On Franklin’s Tower
Today in the locker room we heard the distant strains of “Franklin’s Tower” coming through the walls. While undressing, we listened to Jerry’s high, reedy voice and the watery textures of his guitar, and considered with some disdain the detached and meandering quality of the music — like so much of The Grateful Dead, vaguely cheerful and detached, loosely psychedelic, a demented nursery rhyme — and how it represents the opposite of The Velvet Underground and their progeny. Yet the effect of confronting it in this unexpected setting — and through the walls — was immediate and visceral; we suddenly recalled hearing the same song ___ years earlier in the basement of a fraternity house — “Theta Drug” — where overhead the sound system thudded through the floors. How easy it is to remember the dank stench that emanated from the floors and the thin, piss-colored beer we gulped down from plastic cups as we stood among the clumps of other nervous freshman waiting for refills at a battalion of kegs. Most incredible is the presence of a girl we “liked,” a girl we had already seen on campus and who now hovered nearby, her long, blond hair and diaphanous skin giving her an ethereal quality that made us even drunker than the alcohol. We worked up the courage to glance at her shyly and — enter fanfare of trumpets — she returned the gaze! When our eyes met through the dark gloom, our pulse quickened, though it was less at the thought of falling in love with this particular saint than a fervent hope she might save us from the more tortured longing beginning to possess our heart.
Filed under: Addiction, Bad Rock, Good Rock, Longing, Memory | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cornell, Grateful Dead, Ithaca, Jerry Garcia, la memoire involuntaire, Velvet Underground
We were recently informed via e-mail of the fait accompli retirement of Glitza Gardenia, a woman who had labored in the administrative trenches of our organization for over three decades. Despite efforts of her manager — the author of the e-mail in question — to honor these years of unflinching service, Glitza refused to consider even the smallest tribute, and even went so far as to decline the customary aluminum pin inscribed with her name alongside that of the company for which she had so long toiled; instead she left after her final afternoon as if it were no different than any other, and provided her colleagues with no forwarding address or other contact information.
These days, as the sun begins its to quicken its descent, it is easy to imagine the amber glow of the buildings around Glitza as she pushes through the revolving door for the last time and pauses to confront the frenetic energy of the five o’clock street. She stands in disbelief as she considers the many years that seem at this moment to have passed in a second; she thinks of all the people inside she will never see again; it is exhausting to consider, but she feels no remorse, only an almost staggering relief as she thinks of going to sleep for hours and hours. She walks forward slowly, out of step with the other commuters but oblivious to their impatience, knowing that the next time she wakes up, she will belong to no one.
Filed under: Capitalism, Drag Queens, Pleasure, Resignation, The Autumn Garden | Leave a Comment
Tags: Commuter, Gardenia, Glitza, Midtown, New York City, Retirement, Work
It has been two days since we saw Tropical Malady, the 2004 film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and still we are haunted by his depiction of the small joys and disappointments of a new love giving way to sickness and obsession; the mythological and alchemical transformation that takes place as we stalk our love, and in turn are stalked; the sense of crawling through the fetid depths of the jungle before suddenly arriving at a clearing to catch a brief glimpse of a billowing tree on the plain, iridescent as a jellyfish in the night ocean, illuminated as if from within. Not since reading Henry James’ 1902 novella “The Beast in the Jungle” have we experienced such validation of the universal longing that we know will always reside in our ruined soul.
Filed under: Film, Longing, Pleasure, Sickness, Writers-American | Leave a Comment
Tags: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle, Tropical Malady
Today we read about Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Philip Roth’s new book in which his alter ego Zuckerman is said to be (ahem) a recluse, which led us to think he might at least be on familiar terms with the sublime metaphorical/metaphysical qualities so critical to the reclusive state. We wondered if it were possible in our previous assessments of his work to have misjudged Roth, whom — along with John Updike — we’ve long considered to be among post-war American fiction’s dreariest writers, locked in a tepid and bourgeois frame of reference in which descriptions of a few too many drinks and an equal number of extramarital trysts (with suspiciously compliant women) were eagerly lapped up by an entire generation — one we generally describe as “suburban” for having abandoned the metropolis — with whom we have never felt comfortable in close quarters.
Introducing his character to us, Roth writes in his opening chapter (available in The Times): “[I had] hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in … eleven years, and, what’s more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11… I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction whose power over me is no less, and in some cases greater, than it was in my initial exciting encounters with them.”
