Zauberwelt

Ancient text describing "2003 Gay Pride Parade"

2011-07-09T11:51:00.001-07:00

We kick this temporarily dead horse with a recently discovered papyrus chronicling a series of rituals enacted in the temple-village of Xan Fraxixo some several centuries ago.

It was probably the third time I had driven into the city. I had moved to the Bay Area six months before, but I lived down on the Peninsula, and to this boy from a small town in Georgia, Redwood City and the surrounding neighborhoods seemed to offer enough to keep me exploring for years. Then again, some may say I was simply afraid of the city. And perhaps I was: In talking with city folk then and since, I have always tried to describe a certain something about the city that I did not like or that did not suit me. But I have not yet been able to describe that something.

My goal was Market Street, which was easy enough. I had taken the train in from time to time to walk along Embarcadero, and some of those on-foot explorations had led me across the Golden Gate Bridge, to Chinatown, and down Market itself all the way to Castro (and back). Today I was driving, and I exited on Fourth, saw my friend the CalTrain station, and knew I was on course. After several stoplights, I began to see groups of people sporting rainbow flags, so I figured I was close enough. I pulled off on a side street and found a parallel spot I could pull into. A cautious stranger in a strange land, I wrote the address on a scrap of paper and put it in my wallet: the 600 block of Harrison.

The city was warm today, so I was wearing just a gray T-shirt and jeans. I hadn’t thought to bring a jacket, so I was lucky the weather was behaving. The sun was bright in the incredibly blue sky, and strong cooling winds blew through the buildings. I found Third and headed north. Others were making the same migration, stopping only to wait for crossing signs. I walked faster than these, overtook them, all the while glancing to see what people, like me, were intent on the spectacle of the 2003 Gay Pride Parade. I walked quickly partly out of habit but more out of the knowledge that the parade began at ten and it was twenty past.

A block from Market the road was closed, so I left the sidewalk and entered the broad street, crossing over to the west corner. A mild crowd was pressed against the metal railings lining Market, and no parade in sight. I stood a moment behind the spectators, and there seemed to be fewer than I had expected. But they were much more diverse than I would have thought — meaning that instead of tight shirts, sunglasses, and highlights for miles around, there were families and babies of all races and ethnicities, white yuppies among them. All wore smiles, and some babies waved rainbow flags. All looked expectantly but patiently east.

I was looking for love, as usual, but not expecting to find it. There was an interesting group of men on my right. All were shorter and thinner than I, and all were older. They seemed to be hardened by work in the sun, and a few had broken teeth that I could see behind their smiles. The shortest was also the oldest — perhaps midforties — and also the most interesting to me. He wore tight brown Calvin Klein jeans, which I thought he might have found at T.J. Maxx like I had, a tight shirt, and a straw hat pushed back on his head. I could not look away from his tanned face, which would crease with his smile and laughter and then return to an infant’s smoothness.

In time, though, nature called. Since I had woken before eight, coffee — and lots of it — had been necessary. More was necessary now. There was a small cafe behind me, and though I felt sorry for it as I saw the mass of people inside looking out and waiting, waiting, and as I imagined the sign “Restrooms Are for Customers Only” being ignored again and again, and though I was afraid I might stand in line for twenty minutes or so for the bathroom, I went in. In fact, it seemed everybody else had already taken care of their business, and now they were just watching for the parade. I ordered another coffee — still necessary since it was not yet eleven — and got rid of that I’d brought inside me from the Peninsula.

Back outside, there was still no sign of the Dykes on Bikes who I knew would initiate the parade, so I stepped back from the crowd and took out a cigarette. I had hoped to quit smoking once I moved to the most antismoking state in the Union, but alas the adjustment had proved stressful. I spent the first two weeks in California on the porch of my ghetto house pacing and smoking and waiting for that phone call from someone offering me an interview. Now I stood and smoked and allowed myself a short rest, and a mild congratulatory celebration that I had come this far — namely, thirty miles to Market Street.

After my second or third celebratory cigarette, I heard a ruckus down the street. Yes, it was motorcycles, and soon the dykes came rolling by, slowly, like maids of honor making their entrance. They were in two rows and waved left and right, smiling happily and openly as you might not expect from a woman on a Harley. Standing in the shade of the buildings on Market, I grew chilly, but these women were in tank tops, T-shirts, or nothing. I saw more breasts in those first few minutes of rolling lesbians than I had up to then. Some of the women had children with them, a boy of ten waving a pride flag from the passenger cart, a girl of eight clinging to her bare-chested grandmother from behind.

As I looked at each motorcycle and its driver in turn, I failed to notice for a while that the parade had stopped. The women had their feet on the ground or were resting on the kickstands, and I overheard other spectators asking the tall gay men who roller-skated along the edge of the parade what the delay was. There had been an accident way up ahead, so the parade was going to be delayed for fifteen minutes or so. I sipped my coffee and left the crowd, walking west on Market Street, as much for a change of venue as to prolong the parade by being able to watch the lesbians vroom by again.

The wind whipped my shirt, and a chill ran down my limbs. I sought a sunny patch between two blocks, where the shadow of a building stopped abruptly as the sun shone from nearly overhead. Here I smiled and looked at the happy crowd lining Market, waving flags, whispering to one another, raising their chins and hooting. Yes, it had been a wise migration. Although I was still a stranger here, and although the city was stranger still, I belonged here and fit in. I moved closer to the crowd until I could hear English, Spanish, Chinese, and a hint of Russian. “My name is PG McCurdy,” I said in my own language, and smiled. Yes, I was part of this great, big organism.

The crowd roared, and motorcycles begin to rev. Content in my sunny patch, I pulled out another cigarette and looked up at the sun. A single bit of white fluff shared the sky, too far from the sun and too small to threaten it. I began to eye the crowd. Was there anyone here who might be . . . ? Summer arms around summer waists, summer lips whispering into summer ears, even a summer twink on the shoulders of a summer hunk. I was late for the orgy; pairs had already formed, and I didn’t want to be the third. The smoke from my cigarette tasted sad in my mouth. I ground it out on the edge of a trash can and threw it away. Enough introspection at the edge; I walked down Market and found a spot at the rail. I put my hands in my pockets and watched some of my old friends the Dykes on Bikes.

Wifely

2010-12-06T00:03:00.000-08:00

You should not be allowed to sleep without me. Even your perfectly warm bed and curtained room should cease without me.

I should always be engaged in the study of your dozing. Your autonomous activities should always be subject to my love.

You sit at your desk and doodle. I should be moping in the next room.

Surely you remember the broken faucet. Surely you remember the azure porch.

I have been guilty of idiocy -- you understand that I get confused and fantasize that the unknown stubble will make sense of all the uselessness, of the chance of our tiny biology.

Last night: my ultimate escape. And my ultimate reality. Guilty: I wanted you to make me disappear even more.

* * *

Always: the Hawaiian resort, the wet apartment, and the small doors. Tonight I'll revisit the sandy place of volcanoes and the house with unlocking doors, the glass bathroom and tiny-doored high school.

All these phantasms: a camera that does not work against the purple peaks, a car that barely manages the snowy incline, a video game of swampy adventure.

* * *

I cannot love you because I cannot commit to anything.

Love is actually . . . a desperate necessity? I learned early that nothing would love me, and I developed defenses.

* * *

You have loved me throughout because you are human. You are capable of love and a variety of mischiefs.

* * *

Magic times: a favorite tree and a complete cessation of time, which I did not understand and feared. Weak I was; enamored; wifely; and disappeared even as I became. It is frightening to experience anything important.

* * *

I love you.

Happy Birthday, Zauberwelt!

2010-11-20T07:24:00.000-08:00

Your sixth birthday, and you don't look a day over thirty-seven!

Rooftops

2010-11-10T23:12:00.000-08:00

Oh, oh, oh, you rooftops! Remember last night, when we had had our fill, and I said it was time to go? I wanted to visit the rooftops. I climbed/floated up the improbable stairs and emerged on a sun- and moonlit night. The terra-cotta shingles shined, and sculpted yew trees hid coed lovers. I could see the medieval chapel floating over the general store. Oh arched stones!

Our love is a rare thing -- a spot of life on a distant planet, a burble of conscious molecules in an acidic soup.

It is not like those garages and mosquitoed cabins. It is not like that manhole next to the field, or like the bike paths where an unknown father knew my name. It is not like a mustard fairy or a dancing ogre. It is not like a moment of marble bliss, or even a short patch of stubble beneath the stairs . . .

Our love is an improbability: an unusual meeting of exotic birds, of broken birds miles from their migrations.

It is not like intergenerational passions of curly dark mullets, or well-chiseled and near-sighted vagabonds. It is hardly the teenage Ken dolls of perfect plastic and exquisite guilt. It is by no means the bohemian on the rubber carpet. Nor is it even the supposed bliss on four long legs.

Our love is a whisper, and also a barbed arrow shot from a distant tower. I suppose it is a desperation: a blanket suffocated in our arms, a pond drunk empty by an extreme thirst, a fist of fingers broken against solid earth.

I leave . . . I will leave all tonight . . . There is a place of beaches and hotel rooms. Of winding roads and tunnels. Of deep-set lighthouses and enormous ballrooms.

In short, of rooftops. Have you seen the distant smokestacks? Have you seen the robots dipping in the water? Have you seen green hills naked but for mist? Have you sat and sipped in a bit of wind . . . deflected the realities?

My little feet barely fit on the roofs -- two steps and I am in a different city, causing chills for blocks with my shadow. Look up and see your beast! Look up and see the sad wanderer whose feet fit in no town.

Ah, well. Our love is a pillow. It is a quiet snuffling. It is a baby's speech and a spectacular chandelier. It is a window looking on to wind and electromagnets. It is an angry trip and cows in a field, back steps and a cement-blocked garden. Open arms and violent jealousy: a pockmark on a desk. Fishcakes and flowers. Popcorn. Necromancy. Bottled water.

Mozarts and Bowies

2010-11-07T22:35:00.001-08:00

In a vision of my life are these things:

A plastic pumpkin and an angel made from a green tie. Tom's Lavender Deodorant and a wind chime in the shape of a fish. A copy of J. G. Ballard's Crash and two tall chairs from IKEA. A book of art and Snoopy playing a piano.

* * *

Oh heavens, am I going to turn maudlin?

It turns out that you were not a Caravaggio revelation but simply a poorly bred creature of the Southeast.

I think it's charming that old people still chase tail.

(It is a prose-poem.)

* * *

Turns out there is nothing but a moment on Geary Boulevard. I could die a thousand times, drown in my own million tears, when it comes to a song about birds and a dozen stage effects. Were you seated next to me? Did I touch you? What understanding of life did we have? For once there was something more beautiful than we were.

I am maudlin. I am Starbucks and the favorite tree. I am the place of a future impossibility: the tautly wrapped blond, so lean and vain, so sad and drunk, who took my hand and threw up on my carpet . . . That creator of double life, that depressive of midrange genetics (like my own), not so nearsighted as to miss the stars but oh! so mediocre (like myself) . . . Still, a remarkable arrangement of atoms, if a little Christian (which is to say superstitious), ah but -- Irish moles! Ah, what bliss! Pale shall mate with pale and sonnenschwach producieren.

* * *

But I am not talking about that travesty, but something darker, something forgivable, something invisible, impalpable -- no, immensely palpable. Something cool with incredible feet -- something poorer than Oliver who lives in the comfort of Kings: silks and linens and heretofore-uninvented luxuries of down and duck liver: He, the bizarre gravity of my infatuation. That brief millisecond on the magical cloud: steps which I boasted to a friend, and windows that became the foci of my communion with the divine.

How did I leave Valhalla? (Oh but pictures -- pictures I still have!) I was a self-doubting Warrior. I suppose I grew to expect true deification. I suppose I feared that any old blacksmith would choose his weapons over my sad gray flesh.

* * *

Louder, louder, and then I will soon forget! The Beethovens of yesteryear are the sexdaddies of today. What is it I want with you? To be hooked breast to breast and stretched to the utmost pain? Or simply to be broken and entered?

Are you in some kind of studio, singing into some kind of device? Or are you right here, in my kitchen-cum-bathroom-cum-bedroom? Perhaps you, age 62, are brushing your recessed incisors at my sink? I have seen you at seventeen and (in my dreams) have heard you toot Bach.

* * *

I shake with -- cold, perhaps? Also, I may be inspired by the seed which -- which -- grows on the eastern incline of Mount Esherthione, which some know as the Rise of Polluniony. It may be that I am in the third day of ekstasis, that I have spent already two days with Ureiliana, goddess of misknowledge, inspiritator of the wisdom of Nuu.

For surely I sent to the tall oily blondhead the knowledge of symmmmetry. For surely his lean-pantsed and intelligented genetique needed a bit of inspiration other than the birds -- and his oddly sexed consort.

* * *

There is such thing as excess. Even a local hero knows. Even a geographic aberration knows. Even one of a hundred thousand puppies knows.

Oh you fuckers! I am two generations too late to dance with your mutton chops!

Curling. Curling up and dying.

What are you doing now, Bobby? Once you danced. Did you grow up to be a antipoliticiast? Did you grow up to be a solid gold sexer?

I will hide in my own cryogenesis. The future to which I awake will be inhabited by Mozarts and Bowies.

Today, O columns!

2010-11-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

O small door, I've suffocated under your low arch and suffered in the chamber beyond. I've hidden my broken parts under the rugs even while friendly neighbors stood on the mat with soothing soups. Don't look at me, I've said. I'm hideous, I've said. A dank, burrowing creature.

Even last night I twitched from one side to the other, burning against an infection of tristesse. Manic tunes taunted me, and the press of each new hour closer to daylight. In the end, the clock was stopped. Happy chance, I had an opportunity of sunshine and happiness. I chose oblivion.

* * *

But today, O columns! You stretch beyond visibility, beyond mountain and cloud! I wrap my arms around you each, press my forehead to your cool stone, stand between you with my arms wide and feel your current flow from hand to hand. My friends in their several caravans are winding their way through the valleys to your festivity!

Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben

2010-10-22T11:33:00.001-07:00

Following are my adaptations of Adelbert von Chamisso's poems as used in Robert Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben.

1.

Seeing him has blinded me:
Wherever I look, it is only he;
his image floats before me like a waking dream,
emerging brighter and brighter out of the deepest darkness.

Everything else around me is lightless, colorless.
No longer drawn to the games of my sisters,
I would rather weep quietly in my little room.
Seeing him has blinded me.

2.

He the most glorious of all—
so gentle, so good!
Charming lips, bright eyes,
clear of mind and strong of spirit.

Shining and glorious, exalted and unreachable,
he sits in my own heavens
as clear and glorious as that star
out there in the blue depths.

Wander, wander your paths—
only to gaze at your light,
to gaze in humility
and in blissful sadness.

Do not hear this quiet prayer
devoted only to your happiness.
You may not know such a lowly girl,
you exalted star of glory.

Only the most worthy of all
may be made happy by your choice,
and I will bless that exalted one
many thousands of times.

I will be glad then and weep;
blissful, blissful I will be.
Even if my heart breaks—
break, heart! What will it matter?

He the most glorious of all—
so gentle, so good!
Charming lips, bright eyes,
clear of mind and strong of spirit.

3.

I can’t grasp it or believe it;
A dream must have entranced me.
How could he have raised and blessed me,
this poor creature, from among them all?

It seems as if he said,
“I am forever yours.”
It seems as if I am still dreaming,
for such could never be the case.

