Archive for the ‘Resignation’ Category

In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with the George Washington Bridge. For the past ___ years, I’ve been neglecting my guitars and amplifiers; for example, I stored my ‘blackface’ 1960s Fender Princeton Reverb at my friend John’s house, and everything else sat in the forgotten recesses of closets, which is not exactly the […]


In which The Tsarina takes over The Gay Recluse. On your entry tonight, The Tsarina remarks by quoting Henry Miller (1941):  “There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.” [Via reader CBNY.]


In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with the George Washington Bridge. 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 […]


In which The Gay Recluse is increasingly obsessed with spring. The garden at the end of winter is not exactly a joy to behold: branches are bent or broken, evergreens are pale, and even the ground — littered with dead leaves and twigs — seems inhospitable. But a closer examination reveals signs of life: the […]


On Vexed

05Mar09

In which The Gay Recluse is vexed. Lately we’ve been thinking about how much we still kinda h8 the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’  Though we know that many in ‘the community’ consider this a ‘settled issue’ — and perhaps this is a vestige of our own self-h8red, which is not small by any measure — […]


In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with the George Washington Bridge. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. W, was a large, macho man with a mustache and a tight perm. (You could actually be macho and have a perm in 1978.) He liked to aggressively talk about boys and girls “dating” and “kissing,” and […]


In which The Gay Recluse wins an Oscar. Recently we learned from US Magazine that “[a] few weeks after signing the lease on a $60 million Long Island mansion, [Angelina Jolie], 33, was spotted checking out a nice building in Manhattan’s uptown Washington Heights neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.” It makes us wonder how it came about […]


On Nowhere

29Jan09

In which The Gay Recluse remembers Ride. The opening chords of “Vapour Trail” are high and open, yet filled with same (phase-shifted) melancholy we associate with ringing church bells. To hear this the other day, as we plodded through our thirty minutes on the elliptical at the gym, was to be swept away with a sense of forgotten potential — […]


In which The Gay Recluse dreams of snow. On certain days, we are made aware that capitalism is a vast, raging sea on which we are helplessly adrift. It’s not that this is exactly news; to the contrary, we have always known this, much the way the earth is round and the sun is many […]


On Ludwig

18Dec08

In which The Gay Recluse loves Luchino Visconti best. In Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s four-hour treatment of the 19th-century King of Bavaria, we are introduced to the king as a young man, but learn almost immediately — in what feels like a flash-forward — that he will eventually be dethroned by the state legislature for maybe being insane. […]


In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with the George Washington Bridge. For most of us, repetition is an unavoidable facet of modern life; we might even go as far as to say that it’s been like this as long as we have lived in one village or town or city. When we were […]


On Senso

09Dec08

In which The Gay Recluse loves Luchino Visconti. After scouring the globe, we were finally able to obtain — from South Korea! — a copy of Senso, Luchino Visconti’s 1954 film about the Austrian occupation of Venice during the war for Italian independence. In what is arguably the most operatic of Visconti’s films, we follow a […]


In which The Gay Recluse remembers art class. Yesterday we read about Alton Dulaney, who won the gift-wrapping championship of the world in a wrap-off at Rockefeller Center. Watching Alton’s performance, we couldn’t help but regret all the hours we spent growing up watching football and hockey and baseball on teevee, when we could have […]


In which Dante and Zephyr take over The Gay Recluse. Friends! Aren’t you tired of getting on the subway and listening to two teenage assholes engage in a loud debate about whether it’s “gay” or not to touch shoulders in the kind of “bro-hug” you see on the teevee when a team scores a goal/point/tee-dee? […]


In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with birds. So guess what? We now have a Twitter and a Tumblr and a Facebook! Sometimes we feel like the oldest person in the blogosphere. If we were a bird, we’d probably just fly away.


In which Dante and Zephyr take over The Gay Recluse. Friends, you can be safe in assuming that we spend more time together than any human couple on the planet! That’s why we rushed out and got our federal civil union license, which gives all couples — gay or straight! — the same rights and […]


In which The Gay Recluse feels vaguely nauseous. So OMG did everyone hear that Keith Olbermann had a “special comment” last night (or was it two nights ago, whenevs) about Prop 8 and gay marriage? Chances are, if you spent five seconds on the internet today, you did! We were told not only to watch […]


In which The Gay Recluse sees stars. So the other day we ran into this coal-chute cover named Chris Zieseniss, who lives a few doors down from us. He’s originally from Brooklyn, but moved to Washington Heights like 200 years ago or something and has lived here ever since. We like talking to him, but […]


In which The Gay Recluse listens with admiration to the new record by The New Year. Recently we went to see The New Year in Williamsburg. It was a great show until we went back to our car and discovered that some frat boy asshole had broken off our side mirror on the car. Goodbye […]


In which Zephyr takes over The Gay Recluse. Friends! What if the polls are wrong? What if the conspiracy theories are true? What are these strange places called Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia? And why does our fate rest in their hands? What happens on Wednesday morning if Barack Obama loses? Will we be […]