Archive for January, 2008
In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 31, 2008 Time: 7:23 pm Causes of Disaster: Sprawling development in dwindling reserves of space. Remarks: Unplanned and haphazard growth has resulted in dangerous towers of material. Falling debris has already made the area […]
Filed under: Disaster Footage, Health, Infrastructure, Landscape, Photography, Technology, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Books, Disaster Footage, Homeland Security, Magazines, Paper, Shelving
There is something oddly unsatisfying about The Master, Colm Toibin’s 2004 treatment of the life of Henry James. Odd because we almost always love Toibin’s prose, which is elegant but unpretentious, and — unlike so much contemporary fiction — never shifts tenses or otherwise calls attention to itself in a distracting or superfluous manner. Occasionally […]
Filed under: Gay, History, Literature, Longing, Memory, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, Writers-American, Writers-Irish | Leave a Comment
Tags: Bear, Colm Toibin, Daddy Bear, Gay Bear, Hendrik Anderson, Henry James, Homophobia, Hot Bears, The Master, William James
In which The Gay Recluse documents the exceedingly beautiful ruins of Washington Heights. Location: Audubon Terrace Address: Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets Remarks: Of all the exceedingly beautiful ruins in Washington Heights, perhaps none is more heartbreaking than Audubon Terrace. Not quite dead, it is like a great whale stranded on a beach; as […]
Filed under: Architecture, Capitalism, Communism, Decay, Government, New York City, Politicians, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: American Geographical Society, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Archer Milton Huntington, Audubon Terrace, Beaux Arts, Dominican Neighborhoods, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Numismatic Society, The Hispanic Society, The Museum of the American Indian, The Smiths, Washington Heights
In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 29, 2008 Time: 6:04 pm. Causes of Disaster: Heedless galloping of invasive species across fragile ecosystems. Remarks: A once pristine landscape has been ruined, and is seen here with buckled terrain and dangerous fault […]
Filed under: Animals, Disaster Footage, Landscape, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cats, Dante, Disaster Footage, Homeland Security, Pouncing, Rugs, Zephyr
In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 28, 2008 Time: 5:39 pm. Causes of Disaster: Careless and possibly blatant disregard of invaluable records; ongoing acts of civil disobedience. Remarks: After a long and exhaustive search, an historic document of invaluable worth […]
Filed under: Animals, Disaster Footage, Photography, Technology, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cast Iron, Denton Welch, Disaster Footage, Dogs, Homeland Security, Maiden Voyage
In which The Gay Recluse ponders a sampling of recent search terms used to find the very pages you are now reading. Note: All search terms listed are in the exact form provided by WordPress.com, which is the host (at least for a while) of this blog. Hyperlinks to relevant posts included. Search: disaster + […]
Filed under: Architecture, Gay, Politicians, Search, Stereotypes, Technology, The Gay Recluse, The Times, Writers-American, Writers-French | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Baudelaire, Bully, Cascadilla, Cornell, Cuties, Daniel Jones, Dead City, Disaster Footage, Don McLean, ESPN, Fiction, Gay Bears, Gaydar, Herbert Muschamp, Huckabee, Modern Love, Pottery, Spacemen 3, Spleen, Suicide, sweeties, Terry Bradshaw, Toothpaste
In which The Gay Recluse, with very little sarcasm or irony, reports on real estate in Washington Heights. Description: Triple-lot vacant land, long used as an illegal outdoor parking lot. Address: 573, 575 and 577 West 161st Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. Total lot size = 60′ by 100′. Remarks: This site first sparked our […]
Filed under: Architecture, Capitalism, Decay, Gentrification, Landscape, Monopoly, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: 10032, Christian Orthodox, Columbia University, Department of Buildings, DOB, Monopoly, Real Estate, St. Mary Magdalen, Uptown
In which The Gay Recluse, with very little sarcasm or irony, reports on retail in Washington Heights. Development: Cigar Shop Address: 609 West 161st Street between Broadway and Fort Washington Remarks: Except for the famous quote — likely apocryphal — attributed to Sigmund Freud, we don’t know shit much about cigars except that they are […]
Filed under: Architecture, Capitalism, Gentrification, Retail, The Gay Recluse, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: 10032, Cigars, Dominican Republic, Eileen Alexander, Sigmund Freud, Soberano Cigars, Uptown Gentrification, Washington Heights
In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 26, 2008 Time: 4:38 pm. Causes of Disaster: Failure to follow implemented routines; boredom, malaise. Remarks: Clean-up of the disaster area had already begun when workers were attacked by a savage, rampaging beast. There […]
Filed under: Animals, Government, Technology, The Gay Recluse, The Russian Blue | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cats, Disaster Footage, Homeland Security, Mess, Toys, Zephyr
On Gay Sex in the Seventies
First, it’s a great title for a documentary; just to say Gay Sex in the Seventies makes us a little more forgiving than is perhaps our natural tendency. Plus you get to see some great shots of vintage Big Apple; the west-side piers, the notorious truck bays across the highway, the Upper West Side when […]
Filed under: Film, Gay, Gentrification, Health, History, New York City, Nostalgia, Sickness, Stereotypes | Leave a Comment
Tags: Disco, Gay Sex, Gay Sex in the 70s, Gay Sex in the Seventies, Poppers, St. Mark's Bathhouse, Studio 54, The Saint, Vintage New York, West Side Piers
In which The Gay Recluse updates his informal but rather telling quantitative analysis of Modern Love, the weekly Style Section (of The Times) column in which openly gay writers almost never appear, and even less frequently describe a romantic relationship. This week’s piece: Closing Night for My Bit Part Subject: Woman looks longingly at famous […]
Filed under: Gay, Language, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Daniel Jones, Fashion & Style, Gay Stereotypes, Gay Voice, Gay Writers, Homophobia, Modern Love, The New York Times
In which The Gay Recluse contemplates an uncommissioned masterpiece from the walls of an uptown subway station. Dear readers: we invite you to submit any particularly inspiring (or any particularly uninspiring) examples of subway graffiti to us at thegayrecluse@gmail.com.
