working on the script for the play. (I'm directing an original theater piece that's being created out of group improvistations; if I don't work on the script constantly, then there will be nothing to perform.) I was up to 3 am working at the computer for a few nights in a row. It's a good thing I got all of that furniture stuff out of my system when I did. Imagine if I was trying to do it now?

This blog is a bit like an online version of my journal. If anyone ever reads my journal (because it's published someday or because we get really close and you ask to look at it), you'll discover that it's not all that different from what you can read here. I subject my brain and my behavior to elaborate self-scrutiny, but always with the presupposition that my choices have been fundamentally right and that I just need to become comfortable with that, to see just how right they really are.

The times I write most in my blog or in my journal are when I'm sad or when I have nothing to do. When I have a lot to do, I'm almost never sad. Like now, for example. Work is heating up because the holidays are around the corner. I've got this play to create, which takes up all my time. If I weren't doing that I'd be working on some other scripts that have long been stewing in my brain. The free time, the time for anxiety, is completely occupied by other things. I don't really care in any deep sense, for example, that I haven't seen Sammy in person since the last time I wrote about him. (He's got me hooked on AOL Instant Messenger, though, so we "talk" a lot.) It's not as if I've been sitting around agonizing over him or anything. I haven't had the time. When you're active, you have less self-consciousness, which is why athletes are generally perceived to lead unexamined lives and why Plato insisted on the importance of leisure in his utopia to allow the philopher-kings time to do their contemplative work.

This blog is self-consciousness personified. It's not a rambling account of my daily activities, but a series of studied, worked over prose pieces that tread and re-tread over the same terriotry time and again. I'm always needing to teach myself the same lessons, convince myself that the same things are O.K.

I guess I write this blog for me, then, to get things off my mind. And doing it in a public forum has the added benefit of letting you into my mind. Total strangers, some of you. And that's as good as sex. Sharing the innerworkings of my brain, letting you inside of me. I like doing that, of course, but in blog format it's necessarily one-sided. I can be a slut and share my thoughts with all of you, but I don't really get penetrated. I expose only what I want to. And, in the comfort of my vaccuum, I can keep convincing myself of things that I know will continue to trouble me. The questions recur and recur, but in every blog entry, I pretend to have all the answers...

can't escape me

2005-10-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

It happened sometime last week, I'm not exactly sure when, but I looked around my room and I thought, "This is my room." Somehow the steady force of time has finally leant my new bedroom a "lived-in" quality. It's not complete yet (there are still too many bare walls and I need a couple of lamps) but it's finally a place where I feel comfortable. It's gone from being a random assortment of boxes and junk to being a reflection of... me. And that's the really weird part.

You see, this room has been set up in a way that no place I've ever lived in has been set up. As chronicled on the pages of this blog, I have spared no expense to outfit this place with attractive, quality furnishings. I've shopped at stores the likes of which I would never even have gone into two years ago and have spent more on certain items than I ever would have considered appropriate. In general, I've put a lot more thought into this room of mine: I've strategized and planned over the course of weeks, I've shopped in countless stores in search of the perfect bedspread, the perfect desk. I've paid extra to have my pictures framed (no more thumbtacks for me!). Walking around on my way to work or during my lunchbreak has become an endless quest for housewares and I haven't settled for the first or cheapest things that I've happened upon. Everything has been done in a highly deliberate, highly self-conscious fashion.

So how come it turned out the same?

Anyone who's seen a room I've lived in over the past several years will not be surprised upon walking into my new bedroom. Like my rooms at Menno House or at Oxford or at 337 Crown Street in New Haven it is spare, it is compact. There's nothing gaudy or particularly "funky" about the decorating scheme. Everything looks pretty functional, unostentatious. I've got my shelves full of journals and playscripts. As with many of the other places I've lived, it looks quite a bit like a monk's cell. It's an insulated enviornment, a space that cries out for solitude. If my life were a play, you would fault the production designer for making the set look so similar from one act to another.

How did this happen? How can I have set out to do something with a totally different mandate and ended up with the same result? It's enough to make you believe in a kind of ineluctable "me-ness" guiding each individual choice I make and ultimately ensuring that all of these distinct individual choices (to buy a bedspread from an Indian import store, to assemble an attractive wooden file cabinet), uncharacteristic as they may have seemed, add up in aggregate to more of the same. I'm not upset at all -- I love my room. I ought to since it clearly emerged out of some deeply held, subconscious predisposition of mine.

For the past month, I've trawled through dozens of Chelsea furniture galleries like a zombie, ogling sleek modernist furnishings with with their geometric lines and decorative patterns. The experience has actually given me a real appreciation for the beauty of interior design. I feel as if I've become a character out of Proust, embarking on a flea market hunt as if it offered the possiblity of communing with aesthetic perfection, having an orgasm over an elegant teacup. And I've said to myself more than once, "Gosh, if I had the money I would get that one" or that one or that one. But experience seems to prove otherwise.

I've spent a considerable amount of money on this place (more than I've ever spent before) and I've ended up with basically the same aesthetic, just a little more "put together." A slightly more modernist monk. It leads me to believe that, even if I had unlimited funds, I wouldn't ever choose to outfit my environment in furniture from West Elm or ABC Carpet & Home. I can't imagine myself actually living in a place that was so ravishingly stylish and coordinated.

There's something frighteningly conservative about this realization. Not very post-modern. It seems to indicate that I have an intrinsic "self" that I can't escape. That even in trying to transform my self-expression, the "real me" will always rise to the surface. This experience seems to contradict everything I preach about the doctrine of self-recreation and the limitless transformative powers of performance.

Obviously, if I really wanted to, I could be living in Bauhaus splendor right now. I can choose to furnish my habitat in any kind of aesthetic that I want to. When it comes down to it, my long and drawn-out furnishing ordeal may have proved that I like being me; while I appreciate the way that other people have set up their lives and their homes, and while I might fantasize about being them for a while, I wouldn't really want to be them forever. In the same way that I might enjoy reading a Bret Easton Ellis book, but I don't end up writing like him. Or the way that I might enjoy watching a movie by Brian de Palma but don't really share his same artistic concerns. I can flirt with different lifestyles as much as I flirt with different people -- I can sample them and gain some insight -- but there are reasons why I always come back to me.

Those reasons have to do with culture and upbringing (it's no coincidence that a boy raised by a nun would end up living like a monk) but at this point in my life I have enough self-awareness to assess the values I inherited and to choose which of them I still value. Superficially, I've broken faith with a lot of my past recently -- a process that was in many ways initiated by the catalyst of my more open sexuality -- but that only seems to have made what's leftover, what's stuck, more firmly rooted. I've been left with the core, the essential.

There's an image that I will always remember from Thoreau, of a man walking around burdened by his house and all his belongings, dragging it with him on the journey of life:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to haveinherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for theseare more easily acquired than got rid of... They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land,tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, whostruggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

That passage stuck with me more than anything else in Walden and it had a huge impact on me when I was starting out my new life in New York City. I wanted to divest myself of all those unnecessary burdens of property in order to walk unencumbered. I must admit that over the past month, in buying so much furniture and so many housewares, I'd felt a bit like I was betraying those values, as though I'd regressed a bit or was succumbing to the inevitable bourgeoisification that comes with approaching middle age (and to a certain degree there's a lot of truth in that). Who but a true saint, a holy fool, can walk unencumbered, truly naked, through this world? That's an extreme I can admire, can truly stand in awe of, while at the same time admitting that that path is (at least for now) too extreme for me. And that acknowledgement is another aspect of true freedom.

Every one of us carries a satchel along life's journey and we keep in it the things that mean the most to us. All that we can't leave behind (my apologies to Bono). If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only bring three items... They ask questions like that on internet dating profiles and on celebrity interview shows; the answers are supposed to offer a window into someone's real self. But the real answers to those sorts of questions are arrived at through experience, after the fact. They're not stated, they're lived.

don't get me wrong

2005-09-26T13:09:00.000-04:00

This one's (mostly) for Ben G.

No, I'm not living in an industrial loft. On the link below, my sofa is the one on the left after you scroll down.

As for Sammy, well, let's just put it this way. I discovered that he can name every Oscar winner from 1993 to the present. Impressive. Not unprecedented, but impressive...

holding pattern

2005-09-24T13:48:00.000-04:00

For those who care, the sofa arrived yesterday... and was promptly broken by the movers as they brought it up the stairs! At this point, did I really expect otherwise?

Have a date with the boy tonight, too. [He needs a name... I will hereby christen him Samuel Beckett, in honor of Wating for Godot.] He made it clear, though, that he's gonna have to leave after we have dinner and go someplace else. Again no suprise there. On attend plus...

awaiting deliverance

2005-09-22T21:52:00.000-04:00

It feels like I've been waiting forever. Waiting for my sofa to be delivered, for one thing. It's been almost two weeks now since I purchased it; that moment had seemed like the culmination of a long and arduous search to find the right sofa, the best deal. Once I'd found it, I thought my work was done. I'm learning not to assume that. Wait until delivery.

The sofa was supposed to come last Friday -- I even took a day off of work -- but the truck broke down. It was then supposed to come on Sunday, but they "forgot it" at the warehouse. And now it is supposed to arrive tomorrow. We'll see. The extension of this process is emblematic of where I am right now. I've latched onto this sofa as if it were a liferaft. Clinging to its bulk, climbing up into it, I assume, is what will save me from the sea of liminality in which I'm currently treading water.

The two weeks' wait has lowered my expectations, though. Even if the sofa does arrive as scheduled tomorrow, what is that really going to change? It will fill up space in our living room. It will give me someplace to sit and sprawl out on. But, in the course of setting up this apartment, every time I accomplish something, every time I cross another item off the list, I let out a deep sigh of relief and then realize that five other things have arisen in the interim that need to be taken care of. Things that hadn't even been on the list when I started. In the weeks I was waiting for the sofa, I realized that I needed wall shelving, a larger mirror, a new comforter, a bedside lamp. Will I be able to get all those things this weekend and get them set up? Realistically, the answer is no. More and more waiting, more and more transitionality.

It's been going on and on now, to the degree that I can't even remember what it felt like to be settled, to walk by a housewares or furntiture store and not think, "Oh, I'd better stop in there and see if there's anything else I need." My inner monologue is a never-ending calculus of when and where I can get the next item to advance "Operation: Domestic Bliss." I make advances and I fall behind. Two steps forward, one step back. There is progress, but still the final point seems obscure.

Are other people this end-result-fixated? Somehow I don't think so. Most people I know who've moved don't seem to look upon the process with the attitude that I seem to, an attitude more appropriate for a journey across the country in a Connestoga wagon. "How far along am I?" is my constant question. "Am I almost there yet?"

Which leads me, as it inevitably does, to ask why I think and feel this way. Why does the prospect of a housewarming party -- an occasion that will ostensibly mark the point at which I say, "The move is complete, this is my new house" -- why does that seem like an occasion of profound significance? Will it be this weekend or will it have to wait a whole week longer?? I am truly obsessed with the idea of introducing people to my new home, but paranoid that no one should see it until it has been fully established the way I want it to be. Like a painter fussily dabbing his canvas, I want everything to be just so because I have internalized this sense that somehow I am being judged on this apartment. Judged by whom? By my former housemates probably -- have I moved up a rung on the social ladder? By the infamous Helmut, who scoffed so famously at my previous quarters. "This'll show him!" I think to myself whenever I pay more than I probably should for some shoe rack or other item at Bed, Bath & Beyond. I want the agony to end and yet I am terrified of completing it because that means announcing, "This is the best I could do."

All the while that I wait, a parallel process is becoming more and more extended. Soon before I moved dealings with a new boy began; we met finally at the end of my first week here and (I thought) hit it off. Since then, though, my attempts to get together again have been met not with disinterest but rather with prolongation. Because of his schedule (he's a senior in college -- I know, I know, I don't need the eye-rolling, please!) and because his brother was in town and because of a hundred other things in both our lives it's been two weeks since we last met. But two weeks spent in quite infrequent communication. No surplus of flirty text messages or emails to keep the flame burning. Days lapse between responses; they feel like signposts on my Westward journey. They are always positive, though, and they allude to a desire to get together again soon, but there's no motion to rush into anything (certainly not my bed).

I can't really explain my faith in this extended courtship. There's something about what happens between us that seems definite (as the delivery of the sofa seems definite, even though I can't be sure which day it will finally arrive). Each time I despair of hearing back, I get another missive, another suggestion that we meet at this time a few days hence. I almost feel as if my intentions are being tested: what am I after? Can I stick it out to the bitter end? The benefit of all this prolongation, of course, is that it gives me more time to set up my apartment. It's not as if I'm sitting by the phone waiting for him to call (I have nowhere to sit, after all!). When he does finally come over here, he's going to see not some thrown-together space but a reflection of me, an environment in which every detail has been deliberately chosen.

And that's kind of scary. What is this mania with getting everything right? Why this steadfastness for a boy whom I've only met and made out with only once? Perhaps they both stem from the fact that I'm not getting any younger and what I long for is stability, permanence. An apartment that I've invested time and money in, where things are nailed to the walls. A boyfriend who's gonna stick, who's gonna fit into this apartment and become a part of it. That's what's underneath these twin anxieties, a longing to finally get the full shipment delivered, to get the whole set, everything, and to no longer be perpetually anticipating love and commitment, no longer traipsing over to the apartments of boys I'm hooking up with so that I can sleep in their beds and leave the next morning in the same clothes I came in with. I want a place of my own where I can stay in and someone who'll stay in with me.

This is probably not healthy. It's definitely competitive -- competitive with Helmut, for one (he and the boy went to the same school and know each other... again, no eye-rolling!), but also competitive with the world in general, with my co-workers and with all those people I know who seem permanently paired off. It's unhealthy to be driven to that extent by competition, but I will no longer deny it! I want people to come over to my housewarming party and stand with mouths agape at how well thought out the place is, how homely it seems. I want them to envy this life, this stability of mine. Because only then will it seem like that stability has finally arrived.

the poor you have always with you

2005-09-18T23:35:00.000-04:00

My time has been eaten recently and my mind distracted by the seemingly unending process of shopping for more and more of the things that one "needs" to set up an apartment. Every day I buy more things, maxing out my credit card, and yet every day the list of things I still "need" seems to grow. I long for the time when my new apartment, nice as it is obviously going to be, will finally and completely feel like home. I'm writing right now from my roommate's computer, with unpacked boxes littering my bedroom and unbuilt shelving systems obstructing the hallways. The environment sometimes makes me feel like a displaced person, but of course I know it's ridiculous to say such a thing in light of the thousands of people have been legitimately uprooted and displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

My frustrations with my move, my inclination to consider myself a wandering nomad, are indicative of the fact that we middle-class New Yorkers have no perspective on anything. We don't know how easy we've got it in New York, but we certainly know how to whine. Was 9/11 anywhere near as bad a catastrophe as Katrina? I would argue it was not. Far less real estate was destroyed. Beyond the 2,000 something people who died in the Towers, their families and friends, who was affected? Life went on. Tourism took a hit, as did the downtown economy -- but nowhere near the hit it would have taken had the entire city been destroyed completely. And the majority of the victims were middle-to-upper-income working people, some with huge pensions and insurance policies, people in finance, police officers and firemen who had unions supporting them and their families. You only had to listen to the voices of the siblings reciting the names on the anniversary last week to realize how white the victims of 9/11 were. Not all of them affluent, by any means, but probably pretty secure in their lives before those planes hit.

Down in New Orleans, everyone in the city has lost something, because the city is no more. There will be no "going back to business as usual" because there are no more businesses. Moreover, though, the people most severly impacted by Katrina have been the poor. To paraphrase Helen Schlegel in Howards End, "People who had little have less."

What did 9/11 prompt? More than anything else it made us into a nation of self-conscious whiners and worriers: "Why do they hate us?" It made us jittery, uneasy, suspicious of our neighbors, suspicious of unattended packages. It impacted the national psyche more than anything else; it's as if the flames of the World Trade Center transmitted the native neuroticism of New York from coast to coast.

For most Americans the impact of Katrina is already on the wane. I could tell last Friday when I was at a concert and the audience groaned audibly when the musicians began to mention hurricane relief. We're not worried about the long-term implications of the Katrina disaster because it seems out of our control: we can't control the weather, right?