O let me die in this dream,
cradled against his breast.
Let blessed death swallow me up
in tears of endless joy.

4.

You ring on my finger,
little gold ring—all mine!
I press you devoutly to my lips
and to my heart.

I had reached the end of the
peacefully beautiful dream of childhood.
I found myself alone,
lost in a barren, endless land.

You ring on my finger,
you first taught me then.
You opened my sight
to the endless, deep value of life.

I want to serve him, live for him,
belong completely to him,
devote myself to him,
and find myself transfigured in his radiance.

You ring on my finger,
little gold ring—all mine!
I press you devoutly to my lips
and to my heart.

5.

Help me, my sisters,
kindly adorn me.
Serve the happy one today.
Keep busily winding around my brow
the ornament of blossoming myrtle.

When I would lie
contentedly and of happy heart
in my beloved’s arms,
he would still yearn
for this day impatiently,
his heart full of longing.

Help me, my sisters—
help my chase away
a foolish uneasiness,
so that I may receive him
with clear eyes—
him the source of joy.

My love, have you truly appeared?
Sun, do you grant me your light?
Let me in reverence,
let me in humility,
pay homage to my lord.

Strew flowers, my sisters—
strew flowers for him.
Present him with budding roses.
But you, my sisters,
I greet with sadness even as I
depart joyfully from your circle.

6.

Sweet friend, you look at me in astonishment.
Can you not comprehend how I could be crying?
Let the unfamiliar ornament of moist pearls
tremble with bright joy in my eyes.

How anxious my bosom is, how blissful!
If only I knew how to express it with words.
Come and bury your face here at my breast.
I want to whisper in your ear all my joy.

Now do you understand the tears I can cry?
Should you not see them, my beloved husband?
Stay at my heart, feel the beat of it,
that I may press you tighter and tighter.

Here at my bed the cradle has space
to quietly hide my sweet dream.
The morning will come when the dream awakes
and your image will smile out at me.

7.

At my heart, at my breast
you my bliss, you my joy!

Happiness is love; love, happiness.
I’ve said it and will never take it back.
I once considered myself extravagant
but am even happier now.
Only she who nurses, only she who loves
the child whom she gives nourishment—
only a mother alone knows
what it means to love and to be happy.
O how I pity however the man
who cannot feel a mother’s joy!
You dear, dear angel, you—
You look at me, and even smile.

At my heart, at my breast,
you my bliss, you my joy!

8.

Now you have hurt me for the first time,
but deeply.
Harsh, merciless man, you sleep the sleep
of death.

Abandoned, I glance around:
The world is empty, empty.
I have loved and lived; no longer am I living.

Quietly I retreat within myself;
the veil descends.
I have lost my happiness and you,
you my world.

SIGHTING!

2010-10-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

Sitting here waiting for the sad songs to pull me under and away.

I had thoughts earlier:

- Fair-headed men give me the creeps.
- Sing to me, O entranced skinny-pantsed henna-head!
- You are the crown jewel in my museum of freckled skin.

Also: the darling neighbor, the caregiver, spending a sunny afternoon with his girlfriend. What had they intended, and how had they ended up there? Also, will he recognize me next time?

* * *

I oughtn't fake it (though I do). This is my natural state. Much of the rest is sham, or habit. I am not the productive person you might see, but an escapist -- a beast, an evolutionary dead-end, one easily entertained within his distracting monkey brain. Those little artistic strivings: best when they create something that feels like cosmic order. But always a refuge. I believe strongly in the chance of this mess -- yet I waver, and your gods are proof of a more steadfast escapism.

* * *

Like other refuges that may feel more real: constantly shifting bodies under four blankets; the arm that goes underneath, whose hand is always there waiting; best of all perhaps the fitting feet. (I was truly suspended for those years.) You are the most cosmic and the most real, and thus the least like all these constructs. I talk to you in the babble of the idiot rocks, afraid to use two-footese -- you simplify your own language to be understood.

* * *

Even still I torment you:

2010.10.09.12:45.36 Finally! After months and months of search. And day started so unpropitiously: woke with strange hunger. Ate breakfast bar. Could not see peaks for fog. Disoriented. Took samples at noon and began trek back. Suddenly, 100 m to N had a sighting. Froze on my spot as they approached, then passed. Seemed almost not to see me, or indifferent. Took out journal to mark sighting -- pen to paper and absorbed in writing when felt presence. They were 1 m to right. CURLS! And their eyes were looking right at me.

* * *

Again: this is not the fake me but the less-fake me.

Big black clouds

2010-10-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Go away, ya big black clouds! You make a person absolutely want to jump off this planet and go splat against some cold moon.

Wah wah wah says the little human with hairy knuckles and misshapen feet. Wah this and wah that.

I know you'll pass over, ya big meanies, but why don't you hurry up? There are plenty other dales to cover.

Rosemary fire

2010-09-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

Take advantage of the moments. Listen to the music. Write about the green and blue eyes -- final evidence of your own authorship, if on a small and specific scale.

You have studied the rubber fleshes. You have majored in tousled hairs. (But even then you little understood the absence of creases. Yours was a negligence of basements full of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. You could afford staining coffees and indeed cheesecakes.)

Do you see what happens when inspiration . . . ? And some days ago I censored myself, and did not write about thin gray teeth -- evidence of a separate upbringing and a different federal water. Gray teeth (Grey, like my son) and thin, and floppy fishlike fingers like half-grown larvae. Ego in a flash: no learner but quite learned, an imparter of experience.

Have you been beyond the curtain? Have you seen a certain desperation? In that dark is a galactic hunger: give me your rotten teeth and moth-eaten wool.

* * *

My punishment is wet walls and small doors. I'll face them again tonight.

* * *

Merman, here it is: I love you like the eyelid loves to close and the tongue loves to moisten the lip. In my dreams I float in your mile-long limbs. All the dirts are rinsed. The cold parts are made lukewarm. The hot parts are made lukewarm. Stem to stern I am your temperature.

* * *

Mystery -- and double-mystery -- we are old, old salts. I cannot maintain this deceit. We will return to the bologna. I blare the music, but the silence persists. We will separate our darks and lights and water our potatomato plants. We will aim our toes and calves at the same old holes and fasten the same old ceintures about our middles. Oh vulgar belt! Thing of such coincidence! Did the early beasts at the galaxy's rim design such pragmatism? Or did they not will or genetically splice ridges upon their bellies to support their heavy curtains?

* * *

I cannot end at ET BIO 101.

Most important is the rock-eater. The rock-eater and my competition, Marky Mark.

You, mystery, cannot sleep without me. Independent, creative, and fantastical as you are, you are a funny dimple in the earth without me there to experience you. (Even as I am not looking, you create impossibilities.) Ours may never be an expected romance, but even my baby-talk is more real than the buildings built under these damp clouds.

Yours is a . . . lavender incense . . . in a cedar room . . . in a sandalwood dimension.

Robot babies

2010-09-19T21:05:00.000-07:00

Dare I listen to the musicks?

* * *

I want to defile the bond of our sacred oath by lining up the men of the world -- sure, by height -- and touching the eyebrows of each in turn. You have seen how I study the bone structures of strangers.

* * *

What murders would I commit? Of cul-de-sacs of grass and pine trees? There has been a religion of procreation -- and the reason I am here, of course. What creature would I have been if the result of a careful and desperate decision?

* * *

Other robot babies have felt this discomfort.

* * *

Love, will you burn with me in the beachen bonfires? Our way has never been the festivity of holiday sweaters. We can scarcely hold hands on a park bench. [You need not be part of my artifice. I rally against my species while you are naturally alien.] People and pets, people and pets, while beach grasses anchor themselves in the Always-Before.

* * *

Even as I contemplate my homeworld, I am drawn to the mermen emerging on exhausted bowlegs.

"No, no," he said. "For heaven's sake don't take it off. You are all bloated pork without it."

"You'll have me buried in this thing, won't you?"

"I'll have you put to sea."

"What will you do without me?"

"Oh, you're not taking it with you. I'll find new pork for it."

"Incorrigible."

But such was the magnetism of his fiction that the mermen kept coming.

Make ready your hair

2010-08-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

Why am I sitting around praying for enough electromagnetic magic to watch some hokey French thriller -- when, for example, I could listen to a certain song for the thirtieth time?

I have seen strange lesbians in suits. Lesbians who sing long phrases made of notes whole and even longer.

* * *

I do not understand how you have managed to have all portraits taken on fairy film. Where are your flaws? Your bizarre blondness and bright teeth defy the reality of apes. Which makes you to some extent hideous -- likewise your friends with puffs of curly hair sticking out from home-designed hats.

* * *

I have wondered about the time it takes to make ready your hair.

* * *

Also: six times six the boyfriends have worried about their hairs, and now it is immortalized in a talky.

* * *

Seriously, please tell me what is going on in this mid-European country! Are artistic moles required by law? Asymmetrical hairstyles?

* * *

All right. I get it. You are young. Ornament is what you do. There is a fabulous life of well-placed silverware and glass walls. Let it not be conceived that one of you might be named something so boring as Chris Jones!

* * *

Sad is that I can see the imperfections from this distance. For example, your teeth are not as white as his, and he does not yet have your crow's feet. You have more pictures of him than he of you.

* * *

What if you were not gay but simply some strange mishaps of self-beautification? (I reminded a friend that we were mutants of a bio-curious nature. Our laws are likewise mutinous.)

* * *

In better parts of the mind: coffee, coconut prawns, assorted TVs, windy trees outside windows, even the Simpsons, even an angry stapler, a secret adventure with relatives, dogs and fireworks, and of course those special moments, flowers on a table, and my arms wide with baby talk.

Bearing

2010-07-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

I would like to study your bowed legs—
to place the left against a yardstick,
to measure with level and plumb line the divergence.
I have seen how you walk with careful care of the air around you,
the gentle tube of space you ride from place to place.
Have you minded the turning of your pants?
Have you seen them call out with their shape, We are Yours!

Wander your path, legs; make your carefree comedy.
With your gentle arc you inspire a devoted art.

Regular freaking updates

2010-07-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

Here I am again, kiddos. Obviously there is something wrong (not that this is a cry for help). It is remarkable that a thirty-something atheist, existentialist, nihilist, and sociopath can have so much difficulty in the world.

Do you remember when you yourself were Christian, and everything here was an embarrassment? Now do you understand that it is merely a drunk (aided or un-) spection?

Little whirring insects outside an elevated recital. Singing frogs. We are an amusing sideshow. Only the science-fictionists understand.

* * *

There is somewhere in the universe a firework made of creaking pedals and fingernails upon the treble strings.

* * *

Which is to say that last night offered a sex dream. Some kind of trio, and most notably a ginger: almost contained within one of my slutty hands, a freckled pastry, tasty, though I was afraid of barriers. "Would you allow me to . . . ?" Incredibly like a cookie, a strokable dessert. But I had to give him up to the other characters of my fantasy, who were so much less Catholic than I.

* * *

Do you remember those nights of hallways and latrines? How I tried to understand human coupling! The omega male is a broken thing of pathetic self-medication.

* * *

That character of yore asked me if I did a gesture with my mates . . . and was embarrassed at my nine-year-old sexuality. No, my older friend, I had not yet discovered these things. Though many have delighted at the fantasy of you and yours.

* * *

And -- oh incredible chance of bang! -- there was a high-placed chess set, marble, figurines more modern than we could have possibly understood -- and a warm moonlit room where pajamas caused sparks under the sheets.

Could my Catholicism censor any real memories? Why wasn't there a strange hominid experiment? My hand hovered over molestation -- kicked at that intruder drunk with childhood and nothing else.

I prayed to God about all three. No: only two. Let him love You, and let him love me. The other was always beyond: my son, my Superman, and now a grown-up untrammeled by this greater question. Or lucky?

Why were we ever best friends? Because of the nature of young pups? I was strong then -- hypnotic. My brain grew quickly and then slowed tragically. Regular growths were drawn to me like insects to that bug zapper just above the gazebo at Huddleston Pond.

* * *

Because we never wandered in the dark. We had that one argument, yes, but we never came close to love. You were fundamentally different, and could never walk all night along the asphalt, hiding from headlights, falling asleep exhausted beside a bed covered in boogers and strange experiments of pubescence.

* * *

They have all returned. All return because of the bright lights of our COMPUTERS which compute.

* * *

Truly, I could go all night. What the fuck is this? Place a few asterisks and continue.

* * *

(Yes, I still mean what I said. But I always have one foot on Mars and the other in my own unconsciousness, AKA death.)

Let me bore you with details: I started with coffee and a long walk along the ocean listening to a new album by a human called Rufus Wainwright -- an annoying whining bastard like me but much more talented and amusing. Also a human. Perhaps you've heard of them. Bags of mostly water on a subatomic particle they call Earth.

* * *

You, my dear, need to abandon your cherished religion. You must see that the universe is a larger accident than you could ever imagine. My typographical errors are more than enough proof of that. My tiny honey-bee dance is evidence of your ridiculousness.

* * *

What is real? A fluffy-sheep blanket? A gold-leaf icon? A lamb sandwich? Some entrant in the Austrian House Show called Wolfgang?

* * *

Mozart likes when I put the dog collar on him and make him do tricks.

Danger

2010-07-23T00:57:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I should share with you some of my sadness.

First, let me bore you with realistic details: Certain desperation led me back to the offices of my former employer. I said hello to the old friends and revisited my old cubicle. I sought the director, a certain Stephen.

"Stephen," I said, "I would love to work here again."

"They always come back," Stephen said.

"And would you please tell Jane? I couldn't find her."

I walked down the halls, through the IT department, which had grown, and to my own block of proofreaders and editors. Did I want this? Oh, but yes I wanted $60,000 a year with benefits, and of course I would still have time for music. And I'd once again be able to afford to be a patron of the arts. So what if I was cubed? So what if I had endless emails. So what if I was creating standardized tests . . . in a virgin industry . . . in a blind society . . . stabbing at a capitalist, Republican, and Christian measurement . . . of productivity. Well, maybe I could work part-time only.

Was there any way out? I had come all this way. I had begged and revealed myself desperate.

"Stephen," I called, jumping and floating over new hills. "It was all a bad dream! Please, it was all a bad dream!"

* * *

And then there were cafes. Late-night cafes. Even alcohol does not equal a decent bitter coffee.

* * *

If it is loud enough, maybe it will be the last I hear. My favorite music happened only once and was barely recorded.

* * *

I have written about snuffling, and it's all I want right now. Granted — I am four sheets. Do you know?

* * *

Truly, I can only love asleep and in space.

* * *

Remember the chestnut trees in the gardens of the Tuileries?
     You took me by the hand . . .
Remember the mists on the Seine and the bridges in the easy rain?
     You held my face and kissed me . . .
I held you — I kissed you.

     Remember the fallen birch in the cloister of the little church?
I took you by the hand . . .
     Remember us drifting afloat in the silence of the gliding boat?
I held your face and kissed you . . .
     You shivered and trembled . . .
You quivered and shook . . .

Remember the fragrance of mushrooms in the air?
     I remember there were raindrops in your hair!

I swore to love you always!
     I swore to love you always!
I gave myself to you forever!
     I gave myself to you forever!

—William M. Hoffman

* * *

I imagine you sleeping alone, and I die. As strong as you may be, you do not exist without me. Your empty bed is a sad dream. Lesbian sheet, boy-band pillow, and Bo-Peep blanket — all are a sadness without my complication. For we have known what it is to snuffle against our necks, and your arm as well as mine can weather the night under a beloved head.

