Today I finally read the New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace, which was by turns inspiring and depressing; inspiring because (and this is hardly a surprise) he seemed to genuinely believe in fiction as a means to reflect/analyze/transform currents of our society, and depressing because of his unending doubt about everything from his ability to write a compelling novel to his own mental health, which was apparently precarious for many many years before he finally committed suicide.

His unfinished novel, which will be published next year, supposedly examines boredom as a potentially transcendent force in modern society; it’s set in an IRS office in Illinois, and describes a group of tax auditors, some of whom are better able to deal with the mind-numbing tedium of their work than others. Ultimately, it sounds like DFW was unable to resolve — or at least to his own satisfaction — the fundamental dilemma of how to make a novel about boredom not boring.

Whatever the merits of the novel, it seems that he was touching on an important theme in our culture; seriously, are there not days when the meaningless implications of everything you do at work becomes such a towering wave of ennui that you wonder how you can possibly live another minute, even if by most measures you have a job that is ‘interesting’ and ‘valuable’ and possibly even ‘lucrative’? (In this post, ‘work’ may/may not be a metaphor for ‘life.’) And do you — as DFW postulates — resign yourself to these waves? Do you quit fighting and simply allow them to pass through you so that you emerge on the other side more ‘mindful’ and able to ‘live in the moment,’ so that perhaps you can find gratification in composing say, an elegant e-mail to a senior VP or finally figuring out a mathematical function on a spreadsheet or even participating in a ‘team project’? Ultimately, it seems to me that the issue DFW confronted was (in two parts): 1) ‘how do we stop thinking, when thinking is so painful?’ (or, via Huysmans via Pascal: ‘The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon’) and 2) if we do stop thinking, can we still feel ‘meaningful’ or ‘human’ in modern society, and not like ‘just another corporate drone’?

In this post, there are four photographs: three of them contain an airplane, which may/may not be a metaphor for our desire to ‘leave our lives behind,’ whereas the one picture without may/may not represent the desire to contemplate that which we have seen so many times before with the (irrational/sustaining/instinctual) hope that we will find something there that we have never seen before.

According to Wikipedia, the rooftop of the Stephansdom in Vienna contains over 230,000 tiles. It was originally built in the Middle Ages and then — after it was destroyed by fire at the end of WWII — rebuilt in 1952 with the help of Google Images and Soviet robots.

One fear of the modern age is that we serve no purpose in life but to increase the profit margins on the spreadsheets of our superiors.

Of course in our modern jobs — for which we have attended college and sometimes even more than that — we are insulated from the occupational ravages of disease and prosecution and slavery.

But there is still a part of us that no matter what the risk longs to be one of ten thousand others toiling away for a five or six decades, despite the numbing cold and the slippery slope and the certainty that our name will never be attached to this work.

Only when observing the obsessive madness of such art do we feel anything close to hopeful about humanity.

But then we remember standing on the plaza, hating the hordes of tourists who (just like us) had come to gawk at this spectacle before returning home, where the image becomes — as much as a memory or hope — a bludgeon with which we beat ourselves, knowing what we can never be.

A new and improved version of this post can be found here.

Click through for “hi-quality” on YouTube or watch on Facebook.

Stay tuned for the fifth and final installment of “City of Dreams.”

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

Today we heard from Mike, who’s taking a break from Rottin’ in Denmark to travel our great country in search of hot gay statues (among other things). He writes:

I was shocked when I found this in SF this week. Does it count? It’s about as hot and gay as America gets. . .

As always, we’re intrigued. Let’s check these shots out to see if Mike has finally put San Francisco on the HGS map.

Hey, what’s that hot guy doing in the park?

Crank it brosephine.

Hello! (NSFW!?)

So yeah, we don’t know what everyone else thinks, but we’d say this guy more than “counts.” Thanks for putting San Francisco on the map, Mike — the city (and the country) should all be grateful.

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

Photographer Dino Dinco sent us an announcement for his art opening on Wednesday night, and — hey! — if we were in San Francisco, we’d totally go. Dinco’s show (click here for gallery info) includes shots of the desolate “cruising trails” in L.A. (somewhat ironically located near the police academy); we ponder the haunted light and the unkempt litter-strewn paths, where — like so much in the gay world — the overgrown bushes and weeds offer both danger and maybe a few seconds of salvation for those desperate enough to seek it.

In a glass case in the lobby of our hotel in Munich, they had an advertisement for a product that definitely caught our attention.

“Your Face in Crystal in ’09″ (Sorry we didn’t get a clearer shot!)

Do they make these in the United States, too? Each one was about three-inches tall.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to get one made for ourselves; as so often happens when we travel, we reflect back and think: maybe next time.

In Part 3, Chaos Detective Lasalle follows “the Russian” onto a train headed for Munich.

YouTube Clip below (click through to watch in high-res, or go to our FaceBook page!)

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

Episode 1: City of Dreams (Part 1)

Episode 1: City of Dreams (Part 2)

*Sigh…if only the economy were better, our attempt at an improvised/ impressionistic/ plotless/ gay/ noir/ Proustian/ travelog/ detective teevee-series-for-the-internets would be making a lot more headway and drawing in big-budget production $$$$ from Holleewoods.

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.

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)