1:12 PM *

weather never seems to happen to cities. rather, the city seems to generate its own weather, and each street, block, intersection, and person has its own atmosphere, outside.

the city, in the mood for caterwauling, or dancing in a twirl, or riding an unshakeable optimism, emanates from its inner being a rainy mist, or a crisp and clean air, or a shower of sun with no other sense of temperature. in fact, these all may happen in succession, on your way to the metro, in order to generate its mood inside you. the city is nature, after all, and it never lets itself be affected by anything external, and when it is, we call it a catastrophe, or an attack, but if we are fortunate these are only occasional, and at any rate as singular events they are subject to being subsumed by urban forces all the same, buried under the endless succession of normal events.

i dislike travel, except to cities: i like electricity and telephones and the people who use them. although i bewildered some of my architectural colleagues by making a late autumn trip to milano, when there are much more beautiful and architecturally significant cities in italy, i could think of nowhere else i would rather go. troy lives there. it's driven by commerce and industry, like my own city, and its children are inspired by that flatness. it is physically different than new york, but its folk still live on trains and buses, and in an endless sea of unremarkable residences and selling spaces, with the occasional special moment, and a series of fantastic bars and clubs. i would not miss these delights for the world, especially on vacation. how could anyone suggest i spend boring nights in florence, or venice, or rome? cast in such an ocean of delight, this Good City, i imagine that i am always wrapped in the lives and deliverances of other people, that i am part of the world. and in turn, i sometimes imagine that love happens because i feel it.

you might say that i am now contradicting myself. if people love me because i want them to, it means that i affect this city, not the other way around. you are correct. but i had forgotten this inconsistency when i met luca. we were in one of the aforementioned fantastic watering holes. it was a week into the trip: because of troy's tireless efforts, people had begun to recognize me. luca was a friend of a friend of troy's. he had the northern italian complexion: fair skinned, with large dark eyes and hair, the latter cut short but with an unmistakable tendency to curl. a perfectly shaped nose: full, but with an elegant profile, the cross between lombard nobility and veneto thinker. he had none of aaron's thuggishness, but a gaze that rivaled his, with a softness at its edges, as if instead of freezing the air, and consuming it, there was simply a light gravity to it, easily resisted from a distance but extremely powerful if approached. luca was the size of my little poem, a little shorter than i, with a body very familiar too: muscular, but lean, and a comportment that was sensual and relaxed, with nothing to prove. and like my little poem, he could dance, even when we were not dancing.

in short, he reminded me of other men i love, in other cities i love, and because of this, i believed he had an affection for me too. i have at this point contradicted myself a third time, but i did not know this because i was drunk on several out-of-season pimm's cups. oops.

he brightened when i approached. i could feel my ribs contract around my stomach and lungs. we chatted for some time, as if we had known each other some time, a game that never ceases to delight me, conversation that does not seek introductions, and seeks to avoid any form of information gathering, and does this by its participants making a spirited effort to simply talk in an interesting way, a way pleasing to the other, without asking what that might be, but sensing it, deducing it with clues dropped in each line. no direct questions, ever. the fact that he could do it in english, as someone who did not speak english regularly, while i was completely helpless in italian, compelled me touch his lower back early in our exchange.

this was when he said "why don't you have a boyfriend? you're attractive and charming." by asking for such a thing, he might have technically digressed from our game, but the honesty of his statement was disarming, with an accent, with a note of the game in its inflection, because he had sensed that as someone from ohio i also find it pleasing to employ and receive disarming honesty, another echo of my babies in america.

"i would love to have a boyfriend, i am very ready" i said as i resumed our little game. at this point we were talking into each other's cheeks, our lips at the other's sideburns, each line getting closer to the ear, i began to touch him again to emphasize my points.

he went direct again. he was drunk too. "i like your stomach" after touching it, touching me for the first time. the italians i met seemed less concerned with one's musculature than with whether there was any excess belly or not. it is not a concern i share. i let him feel my abdomen for a second or two, in silence. "i like all of you" he continued. i'd heard these words in my bedroom, only a week or two before, but this time i did not know what to say. instead, because of the cucumber and mint and ginger cocktails, my ability to visualize other places was at an all-evening high, and from his words i imagined our future car trips, wedding dances, plane landings, late-to-dinners together, working late and can't make dinner, ordering drinks in foreign lands, crumbling tile in the east village bar bathrooms while we watched each other pee, and buying houses together in two country's countries.