Filed under: Graffiti, Infrastructure, New York City, Subway, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Graffiti, MTA, Networks, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Television
While we are the first to admit to possessing character traits that would regularly be described as obsessive, addictive and quite possibly manic — and is this not part of our charm? — we nevertheless take no small consolation in having never descended into the ranks of the toilety neurotic and insane. We were just […]
Filed under: Addiction, Capitalism, Health, Infrastructure, Obsession, Sickness | Leave a Comment
Tags: Degradation, Hatred, Insane, Interviews, Manners, Neurotic, Toilet, Toilet Covers, Toilet Seats, Toilety, Toilety Neurotic, Work, WTF
On The Rainmaker
As we watch the first few minutes of The Rainmaker (some fifty years after its release, in 1956), we are impatient and judgmental; the set is generic Hollywood Western, while the men in the family — a father and his two sons — come off as caricatures (stern older brother, mischievous younger, wise dad). Even […]
Filed under: Film, Gay, Landscape, Longing, Technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: 1956, Burt Lancaster, Con Artist, Drought, Katherine Hepburn, Old Maid, Spinster, The Rainmaker, Western
Perhaps you saw the news story making the rounds today about the science of “gaydar”? Apparently a couple of geniuses affiliated with Tufts University came up with an “experiment” in which they showed participants “90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds.” When the participants […]
Filed under: Athletes, Drag Queens, Drivel, Gay, Memory, Science, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Chris Crocker, Gay Stereotypes, Gaydar, Homosexual Stereotypes, Ivory Tower, Lady Bunny, Matt Kaplan, Nalini Ambady, Nicholas Rule, Rock Hudson, Safety School, ScienceNow, Three Quarks Daily, Tom Cruise, Tufts University
In which The Gay Recluse ponders a sampling of recent search terms used to find the very pages you are now reading. Note: All search terms listed are in the exact form provided by WordPress.com, which is the host (at least for a while) of this blog. Hyperlinks to relevant posts included. Search: rambo gay […]
Filed under: Gay, Language, Memory, New York City, Search, The Gay Recluse, Traffic | 1 Comment
Tags: Andrew Holleran, Brazil, Clemetines, Edward Rothstein, ESPN, Internet, Nietzsche, Picea Abies, Rambo, Roger Cohen, Search, Spruce, Vacant Shell
In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 21, 2008 Time: 1:35am. Causes of Disaster: Failure to implement long-term planning procedures; budget overruns; bureaucratic miscommunication. Remarks: It was long ago noted that the tube in question was reaching dangerously low and unsustainable […]
Filed under: Government, Infrastructure, Language, Resignation, Technology, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cinnamint, Digital Photography, Disaster Footage, Homeland Security, Technology, Tom's of Maine, Toothpaste
Let’s imagine that your name is Rex Cole. You were born in 1887 in Port Huron, Michigan. You drop out of school at the age of 16 to become an electrician. Dissatisfied with the provincial life, you fight the tide of many millions and head east to New York City, where you save enough money […]
Filed under: Architecture, Capitalism, Decay, History, New York City, Resignation, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Art Deco, Billboards, Biography, Economic Depression, General Electric, Refrigerators, Rex Cole, Showrooms
We have long suspected that “Modern Love” — the weekly column in the Sunday Styles of The Times — has been a startlingly barren landscape for gay writers, particularly when you consider its location in what is undoubtedly the “gayest” section of the newspaper (and — oh yeah — the gayest city in the world), […]
Filed under: Gay, New York City, Sickness, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse, The Times | 2 Comments
Tags: Daniel Jones, Fashion & Style, Gay Stereotypes, Gay Voice, Gay Writers, Homophobia, Modern Love, Morrissey, The New York Times
In which The Gay Recluse ponders a sampling of recent search terms used to find the very pages you are now reading. Note: All search terms listed are in the exact form provided by WordPress.com, which is the host (at least for a while) of this blog. Hyperlinks to relevant posts included. Search: gay stereotypes […]
Filed under: Architecture, Gay, Infrastructure, Language, Memory, Opera, Search, The Times, Traffic, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Beatrice, Clementines, Cornell, Crack House, Drug Lords, Edmund White, English Elm, Frank Rich, Gay Stereotypes, Geraldine Ferraro, Opera, SUV, Theta Drug
The Gay Recluse 