While there are many disturbing aspects to this character, none are for the reasons Roth seems to want them to be. Only someone as bourgeois as Roth would think it shocking to forego dinner parties and cell phones and — heavens, voting, or god forbid the news! — in lieu of reading and writing. Sometimes he even stays up late! OMG! This is nothing more than Pre-Recluse 101, an introductory course of conduct our 14-year old niece has already mastered.
The truly disturbing (or at least truly annoying) feature of this extract, however, is the insipid nostalgia Roth displays — for the typewriter, for the books of his youth, for a life pre-9/11 when he was still interested in the news — that contains no inkling of remorse or resignation, those most critical ingredients to a more elevated state of seclusion. Rather, we are confronted with a bitter old man who cannot admit he ever made mistakes in his youth, or was stupid or phony. By clinging so tenaciously to the “work” (and in his case, it feels like drudgery) that once excited him, he shuts out the possibility of new discovery and enlightenment; for us, this would be like returning to The Lord of the Rings or perhaps Led Zeppelin’s Zoso as everlasting sources of artistic inspiration, simply because we worshipped both at a certain point in our lives.
On this point, we turn to the great Huysmans, who in contrast to Roth states of his reclusive alter ego Des Esseintes: “In no way did [he] derive even a fugitive distraction from his boredom from this literature [of his youth]. The mass of books which he had once studied he had thrown into dim corners of his library shelves when he left the Fathers’ school. “I should have left them in Paris,” he told himself, as he turned out some books which were particularly insufferable: those of the Abbe Lamennais and that impervious sectarian so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, the Comte Joseph de Maistre.”
Huysmans shows us that it is only by way of the admission of our fading interest in the once inspirational that we can pave the way for new (read “unfamiliar,” for the work in question might be five thousand years old) to take its place. In this regard, Huysmans writes of discovering Baudelaire: “[T]he more [he] read Baudelaire, the more he felt the ineffable charm of this writer who, in an age when verse served only to portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language; who, more than any other writer possessed a marvelous power to define with a strange robustness of expression, the most fugitive and tentative morbidities of exhausted minds and sad souls.”
We identify with Huysmans because under his florid, obsessive (read: gay) prose, he seems to possess secrets and regrets that he wants to see reflected in the more obsessive art he now holds close to his heart; in the case of Roth, we look at the world through his stony eyes and find we don’t care about anything; how could we, when we don’t even exist?
Filed under: Capitalism, Drivel, Pessimism, Resignation, Writers-American, Writers-French | Leave a Comment
Tags: 9/11, Fiction, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Philip Roth, Technology
Thank you, New York Times, thank you! In your recently published article, “Despite Denials, Gays Insist They Exist, if Quietly, in Iran,” you have finally proved just how wrong President Ahmadinejad was when he claimed that his country contained not even a single gay recluse! Before we read this brilliant piece of investigative journalism, we were actually beginning to think that — unlike every other corner of the world — Iran might be an exception to the rule, that among its millions of inhabitants you would be hard pressed to find even two men (or two women) slinking off for a night of illicit pleasure. But no, you have introduced us to “Reza,” a man you felt compelled to tell us “lean[ed]back in his black leather desk chair” and who “shaves his head and often wears an earring in his left ear” (the emphasis, we confess, is ours). Ahh yes, thanks to your exquisitely rendered detail and deep insight, we have learned so much about how the Islamic world really operates; seemingly it is a place — not unlike the (Republican) halls of the United States Congress — where nobody in a position of power (or their supporters) has ever been known to act out on the maddening urge we know lies just beneath the surface of their heart.
Filed under: Capitalism, Drivel, Pleasure, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Iran, Larry Craig, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The New York Times
Of all the outer boroughs, Brooklyn seems to offer the least potential for the gay recluse in search of refuge and contemplation. Having once lived in Park Slope — there, we admit it — we remain mystified by the unceasing torrent of adulation heaped upon the borough — and in particular, we address these comments to the newly gentrified swath that extends from Williamsburg and Greenpoint down to Park Slope and then east toward Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, i.e., that which exists in the pages of The Times — by a mafia of literati and music scenesters in an apparent effort to convince themselves and a few others — who perhaps have never had the opportunity to visit New York City and experience the self-evident — that to live amid a few three-story brownstones and converted warehouses is really much better than anything in Manhattan, where the buildings are too tall, the streets too crowded, and life in general just too extreme for their suburban sensibilities. We also note the outer-borough sense of civic pride — “I love Brooklyn!” — that seems particularly noxious amid the rampant nationalism that has descended upon the country since ____.