Those days — those nights. Which happiest moment would you choose? I couldn't choose coconut shrimp over Starbucks or a smoke on the back porch. Alone: filming the tree outside the window or speaking in German against the chair outside the bathroom.

* * *

It is deadly to think these things. All the same, God is an amusing story for children and baby species. Very few other things besides are real.

Gee whiz

2010-07-19T23:46:00.001-07:00

I am in love with celebrities and a few mortals.

I can barely breathe. I'm just going to stick my head out the window. Would you check on me in an hour?

What window was ever more beautiful? What metal frame was ever more comfort than the porcelain of a drunk's toilet?

I have arranged the blankets for a photo.

I have written a poem about the closet.

We must all run from what we love. Otherwise: annihilation.

* * *

I have been taunted by beautiful housing. Two beautiful rooms and my own bathroom in a house on a San Franciscan hill. No door, but turning halls of discretion. A dressing room worthy of a piano.

* * *

Still, though, I will never leave that hotel in Hawaii.

* * *

Pardon the F bombs: fuck fuck fuck!

* * *

If there is one who was most extraordinary, it is the one I can never talk to as a friend. Only one was ever from another planet. Only one was ever a god.

* * *

Oh gee whiz.

Whisper, whisper

2010-07-06T22:22:00.001-07:00

I forgot to tell you that I engaged in the cleansing rituals. I sloughed. What you see now is an inside skin, free from the old damages and ready for the new.

Mechanically, a number of things have gone wrong. A few machines have malfunctioned and been jammed into the locker of broken parts in the back corner of the garage. Will the old CB ever work again?

* * *

Immobile. Ears stuck.

* * *

Late-night walks in childhood.

* * *

I could not confess my sadness to the babysitter.

* * *

I am not all sap.

* * *

O spirit of indifference, smile upon me! Children, revolt and bring about my embarrassment! I was you once. My adults did not confess to childish adolescence but went about with invalids and lipsticks. And did the old bat ever have a husband? Must have, to have borne those children.

Finality, and a fantasy of the 5 Fulton bus. There was a prince once; I wrote well of him. Windows and torsos; how insufficiently I breathed it in. The best loves perhaps cause the greatest damages.

(Another reads here occasionally . . . The Unmolested. We had a certain love, though I could never truly love a Christian, and he could not truly love a man. Rams both, one brown, one blond. One with skin like well-cooked beef and one with skin like clean-pulled pasta. Oh, they were hateful bastards. So fragile, so like oak stakes in a hidden hole covered by twigs and grass in the middle of god knows where.)

I am free. I am free and alone as ever and can theorize about past and present. Fuck the last.

Is it pride? Does one regret caring? It is a contest? Ought I to have been a stone door as well?

* * *

How much longer can I insist on escape? Won't my heart or liver give out? And yet there are little birds who take their hearts and lungs to the utmost edge, and impale themselves on dangerous outcroppings, and drink foul poisons and beg to be destroyed again and again and again.

It will always be safest to be elsewhere: quite deep, beyond Pluto, or in a world of wood elves and bears rolling downhill. My genetics are not built to maintain the species. My blood-connections are weak. This organism longs to evaporate.

To be spirit? To leave the world of watercress and bologna?

* * *
You never, never, never appreciated, you bastard. You spat in my soil and clipped my blossoms. You played jacks in a game of canasta. You whittled guano out of carvings of clouds. You fumbled the commands of Oberon. In short, you painted a purple wall white.

Salty

2010-07-04T22:34:00.000-07:00

Oh children, we are a mess. Things have happened and unhappened; leading men have become extras; heroes have become villains; characters that died in Act I have returned in Act III. All these things and more: pesky leaking walls in a far-off house; there was even an attempted abduction with threat of rape.

How can one simply sit? How can one do anything but walk heavily west until the continental shelf gives way?

Did I live for the moment? For an eighth of each, perhaps. Some people are better equipped for earthly joy. For each moment here I spend three building its sister somewhere beyond Pluto.

I sang sad songs to the ocean today. Heavy sands blocked much of the plaint, but enough dreary melody was washed away that I could turn back toward home.

* * *

To loves specific and general, I offer my insufficient thanks.

It may be that a tiger has come closest to a blind, willing, and spiritual love. I had never been loved as mere and utter saltshaker before. Do you understand? So irrelevant was the artifice of my own person that Tiger loved whether I was tan or pale, tired or spastic, talkative or tongue-tied, or even there at all.

* * *

Tiger perhaps does not deserve special mention here. Tiger is, or has become, precisely the handsome prince who rules the lands beyond Pluto. Tiger is the scent of foggy eucalyptus trees, rosemary bushes in the sun, and that indescribably delicious spice of well-tended flesh.

* * *

Goodbye, tigers! It is time for all saltshakers to turn inward and reflect upon their grains. Never again, we say. Never again, we repeat.

Everything in moderation

2010-06-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

I line up my sadnesses like toy train cars. I poke them with cardboard triangles on sticks and set them adrift in my tub. I tie strings from them to the knob and slam the door. I pose them like stuffed animals in a pretend jury. I leave them in the pockets of my jeans while they're in the wash.

I tease up my sadnesses' bangs and set them with hairspray. I let them wear my favorite rings. I help them into the crook of the redwood in my backyard and paint their portraits. I cut off pieces of them and eat their sacred flesh. I write their names on the ballot and elect them to parliament.

In other words, I will never leave that narrow beach of alternating sun and storm. I will always be tricked by glittering sand and half-clad bodies. I will always be led to the southern end of the beach and trapped by tide and disoriented by rain.

I have tried hiding in my hotel room, but one wall opens onto the pool and the kitchen staff passes between my bed and the dresser. I have almost stopped trying to hide my secrets. Let the other guests look through the tattered curtains!

Before this was the terror of moss and mold, of rank water and slime. We huddled, didn't we? And died, while others crawled first on two, then on four, to the farthest reaches of the desert.

I cannot define your pleasure for you. It does the hokey pokey with my language. Your pleasure is something like an army on the moon. Your pleasure is like cotton batting in the clouds. Why do I lie? Your pleasure is a frozen glacier in my throat.

Here I am in the earth's lowest hole crying for the abandoned. What other hope is there of floating?

A Dedicated Fool

2010-06-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

It's 8:55 in the morning, and I'm listening to sad and beautiful songs. The lump organ in the middle of my chest has been engaged this weekend, and I must artificially feed it a little emotion today or die from withdrawal.

It may be better to shut down the devices completely. Previous systems of functioning were more than adequate. One cannot believe in -- or endure -- change.

And yet I feel inspired to fight. I must become a chocolate-covered golden ingot. I must sit cross-legged in my halo. I must make beautiful mosaics of my chromosomes.

I may never tell you, but I will tell nonetheless. Somewhere and somehow. You may not understand it, and you may not like it. The saying of a thing is a commitment to a reality I cannot feel. It is someone else's. You know that I live here half-asleep -- and my woken body moves in a far-off welkin.

(In that place of incandescent foods and electromagnetic instruments, my ankles have lost strength for floating inches above the seaside brome.)

On a roll

2010-06-04T00:13:00.001-07:00

I did not go wrong with the under-gamekeeper. Or with the over-gamekeeper. I went wrong with no gamekeeper.

My clothes are splashed with alcohol and infused with multiple smokes. I have made a careful study of the will to spew and absorb.

People have touched each other. Happy ones with happy faces have shown their teeth. Those who would console you have whispered in your ear.

A fairy-tale elf-prince reappeared and smiled beyond reflecting glass. No one should be smiled at like that, but we all are.

What is it you want, little munkee? No amount of worship can equal your grace. Only those from the sea or another planet give so freely to the beasts -- and out of what? Alien science?

There is more each time, not less. Ridiculous inventions of purpose. I once saw a thirty-year-old adult engage in a simulation of a nonreproductive act.

Pockets with overwrought flaps. Shirts with an occasional faux pas: sleeves limp around weak arms.

Every tribulation a fantasy: these wet houses, these loves, my children and antichildren -- all bacteria, all dust, all tearings from a spiral-bound notebook.

I was sleeping while you were apocalypsing

2010-05-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

With enough sad music, I can accomplish anything. Can even stay up three minutes past ten. With six minutes of Bowie singing "Wild Is the Wind," my eyes are open into late next century . . .

I have already forgotten the future: roaming creatures with new inventions of purpose, handmade and accidental technologies. I believe we loved then, you with your seal and I with my vacuum. Yes, it is coming back to me: we exchanged information then. We laughed at the differences in our codes. In the end we coupled around our similar digits.

Something has happened to the moon. A big finger has pressed it closer. In our last minutes I am grateful that the Deus has chosen the West's night for this end. The earth below grumbles, but the moon is a deep-textured bulb half-covered by horizon.

I thought I would jump and wrap my arms around the queen of tides, but I press my face into the sand and inhale deeply. With each breath I sink deeper. The cranky old rocks beneath me are angry, but earth's liquid inferno will out. An upward-falling spew burns my cheek, already half-fossilized.

I am not alone in the sand. And in truth it is a dark-haired crab that reminds me of

a Coke and a bike and a shop with crooked lintels
three blue little books nestled in a cardboard box
poppy seeds and strawberries
lesbians and sailors
a long-lit day and neither moon nor stars
sitting and rolling
arguments about stained-glass windows
secrets in basements and bright yellow grease
ceramic figures with their hands reaching upward
five in a car
french fries at the end of a long journey
celibacy and the book at the end of the day
ah, friends in the attic

Four trifles

2010-05-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

More than anything I long to unglove my hand and poke you where your skin is palest. I have seen the battle between ground and sky at your waist, air's wantonness and earth's modesty. Only a compromise between god and devil will unclothe that middle part of you. My finger will be waiting.

* * *

Out of an awareness of my vanity, I allowed the breath of my pirouette to extinguish the seven candles. How can I dance for my love if my mind's eye sees the firelight echoing off my contracting thighs? The motion had for the first time meaning. "Yes, I understand," he said. I danced and danced and danced in visual blindness . . . until my vanity grew ears and heard the beauteous crunching of my bones, and I danced for them. My love left and found a happy stillness.

* * *

Child -- and I do mean child -- you will no doubt give your body like all before you. Itsy-bitsy monkeyfaces make itsy-bitsy monkeykisses. You are not disgusting to me like spitty-white larvae, but you are equally unblemished and fragile. One sharp poke and you will spew in evisceration.

What would I have you do? Hold your breath and become an incandescent fog. Travel to a faraway planet and be a god. Be a pure and worshiped gas. Whisper to the munkeepeeple the words of your hymns. Caress symmion mandibles only as a last resort, when nothing else cures your uniquity.

But you will not heed me. You will rub thing upon thing as I did and do. A more powerful god than I whispers to you: the god of dogs and cats and every little thing that eats and uneats. It bids you join it under the covers, on a bed bedecked with nasal discharge, and explore your palest parts. As a leaf turns to the brightest part of day, you turn to the softest sheet.

* * *

I have asked for relief of duty, but none comes. I have asked to be as free as sadness, but they keep me rich. "Haven't you seen the vegetables in my cellar?" I ask. "Cellar -- what is?" they reply.

I want your love in my undercroft. Place your carved worship in my crypt. Sauté your loving fruits and place them in my basement. My poor dead soul wanders restless. Have you known a still-secret burial? Seen the soul wander among the entombed riches? Lightless, soundless, only cold ceramic against the bitter odor of my rotting cheek. Join me, finally.

* * *

I cannot trifle long with anything that is not a twinkling light six inches beyond the known edge of the universe.

More surrealist word porn

2010-04-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

dedicated to SopranoAscending --
you call it surrealist word porn,
I call it drunken rambling;
in fact, I have only the vaguest memory
of writing the following:

Occasionally there will appear a Russian-speaking beauty of such majesty, so rectangular of head, with such stylish mullet, and de jeans et autre haute clothing, that you will crumble to the ground and pray that the god of K-mart call you home immediately. There is nothing to do but save your game, satisfy your base imaginings, and then restore, happy that no one but you and a digital device know of the sins you just committed . . .

Have you experienced such a tall danger? Have you seen such a stranger conform himself to an unusual place? Heard him commune (strangely) with an even vaster Easterner -- "You feeled! You feeled!"?

Bedding

2010-03-30T23:31:00.000-07:00

I am snug in my bed, which is not a bed but a collection of geographies: plain and rocky cliff with clouds floating at the edge of the canyon. I have long been excavating this site; I have long counseled myself, "Patience! Next year we shall secure the find."

Last night there were many beds -- a house with ill-fitting doors and undiscovered rooms. I sought to take my new roommate on a tour: "There are several rooms we do not even use. I'm not sure why." But they were suddenly difficult to find. What we could was claimed and occupied: desks covered with rustling papers, dipping beds with flowery duvets.

* * *

Happiness is shamelessly beautiful art

provided by a shamelessly beautiful friend:

* * *

I can't stay long from curls. Yesterday I had a breakthrough: by adding essence of calendula, I achieved a light-brown curl the tightness of my pinky that lasted for thirty minutes. Tomorrow I will resume chromosomal manipulations. The answer must lie in a combination of genetics and alchemy!!!

Medical advice

2010-03-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

It happened again: someone found my blog by Googling "jiminy cricket never put something in your ear sharper than your elbow."

That's what I'm here for.

Perfection

2010-03-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

I have made of you an amber jewel.

Physically uninspiring

2010-03-04T22:15:00.000-08:00

Of the various things I could be doing right now, I choose to listen to a bit of sad music, have a Guinness or two, and sit with you.

Is anything sacred?

Here is an image of how we can sit: let me be a child again, a wee thing, a pie-crust promise of sticks and bones, and let me sit in your lap like a boy in an inner tube in a warm, lazy stream. You may very well put your arms around me -- for some reason I am not frightened by the new breasts that press against my back. Though I am not yet old, I know enough that they are something divine: a magic I lack.

But I am not a wee thing. I am "physically uninspiring (short, thin, moderately misshapen, and very blond)." True (true, now false, true, now false).

Is your pain sacred? I cannot relate to an old pain. I cannot quite feel the whole universe in my body. I can feel my own smallness in the universe -- but I'm able to see my own life as a funny little TV show with my own laugh tripled and tripled and tripled as the laugh track. So what I know is that my own pain is a background noise that I spice with sad songs.

More important, perhaps: Last night I rode a tiny motorcycle up and down those hills. The fuse of the little motor was lit by fire (and happily smelled like lavender), so it was best to use the cherry of my cigarette -- in which vice I was only too happy to indulge. At times I found myself in the plush homes of strangers; it was pleasant to inspect their couches and aquariums, but I feared the noise might draw them out of their bedrooms.

Always, always, and always the wet house. At some point everything that works will fall off, and I will be left a blob of flesh and digestion. You may wonder what the point is.

Fuck if I know.

What have I got? Three precious ex-husbands, all of whom can face me when sober and might remarry me when drunk.

Nights

2010-02-11T21:51:00.000-08:00

Give me just one more night of depression. Give me one more night of black bliss -- if not of drunken forgetfulness, then of an early sleep, with pillows that turn into warm dark masses with sideburns and mustaches.

For years it has been this way, though darker sometimes: every night when the baker slept, having said goodbye to the citizens and vacuumed the cat-piss carpet, I would escape through a narrow tunnel to a boy-bar east of the iron curtain. My socks and pajamas would grow heavy with mud, and my eyelids would darken even as my pupils reflected the metallic light of that foreign place.