The real problem with the Katrina situation, though, is not what might come next but what came before, the sorry societal setup that subjugates so many of our citizens to poverty. It took a big wind to blow the veil off of that and to get the media to pay attention. The wrangling about securing the levees and FEMA being subsumed into Homeland Security is beside the point. How as a people can we continue to underserve so many of our most vulnerable citizens and then, when catasptrophe strikes, leave them to fend for themselves? As this very perceptive column from the Chicago Tribune argues, Katrina is just a more dramatic example of the kind of calamity the poor face every day and which many of us never notice.

The point is not to shore up the levees. The point is to remember our fellow man, the people who could not evacuate because they had no transportation, no disposable income. I'm struggling to make ends meet right now, paying twice as much in rent and needing to buy a slew of things to equip my new home. But how blessed am I to be able to charge my purchases and defer payments. To get transit checks from my employer that allow me unlimited access to the subway. My frustration as I shuttle back and forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn these past few weeks has been intense, but how much more frustrating are the lives of so many of the tenants in the building where I work, for whom a one-way $2 Metrocard is a luxury?

When are we going to have the conversations that matter? Not about the Freedom Tower or democracy in Iraq, but about domestic democracy, about enfranchising all of the people who have been left behind by technological advances and by the economic boom. The Democrats aren't ready to have that conversation; they're glad that Katrina has pushed down Bush's poll numbers but they aren't about to start "class warfare." Electorally, they would be foolish to do so. Katrina serves them best as a tool for winning in 2006 and not the wakeup call that it should be to the fact that something horrible has happened in our policy towards the urban poor, something that has been going on for decades.

New York suffered a blow on 9/11 but it survived. But for many New Yorkers (perhaps the majority?), not much really changed on 9/11. Many young, black New Yorkers, for example, living in Brownsville, Brooklyn, or in the Bronx only came to know what the World Trade Center was because it was destroyed. They'd never been there, never been in the heart of their own city and they still haven't. They're cut off from prosperity, culturally as much as anything else. They function in the economy as consumers of cheap entertainment and sneakers, as people to fill up the prisons, but not as voters or constituents whose interests politicians give a damn about. Where are the memorials for the slow destruction of our inner cities? Because we can't pinpoint the date, does that make them any less dead? For all of them, 9/11 doesn't mean much.

I hadn't planned to write all this. My head's been full of comforters and kitchenware. I've been operating in bourgie mode a lot recently. Which makes me realize how easy it is to empathize with televised tragedy when the victim is someone who looks like you, who works a job like you do, who makes the money you make. You say, "That could have been me." That was 9/11 for you, where catastrophe seemed suddenly personal. The poor, though, even in their suffering always seem to remain invisible. It takes a major leap of analytical thinking to consider how the decisions that we make in our daily lives connect us to the impoverished people in Kandahar and Falluja and now in New Orleans (not to mention in Bushwick and East New York) who had little and now have less. They don't get individualized write-ups in the New York Times. We don't see their "Faces of Grief." They're lucky if we even count the bodies.

pro-choice

2005-08-28T14:24:00.000-04:00

In a comment appended to my previous post, Desiree takes me to task for arguing that New York is somehow more "real" than other places. This is not precisely what I was trying to say, but her commentary raises other interesting questions.

In my post, I was trying to express that New York has taught me some hard lessons about "reality," has made me more of a "realist." Some might argue that being a realist is just another term for being a cynic or an individualist, but I don't see it quite that way. I like to think that my new perspective on life is the same idealism I used to have, tempered with a healthy does of experience. I've been dis-illusioned in the best possible sense.

But does that mean that New York is a "realer" place than any where I've lived before? Certainly not (cf. a post of mine from earlier this summer in which I argue exactly the opposite). Desiree offers us a memorable maxim, though, acquired from television viewing: reality is just another genre. Certainly our experience backs this up. Does any style of art seem more dated than historical attempts to depict life unfiltered, "as it really is"? The handheld camera work of French New Wave cinema or the pathological asceticism of Scandanavian Dogme seem as stylized to us as the overstuffed "naturalistic" stage settings used in 19th Century productions of Ibsen. Representations of reality are invariably selective; even the ubiquitous (and hopefully fading) fad of reality television, though unscripted, is edited to create tight, readable narratives and familiar character roles.

The "real" is just another modality, a way of limiting the totality of experience, which is too overwhelming (or, at times, underwhelming) for us to process without filters of some kind. What feels "real" to us is not substantively different from experiences that we describe as "surreal"; the two types of experiences just come at us in different ways, one in a way that we can easily process and the other in more unexpected ways.

What Desiree really seems to be saying is that living in New York seems to predispose people to a certain collective fantasy: that the hardscrabble way New Yorkers have chosen to live and arrange their interactions with others is somehow the only "real" way to live. That the dog-eat-dog world of competition this city fosters somehow allows us to access a truth about existence that the poor rubes in the sticks will never receive.

I came back last week from a trip outside of New York City, my first extended departure in many months. The journey made me realize that all of us create our own modalities of existence, based to a certain degree on the circumstances in which we find ourselves but also (perhaps primarily) on the choices we make or do not make to alter those circumstances.

"Reality" in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Ozark mountains, where I spent my vacation, is vastly different from the Manhattan sense of "real." In Manhattan living in the "real world" means paying half of your paycheck in rent so that you can meet all of your expenses and still live in a decent neighborhood -- defined not only by its safety, but perhaps moreso by its proximity to desirable subway lines (not the JMZ, please!) and its proportion of hip bars, stores and eateries. For Manhattan artists, social activits, and other counter-cultural types, living in the real world often means making commercial compromises to subsidize that kind of life.

New Yorkers in Little Rock may marvel that this state capital seems so suburban in places, that the downtown area can feel so empty on a weekday afternoon, that young bohemian twenty-somethings can live in a sizeable house on a tree-lined street and that you can wander around to local watering holes and bump into all kinds of people that you know and grew up with. It seems like a fantasyland, equal parts Andy Griffith and Harper Lee. But I'm sure that New York, with its unrealistically infalted prices, overscheduled appointment books and constant cell phone communication, must seem to outsidere like a theme-park spin off of Sex and the City. People who doubt that New York thrives on unreality only need to note the hordes of television crews that crowd the streets, filming the latest installments of Law and Order. Half the population here seems to be employed peddling fantasies of one kind or another; too few of us realize that we're also living in one.

The peculiar fantasy that New Yorkers subscribe to is that so many of the things they live their lives for are actual, undeniable "needs," rather than imagined ones. Leisure time, to a New Yorker, means being able to go to the Hamptons, or (for those who can't afford that) going out to the trendiest bar, which necessitates all kinds of further expenditure: cigarettes and clothes and hair care products and unlimited Metrocards. Being here for any extended period of time warps the mind so that we come to feel that this very peculiar way of living -- aggressive, with everyone piled on top of one another -- is the only possible option, when the case could well be made that it's actually incredibly unnatural and inhumane.

It's hard for anyone, in New York or in Little Rock, to distinguish between habit and need. As a lapsed Catholic Worker, I'm peculiarly sensitive to the burden that imagined needs can make on the human soul. The spiritual practice of truly divesting oneself of all the material possessions that one does not actually need is a hard but enlightening path to take (one I tried for a time to go down, only to settle for a compromise). Time in Manhattan, though, has made me sympathetic to some of the imagined needs shared by my fellow urbanites. I remember in college marveling that anyone -- anyone! -- would ever really need more than three pairs of shoes: sneakers, dress shoes and boots. Done. Of course, as I find myself packing up my belongings to move into a new aparment I find that my shoes have multiplied like rabbits in the two years I've lived in New York and are now a motley crew of various lether, faux-leather and canvas constructions ranked by minute differentiations of casualness and chic.

To a certain extent, the need for different shoes is a "real" one based on the type of functions that I'm accustomed to attending these days and the expectations of my footwear. More than that, though, our imagined needs are real in the sense that they are expressions of our desire for comfort, perhaps the most human of all weaknesses. One can be a complete ascetic and still be motivated by the same drive: the monk who enters a life of strict celibacy and scheduled prayer is similarly seeking a kind of comfort, an existence whose parameters and clearly understood and will remain unchallenged.

Most people live their lives as if someone, some oppressive power, designed the world to make them frustrated. I know so many New Yorkers who complain constantly about high rents or the stress level that they experience and yet who never admit that they themselves have chosen to live here when they could be in Santa Fe or living on Walden Pond. In fact, our frustrations just go to show how comfortable we are with the system as it exists; despite all our complaints, there must be something (even if it's just fear of the unknown) that keeps us here.

Imagine a world where more people were able to admit how much of their lives are based on their own choices, their own need for comfort. We would be a bit healthier as a nation if we realized that the Red State/Blue State divide is a manifestation not of two "fundamentally different Americas" but rather of two modalities of being American, that might have more in common than we think. The differences between your average Bible-belt Republican and your average limousine liberal are superficial at best: the one attends church regularly while the other goes religiously to a pilates class; the one believes he needs a firearm to protect himself while the other believes he needs macrobiotic food.

Perhaps in order to really experience reality what we all ought to do is own up to the fantasies we've constructed around ourselves. The consciousness that allows us to do just that is the lasting (and underappreciated) legacy of postmodernism. Human beings are fantasists; we construct imagined castles around ourselves -- whether out of material goods or ideologies -- to ward off the evils of the outside world. If we all recognized one another as members in this quixotic club, we might be able to have healthier debates and, indeed, to imagine new ways of being, new interactions that we could subscribe to collectively to lessen the conflicts between us.

Certainly some people in the world do not have much capacity to "choose their own reality"; a baby born infected with AIDS in Africa cannot just pack up and move on to a better life of her own free will. But for most of us in the West, the key to enlightenment is not going to be one thing that will work for everyone. For some people it will be going back to the land, while for others it's devoting yourself to your career or starting a family or living in voluntary poverty or some other mode of existence that offers them satisfaction. The key lies in recognizing that none of us has been forced by some ontological imperative to live life the way we do. Each of us has chosen and continues to choose. The real world circumstances to which we so often ascribe our motivations in decision-making are, in fact, changeable. Once we have seen that much, we may do nothing to make budge from our comfortable, imagined castle, but at least we've let a little light in. New horizons of reality become visible.

if you can make it there

2005-08-15T23:47:00.000-04:00

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way or antoher
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
-Walt Whitman

For the past few weeks I've mostly been dividing my time between two missions: finding an apartment and finding a boyfriend. They're not that dissimilar, when you think about it; I was using the Internet a lot in both cases, for example. The boyfriend thing turned out to be less pressing, though, and so most of my attention turned to housing. Thanks to my concerted efforts I've now secured a new residence starting in the month of September.

Dating. Real estate. Employment. Why is everything in New York such a struggle? People move to other cities (like San Francisco or Philadelphia) because they want to live there; people move to New York to make it. The moment you set foot here, it's a competition. And the way you hear people talk about this city, you get the sense that it's not just all the other New Yorkers that you're competing with but rather the city itself. It's a personified oppositional force, one that's making it harder for you to afford your rent or to find your life partner. New York is bigger than all of us, we imply, it has a mind of its own. And our relationship with the City is, and always will be, the Big One. [Note that the TV series was called "Sex and the City" not "Sex in the City"; New York is not a mere location.]

When I talk about the City, of course, I mean Manhattan. Or those parts of New York life that emanate out of Manhattan, exist in relation to Manhattan. When you consider the real New York City, all five boroughs in all of their diversity, you actually can start to feel a little bit warm about it; there's an all-embracing feminine quality, an organicity to it. But when you're talking about The City there's no femininity in the equation. If The City were a woman (and it very well could be) it would be an iron lady, a power broker, a Martha Stewart or a Maggie Thatcher. The City gets what it wants. The City doesn't give a fuck.

I've been in the "very heart of it" for two years now--that's 24 times longer than I've been with any boyfriend. And I'm moving on. Not a definitive break, of course, but an increasing distance. We'll still see one another casually, as friends, at work, maybe sometimes it will get more intense than that. But I don't forsee that happening soon. I've got another borough on the horizon that's going to require some attention. But the City, oh, the City. He's always going to be a part of my life. He's my Mr. Big. (Sorry for all the Carrie Bradshaw references, I'm usually more of a Henry James-Proust-style gay, but what can I say?)

Maybe it's time to settle some accounts. My relationship with the City has not only been one of the longest affairs of my life but also, perversely, one of the healthiest. I'll admit, it's not the sort of thing I would wish on everyone. The City is not a sensitive or considerate partner. He makes a lot more money than you and he's always more busy than you are. He doesn't really get your idealism, your commitment to putting other people first. Sure, he thinks it's noble, but nobility and $2.50 will buy you a hot dog at Nathan's.

The City doesn't support you. He's not "there for you," the way the women's magazines tell you a boyfriend should be. "All right," he says, "Go out and try to do good in the world. I'm not gonna stop you. But don't come crying home to me if it turns out to be tougher than you thouhgt." The City is not going to change its routines to accomodate you; like the female recruits at the Citadel, you will get no special treatment. And if you succeed despite all that, you will have earned the City's respect.

That's where we've come to, he and I. He's not abusive. Some people leave the City crying, talking about how unfair it's been to them, how fucked up it is. But, hey, they entered into it with their eyes open. The City never cared about me and, you know what, I don't think I wanted it to. I learned more that way. I learned more about reality. And if I've had some of my ideals hardened and scuffed up a bit while I've been here, in the thick of it, all the better for me. What good's an ideal that you have to keep locked in the china cabinet?

We've had some good times, the City and I. Fun nights out, excesses. We've had bad nights, too. Nights when I came home by myself, cursing, pissed off. Every block that I walk down these past few weeks seems to call up some new memory or other, from Avenue A to Chelsea Piers, from Times Square to City Hall. I won't be sad to walk some new streets soon, ones that aren't so saturated yet with experience. My new boyfriend, Brooklyn (it's a Dutch name), still seems dewy-eyed and sensitive to me, cuddly. We're still at that stage. I don't think the City would think much of him. They could never be friends.

But I don't need them to be. I don't need to seek the City's approval. I'm not running away from him; I've just come to see that I need something else. I've got other needs that I have to be fulfilled. And I don't expect him to miss me. Well, at least I don't expect him to show it.

The City didn't give me me much. No handouts. No gifts. (Those came from the Mennonites. What were they doing there?) But I think it's because of that rock-hard consistency that I've really loved this relationship. I never expected anything from him and I got what I expected. The thing I'm going to take away from all of this is what I have become: idealistic but wiser, driven but practical, sensitive but self-reliant. And I think he respects me for that.

cock block

2005-08-07T00:30:00.000-04:00

When I first started writing this blog, a rather prurient friend of mine said that he found it boring because there wasn't enough sex. Well, Chris Bradley, this one's for you.

I can't get laid. And it's not for lack of trying. In the past month and a half I have been to the seediest of East Village gay bars, sometimes twice in one weekend, staying out 'til closing time (4 am) in hopes of finding someone to bed. With no luck. It's become a Friday night/Saturday morning ritual to totter drunkenly up Second Avenue, slapping my hands in frustration against lampposts and cursing under my breath, then climbing up four flights of stairs (and one loft bed ladder) so that I can slump into my too-long empty bed.

This has happened before, of course. I don't keep track of my success rate, but I would say that I tended to return home solo from these late-night trawlings at least 50% of the time, probably more. What makes this feel different is the doggedness with which I've been pursuing my goal of late and the complete lack of results.

It's a truth commonly acknowledged that the more sex someone is having, the sexier one appears to others. You're confident, you move with an unconscious sensuality, you don't have anything to prove. Well, from January to June I was doing pretty well in the sex department. My pick-up technique was improving. I didn't need to go out to The Cock, where little in the way of finesse is required to find willing partners; I was, in fact, employing my voice and mind and body in social situations to identify, flirt with, and "seal the deal" with a string of desired partners. I'd become consistently proficient at a skill I once thought I would never master. After one successful night last spring (the night of my first date with Helmut) Kyle expressed his unqualified awe at my goal-oriented dating strategy. I identified what I wanted and damned if I didn't get it most of the time.