We have thus come to view Brooklyn as less a geographical location than an unfortunate phase of life — like adolescence — marked by naive idealism, a severe lack of self-awareness and denial of the infinitely more terrifying yet beautiful world we must come to know as an adult. This, of course, is why we are thankful to have left Brooklyn for Washington Heights; not, of course, that we “love” it — any more than we “love” being an adult — but it is still Manhattan’s most forgotten and perplexing neighborhood, where we are never far removed from the crumbling, gilded apartment palaces, the maddening noise and debris, the armies of rats and — most of all — the thousands upon thousands who like us must scratch out a futile existence in the high cliffs above the Hudson.
Filed under: Decay, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Cobble Hill, Heath Ledger, Park Slope, The New York Times, Washington Heights, Williamsburg
In response to the criticism by us and many others of her article on Thelma and Louise, Judith Warner in her latest column in The Times has come back to the table, prepared to admit how “shocked” she was by the reaction, but nevertheless maintaining that “[since] the 1970s and 1980s… I [can] attest to the fact that there’s been a major shift. What may have started with a fear of lawsuits has trickled down into everyday behavior. What’s sayable in polite company has changed.”
In support of this she quotes Casey Jordan, a professor of justice and law administration at Western Connecticut State University, who tells her that “what’s doable – in most of mainstream America, at least – has changed as well.” The professor expounds: “I do think most young men have an appreciation for ‘no means no.’ There is a new sense that women should be respected. You’ve got men responding to the idea that women do have more power and they have to respect them.”
Not to belabor the point, but what continues to bother us about Judith Warner (but only in these articles; generally we like her) is her failure to admit that her experience — again, as much as we often appreciate and enjoy her perspective — appears laughingly remote to those (billions) who live outside the upper middle-class enclave where she seems to spend the bulk of her time. In short, Judith, the only truth you can present with any authority is your own, as you almost seem to admit toward the end of your piece. “It’s such a quagmire,” you write, “this business of victimhood and empowerment and identity — particularly for those of us who have not been directly touched by sexual assault or harassment. In the 1980s and early ’90s, I used to believe that we all suffered from sexual violence by proxy. Beyond simple empathy, I felt we were one, in our status, with the most violently sexually subjugated women. Now I’m not so sure.”
The true quagmire, Judith, is your failure to differeniate between the subjective and the objective. To conflate the two as you have done here will never seem less than insulting to those who have been more “touched” than you by the often grim offerings of the world around us. We invite you ride the A-train uptown and spend a night with us on the corners of Broadway and Amsterdam in Washington Heights, where an entirely different culture of respect and disrespect prevails, one that we can assure you has nothing to do with fear of being hit with a sexual-harrassment lawsuit.
Filed under: Drivel, Pessimism, The Times, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Judith Warner, New York Times, Schopenhauer, Thelma and Louise, Washington Heights
Although it is far from being classified as a specimen plant in the garden of the gay recluse, the firethorn (Pyrachantha‘Mohave’) is valued not only for the depth of its evergreen leaves and the length of its ferocious needles, but for the perfect orange tone of its berries, which provide such welcome interest to the sometimes dreary landscape we find outside as summer gives way to fall. We are reminded of what the great Huysmans wrote 150 years ago about a certain orange tone being the most obsessive and neurotic of any color; this would certainly not be the more garish flavor of orange we associate with construction sites or corporate logos, but a version containing a deeper reddish tone found — artificial though it may appear! — only in nature.
Today as we contemplated the clusters of tiny fruit, illuminated by the eastern sun, we remembered how as a child we used to play under a tree — in our memories, at least, the bark was silver and peeling, like a birch — which like the firethorn possessed similar berries that we used to collect in a bucket and give to our mother, knowing that orange was her favorite color. One day, however, we came home from school and were dismayed to find the tree gone — we now suspect it was a mountain ash (sorbus aucuporia) — in its place only a stump, some flecks of sawdust and a few scattered berries in the lawn. We gathered up the last of these and presented them to our mother who, with tears in her eyes, explained that the tree had been diseased — you could see the vein of rot even in the stump — and had to be cut down; only later would I understand her reluctance to ever replace it with a new one.
