Yes, it's time for me to visit adastranot this weekend. (And we may be wankers, but we have yet to be reduced to lighter fluid.) We are preparing for the annual reunion talent show at Promises, staging a production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer with our dear friend and sponsor, Robert Downey, Jr. Robert will play Violet Venable, adastranot will play Catherine, and I will be a homosexual-eating cannibal. Yes, my colleagues get the big showy roles, but I'm afraid you don't realize how difficult it is to convey the contradictions of the my role--to plumb the grisly depths, to emote with ketchup smeared on one's face.

This is so gloriously weird and hilarious (particularly if you've seen the original film version), I love it. I would marry it. Oh, if only it were a real movie!

Warning: NSFW!

Via Arts & Letters: A take from the Literary Review of Canada on fan fiction.

From the article: "So where does all this leave fan fiction? It may be that its shadowy status – largely tolerated, but legally vulnerable – leaves it just where it ought to be, in a healthy state of tension between fans and authors. Because the fact is that fan fiction has so far been able to operate as a tolerated use, if not a fair use. Both parties have good reasons to accommodate the concerns of the other. No one wants to crush a fan; and fans don’t want to damage their favorite author’s livelihood or reputation. Fan fiction, particularly under Canadian law, and in view of authors’ moral rights, requires the author’s forbearance, and probably deserves a degree of that."

Or, Bastille Day for the pidgin French speakers out there, moi included.

I walked around the city, copying down signboards, the names of goods in stores, words overheard at bus stops. In movie theaters I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen, and noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells, but through words; furthermore, words not of the indigenous Hindi, but of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root here that it was for me an indispensable key to this country, almost identical with it. I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I was able to name: for example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.

~from Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński

What's better for gay pride than a little VOTD?




And you young men out there, beware of those picnic hikes:

Several weeks ago I was in a wine shop that had just opened up in our neighborhood (a scant block away from tehHolyinnocent Hovel). Unlike the other neighborhood booze store up the block--which has been around for years, is heavy on Italian wines (probably because the business is run by guys who have lived in our Italianate neighborhood for eons, who probably are Italian themselves), and has a great cheesy sign in the window: YOUR WIFE CALLED. SHE SAID BRING HOME SOME WINE--the new wine store is hipsterish. It appears to be run by a young, thin fabulous couple. The floors and racks reek of new, beautiful polished wood. Sometimes there are other thin, fabulous people hanging around listening to Thievery Corporation and drinking samples out of plastic cups. Sometimes I am afraid to go in, as if an alarm will go off and I will be ejected from the store.

I'm glad I keep overcoming this irrational (?) fear, because I've found my latest obsession: Sparkling red wine. Shiraz, to be exact. Chilled, most def. This article gives some background on sparkling reds. Apparently it was a big cheesy thing in the 70s and 80s, which I did not know. (In fact, I had never seen any before my first foray into the new wine store: It was news to me.) Additionally the articles gives the Australians big props for reinventing sparkling reds and making them palatable. God Bless You, Aussies, I'm afraid that's one more reason for Bret and Jemaine to continue hating on you.

Anyway, the sparkling shiraz I had was, of course, from Australia (a family-run vineyard called Loomwine). It was cool, sparkling, and dry--not sweet at all. For me, it was like the best of both worlds: Chilled and refreshing like a good white, but with the satisfying body and dryness of a red. It's a good food wine as well; so far I've had it with pasta and pizza.

So you can guess what I'm going to be picking up on my way home. What are you guys drinking this weekend? (And I ask, even though I anticipate the "MARGARITAS!" answer from cabenson....)

Usually you see me crowing about my reading triumphs, such as they are: I finished Middlemarch! I read three--count 'em, three!--books by Patrick Leigh Fermor with lots and lots of big words in them! But when have I written about the books that have defeated me?

Perhaps it's silly, but I do feel defeated when I can't finish something. Sitting in shame upon my shelf, unfinished, is Don Quixote. Apparently I can take only so much wacky picaresque Spanish fun. Then there's the Leni Riefenstahl autobiography, which is another kind of wacky fun altogether--that of the self-delusional kind. (I don't even think I made past page 30 of the Riefenstahl book.)