This past month or so, I seem to have regressed. I'm wildly more sexually experienced than I was a mere year ago (when I first started going out full-force), I have a much better haircut, and I don't mean to brag but in the past couple of weeks an absurd number of people (male and female, straight and gay) have been commenting on how hot I look. So what gives? Since the Helmutgate debacle, I have turned to my old East Village haunts for solace and have found nothing -- on some nights, not even a good grope or any snogging.

I'm tempted to chalk it up to the vagaries of Feng Shui. As all horny young homos know, The Cock has moved into the Hole (that is, New York City's sleaziest gay bar lost it's lease on Ave. A and had to move two avenues over). The old Cock is a space that will probably remain forever etched on my mind in the way that one's childhood playroom typically is. It was sleazy, smoky, and sweaty to be sure, but in one year's time of exploring its nooks and crannies (and believe me, it had more of them than a Thomas' English Muffin), I'd found my own favorite spots, my own strategies for soliciting attention. There was the long "runway" leading from the door to the lav, the hip area near the DJ booth, the murky shadows in the corner, the stage where go-go boys and exhibitionists could display themselves, and the cramped dance floor near the "back room"-turned-coat-check-area.

The new Cock, however, is essentially a bland rectangular space, lit more darkly than its predecessor in hopes, perhaps, that we won't notice what a shoe box it is. People are packed in even tighter and instead of sinuously bumping and gliding between bodies like a sexually promiscuous pinball, one finds oneself more often than not grimacing in frustration as you get shoved around by people trying to make their way throught the fray. There are no longer any curves and eddies, just a mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. I've in fact vowed two or three times that I will never go to the new Cock again and broken that vow at least as many times. But the thing is that even as I break that vow, I don't do it with a feeling of guilty pleasure because, frankly, I no longer enjoy going there. I enter with a sinking feeling in my stomach. There are no incidental pleasures there, just pursuit of the goal.

And that situation is something I've felt elsewhere in the past couple of months, leading me to believe that it's more than the re-configured Cock that has cursed my sex life. When I'm out most nights I am just not seeing that many exciting partners. Probably only two or three over the course of eight of nine recent trips. It was not always thus. Have my standards raised? Is everyone out at Fire Island to escape the heat? Whatever the reason, the result is doubly frustrating: I go out looking for something that doesn't seem to even been out there to get. I wear out the heels of my shoes wandering up and down the bar, eyeing men left and right but finding no one remarkable, or even especially desirable. The paucity of hotness ought to make me stay home but perversely it tends to prompt me to stay out even later, thinking "Somebody's gotta come in, right?"

It may be that my heart's not in it anymore. I can't very well expect to succeed at something I no longer have any faith in. My Cock-going days ended when I started getting into semi-serious dating situations, the type where you actually talk to people and see them multiple times, and go to their apartments during normal daylight hours. I thought I could return to bars like the Cock as if they were Blockbuster outlets, but I seem to have discovered that my membership has expired. Or something. I need to move on to a different stage in the development of my sex life. I've been thinking recently that the type of boy I need to find will probably not be met at a cruisy bar. If only there were a pick-up scene at Barnes & Nobles or the Film Anthology Archive! (Perhaps there is? Anybody, anybody?) I've outgrown the playroom.

As much as I am starting to accept that fact of evolution, I still don't see why I shouldn't be able to get in a couple of pokes or two just to make myself feel better. I really need to bring somebody else to my bed before I leave Menno House, just to wrap things up. I will probably be much better off in Brooklyn, where the gay bars are fewer and farther between, where I can't be lured at a moment's notice to dens of vice within walking distance of my hacienda. But before I enter that period of burgher-like maturity, I'd like to prove to myself that I've still got it. In order to succeed at that, I need to stop trying so hard and find the fun in it all over again.

So there you go. Sex, sex, sex. Remember when I used to write about things like welfare reform?

chew on this (ouch!)

2005-08-04T22:14:00.000-04:00

I remember getting a C one time in my freshman year high school math class. It was like this stain; it made me feel like I was somebody else, somebody who got C's.

I felt that way this morning, except the C stood for cavity. That's right, for the first time ever yous trult left the dentist and they told me that I had to schedule another appointment... to get a FILLING. Because I have a CAVITY. In fact, to be perfectly frank, I have two.

I'm not quite sure why it feels like a moral lapse. I ran into my boss on the way into work and she asked me, "How was the dentist?" I told her about my first cavity and she said that she had a few, they weren't so bad. (She's a total overachiever, straight-A student type, so I was frankly quite surprised that she, too, had this blot on her permanent record.) I guess a lot of people (most people?) have had cavities, but not me. Until now.

I remember being in elementary school and seeing those posters on the wall showing a walrus with his mouth open wide, tusks shining. The caption: "Look, Ma, no cavities!" I remember going to the dentist and him telling me that I had "big, healthy, Italian" teeth and that they would never fall out ever (he really said this) as long as I kept brushing and flossing. I thought I had been genetically blessed. I guess I let my guard down.

I had not been to the dentist in at least two years before this morning. I feel a little guilty about that. When I was in school (even when I was in grad school in England), my aunt would always hector me to get to the dentist every six months. I would dutifully go to see him when I was home for Christmas vaction, just to pacify her. Because I always received such glowing reviews, I suppose I thought I that the visits were just a formality. But every Achilles has his heel. I never thought, for instance, that it might have been because I went for teeth cleanings with such regularity that I had such good dental hygiene.

I've changed in a lot of different ways over the past year. I counted recently and I had 18 sexual partners between June 2004-June 2005. In the year previous I'd had two (and one didn't really count). I've become more jaded, hard-boiled, fashionable etc. But this is the one change that doesn't even have a tincture of cool attached to it. What's cool about a cavity? No one wants to admit that they're letting their mouth go to pot.

I should have known this was coming. Back when I was dating Helmut, I got very insecure about my teeth because they seemed to have yellowed. Rather than shilling out any money for a sophisticated bleach job on my molars (which, along with laser hair removal has always seemed to me the height of needlessly expensive vanity) I got some drug store tooth-bleaching gel. Not whitening toothpaste but an actual gel that you apply to your teeth and leave on. I'm not convinced it did anything. It's indicative of the changes I'm going through that I tried to effect some kind of superficial appearance-saving whitening, when the actual core of my teeth was rotting away underneath...

I sat in the dentist's waiting room this morning (before I knew that I had holes in my teeth) and I thought about the fragility of the human body. I had to fill out a medical questionnaire and, thankfully, I was able to check "no" next to every single ailment listed on the form ("Angina"; "Diabetes"; "Heart palpitations"). It felt obvious that I wouldn't suffer from any of these, but I looked around at the middle-agers in the waiting room with me and realized that none of us is invincible. Our systems are delicately balanced and my muscles and organs have been pumping for 26 years straight. They're not going to last forever. The health care crisis in this country is so appalling (how many millions are uninsured) precisely because health problems are so universal. Every single one of us is a machine and we will start sputtering sooner or later. I thought about health insurance companies, presenting themselves altruistically when they're business model necessitates their trying to withold payment from suffering people. I thought about the old days, before fluoride in the water, when everyone's teeth fell out early.

And I felt myself getting old.

god bless the child that's got his own

2005-07-21T09:01:00.000-04:00

Was it really this hot last summer? Somehow, I don't think it was. I don't remember the edges of every poster and snapshot affixed to the walls of my bedroom curling in quite so noticeable a fashion, as if to say, "We've been up here much too long..."

It's a sign of this summer's peculiar characteristics that I am already trying to wrap it up and tie a neat little bow around it, to define it so that I can file it away and be done with it. This summer, both for myself and for others I know, has not felt particularly "summery." What does that word call to mind? I don't know, exultation? Relaxation? Joy? Instead, it's been a time of significant and often difficult change. June alone was enough to make me long for the fall. It was a month of being overworked and underappreciated, both by employers and lovers. I guess this summer was (I will employ the past tense, though we're only just past the season's halfway point) a time in which I realized that certain relationships of mine, some of relatively longstanding, had just about run their course.

Summer 2004 was a time of burgeoning possibility. It was intense, to be sure -- reading the daily news anaysis of forged National Guard memos and swift boat veterans, staying up late to watch Red Sox games or to test my luck at some seedy bar where I tried to "seal the deal" with a string of interational one-night stands. I had more energy then, I guess. More stamina. Most of that summer's possibilities didn't really pan out, of course. John Kerry and I enjoyed a relationship about as long as the one I had with the cute but self-centered Polish guy who made out with me in a dress shop window. Only the Red Sox, formerly the most unreliable of my lovers, really came through.

This summer has been different. How? I'm inclined to say that lots of things have "soured" for me, but I think that puts too negative a spin on it. Perhaps the character of the season can best be captured if I enumerate a list of significant events that have occurred since Memorial Day.

This was the summer in which:

I drifted away from the Church (not totally but to a great extent).
I stopped talking to my family regularly every Sunday night.
I started to get a bit fed up with living in a communal house, with all kinds of short-term and long-term people coming and going.
I started to wish I had a real closet so that I could hang up my shirts and jackets without them wrinkling.
I developed a longing for real furniture and framed artwork on my walls, instead of the same posters I've had thumbtacked in every room I've lived in since college.
I became more and more surly at work, griped regularly about my salary, and decided that the appropriate word for my relationship with my employers was "exploitation."
I decided that it's about time I stopped being so satisfied doing only unpaid and socially-constructive theater projects with non-professional actors and got out there to promote my own writing and actually get it performed somewhere where someone important would take some notice of me.

In other words, it was a summer where I started down a road of increasing self-interest, where I became less abashed about the idea of promoting myslef, buying things for myself, possessing things solely and exclusively. In other words, I kinda started to think Ayn Rand may have had a point. I don't like to think that I'm too impressionable, but some of this development no doubt had to do with my two months of exposure to a would-be boyfriend we'll refer to as Helmut Lang. It was certainly he who planted in my brain the germ of an idea that I was "still living in a college dorm room," he who made me feel like I had not fully entered into adulthood until I bought a full set of my own kitchen accoutrements at Bed, Bath & Beyond. No matter that I'd been working for almost two years and supporting myself without parental assistance for four (something Mr. Lang has yet to achieve). No, it was about property.

I'm not totally convinced of this hypothesis, of course, and I hopefully never will be. But one does want to have one's most deeply held assumptions challenged once in a while. Sometimes people looking at you from outside (even callow, somewhat superficial people) can hit upon truths that you wouldn't see yourself. Helmut, to a certain extent, was a mirror for my own growing discontent.

In a few months, my life will be remarkably re-configured, one way or another. I will be living someplace else and (most likely) will be living with fewer people (maybe no one). Everything in my personal environment will therefore be mine, an expression of me, my choices, my interests, my purchases, alone. By December, I have pledged I will be actively moving on to another job -- either with the same employer or another one, but I will definitely be looking for a change. And my life, I suspect will become more about me advancing my own agenda a bit -- an agenda of doing for others, yes, but also of doing for myself.

How much of a change will this be? I don't know yet. Maybe all of these predictions are premature. Maybe Helmut and I got it all wrong and I'll end up living in a Buddhist monastery eating miso soup and wheatgrass. Maybe.

One other thing that happened this summer: I got a New York state driver's license. In other words, I really started to set down roots. I went and changed my identity.

self-promotion

2005-07-16T12:34:00.000-04:00

I'm using this blog to advertise my own work. Check it out!

She's a private dick who's seen it all. He's a blonde bombshell waiting to explode. Even in this filthy, lonely city, some secrets just can't stay hidden...
rip me open
a new play by Kyle Jarrow,
with Desiree Burch & Michael Cyril Creighton
developed & directed by
Brian Mullin
Two wise-cracking, desperate souls investgate a strange case of threatened violence and psychosexual intrigue. Join four of the downtown theater scene's hottest young artists as they take you on a mysterious, hilarious journey into the dark heart of desire...
first public reading
tue. aug. 2 at 8 pm
at Ars Nova (511 W. 54th St.)
$5 admission

causus belli

2005-06-27T23:18:00.000-04:00

I've just read a story in The New Yorker that everyone should read. Unfortunately, the magazine doesn't put most of their content online, but it has posted a Q&A with the author, George Packer. This article is probably the most clear-eyed, perceptive piece I have read about the war in Iraq. Everyone should read it -- the acquired heft of its import moved me to tears.

The article is essentially a profile of a father whose son died in Iraq, but it's much more perceptive than, say, the Lila Lipscombe section of Farenheit 9/11. This is more than just a parade of grief. It's mostly about the disturbing ambivalence and the ideological pettiness that this war has prompted, qualities that distinguish it from other wars in our history. In a long middle section of the article, Packer tries to come to grips with the conflict's strange character:

Iraq provided a blank screen onto which Americans projected anything they wanted, in part because so few Americans had anything at stake there. The war's proponents and detractors spoke of the conflict largely in theoretical terms: imperialism, democracy, unilateralism, weapons of mass destruction, pre-emption, terrorism, totalitarianism, neoconservativism, appeasement. The exceptions were the soliders and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.

Packer presents a scathing indictment of the Adminstration's conduct, arguing that "what prevented open and serious debate about the reasons for war was, above all, the character of the President." But he also scrutinizes ideologues and media voices on both sides who have seen in the war vindication of some narrow political position, as well as a Democratic opposition whose policies are bankrupt. He asks what happened to an anti-war movement that included millions of Americans in the buildup to the invasion but has essentially dissolved once the war became real.

The other night I was sitting with friends, discussing the state of the nation and asking what was the differecne between this conflict and Vietnam. Packer's article points out that Bush's behavior, his projection of a completely unmerited optimism, demonstrates that he's not "waiting up past midnight for the casualty figures to come in, like Lyndon Johnson in the Situation Room." No one in America is. For all of us, including the anti-war left, the conflict has become an empty echoing chamber into which all of our talk fades into nothingness. Public dissatisfaction with the war, the media blared last week, has reached record levels! Does that mean that the course of the war will alter significantly? Not likely.

I feel as if my own response to the war has been curiously neutered. Anesthetized. Packer and the father he profiles argue for a discourse based on truth rather than ideology, on trying to bring the reality of what's going on over there home to us. They call for leaders who can accept the "cognitive dissonance" of a war that was begun under false pretenses, which certainly did overthrow a despotic regime, which has brought about a certain form of democracy, and yet which may end up in only bringing more years of chaos to the nation it ostenbily was intended to save. That cannot be summarized into a few talking points. It's not as simple as "stay the course" or "bring the troops home now." We need leaders who are adult enough to begin that conversation, and who trust that the American people are adult enough to handle it.

I've started to think that the only way to effectively take action as a citizen in regard to the conflict is to argue for the re-instatement of the draft. An unlikely proposition, especially given recent poll figures about the war's popularity. But only with a universal draft, only if every family in America had some stake in what we were doing over there, only if every young man had to make a choice about what he was willing to risk his life for, would the war that we are all paying for be brought to the forefront of everyone's minds. Only then would we be compelled to demand the truth.

do not call list

2005-06-24T13:51:00.000-04:00

I've never been very good at games.

The type at which I excel fall into a couple of limited ranges. I'm great with games of factual recall, trivia games where all I have to do is unfailingly come up with the correct answer. Similarly, I'm good at games where all I have to do is consistently demonstrate some preternaturally charming and precocious skill -- parlor games like charades that require one to engage in creative thinking and mimicry, to act things out to the delight and amusement of others.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm competitive. Anyone who's played me in Trivial Pursuit can attest to that. But I suffer from a complete lack of strategic skill. When all I need to do is come up with the right answers time after time or to keep acting things out to the best of my ability, I flourish; when I need to choose between any number of options in order to dupe, outsmart, or deceive my opponent, I'm hopeless. I've never been very good at athletic contests for this reason (which, I would contend, trumps even my relatively unexceptional level of physical development). I'm no good figuring out when I should be on defense and when on offense, who I should kick the ball to, when's the right time to go "in for the kill." Tennis has always seemed more like an excuse to bat a ball back and forth than a system for idenifying my opponent's weaknesses and placing the ball in the part of the court that best takes advantage of them. I'm no good at that.