Filed under: Decay, The Autumn Garden, Washington Heights, Writers-French | Leave a Comment
Tags: barrier shrubs, Firethorn, gardening, Joris-Karl Huysmans, la memoire involuntaire, Marcel Proust, Mountain Ash, orange
On the Rape of Pittsburgh
In today’s Times, we read an opinion piece — “Where Everybody Knows Your Team” — by an author who grew up in Pittsburgh and — having now returned — wants us to know how watching the Steelers has long been an important thread of her life. “As any native can tell you,” she declares, “we take our football seriously.” She describes watching the team in sports bars all over the country, where “[t]he bonds we [i.e., she and the other Steeler fans] formed were based on solidarity — not a flag-waving patriotism but an awareness of our similarities, inherent and deep, which in the moment outweighed our differences.”
Are you vomiting yet?
We are here to reassure you that not all native Pittsburghers — and yes, we are one of them — do not take our football seriously and, despite all reports to the contrary, remain vehemently opposed to the completely superficial sense of “community” propounded by the author and others of her ilk throughout the world, all sadly duped by a trademark and Oz-like mythology designed to produce the largest possible amounts of revenue for its owners (such as ____ Rooney, with whom we attended grade school).
The author writes: “When I was a girl, my dad, a former high-school halfback, watched Steeler games from an easy chair opposite the television in the family room, where I divided my attention between my homework and the action on the field. The quarterback dropped back. My dad’s feet began to move. Then the handoff. The defense swarmed the ball carrier. My dad juked in his chair. All this took place in silence, punctuated by the occasional clap or groan. That was the extent of our collective viewing experience.”
Are we the only reader struck by a certain desperate sadness in this image of a girl watching television with a father completely oblivious to her presence? Did you too note the oddly literate way she described the action — particularly her use of the term “ball carrier” — as if she were trying to convince us that she really learned something from him? Are we the only one with the sense that her continuing lust for the Steelers is a fruitless quest for her father’s attention?
How we wish she would have talked to us of rejecting the horrible conformity represented by the Steelers, one that suffocates Pittsburgh and has driven so many of us from its ancient hills and winding rivers! How we wish she would have used The Times to declare the truth, which is that the Steelers and their brethren have time and again raped Pittsburgh, not only financially but spiritually, turning the city into a junkie, a whore, a beggar who would spend his last dollar on a lottery ticket. We have several times driven into the city on a Monday in January and seen the tattered banners hanging from the toll-booths and the dingy, dilapidated porches of the sad houses that line Route 19 (even after a Super Bowl win). We too have proclaimed our love for the Steelers — and the Pirates and the Penguins — and wondered why we felt so hollow and bereaved the next day, as if we really had given away our soul.
Filed under: Addiction, Capitalism, Drivel, Infrastructure, Sickness, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Chuck Noll, Dwight White, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, NFL, Pittsburgh, Terry Bradshaw, The New York Times, The Steelers
The oily black smoke of 100-year-old boilers disperses daily across the rooftops in Washington Heights, heedless of those who suffer from pneumonia, asthma and tuberculosis. Officials and politicians? Not even footnotes in this story, which is about the aggregation of capital and the relentless rise of the metropolis.
Filed under: Capitalism, Politicians, Sickness, The Gay Recluse, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Betsy Gotbaum, Charles B. Rangel, Charles Schumer, Eric T. Schneiderman, George W. Bush, Harlem, Herman “Denny” Farrell, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Miguel Martinez, Robert Jackson, Scott Stringer, Washington Heights
In the elevator today, we were asked by an acquaintance what book we were reading, and in response displayed Emile Zola’s Nana. Noting his blank expression, we elaborated: “It’s an old French novel.”
“Is it good?”
Not wanting to digress into our true reasons for reading the book — namely, to better understand the context out of which the great JK Huysmans arose — we answered truthfully that we had only reached page two — still too early to judge — at which point the elevator doors opened and the conversation was mercifully terminated. Still, as we reflected in the seconds afterward, we reconsidered the following facts, which we had just read in an introduction to our paperback edition: on February 15, 1880, when Nana was first published by Charpentier, a first edition of 55,000 copies sold out — an unprecedented number — following the largest publicity campaign ever mounted for a novel. According to Henry Ceard in a letter written to Zola at the time, “[Nana] is being repeated ad infinitum over all the walls of Paris. It is becoming an obsession and a nightmare.”
Having just lived through the publicity frenzy and commercial triumph of this week’s release of Halo 3 by Microsoft, we understand completely. Described in Friday’s Times as “the video-game phenomenon of the year,” with over $170 million in opening-day sales, Halo 3 made more money than any “blockbuster” movie ever has in a single weekend.
