Watch on Facebook.

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE is a teevee series for the internet. “City of Dreams” is a five-part episode set in Europe. Future episodes will be located in New York City.

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

City of Dreams (Part 4)

It would be a fallacy to argue that my location here in the shadows of the riverbank

in the company of another man about whom I knew next to nothing

was anything less than conscious.

I couldn’t say if the vision I saw was of the past or the future but I no longer cared

I took a step forward and then another, ignoring the chorus of screams in my head.

I approached the Russian, who stood up as if he had been expecting me. “Do I know you?” he asked.

I shook my head ambiguously. “I’m not sure,” I replied.

“Follow me,” he said and together we walked up the stairs into the infinite fog of the Parisian night.

Today was a tough day on Capitol Hill, where the topic of hot gay statues was taken up and — as usual — soundly defeated. Fortunately, the issue is not entirely moot, and reader Tyler Green was kind enough to point us in the direction of something that until now had escaped our attention:

[This statue is called "Man Controlling Trade" and is by Michael Lantz] the brother of Walter Lantz of Woody Woodpecker fame, from outside the Federal Trade Commission HQ in DC.

Sounds like it might be worth a look?

Whoas. That guy’s controlling something, and it may or may not be “trade.”

Hey, that’s one way to end your “Depression.”

Thanks for the tip, Tyler. Let’s hope the “stimulus plan” delivers everything we were promised, including not only more hot gay statues in the nation’s capital but in every town with a population greater than 100.

Photo credits: Andy961 on Flickr (first) and Eric Marc Crawford on Flickr (second).

The Hot Gay Statue round-up:

• Rules and Guidelines
• Dan Savage Endorsement
• Washington Heights (New York City)
• Washington, DC
• The London Eye Clarifies an Important Issue
• Florence (Italy)
• The Park Avenue Amory (Upper East Side/NYC)
• Murray Hill (New York City)
• Madrid (Spain)
• Los Angeles
• Philadelphia
• The London Eye: “In Your Face”
• The J-Man Inspires
• George Washington
• Georgia (Republic of)
• New Orleans
• Columbus Circle (New York City)
• Two Davids (Florence)
• Franco Harris Statue (Pittsburgh)
• London Firefighters and Other Heroes
• Columbus Circle Mall (New York City)
• Miami
• Paris
• Grand Central Station (New York City)
• Albany, New York
• Chicago
• Albany, New York (Hot Gay Statute)
• The Metropolitan Museum (New York City)
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles)
• More Getty Villa (Los Angeles)
• Union Station Centurions (Washington, DC)
• Hot Gay Ladies in Washington Heights (New York City)
• Honolulu
• Stockholm
• Florence (Italy) II
• Vienna
• San Francisco

Ohai! We thought we’d play a lil game in which we pull quotes from three pieces about the exurbs, two written in 2k4 by David Brooks in The Times — “Take a Ride to Exurbia“  on the opinion page and “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia” in the magazine — and the other — “In Florida, Despair and Foreclosure” — published today (i.e., 2k9) in The Times. Try to guess when the quotes were written, and by whom — click through for answers! (Note: there’s one trick question — guess which one it is.)

I came out with a book on the booming exurbs – places like the I-4 corridor in central Florida and Henderson, Nev. These are the places where George Bush racked up the amazing vote totals that allowed him to retain the presidency.

Early last year, garage sales and estate auctions became more common in Lehigh Acres as families sold what they could to survive.

I’m so impressed by Karl Rove. As a group of Times reporters demonstrated in Sunday’s paper, the Republicans achieved huge turnout gains in exurbs like the ones in central Florida.

Home prices have collapsed, and many houses built during the housing bubble have been foreclosed or abandoned.

[C]riticisms don’t get suburbia right. They don’t get America right. The criticisms tend to come enshrouded in predictions of decline or cultural catastrophe. Yet somehow imperial decline never comes, and the social catastrophe never materializes.

Hunger has become a growing problem.

[P]eople move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality.

[I]t went from housing market boomtown to its current landscape of abandoned developments and struggling businesses. No one seemed interested in buying whole houses, and foreclosures soon gave way to empty homes that became magnets for crime.

[T]here is this spot you can get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures will be relieved and happiness can be realized.

Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in.”

Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It’s a new world out there.

Panic is a powerful headwind.

Poets, pundits, philosophers and politicians, take note! This is not the story of nations or other one-hit wonders, nor is it the story of religion, for which so many millions have died in futile anger and delusion. It is certainly not the history of capital, although this too has been a scourge; no, friends, these are distractions from the real story, which is the slow but relentless rise of the city. Incomprehensible beauty and despair! Inexplicable dissonance and distortion! Inalterable repudiation of all political philosophers and religious zealots who would explain our existence without acknowledging the seething allure of the trains and tunnels, the buildings and bridges of this endlessly mutating labyrinth into which we must cast ourselves to find civilized life! How sorry and sad — which is to say, irrelevant — are the candidates — which is to say, all of them — who fail to discuss the implications of this truth; how tiresome the critics and commentators who obscure it with egocentric jargon about freedom and community. Is it not immediately obvious who among them has or has not walked the streets, and not only in the tedious safety of the day but in the more barren and remote hours of the night, when we are possessed by creaking gates, distant gunshots and — most of all — the pounding, subterranean space we learn to call our heart?

[All pix except the GWB by Chip Litherland for The New York Times]

When we started blogging, we didn’t really know anything about the internet, much less “bloggable memes.” Until then, like most people in our demographic, we had spent our time on nytimes.com and our “Yahoo home page.” But we quickly discovered internet traffic, and modified the blog to include many “gimmicks” to attract as many page views as possible. We wrote about the need for gentrification in the Heights, we made fun of str8s in the Style Section of The Times and most notably, we posted pix of “hot gay statues” from around the universe.

But this year our interest in gimmicks has faded. We like to tell everyone that our blog is “growing up,” but this raises a difficult question: can you still be “a relevant blog” if your traffic is growing at <1 percent/year (or if your “authority” on Technorati is <500)?

Also: do you think it’s a mistake to be a “gay blog” instead of a “literary blog (written by a geighehgihay)?” Technorati reports that “to be gay walls off close to 90 percent of internet users, and 98.7 percent of ‘serious literary readers.’” Given this, do you think we should “downplay” the gay side of the blog — maybe rebrand as “The Guy Recluse”? — to make our blog more “palatable” or should we go “all out” and post pictures of David Beckham and other “str8dbags” like you see on the “leading” gay blogs?

Or is it too late, so that we’ll always exist on the fringes of the blogosphere (and never make enough $ from Google Ads to “quit our job”)?

In the third book of Roberto Bolaño’s epic 2666, we leave behind the maybe-psychotic descent into madness of Professor Amalfitano for a broader type of madness known as the fringes of modern/capitalistic civilization. Bolaño does this by way of a Harlem-based reporter who goes by the name — for reasons never fully explained — of Oscar Fate. His mother has just died, and we follow him on an assignment that takes him first to Detroit — to interview a former Black Panther — and then to Santa Teresa, the fictional Mexican border city where hundreds of women have turned up murdered in the desert over the past decade or so.

Initially sent to cover a boxing match, Fate becomes at first intrigued and then enmeshed in the local “culture,” a bizarre and thuggish (and macho and obvs homophobic) netherworld. Bolaño’s prose takes an appropriate turn toward the noir; if Fate is not a detective per se, he uncovers tantalizing facts in his adventures in Santa Teresa that may or may not shed light on the outstanding questions of who the mysterious author from the first book is, whether he too is in this Mexican city, and what this may or may not have to do with the murders. Whatever the case may be, there are few people Fate meets who don’t seem to be guilty of something.

So it happens that we become the true detectives; we read with a cool detachment that perfectly captures the sense of unreality we associate with trips to a foreign country, most obviously, but also in our daily lives. Bolaño captures that stunned moment when we ask “wtf are we doing here?” before we spend a few more seconds looking for clues in the deluge of senseless details with which we are all confronted. That there is never a clear answer to this question does not always prevent us from asking; then we stumble forward, perhaps with some recognition (or hope or fear) that this in fact is our Fate.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About the Crimes
The Part About Archimboldi

In this weekend’s City Section of The Times, we learned that the city recently tore down the only luxury condominium development in Washington Heights, located on an undeveloped patch of land under the George Washington Bridge overpass. Nestled in the trees and rock formations, the site had promised a rare opportunity for prospective buyers to own “a slice of old-growth Manhattan,” while remaining close to the “world renowned” Columbia Presbyterian hospital complex. Residents of the new development were promised “easy access” to Wendy’s “gourmet” at 165th and Broadway and all of the other incredible cultural amenities of New York City’s “most vibrant” neighborhood.  Construction had already begun, which makes the city’s actions all the more perplexing. We attended an open house a few months ago and took some shots of the units.