I remember a higher place ringed with smoke. Some creature buried in that mound scratched for release. Another creature wandered as aimlessly as I. . . . No, sometimes his movements were quite intentional. He longed to destroy, or maybe only to unearth the buried creature. Neither of us had the comforts of absinthe then. We hid burrs in each other's blond hair. Occasionally we bathed.

Happier moments: distractions. Living pillows. Occasionally a two-part invention (never more than a few minutes long). The best beginning -- when I first moved into Schloss Neuschwanstein -- is well documented. I have pictures of most corners, and video of some. Oh happy cups! Oh hangers and rugs! Oh windows and doors!

Each February, my age increases. But several days it has been since I've wanted to whisper, "Caution! I am about to unravel!" Besides, I will likely stay wound up even until my daughter takes me deep into the forest to die unobtrusively.

Once again: a slug wearing spectacles in a vast dark cellar.

Moles and curls

2009-12-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

The bus turned me maudlin -- or even more maudlin than the production of Romeo and Juliet I saw tonight. I saw a couple and had a sudden realization that the fantasy of love was highly improbable for me. And it is likely my own doing: beyond chance, what materializes in this realm is our own fantasy. And I've descended into nihilism.

Also on the bus: peacocks and bangs and Puma sneakers. Skinny pants. Adornments. People living and enjoying the fantasy of coupling. And in my past: shamelessly smooth skins devoid even of freckles and moles.

"He had a clean, vertical, metallic smell about him." Or, "I loved how at night, when the artificial odors of his laundry had faded, I could smell the oil of his beard." Also: "Just hearing him switch from conscious nose breathing to that slower, slightly wet mouth breathing of his nightly peace would be enough to silence my mind and drop me finally to sleep." And don't forget the unknowns: "I watched the curls turn gray over the course of six years."

As French poet

2009-11-10T23:43:00.000-08:00

Were the French poets any lazier than I? Consider this:

"I confided no secrets except an enigmatic song to the damp bogs."

Is that really any different from "The arrangement of moles on your cheek may spell an ancient word; let me consult the decaying tomes"? I am a thieving highwayman.

Poetry is the only place where words have a chance of becoming important. And "it is thus that you are."

* * *

I've lost my dependence on civilians. Now that I see them all around me, I no longer need one. I am sufficient in my pathetic machinations. I am fulfilled in my childish fantasies. If only I did not resort to desperate acts: when have I not behaved like a wounded monkey?

The last two days have been nothing but productive: music, music, and editing. Singers, singers. Paid to read a book that reminds me that all attachment is suffering. Reading through the Mozart two-piano sonata with my dear teacher who like a younger puppy has extended my musical life by several more dogdecades.

* * *

Whom do I love if I've lost my need for civilians?

I want to press to nothingness between my thumbnails certain of those I don't understand. How simple it would be to love a chest of hair and a pair of glasses! Your curse, I suppose, was to love blue irises. Mine: the imaginary. (Win me over with persistence!) Each time I judge you for whorishness, remember my own egocentric sublimation.

(Better yet: Stare at me as we ride the bus from Tuesday, 2009, to Thursday, 2048. If we happen to bump into each other on a sudden uphill brake sometime in there, so much the better. But do not speak.)

* * *

When I grow up I shall be a High Priestess of the Useless. I shall naturally preach against humano-masculine gods. (A god with a human-colored penis? Get real.) I will encourage a number of my followers to abort. Others I will allow to explore the phenomenon of complexity: they will pile upon them talents and genetic manipulations and body mutilations. They will explore arts and smarts and farts and highs, ideas, and eye candy. Through an intensive program of bestiality they will lower all other animals to the level of Man until nothing can be distinguished from its sister. And all will be virtuosi on the mozartophone.

* * *

Perhaps you have met my brother Uzophenie? Nights, when I have run out of momo juice, I'll snort a flavor packet.

* * *

Dying, dying! Wagner is combining with a girl and a boy -- a stranger girl -- a pixie, dryad, or naiad -- or perhaps Rose Nylund herself -- from some better dimension -- and an old friend -- an incredible smile, perhaps a hawk, who once told me about Crew, who flirted and was fey -- . . .

Had I written my fate then, what would I have achieved? Two beautifully brown beds? Two additional beige beds? Only in fiction can I experiment with original love. Seven years gone at least are the thoughtless hormones even if it was only September 2007 that the "forgotten joy impossibly return[ed]" and April 2009 when I "bored into some dark corners and came out brighter."

I simply must meet and keep him in fantasy.

Pursuit

2009-10-30T08:39:00.001-07:00

But seriously, folks. Here are some of the divisions:

Those whom I cannot satisfy. They have developed interests in specific things. Fetishes. Thus I am invisible.

Those who look like they speak English but actually know Russian as well. They have larger thighs than might have been expected. And some of them are blond.

Also, we see people with charcoal pants and brown shoes. Is this allowed? They have strange creases along their cheeks.

I'm engaged . . . in the pursuit . . . of romance. Sure, there are the old ones, and the unrequited ones, but it's time to find the new ones. I asked one of them to love me, but he said no. Others say yes. Sometimes.

The difference is that this time I'm a grandfather, and I'm looking for great-grandfathers. And there are many. So many of us are unlovable.

It makes sense: we have "abjured" the impulse. (Though few of the others are Southern intellectuals.) We long for something beyond impulse. Why does Susan love Tim? (In truth, we doubt love.)

Sure, he thinks love is a hot dog in his bun. He is confused. He was not loved by his father or mother; he needs to know why he is here. Oh, if only it were to please me! (Though my demands would be so minimal.)

Look at him. He says nothing. He thinks other things are important.

And this is why I love him: an indomitable sweetness; a subservience; a joie de vivre that is egocentric without ego. For does he care about himself? Yea, though he look in the valley of mirrors, he wants only love. He tends his eyebrows so that his mother will love him. Or anyone. And so little does he overthink that he lets play his mock fetishes: one day he will know that he only wants to be cherished. And cherished he is.

That purity is one of the thousands I love: for I also love the artistic ego: which has but little place for my own halting attempts. Like Oates I love also the inarticulate brute. And the older academic. The simple Englishman. The alien with no pupils. The mutant with one shelflike breast. The child unsure of its voice. The carnivorous feline. The mustached Arab. The effervescent liquid (pervading, invading, making me buoyant).

You are a wimp. A wimp and a coward. How I've loved you!

Chaplin

2009-10-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

Darlings, I'd like to wax incoherent if I may. My visit to 1993, which I continued working on last week but didn't post, will appear below my current ramblings.

Tonight I went to a concert. An assortment of singers. I wanted just one transcendental moment. It wasn't a requirement, actually, just something I wanted. And there were many beautiful things . . . And then appeared . . . a magical pianist:

Here are words and phrases to describe him: Orchestral, virtuosic, subtle, accurate. A soloist's ego and strengths, but not a distraction. Rather, a vif and liveliness and joy . . . A supple backbone for its voices, and at the same time an arty moment of itself if any singer should be lacking. Consider, for example, those well-placed Straussian chords, which could have turned any singer into beauty.

Oh how I wish I could speak on the level of the gutter. For there are in this world . . . certain Hipsters . . . He crouches beside the green trash can . . . and raises his atl-atl above his head. For there is a black-tied, skinny panted Goth! Or is it -- oh my lord -- a Jonas Brother?

Nothing lost in honesty. So I liked the hipster. Sue me.

But I have not even gotten to the transcendental moment. You know how a person can achieve magic with words? You know how some people's German falls flat, and others create crystalline sculptures in neighboring universes? So it began tonight with "Mein Sinnen," and from those few words I was on artdrugs, and I worried that the hair on my neck might have stood so high as to block the view of those behind me.

How I long for those moments! As I scribbled on the program, this is "what I live for!"

Earlier this week I accompanied a powerful goddess -- but I can't talk about it because it's unprofessional. But if only I could! If only I could tell you about that feeling of mutual uber-awareness, a certain feeling of inevitability that was actually realized. (And which, as so often, may lead ultimately nowhere: for what are we but accidents in an accidental nanosecond?) Must always remember the magic. Must forget certain simplicities and idiocies: "That was really great. I enjoyed it." What justice in those words?

I said something similar tonight. But I was flirting. It was on a human level. "Great job," I said. But what I meant was "Love me." Love me, Charlie Chaplin. Let me be the one you come to after the world-changing screening of your latest work.

[What a world . . . What a world it would be if I were the Charlie Chaplin . . . if I were the artist who was loved.]

Perhaps Chaplin was my first love. [Coinciding with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf in the last of the Vier letzte Lieder.] It's a night of very little food -- worked, then ran into my Musiklehrer and listened to Henry Cowell, then worked on my memorization of Debussy Book II four through six, then the concert -- and a little bit of beer. Never been into pot, which would probably heighten the music even more . . .

Now I'm useless and at the mercy of whatever song my American device spits out at me. Now it's something from this century: The National's "Start a War." Which reminds me of a certain blond whose readership I can no longer hope for. But slightly tipsy, and looking at various vomit stains, I might become sentimental. What I loved most about him was his pain and outsiderhood. At the same time I hated him for having found his truelove. Anyone so fortunate must be detested . . . as tonight I saw the gayboys hand in hand on Van Ness . . . and remembered it was not so long ago I was able to text my friend that I was PDAing on Market Street.

Not so long? Three years.

. . . In twenty years I may become quite a good pianist. If I live that long.

Speaking of twenty years, we now bring you the following musing on events seventeen years in the past:

* * *

But even as I was obsessed with B. (and it really is a shame so many pages were wasted in devotion to him and certain others with whom I should have realized it was fruitless), I was contemplating my sexuality deeply and considering a new way of life:

3 December 1992 It occurred to me only moments ago that the occupation of my mind [apparently one of my phrasings for depression] may be a product of my frustration at being slightly hidden. It is true that I was only in this awful frustrated state since Monday. On that day I was presented with the question of whether or not to read my gay-themes short story to my English class. I wanted to, but I could not. But I felt regret at keeping the story to myself.

I decided then that if anyone came up to me and asked to read my story, I would allow him. I have not yet had to implement that.

I cannot rationalize staying hidden.

Though I did. At this point some teachers and best friends knew, but not even my parents. Their time was coming, however. The following entry is interesting for its juxtaposition of music and sexuality -- the piano and men, my two great loves. In the first two paragraphs I talk with great excitement about having won a piano concerto competition and what it might mean for my future. But then I move on:

4 February 1993 . . . Yesterday I went to see Straight from the Heart, an AIDS benefit that M. is performing in. It was quite moving. Since the performance, I doubt my existence; rather, I doubt how I allow myself to exist. I am closed and hiding. I allow people to like me without revealing myself and consequently their prejudice.

I've considered many times being completely open. In truth it must be a fear of personal injury that discourages me. I would not mind losing false friends; I mind only persons making happiness difficult.

How wonderful it would be to wear one of those black shirts with the pink triangle and the "Silence = Death" message. How wonderful not to hide anything. How nice, too, to show the world that stereotypes are only stereotypes.

A couple days later I went back to the show and then to a gayish store where I bought a button. I thought more about coming out:

6 February 1993 I bought a button with a pink triangle on it. It is now resting at the top of this page, and I am filled with only the best when I look up at it.

I grow more and more tired of hiding myself. After high school I expect that I'll be completely open, and my only distress there is my parents. They need to know eventually from me, that they don't catch a rumor and be troubled. I don't want to trouble them at all. I'd rather not tell them, but I cannot hide from them for the rest of their lives.

I do not think they would accept the fact well. They would question how I could choose to be that way. They would convince themselves that I'm all right [I'm not sure what this means] and would monitor my life much more. They would cry at night. They would consider me doubly damned [firstly for having become unreligious]. They might struggle for the rest of their lives.

And that's not a pleasant thought. Nevertheless, as with my religious views, only even more so, I cannot change. I may as well present myself truthfully and hope for the best.

When do I tell them? Logic suggests years from now when I am free from their jurisdiction, but how much more does it hurt them to discover that I've kept it from them for years?

I showed a little of my future vehemence on the issue and a possibly naive idealism later as I was contemplating the small community of gay teachers at my high school:

8 February 1993 . . . I am bothered to no end by the deceit there. All three men are among the most respected of McIntosh High School teachers, and all make sure that no one knows their truth. They'd lose their jobs, you say? So what! What kind of job is one that would not admit an excellently qualified person because of aspects of his social life? Think of the good that would come. People would see that real respectable people are gay. One person, at the extreme least, would rethink his backward position. [This sounds like the Christian idea of the littlest lamb, and I like it.] But no! Let us hide ourselves, and lie and lie and lie! Let us not even reveal ourselves to a student who we know is gay! Let us worry too much that our perfect little fake world will crumble! [Yikes. Harsh, much?]

I am excited to know that so many exist even at McIntosh, but I am displeased that people still feel they must hide. But me? I hide still, usually. I do fear physical discomfort [known in less oblique circles as "being beaten up"]. I do not wish the idiots and too-Christians to harm my only body. ["My only body"? Where does PG-16 get this stuff? More important, what held him back from "my onliest body"?] I expect that after high school I will be completely open.

I could be now. I'm not too far. This morning at the academic meeting A. said, "PG, I have a large Alternative Lifestyle section in the back of my car," referring to the many books I had loaned to her. We then commenced to speak of some of the gay-themed Forster short stories she had read. I did not fear being overheard.

Perhaps I should take a damning attitude and just do it. Perhaps I should stop hiding and simply be, even if it means I be beat up and my bones broken. Even if it means I be killed. [I think I'm experimenting unsuccessfully with the English subjunctive here.] How many people would be moved, then, to rethink? What matters anything if I lack honesty? The opposite of beauty, I think, is deceit. [This is true if one believes that enlightenment is to know oneself or even to know one's complete nothingness -- a philosophy I've been moving away from, even as I have nowhere else to go.]

My musings were interrupted by a phone call from the beautiful Apollo that the fates sewed into my adolescence without weaving love or even lust.

B. called.

2009-09-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

I've pulled out the old journals to research the beginning of a friendship from some seventeen years ago, and I'm finding all kinds of interesting stuff. I'll share a bit here, and it's very possible that this sort of musing will dominate the coming posts at the expense -- alas -- of my undisciplined, incoherent, and drunk or drunk-like ramblings.

Here is the beginning of the friendship. Please note what an aggressive sixteen-year-old gayboy I was:

24 October 1992 Yesterday I went with friend S. to Oxford Books in Atlanta, intending to get Douglas Adams's signature (but hundreds others had the same intentions, so I changed mine). . . . I purchased a book categorizing piano music, a book containing Chopin's letters, a Schönberg CD, and a Stephen Paulus CD (with my love Håkan Hagegård). I purchased these from an interesting fellow named X., who interested me so much that I asked for his address (and was obliged). I also learned of a recital he is giving Halloween night -- he is a singer -- which I plan to attend. I shall write this X., and I hope we prove of interest to each other.

Around this same time I complain several times about the same piano teacher I've frequently maligned here:

22 October 1992 Two weeks ago she moved me to several tears and feelings of dislike through her monstrous disapproval of my wanting to accompany someone [Andrea, perhaps?] and my wanting to take violin lessons. Now she says, "What? He gives piano lessons? He doesn't have enough time to practice as it is!"

Shut up, Mrs. X. Take your coldness elsewhere. Let me have a teacher who listens to what I say and doesn't act oppressed to hear my voice. Let me have a teacher who attends me and doesn't stop midsentence to cater to a man of high import.