My latest defeat was an post-World War II Italian novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. On first glance, it seemed right up my alley: It's Italian, it's about murder, it's grim, it's fabulous, it sounds as if it's written by a dude who is the Italian equivalent of Nabokov. "Baroque wordplay," the book blurb says. Well, I careened through all the baroque wordplay like a pinball, battered against classical allusions, Mussolini puns, and serpentine lines of ancient Greek that required the help of my spouse:

Me: Honey, what does this here line o' Greek mean? [insert banjo music]

Her: You know that one...it's from Heraclitus, you know, "no one ever steps in the same river twice," blah blah blah.

(Actually, she did say the whole line, I'm just too lazy to write it here.)

So I plow on, grimly determined to finish, not enjoying it at all, and I hit this passage, where the main character, a detective named Ingravallo, indulges in some musings about the opposite sex:

The female personality...what did it all mean?...Typically gravity-centered on the ovaries...the woman's personality turns for affective coagulations and condensations to the husband or whoever functions in his place, and from the lips of the idol take the daily oracle of the understood admonition....

And I was done. To quote Heraclitus, "blah blah blah." (My translation.)

The plot involves the murder of a woman who could not bear children, and was so desperate for a child that she tended to "adopt" young women (yes, lesbo undercurrents, but not developed or explored--oh, what the hell, I didn't really finish the book, so I don't know. I'm just going by Calvino's foreword). So there is a lot of blather about women and how necessary childbirth is to their fulfillment. Yawn. I accept that having children means a lot to many, many women, but not when this truth is reduced to the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence, to a lot of pseudo-psychological misogyny, and when the character in question is not written with any real empathy, depth, or understanding. (Not that the other characters are written with a great deal of empathy either.)

So in order to hopscotch to the end, I started to read only the first sentence of each paragraph and nothing more. (A trick proposed by the missus, which made me realize this is how she gets through all those goddamn big boring books!) It kind of made sense that way. I found out what happened to the stolen jewels, at least. But as for who murdered the woman?

You never find out.

Big gay Monday news. Well, big because it's stuffy and sticky in my office and as a result I don't feel like working (but when do I ever?):

1. Gothamist reports that Brokeback Mountain may be made into an opera. For the love of all that is holy, PLEASE keep Philip Glass away from this project. I think we should all be thankful Brokeback is not getting the third-rate movie-to-Broadway-musical treatment.

2. Watched the movie trailer for the remake of Brideshead Revisited:



I like Matthew Goode, I love Emma Thompson (even in frump mode), but boy, this looks like a ton of suckage. A complete bastardization of the book that makes it into a boring, quasi-tragic hetero love story, where the homoeroticism between Charles and Sebastian is nothing more than an exotic counterpoint. Gutless. Give me the original any day:

Did we ever think that the Dem. nomination would drag on so long, would be such a bloody battle? I know a lot of people are thinking of sitting it out if Obama becomes the nominee. Or, worse yet, voting for the Evil Empire. ("The Yankees?" you say. NO. I mean the other Evil Empire, the really really bad warmongering one, the one that is really for elitists.)

But before any of you contemplate voting for the presumptive Republican nominee, read this article on John McCain in the New York Review of Books. Any man who calls his wife a cunt in front of a group of reporters is not someone you should be voting for.

And I, dear readers, I, your soft-voiced correspondent from the ether, your confidant, your secret shame, your blathering, teasing Proust wannabe, your reluctant refugee from the cork-lined room, your coffee-loving, brunette-lusting, nearsighted and afraid of ceiling fans stalwart of the underpaid, found myself trapped in a bathroom stall this afternoon listening to my OCD (obsessive, compulsive, drunk) coworker brush her teeth--brush and rinse loudly, water hitting the sink like a whale throwing up against a rock--five times.

Five times.

Happy 125th Birthday, Brooklyn Bridge. I still get a frisson of excitement when I cross over you, unless I am driving a rental car and I'm worrying about the douchebags weaving in and out of lanes, or stopping suddenly for no reason, and I start thinking, fuck, I should have paid that extra money for the insurance! And I felt awe on that evening nearly five years ago, during that blackout, when I walked across you with thousands of other people and I gazed up at the great cathedral darkness of you, illuminated only by headlights. I only wish living in your borough did not leave me brokelyn. Oh well, whenever I move out of this city, whenever that might be, I will miss you most of all. (Well, I'll miss bagels too. Fresh, warm bagels.)

On a completely unrelated note, Knut is a psycho! This is distressing (I still think they made the right decision in not killing him as a cub), but I suppose there is no way we can set him up with LiLo or Britney? He needs a mate who understands him.