We don’t bring this up to belittle our interlocutor’s lack of familiarity with Zola, a fading titan of 19th-century French literature; in fact, our own opinion of Zola’s writing remains decidedly mixed (though we will never hesitate to express our unqualified admiration for his defense of The Truth in L’Affaire Dreyfus). Still, as we peered into the deep fog at the infinite future, we could not help but be consoled by the thought that every entity — whether living or not — will eventually be relegated to the trivial and unknown.
Filed under: Capitalism, Resignation, Writers-French | Leave a Comment
Tags: Alfred Dreyfus, Emile Zola, Halo 3, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Microsoft, Nana, The New York Times
To those who complain about our subway station, we will not dispute your claims regarding the legions of rats who live on the upper platform, the large underground cavern now filled with trash that has long been closed off to riders; nor will we deny that the smell of piss is pervasive, and that at least a few times every week shit is smeared — “how did this happen?” we wonder every time we encounter it — on the handrail leading down the cement steps from the corner of 161st and Amsterdam; nor that the walls of the station — at least upstairs — are covered with nothing — no maps, no advertisements, no graffiti — but waxy, industrial paint in the bleakest shades of mustard and black. True enough, all of this and more could be duly confirmed and documented at this very second, just as we have done here.
And yet, even though we are inclined to applaud your efforts to bring these despicable conditions to the authorities, who most certainly can be expected to take the appropriate measures once the mean income of the neighborhood has crossed a certain line of destitution (and yes, we too have noted the recent appearance of movie/television posters along the actual platforms), we do so with a measure of trepidation, for fear of losing the panels now in place, the one thing that has inspired us over the course of these many years spent waiting for the local C-train to irregularly arrive. Consider, if you will, one of the old panels on the subway platform wall, and observe the finely wrought precision with which each strip of peeling paint has by the hands of time been distressed in the subtlest shades of gold and silver, all displayed in a collage with the glue and paper of generations long deceased. And now — for the sake of comparison — consider some of the newly hung posters adjacent to our masterpiece: how pathetic and ridiculous they look! How unenduring, superficial and transient! There we spot an ad for a new television show by ___ (shown swinging in a tire swing in what is apparently the height of comedy) or another by ____ (with blood on his freakishly adolescent face) or some unimaginably tedious sports program.
Nor as we consider the loss of our masterpieces are we comforted by the prospect of any real “art” being installed in their place, or even nearby; all we have to do is think of the brass turtlemen perched all over the Chelsea station, and how depressed we used to get seeing them on our way home from work each night, to know that we have completely lost our faith in the ability of any transit official to make such commissions. We know there will be many who fail to see the beauty of these forgotten panels, and will respond to our assessment with scorn and disbelief. Yet before you judge, we again invite to you to behold the works in person. Here you have the abstract expression of the city itself, resplendent in decay and neglect, and to observe it for even these few seconds fills us with the transcendent bliss of true insignificance.
Filed under: Decay, Infrastructure, Pleasure, Resignation, Washington Heights | 2 Comments
Tags: Andy Warhol, ESPN, Michael C. Hall, MTA, New York City, Sarah Silverman, Washington Heights
As promised, we agreed to have the president of Iran over for tea on Monday afternoon to discuss The Magic Mountain, the magnus opus by Thomas Mann. President Ahmadinejad has long defended the work — as he did (somewhat controversially) in his speech a few blocks south of us at Columbia University — as one of his favorites in the Western literary canon. The president spent a few minutes admiring the “understated elegance” of our Grosvenor silver-plated afternoon tea set before turning to the topic du jour.
—————————–
The Gay Recluse: President Ahmadinejad, can you tell us exactly what makes The Magic Mountain such an important work for you and your followers?
President Ahmadinejad: Do you have a week? (Laughs.) Seriously, I think I would start with the fluid yet arbitrary sense of time in the sanitorium, where years can pass for the patients in the blink of an eye while the seven minutes it takes to get your temperature can seem — no, it actually becomes! — a minor eternity. Mann captures that perfectly. Of course it’s almost a cliche to mention the chapter where Hans gets lost in the snowstorm and thinks that days have passed, when in fact it is only a few minutes, but I’m not a writer — or at least not yet! — so I’ll mention it anyway.
TGR: What did you think of Hans’ obsession with Clavdia?