I'd forgotten quite how small she could make me feel. PG-16 described it well. And a few days later he took a break from describing his latest infatuation to complain again:

29 October 1992 I am not pleased. I honor Mrs. X. X. as the primary cause of my melancholy. Like she tends to do each time I speak to her or see her, she darkened my mood today at my piano lesson. She is bothersome. She is monstrous. [PG-16 does not win awards for this paragraph.]

"Mrs. B [my previous, warmhearted piano teacher] tells me you have, what, some thousand-odd students?" Asked with indescribable -- as I think now about it, I cry -- painful inflections.

"Sixteen or seventeen or so," I say, with the minimal force that apathy employs.

"How do you do it?" the damn demon asks. "Do you only go to school part-time?"

You make me laugh, you monster. Say it again. Tell me to give up piano if I wish to pursue violin. Tell me to do nothing but your stupid bidding.

Why does she affect me like this? I am crying now. Am I afraid of her? Does she make me doubt myself? Is she one of those two demons who scolded me for destroying the house of cards? [This was a terrifying recurring dream of mine: two parental figures watching over as I built a house of cards, and try as I might not to bump it, it always fell. They scolded me in whispers louder than any human anger.]

What can I do? I don't like her; I despise her. Will this pass? Does X. X. [a gentleman piano teacher I'd recently met] become my refuge? [And now watch the terrible direction my thoughts take -- or was Mrs. X. simply the scapegoat for these underlying feelings?]

Damn the piano! What is it to devote one's life to the training of stupid fingers, that they may make dull, unnatural songs? What is it to put such training above anything else?

But enough about the piano. Let's take a quick look at PG-16 in love. Hold on tight -- it's gonna be a bumpy ride! (And this time I'll use real first initials; otherwise we'll all get lost.)

9 November 1992 My love tosses and turns and settles anew. This time my attention rests on K. It occurred to me last Friday that I would do anything K. asked of me.

24 November 1992 For a day I lacked infatuation, but it is back now. B., love me! Love me, B., be charmed by me!

27 November 1992 B! B., B., B.! I know that you can't love me . . . but I am charmed still. I will continue, and how great will my delight be when you lift your head and greet me!

1 December 1992 . . . I am tired of loving all these damn stones. "Can't you kiss me?" asks Maurice.

Would that A. were here, that I could embrace myself in him. I would be comforted, at least, by his touch, whether we love or not. To think that I once lay in bed with him, innocently entwined, affectionate, if adolescent. To think that I lay in bed half-asleep, still with the sensation of A.'s lips on mine!

Would that I were loved! Come B., come J., come K. -- oh, blessed K.! [J. was a leftover from October's infatuations, at which time he was "an angel of a person -- a divine creature transcending natural laws."]

In the hormonal turmoil there were moments of true life. I retain a name here in honor of someone I have loved:

16 December 1992 In English, that pool of genius, I loved all. We watched a movie, and I lay down on the floor. I looked back and saw Silinda's feet and said, "If only your feet were pillows!" I turned back around and lay down -- suddenly below my head was a blanket. I cried.

In the next period Silinda picked up a piece of green pipe cleaner and fashioned it into a ring. I asked if I could have it, and she assented but then said, "Wait, hand me that string," pointing to the most gloriously purple piece of yarn that graced the gray floor. I gave it to her, and she wrapped it around the pipe cleaner. "Here," she said, and she gave it to me. I tried it on my finger as a ring and cried. I cry now as I think of it, as I did all today. I don't know that I've ever been as touched by a gift. It's so beautiful.

But mostly I was ridiculous. Between that last paragraph and this I've been painfully reading along in my journal about my love for three different people, and I was surprised to see how aggressively I pursued "friendship" with them. I wrote to the end of a notebook, and a new one began. I'm no Ricky Gervais, but I had to laugh aloud at the first paragraph:

19 January 1993 Last you heard I was in the misery of stagnation. My precious Prospectives -- B., K., and A. -- all refused to return my interest.

But that has changed.

Today, at three in the afternoon, my life changed. The pathetic world I had resolved to live in for a time -- that world where no one was interested in me and no one was even capable of pursuing me -- crumbled:

B. called.

Pizza

2009-09-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

It's raining fog in the Outer Richmond. The mists condense on the electric wires and then fall in great big, cold drops. My shoes sound like high heels on the asphalt -- my new brown shoes, which broke both feet on their first day two weeks ago. For the shoes' second outing, I prepared my toes with band-aids. All painful shoes eventually adapt.

It has been a long day (at risk of being pedestrian). Playing for the chorus at eight, copyediting (and eating) until three, then the glorious bus ride on the number 28 through eucalyptus and the parking lot of the Golden Gate Bridge (to pick up exotically dressed European tourists) to Cow Hollow (with its frightening SoCal ladies and Southern-style middle-aged fratboys) for a glorious run of Strauss with a new friend, then to SoMa for two hours of playing for auditions.

. . . I am tempted to stop . . . I'm less comfortable talking about things in this realm.

But I am watching/listening to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Inspired, naturally, by the recent conversation with ma cousine. Reminded of a garage.

James, do you remember singing "a demain" around that house that cost us a mere $1,150? What strange imposters of ourselves were we? I was still a sad thing . . . But how fondly! The gas station across the way. Cigarette after cigarette, each one a precious thing. A little raised wooden porch with god knows what underneath. What creature was ever more lost than we? Despite the four walls and roof, we were frontiersmen.

I want it back! I want back even those moments lying in my army cot and reading C.S. Lewis by the battery-powered book light my mother put in my stocking for my farewell Christmas. Vacuuming the floor of a video store . . . Relying on a community of strangers for my sanity. Romance, yes, but merely the knowing of so many names . . . I have lost a lot by losing those names.

I want to bend "that oceanic brow, / That forehead of never-ending waves" to my will -- to make him love the recording of me that I played, despite the furry carpet and the pisscouch and my depression and . . . loss of power . . . and his life-disappointment. Birds! Birds! Fuck all, birds!

And I want to stay in the garage forever, despite the beaded necklace, the youth, the flippancy. Les Garages de Cherbourg -- and I bet Guy has little memory -- just another evening in the garage. Freakishly French, maybe, but still forgettable.

Half-and-half drunk overnight, and Mexican food secretly eaten. Teetering on the edge of unconsciousness in the laundry aisle at Target. And once, the greatest extravagance: pizza from Round Table. Like the first earth food after a seven-year voyage to Mars.

Last night, anyway, I dreamt of the same dangerous coast. This time the ocean around Hawaii was turning to gel, surely a sign of apocalypse. My friend decided to streak through the resort. I was embarrassed until I remembered his autonomy; then I relished his fetish, though I was depressed to remember how little I was willing to satisfy him -- to satisfy . . . anyone?

I see you and press Pause: I pull out my microscope to see how the hair of your sideburns curls. The arrangement of moles on your cheek may spell an ancient word; let me consult the decaying tomes. My manipulation of time allows me certain liberties, and I press my index finger against your earlobe. I smooth an eyebrow. I paint the three hairs along your Adam's apple in oil. I fill my viewfinder with your profile and snap snap snap snap snap snap take six photographs.

Pregnant

2009-09-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

It's a natural high, baby. As Mr. Vass says, "I haven't gone to the office in . . . gosh . . . It's been . . . a week at least!" I sit here drinking ice-cold water -- a plastic bottle has been on its side in the freezer, a dozen spits freezing along the bottom. Topped off with tap. Sure, I'll probably have to pee about the time I start dreaming about the house with many rooms, many of them moist. And again when I dream of the incoming tide.

With him, it's always about water. It's the double escape: amniotic and galactic. If he can't go back to the womb, then send him floating eternally to the outer reaches. (Eventually they must stop.) Is there a localized and archaic foolishness in our concept of the infinite? Is infinity actually a desperate grab from the ego? How much humbler to exist in a drop of water. (But what beyond?)

They have been telling me that the answer is within. Still, I'm doubting the spirit. I cannot differentiate from the goldfish. And I cannot see a search for meaning in the goldfish.

What do the alien races worship? Don't you see? Does it not seem local? And yet I'd like to believe that many, many have truly been in touch with the spirit.

. . . Every thought laid down by a string of couplings, by wars and foods, by medicine and departments of education. No freer than in any of the billion seconds of my past. (1,040,688,000, roughly.)

O childlike race! This much is true: as old and stale as we seem, we are but five-year-olds, still innocent and wildly imaginative: gravity, psychiatry, atomics, pornography. "What a clever little people they all were! It almost even made sense!" Chortle, chortle.

* * *

Once again: Catherine Deneuve in a garage. Will he remember that gift I gave him? Who else? Who else gets Umbrellas of Cherbourg projected onto the wall of a garage-cum-playroom? Little else matters: certainly not hairy arms and pookah shells. (Oh my god, Pollux! As I was looking up "pookah" in my Webster's 11th, my eye fell upon poofter: "(1903) Brit., usu. disparaging : POOF," which is in turn "a male homosexual." Is there an equally cutesy British term for lesbians? If not, I might suggest "madge.")

But perhaps I've made the pookah up. I cannot see jewelry. (Has jewelry fallen on me? Has, possibly, a cross? Would I allow that?)

* * *

Every night they do something strange to me. Last night they put a crease running from the corner of my eye down to my calf. Two nights ago it was smile dimples. Great big dents. Not symmetrical because I'm a little happier on one side than the other. (Right brain, left side, according to the mystics.) Who knows? Tonight they may take away the central part of my hair.

My first son will be called Grey, and my second Dobbin (though lord knows how he'll recover from that). My daughters: Lavender and Rosemary. And we'll have to do something about that pesky last name. Nothing goes with McCurdy. It's hardly even pronounceable.

Dreaming. Moonchild. From-th'-sea. Weightless.

Grey Dreaming.
Dobbin Moonchild.
Lavender From-th'-sea.
Rosemary Weightless.

Scudder

2009-08-24T23:26:00.000-07:00

I must use my imagination:

Although I realized something tragic today, and it struck me instantly and clearly: True love doesn't exist. I was riding on the bus with strangers. Couples abounded. I thought up phrases of my own mating ritual: "He makes eye contact with you. His face twitches almost imperceptibly." I imagined the humans around me in rut. Biology. All the accidents of existence. What mechanism could there be for duality? The mild biological mechanism for straights has been explored. ("Straights" is a word that might brand me a narrow-minded racist to future generations.) Duality is by no means the rule. And the mechanism for gays is perhaps even freer.

I can't talk about biology -- that's ridiculous. The understanding of experts is already archaic by centuries, so what could I comprehend?

But I might speak on theology and superstition -- but perhaps I've just done so.

Have you noticed how human knowledge grows obsolete or is disproved but human art does not? Have you noticed how the physics of a hundred years ago is metaphysics but a carved stone of ten thousand years ago is still high art?

Don't put me to sleep yet. It's only here that I begin to understand, as little as it may seem.

There is nothing and no meaning, and yet I have learned to love:

booze, yes, and all those things that put us in charge of our own destruction
but also: these little bits of art that are nothingnesses -- tiny tiny desperate attempts at meaning by one tiny bacterium in a dank corner of the universe

For example: a man in drag in the Dance of the Sugerplum Fairies. For example, the costume of a prince -- be he nutcracker, French actor, or redhead.

Dear Mr. McCurdy [?!?],

We regret to inform you that you are thirty-three years old, and parts of the body that you took for granted will now betray you. You may not notice some of the changes, but be assured that they are happening.

Perhaps if I check my mail, there will be an answer . . . Well, the truelove of my firstlove wants to be Facebook friends. Is this somehow an answer? Let me contemplate.

Although it may not be accurate to call him my firstlove. My firstreallove, certainly. Before him were A., the twelve-foot-tall hot-marble statue whose slightest touch halted thought, and C., who promised to be so much more but may have been one of the first truly independent humans I knew (independent? he simply didn't care about me). And of course the classmates to whom I sent anonymous love letters, and Adolfo the waiter, and Edward Scissorhands, a couple different Romeos, and of course Alec Scudder. (How many years has it been since I've visited the boathouse? And how many times did I visit the boathouse between 1990 and 1994? How many times did Clive collapse? How many times was Maurice hypnotized? How many times did . . . Alec . . . say . . . Now we shan't never be parted . . . ?)

Fuck. I was Maurice many times in those days. There were incredible excitements: Do you know -- I abandoned the piano for Alec Scudder. Imagine: a larval meat is supposed to make decisions about societal pigeonholes at the precise moment its body feels nothing but heat. I could see Walter Bally outside the window even as I trained my fingers to the Pastorale. I brought my fingers down with such force that they broke, but when I went outside, Walter wasn't there. Just bees. Bees flitting about the regularly spaced purple flowers. And three skinny pines that would eventually be cut down. A mailbox full of secrets and spiders, the occasional magic trick, and a touch of the gom jabbar.

Oh terror and delight! Is there nothing to stop it? What a desperate attempt! What "irrepressible" (as I read earlier) incoherence!

And now I am in that cul-de-sac. Playing Ivory Tower with someone I may not mention because he lives in these very Internets, and I've already told all his secrets, though he guarded them lo these thirty-three years. And everything I feel toward him is an accident: erased in an instant, existing in a temporary mote. Poor creatures. How I spiraled down out of that tower. What image was there for adults? What? A nine-year-old boy running in circles in the street . . . Sweat pants? Buck teeth? A nudibranch exercising its thinking muscle. Do you remember? I came back from one with red eyes. You said, "What happened to your eye?" I said a branch struck me. And it was almost true. I could imagine it. But we had had a fight. Over what? It was probably the beginning of the end: puberty. We would go our own ways. The complete difference in our programming already visible at twelve.

Perhaps email has the answer now: It says nothing, which may mean I have not done justice to the firstreallove, which has now finally found truelove. So I will say: I was a lucky 17/18-year-old. (Wait a second -- I realize what's missing here: Thank you, T.!) Which brings me to the postscript, already written:

P.S. To D.: Thanks for reading, as always, and enjoy your new computer! To T.: You are correct. Ah, to go there with you! To PS: A stranger who reads me! Fantastic! If you're a boy, we should get married! If you're a girl -- well, maybe we can pretend.

Throughout this posting -- which is likely riddled with errors that I'll probably get around to correcting a few days from now -- I've been watching/listening to those most beautiful moments in Act II of Mark Morris's Hard Nut right before the pas de deux, when the Prince and Clara fly above the rest of the company. Again and again. I started with the Nutcracker's transformation, that beautiful gay moment with incredible music.

What function? What function does this serve? In a godless, pointless world, what is art? Certainly one seeks purpose. "There is in every artist's nature a wanton and treacherous tendency to side with beauty." But beauty here is essentially reason and purpose. But why sit in Bacchal abandon listening to these strange Western sounds, anticipating again and again those piccolo scales?

Only, come! "I heard you calling for me."

Svelte

2009-08-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

Eatin' plantain chips. Deliciously salty but only three percent of the recommended daily value per serving (and only four servings in the bag!).

Something is better than nothing. Always. And D. wants me to post a blog.

There is a Cuban restaurant in Athens, Georgia, and this is my memory of it: A strange skinny building serving steaming pork and the most delicious fried plantains. You get there by driving out into the country (everything is flat) but the restaurant is an oasis. For some reason a veritable stream has sprouted and flows through it: eight feet below the level of land, as if this water has slowly etched its way down. The food is eaten with friends (a different D.) at umbrellaed picnic tables. (Ah, friends. Those were friends.)