travel sets the city one is in in motion, as if someone had constructed a meticulous toy, had aged and soiled the trains, put innumerable scratches on the handrails, dented the doors, planted weeds in the cracks of the median's paving, placed thousands of automobiles of foreign design and era along with millions of diverse people in a peculiar environment dedicated to a unique mix of industries and traffic, flavored by particular obsessions and languages and shopping habits. all of this is set into motion by the traveller, as if the city were not an external force at all, but a distraction generated deep inside the traveller's mind, or my mind if you prefer to return back to my second errored metaphor, a recombination of all my memories that is capable, for a short time, of completely surprising me.

this is how i met luca. and as our evening progressed, standing in a corner, completely ignoring the crowd around us hoping to talk to one or the other or both of us, our ongoing talk successfully insulating ourselves from unwanted urban distractions. i had to wonder if he was a person at all: a small, compact, gorgeous italian man who spoke english and also understood my puns, who appreciated my absurdly endless neologisms, and was shocked and captivated by my flowers and stars. i could not stop giving him what he wanted, namely, my physical presence, the little touches, the unwavering attention, his twin in conversation and its twists. i began to doubt his being, only because he was too perfect, as if he was someone i was unconsciously writing, and not someone i unexpectedly met, someone who told me he had a boyfriend but still asked if i had a hotel room, who furrowed his brow and softened his eyes when i told him in sanded consonants and no spaces between words that he was the most beautiful man i had seen in a long time, whose gaze was at once longing for a kiss and attempting to own me, who so elegantly combined the best aspects of my two amorous interests in new york city, my city. this completeness, this one perfect man on this one perfect evening, who also found me perfect, made me perfectly suspect that he was not a person at all, but a reconstitution of what i knew and what i wanted. he and i could be one, that is, we could have been the same person twice, and even though i would easily be able to renounce career and return flight, and quickly finesse those details for him, i was completely unable to locate the source of this twin. was it me, or him and me?

 

12:52 PM *

as I walk along and stumble
trains rumble in my head
and I breeze along and grumble
and think about you instead

and a piece of pecan pie
and you that’s all I want
just a piece of pecan pie
and all I want is you

sometimes I get so hungry
i think about pie all day
just a little whipped cream
and honey, I’m on my way

with a piece of pecan pie
and you that’s all I want
just a piece of pecan pie
and all I want is you

now, don’t you call me key lime
you're the apple of my eye
don’t you know I'll be fine
whenever you’re by my side

with a piece of pecan pie
and you that's all I want
just a piece of pecan pie
and all I want is you
all I want is you.

(pecan pie by jeff tweedy writing as golden smog.)

happy thanksgiving everybody. love.

 

10:31 PM *

he was holding my hand. he led me into the black room. the music in the nearby dance began to fade with the light. i opened my eyes wider so that i could avoid people, see furniture. i found a table and sat on it.

a couple of weeks before, a couple of rooms from here, on the dance floor, i had kissed him for the first time. i had given my little poem what he wanted, something that would please him, and shown him that i accepted his affection, and could feel it too, in a way that made me feel like i'd never shown anyone this before.

but this was now, and it is important to know that all of this happened in the same one thousand square feet of manhattan, over the period of several weeks: there is a continuity to these particular emotions that obliterated my perception of time. does it really matter that i've been meeting or seeing him incidentally for months, over the summer, spaced by weeks? that we'd intersected regularly at this bar and club for weeks on end, in september and october, with no interruption? the connection between us was building, as long as we were in the same room together, irresistible, and like a film about a relationship, or anything else, really, i can edit out my life between our meetings. like watching that film, while writing this my mind does not perceive that things might have happened in between those meetings, even though i can perfectly recall that i was living my entire life.

as i was saying, this was weeks after i'd first kissed him, dancing, and how dearly i wanted to kiss him again, but this time alone, in the dark. his lips, and how he moves them, are something special: they make you feel wrapped in love. they are the perfect expression of his emotions, and meeting them to mine was the connection of his feelings to mine, simple enough. and so i wanted to show him that i could give more, and that i was more than i let people see of me. i was sitting on the table, he was standing. i put him between my legs, because that's where i wanted him. i had his undivided attention, and we began to kiss.

after a little bit, he unzipped my pants, and pulled back my underwear. i was very hard. the heat from our two bodies touching dissipated when he uncovered my privates. suddenly, the warmth and wet at my mouth was wrapped around my another part of me. the wave expanded, and i breathed deeply. realizing this, he looked up, and said the most peculiar thing.

