Event

Attend the Black Market Auction at 580 Hayes Street, San Francisco, September 24 from 6-10 p.m. The theme: artists exhibiting their craft through quality knock-offs of other well-known artists.

More information at Independent School of Art.

Panter Pringheim, Part One

The news had been in the papers and magazines for a month now. Well, the latest, most prurient tidbit, at least. Long had we known of the renovation of the hall. And long had we awaited the appointment of the new conductor, the acclaimed Maestro S—— from Amsterdam. And long had we been promised some classics, some new works written for the occasion. Names, names—there were rumors of Stern, Midori, Shawn. It would be the reopening gala to end all galas.

And then, one Sunday morning, it was announced in the arts section of the daily paper: Panter Pringheim would be performing, himself, the premiere of his new violin concerto! It would be five years to the day since his last public performance and ten years since he wrote the viola concerto that had rocked the classical world and then, with the help of a popular pair of electronic musicians, overtaken the kings of pop on their charts. “Where did it come from?” we all had asked. Some, more musically inclined, asked why they hadn’t thought of it first. Others wanted to know more about this violist or what-have-you and his concerto, which was at the rounded lips of young and old—though of course their breathy imitations were doomed to fall short.

Who was this Panter Pringheim who was on everyone’s lips?

We learned soon enough.

At first he was discrete, a few comments here or there to a public radio personality or a classical music academic with a column in a national magazine. Then the rumors began. Spotted fingering abyss between woman's unnaturally large breasts in airport cafe . . . Found creeping out of gay rock star's home at dawn missing one shoe . . . Disappeared in steam room with four female escorts and ten-pack of Capri-Suns at decadent film director's party . . .

And then he seemed to gorge himself on our fantasies. The prim and prudish hostess of a daytime television show would allude, in spotless language, to a certain rumor circulating in the papers or on the Internet. “It is true? Is it true?” she would beg, first high then low, her teeth all smiles before the camera. And he would roll his eyes, look away (more toward us, in our living rooms) and then back at her. “You devil!” she would gasp, pinching him on the knee. He made the rounds. Daytime, nighttime, newspapers, glossy magazines, and then—disappeared.

It seemed we got tired of him, or perhaps turned again to the more mainstream celebrities on whom we had, for a good year, turned our backs. A national entertainment magazine dug up a stock photo of the smiling violist with instrument. The stage lights up at his face from below: “Whatever Happened to Panter Pringheim?” The answer came in a much quieter classical music magazine. He was not on the cover, but a full page inside told how he was giving concerts and master classes in primary schools across the nation. No mention was made of those scandalous years of excess after the premier of the viola concerto —nor, indeed, of the concerto itself. Panter Pringheim, the author would have us believe, was an upstanding musician of mild talent but superior dedication to the spreading of the art.

The music world turned back to the O’Briens and Johansens and Keeblers. There was a new album of French arias by Cynthia, followed by a concert tour in this and many other cities across the nation. A new piano concerto by Turenev, which reviewers called “deliciously inaccessible—a triumph of chicanery,” premiered by the composer and Smith-Waley at the keyboard (and, of course, the sound board). A fairly respected trumpeter (with no orchestral appointment) was seen in a music video. An R&B diva appeared with a string quartet at a charity ball for AIDS research. New songs, old songs; old faces, a few new faces, voices, fingers.

Out Here/Back There

My brother and his wife are coming to visit. The reality that they will be here, in my city, has made me question who we are in relation to each other.

I have been working on trying to explain why I will never move back to Georgia (and why I am not even afraid to say something so definite). I have also been trying to figure out why I do not want to go back for a visit. Notice, of course, that the movement is called "going back." The thought of "going back" gives me a case of panicky heebie-jeebies.

"Room to grow" is one hypothesis, but I find myself wondering what I should go back for. There are friends (approximately two) and family members I would love to see, but not if it means being torn from the life I am now creating. I have considered teleporters, and I think I would teleport to Georgia once or twice a week. Psychologically and even physically I would remain mostly here.

There are other considerations specific to Georgia and the South. Yesterday, for example, I got a catalog from the University of Georgia bookstore. Revolting: Everything that's brutish and repulsive about America: Football, trucks, ground beef, the color red. What percent of the population voted to add, prophylactically, an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman?

And so when my brother and his wife are coming here, I find myself wondering whether we really settled our issues or I let them go because it was easier and safer. My attempts to understand that email incident with my sister-in-law and her mother led me to search through emails from my brother and sister-in-law to see if perhaps the "gay issue" was still a problem. I was surprised to discover that they never mentioned my boyfriend. And still haven't, a year after we've been living together.

I don't know if I'm insane for thinking this might be an issue or insane for not realizing that it is.

I should just say what I am thinking. First in plain words, then in better words:

Come! But not if you believe being gay is a sin.

Come, all! Let us love one another! We will talk about things that are important, and we will grow in our exchange! But if you have quaint "religious" ideas like "this-or-that is a sin," then you are living in a tiny period, a period very much now, the time of the fat white buildings, the great arrogance, the importance of the thing. And you know what I'm talking about! You know what's really there, and yet you pretend to live! Honestly, what will you say tomorrow at heavenly Bingo?