PA: Obviously I can’t answer that without acknowledging the long shadow of Proust in this regard — not to mention Death in Venice, which is probably a better treatment of obsession — but I personally like to revisit the chapter in which Hans realizes that his obsession is rooted in a schoolboy “crush” he once held for one of his classmates — interestingly enough, a boy — whose eyes had the same color and shape as Clavdia. A lot of my gay friends think this is kind of a cop-out, but again, I think you have to give Mann a lot of credit for making this statement when he did — and how can you not read it as an admission? — which is something Proust never quite did with Albertine. I mean, did Virginia Woolf ever get that far?
TGR: Arguably in Orlando.
PA. Yes, well — I love Orlando for different reasons, but it’s still not as explicit as Mann, if that’s the right word. But the other point I wanted to make is how incredibly moving it is when Hans finally declares his love for Clavdia, not in his native language, but in French! It’s genius, not only because French — comme tout le monde sait! — is truly a language of love and philosophy, but because there’s often something dreamlike and fantastic about speaking a foreign language, and to actually employ this device so unapologetically was really a remarkable feat. I’m not really aware of another work in which this was done so effectively.
TGR: How do you respond to critics who point out that Musil was not a fan of the work?
PA: Are critics even part of the human race? (Laughs.) Look, I’m not trying to elevate The Magic Mountain to the level of Proust or a handful of other twentieth-century works that taken as a whole have probably aged better. Clearly The Magic Mountain is flawed — and Mann just about admits this in his notes that accompany the English translation — particularly in the wooden philosophizing that passes for the characters of Naphta and Settembrini. Musil is a different kind of genius — a true philosopher — so I don’t think you need to raise one at the expense of the other; Mann at his best displays a gift for story-telling that I think is generally absent — even if intentionally so — from Musil’s work. I guess the short answer is that I like them both!
TGR: That’s so true about Naphta and Settembrini, but wouldn’t you agree that the duel was effective?
PA: Mais oui, bien sur! Exactement! You have these hundreds of pages in which the characters discuss and philosophize and deliberate, and to see them dissolve into that kind of violence is both absurd and somehow fantastic, yet ultimately inevitable. That’s what really what’s disturbing about it, the inevitability, and of course we only have to look back at the horror of the first world war to understand what Mann was describing. You look at the world back then and you can’t help but wonder what was going on in their minds! But then again, I guess if you’re in the middle of it, it’s really hard to say what’s right or wrong. After a while, you just want to blow your head off [spoiler alert] just like Naphta. (Laughs.)
Filed under: Drivel, Flatware, Politicians, The Autumn Garden, Writers-Austrian, Writers-British, Writers-German | Leave a Comment
Tags: Barbara Walters, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Maureen Dowd, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf
On Twilight of the Idols
Did you not see it? Did you not experience the thrill of David Schwimmer emerging from a limousine to shine his brilliant aura across the travertine plaza to the vaunted Roman arches of the Metropolitan Opera? (How many times have we been enraptured by his finely nuanced work and thought, “If only we could see him in person, then our love of music would be affirmed!”) Did you not gaze with awe at John McEnroe, whose incisive serve-and-volley has literally for decades made us think of him as nothing but the most perfect hors d’oeuvre to an entree of Donizetti? And did you not weep a tear of gratitude as Walter Conkrite — as reported in The Times — stated: “I’m just very taken with the spirit of this group of people tonight — it’s followers of the opera and it’s those who like the idea of ceremony”? And were you not equally taken by the keen intelligence and insight on display from his “companion, Joanna Simon, a longtime opera singer,” who said, “It’s like a movie premiere here. We’ve been thrilled with how opera is being put on the New York map, which it’s never been, not to this extent.”
Why must the moderately beautiful and aging grande dame that is Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor be forced to appear — even for these few moments — in such gaudy, worthless trinkets? It degrades and humiliates, the only pleasure to be had is sadistic and voyeuristic, and we are reminded of nothing so much as those pictures from ___ of the lost and betrayed in hoods.