"just think of this as research" he was referring to my writing. i was appalled to think he believed that i was simply humoring him. and so i pulled the side of his face to my lips.

"darling, it's not even that complicated" i told him. and i kissed his cheek.

later, i wanted there to be no doubt. by later i mean a week or two later, during a rendezvous at my house, after a friend's party.

"i love kissing you" i said "i love being naked with you" because these things were true. our bodies seem made to keep each other warm, our innate habits to touch each other in naturally pleasing places. but i did not want to stop talking. "you are so beautiful, on the inside. you are so warm. it's why i love being with you. it's why i love you."

it was also the first time i had told anyone that, while thinking it, unafraid of what may happen. it was the first time i'd said it first. it was the first time i said it while feeling it. it was the first time the words were said while it was happening, as opposed to being said in the back of a cab in midtown while dropping an ex-lover off for the night, knowing that the words were intended to separate us by a continent. but far from it being that notable event in history, it was something we were simply sharing, and i simply named it.

"i love you too." he said.

yet i am reminded of the fact that we both have many loves. it's not that complicated, but words for it are. he has a partner/husband/alpha-boyfriend/love of his life. i, for the time being, do not. he has one or two other beta-boyfriends. i am, among my names and titles, one of his beta-boyfriends. i thought at one time that i might be a jealous guy in these situations. but being with him had caused me to effortlessly forget what i love about images, forget how i attach that to sex, forget what i think relationships are, forget to construct love, forget aaron, forget about nature and marriage and grandchildren and singles and delirious cities, forget time's effect on love, and forget to think about how i should feel. he makes me want to simply feel, to listen to that, and to say that.

let me tell you, too, how i feel. his multitudes in love, his endless gift to everyone, inspires me, and makes me love him more, makes me love more. it instills a desire to share more of myself with him, with everyone, forget more time and make love with him, with everyone, saying it aloud and writing it down.

 

3:24 PM *

surprises abound. people you meet will show you bliss and disaster, together, whenever they please, whenever you believe everything is all-right. i wish it weren't true, but this the most i can expect from the people worth meeting.

one convenient illustration, this summer, near my birthday:

of all of my mistakes
i think i lent you late
now every sick person
seems to come my way
but i've never seen a starlet
or a riot or the violence off you

"we can't listen to the weird break-up song right now".

in the middle of the party he jumped up and he skipped over it.

before the comeback song could be over, it was over.

 

6:42 PM *

yes darling, the land of space prostitutes is only a few seconds away, ready to receive you. happy anniversary!

i myself was going to be an astronaut. "the other two astonauts were going to be my dad and my sister."

i wanted to drop you a little note saying that your hair-care tips have worked, to perfection. saturday, i went out into the rain. i did not wear my hat. my hair got a little wet. then i donned my knit ski cap, turning at regular intervals on my journey across our grande centrale parck, in one of the fine, blue, extended autobuses that traverse the winding low road, on my way to our grande metropolitan arte museum to see lovely photos by mister avedon with the friend who likes to spar with me when we are drunk. your tips were useful, and your timing impeccable, because i needed that extra little lift in my personal style, so it would tease my tempted friend with. i say, if you must spend time with someone who is attracted to you, but he is disciplined enough to refuse your advances, despite wanting to give in to them, despite constant mutual magnetism, then the only course of action is to turn up the volume on your attraction so that the other museum-goers cannot hear the pre-recorded exhibition tour. he loves spiky hair and little european guys, so i dressed in my finest italian military sweater and took your hair tips. et voila! we both had bulges in our jeans throughout our tour of the modern special exhibition galleries.

but that's not all. i want to write more.

later in the day, i went to my gay dentist. same deal with the hat. it was still raining. after irradiating my teeth with x-rays, he grabbed my chin and said "god, you are so cute!". again, the hair worked!

i suppose it might have worked with my little poem, formerly known as the admirer, but we didn't spend a lot of time on each other's hair last night.