I'm worst at poker. Or any other card game that requires you to mask yourself, to act stealthily, to make wagers on a hand that you know is not strong, and to read your opponent's moves in the hopes of deciphering the reality behind his similarly encoded actions. I am a natural actor but not a natural con-man. Part of the reason is genetic -- I was bequeathed a face with absurdly, almost grotesquely expressive features that inadvertantly register the smallest flicker and variation of my internal mood. My features are so big that they play beyond the back row of the balcony, with a mouth as rubbery as a Kabuki warrior's painted one. And the skill that I've developed in acting classes is transparency, the ability to dredge up feelings and wear them on my sleeve. When I was acting in college and graduate productions, I perfected a type of thin-skinned emotional sensitivity, an art of expressing incredibly clearly the painful pathos beneath the surface. But even on the elementary playground I could impress my friends by making myself cry. I didn't do it by pretending to cry (i.e. fooling them), I just dipped into my well of sadness. I got sad in order to act sad.

All of which leads me to the game I am currently involved in. Right now, as we speak. It's one of those long ongoing games that continues, waking and sleeping, for the duration of play. Like a long-distance chess match conducted by post -- or telegraph or text message or email. Or in my case, conducted by the absence of telegraphs, text messages or emails.

I'm playing hard to get. That is, I'm taking the advice of more strategic friends and, against my natural inclination, refusing to contact someone. (Those up-to-date on recent developments in my personal life will be able to figure out who it is. Needless to say, I'm not quite as detached about the whole thing as I was when I wrote that relationships post a while back.)

I've played hard-to-get before, with quite a bit of success. The New York dating scene (especially, I think, between men) almost requires it for some reason. The hard part is not the not-calling. That's easy enough to go cold turkey -- you just declare that you will not call him, will send no emails, will send no text messages, and that when he calls you will let it go to voicemail without picking up. Easy enough, especially if you have friends monitoring you to make sure you don't fall off the wagon.

The hard part is the mental transformation required. To play effectively, you have to get into the right mindset -- meaning that you have to really be in it for the long haul. You have to internalize the fact that your decision to play hard to get may result in the relationship existing in a state of uncertainty for a good two weeks or so. You can't expect him to notice the fact that you're not calling for at least a few days, probably longer. (Hoping for anything sooner means that you've probably got an unrealistic sense of how big a part you play in his life -- or at least how big a part he wants it to appear you play. See how it gets tricky?)

You know you're in the mindset when friends suggest that you do things with them five days hence and instead of thinking, "Saturday night? But what if _____ calls me and wants to do something? I better keep the evening open," you start thinking, "Perfect! That way when he calls and asks what I'm doing Saturday, I can tell him I've already got plans."

And, yes, as long as there's a little bit of something there to begin with, this strategy is almost certain to inflame his desire eventually. I don't even think you have to worry about the possibility of his meeting someone else, due to the perverse logic that someone who doesn't seem to want you is always more attractive than someone who does.

The unfortuate part is that getting into the mindset seems to inevitably result in spite. You start hating the person. The longer this goes on, the more you start thinking, "Fine! I'll schedule a whole bunch of things so that bastard will feel even worse!" When you inevitably do end up spending time together again, every interaction will have become a mini-competition to prove who's more disinterested. Isn't it unfortunate that the very skills conventionally considered necessary to snag a man (competitiveness, deceit, acting in one's own self-interest) are the opposite of the ones needed to sustain a healthy relationship in the long term?

Moreover, the more time you spend not calling him and filling your appointment book with other pursuits and interests, the more you realize how unimportant he really is. You start to feel that peculiar form of loneliness known as autonomy, which is both heart-breaking and empowering and probably makes you a healthier person. It may have the unintentional side effect of making you totally bored with the guy and no longer feeling that he's the center of your universe, which is probably healthier, too, but doesn't do much for romance.

Of course the stupidest thing one could do when playing hard-to-get is writing a big, long, self-analytical post about it on one's blog. But I guess I'm going to take that risk. You see? I can't supress my innermost feelings -- they just pour out of me! The entirety of this blog attests to that.

Maybe what I really should do is drop the whole game paradigm and think about it as a science experiment. I'm not trying to "gain the upper hand" or anything like that. I'll drop all the competitiveness. Instead, I'm trying to resolve some doubts. I want to figure out if ____ really is inclined pro-actively to include me in his life. When I call him, I can never know if he would have sought out my company of his own accord. By not contacting him, I'm simply controlling one of the variables in hopes of determining the truth of the situation. That's a much less dramatic way of thinking of it.

But I've never been good at science either.

city of dreams

2005-06-12T10:36:00.000-04:00

Author Tom Wolfe may be a self-important conservative blowhard (not that I've read any of his novels, I just know him by reputation), but in today's New York Times he offers a very incisive, accurate accessment of the strange foundations of New York City at the dawn of the 21st Century (one that seems in line with things that I often try to say here, but never quite can). Since the article is weirdly clumped in with others on the Times' website (when you check the link, be sure to advance to the next page to read the whole thing), I'm going to cite the most pertinent passages below:

None of Gothamland's stocks in trade are tangible. Rather, all offer the sheer excitement, even euphoria, of being ... "where things are happening."

Humanity comes to New York not to buy clothes but, rather ... Fashion ...not to see musicals and plays but to experience "Broadway," which resembles the turn-of-the-19th-century trolley town one finds himself in upon entering Disneyland in California. If the traffic on Broadway should ever lack congestion, if the people ever stop spilling over the sidewalks and out into the street, if they ever stop hyperventilating in a struggle to get to the will-call window before the curtain goes up, the producers and theater owners should hire hordes of the city's unemployed actors to serve as extras and recreate it all...
After all, what does our city now live on? Why, something about as solid as a sharp intake of breath: the world's impression that Gothamland and only Gothamland ...is where things are happening.

upon further investigation...

2005-06-11T09:54:00.000-04:00

...I discovered that Johnny Depp's (and Julianne Mooore's) ad for Mont Blanc pens is some sort of charity tie-in. What I said in the previous post still holds generally true, but at least we now know that the man who embodied shoe-string filmmaker Ed Wood is not a total corporate sell-out.

hey, big spender

2005-06-08T19:30:00.000-04:00

I have many talents, but there's one thing I do better than absolutely anyone I've ever met. I am a fucking genius at identifying celebrity voiceovers. Whereas some viewers of advertisements are lulled into a state of ripe consumerism by the voice of a familiar actor that they have not consciously identified as familiar, my ears will perk up and I will almost always be able to identify whose voice it is before the end of the ad.

Julia Roberts for AOL.
Richard Dreyfus for Nissan.
Stockard Channing for AIG Insurance.
Patricia Clarkson for BMW.

All of these recent examples, however, prompt the question, "Why the fuck are so many celebrities doing ads these days?" This interesting article in Slate examines the phenomenon in the context of the history of advertising, but I don't think it goes deep enough. It seems like every celebrity is doing this these days, and we're not talking minor league celebrities like Suzanne Summers hawking the Thigh Master. This is Julia-highest-grossing-female-actress-Roberts we're talking about!

Of course, when it's a voiceover you're hidden by a cloak of anonymity. But there are big name actors who aren't afraid to put their mug right out there for a product (think of those American Express ads with Robert DeNiro, and now Kate Winslet). I'm excluding fashion ads from this, because I think we all can see why stars might be in fashion ads. But pens??? Both Julianne Moore and Johnny Depp (for the love of God!!) can be seen on a number of telephone billboards in the Gramercy Park area promoting some classy fountain pen. How did this come about? Did the pen representative approach them at the Independent Spirit Awards or something and demonstrate his wares? Using Johnny Depp (who's so famously anti-establishment) to promote your product is a brilliant strategy. You're like, "Whoa, if Jonny Depp likes that pen so much, it really must be good! It must, like, save starving children in Africa or something!"

Which brings us, of course, to the political implications of all of this. I think a lot about celebrity voiceovers (especially since identifying them is my most unique talent), but it wasn't until the other night when I heard George Clooney's voice on TV extolling the virtues of Budweiser that I got worked up enough to write this post. There's no way that George Clooney drinks Budweiser. In fact, I would suspect that -- like most limousine liberal Blue Staters -- he has almost no respect for Budweiser as an organization. Yet, he'll use them to earn some extra spending cash.

This pandemic of celebrity endorsement is further evidence of the long reach of the tentacles of multinational corporations. It has started to get me worried about art as a pursuit. I'm not going to get all sanctimonious on you; I know that art and commerce have been intertwined since the age of Shakespeare. And I certainly don't fault George Clooney for doing a stupid commercial film like One Fine Day (remember that one? romantic comedy with Michelle Pfeiffer?) so that he can produce more edgy, less bankable work. I understand the principle behind that and I accept it. But at least in that situation, the artist is still functioning as an artist and not trading in on his associations (which for George Clooney make him the Hollywood equivalent of Eliot Spitzer, a leftie heartthrob) to be a salesman pure and simple.

Maybe it's always been this way and I've only just now cottoned on to the extent of the corruption. It was only really this past year, for example, that I thought to myself, "Hey, the Tony Awards are just one big advertisement!" That's what they are -- a commercial advertisement created by an exclusionary cabal of capitalist racketeers intended to lure impressionable Midwesterners to the Big Apple to "experience the joys of live theater." If the purpose of the show were really the awards, then the bulk of it would not be taken up by huge glitzy musical numbers for show that aren't gonna win any awards (Sweet Charity). If it were really about honoring artistic work, then the nominees would not be restricted to work that was performed in a handful of specific theaters not distinguished so much by their geographical location (i. e. "Broadway") as by the people who own them.

Commercial structures can produce great art (cf. Elizabethan theater or much of the output of Hollywood before 1945); they can create great popular art, which is harder to do. It's easy to make acclaimed work that appeals to a limited group of overeducated, elitist snobs or to affluent philistines looking for a little intellectual cachet to rub off on them (which is essentially what all "non-commercial" theater in America does these days).

In America, we have one big come-on masquerading as a culture. When supposedly "liberal" stars and media outlets are falling all over themselves to be just as profit-hungry as the robber barons they scold, you realize that everyone, everywhere is buying into corporate culture, some are just afraid to show their faces doing it .

i beg to differ

2005-06-05T17:58:00.000-04:00

Normal people use their weekends to do relaxing things. They spend long mornings reading the newspaper and sipping coffee. They go for a stroll around town and pop into a flea market. They sit out in sidewalk cafes and let the hours pass, chatting and sipping drinks.

Normal people. Normal, upper middle-class New Yorkers. Les bourgeois.

I don't know if I'm worried, but I am changing. The first paragraph of this entry is a relatively accurate description of the weekend I just had. I did a couple of other "less normal" things -- such as attending a teacher training for a volunteer arts school for disadvantaged young people, and taking some time (not enough) to work on revisions of a play of mine. But my bourgie buzzer has been sounding a lot more frequently these days and I don't quite know what to make of it.

It all has to do with settling in. It's a form of cultural tropism, through which you gradually and involuntarily acquire habits and attitudes characteristic of your environment. The pull of Manhattan living is just too strong.

Come to think of it, I went through a similar evolution when I was studying at Oxford. I arrived relatively militant and countercultural, rejecting the culture of weeknight pub-going, fancy dinners and overall lounging as an affront to productivity, even morality. We'd been given all of this privilege, this time removed from the hustle and bustle of the workaday world, in order to think deep and work hard and contemplate serious issues, not just to sample life's pleasures like latter day Sebastian Flytes! By the end of my stay there, of course, I was sipping champagne on the manicured lawns with the rest of them, eating strawberries in a punt and justifying it all by saying, "You only live once."

The point, I guess, is that when you first move to a new place you come with a set of assumptions -- and, if you're me, those assumptions often form the basis of an immediate cultural critique. I arrive in Oxford or Manhattan or wherever with a goal or a purpose in mind that is somehow contributive to my greater personal trajectory, the ongoing project of my artistic/professional vocation. And I have no time for whatever the local manifestations of the irrelevant hedonism of late capitalist culture happen to be. I arrive with my internal metronome set on a rhythm that does not stop. I try to cram in so much that weekends become precious resources -- "outside-of-work" time that's available for developing all kinds of side projects. It becomes time to accomplish something, not time to just enjoy.

But then, at a certain point (often around 1.5 years in), I start to realize why all those people around me are enjoying all of those pleasures. Because it is really nice to sleep in on a Sunday morning (especially if there's a nubile, recent Columbia graduate in the bed with you) and to get up and have breakfast and stroll around and do nothing and pop in and out of stores and read things and discuss. At times, I live my life as if Henry Ford were looking over my shoulder, urging me onward to be more productive. This syndrome is different from conventional "workaholism." It's the psychological predisposition towards activities that have impact, that will change society, better something, contribute something.

What a lot of people -- a lot of privileged urbanites, whether they live in New York or Europe -- have been raised on, though, and come to value is a culture of digestion. It's not just about sampling all of those pleasures, it's about savoring them, sitting and letting them work through your system. It's about appreciating the good things in life.

(Doesn't Martha Stewart always say that? "That's a good thing." I've come to realize that for a certain class of people the default use of good is almost always an aesthetic one, as you would apply the word to a wine. I'm more inclined to use the word in a grander, Kantian sense, with moral and social justice implications: "Sure this is all nice, but is it really good??")

I started out my life in New York self-consciously trying to be different. Different from my fellow Ivy League graduates, different from the other returning Rhodes Scholars and the grad school students. Different, too, from my fellow young aspiring artists whose main social goal so often seems to be conceived only in aesthetic terms. I wasn't going to live as other people do and whenever people asked me questions -- about where I worked or how I lived -- I wanted the answers, on some level, to raise eyebrows.

"Really? You have a communal living situation -- with Mennonites?" "You work 40 hours a week trying to 'end homelessness' while you're also trying to build a career in the theater?" My fundamental motives for living and working as I have been are genuine ones, but there's also an element of trying to live as differently as possible from everyone else around me, even my friends. To be in the culture, but not of it. And to an extent that's a worthy goal; taken to its self-serving extreme, it can become perverse.

Now, as I face the impending inevitability of my finding a new place to live (most likely a much more conventional place, where I have my own apartment and my own bourgeois trappings), I feel as if I'm at risk of over-normalization. Why not live communally forever? I love it so. The answer is, of course, that I could do that if I wanted to, but that would be a choice -- a choice that is not only different, but also difficult. My situation at Menno House doesn't put a lot of burdens on me -- it's cheap rent, a few minor obligations and really nice people. It's really a great deal, but it comes with the air of living on the edge, of challenging the cultural norm. Perpetuating that is a harder thing to do.

Bringing people back to where I live or telling them about how I live (whether they're friends or potential lovers) causes raised eyebrows and expressions of admiration, yes, but also sometimes responses of confusion. Why not take advantage of certain comforts if they're there? You're not a monk. What's so great about renunciation? "A lot!" I'm inclined to whine, and I still believe that. But there's also a lot that's great (and healthy) about enjoying yourself. It's a balancing act: when does enjoyment become indulgence? Especially since I was raised Catholic, this issue will probably always plague me.

The conclusion to draw, though, is probably that living counterculturally is not more worthy in and of itself. Things defined in opposition to something else tend, at their core, to possess a fundamental emptiness. What the heck do I value most of all? That's the question to ask. Little quotidian calculations of worthiness and justification, having faith that I'm being honest with myself and not being seduced into bourgeois self-delusion...

Well, I think and talk so much about the moral justification for every damn little thing I do that at least I know this much: it's not going to creep up on me. I'm gonna be choosing every step of the way.

to the marriage of true minds admit imediments

2005-05-24T23:04:00.000-04:00

I'm not in a relationship. I'm not.

I don't want to jinx anything, or jump the gun, but let's just say that interactions with a certain young man have got me thinking a lot recently about relationships and what they might be like. As a member of that rare group of men in their mid-twenties who has never once been anybody's boyfriend (not in high school, not in college), I think I'm uniquely qualified to offer up a few thoughts about the phenomenon as I approach the edge of the precipice.

First: the grass is always greener. When you've never gone steady with anybody, being tied down to some particular someone seems like the fucking greatest thing in the world. You have no sympathy for friends who complain about problems in their years-long relationships. All you can think of is how great it would be to have someone who was committed to you -- just you -- and you think it will totally validate your worth as a person.

I used to always think, "All I really want is to know that there's someone out there who's always gonna be thinking of me as much as I'm thinking of them." When you're in college and you see people who are in relationships, you marvel how they both know the other's class schedule and how they plan their lives around it. It's not so much about the easy access to sex or even affection -- it's really more about the confirmation that you are someone else's top priority, that there's never an instant of the day when someone is not caring about you and wishing you were with them.