Filed under: Capitalism, Opera, Pessimism, Philosophers | Leave a Comment
Tags: Abu Ghraib, Dame Joan, Donizetti, My Bloody Valentine, The Metropolitan Opera, The New York Times
There are many games of dominoes in Washington Heights, but we prefer to avoid those on Broadway — populated by noisy, drunken louts — in favor of the more intense and serious version found on the side streets leading up to Amsterdam. Here the diamond-studded drug lord steps out of an armored SUV to take on the big-haired queen of the apartment palace, the stocky numbers runner, and — most daunting of all — the crippled savant said to have the ability to see through tiles and over whose head can frequently be seen a single white moth. The gay recluse walks by slowly — detached and invisible, always the flaneur — as the tiles are slapped down on the folding table and mixed together in a cloud of clicks. It is a new game; bets are being placed and the air is filled with the intoxicating sense of possibility. Our mind drifts back to a period of our youth when every night was a drunken phantasmagoria of furtive glances and accidental touches; when we, too, could have killed for a single kiss.
Filed under: Drag Queens, Pleasure, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Beatrice, Broadway, Candy Darling, Dominoes, New York City, Walter Benjamin, Washington Heights
Opening the gate that leads from our front yard to the street, we were met by a short, scrawny man with veiny arms that seemed to swell grotesquely at the elbow. He wore jeans and a dingy t-shirt on which the faded outlines of a corporate logo could be seen. His eyes were gaunt, but there was a resigned, if not quite contemplative, quality to his expression that contained no trace of the agitated desperation we have noted in other addicts who roam the streets of upper Manhattan. He nevertheless addressed us with a certain swagger: “How long have you lived here?” he asked, the words slightly slurred as they passed over his rotted teeth.
“Ten years,” we answered truthfully. “An eternity.”
“I was here ten years before that,” he replied, and then raised an eyebrow. “Did you know this used to be the biggest crack house in New York City?”
“It’s good to be known for something,” we said, and then offered to show him the garden, where even now–in certain spots, if you dig deep enough–it is possible to unearth the lighters, bent spoons, syringes, dime bags (empty, of course) and other detritus of the period to which he had referred. We did not, however, mention the broken teacups, porcelain saucers and glass perfume bottles of an era even further removed from his own.
“Any bones?” he asked.
“A few,” we admitted. “They stay under the path.”
He bent down to rub his hands over the mossy green surface of the bricks. “Each of these represents one of the forgotten dead,” he ruminated. “I once knew them all.”
The wind blew and the bamboo scratched against the wall. Although we were not inclined to disagree with him at the time, as we led him back to the street, we remembered making the path — brick by brick — and it seemed that they were chosen not to honor the dead, but rather those with the even greater misfortune to remain alive.
Filed under: Addiction, Pessimism, The Autumn Garden, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: 1991, Beatrice, Crack Cocaine, The Rose Brick Company, The Velvet Underground
On Corsican Mint
Of all the groundcovers we have introduced into the garden this year, Corsican mint (Mentha requienii) has attained a particular affection for us as we consider it now, with the growing season on the wane. Although it has thrived in several places in the garden, it is most spectacular in the crevices of our stone wall, where it seems to have grown with a true sense of purpose and deliberation, a quality so often lacking in less disciplined plants (and you know who you are!). Its translucent lime leaves provide a beautiful contrast to the darker hues of the surrounding stone — a warm gray — the deep greens and silvers of the conifers and the burned reds of the brick path. Our only fear is that with a hardiness level of Zone 7, it may not survive the New York City winter; but we will not think of that now, and instead imagine a spring marked by tiny fields of Corsican mint, and the even more microscopic blooms that will hover above it like infinite stars on a clear night.
Filed under: Pleasure, The Autumn Garden | Leave a Comment
Tags: Corsican Mint, Global Warming, Manhattan, Washington Heights, Zone 7
Nor, with regard to the Times’ coverage of the murder trial in Brooklyn, can we resist commenting on the following description of the courtroom:
“All of them [i.e., the defendants] were watched by a vibrant cultural divide of a spectators’ gallery. To one side, dressed in conservative attire, sat supporters of the defendants, arriving from the middle- and working-class neighborhoods of Sheepshead Bay. To the other side, dressed in fashionably narrow jeans and Velcro sneakers, sat friends of the victim, Michael J. Sandy, 29, a designer from Williamsburg.”
It seems to us that in the context of writing about the murder trial of a gay man, the reporter, in the puerile attempt to inject some “color” into the piece, has reinforced the exact sort of stereotype with regard to gay men that led the defendants to think they could dispose of one with such ease. Our fears in this regard were only inflamed by his continuing description of the scene:
“From the witness stand, Mr. Timmins [a defendant] described sitting around Mr. Fortunato’s house that night, discussing a displeasing marijuana shortage. Mr. Fortunato, he said, devised a remedy.