and there's something else, a little postscript. i think you know i want to always put my endings in the wrong place, and i want people to get that. i want to tell you where i've been with aaron. i want to Capitalize His Name. i want to dedicate this entry to that. i want people to be jealous, to make bargains and blue entreaties and to secretly wonder when we will break up, so that they can have him or me, though they know that is never going to happen. i want there to be parades, and charges, and war. yes i want him to be any war, to be the two opposing sides, the forces of right and think-they-are-right at once, as he is in the direct way of his eyes, or the way that registers the battles on his face, making those sides famous for tactics over that specific terrain, and change our world from that outcome. i want the questions that he and i hold to be beyond life and death, hurtfulness and its remedy, and have mutely delivered answers that are sprung from the truth and ideas and sex that are part of the weather of our love.

i want to be a homosexual.

i want to make my entries into yours. i mean: i want these words to slip away into ones you have written. i want our ideas not to blur, but to happen in sequence, but not necessarily continuous, the way a film does. i want to swipe selective tracks from your online album. i want to record the rest of that album's tracks, the ones i have not yet heard. i want the idea behind that fierce recording to come out differently (i always want the ending to be different). there should be banging on the drums. guitar boys in the lesbian girl band. i want to buy stupid clothes and make them sweet. i want our writing to extend beyond our little blogs. i want our little performance literature to take off from our respective keyboards, make all the yous in these paragraphs plural (fucking english), stuff myself into the rush hour subway car, 5 people in the cab, schedule too many parties, photocopy all the art i bought, make up all your dirty pictures, and take off all my clothes. i want to take more pictures of myself, but use them with your name.

i want you to like the song live and let die. i don't exactly know why, but i don't really need to.

i want there to be a massive anti-war, a completely gorgeous productive period where something huge and out of our control is senselessly constructed, changing our lives for the better. i want online NYC writers build an open web of writing, overlapping, dense, a messy urban exquisite corpse, putting a new city into words. i want them to extend the entries they read, each blog a huge comment for something they already read, mixed up with what they wanted to say in the first place. i want our little parties to spill out into the street. i want to tell you this because i can't do it alone, and the bunches of us sees each other all the time now, so there is a lot to say about this new town, even if we don't refer to ourselves. game?

 

8:47 PM *

need more naked...

...jason statham richard isn't the only one who admires him
...almost anyone on italian television i watched a lot of MTV and sports discussion
...the coatcheck guy at my favorite bar which i have not seen in six weeks
...the cute guy at the gym the interior of which i have not seen in four weeks
...chris pontius i know i already mentioned him, but this list needs to be complete
...chris meloni ditto
...action figures like the one on my computer monitor. hi daddy!
...the Rock i liked him a little better as Rocky Mavia, whose action figure i own. hi baby!
...marshall mathers i can't rhyme clever. i know you're cool with the homos, so let's get undressed already.
...JM-L papa-mec writes a mean workout
...a fellow in milan i haven't written about yet how's that for foreshadowing
...a couple in venice i haven't written about yet this is getting long
...this guy on, er, some site, which i will not write about, who won't write me back dammit. this entry sucks if you don't have enough people to put on it, princess.
...H.C.L. glued to the screen for that queen.

(n.b.: if you feel you were unfairly omitted from this list, remember that these are merely the ones that i do not already receive nude pics from regularly. if i have your pics already, or see your wee-wee on a regular basis, you were not named. sorry.)

for those wondering, i've been laid up with strep throat all week/end. in my fevered delirium, this was the only thing i could formulate.

 

9:32 PM *

i managed to wiggle my way through the tall queens around the table, so i could talk to mike. it was "talk" meaning "shout" because the drab music was very loud. after a few lines of normal chit-chat, inbetweened by "what did you say?" and "i SAID...", i became extremely frustrated by the whole situation. i began to become detached from mike, unable to concentrate on the fact that i should be nice in public, especially to the very close drinking friend who was in front of me. my mind wandered to my left, to the guy three people over but only a few feet away, the guy i recognized but did-not-recognize. aaron. the roundness of the vowels in his name had not yet occurred to me, but there was an echo of it in my admiration of his shaved head. my eyes were the first to go, leave mike, drift across the table until they got near aaron's gaze. sensing i was being looked at, directly, i was unable to look at his eyes, so mine would settle again on the glowing frosted plastic table top. then they would undertake a cursory glance at mike, who because of my drift was rejoining the conversation he was having with a hunky guy next to him. i became very unsettled: surrounded by undesirables, unable to talk to my friend, and unable to look at the most attractive man i'd seen in thirty years.