And, of course, all of those desires are pretty egocentric. They're more about charting your position on some system of existential coordinates. They're about stating, "I exist, I matter" and needing someone else's confirmation of those statements.

People do have relationships like the one I describe above (especially when they're in college) but are those actually healthy at all? The answer is a resounding no.

I used to go around thinking (and sometimes saying), "How come everyone I know is in a relationship and I never have been? I have SO MUCH love to give. I would be the best, most selfless, most generous boyfriend ever. I would totally never be petty or annoyed. I would just be so appreciative, unlike those ungrateful motherfuckers who take relationships for granted, as if you can just pick them up at the local mini-mart! I am so ready for commitment."

That was then.

Recently, I did some self-assessment and I started to wonder whether, when I die, the deepest, most profound, and most satisfying relationships in my life won't indeed turn out to have been my (numerous) friendships. I've got a lot of really satisfying friendships that I put a lot of effort into and that I get a lot out of. These aren't just people I hang out with, they're people I share my deepest desires and fears with. I'm a pretty committed friend.

I had sort of come around to accepting that reality about myself when it started to seem like maybe actually I might end up having a boyfriend after all. And I started thinking, "Whoa! How is this going to affect my friendships? How is everyone going to cope with me having someone in my life who is suddenly more important than everyone else?"

But that's bullshit.

We're taught -- by movies, reality TV, Victorian novels and Shakespearean plays (basically by works of fiction) -- to prioritize romantic relationships above all others, but not really for any good reason. In modern day America it's assumed that everyone is seeking a life partner, gunning for that marriage announcement in the New York Times (same-sex couples now included!) accompanied by a photo with just two heads in it. You and me against the world, baby. Just the two of us. When you get married, that takes precedence over all the ties that have come before. Just ask Terry Schiavo...

But isn't it possible that someone could be closer to their mother, or their brother, or their housemates or their co-workers or their artistic collaborators than the person they happen to be sleeping or even living with? There are all kinds of ways to piece together a life and all kinds of things that are important. This logic seems kind of weird; it's countercultural. It goes against the cult of Valentine's Day, for sure, and and indeed the cult of marriage as the primary social unit.

Certain pop-cultural products seem to argue implicitly for this position. I'm thinking primarily of certain types of chick flicks (like Beaches) that boil down to, "Boys may come and boys may go, but your girlfriends are what really matter!" The final episode of Sex and the City (I'm told) could be summarized in pretty much this same way, couldn't it?

But that position basically seems to me like a sort of compensation for people who are dissatisfied with failed romance. After all, when's the best time to watch a chick flick? When you've just brken up with your boyfriend!

The position I'm advancing is somewhat more radical, especially in this day and age when the term "sanctity of marriage" gets tossed around as if it were an undeniable truth. What the hell is marriage anyway? In a certain sense, it's not even very Christian. Why should I say I love this person and am committed to him or her more than to anyone else? Wouldn't it be more Christian to live with a whole bunch of people, a community, and to devote the same care and attention to all of them?

In certain other cultures (I understand) the marriage of two people is not the primary defining societal unit. Married couples get absorbed into larger extended family or even village units. The idea of marriage as the fundamental building block of siciety is a symptom of modernity. Some people would probably trace it back to the Renaissance innovation of "marriage-for-love" (perhaps best enumerated by John Milton). In other words, it needn't be so. Society would not dissove if we re-considered the ways in which we pair off.

There's something nice about the idea of having a romantic relationship -- sharing things that are not just sexual with someone, but that are emotionally intimate as well -- but not building it up and saying "This thing must by virtue of being a romantic relationship therefore be the most important thing in my life." Why can't your relationship with your boyfriend be one of many important and un-ranked attachments that you have in your life? Certainly if there weren't so many expectations and significances piled onto our relationships, more of them might work out better or last longer.

I say all this because I'm thinking about this guy and thinking that we may indeed end up saying something to the effect of "I'm going to commit to you exclusively. I'm going to pledge not to have sex with anyone else. I'm going to see you quite a bit." But that doesn't have to mean that I'm going to say, "You're the most important person in my life to the exclusion of all others" or "I'm going to share more with you than with anyone else." Maybe I will come around to saying that eventually, but if I don't there's nothing wrong with that.

We're all hindered, I think, by the idea that our lives have to fit into some kind of acceptable, easily identifiable model. That's one of the problematic side effects of our hetero-normative binary culture. One of the most beneficial aspects of the "queering" of American life has been the small but persistent challenge to the perceived inevitability of pairing off. That's why I am totally in favor of same-sex couples having the right to marry and yet still ambivalent as to whether it's a good thing to promote marriage as the ideal one-size-fits-all social unit. My aunt (a former nun, now basically a celibate sextagenarian) is not married and has never had a romantic partner, yet she's managed to forge some of the most durable, meaningful bonds with other people that I have ever seen.

We lead lives of many different shapes and our connections with others extend outward in many different ways. Haven't we advanced far enough as a species that we can embrace that multiplicity?

testing... testing...

2005-05-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

I've got AIDS on the brain.

After reading a troubling (and somewhat overlong) article in the New Yorker last night about rising rates of HIV infection in the gay male population, I spent a significant portion of my time at work today researchig the history of GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis), the first AIDS advocacy group. This was for our June "gay pride"-themed newsletter at work. I came across this quite amazing timeline on the GMHC website. Reading about the early years of the epidemic was revelatory -- these were years that I was living through but the horrors of the disease did not at all penetrate my childhood world. I can remember the Reagan-Mondale election and the Challenger explosion but it was not until Magic Johnson's revelation that I even feel like I had any clue what AIDS was. (A result, probably, of the Reagan-Helms-et al. effort to hide/deny the reality of the disease, an effort that resulted in hugely increasing the number of infections.)

Most significantly for me today, though, I went and got my first HIV test. I am going to come clean to all of you and say that this is because I had some unprotected sex last weekend. I did not know my status at the time (and still don't -- I'll get the results next week). It was a really, really stupid thing for a "smart" guy to do -- especially considering that I was not really drunk, not on crystal meth, and work with HIV/AIDS patients at my job every day.

The thought process when you decide to do that goes something like this: "Well, I've been pretty sexually active for the past year or so but I've mostly used condoms. No one's ever penetrated me without a condom on. I was definitely negative before. I'm probably negative now. I'm giving it to him. He wants it without the condom and it's not really very likely that I'm gonna get it by giving anal sex, is it???" Not the greatest logic. But it's the sort of thing that, when testosterone is rushing into my head, I'm likely to say to myself. And I'm ashamed to say that I might well say something to myself like that again....

Before you start sending me "You're so stupid! What the fuck are you thinking?!?" posts, let me just write my reactions to getting my first test (at a free anonymous New York City testing site).

The place was in Chelsea (that's where I work), but a pretty unfashionable section of it -- nearer to the projects than the trendy clubs. The clinic opened to the public at 8:30am but when I arrived around 8:00 there were already 10-12 people who'd formed a line outside waiting. The group was somewhat amazing: young black males (a couple of whom appeared to be high), young gay white males my age (trendily dressed and reading stylish magazines), a Latina teenager talking non-stop on her cell phone, a very bedraggled and somewhat upset looking middle-aged white woman who looked like she hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before, and even a threesome of one cookie-cutter blonde gay boy and two fag hags who looked liked they'd wandered out of a Sex-and-the-City-fan-club meeting (it was hard to tell which of them was there to test -- were they all?).

We all stood for a good thirty minutes as Parks Department workers used a leaf blower to clean up the courtyard around us. It was hard to know where to look. You didn't want to stare at people too hard because you suspected that some of them were very much on edge and might think you were judging them. There was a weirdly cruisy dynamic among the three or four lone gay men peppered throughout the crowd, each of us trying to be as nonchalant and self-immersed as possible (one of the others had a Norman Mailer book with him that he was reading).

Inside, we sat for a long time in a waiting room as a ten-minute public service announcement about HIV testing played on a video screen in a continuous loop: first in English, then in Spanish, then in English again. Everyone else seemed to be tuning it out after they'd watched it once through, but I couldn't. I hadn't brought any reading material and besides I'm not good at focusing on something else when any kind of media is being projected. I waited a good hour and fifteen minutes before I was called and that video kept playing and playing. Maybe that's the point. To just drill the message in: "HIV can be transmitted by the following bodily fluids -- blood, semen, pre-ejaculate, vaginal fluid, breast milk..." I'm never going to forget that.

I feel a little bit uncomfortable writing this and I don't know how everyone out there is going to react to it, but getting my HIV test sort of made me feel good. And I don't mean good like the people depicted in the video who say things like, "Now at least I know -- what a relief!" (I still don't know and won't until I pick up the results next Friday.) The squeamishness and uncertainty that I felt in that ugly, ugly waiting room feels like a good thing. It brought me down a peg. It's hard to condescend to the elementary tone of the video ("Did you use a condom every time you had sex? Every time?") when you know that you're there because you did something kind of dumb.

There was an incredible frankness and a dropping of pretense in that room. People who wouldn't feel comfortable sitting next to each other on the subway were sitting there wondering lots of the same questions, experiencing the same fears. (Unfortunately, that equality doesn't extend far after someone's been diagnosed -- those with medical coverage and some money to spend on anti-retrovirals have a much easier time of things, as do those HIV positive people who live in communities where being infecting is less suspect and stigmatizing.)

When I went in to be screened by a middle aged Carribbean woman, I had absolutely no problem telling her how many times I'd given it to somebody up the butt in the last three months. It was almost as if everyone in the room had said something like, "OK, this is serious. Let's drop all that bullshit about identity and discomfort and get down to brass tacks."

People who work in HIV prevention often seem to have that bluntness; it can be jarring when you're an extremely sheltered, virginal college freshman arriving at a place where you're obligated to sit through demonstrations of how to place a condom on a wooden penis. No doubt that frankness makes aging, celibate Catholic bishops all the more uncomfortable and thus more intractible when people ask them, "Why can't you distribute condoms in your health clinics in Africa?" But when you work every day under the spectre of that disease, you don't have time for bullshit or niceties. It's all about practicality.

There ought to be a perverse solidarity about AIDS because the virus is so indiscriminate. For so long it was presented as a concern only for "degenerates," but ironically that very stigmatization helped it spread into all communities. We're all sleeping around and AIDS has made that clear. We can't hide under the veil of respectability anymore. Even we who work in social services and have to act all put together and superior to our "clients" day in and day out have to admit that we, too, make stupid choices and fuck up sometimes. AIDS ought to make us rally together, to forget all the small stuff and feel closer to one another. Unfortunately, though -- because of money, race, religious intolerance, and apathy -- that day of universal solidarity is still a long way off.

troubled

2005-05-10T21:32:00.000-04:00

I didn't plan to write another post about Catholicism. I thought I'd just maintain a "wait-and-see" attitude on Pope Benedict XVI. Though I consider myself a political radical when it comes to issues of war, poverty and justice, I'm not a party-line secular American liberal. When it comes to consideration of the "conservative" opinions on certain thorny issues -- notably right-to-life ones -- I'm inclined to give both sides equal time.

But tonight I read Peter J. Boyer's New Yorker piece on the conservative ascendency in the Church, and it has really shaken me. There are few recent incidents in contemporary Church history that I found more shameful than the effort last year to deny John Kerry (and, as promoted by some extremists, Catholics who voted for John Kerry) communion, ostensibly because of his support for laws that keep abortion legal. I comforted myself, though, with the thought that the American Conference of Catholic Bishops had come down against the politicization of communion, had rejected in effect the single-issue morality that seems to say "one's position on abortion rights is a litmus test that trumps all other factors in determining your allegiance to the faith." The Bishops' position in the past, one to which I still adhere, is that Catholics should embrace a "consistent ethic of life," that rejects not only abortion but capital punishment, war, as well as political and economic policies that contribute to poverty.

It turns out, though, that I was wrong. In fact, as the Bishops were meeting this summer and considering their position, they received a starkly conservative message from the Vatican. This message was suppressed by the more prgoressive leaders of the conference, but was later leaked in the Italian press. It read:

Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to receive Holy Communion... There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty but not, however, with regard to abortion and euthanasia... [Politicians who support abortion rights should be warned against it, and if] the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it.

At one time, that position would have rightly been regarded as a radical fringe opinion, not so much conservative as totally extremist. But the man who wrote those words (less than a year ago), Joseph Ratzinger, is now the Pope.

It's hard to describe how I felt to read that. The sentiment -- to deny the Eucharist in that way, to refuse to distribute a sacrament that all Catholics believe is "life-giving" -- is, in fact, un-Christian. It's medieval. It's despotic and it has really forced me to reconsider a statement that I have often made (without hesitation and often to the shock of liberals in the room) that I would "renounce my American citizenship before I ever renounced my membership in the Catholic Church." I don't know whether I would say that or not any more, but perhaps (according to Pope Benedict), the choice of renouncing isn't mine to make. It seems like they don't want to have me.

Here's another choice (and chilling) quote from the article. This is from Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, a leading enforcer of right-leaning orthodoxy:

We're at a time for the Church in our country when some Catholics--too many--are
discovering that they've gradually become non-Catholics who happen to go to Mass. That's sad and difficult, and a judgment on a generation of Catholic leadership. But it may be exactly the moment of truth the Church needs.

Well, there are an awful lot of other "non-Catholics" out there who happen not only to go to Mass, but to pray, to dedicate their lives to charity, to work for social justice, to read Scripture, to spread the Good News, and to remain fervently to Jesus Christ and the saints. I suppose the Chuch would do better without all of us?

local boy

2005-05-03T21:11:00.000-04:00

Fo the past several mornings, I have awoken to a series of news stories on WNYC (our local NPR affiliate) about the proposed re-zoning of the Williamsburg/Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Every time I hear anything about this topic, my heart skips a beat. Yes, that's right -- re-zoning gives me palpitations.

Why? Because mulling over issues like that makes me feel like New York is my city. I know where Williamsburg and Greenpoint are. I know a bunch of people who live there (unfortunately, they're the type of hipster artists who are contributing to the area's gentrification). Moreover, I work for a non-profit housing developer. Housing is on my brain all the time. Food and shelter. A living wage. These are the social issues I think about more than anything else. In other words, I've gone back to basics.

On the front page of the New York Times today, there was a picture of some Williamsburg houses with a view beyond of the Manhattan skyline. On the front page of the Times. There have recently been major stories in The New Yorker about Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to built a stadium on Manhattan's far West Side and about yet another proposed stadium in downtown Brooklyn. Does anyone in, say, Detroit or Los Angeles or London really want to read about these matters? Do they care about New York real estate -- in the outer boroughs?!

I haven't read the international news pages in months. Nowadays, I turn right to the Metro section because it feels like that's where the meat of the news is. That's where I'm actually going to learn something. (I apologize for the frequent italicization.) When I was in Oxford, reading the Times online, the stories I clicked on were all Afghanistan, Israel/Paelstine, Colin Powell testifies before the UN. I was imaginatively entering the corridors of world power and filling with righteous outrage at Bush, Blair and Sharon -- inscensed that a cabal of neocons was out to reconfigure the global balance of power!

I've been filled with rage and sadness reading about the casualties in Iraq and the bungled diplomacy in Iran and North Korea. I think I got burnt out on it. John Kerry's entire campaign was fueled by that rage (not in the candidate -- he rarely expressed any strong emotions -- but in the voters who backed him because they thought it would quell the rage). The election of 2004 felt cataclysmic, but no one can live indefinitely at that high a pitch. (Well, I guess some people can, but they become less than human -- policy wonks like Tom Friedman or like many of my fellow international scholarship recipients.)

2005 is an election year, too -- the mayoral election in New York City. And I have a status that I never really had in 2004: I'm a swing voter. Really, I am. This election is so interesting to me because it's cast in shades of gray; it's all about compromise. "I like this guy for this position but not for this one." "Well, he's got a good record on that issue, but what about the stadium...?" On the local level, elections are rarely about "the vision thing"; they're about re-allocation of funds, they're about courting union support, offering goodies to various ethnic constituencies and trying to please a whole lot of different people.