‘He started talking on the computer; he went to the gay chat site,’ Mr. Timmins testified.
When Mr. Sandy offered marijuana, ‘Anthony got all excited, because that’s basically what we wanted.'”
Yes, we initially laughed at this, which seems rather too satirical to be true. Yet as we returned to consider the entire article and the event it purported to describe, we could not help but be struck by a certain levity, if not ridicule, we detected in the prose, as if to imply that one deserves to be killed for associating with those who wear fashionably narrow jeans and Velcro sneakers. Have we gone too far in our accusations? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It is not our intention to overreach, and we even wonder if our reclusive state has led us to extremes of paranoia; but surely there are very few murder trials whose descriptions — at least in The Times — are so blatantly Onionesque. We will, in any case, admit to holding a particular sensitivity to the issue, having once — and we say this with less shame than wonder — felt the same ourselves.
Filed under: Drivel, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Freedom, Picea Omorika Pendula, Senator Larry Craig, Sheepshead Bay, Trademark Infringment
From today’s Times, we now turn to an article regarding the trial of the three hooligans accused of luring a man into a parking lot in Sheepshead Bay, which ultimately led the man — attempting to escape — to run into the nearby highway, where he was struck by a car and ultimately killed.
Although we don’t wish to comment on the crime itself (except to perhaps draw Judith Warner’s attention to its continuing existence) we could not resist highlighting the following text:
“To win a conviction under the hate crime law, Ms. Nicolazzi [the prosecutor] seeks to prove the defendants selected a gay man for robbery on the notion that gays are fearful and vulnerable.”
For the many readers of The Gay Recluse who–after noting this in The Times–have written to express concern on our behalf, we would like to emphasize that we do not feel particularly fearful and vulnerable, although we do make a point not to harangue the drug dealers who populate the corners of our streets. Furthermore, our steadfast refusal to identify with any “community” — except for those related to subway ridership, alpine plants and certain animals — leads us with all due respect to declare our fundamental opposition to the “Hate Laws” enacted in our behalf. Does it really matter that Mr. Sandy (the victim in this case) was gay? It seems to us that even if he were Anita Bryant, he would deserve the full force of society’s prosecutorial power for being so mercilessly led to his death.
Filed under: Politicians, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Anita Bryant, Brooklyn, Kobe Bryant, The New York Times, The Smiths
In yesterday’s Times, we read an “Op-Extra” column by Judith Warner called ‘Thelma and Louise’ in the Rear-View Mirror,” in which we were informed that such a “dark” and “disturbing” movie could not have been made in the present, given that in 1991, “[a]ll the talk, nationally, was of sexual harassment, date rape and crimes against women generally,” whereas now, “date rape is no longer a contentious concept; it’s a known reality…[r]ape itself is down – its incidence having dropped 75 percent since the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice.” In conclusion, we are told, “[t]hese are profound and meaningful changes, and we should celebrate them — and revel in “Thelma and Louise”’s passage into history.”
We–it is fair to say–are not reveling. Rather we are disturbed by the shallow optimism on display here, one that is certainly emblematic of the present leadership of this country in comparison to 1991, when–though it pains us to praise him–a certain president at least had enough sense not to fight 3000 years of history to invade ____. But already we digress; what we would like to say to Judith Warner is that while it is perhaps understandable for one who now presumably lives in an upper-class, suburban enclave in or near Washington, DC–or at least cavorts with senators and representatives–to opine nostalgically about the “fear and anger and outrage” that marked her life in 1991, for those of us in 2007 who do not share her circumstances–and we estimate this figure to be 99.9 percent of the world’s population–we are not inclined to agree that rape is down, any more than killing or vandalism or any other form of violence and injury that have always marred civilization is down (Department of Justice figures notwithstanding). Nor, consequently, without commenting on the merits of “Thelma and Louise,” can we “thank goodness” that such a movie would not be made today; to the contrary, the best works of art — just as they always have done — can be expected to explore the more disturbing but universal elements of the human condition. In short, Judith Warner, while the gay recluse shares your desire to insulate yourself from these most unfortunate crimes, we would never be so naive as to forget the (admittedly brutal) truth with regard to the world around us; that you have done so in this unfortunate piece is a disservice to us, i.e., your faithful readers.
Filed under: The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrea Feldman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Judith Warner, Schopenhauer, The New York Times, Thelma and Louise
The Gay Recluse 