"i'm going to get a drink." when said to someone you haven't spoken a single word to, who is standing next to you, this means "your company is intolerable, or at the very least completely unwanted, and i hope you have a good life." in case you didn't know. i don't use it often, because i'm really not mean, but it's a useful aphorism nonetheless.

i tried to measle my way through the phalanx of guys at the bar. new york bars are so silly: they are always understaffed. better for tips, but not-better for getting drinks. of course, in this bar, the two bartenders are never overwhelmed, because the bar is surrounded by people who already have drinks, surrounded by a second tier who cannot get through. there is no place to stand except at the bar or at the table, and you will get shoved to one or the other by the folk trying to cruise down the middle. so there was a wall of overdone t-shirts in front of me, unwilling or unable to scooch. i just stood there, behind the guys, half-heartedly looking for an opening. my detachment became fuller, more pronounced, as i was considered forgetting the whole thing and just going to my favorite bar up the avenue.

then a warm hand placed itself on my belly, and pulled me back a little, and left with the echo of a rub. aaron put his shoulder between the two guys in front of me, and wedged them apart with a quick flick, and put twenty on the bar. he wiggled a little more and there was room beside him for another. barely.

"c'mon" as he looked at my face, a little smile forming with his lips.

i stepped up and grinned, grin of embarrassment. "i'm usually pretty good at getting drinks. i was just thinking about something just now." our bodies were very close. his elbow was on the bar, his shoulders and hips twisted to face me, and everything was very warm. his shirt was tight enough to show he had a nice chest, and swell arms, but loose enough and with holes to indicate that he did not care or need to appear tidy. i nestled into his mirror image, if only to show him that no one will ever accuse me of timidity.

"sure you were. you looked like you were afraid of asking them to move. you just push'em. how long have you lived in new york?"

"nine years."

he looked surprised. "so you should know how to get drinks, but you were distracted." he smiled and looked away. it was the first time he had looked at something other than me. the candle on the bar put his shaved head in high relief, defining his handsome profile with shadow, the light sparkling off of the gray in his beard stubble. the bartender came over to his gaze. "what do you want, chad?" he looked at me.

i had not introduced myself. "uh, jack and coke" i said to the bartender.

"two" he said and she began to fetch them. my mind raced: he knew my name, and seemed so familiar, yet i could not place him. perhaps we had met before. name, name, name. blank, blank, blank, you silly fool why don't you remember names? i was running through all the possible scenarios: mike had introduced me to him before, when i was drunk, in which case i was in deep trouble for forgetting; i had met him through my job, and i would bear not only personal but professional grief for forgetting his name; i knew him from the gym and had said hi to him for three years, but didn't know his name anyway so was completely in the clear; he was famous and i'd seen him on tv or at the movies, or i'd seen him in internet porn, either case meaning he was a total stranger. his person travelled from scene to scene, like some kind of living magazine clipping made to travel to different collages, searching for the correct fit.

"mike told me your name. i'm aaron." oops. that simple possibility was coming to me, i swear. i began to feel that he was too swift for me, and probably would soon begin to think i'm foolish. but i continued my trajectory: perhaps i know him through jonno, or from some old friends at columbia. suddenly, he began to become familiar again, as his face and body settled into a rapidly emerging scene, an early gay scene. he was there that night, at crowbar. he knew my friend jeff. he was my first gay jealousy.

"nice to meet you. how do you know mike?" i had to discover if he recognized me. he had only met mike this evening, and his friend was a friend of someone who knew mike. i chased this around a little to establish that we had no common friends in our immediate friend-families.

it was important to me that i be certain he did not recall our first meeting. my first impulse was to hope he'd forgotten it entirely. i was not even out of the closet when i met him, and did not dare remove my t-shirt on the dance floor that night. i was afraid that his interest would disappear if his first impression was recalled. but the more we spoke, the more my non-adolescent self came into my skin, comfortable that the past was, well, the past. i have a very different body now, six and a half years later, and i've learned from experience that that fact tends to end all arguments. hell, every time a get a new tattoo, the deck gets stacked differently. he had been occupied by a boyfriend at our first meeting, the guy who had removed his white tee, put his hands on his perfect chest and arms, while aaron had tenderly kissed him on the loud and crowded dance floor, and lifted him in the air. he could not have cared less about me. and i had a profession now. i was no longer in school. i had colleagues, alliances, ideas, and projects. we talked about people.