My vote is quite honestly up for grabs. I like Mike Bloomberg quite a lot. There's actually soemthing genuine about a guy who says, "Well, I ran a business pretty well, why not try to run the city?" I don't think anyone believes he became mayor to move onto higher office or to advance the interests of his fellow billionaires. He's done some totally unexpected things, not least of all investing an unprecedented amount of city money and energy towards the goal of ending homelessness (that's right, folks, ending it) through new supportive housing models.

On the left, you've got Democrats complaining about the stadium and calling it a kickback for business interests. Maybe it is, but most of these local Dems don't seem beyond handing out a few kickbacks themselves. I don't know what I think about the stadium plans or all of the other proposed re-development projects. I think it's important that incentives be given for the developers to include affordable units, but then you get into arguments about 20% and 40% and you get a lot of quibbling back and forth about what's really in the city's best interest. Balancing job creation with the preservation of housing for low-to-moderate income people. And those issues can't be resolved easily. There is no clear answer (as far as I know) about what exactly the best formula for economic development is. But they're asking that question. They're asking, "What can the government do to improve the lives of people in this city?"

I'm not set on Bloomberg but I do like the confidence of his vision. I've recently become intrigued by the unfortunately-named Congressman Anthony Weiner as a possible alternative choice. The whole race makes me want to attend a mayoral candidates' forum and to really listen to what they have to say. When was the last time you approached listening to a politician with an open mind, rather than knowing from the get-go whether or not you would wind up indignant after he'd finished?

So much of what I value has to do with community. The theme is a strong throughline in my life -- it comes up in the job I do, in the place and people I live with, in my understanding of my religion. And community is tied inextricably to locality. People come to New York to escape small-town life, expecting to remake themselves in a World Capital that is the equal of Paris or Tokyo etc. etc. But New York is also a small town. Decisions that affect all of us are made by small-minded, unphotogenic career politicians in City Hall or in Albany. No matter how much globalization shrinks the world, everyone will still have to live somewhere, everyone will still have a neighborhood.

Maybe it's because I'm from Boston, but I relate to things that are parochial. I'm drawn to those things in New York that are specific, peculiar, local and not noteworthy on a world scale. Those are the things that can really become yours. They're sized to own. And it seems like the community-level, the level of the parochial is where individual people can really make a differnece.

There's something to be said for thinking small.

new kid on the block

2005-04-25T16:55:00.000-04:00

Yes, I am here to officially "out" Desiree as a newly enfranchised blogger. Go to her page. This will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

it is accomplished!

2005-04-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

For several months now, I have been slogging through Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. It's a book that I've always wanted to read and the Scorsese movie version impacted me a lot when I saw it in college. Ben and Kyle both read and loved it. So last winter, just before Christmas time, I started the novel... and couldn't stand it.

It was weird because I had always assumed that it would be right up my alley. I had assumed that Kazantzakis's project was similar to what I did in my play Three Days in the Tomb (which is being officially given an "honorable mention," though not performed, in D.C. this week at the Catholic University of America as part of their Religious One-Act Play Festival). I thought he was re-dramatizing the life of Jesus as a human being, making his choices realer and more contemporary. I was immediately turned off by the "fruitiness" of the book (for lack of a better word), the weird mysticism, the florid metaphors, the fact that all of the characters (from Magdalene, to Judas, to Samuel) all seemed to have grown up with Jesus and to be some cousin of his. It was a weird book and I couldn't figure out what it was getting at. Rather than altering scripture it tended to reproduce many of the gospel stories almost exactly as the Bible depicts them. When things were altered, it was seemingly random. I could find no pattern to the madness but I'd invested so much time into reading it (I'd gotten through about 350 pages) that I refused to give up. I just put my reading on hold.

Since Christmas I refrained from reading other books because I had the last 150 pages of Last Temptation waiting for me. But every time I tried to pick it up I got confused, or bored, or lost in the story or I quickly fell asleep. My high school English teacher/drama coach, David W. Frank, was fanous for his arbitrary rules; one was, "If you've read less than 50 pages of a book and it doesn't interest you, you can set it aside with a clear mind. But if you've read past page 50, you owe it to yourself it finish it." (Which is a weird rule: surely the page count should be on a sliding scale!)

Anyway, today I finished it and I will conclude this much: it got better. The mysticism achieved more of a sustained power the closer you got to the crucifixion. There were some incredible, extra-Scriptural passages (like when the corpse-like resuscitated Lazarus is hanging out with the dsiciples or when Simon of Cyrene comes to scold them as they hide from the Jews). I didn't buy the psychological depiction of Jesus in the early part of the book; his mood swings seemed arbitrary and he didn't feel real. He still didn't feel "real" by the end, but I think I came to understand what Kazantzakis was trying to do: exploring the struggles between the Spirit and the Flesh, reconciling the truths that he (Kazantzakis) had discovered in Christianity, but also in Buddhism, Nietzsche, Marxism etc. His take on Christianity is fraught with a lot of hang-ups, but they're not necessarily the same hang-ups that I have, so I'm not immediately drawn into his thrashing out of them. It's a personal vision and a complelling one, but one that I would have preferred to get in a smaller dose.

There were two quotes from the last two chapters, though, that I liked:

The Apostle Paul addressing Jesus: "I create the truth, create it out of obstinacy and longing and faith. I don't struggle to find it--I build it. I build it taller than men and thus I make men grow. If the world is to be saved, it is necessary--do you hear--absolutely necessary for you to be crucified, and I shall crucify you, like it or not; it is necessary for you to be resurrected, and I shall resurrect you, like it or not."
Thomas: "A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs."

So, I got something out of the long ordeal. But mostly, I'm just happy to be able to move on! Next on my reading list: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan & the Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto and Saturday by Ian McEwan.

And maybe someday I'll get around to watching that other famous dramatization of Christ that I've always assumed I'm going to love, Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Word to the wise, though: Don't (always) believe the hype.

skin

2005-04-18T10:05:00.000-04:00

Devoted readers of this blog (Are there any of you still out there? No one's posting comments!) may have noticed that my entries have become decidedly more personal, focusing less and less on world events and social problems and more and more on me. Perhaps this is an inevitable degeneration. I'm not going to try and fight it by writing a post about the revolution in Kyrgyzstan or anything like that. After all, it's my birthday this week, so I deserve it! (I've been saying that a lot recently -- it's a wonderful rationalization.)

I love New York during the first days of spring. Specifically, I love the East Village at this time of year. There's nothing quite so enjoyable as walking down Avenue A on a sunny evening or afternoon and watching the street life. One should be wearing sandals or (preferably) flip-flops. One should have nowhere to go really. And one should walk with a particularly aimless gait.

I've been told all my life, by everyone, that I walk fast. It's just natural to me -- I want to get where I'm going and I book it like a maniac. That's just the natural pace at which my legs move and sometimes I think it makes me appear prissy or uptight, like I'm running around with a stick up my ass. But on a walk like the one I took yesterday -- walking for no reason past Tompkins Square Park and all the funky little sidewalk cafes, the boutiques and bars, picking up a pineapple-papaya-mango smoothie -- I just SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. Naturally, without even trying.

My walk was not completely without purpose. It was a sort of fact-finding mission. I popped into a few East Village tattoo parlors because I've decided to get an image inscribed on my skin. Yes, that's right. I'm going to pay to have myself scarred. (I read this website called something like "Tips for Teens: Should You Get a Tattoo?" that was very insistent on letting the teens know that a tattoo was actually a scar.)

Why am I doing this, you might ask. Sadly (and I did confess that this blog has degenerated), I think the primary reason may be because I've hooked up with a couple of guys who have tattoos and I think it's really hot. Or, more frankly, I have some crazy idea that getting one will make me hotter. And I know that that's not true, of course. But whenever I do think of what it will be like to have one, my mind jumps to me waking up in bed with someone looking at it, both of us naked and loving each other. My crazy logic could be reduced to: "tattoo on skin = boyfriend in bed." Which is absurd.

But I'm gonna get it anyway. Some people are for it, some totally against. Almost everyone seems surprised, though. One person said to me, "I think you should definitely do it. It's so out of character." He was both right and wrong.

A tattoo is (literally) a character imprinted on your skin. If it seems out of character for me to have one, that's only because looking at me from the outside you don't see my innermost character -- my desire, my vulnerability, my sensuousness. All of those lusts and insecurities that drive me and make me think about skin and touch and nakedness. All of that's buttoned up.

Tattoos are externalizations of desire. They're like journal entries or creative writing assignments or blog entries that you wear on yourself. That's probably what makes them somewhat inappropriate for polite company. Some people don't want to see the internal externalized. It's a bit unseemly.

Getting a tattoo -- whatever the image may turn out to be -- is, for me at least, another form of "coming out." Acknowledging my sexual desire seemed unseemly, too. My rationalization for that was always, "Well, I admit -- to myself -- that I have those feelings but I don't have to act on them." Just speaking about your sexuality -- bringing it out into the open -- completes you, unifies you, makes you whole. (I sound like Lynn Redgrave at the end of Kinsey!) It breaks down internal barriers and creates a healthy kind of transparency between different parts of oneself. So why not put a picture on my skin? There's more than a bit of edginess, of sensuality inside of me. Why not be more transparent? Why not wear my insides like a new set of clothes?

I don't want to over-analyze the significance of this image I'm planning to get. Because I don't think the picture itself, the character, has to define me. I also am not saying that everyone in the world needs to get a tatoo in order to self-actualize. But I sort of feel like I do. At least, I do right now. And it almost doesn't matter what the image is (within reason). It's more about the choice, the risk, the confidence, the willingness to display. It's the physical imprint of a year and a half of changes going on in me. It's a scar from all of those growing pains, but a healthy scar. Scars are reminders, too.

So, what's it going to be? And where? I'll get back to you on the second question, though I'm now thinking it'll be somewhere on my back. As for the image, I've been playing around with the idea of an olive branch, which seems simple, classy, and in-line with my philosophical outlook. But I've also been thinking of this image and I can't quite shake it.

It's a little bit weird and embarrassing maybe to have a medieval pelican tattooed on one's body. Bur it's also distinctive. There's a whole history to the medieval conception of the pelican as a symbol of Christ.

Of all the images I've considered getting, it's probably the one that tells you the most about who I am and the kinds of things I think about. It tells you a lot more than just "I think it's hot to have a tattoo," which is unseemly enough in and of itself. For all those reasons, it may be too revelatory to wear around, to have exposed on me for the rest of my life (barring laser surgery, of course). But, then again, maybe that's what I need to reveal.

finally(?)

2005-04-11T23:01:00.000-04:00

You don't know it, but you've been deprived.

That's right, dear readers (assuming there are any of you left out there), I wrote two lengthy, lovely blog postings last week that got chewed up by the software and are gone forever into the ether. I felt like blaming the Vatican -- perhaps they were conspiring to make sure that my (relatively) laudatory blog entry about the late Pope would remain as the most recent posting on my blog forever! As time went by and I hadn't posted anything, I began to worry:

Did I really like John Paul II all that much? Had I gone a bit over the top?
Would people who happened upon the blog be immediately turned off and think I was a member of Opus Dei?
Was there anything other than Catholicism I found it worthwhile to comment on?

It's kind of fitting, I guess, that my Pope posting remained up there for so long. It certainly mirrored the fixation of the rest of the media for the past week. You have to hand it to the Catholics; what other religion (especially one that is frequently being described as moribund) could command such attention for so many days straight? I mean, nothing was happening after the death had been announced. There was no news to the story of the Pope's funeral, except the documentation of the amazing outpouring of feeling.

Recently, my life has felt like CNN. I don't watch CNN or MSNBC or any other television network really. But I have a vague sense of how the news media coagulates around certain stories for days at a time (funerals, conventions, Terri Schiavo, the invasion of Iraq), offering viewers special graphics and theme songs, with an endless rotation of pundits wringing every last drop of significance from the event. The "news cycle."

The phenomenon seems similar to the way I sometimes experience my life: for a succession of days, everything seems like it ought to have special theme music with graphics that read something like "Busy Because It's the End of the Month" or "Feeling Like He Should Get Back Into Dating Again."

What's the theme these days? It might well be "Birthday 2005: The Countdown." It's coming up in less than two weeks and its impendingness has prompted a lot of different feelings. It seems like it will be simultaneously super-important and relatively uneventful. Last year (I recall with bemused nostalgia), I was very, very concerned that the party be a bug success. I pinned a lot of hopes on a particular young man attending and coming home with me (the first happened, but not the latter).

This year, there may well be four or so past and potential sexual partners in attendance and yet the suspense of whom I might sleep with doesn't seem especially tense. Maybe it'll happen with one or the other of them, but none of that really matters. It doesn't matter like the bigger questions do. I can sense them distantly imposing themselves on the horizon: Where am I going to live next? How long am I going to stay in my job? These are the biggies. The birthday is a signpost that one passes without necessarily getting a better sense of your bearings (like most towns and cities in Connecticut on your way to Boston from New York).

I'm in a funny place these days. I'm balanced and contented about most of the major things -- work, art, sex. Not that everything's perfect, but I guess I've stopped expecting that. I'll settle for "good with the prospect of getting better." I don't feel like I get things done, though. I get all the important things done eventually, things for work, for the shows I'm working on and for the classes I'm teaching. I have time to see my friends and meet up with them. It's the mundane things that seem impossible to accomplish -- like a haircut, or a teeth cleaning or even reading all the sections of the paper read that I would like to read. I never get a chance to shop for groceries. Maybe I've filled up my life with so many satisfying projects and vocational activities that I've no time left for the basic human functions. I have been eating less. At first it was just that I didn't have time to cook, but now I have much less appetite.

Hmmm. It's hard to know when this cycle will be over. When will the graphics and the theme music announce "Operation: Time to Smell the Roses" or even "Get All That Annoying Shit Done on Your To-Do List." Maybe not anytime soon.

may perpetual light shine

2005-04-03T20:15:00.000-04:00

Why do I feel differently about the passing of John Paul II than I did about Ronald Reagan's? In many ways, they had parallel public lives -- they were conservatives whose world views were shaped by the Cold War, and they were beloved by many of the same people. When Reagan died I had to acknowledge the profound impact that he had on American (and world) history -- but still, the headline that seemed to sum it up best for me was the one in the Village Voice: "Death of a Salesman." Ronald Reagan, I insisted on telling people, was indeed an "optimist" and he successfully sold Americans that optimism, but his optimistic vision of America was, to a great extent, illusionary (delusionary?) and the disconnect between his rhetoric and the reality of life for the working poor, AIDS patients and other forgotten people amounted to a scandal.

One might offer the same critique of this Pope, and I'm sure that many people (Catholics and non-Catholics) will. I've listened to some denounce this Pope in the past as "evil" for the negative impact that his positions on social issues like birth control and abortion have had on women around the world, for the way they've contributed to overpopulation and to the spread of AIDS. I can't deny it. It's a common claim that he's "stacked the ranks" with conservative bishops. He's stagnated any progress on Church reform issues like ordaining married men or women. He was curiously absent from the official response to the sexual abuse crisis in the American Church, almost as if he did not grasp its foundation-shaking impact. And one of his last public statements was to rail against the pernicious ideology of the homosexual agenda.

But still, I think the man may have been a saint.

It seems odd even for me to say that, but then I guess we might need to stop and think a bit about what it means to be a "saint." Saints are not always right, nor do they always make the right choices (or, rather, they're not out to please people). But they are imbued with a holy fire, they are filled to the brim with faith -- and it's hard to argue that this Pope was anything short of that. The manner of his death was the summation of it all. He remained a servant of God to the end, expending every last breath for what he saw as his calling, for the propagation of the faith. He accepted his suffering and turned it into a type of spiritual purification. He was both a mystic and an intellectual; a playwright in his youth and a poet even into his last years. He contained multitudes and the binary categories of "liberal" and "conservative" are insufficient when applied to him.

He made the papacy global, traveling more than any other pope -- and right up to the end. He reached out to the third world and to other faiths, notably Judaism. He opposed war and the taking of human life in any form, whether by an abortionist or by a government in the name of punishing crime. He was a world figure of immense stature and yet he was not a political leader. His concerns were not temporal (ostensibly) but transcendant, eternal. At his best, he was a strong and consistent countervoice to so much in our society that advances a militarist-consumerist-individualist agenda.