New flute

Dear Flutey,

You are silver, you are sleek; you feel so cool against my cheek. You're clicky, and long, a metal windpipe for my song.

Yesterday, when I held you in my arms for the first time, I could not find your fulcrum. And when I sang those first lullabies, you hardly cooed.

But today . . . Today is like tomorrow already. Today I toss your slender form up and catch it, sure, between my fingers. And today you sing the lullabies in your own young voice.

Always be mine, Flutey.

Love,
Paul

Oh, the young-old horror!

I've been working on my Death in Venice essay. Sometimes I fantasize that it might grow into a book, a sort of creative autobiography. I can trace my development as a person—as a gay person and as a person struggling to fulfill a creative identity—through Death in Venice. At the major crossroads, Aschenbach and Tadzio are there.

I can also be said to have had some obsession with the young-old issue, or innocent-corrupt, creative-destructive—or, perhaps, receiver/giver of knowledge. Even in my earliest years I established hierarchies of power.

In the five or so years of imaginative play with Jeff (dear Jeff, with his Superman curl and glowing birthmark), I appointed myself father and him son. ("How come you're always the father?" he once asked in second grade. "That which is done cannot be undone," I replied, so proud of myself that I remember the statement some twenty years later.) Later I voted myself president of the solar system. His first official post was as treasurer; only later did he rise to vice president.

I was somewhat sadistic with Bobby. His genius threatened my sense of my own intelligence, and I found cruel ways to keep on top of him. I bossed him so mercilessly that our sixth-grade chorus teacher dragged me into the woman's restroom with her and said, "P.G., you've got to stop controlling his life!" Later, of course, he would become my first love. (I remember one night we snuck out of the house, and the dark and still were seductive, and before we knew it we had walked barefoot to the lake and lay on the dock. The moon and stars of childhood were still beautiful . . . In the morning our feet were black and pocked. He would not wake up, and I put on the variations from the Appassionata to bore him out of bed; even then he knew it was incredible music.)

After that was a series of what my same-age friends called my "apprentices," mostly the younger folk who worked with us on various city boards and committees.

My reign did not last past high school. In truth, as a fourteen-year-old gay boy I sought role models, or guides. The only place available to me at that time in Peachtree City was the Internet. (Was it called that? Or was it simply Prodigy and Compuserve?) By looking at bulletin boards dedicated to "Gay Literature," I was able to select a group of people who seemed suitable: knowledgeable, intelligent, and relatively nonlecherous.

I found one woman, who was understanding and friendly but not altogether interested in me, and two men. One turned out to be less intelligent and more lecherous, and one turned out to be a pen-pal friend for some years. He imparted much wisdom by email. When we met in person, I realized that his wisdom was both questionable and endless, and I was at that point 18 and more prepared to find my own information.

But I'm straying from the point. He was in his 40s. And when I went to visit him, I developed a crush on a friend of his, also in his 40s. Also in high school I had a short-lived crush on a singer, 29, that turned into a friendship. I had crushes on several of his 30-something friends. I had a stronger and sad crush on a German teacher in his 40s who died of AIDS. I also befriended a much older student (in his 50s) of my piano teacher and met with him once or twice a month well into my college years.

A young-old obsession? No—the fact is that there were simply more older men. Certainly there were no eligible school chums. When people my age did come along (from other schools)—Andy the upper-class oak, Craig who looked like Charlie Chaplin—I pounced on them.

My hands on Death and Venice, the movie

And so I loved both Aschenbach and Tadzio as a lonely person loves the romance he has for his own loneliness. I wanted these two outsiders to come together, to be left clinging to each other on the Ponte di Rialto, the only two left alive in all of Venice—those who would keep them apart brought low by cholera and rotting in the canals.

I remember the day I saw the cover of the Luchino Visconti's film version of Death in Venice at the Blockbuster in Peachtree City. On the cover was the face of a dashing man not unlike my uncle over a wide white collar, a scarf around the neck. I picked up the case, turned it around. It was heavy plastic, an austere official font. It felt like a foreign film. (Throughout my teens I would search out foreign films with gay or sexual themes. Health class did not teach me everything I needed to know.) And two hours long? How do you turn ninety actionless pages into two hours of movie? I grabbed the empty case, took it to the front counter, and handed over some of the money I earned giving piano lessons. I raced home on my bike.

Even at an early age I was not easily bored. What struck me in Visconti's Death in Venice was, foremost, Dirk Bogarde, who captured Aschenbach so successfully in so many places: the pensive intellectualism which always plays on his silent features, the slow embracing of his happiness once he realizes that he must return to the Lido, the glances over the newspaper at breakfast, the ritual of beautification before going to dinner, the trembling beneath the running india ink just before his death. Perhaps you can even see the tenor of his lust for masculine love in the way his lithe dead body accepts the hearty aid of the Italian lifeguards who carry it away.

Behind Bogarde's performance, at every corner, is a lush music—seemingly dozens of minutes at a time (like the extended music video of the beautiful second movement of the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto in Ken Russell's Music Lovers) of a very natural, pleasing, scratchy hotel parlor quartet playing Viennese waltzes, a Russian woman singing a contralto folksong on the beach, the rough band of traveling players with their contagious and repulsive laughing song, and Mahler's Adagietto, which follows Aschenbach through his indifference, love, and death.