Lush forest shades a gently inclining approach* to the residential complex.

*ADA compliant

Constructed of sustainable-yield hardwoods and recycled stone, the cutting edge of eco-friendly living.

Hudson River views and free tennis courts only minutes away.

RIP, Wahi luxury condos///miss u, 2k6.

[HT Carla]

In the United States — except for the rare exception — there is a well-documented dearth of hot gay statues.

Occasionally you’ll see a statue and think, “hmm, he’s a lil gay.” (Or she, obv.)

Or: “Why is that guy’s head between that other guy’s legs? It’s not that gay, but — ha ha — we should send a pic to The Gay Recluse.”

And then you go on your way, and perhaps in a year or so — assuming you don’t leave the country — you might spot another statue or piece of public artwork that could be described as gay, with a mix of earnestness and irony that is a hallmark of internet discourse.

Hi ladies! Did you know that the final season of “The L-Word” premieres this Sunday?

Whoa, Daddy!

Let’s just say that in terms of hot gay statuary, Vienna operates on a completely different level than any U.S. city.

It’s not like this was unexpected, of course.

And at first, we didn’t think too much about it.

After all, our primary purpose in coming to Vienna was not to obsess about hot gay statues.

Hey buddy, nice package! (Was Johann Strauss the “David Beckham” of 19th century Vienna?)

Here’s a gay in Vienna “playing straight,” just like today’s biggest stars in Hollywood.

While almost every statue in Vienna was exceedingly gay, not all were equally hot!

At night, there was a phantasmagoric quality to the statues, that made many seem NSFW.

We wouldn’t call this “man-baby” hot, would you?

This guy just won’t take “no” for an answer!

Some required more than one shot to capture exactly what was going on.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened here!

Oddly, as time passed, we became less innured to their presence, which was not what we had expected.

We began to consider the mindset of those who commissioned such work, and why they were so interested in “hot dads.”

We resented the puritanical tendencies of our own country, which for hundreds of years has made even the most innocuous statues NSFW.

We considered the drudgery of our own commute in New York City, and how we never see a hot-gay statue without making a special trip to Audubon Terrace.

Hey girlfriends! What do you mean you haven’t seen Milk yet!?

We wondered: why does our contemplation of this statue offer us so much more pleasure than any of the tedious shots of “real-life” models we see every day on all the mainstream gay sites?

Translation: Every one of these guys is smokin’ hot.

Translation: Workers unite (for a hot gay revolution)!

Vienna’s hot gay statuary is obv not limited to the neoclassical.

The more we looked, the more statues we saw; many of them contained features — and more incredibly, expressions — we found genuinely attractive, so that our posture of ironic disdain began to feel limiting.

Overwhelmed, we questioned the movement toward abstraction that occurred 500 years ago, when Pablo Picasso first heard Franz Liszt and was inspired to create a reality teevee show on Bravo.

We could not completely shed this irony, however.

Just your average fountain statue in Vienna.

As so often happens when we lose ourselves the past, we felt an intoxicating mix of suffocation and exhilaration.

It seemed miraculous to us that the roof of the Parliament could feature a lineup of NSFW men.

By this point, our resistance had completely eroded.

Seemingly every alcove was inhabited by a hot gay statue.

We felt as if our hatred of the present — not only the time in which we live, but the tedious, mass-produced nature of our surroundings — had been validated.

But in the next second, we felt deflated and beaten.

We arrived at Gonzagagasse, the street where our friend John had grown up.

And thought about how he must have felt as a child, walking past these hot gay dads every day.

Until the Nazis came to power and he had to flee to the United States.

Where he too would always remember life in Vienna with an irreconcilable mix of hatred and longing.