It was that anti-individualism that was both the most important and often the most troubling aspect of his mission. Americans are defined more than anything else by our strong sense of individualism (even liberal ones -- look at the ACLU) and he stood for a different ethic. We tend to think favorably about those instances in which he encouraged the world to think communally, as in arguing for debt relief, but many of his more conservative stances were based on similar reasoning. To place individual rights first, including the right to decide when you're going to get pregnant or the right to have sex with anyone you want whenever you want, was never something he cared much for. You subjected your own desires to some greater authority -- whether that was justice or God or simply the authority of Church teaching.

Even as I type those words, I begin to frame my own critique of that philosophy, but at the same time I find it hard to criticize the Pope. Devoted secularists would say that my faith muddies my thinking, that I give the Pope the benefit of the doubt because I've been raised to (irrationally) revere his authority. There is a strong element of loyalty in my respect for John Paul II. I tend to agree with Dorothy Day's saying about staying faithful to the Church despite its failings: "Even if your mother's a whore, she's still your mother."

The papacy is an outdated institution. It has nothing to do with democracy. Yet, though I agree with liberal Catholics that JPII never advanced the Church far enough along progressive lines, I don't understand the point of nit-picking and second-guessing when it comes to the papacy. I'm uneasy with "telling a pope what he should do." A pope is not a president (which is perhaps why I hold him to different standards than Reagan). He's not really my "employee" in the same way that George W. Bush is meant to be. By saying that, am I at some fundamental level saying that I'm happy to remain nothing more than a sheep as far as Church teaching is concerned? Perhaps.

But the pope is not the Church. The Church, as the Second Vatican Council attested, is made up of everyone, the clergy and the people. Both saints and sinners have been popes. And some of the most beloved saints, including Francis of Assissi, have challenged Church authority. The Church has changed (dramatically) over the centuries and now it is undergoing another time of change. It will not just be the new pope alone who will determine the Church's new mission, but rather the clergy and the laity, together and in tension with one another. God's will is never very simple.

getting my monthlies

2005-04-02T10:45:00.000-05:00

Ever since the demise of Julius Caesar, March has seemed a somewhat forbidding month. One can have a certain degree of affection for it, but it seems always out of your control. It is regal in its implacable power. Will the blustery March wind blow in or will it bring us a comfortable spring thaw? We do not know nor can we.

In contrast, April -- no matter what its deficiencies in any given year -- seems downright genial. It may rain and rain and rain throughout the month (as it's doing now outside my New York City window) but still we welcome April. We root for it. Sure, May is famous for its flowers, but by May spring is already in full bloom. It's in the month of April that we start to feel that glorious sense of anticipation. Sometimes the only thing better than feeling good is the consciousness that one is about to feel good very soon.

I'm a biased observer, of course. Like so many auspicious individuals (including Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth II, and Adolf Hitler), I was born in the month of April and it's always been good to me. Somehow April always seems like the real start of the year -- it has more of a claim to that feeling, I think, than January. The artificial beginning of the calendar was established in January, I suspect, because that is the darkest time of year (at least in the Northern hemisphere, which is where these things got set). People wanted to place some kind of signpost there to say, "Well, at least we're making progress. We're moving out of this."

But it's in April usually that I start to feel new again and I suspect that many of you out there have had the same experience. As March wound down to a close this week, I was conscious of a remarkable degree of sychronicity in the world around me. On Wednesday evening, as I walked from Houston to 14th St. (which took probably 10 minutes or less) I passed no fewer than four acquaintances -- two tenants who live in the building where I work, one woman who works for a non-profit we collaborate with, and a college classmate I hardly know. I didn't really stop to talk to any of them, but somehow as I made the journey uptown it seemed to say that something was brewing...

Could be...
Who knows?
There's somethin' due any day,
And I'll know right away,
Soon as it shows....

Perhaps April doesn't seem as significant to you. Well, then, answer me this: Why does no one name their child "March"?

And, come to think of it, why not "July" either?

observances on observance

2005-03-27T21:36:00.000-05:00

Lent 2005 began when I woke up in bed with a (Mormon) boy on Ash Wednesday before scurrying off to mass to get my ashes. It ended last week on Palm Sunday, when I didn't find any time to go to services, opting instead to go to a 'gay sauna' in Paris. I toyed with the idea of giving up drinking for forty days but soon fell off the wagon. I tried to think of other things. For a while, I was trying to read one new entry from my "Book of Saints" for each day but that didn't last long either. In the end, I didn't give up anything -- unless you count going to mass, which I "gave up" on more than one occasion (usually because I'd been out drinking or partying the night before).

And today was Easter. I observed it in the chapel at the nursing home where my uncle now lives. Whenever I go home to Boston for any length of time these days, I spend a major part of that time at the nursing home and a major portion of the time there at mass. My uncle, a priest, was severely incapacitated a couple of years ago with a stroke. He goes to mass in the chapel every day; though he can no longer celebrate the mass on his own, he sits on the altar wearing some of the clerical vestments and joins in on some of the prayers. He can't move or speak as he used to, but deep inside the Holy Spirit is moving.

What is the story with my Catholicism these days? What excuses do I have? None. It isn't as if I've been missing mass for any good reason; I haven't decided not to go. Often when I do go (like this morning) I'm reminded of how important my faith is to me and how sustaining the Eucharist is. I cling to the fact that I'm Catholic. The teachings of the Church, the scriptures and the rituals all have immense value for me. It's not as if I'm a gay man who's been "turned off" by bishops railing against same-sex marriage or something like that. Those social teaching issues are a connundrum to be sure, but for me they are not the core of the faith. That's all posturing; it's not eternal. And what is eternal is what I value.

So why don't I feel the way I once did? Exhaustion? Fatigue? Neglect? Or could it be that I do still feel the way I did? External forms of worship don't mean a thing. I'm not beating myself up for missing mass or for not abstaining during Lent. Those things don't matter in and of themselves. But, when I'm honest with myself, I recognize a diminishment in my spiritual energy. I'm too easily distracted from my faith; I don't pray. That energy's being expended somewhere else.

And, yes, that "somewhere else" is often a bar or a club on a Saturday night 'til 4am (though I've still been known to make 11:30 mass the next morning--but that's usually when I haven't brought somebody back with me). My spiritual energy, though, is also being channelled into my job with the formerly homeless, into my volunteer work with disadvantaged youth. I wouldn't be doing those things at all if I hadn't been raised as a certain type of Catholic, imbued with values by my aunt and uncle. In terms of hourly expenditures of time, I'm probably living out my commitment to Jesus' teaching more now than at most other periods of my life. Yet it can also feel like I'm just riding the subway between Sodom and Gomorrah.

I haven't been to confession in a very long time (since last summer?) and I sincerely love to go. I love it when it really gives you an opportunity to do some honest soul-searching and self-assessment. I don't go all that often because I really do try to take stock and say, "What am I really sorry for? How do I really want to change my life?" It would be hypocritical, for example, for me to go in there and confess the number of times I've had sexual relations with boys when I have no intention of stopping. [Maybe I'll try to be a little less profligate about it, but that's just a question of degree.] Who would I be fooling?

Accepting that drinking, sex and things of that sort aren't necessarily sinful doesn't mean, though, that you're off the hook. In fact, reaching that point opens you up to deeper self-analysis. Those sorts of misdemeanors, the types of sin that get policed prominently by conservative ideologues, don't actually go very deep. They're external acts, that's all. Again, it's the spirit that counts. Rather than listing all the times I've sucked someone's dick (which, though it may shock some people to hear it, can in certain circumstances bring you closer to God), how much more important it is to really discern how I may have turned away from God on a deeper level, how I might be acting out of pride or vidictiveness or pettiness or jealousy. Or anxiety, another thing that God does not want. Or despair.

In other words, I value ritual (whether it be confession or the mass) when it provides a format for deepening my faith. It allows you a way in. Therefore, I shouldn't be beating myself up about my half-assed Lenten observance (and I'm not). I shouldn't feel guilty. Every mass is an opportunity to get more out of the faith that I profess (so is every moment of one's life, for that matter, but a mass is sort of like a pre-packaged opportunity). When you pass that up, you're only cheating yourself.

Luckily, there's always next week.

get real

2005-03-23T23:50:00.000-05:00

This trip to France that I just came back from was sort of unlike any trip I've ever taken before. I keep saying that to people but I have yet to express exactly what the difference was. I tried it in the previous blog entry but didn't quite hit upon it -- perhaps that was because I was still over there and didn't have any distance at all yet on the experience. Here's another try.

Disregarding how incredibly restful and relaxing the trip was (and it certainly, certainly was), there was also something sort of pensive and introspective about it, but in a way unlike the pensiveness and introspectiveness I'm used to. That's the difference! I've been on many a trip in the past four years that has prompted me to think about my life. These trips have prompted me to write (for pages and pages) in my journal about where I've been headed and what I've learned.

I didn't open my journal once during this trip.

I didn't have any impulse to write an email to someone detailing everything that was happening to me and analyzing its significance.

What has happened exactly? Why did this trip feel so weirdly (and wonderfully!) cut off from the rest of my life?

The amazing thing about all of this was that it was not summarizable into a little nugget, a moral for me to interpret for myself and assimiliate into "the next stage" of my life, as most of my recent traveling experiences have been. There was something sort of dark and ambiguous and (dare I say it?) mature about it, as if I'd grown up. Moved beyond summaries.

I don't know if any of this is making sense. It's only starting to come together for me as I write this. My life is moving in a lot of different directions right now and I think my experience of this trip reflects that. I've returned home to some big decisions: Where will I live once I move from Menno House? How long will I stay in my job? How much do I really want a relationship and who with? I'm of two minds about all of these issues. I know what I used to think about them and I also know how recent experience has slightly altered those assumptions. How tiny collisions with reality have made me question what I thought to be true, what I had planned out for myself as my life.

Because everything before this past year, all of those journal entries and manifestoes I wrote were essentially utopian. They were ideal visions culled from books. Ideas gestated in a period of leisure known as my "academic years." But since the fall of 2003 (during which time I have not taken a vacation, until this past week), there's been nothing utopian about what I've been doing. It's been about compromise; about saying, "Hey, I dreamed up all that stuff while I had time and space to dream but now I actually have to do it." And as much as I railed against consumerism in all its many forms, I still have taken on a new-found fondness for buying new clothes. And as much as I remain committed to peace and justice through my writing and my occupation, I've also started missing church more often. And as much as I still see myself as a radical, anti-commercial artist, I also recognize the benefits of networking to establish some kind of traditional theatrical credibility. In other words, things are never really gonna be all one way. As Susan Sontag has said, "The very nature of thinking is but."

I wrote a play this past year, since I started working my job, called Charity, and it took me a long time to write and it's different from my other plays. In some ways, it's more cynical about the world. It invetsigates the truth behind various ideals and in the end it sort of concludes on a note of ambiguity as to whether they can survive in this world. My other plays had "messages," as much as I tried to hide them, but this one is more of an investiagtion. I'm trying to work something out. The process of living through 2004 has made me question a lot of things, most of all my own assumptions about what I believe in, and how I see the world. And that's all for the better. Questions can only make our beliefs more meaningful, right? If they withstand that test?

I just came back from a reading of an older play of mine, called Three Days in the Tomb, which a lot of people have found to be somewhat polemical and message driven. I thought it was a very good reading and it really struck me as I sat through it that there was far too much in the script of me giving the message and giving it again, unchanged. Seen in the light of all that 2004 has taught me, Three Days seems restricted to me, caught inside its own ideological intentions. It feels very "conservative" to be saying that, like I'm T.S. Eliot or somebody telling you that political art is less worthy than something created for purely aesthetic reasons. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that it's harder for me to think in messages these days and that's good. I'm gonna start re-working the play soon and expanding all of those contradictions. Yes, but--

Does this make me a "realist" now? Is that what I'm saying? Have I switched from Dorothy Day to Condi Rice? I don't think so. But I guess I have learned that Dorothy's followers (of which I'm still one) could learn something from the way that Condi sees the world. Without ever having to deny their values. They have to acknowledge that there's always going to be a but.

What does this have to do with a trip to France? If you can figure out all of this connections, then I should probably marry you -- or pay you. I hope people post comments on this blog entry because it's only starting to make sense to me and I wonder what others feel.

I'm back from a trip that had a huge effect on me and I'm not prepared to say what it was. But.

There's gonna be a lot more of this.

off the map

2005-03-20T19:58:00.000-05:00

I'm writing this from Paris, where I seem to have found myself for the past several days. This has felt like a vacation completely outside of time. Unmoored from all schedules, all responsibility. In the profoundest sense, I have felt for the past week as if I don't exist.

Travel agencies often talk about vacations as "escapes," but they often don't feel like them. You're full of enthusiasm to see the sights, to get to know a place or to go out eating and drinking. I haven't been doing much of that. I've been to Paris two times before and I guess I didn't realize how much I'd already seen, how familiar with everything I'd be. Absolutely no inclination to return to the Musée D'Orsay or to go inside Notre Dame. No inclination to do much of anything really except to spend some time with David and Mike. But time spent mostly tracing paths around the city, not going anywhere, not even spending much money at all. Haven't had too many big special meals, haven't really even painted the town red.

It hasn't felt so much like I'm in Paris, more like I'm nowhere. It's fantastic to realize that no one back home knows where I am. I feel like I've disappeared. The "real" world of my life in New York feels completely gone, infinitely distant (even though I'll be returning there in about 48 hours). There's an Emma Thompson/Antonio Banderas movie coming out in Paris this week that was never, to my knowledge, released in the US (it got terrible reviews in international festivals). The title is "Disparition." That's me. Disparu.

There's a primal thrill to this feeling, like that moment in Tom Sawyer when everyone thinks he's dead and he gets to watch his own funeral. I hadn't realized what a burden my life had become until I was released from it, released from everything. Because even all of the things I treasue - my job, my theqter projects, time spent with my friends, New York nightlife - they possess a cumulative weight. How fantastic to sneak out the backdoor of your life (a life that could hardly be much better than it is, frankly), to sneak out and really be gone.

the turtle carries his home on his back

2005-03-14T09:35:00.000-05:00

Last night, I reconnected with a trusted friend: my Dana Design Swift Traveler backpack (the one I have, unlike the picture, is dark green). When I took it down from the shelf above my door and opened it up, it had that musty air of nostalgia. We've been through a lot together, she and I: Eastern Europe, England, Ireland, Russia, Japan, and a trek across the United States. We've camped out in tents, spent long hours in cars and trains, pounded the pavement on city streets. She may look a little bit worse for wear, but I like to think she's just "lived in." Lived in a lot. I practically lived out of this backpack for about two and a half years of my life, the "wandering years."

It's been a year and a half since I've gone anywhere. The only trips I've taken since moving to New York have been on the Chinatwon bus up to Boston to spend holiday weekends with my family. This trip is different. I'm going further away and I'm going through old rituals: packing up my passport, placing toiletries in the convenient Dana Design pouches, putting my journal in there for in-transit meditations, filling up the sleek "scout pack" for day trips once I get to my desitination (some have compared the look of this little detachable pack to a turtle shell, not inappropriately).

I'm going to Paris, a city I've been to before. On the list of places I wanted to return to, I must admit that it was not the highest on my list. I've been there twice before and it was not a city I fell in love with (Red-baiters take note: I much prefer Moscow and East Berlin). I'm going because Air France had cheap flights and because my friends David and Mike are there. All the circumstances are perfect for a relatively cheap, much needed getaway. Istanbul, Bombay and Rio will have to wait. I don't want to do anything while I'm there. No cathedrals, no museums. I want to hang out at spots my friends know and wander around, soaking in the daily life.

Everyone seems surprised when I tell them I'm going to Paris on vacation. It seems unusual, unexpected -- and I guess it is. There was a time when I was always traveling, packing and unpacking this backpack and hauling it from one temporary stop after another. These familiar traveling rituals seem quaint now that I have a "home," now that I'm setting down roots in New York. But Menno House can't be my home for long. I'm already starting to think and worry about the next journey, the struggle to find an apartment in New York's cutthroat real estate market next fall. The challenge of reconfiguring my life all over again, made all the harder by how successfully everything has ended up this past year and a half.