It's a place of my dreams: a place that is too fine to exist. Like the gardens of Athens that are arranged like discrete rooms in a fine woody estate. Green doorways. No furniture, but green rugs and green tapestries.

I recently discovered a second place of my dreams. Do you remember walking down that long, straight, tree-lined path to the area of marble statues? I discovered that they are not marble statues, but granite boulders at the base of Yosemite Falls. (If I had visited in spring, when the falls were in full force, I might not have recognized the place of my dreams.)

In the background: the 1994 Legend of Drunken Master. For some reason, I'm unable to love it as much as the last several Jackie Chan movies I've watched. "Here lies Paul Gaylord McCurdy. He loved martial arts films and wished the West had moved a little less toward court dances and a little more toward kung fu."

Last night, I suppose it must be said, I saw G.I. Joe with an incredible human whom I'd love to know better. Sometimes, though, a conversation mandelbrots simply because of a person's dynamic conversational skill, and not because of a special kinship. But it remains an expanding universe of a conversation to those of us less skilled (and naturally we want more).

And here is a love that does not exist: Please envision the cellist with dark curls. Or ginger curls. Or bald. Or with a blond wisp detached from the mainland. Play the piano now: let's make it Mozart. Look in those brown/blue/green eyes. The looking is unnecessary because it's all in the ears -- except that those with vision are so reliant on it that they take it to mean everything. Why does he look at you like that? "No one should be smiled at like that."

Which reminds me: You told me your lashes were nothing -- "something just about the eyes" -- and I believed you for a time. I busied myself about other things: a book of mysteries and a series of moving images about a slow marriage, symbolic songs and sugared foods and long voyages with solitary others. How many, and how long, I do not know: but each horizon was green on blue like something else I well knew.

Thirty-three, remember. Recognizing . . . that . . . living is the standard. Cosmos . . . Accident. Joy no more the baseline than sorrow. Such a strange little diversion. I was not accurately trained to function. Genetically accidental. Why produce? Does the universe really care about production?

"Monkey drinks master's wine."

That is the great mystery. Suddenly I've got 'ligion. The world expands and vomits? Surely that's all this is. Does dynamite vomit? Do the little spewlae of dynamite's vomit insist on living? Wake up, Paul-creature. You've almost got it. Everything that is is only what we see . . . It has an order of our own limitation. Why does that fucking hummingbird keep showing up at my droopy red flowers? How important is this ecosystem, really? What impact does it have on the larger explosion?

Little twirling humans. Is a svelte, more advanced race really possible? Wouldn't advanced knowledge lead to advanced hopelessness? What reason could they possibly have?

Sacrifice

2009-06-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

No time to taste the sacrifice and stumble in the reeling dance tonight. But how I'd love to roast meat over the beach's bonfires or simply drink in the seaside woodsmoke.

I've dreamt enough the past few nights: that powerful but useless love from long ago . . . It was in strangeness that we met again, but it seemed natural to be affectionate; that had always been so easy. Oh -- house on legs in Florida! The second time Florida was ever beautiful. I read my first Patricia Highsmith book then and smoked Dunhills on the porch. One was frequently intimate in those days, and as Dorothy says, We named it. At any rate, we looked it square in the eye. But our relationship was already dead: there was awkwardness in the car. We had broken up many times. On the way home he took delight in a recording of A Handmaid's Tale but fell asleep. (Ah, the skin's constellations! Changing now, I suppose, like my own.)

And then another love, more recent, and I was a traveler: At first I was in a foreign land on a corner much like that of Sixteenth and Potrero, across from Safeway, and there was a beautiful blond-haired young man hawking T-shirts in a profound-sounding Dutch. I frantically tried to text my American friends that "Tadziu is selling T-shirts!" but dream logic wouldn't let me. (I was also afraid about international charges.)

And then I was at the airport in Amsterdam (as I once was in real life), insisting that C. was wrong when he said that the airport was right downtown and I should have strolled out and lived it up a bit instead of spending the night sleeping in a plastic chair. Even so I had left the airport, traveled down a short road lined with worn volcanic rock (borrowed from my trip to Maui), and ended up at a mall where, according to Google maps on my iPhone, there was a gay bar. It was about seven levels up and reachable only by Donkey-Kong-style moves. I saw J. (whom I just ran into tonight with his beautiful boyfriend, the fuckers! though I must be happy for J. and extremely happy for the lucky guy who's snagged him) and M., who naturally were living it up, and we did our hugs and things and I explained I was about to go in. Finally made it to level seven and saw the bouncer judging the gays trying to get in . . . Decided it wasn't worth it. (No doubt the beautiful Belgian Sylvain Daelemans and his suspiciously divine friends would be allowed, if they weren't in fact running the bar and my dreams in the first place.)

But then I suppose it was time for my flight, and I was in Turkey visiting C. It was not clear why he was there, though he was teaching a bit. He lived with a Turkish family, the son of whom had a curious patch of hair on the bridge of his nose. Istanbul was splendid -- bridges and underpasses of marble, grape vines growing on distant hills. We were not intimate; he loved another. His mother cried and confided to me:

"I don't know what to do!"

Was there something wrong with the new love? (Did she want me?)

"When they are together . . . it consumes them!"

* * *

But let us come back to Earth. When I'm dead I will say to my compatriots, "Every night I watched an episode of this television show called 'Golden Girls.'"

9:30 pm it is

2009-06-08T22:21:00.001-07:00

9:30 pm. I should probably continue copyediting or learning music for next week, but it's been a long day and it's time to . . .

wrap myself in the blanket of my childhood and walk down to the beach and . . .

dig with my fingers until there is only sand to breathe
lie down in the surf and let the cold creep up and take me away
offer myself as a sacrifice and burn on one of the beach's many bonfires

Remember: The ocean told me to burn the evidences of tristesse. I have burned them time and time again, but only recently have the ashes remained scattered. In the absence of evidence there can be no tristesse. Indeed, the ocean may even think me happy. And in many ways it may be correct: the lungs and liver it sees are much improved, and the casing has gone from sea lion to seal.

But there is a real danger: I feel unhinged from the lives around me. If I am living as if I've been given six months to live, then I may have only six months to live. The happy perceivers are living for the moment, but the unhappy perceivers are expecting the end.

Ah, well. This is what backyards are for. This is why we are covered in hair and growl at the raccoons. This is why we eat dirt and rub grass on our faces.

Ginger pianos

2009-06-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

We now bring you an excerpt from an unfinished post:

Ironically, perhaps, I'm more conscious of the dangers of blogging now that I am actually free from a regular job full of evil supervisors and high-profile governmental clients. . . . Where I used to write freely about the musical creatures that either inspire (Isabel Leonard in Don Giovanni at Chicago Opera Theatre) or terrify (Jane Eaglen, Jill Grove) me, I now have to be careful because I'm trying to move deeper into the musical world -- and, in truth, I'm beginning to understand how difficult an opera singer's life is. So I can't even talk about the various local/regional singers I love, because it means I don't love the ones I don't mention. Nor do I want people I work with regularly to fear that I might write about them (not that my readership surpasses six people on a good day).

But today, in vague terms, I sightread the first movement of the Saint-Saens' bassoon sonata, then rehearsed the . . . [Transmission seems to end here.]

I tried out my set of three Chopin etudes (Op 10 No 8, Op 10 No 6, and Op 25 No 11 "Winter Wind") in a little recital today. They went well. Sure, I might wish my performances might be as confident and smooth as a concert pianist's or a piano-performance major's at least, but perhaps that's hoping for too much right now. I must remember that I could barely imagine memorizing a piece of music a year and a half ago. So, 10-8 had a significant memory burple that I'll have to look into tomorrow; I was so shocked to have jumped off the track at some point that never caused me a problem before that I skipped back a good ways to have another go. 10-6 felt quite good -- just a few moments of panic that I barreled through, which is fine given how chromatic the accompaniment pattern is and the fact that it's in e-flat minor. And since I didn't melt into a quivering blob, 25-11 must have gone pretty smoothly. I have no idea what it sounds like on the outside, but a few of my teacher's students thought it was strong. I can live with that.

But I mean, how boring can you be?

It's true though, what that previous Paul wrote. But I'm blog-shy also because certain parts of my future matter more than they used to. It's easy to say I don't give a fuck if some manager at NCLBCo finds my blog and thinks its inappropriate for me to blog about trying on my outfits for a business trip. But I do possibly give a fuck if a great singer is frightened away. I shouldn't -- because no singer or instrumentalist can be too great without an appropriate sense of compassion and forgiveness.

That said, let's talk about gingers. There was a ginger by the grace of goddess at Ocean Beach yesterday: a divine redhead in mustard-yellow pants, accompanied by a redhead of indiscriminate gender. Imagine! Double redheads! One androgynous! And today there was a redhead on the bus in front of me. He made me think of Isabelle Huppert, whose freckles are vast as the cosmos itself. His hair unique: "fine strawberries mixed with oranges (albeit slightly balding)," as I texted my sister dragonfish earlier.

I'm lonely, just so you know. I'm 33 years old. Mating . . . The happy couples I know have been lucky. Think about your favorite couples: they are compromising but also not compromising. You know why they are together. You could love either one of them. I have not found that. (One begins to think, with a roster of exes like mine, that perhaps I've made a mistake, overlooked a true love with one or another -- lord knows I've redated most of them -- but then one realizes: No, he is not right.)

Or is he? Or is he? Out of the parentheses, new paragraph. It's only one small part of the package that makes one or the other wrong . . . Perhaps conversation is right with one and romance impossible, or romance with one and conversation impossible.

But I can't reignite a passion of the heart. (How did the heart get associated with love? And in what alternate universe of geometric organs was the heart symbol born?) Someone is hiding out there. Someone new. My dear friend Morrissey says:

My love, wherever you are --

whatever you are --

don't lose faith.

I know it's gonna happen

someday to you.

Please wait. Please wait.

Don't lose faith.

You say that the day

just never arrives,

and it's never seemed

so far away.

Still I know it's gonna happen

someday to you.

Please wait.

Don't lose faith.

Living

2009-04-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

My dears. Oh. This is what it's all about. I promised you drunken ramblings, but you get hungover reflections instead.

At 33 I am not so old that I cannot be moved like a teenager. Sure, in my old body: my eyes still can't focus, my throat is raw with whispering sweet somethings over a crowded bar, my stomach is churning with disorientation, and my limbs must think about each move. This is the gift of six rums and Coke in the space of an evening.

And how do I cope with this new day, aside from coffee and croissant? With my hoodie raised and my favorite moments from Strauss DVDs (currently "Diese Liebe, plötzlich geboren," Flamand's love for the countess Madeleine, as I translated here).

And, sadly, sober thoughts of the new day battle with the happy and fantastical memories. But "I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch" -- let me hold to that! Let me hold it today and tomorrow at least.

What I'm talking about is (of course) the stranger. And as I'm saying this I'm also cursing my future: for how many times can a person go out and be moved? How many strangers before they all achieve a pattern? When one can no longer trust one's fluttering emotions, one makes a more concrete, sexual, goal. I am not there yet.

I curse also the present, as J. warned: Do not write about them now. It is true: words are scary. I write to capture and to understand -- little wonder that the captured and defined find their ways of escape, leaving me only the words. If I did not trap, I might find myself surrounded.

Do you want me to get on with it? Do you want me to say what I have to say?

What -- some kind of narrative?

Bar. Great friends. Drink. Dinner. Great friend. Drink. Bar. Drink. A darkly handsome but not attractive old-looking late-30-something fetches us to amuse his daddy, who molests my friend more aggressively than he does me. We say we have to go. We move to an opposite corner of the bar. My friend alerted me to a stranger propping the wall. Something -- my drinks, my promise to be social, his face -- impelled me to move: "Are you here alone?" or some such.

Narrative destroys! And I have only a few more minutes before today's sun dries yesterday's tears of tomorrow's loss. Before today's loss becomes real -- yesterday, ah yesterday!

It is tenderness. It is ego as well, and infancy. Sure, it is a yearning for mommy-love and for the approving smiles of both parents.

We bored into some dark corners and came out brighter. True, my body reacted: lips and teeth and hair and eyes, the mommy-love and puppy-love. I became tentatively affectionate: testing (drunkenly, not always consciously), a hand on a back, fingers poking a belly.

The change -- can I find that point in my memory? I can't. Only that at some point fingers sought my own.

Blanche DuBois sings (and these are not beautiful words, but direct), "Real? Who wants real? I know I don't want it. I want magic! Magic, yes -- that's what I want. That's what I try to give to people . . . I do misrepresent things; I don't tell the truth. But I tell what ought to be the truth -- what it ought to be. Yes, magic's what I try to give to people. If that is such a sin, then let me be damned for it . . . Don't turn on that light. It all looks so ugly in that light. Why not see it by candlelight, or moonlight, or by starlight? They are bright enough to see by -- sometimes too bright."

Meanwhile: I can no longer avoid the new day. Those other parts of me -- there is music to learn, a rehearsal of four-piano music. A conservatory awaits.

Oh wonder and dread -- a phone call as well.

Musical reckoning

2009-04-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

And it's time for another reckoning.

On April 7 I celebrated my one-year anniversary with my new piano teacher. In that time, he and I have accomplished the following:

Bach Concerto for four keyboards (BWV 1065)

Beethoven
Sonata No. 7 in D major (Op. 10 No. 3)
Sonata No. 18 in A-flat major (Op. 31 No. 3)

Chopin
Etude in F major (Op. 10 No. 8)
Etude in a minor ("Winter Wind"; Op. 25 No. 11)

Feldman, Morton Piece for four pianos

Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major (K. 595)

Poulenc Three Novelettes

Rachmaninoff
Prelude in D major (Op. 23 No. 4)
Prelude in A-flat major (Op. 23 No. 8)
Prelude in g# minor (Op. 32 No. 12)

Ravel Sonatine

Stevens, Halsey Sonata for trumpet and piano

All in all, it's been a pretty good year. Certainly I wouldn't have guessed a year ago that I'd leave a job that was doing more harm than good and that I'd be living a life so much closer to that difficult ideal: What would you be doing if you had only a month to live?

Next time: semi-drunken ramblings.

Some updates

2009-03-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

1. Come to the San Francisco Conservatory (50 Oak Street at Van Ness and Market) at 5 pm this Saturday, March 28, to hear lots of great music by students in my piano teacher's studio. I'll be performing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 and pieces for four keyboards by Bach and Morton Feldman. The concert is on the lower level in the Osher Salon.

2. I was slowly, slowly inching up some tempos on Chopin this morning. I had just played a page successfully, so I notched up the metronome and took a swig of coffee. Suddenly, a great cough came upon me. I don't think my body had time to realize my mouth was full. Chopin was covered. Coffee of lesser velocity landed on my keyboard.

3. For the first time ever, I bought and ate my own avocado. What an amazing substance. They seem so magical when other people prepare them that I just couldn't imagine being responsible for bringing such deliciousness into the world by myself. But I did today. I picked out a dark squishy one, brought it home, cut it open, and spooned out that amazing butter. I scooped out the pit and licked it clean. Then I nested the two leathery halves of avocado peel and put the pit inside. I squeezed the pit through the peels a couple times. Then I went about the rest of my day.

Cecilia!

2009-02-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

Let me take a few moments to write about the days, lest I forget.