"chad, i just want to tell you this: i really hate playing 'do you know so-and-so'. i want to know if you have a boyfriend." the look he gave me was the same as when i'd stepped to the table. yet because i was becoming familiar with him, through my memories and through our conversation, i realized that what he wanted was not simply carnal. it was carnal-and-more.

boyfriend. i hate this question. it makes me want to flee, recede, stay at home and never emerge. i had no boyfriend, and it leads to a second question, the one about 'have you ever?'. it is still answered accurately with "no, never" and this embarrasses me deeply. i'm thirty one. something should be clicking at this point. i've met people who were visibly disappointed when i tell them that i have never been in a long-term relationship, and am afraid of that lightning strike more than anything else. but i looked at his face, and realized that with his singular look, carnal-and-more, he was actually hoping the answer was no. and the mature side of me, the one that never conceals my childish side, stepped forward, confident that part of my charm is that i am charmingly under-experienced. finally, i had something to give him, in the form of a simple answer, and it was something he badly wanted. and so i obliged him.

"no, never." my reply made him laugh, and he looked relieved.

"you mean you've never been in love?" he said, the way one would pose a challenge. you dare challenge me to a game of strip poker?

i thought about the two stars. the flowers. the double-grief. i turned inward looking for my answer. i turned my body to the bar and looked at the candle, unable to meet his challenging gaze. "i was in love with someone for a long time, but never had them love me in return." i said it softly.

he paused. he looked at the side of my face. he leaned into my ear, lips brushing the little hairs that grow there, so he could whisper over the music. "it's okay buddy. i don't think they need to love you back for it to count as love."

 

6:10 PM *

just a few questions, because once again a.o. scott does not get it.

is it possible that films, or movies, are a form of entertainment, that sometimes become what we know as moving artworks, but are above all a medium for several kinds of entertainment, art, and information?

i've never failed to be inspired by the fact that shakespeare was written for bawdy theatre-in-the-round, and is an outgrowth of medieval theater. that it was interrupted by acts like throwing flowers or food into the audience, or other little comic routines. that he wrote works between these pieces.

cynicism is defined by my macintosh as "An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others." for myself it is a contradictory stance that i fail to grasp: to be a cynic is to deny the validity of the opinions of others, yet the cynic expects us to believe their opinion is professionally valid. i don't mean to fight for pure relativity of taste or values, but really, wouldn't it be more productive to artists and consumers alike to simply value both good and bad about a work? isn't criticism better when it reviews a work on its own terms?

i won't deny that mr. scott's review makes some brilliant points. first, that the scenes are demented science experiments. or the wonderful observation that this is the documentary version of fight club. i am simply bewildered that he assumes this to be pejorative. the fact is that fight club also had a non-intellectual and homoerotic attraction based on direct, intense physical contact, yet it was caught in a trap: put an ending on the film and satisfy the intellect (which ran counter to what the film was exploring, unless it was trying to say that intellect always wins, which would be silly) or simply end it and leave the tension in place. we know that they chose the former, and the only way to enjoy the film is to have it on dvd and not watch the final scene.

but contrary to his review's point of view, a great deal of the movie is devoted to undercover inventiveness, and many of the scenes are shot in japan. additionally, there are enough surreal or absurdist 5-second bits to give a sense that the movie is composed of both bawdy and sublime pieces. it is fascinating to hear them talk about how the film is being made: that there are ideas floated, and someone accepts them, and they are undertaken. it is perfect: you can make a television show, or a movie, or a home movie. it really doesn't matter, because that is not the point.

will art criticism ever escape the notion that there is a fixed ideal for artworks? will it ever accept that mid- and late-twentieth century concepts of seriality, democratization, and distributed logic have begun to change the things people make? that there is a whole class of people, especially in america, that are making things in series, and they are not recognized as artists, and they do not get paid, and they have nothing to sell, really, but they make them anyway?

i like and appreciate cabaret as a form of entertainment. my mother said that her father always liked slapstick: i couldn't agree more. i like fools, i am turned on by physical comedy, and i like little bits.