But I don't need to think about that for a few months at least. Now it's goodbye to work for a week and goodbye to New York. Bonjour, vacances!

unbearable lightness

2005-03-13T14:24:00.000-05:00

Young gay men in online personal ads like to tell you that they're "not into drama." You read this all the time. And, by this, they do not mean that they're uninterested the newest revival of a play by Ibsen or John Millington Synge (usually quite the reverse). What they mean is that they don't want any "drama" from you, the prospective date. No histrionics, no intense emotions, no accusations, no neediness, nothing over-the-top. Save that for the stage.

So many people write this on their profiles, that it leads you to wonder, "Who's 'into' drama? Who would actually enjoy that kind of painful, overly emotional intensity?" Well, as a matter of fact, I would. Or rather, I might.

In the past few weeks, I've been doing an awful lot of listening. Listening to friends on my cell phone or in person, hearing about their relationships. Long-term relationships that have been going on for a year or more. New relationships that are hot and heavy with sexual passion. Simmering relationships that are building towards something. Relationships that all of these people are pretty worked up about, relationships that have some kind of vast all-consuming impact on their emotional lives.

I've always been a decent listener in these kinds of situations, but in the past few years I've really developed my skills. A while back, I participated in an informal series of workshops on listening run by a Chinese Catholic nun (no joke) who has done a lot of work on conflict resolution and peace negotiation. I began to learn the importance of listening objectively, of reflecting back to people what they themselves are telling you rather than interjecting or imposing your own agenda or interpretation. I'm always talking to my friends about trying to achieve balance, to look at things objectively, to go after what's healthy for them and not to make unrealistic expectations. I'm also always telling them, in different ways, to look at what they have and to see that it's good. Like Friar Laurence in Romeo & Juliet, I'm always saying, "There art thou happy."

And it seems to help. Seems to calm people down, to get them to see the situation anew. It leads them to new ways that they can approach these intractible problems with lovers and potential lovers. You can't avoid the drama, but you can manage it.

And people are always thanking me and telling me that I seem so well-adjusted, sensible. They tell me that the advice I've brought them around to is "absolutely right." How do I have this preternaturally mature sensibility for what it takes to maintain a healthy, stable, committed romantic relationship? Perhaps because I've never had one.

The great irony of it all is how trivial my romantic affairs are right now. They have their passing pleasures and they have their annoyances, too. I become mildly frustrated at times with some guys who I've been seeing off and on for a while when they send me mixed signals or act weird or confuse me with their behavior. They don't call and then when they do they act all lovey-dovey and then they ignore me again. But I don't get worked up really and I don't feel too rejected because I don't have a whole lot invested in these interactions. I haven't really shared a lot with any of the guys I've been seeing and I haven't really come to care about them (or them about me) so their behavior doesn't really get to me. The annoyance isn't deep, it's superficial -- a mosquito bite rather than an open wound.

I love the word "blithely." I associate it with 1930s screwball heroines who carry on blithely in the face of comically complicated situations. I'm living my life quite blithely these days. Yes, days at my job can be long and frustrating. I sometimes wish that my artistic career were moving further faster. And I wish that I could meet someone who's either a) ready to sleep with me anytime we get together or b) my soulmate. But these aren't really grave concerns. Fundamentally, I like my life. No matter what frustration I may be feeling at the moment, I know that things are on the whole moving in a positive general direction and this keeps me well-balanced. I blithely go about from one thing to another, bouncing back from little obstacles and troubles. I don't really need to take any of the advice that I give out to friends. I live it. But I live it in situations that are remarkably less intense than theirs.

Deep down, I worry that it's all too balanced, that nothing really gets to me and that maybe it never will. You're supposed to come to a measured, mature understanding of life after going through all that messy emotional painfulness first. So where am I headed? Where does all this "wisdom" come from -- did I pick it up by reading books? Is it real at all if I haven't earned it?

popery potpourri

2005-03-08T23:04:00.000-05:00

In Harvard President Lawrence Summers's controversial remarks about the possible differences in intrinsic aptitude between men and women, I was struck by the following:

...the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying
profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture.

He's operating under the assumption that all three examples are commonly accepted observations. Sure, there aren't a lot of white basketball stars and there aren't a lot of Jewish farmers but, I asked myself on first reading it, would most people instinctively assent to the assertion that there aren't a lot of Catholic investment bankers? Has anyone ever given thought to that? And, if it is the case, why is it so?

I read those remarks a couple of weeks ago. Then today, at my non-profit job, I was mailing copies of our newsletter to the directors of our partner service agencies. I filled out one envelope for a man named "Joe de Genova" and I thought, "Oh, a nice Italian name." Then the second one, for another social service agency, was to "Sister Paulette LoMonaco." An Italian nun. The Executive Director of the organization I work for is an Irish-American woman named [deleted to protect identity], who used to work for Catholic Charities and wrote her Master's thesis on the Catholic pacifist monk Thomas Merton. Obviously, the Catholics are underrepresented in investment banking because they're too busy helping people!

There are, of course, many ways to be Catholic. You can be Mel Gibson. You can picket carrying pictures of fetuses outside abortion clinics. But it seemed like Larry Summers and I (and perhaps Max Weber?) were on to something.

Tonight I was at a teachers' training for a youth theater program that I volunteer for. I'm one of the founding faculty members in their "Community Performance School," where kids from the outer boroughs are offered theater classes completely free of charge by professional volunteer artists. There's a lot of philosophy behind what this community does and one of the central ideas is "radical acceptance": the kids who work in this and the other youth programs are told to face up to the fact that they are poor, something that is very uncomfortable for them to do sometimes. But the idea is that one can only develop from a realistic understanding of one's actual circumstances. You have to radically accept who you are so that you know where you're coming from.

Conversely, many of the teachers need to accept that they are affluent (I'm not going to use the word "rich", because I'm not and never have been, but I am indeed quite affluent). Not just in monetary terms but (even moreso) in educational and cultural copportunities and experiences. That's what I bring with me when I come to teach these kids. Our facilitator this evening said, "Lots of rich people are taught to feel guilty about their privilege. We don't want anyone to feel that way here. We want them to acknowledge it and share what they've been given with people who don't have it." The idea isn't to understand or to empathize, but to accept that we come from different circumstances, with all that that entails both positively and negatively. I'm giving short shrift to the arguments, but they really do make a lot of sense. They're really right on the money, in fact.

Now, at these teacher trainings I'm always introduced as "the guy who went to Yale and who is a Rhodes Scholar etc. etc." and these other people who don't know me get this picture in their heads of Ivy League privilege. My housemates get that picture of me sometimes, too, I think -- as if I grew up eating Buffalo mozzarella and imported Balsamic vinegar during our weekend trips to Tuscany. I might eat that food now and I did indeed go on a trip with my family to Italy recently, but when I was growing up I was eating Shake n' Bake chicken and I wasn't going on vacations anywhere.

The Shake n' Bake was not about being cheap. We were upper middle class certainly. But that's not the way my father or my aunt behaved. They were more likely to drive a car into the ground or wear a wool sweater until it had almost no armpits before they would buy a new one. My father had famously accrued so much unused vacation time working for the Justice Department that, at one point, he could have taken an entire year off of work with pay. Growing up no one in my family ever treated themselves. We were not spenders, not consumers. We retained that anti-materialist streak which I associate with our Catholicism.

Abstaining. Self-abnegation. These are the hallmarks of my Boston Irish relatives. My grandfather was a butcher and my father worked his way through law school. I, great-grandson of immigrants, was the first in my family to go to an Ivy League school. When I think of my family history, I don't think of myself as a son of privilege. I think of my aunt and uncle who gave up material comforts to join religious orders -- helping the poor, protesting against war and injustice. I think of my father who has spent his entire legal career working for the government, never in private practice, satisfied with his comfortable but hardly exorbitant government-issue salary. They give to charity, they don't buy a lot of stuff. They don't take a lot of time for themselves. In fact, I think a lot of my early resentment of my stepmother (who introduced me, my father and everyone in our family to imported Balsamic vinegar) stemmed from my sense that she was corrupting my father's anti-materialism. I saw her as an agent of bourgeoisification.

In these discussions of "privilege" that we were having at the teacher training, I inevitably felt like shouting out, "OK, so I didn't grow up in the inner-city, I don't have any realtives who were incarcerated, but I'm not your typical white rich kid either!" I want to make these distinctions, want to specify that, although I may never have felt material deprivation, I am also not accustomed to extreme luxury. Those are my instincts, but then I check myself. On the spectrum of privileged white youths mine may not have been extravgant but it was more than comfortable.

The biggest privilege that I never appreciated until this year was not having to take out any school loans or financial aid. This was partly because I was an only child, partly because I could apply my deceased mother's Social Security dividends to my education, but it was mostly because my father was well-off enough to pay. And so I graduated without any debt. I was then privileged to be able to choose a job doesn't pay much without worrying how I would pay off my loans. I got a whole mess of academic opportunities, I was exposed gratis to whole lot of broadening experiences that helped me get the kind of jobs I'm doing now. I worked really hard, but I was starting out from a very favorable position.

What does all of this have to do with being Catholic? I guess I've digressed a little. But these reflections have helped me understand some aspects of the cultural divide between me and, say, my black and Latino co-workers who earn the same salary I do and pay out regularly for big-ticket status items like an IPod or DirectTV or designer label jackets. It's a sign of pride, coming from the communities they grew up in, to be able to buy those things, to have earned the money to buy them. I, on the other hand, am inclined to want to give things away, to survive with as few material goods as possible. When you consider my educational background, I'm deliberately choosing to work for a salary well below my earning potential which, to a lot of people with less than me, wouldn't make much sense.

This is where Larry Summers doesn't get the whole story. (Almost nothing, I'm starting to realize, is really explained by "intrinsic" qualities.) I might be inclined to live the way I do because I was raised Catholic, but I'm able to choose it because of all the opportunities I've been given from childhood onward. Opportunities that I did absolutely nothing to deserve.

the buck stops where?

2005-03-05T10:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I saw a documentary called Gunner Palace about the daily lives of soldiers living out of one of Uday Hussein's palaces in Baghdad. It's a great movie and I hope it gets wide distribution. The strength of the film is that it takes its time to capture the texture of daily life for the soliders -- patrolling the streets during the day, night raids looking for suspected terrorists, partying by the pool, rapping, playing guitar, training the Iraqi Civil Defense forces, interacting with Iraqi translators and civilians. It gets you into the rhythm of life there and also keeps you attuned to the length of time that the soliders have in their tours of duty. Titles on the screen announce how long each individual has left in Baghdad: 300 days, 200 days... The movie is funny and full of attitude (it takes its cues mostly from the soldiers themselves). It has a great soundtrack, too, featuring lots of rap and freestyling performed by the servicemen. In fact, the picture of war it shows is remarkbly like David O. Russell's Three Kings, a movie that, though fictionalized, seems with each passing year more perceptive, more accurate, more amazingly ahead of its time.

In an effort to demonstrate that this film is not Farenheit 9/11, the marketing for Gunner Palace emphasizes that it's the soliders own stories, told by them, with "no politics" and "no B.S." What they mean I think is that the film is not about partisanship, though it does confront tough issues. In one of the most powerful moments, right at the end, a solider says, "I don't think that, in the history of the world, a person has ever killed another persona and something good came out of it."

Watching it in a dowtown New York movie theater (the Angelika) with an audience that was almost certainly made up of anti-war liberals was an interesting experience. Very few people responded vocally (though I laughed quite a lot myself). It's not an agitational piece like Michael Moore's film; it won't leave you shaken in quite the same way that most of us were after watching Lila Lipscombe's grief. In fact, the soliders continually express their perception that, unless he or shew has a family member in the service, the average American isn't really thinking about what's going on in Iraq.

I think that's true. It's certainly been my experience, despite the fact that my unlce, a retired Marine, is over in Baghdad right now. For most of 2004 I followed casualty reports in the New York Times with a self-satisfied sense of indignation that fuelled my opposition to Bush. Since the Iraqi election, there has been far less coverage of the war on the front pages (it has fallen off the radar screen much in the way that the Afghan campaign has). Instead, I get worked up about things like Bush's Social Security and Medicaid proposals. How have we forgotten so easily when it seemed like we cared so much?

Opposition to this war offers a fascinating case study of how our society has changed since the 1960s. Yes, the anti-war campaigns that began in 2003 as the war was being planned did seem to signal a widespread re-invigoration of protest culture. Everyone wore buttons and went to marches. Everyone posted their favorite anti-Bush cartoons on their refrigerators. This was especially true in New York over the summer: during the buildup to the Republican National Convention protest became the "new black." Oppostion to the ruling party was a fashion statement. Time Out New York offered a guide to protest activity, along with its club and restaurant listings, recognizing that marching would be the "in" thing to do for the month of August. But it now seems like it was a second-rate, knockoff version of dissent. Did society ever come to a halt? Was anything really disrupted at all?

People got worked up about protesting because of media saturation, but the commitment didn't run deep. Once the news cycle was over, the population at large moved on. Include myself in this assessment: when I get emails now from the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition about marches on Washington, I tend to delete them. I feel bad about it, but somehow it all seems irrelevant, ineffective.

Part of the superficiality of the 2004 protest fad was that it got entangled to our cult of personality. Bush became a figure to rage against, a stock enemy. We were busy focusing on him rather than on the issues. Much of the progressive rhetoric in 2004 never got beyond "Bush is stupid," "Bush is a hypocrite" or "Bush is a Christian fundamentalist." Opposition to Vietnam transcended party lines: the war was waged by Johnson and Nixon. What would we be saying if it were Kerry (who voted for the war) in the White House now? Would things really be any different? Farenheit 9/11, powerful and funny as it was, contributed to this failing. I can see that now after watching Gunner Palace. It muddied its critique with too many clips of Bush gaffes to make us feel satisfied that we on the East Coast were smarter than the man in charge.

What we needed was something to challenge us, to make us ask if we are not equally responsible for allowing all of this to happen (and to continue to happen), for continuing to pay taxes, continuing to support a tepidly oppositional Democratic party. That's tough stuff and I certianly don't think that I'm able to dish it out, given the level of apathy and political inconsistency that I've fallen into recently. But that's the conversation we need to start.

The politics of blame allow everyone to be comfortable. The politics of collective responsibility force us to admit that as long as our nation continues to wage unjust war, torture detainees, or to target the poor and the marginalized, each one of us is morally diminished.

job satisfaction

2005-03-02T20:54:00.000-05:00

High on the endorphins of my first ever salsa class, I had a little epiphany as I came home tonight. My job(s) right now all involve facilitating some form of fun. Being a fun-maker has become my specialty.

At work today, we offered our first salsa class for the tenants, something I've wanted to have in the building for a long time. And I was pleased with the turnout -- six people, men and women of different ages and abilities, all seeming to enjoy themselves, not wanting to stop when the time was up. On its best days, my job is all about this: bringing people together, allowing them to get to know one another, to explore their creativity, building trust, having a great time. On Monday, I facilitated a fabulous session of our long-running Drama Group in which our tenants were reading free-writing that they'd done about their family history and then everyone was up on their feet acting out the characters. We have a tight-knit group now and I'm amazed at the lack of hesitation and unself-consciousness of these people who have never been trained as performers.

It's rubbed off elsewhere in my life. I am paid to be a professional party-planner, and then, last Sunday for the Oscars, I planned my own personal party (by far the largest crowd I've ever had). I brought more people together, fed them, tried to keep them entertained and intermingling.

I growing comfortable in that role of "facilitator" or "prompter" -- pushing people to expand their boundaries, to become creative. My theater projects recently have been with young people and they've mostly involved me making them comfortable so that they can create, not teaching or directing so much as coaxing them into offering something of themselves up for the group. Even in this new project that I'm working on with Kyle, Desiree, and Michael, I'm fulfilling that same role -- not writing the script but creating "assignments" for Des and Michael, trying to come up with prompts for their creativity, to spur them on.

It's easier than ever these days for me to talk to people, all kinds of people. I think it's a sort of occupational fringe benefit. What does this mean about where my career is headed? No longer an auteur, instead a sous-chef stirring the pot, getting all the flavors to mix? Not exactly, I can still be individiually creative when I have to. And there's always a certain amount of healthy egotism involved in leading a group. But I'm learning methods of collaboration. I'm learning patience and trust. As job skills go, those are pretty good ones.