Yesterday I saw Cecilia Bartoli. I was trying to decide in talking to S. if she was in fact the one singer I most wanted to see. Given that Callas is dead and Joan is . . . retired, and I've already seen Kiri, Cecilia is The One. She did not disappoint. I was in the front row, in the farthest left seat, so the experience was quite personal. I had a perfect view of her profile (that beautiful face, that incredible hair, and ample bosoms -- it must be said) and of the back of her commedia dell'arte pianist.

Why is Cecilia the greatest singer in the world? Many reasons. She sang twenty of my least favorite songs -- those light Italian songs of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini with plain accompaniments and none of the drama of Mahler and Strauss. And I loved every one. And even if Cecilia is limited, and even if she does not possess the calm body and relaxed vocal technique I love to see (as Susan Graham once displayed at point-blank range in Nuits d'été), her music (and with it her expression and gestures) comes from some central part of her that understands song. Like my ideal singer, she seems to understand that the breath is all. She loves breath and invests her own with all the joy and sorrow of we who breathe.

Ay, she's fantastic.

In other news, I spent a full workday accompanying flutists today. I'm playing for twenty-four flutists in recital on Sunday. On Saturday I'm playing an opera rehearsal for which I'll need to know all of Cosi fan tutte. I've worked out many parts already, but it's a daunting task to learn three hours of music well enough to keep my eye on both the conductor's baton and the vocal lines to shout out the occasional forgotten Italian. Must wake up early tomorrow to work on flute music for rehearsals the next two days, and then Thursday and Friday are devoted entirely to Mozart.

Want to get your own Cosi on? Come see it!

Mulling

2009-02-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I do worry. I have abandoned a path that I had grown used to: a nine-to-five job with all the social and financial consistency it brings, and in a company I could have stayed in for life, watching my TIAA-CREF retirement grow and taking my yearly six weeks of vacation to New York, Chicago, Hawaii, and beyond. Certain things are sacrificed, at least in the near future: a new car, an upgraded apartment, hundred-dollar tickets to the opera, the freedom to buy whatever catches my fancy.

Last year JT asked what I would really like to be doing with my life. I couldn't really conceive of "just music" unless I pretended that I met some rich man who would be delighted to have me sit around all day playing the piano. I imagined our parlor, and me spending the day working on Beethoven trios or Debussy art songs and hiring famous musicians to join me in home recitals. But that seemed too unrealistic -- and I could never imagine luxuriating in someone else's money.

I spent much of the conversation trying to convince JT that I was too mediocre: there are tons of fabulous pianists with greater ability and greater understanding of music as a language. Even still, I could admit that I might be able to fill some middle niche -- young players or singers who need an accompanist, or beginning pianists. But I could definitely imagine how much fun it would be to sit around and play all day.

I've basically been sitting around and playing all day since I left my job on October 31, 2008. In that first week of freedom I polished up and memorized two movements of a Mozart piano concerto that I would later play in recital. When the job was still consuming my time, I figured I'd have to perform the movements a little rough and with the music, if at all.

I've retained a small amount of contract work and have some potential copyediting work in the future (if I passed the tricky copyediting test), and some music opportunities have blossomed -- enough that it finally felt necessary to have business cards made. I'm still coasting on lentils and some savings, but I'm not yet at the point of resorting to back-up plans: trying to get in with one of the private lessons schools around here or (gulp) signing on with a temp agency.

Though I'm sometimes afraid, what I feel more is that I'm living my life honestly and honoring my loves and abilities, and I'll have something to remember and talk about when I'm dead.

Self-review

2009-02-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

I performed the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major (Op. 31 No. 3) in a master class with Jonathan Mann at the San Francisco Conservatory last Saturday. I was the last of three on the program, and I was nervous because Jonathan was so specific with the first two performers. There are so many repeated ideas in the first movement that require nuance, and so many areas besides that invite or require musical decisions. But I walked up to the piano and enjoyed its easy sound in the Conservatory's large but snug recital hall. Jonathan seemed pleased with my interpretation, and instead of being specific, he offered some large-scale ideas, pointing out how the movement shows both Beethoven's romantic and classical sides. The opening measures, for example, show Beethoven improvising at the keyboard, testing out chords and ideas, delaying the arrival at E-flat and the classical scales and arpeggios that it will bring.

Later that day I tried out the complete sonata from memory in my piano teacher's studio recital in the same hall -- the first time I had played a full sonata from memory. There were memory hiccups, but no train wrecks. My nose began to run, as it has been doing when I perform from memory, but I think it is getting better. The shaking hands and general terror are now gone. All in all, I was able to enjoy the performance.

From my own perspective, I knew that the second-movement scherzo was a little out of control, though one discriminating audience member told me it was quite effective. I felt the third-movement minuet should have been a place for me and the audience to relax, but it fell just a little short of that. The fourth movement presto was fast and exciting, though certainly not as accurate as a studio recording.

In talking with my teacher, we decided that the whole sonata needs some more shape and distinction between the movements. As I performed it, it seemed like three similarly fast movements and one somewhat slower minuet. My teacher had recently listened to a recording Rubinstein made when he was 90. His minuet and presto are a little like mine, but he takes the first movement at a much slower tempo, fully enjoying some of the romantic moments, as Jonathan Mann suggested. His scherzo is still humorous, but must less manic than my own. The good, fun, fast times are saved for the presto.

I'll be playing the sonata again on February 21 at the Conservatory's official recital for the Adult Extension Division, so I hope to incorporate some of these improvements.

Intrusion

2009-02-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

Something woke me, but in my sleepy state I was not alarmed. I let my eyes adjust to the dim light from the street lamps. The floorboards creaked on the opposite side of my studio apartment.

She was here.

I lowered my lids and controlled my breathing, thinking of the best attack. Countless thoughts ran through my head: What does she want this time? How did she get a key? I'd have to get a new padlock for the gate and a new lock for the door. The landlord wouldn't mind; but how much would that cost me?

I mumbled a little and turned in bed, pretending to see her shape for the first time. Like many a reasonable person with a dead-hour intruder, I screamed. Louder and higher in pitch than I intended -- perhaps I was still a bit tipsy with drink or dreams.

The two thick discs of her glasses turned to capture the light, and I jumped out of bed and ran toward her with an angry snarl. My apartment was smaller in the dark, so in a second I crashed into her -- or rather, sunk into her. It felt like her body absorbed mine for a moment: her neck grabbing my own, her bosoms wrapping around my torso, her thighs closing around my legs, her twisted feet embracing my own toes.

In another moment she was gone, out the door she had snuck in. I followed her, watched her amble across the backyard. I pretended to recognize her for the first time.

"LouAnne? LouAnne, is that you?" I called after her. I pretended to be my helpful self. "LouAnne, what is it? Is there something I can do for you?"

But she was gone.

Recitals!

2009-01-30T21:31:00.000-08:00

Some recital announcements:

Thursday, February 5, 7:30 pm
A Casual Recital of Music for Piano Trio
Berkeley, CA
My friends G. and D. and I will be performing Beethoven's "Ghost" trio along with short works by Frank Bridge and Theodore Dubois. I'll also be performing a few movements from Beethoven's Sonata No. 18, Op. 31 No. 3. Contact me for directions.

Saturday, February 7, 5:00 pm
My Piano Teacher's Students in a Casual Recital
San Francisco Conservatory of Music Recital Hall (down the steps from the main lobby)
I'll be performing the complete Beethoven's Sonata No. 18. Other adult students in my teacher's studio will perform a variety of works for piano.

Saturday, February 21, 2:00 pm
Adult Extension Division Recital
San Francisco Conservatory of Music Recital Hall (down the steps from the main lobby)
I'll be performing the Beethoven sonata again. Other students in the Conservatory's Adult Extension Division will perform a variety of works, usually for piano but occasionally other instruments.

It's almost February.

2009-01-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Don't be grandiose.

What's new? How is the world treating you?

I have now been out of the salt mines for three months. No regrets. I am confident it was the correct and only possible decision. The work was doing very little to make me or the world better, and many of the people I worked for were among the least enlightened and beautiful humans that I've ever met. True, I'm still engaged by the company in a small capacity, but the work I've retained is aligned with my passion for the arts -- and it may soon disappear, as No Child Left Behind continues to force states to focus punitively on reading and math.

I'm currently enjoying a new relationship with an old friend. We rejoined magically under Mozart, the color orange, a V-6 stallion, and a blazing apartment. When we first dated and lived together, I was a weak little bird. Now I'm strong, as Jillian Michaels tells me in Level 1 of the 30-Day Shred. You can see us in action on Dax in the City.

Pianoing is going well. D & G and I are playing Beethoven's "Ghost" trio and assorted other pieces on a house recital on February 5, and I'm testing out a complete Beethoven sonata (No. 18, Op. 31 No. 3) from memory at my piano teacher's studio recital on February 7 and playing it at the San Francisco Conservatory's official recital on February 21. I have some freelance accompanying in the works for February and March, and my piano teacher has talked about me to two of his accompanying contacts. I've sent cover letters and resumes to both.

I'm also due to take a copyediting test and hopefully return to freelance copyediting, this time with a fantastic independent press that does a wide range of books from raw-food recipes to martial arts instruction and from political songbooks to fiction.

So, there is creatively earned money in the future. That means more lentil soup and the occasional iPhone app.

In closing, a paragraph from the secret diary of Walter Bally:

"After Chevy’s I walked down Market to the San Francisco Opera: Rheingold. It was fairly dreadful. But I suppose I was mostly biased against it because my seat cost $110 and was still (in the dress circle) really too far to tell which mouths were opening to sing. Other major flaws: too much fog, too much fire, too much noise changing boring sets, high school gestures by all performers, two warhammers for Thor (an architect’s t-scale and a regular hammer), translation of Rheingold as “Pure Gold,” and Jill Grove. Actually, she didn’t sound so bad in this (compared to Cornelia in Giulio Cesare at the Met). But she rose up (naturally) from a damn trap door that we saw open and waiting for her. One woman in the audience was disappointed by the bridge to Valhalla, which was an aluminum-looking cruise-ship launch."

Guilty pleasure

2008-11-12T11:11:00.001-08:00

Let me take a break from piano practice to reflect on my new life. It has been enchanted: I spend as much time as I want working on music, going for walks, traveling about the city, and enjoying the company of friends. It seems undeserved: deep down I feel like everyone should suffer eight hours of uselessness to keep the markets running. But for now I will accept it as a break and a sabbatical.

I've retained a small amount of contractual work with my former employer. It is the best and most rewarding of what I did there. The work, though small, means I do not have immediate worries of going hungry. (My new diet of fruit, beans, tuna, and crackers, however, is not very expensive.)

I have not moved far in my plans of being a freelance musician. I'm still not sure whether that's what I want to do, though I may only be afraid of failure. I think the main thing holding me back right now is this independence and freedom to work on solo music. In my first week away from work, I was able to memorize a piece in time for a mini-recital, as well as make true progress on two very difficult pieces that have been on the back burner.

I have been toying with the idea of pursuing a more altruistic career. Wanting to help people is supposedly a characteristic of my personality and my sign, but I've never tried it before. Though I love people and need them to love me, I have a strong streak of self-absorption and introspection. And even though I suffer, I am often skeptical of pain: when confronted by it in others, I tend to philosophize it as temporary and unimportant in the larger picture. (I am only occasionally able to do this when I am experiencing my own blahs.)

Defining goals has occasionally been successful (though it makes me feel dirty). A goal of learning to play the flute was rewarded with learning to play the flute (though I've since gone back to the piano). A goal of financial stability was rewarded with financial stability (though I've since given it away). I'm not yet prepared to make goals, though I think early 2009 is my target for moving toward the next thing.

Yes, my dear screenwriter friend, it would be nice to find a sort of love that can support my current life: doing a bit of work for the outside world, working on my music and other slightly creative ventures, and loving or helping the strangers of the world. And while it would be nice to find such a prince, I can't even land a pauper.

Ay, sure, I've come a long way from a dirty house in Athens, Georgia, with melting-plaster walls, dial-up Internet, and grass up to my 24-year-old, 28-inch waist. Most all of the movement has been in the right direction.

First days out of the saltmine

2008-11-06T12:47:00.000-08:00

A few thoughts from the last week or so:

I could have lived forever in this night. Drunk by the will of friends, my hand on the knee of one, my flirtations at the ears of the other, and two beautiful women.

We all go to bed . . . such swoozy masses. And I am . . . such a tender ass. And all I ask is . . . a knee to hold . . . and a shoulder to collapse on.

When I am old, and dead, I will remember tonight, and the living poems that loved this gargoyle.

* * *

That was several days ago. And I don't know why I would use the word gargoyle when a very strange man recently told me that most things we think of as gargoyles are actually called chimerae; gargoyles must channel water. Ah well.

Yesterday was my first jobless day. All in all, it was challenging and lonely. But I did some things that suggest I may be able to be happy and healthy: I started with a nice walk down to the ocean, stopped by the grocery store to get healthy food (apples, bananas, cereal, soy milk, lentil soup), and came home and practiced some Mozart. Went to the library in the middle of the day to post photos of the beautiful marriage I witnessed at San Francisco City Hall (look here), tinkled more on the piano, and headed downtown for my piano lesson. I kept my beer intake at 0, and my calories were substantially less than the 4000 a day that have been making my skin undulate.

* * *

And now it is Day 4. Each day has been better than the day before. Yesterday was a nice balance of piano practice with friends and family -- talking to my mom, to my coworker, to my friend abroad, and then dinner with a new friend, her husband, and their beautiful baby.

Does it matter if it just rained into my kitchen? Does it matter if I was lurking around my old carpet, resting my fingers, planning to do a little meditation, when I heard a suspicious drip-drip in my ceiling? Does it matter if one of the lights in my kitchen then welled and began to cry?

It was a small leak, easily caught in the metal trash can that had received some (but not enough) of a friend's vomit. I called my neighbor -- thus betraying that I was home -- and this time it was merely water from the shower. The towels she put down were not close enough, it seems. (One wonders if there is a large abyss between her tub and the floor, and if she's always relied on towels to fill it. One can only expect more in-house rains.)

It is a thing like this that in the olden days would have sent me into a panicked depression. Nowadays, well . . . The struggle not to be pointless distracts me. And I am waiting.

Music time

2008-10-23T11:06:00.001-07:00

This Saturday I'm playing the first movement of Mozart's 27th piano concerto in a student recital at the San Francisco Conservatory:

Saturday, October 25, 2008
2 p.m.
SF Conservatory Recital Hall
50 Oak Street, San Francisco

Next month I'll perform the second and third movements of the concerto (and possibly accompany a soprano in songs by Wolf) at another student recital:

Saturday, November 22, 2008
2 p.m.
SF Conservatory Recital Hall
50 Oak Street, San Francisco

Change

2008-10-21T08:45:00.001-07:00

Darlings, I've given my notice and am leaving a job that has been my home for three and a half years. It has seen my transition from my first home in California, Redwood City, to the city that looks like Heaven and holds the craziest rejects from Hell. It has seen two artist-boyfriends who challenged and inspired me to greater creativity and independence. It has seen my writing, my flute, and my piano. Crushes and loves wholesome and misplaced. Before it there was no Ibsen, Shaw, Balanchine, or Handel. Harry Potter was still quite young before it. My teeth zittered years in fear of cavities. And the people who did not exist! K. and S. and J. and C. and J. and J. and P. and the dozen others (many already gone).