i like homoerotic attraction played out in intense non-sexual physical contact because i am a homo.

i like watching it with friends.

i like making little bits, and believe in media that allow one to collect them and show them. if they are intense and interesting, what more does one need?

i am completely smitten by chris pontius.

i think i've mentioned this, but i have a friend who likes me to pound him in a bar when we are drunk. it's an unspoken affection.

i reread the complete sherlock holmes, in order of publication, at least once every three years.

the movie approaches pure seriality: all the scenes are almost exactly the same. there is a set-up. there is an intensity. there is fun release. there is pain. there is laughter, laughter of the ridiculous mixed with the absurd mixed with nervousness. there are many scenes. there is no beginning, no end, and how wonderful this is! the characters come and go, and the ones we recognize are useful for only specific tasks (hank driving in 'offroad tattoo' and rip just being rip). no understanding (we already understand it), no development, and all action. somehow it's something new.

 

9:07 AM *

notes from 10.29.2002.
bergamo, italia.
i am with oliviero, dorit, and their baby dan, who just went to bed. (so many new children, so many first introductions.) the last time i saw them was 1999, before david. the last time i shared a meal we cooked was 1996.

they picked me up in milan. oli as he puts the car in gear: your voice sounds so mature. then sly grin as he looks back the person may not be yet, but the voice, yes.

first we sliced a delicious salami. then, tomato sauce with oil and fresh basil, and a small amount of fresh hot pepper. and wine, wine i only seem to be able to acquire in his company. wine and food have not satisfied me, at all, in six years, with the exception of a rhubarb cake on my last birthday, a satisfaction so deep, so complete in its assuagement of my anxieties, so richly wrapped around my soul that i feel i could forget to have sex, or breathe, let my heart stop, and softly die with a relaxed and moist smile as i silently fold to the floor.

we had just finished a bottle of lambrusco di sorbara secco. and another bottle but sensa frizzante. and begun the grappe, the holy water.

my little poem
i dreamed you were here
in my little bed
wrapped together in our coat
after all
there are four seats in a car
we were all together
in these lombard valleys
with rationalism staring at the mountains

they wanted to know why i was sighing so pleasurably. i was thinking of my little poem. so i began explaining how memories multiply into productive realities. they are kaleidascopic tools. but i was repeating the obvious, and they enjoyed that, because that is what they remembered of me. i had first tasted this particular grappe, made by his father, when i had visited his family here in 1995. it had been my first grappe.

grappe grappe grappe.

tonight's grappe was both memory and simply there, fragrant, transmuting the air into liquor, multiplying the multiples. because of this, i had difficulty speaking.

my breath drank mountain herbs when i put my nose and tongue near the little cognac glass from tenessee (oli also has a sense of humor), at once burning nostril and tongue with the astringent of a reality that will be with me for a long time, that old friend that returns to you more familiar at every meeting.

so much, all the dinners he made for me and our friends in new york when we were in graduate school, all the inexhaustable energy, the appetite for knowledge and coppa, the completely different backgrounds him never pushed by his educators me a luxurious ocean of caring teachers, his ability to converse directly with Alvaro Siza or Jacques Derrida because he made the effort to visit them at dinner, and his impeccably Bergamese manner that no one could resist, no would would dare resist, whether the manners of Northern Italy were familiar to you or not.

they never were to me. he was constantly reminding my confused mid-twenties not-out not-having-sex self to open doors, open wine, say thank you, find a way to please a guest, activities repeated through countless dinners after design studio, lessons designed to teach a detached ohioan that life must be pursued. i am gay now, and still dangerously lazy, but these reminders have multiplied, become a substrate for my post-closeted self, professionally and personally sometimes painted over. but i remain fascinated, and remain dissatisfied with myself. i have been doing well, yes, for six years, but i can do even better.

 

8:34 AM *

underlying menace one
animal ready to strike that
you cannot see but
know is there it
might be inside you because
knows what you want and
kill to get it
gun rock machete paper
rend flesh thirst offal manipulate love

your only hope it
never gets what it wants
your continuance certainly but
you never get it either no
act no pain all
travelling together your
little NEED little animal need you
are the baby in the photograph in
your fathers orange softball shirt at sunset queer.

 

ps all work in this domain is copyright chad the minx.