The Hot Gay Statue round-up:

• Rules and Guidelines
• Dan Savage Endorsement
• Washington Heights (New York City)
• Washington, DC
• The London Eye Clarifies an Important Issue
• Florence (Italy)
• The Park Avenue Amory (Upper East Side/NYC)
• Murray Hill (New York City)
• Madrid (Spain)
• Los Angeles
• Philadelphia
• The London Eye: “In Your Face”
• The J-Man Inspires
• George Washington
• Georgia (Republic of)
• New Orleans
• Columbus Circle (New York City)
• Two Davids (Florence)
• Franco Harris Statue (Pittsburgh)
• London Firefighters and Other Heroes
• Columbus Circle Mall (New York City)
• Miami
• Paris
• Grand Central Station (New York City)
• Albany, New York
• Chicago
• Albany, New York (Hot Gay Statute)
• The Metropolitan Museum (New York City)
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles)
• More Getty Villa (Los Angeles)
• Union Station Centurions (Washington, DC)
• Hot Gay Ladies in Washington Heights (New York City)
• Honolulu
• Stockholm
• Florence (Italy) II

One thing that never seems to change in Paris: the booksellers — les bouquinistes – that line the banks of the Seine.

These are the ones who operate out of those green metal boxes that sit atop the balustrade. Obviously this could never exist in the United States; the boxes would be pried or sawed open, filled with gasoline, the contents incinerated and the video posted on YouTube. (There would be lawsuits, tho.)

In Paris, we always loved strolling past the dealers and their wares, carefully considering what we wanted to buy: old maps, postcards, rare editions of forgotten books, drawings of fish and birds, comic books — typically racist/sexist in the “old school” manner — and more!

But in the end, we could never bring ourselves to buy anything. It was less a suspicion that we would probably buy a fake than something about the vision in front of us that made it feel precarious, as if it were a dream that we might puncture by reaching through.

Or maybe it’s a fear that if we entered such a world, even for a few minutes, we might not have the will to ever leave; we would slowly evaporate and our ghost would walk the banks of the Seine until it was covered by the sea, and even then we would haunt the bottom of the ocean for an eternity, rummaging through the detritus of another lost civilization.

Recently we heard from Mike, an American expat (and blogger!) living in Denmark who writes:

I didn’t know about your blog this summer when I went to Florence, but now that blog-whoring’s brought us together, here’s a humble contribution:

Though we’ve already covered Florence — and this statue specifically — we wanted to take the opportunity to demonstrate a fundamental point about hot gay statues that has been missed by some of our less enlightened readers. Anyway! Here’s the shot of Hercules and Caucus (courtesy of Wikipedia) from the original post:

A lil hot and def gay, but kinda whatevs.

Now let’s compare with Mike’s shot of the same statue:

Whoa. Smokin’ hot. Srsly gay.

Need we say more? We think not!

Thanks again to Mike for his most excellent submission.

The Hot Gay Statue round-up:

• Rules and Guidelines
• Dan Savage Endorsement
• Washington Heights (New York City)
• Washington, DC
• The London Eye Clarifies an Important Issue
• Florence (Italy)
• The Park Avenue Amory (Upper East Side/NYC)
• Murray Hill (New York City)
• Madrid (Spain)
• Los Angeles
• Philadelphia
• The London Eye: “In Your Face”
• The J-Man Inspires
• George Washington
• Georgia (Republic of)
• New Orleans
• Columbus Circle (New York City)
• Two Davids (Florence)
• Franco Harris Statue (Pittsburgh)
• London Firefighters and Other Heroes
• Columbus Circle Mall (New York City)
• Miami
• Paris
• Grand Central Station (New York City)
• Albany, New York
• Chicago
• Albany, New York (Hot Gay Statute)
• The Metropolitan Museum (New York City)
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles)
• More Getty Villa (Los Angeles)
• Union Station Centurions (Washington, DC)
• Hot Gay Ladies in Washington Heights (New York City)
• Honolulu
• Stockholm

The Chaos Detective: City of Dreams (Part 2)

In this episode, Chaos Detective Lasalle arrives in Vienna and embarks on his first assignment.

[Note: if you click thru to YouTube, be sure to watch in "high-quality": otherwise it's kinda blurry/fuzzy!]

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

Episode 1: City of Dreams (Part 1)