In other related news: Job situation has been downgraded from hate to niggling apathy.

Also, I wish I could be excited about the new Indiana Jones movie (leave my memories in pieces, gentlemen!), but admittedly I would prefer seeing Janice Covington and the Elysium of the Exquisitely Cut Crystal Shotglass. But that's just me.

They had to change things, of course: Gender, nationality, etc. But the story of drunken idiots remains the same, and this stunningly beautiful and poignantly moving clip gives you a reason why we are never allowed to go out in public without our spouses sitting decorously between us:



Happy Belated Brrrthday!

...And after all the other birds were up and about their affairs--even after the jay, who would burst each morning from the mist, screeching in a blue rage at these damned early birds who never let a fellow finish his rest--the crows would make their stately entrance. From the tops of the firs they would swoop, laughing with a sort of pitiless amusement at the lesser birds, and circle away in a slow, disorganized flock bound for the mudflats, sometimes leaving her feeling strangely disturbed. Perhaps because they reminded her of the magpies from around her Colorado home--carrion eaters, lining the rabbit-killing highways, living off death--but she thought there must be more to it than just that. Magpies were, all in all, rather silly birds. The crows, for all their raucous laughter, never seemed silly....

Again in the evening she often saw through the barn window the crows returning from their daily contest with the pigs; sometimes one or two were conspicuously maimed, or even missing. She didn't know about the pigs, how they were taking the contest, but, win or lose, the crows always laughed--the hard, old jaded laughter that came of looking at the world with a black and practiced eye. From the less skillful the laugh might have hinted of despair, or silliness, like the magpies', but the crows were masters of the wry outlook...they knew the secret of black, that it could not be made blacker, and if neither could it made lighter, it could still be made funnier.

~from Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

p.s. The pope has left the building!

p.p.s. I hate my job.

1. Pope, Pope, go away! Come back when you are gay! Or at least gay-friendly. I love your outfits, but give me a break. I bet you are going to cause serious commuting snafus when you're in NYC. Okay, so you're giving me a good excuse to work from home that day. Let's call it even.

2. I had a dream last night that I was a postal inspector investigating mail fraud. I was very good at my job. My boss was either Eric Bogosian or Anthony Bourdain. Maybe a combo of the two? Bourbosian? Anyway, Bourbosian had a really nice, spacious loft apartment filled with very strange, Alexander Calder-kinda mobiles. Bourbosian was also a bit sweet on me. I was considering sleeping with him for the apartment alone. (Proof of a tragic, New York sensibility at work: Real estate over desire.)

3. Portishead have a new CD coming out!

4. A friend sent me this vid of a cat playing a theremin (coincidentally, an instrument used by Portishead to great effect on previous albums):




Perhaps the cat has a gig playing with Portishead now.

Today my other half sent me this article about a writer who couldn't get his second novel published and so resorted to the lucrative field of writing pornily. (He writes gay erotic fic under the nom de plume of James Lear; his mySpace page is here."I know about half of you are like, "Oh yeah, him. Love him!"). She added, in her email: "Are you sure you can't write smut?" (Translation: "You need to make money, you fucking slacker bitch, so I have can a Tuscan villa!") In the article Mr. Lear, aka Rupert Smith, is quite proud when a reader on amazon describes his novels as "smut with pretensions."

So it got me thinking about porn/erotica. Well, sort of. I've got the pretension part down pat, but I really think I suck at smut. So help me out, flist. Tell me what you like. Recommend a story--long, short, plotless, or even poetry. Preferably girl-on-girl, but I can be flexible. It doesn't have to be fanfic (but please, no space aliens, no Trek, no ALF), but it has to be something you think is really good and really hot. I know ralst posted a similar query to her flist a while back, but just humor me. Or, as Gabrielle has said to Xena in legions of first-time stories, "Make me a woman."

Currently, we have three viable choices for the presidency: Clinton, Obama, McCain. Quelle decision, right? What if we could combine their superficial qualities all into one person, so that we would have a 71-year-old black woman as our president-elect? And one that can sing, to boot? Submitted for your consideration:




BASSEY IN NOVEMBER, BABY!

Tyranny, in a word, is a farce got up for the entertainment of poor human nature; and it might pass very well, if it did not so often turn into a tragedy.

~ William Hazlitt, from "On the Spirit of Monarchy"

[Image from Magnolia Pictures, No End in Sight]

p.s. On strike tomorrow!