Archive for the ‘Longing’ Category
On the Rainbow Room
In which The Gay Recluse writes metaphorically about life. Let’s say you were invited to a cocktail reception in the Rainbow Room, hosted by ____ and featuring a talk by _____, a political hero of yours who now works at a prestigious law firm. And even though it was a corporate event, which is never […]
Filed under: Dissonance, Government, Longing, Memory, Politicians, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Crab Cakes, Law Firms, Midtown Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, Suits, The Rainbow Room, Ties, Wine
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 | 1 Comment
Tags: Bear, Colm Toibin, Daddy Bear, Gay Bear, Hendrik Anderson, Henry James, Homophobia, Hot Bears, The Master, William James
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
In which The Gay Recluse ponders some 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: where to find sweetie […]
Filed under: Architecture, Gay, Longing, Obsession, Search, The Gay Recluse, Traffic | Leave a Comment
Tags: Arthur Schopenhauer, Corsican Mint, Die Walküre, Friedrich Nietzche, George Washington, Leonard Cohen, Metropolitan Opera, Michael Kimmelman, Peter Nadas, Stephanie Blythe, Sweetie Clementines, The Gay Voice, Velcro Jeans
True, there’s a part of us that wants to mock this display in the entrance to our parking garage in Washington Heights; to note with derision the odd juxtaposition of the toy sports-car bear with the postcard portrait of a baby Jesus; to look with disdain at the tree itself, oddly pathetic and completely garish, […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Longing, New York City, The Gay Recluse, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Christmas, Faith, Jingle Bells, Logic, Outsider Art, Parking Garage
Today we heard the unfamiliar whine of a dog on the subway. Poor thing! We can imagine no environment more foreign or artificial to a dog’s sensibility than a New York City subway car, between the plastic orange seating, linoleum floors, steel poles and preposterous advertisements. (Dr. Zizmor, anyone?) Or — from a sonic perspective […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Communism, Infrastructure, Longing, New York City, Subway | Leave a Comment
Tags: A-train, Dogs, Human Condition, New York City, Philosophy, Subway
Music courtesy of Saturnine from the album Remembrance of Things Past (VictoriaLandRecords 2007); released under a Creative Commons license here.
Filed under: Dream, Good Rock, Longing, Memory, The Gay Recluse, The Russian Blue | Leave a Comment
Tags: Indie Rock, Life, Proust, Saturnine, Shadows, Zephyr
Bravo, Andrew! Your dismissal of “community” was a pleasure to read, even if it did make us wish you would find a similarly pessimistic lens through which to analyze political regimes and nation building. But no matter, this is an important notion, one that faithful readers of The Gay Recluse will recognize as the foundation […]
Filed under: Longing, Pessimism, Pleasure, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Arthur Schopenhauer, Community, Community-Free Existence, The Gay Recluse
On Norma
Yesterday — what luck! — a final dress rehearsal for Norma at the Metropolitan Opera. The first thing we note, incredibly enough, is that the audience on average is even older than the one into which we immersed ourselves the other night at Aida. Can you imagine it? What a rare oasis from capitalism! How […]
Filed under: Good Rock, Longing, Opera, Pessimism, Politicians | Leave a Comment
Tags: , Bellini, Bernard Kerik, Dolora Zajick, Hasmik Papian, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Norma, Rudy Giuliani, The Metropolitan Opera, The Odyssey
We leave work and walk the long blocks from Madison to Sixth Avenue. We hurry down the stairs into the station, where we mindlessly extract our card from our wallet and slide it through the reader. In the distance we can sense the deep, subterranean rumble of what is surely an empty uptown D-train approaching […]
Filed under: Infrastructure, Longing, Resignation, Subway, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: D-Train, Fate, God, Homophobia, Karma, MTA, New York City, Pessimism, Proletariat, Schopenhauer, Subway
One day on the street in Washington Heights we passed an old man who invited us into his garden. Though barely the size of three parking spaces, the garden contained a vast array of unusual trees, including columnar varieties of a blue atlas cedar, a purple beech (the most magisterial of all trees), a Norway […]
Filed under: Dream, Longing, Resignation, The Autumn Garden, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Art, Beech, Blue Atlas Cedar, conifers, Dawn Redwood, Gardens, Hellebores, Life, Norway Spruce
We pull and tug at the blanket — the first cold night of the year is upon us — but it doesn’t move even an inch: it is trapped under the leaden weight of cats in the night. We shiver at the edge of the bed, longing to be covered and warm, to retreat to […]
Filed under: Addiction, Dream, Longing, The Russian Blue | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cats, Day, Insomnia, Night, Science, Sleep
According to an article in The Times today, “[h]omophobia directed at the elderly has many faces.” We learn of home health aides who “must be reminded not to wear gloves at inappropriate times, for example while opening the front door or making the bed, when there is no evidence of H.I.V. infection.” We learn of […]
Filed under: Dream, Longing, Pessimism, The Autumn Garden, Writers-American | Leave a Comment
Tags: Adirondacks, Aging, American Fiction, Death, gardening, Henry James, HIV, Picea Omorika Pendula, The New York Times, Weeping Serbian Spruce
Yes, we exalt at the view offered by the summit of Whiteface Mountain! Here from New York State’s fifth-highest peak we see nothing but a carpet of trees — both deciduous and coniferous — rolling over an ancient, haunted landscape interrupted by exquisite lakes and bands of cirrus clouds that hover ambivalently over the horizon. […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Good Rock, Longing, Philosophers, Travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: Adirondacks, Democracy, Desparate Housewives, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Populism, Walter Benjamin, Whiteface Mountain
On What Is Confirmed at Auto Tour Stop #9 on The Whiteface Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway
“If you turn around now, and face the mountain, notice how dwarfed the trees just above the parking lot are; small, contorted by the wind, branches broken from the load of ice in the winter, spring growth killed off by late spring frosts, soil so thin and impoverished as to defy definition, the whole scene […]
Filed under: Longing, Pessimism, Philosophers, Travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: Adirondacks, Nature, Schopenhauer, The Smiths, Whiteface Mountain
There is a tawdry quality to the buildings lining the main street into town that even we find it difficult to romanticize, as it does not recall an excess of abandoned grandeur (in this regard we have been literally ruined by Washington Heights) but a desperate, opportunistic desire to skim off the hordes (us among […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Longing, Travel, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Goth-Punk, Lake Placid, New York City, Saranac Lake, Washington Heights
The Gay Recluse 