Doubtless I will grieve even more after my last day. I only know what is gone after it is gone. Yellow tags, Post-its, and pens. My stapler and stapler remover -- the nemesis who inspired a compassionate short story. My opening and closing metal drawers. My fragile cubicle walls. Mini, small, medium, and large binder clips. Stems, ACs, distractors, DoKs, subdomains, indicators, pVals, differentials, genres, proc/doc elements. An $800 office chair skating on a plastic pond. The blinds, raised and lowered each day.

Joy: I am leaving before the days grow short, and will no longer battle the sunset at my window. For a time at least, my days will be where I put them. The future is an exercise in ridiculous entitlement. Having nothing, I dare everything to come. But could I survive a meaningful life? Could I trust the life that I myself wrote?

Trying to break it

2008-10-08T13:25:00.001-07:00

What a mess. I took a vacation day today and stayed home to learn some music and be generally productive. Only an eighth of the day was spent at the piano. Many hours were lost in uselessness. The day was saved, at least, when D. texted to see if I was up for going out. I was tempted toward something new and slutty, like checking out the male strippers at Nob Hill Theatre, but we decided on dinner and drinks in the Castro. Fish and chips, yum, and meanderings through Midnight Sun, 440, Badlands, The Bar, and Lookout. Of boyfriends found I none.

What is remarkable is the number of teeth: shiny white teeth. Jawlines, no, Emperor's noses, no. But teeth smiling in tanned faces, yes.

* * *

Sure, I may escape at this point into a video game rather than explore unhappiness here.

But I so want to steer my own happiness without relying on the ugly mechanisms of this society's capitalism.

* * *

After a sleepless night I woke up half-asleep and decided I couldn't possibly face the enemy.

And last night I was crazier than last Friday, even. Well, not quite as destructive -- but let us say that I roamed the streets rabid.

* * *

I am such a timid creature.

Phantom email

2008-10-02T13:18:00.001-07:00

It's very frightening to be alone: loveless, kidless, essentially jobless. I walked the labyrinth asking how to be happy, but I ended up wondering what happy was and how to measure it.

* * *

Was that email a phantasm? There was a work email from X. that instantly felt like the back-breaking straw. Now I can't find it. Did I make it up?

* * *

I should tell you, darlings, that I went to the opera incognito. I was going to go to my recital incognito, but I changed my mind at the last minute. Incognito = in this case a different hairstyle. A part in the middle, rather than on the side. Rather more practical with long hair.

The opera = Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Barbara Frittoli in Simon Boccanegra. A decent but lackluster production. My new experiment in "orchestra rear" a great success, however: Row K, one seat away from the expensive seats (a woman who said, "Are you familiar with this opera?" I said, "I've heard recordings but never seen it live. . . Have you seen it before?" "Oh, at my age," erwiderte die Alte, "I've seen it many, many times."). At this distance, the singers had facial expressions.

* * *

Let us think about the last time we worked on the Brahms A-major piano quartet. R. was visiting when I received word that I would be playing it in two weeks at a workshop. In that month, May 2007, I was in love even though the end was near. In that month I watched Dog Day Afternoon, The River, Pennies from Heaven (Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters), The Double Life of Veronique, Fracture, and Angels in America. I also saw an experimental theater piece involving an audience sitting at a dinner table, Kathleen Turner in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Bad Plus at Yoshi's in Oakland, DJ Desultory at Argus Lounge, Chanticleer in Berkeley, and Susan Graham singing and oopsing "Non so piu" at a free concert in the park.

Since we're growing tumescent with nostalgia, consider May of the year before: that month I met B. and moved into my square near the ocean. In those days I was going piano shopping with Anjuska, playing at the Claremont in Berkeley with G., fluting heavily, and of course navigating the waters of a new relationship.

In May 2005, I was only recently employed (dishonestly, as I like to say, since I was asked to do important work for six months for $20 an hour and no benefits) by my current employer. I was happy to have escaped from the video store with sparking sockets and cat-pee stains and sufficiently distracted by the strange joy of discovering missing punctuation and triple letters.

* * *

What improvement can be claimed? A steadily increasing acceptance of independence.

Bitter shell

2008-09-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Last post in June? Boy, that's sad.

Here's a little something from a few weeks ago that's just now making it to the Internet.

This place is not yet dead. I've been scared away by three things:

(1) Embarrassment. There are too many people around me who think blogs are ridiculous. They make fun of me maliciously or accidentally.

(2) Indifference. It's easy to complain that no one cares about these words. I've seen other blogs really blossom, while mine (after four years) has yet to really . . .

Sometimes that damn plastic bad is so beautiful I want that shadowy figure at the corner to stab me in the heart so I can look at his stubble as I . . .

And sometimes I want to turn up the volume so much that I never hear again . . .

Tonight someone said, "You know, Paul, you're allowed to eat nachos with your fingers" because he had caught me cutting a large one with my fork.

Though in general the meeting with friends was successful. Oh, how my age is beyond my maturity! I'm growing up a bitter shell. Compassionate, sure, but a little empty.

I'm listening to random loud music on my damn iPhone. Right now it's Liza Minnelli singing "Yes" from the concert filmed by Bob Fosse. My laptop is right in front of my TV, which is showing (on mute) some show where three or four couples are wearing shell necklaces. Two blond men and a brunette, at least.

I realized that one of the reasons I stopped writing here (possibly the third reason interrupted above) was my job. And jobs in general. Most companies do not consider drunk blogging to be desirable. Don't ask me why. Then I remembered: Fuck jobs; they don't sublimate after death. Correct action? Is that what the old wise one said? I am too seldom guilty of correct action.

We nearly all of us operate on a level of moderate intelligence. And we serve an important function as majority stakeholders. Sure, we may hate those above and under us.

But let me be direct: I smoked a tabacky cigarette the other night for the first time since, say, July of 2004. Remember, the Croc-bedeckt Doktor told me I had the lungs of a 40-something-year-old. Big empty useless bags. And I should never smoke again, because smoking is bad and it will kill me. And stay away from cats. I believed him, and believe him. But I was in the middle of the city with the rugged gay Marlboro man and the enlightened K., and it seemed the right time to prove my strength. In that regard.

Certainly I've given up on love. I don't need it. I'm on autopilot. Coordinates set for . . . mild self-improvement hell-bent on distracting the chaos of the universe with a little complexity. Certainly I can no longer believe in a two-legged creature that will walk or roll with me across that new Bay Bridge. Because what are bodies?

Today on Tyra Banks I saw men who like large ladies. They particularly like them to roll over them. Ah, to be twerpy! In the olden days I could want some more substantial creature to press his atoms into mine. God -- where are the days of Marble Boy? of Rock Lobster? of Spoken-Word Poet? of Wes, Aaron, Apple-Paul? Do you remember selenium? Capsules of selenium? Brought to you by the father of Star Star.

But seriously, folks, there once was a tall creature with a wooden necklace. Catherine Deneuve in the background. There once was a creature of forehead, curls, and moles -- and birds deep, deep, deep into the morning! How we fucked that up. There once was a mirror image: moles again, a constellation of moles on a back that I wanted to remember beyond time. And nothing deep connecting us! Nothing but video games and that mysterious gaze born during sex . . . Alles vorbei.

Do you remember that first time, in a tent? Or in a hotel? "You've got to work out." J., you troubled child, you are undoubtedly the best. Because you are first? Because you are the best? Can the first ever be the best except under the direst probabilities? I remember a room with two beds and your sister and mother knocking on the door. I'm talking about imaginationland: fourteen years ago. A tent. Thanks for being such a good friend all this time, Jim. Shit, was I useless from January through at least March of 2003. I was afraid for my own life.

Can I claim to have met my truelove? Of course not. I've balked at the ones who have come closest. Occasionally I've thought I've been too persnickety. But the trueloves I've seen have been obvious, despite the extreme amount of work and compromise they've required. I have not yet been so fortunate.

I am pursuing musicality, even though I'm only so-so. I have a "natural" sense of the classical style. That is to say: I'm Target through and through.

This is not a laundry weekend: tomorrow I'll wake up, make some coffee, consider my lovelessness, and start practicing some Haydn and Beethoven. Later, I'll stop to consider the weather: what combination of sun and fog? I'll try to get all of a Chopin etude hands together, as one says. Family will call. Maybe a few flirtatious texts with past and present. I'll have to eat, and it will be more calories than I burn, as usual, and I'll pad a little more on against the coming armageddon.

Let me wrap this up: I'm back. Drunk. But with good excuse: the friendship of coworkers. And I'm here to stay: I haven't found a better way to be honest with my thoughts. It little matters that I'm 32 and have a number of friends who cringe at my slipshod confessions. Fuck, in fact. Fuck them. And in a very unenjoyable way. Probably involving sugary powders that are supposed to be tasty and scintillating but are in fact abrasive.

Sweet Jeez, Robin Williams is in rerun on Letterman. I'm off.

Fashion

2008-06-24T20:06:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm ready for my Businessboy Fashion Show. Got to get this thing done so I can enjoy my evening.

Loading Dark Pants Number 1 . . . Interfacing with big blue shirt and belt. Sheesh. Apparently I'm a little bigger in the middle. Let's see: move around a bit. Go look in the mirror. Not bad. A bit of a kid playing grownup, but passable. Testing out charcoal blazer. Um, somehow not with these pants.

Testing Brown Shirt Number 1, a fairly ugly thing by Calvin Klein. OK. Jumping around. Pretending like I'm doing business, business, business. Reaching here, reaching there. Moving papers. Not bad. Let's try a tie just for kicks. Feels like something to wear under a graduation gown, but serviceable.

Let's switch to Dark Pants Number 2. (But first: I just remembered that I have a scale. Let's see how gravity's pulling these days. Ha! I can blame the pants! I'm still floating between 140 and 145. I can live a good two weeks into Armageddon with that mild amount of stored food.) OK, with these nice pants we'll try our funky shirt with a bit of peach in it. Um . . . this is definitely a last-day, going-back-to-California ensemble.

Now for the Grand Finale: a faithful old Ben Sherman shirt followed rapidly by Brown Shirt Number 2. . . . And we're good.

With a little help from a hotel iron, I'm ready to go. Go Businessboy, Go!

Ungkaharla

2008-06-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

K., darling: nothing cut and pasted here!

. . . and watch me blog despite all. It's 10:30. Frankly, I've had a coffee cup full of oat and honey cereal and half a glass of partly frozen Gatorade. And this is an improvement over the heaviest ten-dime bag of BBQ corn chips and the darkest Guinness I can find. And my armpits smell like stale onions -- both of them!

But I tease you: I've been rawkin' out! What you do, see, is hop on that F-line and get off at Van Ness, stroll into that Conservatory, say hiya to Manny, and cruise on up to the fifth floor. Just for kicks, let those window seats go -- those grand pianos with a view of the setting sun -- and take the Schimmel in the practice room with the support pillar.

Take out your Ravel and try out that third movement you started Saturday morning. Damn, girl, those notes are setting up house in your fingers! A month ago there was no Ravel. Then there was a Modéré. Then there was a Menuet. Then there was an Animé. Voilà: une sonatine.

Last night in a dream I fell upon my piano teacher: "This is my piano teacher," I explained. "I love him!" and I hugged him like a tree. After my lesson (in the recital hall) I found a large classroom with a beautiful piano and worked some of the new ideas into the Ravel, then tried out the complete Beethoven sonata (Op. 10, No. 3) and the two Rachmaninoff preludes.

I also awaited a reply from the East:

East: "Have you made right by the master of might today?"
Me: "Love is sharing."
East: " . . . "

Did I break the pattern? Was there a specific answer to the East's question? Certainly there is a response to my statement . . . but where is the East's reply? Tomorrow perhaps.

Review: Ariodante

2008-06-19T10:55:00.001-07:00

I may occasionally resort to trickery to keep my blog alive. The following lists come from an email I wrote to a dear friend this morning, and they qualify as a dying blogger's review of San Francisco Opera's production of Handel's Ariodante, which I saw last night after spending the day at home in a malaise tragique:

Ariodante was fabulous! And that's despite several bad things:

1. It lasted from 7:30 to 11:00.
2. The dress circle was its usual 80 degrees and stuffy. One woman near me said, "What's that smell? Someone needs to bathe. It smells skunky." The man next to her said, "It's probably Italians." Ah, the opera.
3. The opera takes place in Scotland, but everything was Roman. Lots of columns.
4. There was MUCH MUCH swishing of very large capes -- not nearly as bad as Giulio Cesare at the Met, but still: stop the capes!
5. All the men were pretty weak, especially the bass. He chose to perform his role in a warbly Sprechstimme. I don't think he ever landed on a pitch, especially when he aimed for those impressive low ones.
6. Ruth Ann or Susan may have forgotten a line at the end of Act I. There was a strange silence, some half-hearted singing, and then the full voices got back on. (The lukewarm village dancing behind them may have caused the kerfluffle.)

In other Ariodante news:

1. The audience clapped when Ruth Ann walked on, but not when Susan did.
2. Ruth Ann blew us away with her fast, high arias and da capo ornaments.
3. The audience went WILD WILD WILD after Susan's slow aria in Act II. The B section emotionally drained her Ariodante, and she performed the repeat lying on the floor. One of her ornaments took her to the very bottom of her voice (I'm guessing F or E?) and then leapt up to her very top (B?). A man who sounded like Harvey Fierstein screamed out "BRAVA!"
4. I still felt like Ruth Ann stole the show, but the audience was most excited about Susan in the final bows. (But then Susan was also last.) They were both great.
5. I have a renewed admiration for Handel and for singers of Handel. I found myself nestling happily into each new aria, listening for that B section, and looking forward to the virtuosity in the repeat.

Dying blog

2008-06-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

My blog is dying! I don't want it to die! There are still beautiful things to write about:

San Francisco for Chicago

2008-05-08T01:01:00.001-07:00

It's vacation time! Time to leave the eternal vacation of San Francisco for the temporary vacation of Chicago.

And I've been sent off well. Last night I explored San Francisco in new ways with a new friend. We had planned for a walking adventure, but I doubted there were places we could walk that would be truly new to me. Wrong I was! Only take to the streets, my child, and you will find secret glimpses of heaven just when you stop looking.

Around Coit Tower, for example. Amble aimlessly, or stumble a little down the hill, and you may find yourself on a brick path leading through secluded, cute, and obscenely expensive homes. Or in a wild tropical garden clinging terrace-wise to a daring incline. A more leaned adventurer may tell you the names of the fragrances and blooms surrounding you -- purple things, yellow things, heavy-drooping orange things, frondy things, big-leafed things, jasmine, sure, and birds of paradise.

After sunset, you may be drawn to civilization and find yourself on a raised plaza decorated with glass and metal moons and stars. This would be just after the virus rages through the planet's meat but before the mechanisms shut down, so there would be silence and six tall buildings glowing down on you.

* * *

Update! I've arrived in Chicago, met up with my dear old friend M., seen a long-form improv show at ImprovOlympics, had late-night breakfast at a diner with M. and her boyfriend, and am now getting ready to climb into bed in my large, luxurious, corner room at the Amalfi.

Showgirls

2008-04-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

Whee!

I'm playing two little pieces -- Debussy's second Arabesque and a Moszkowski etude (Op. 72, No. 2) -- in a student recital at the San Francisco Conservatory's beautiful recital hall at 2:00 on Saturday, April 26.

Every stranger, heck yeah!

2008-04-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

Umm, okay. No one likes a sloppy drunk.

But I've earned this drunk fair and square, and I bet the friends who helped me earn this drunk would even attest that I was only slightly drunk.

Ah, well. Today I was only in love with the much older known, the much younger underwearing unknown, the same old sweet wild standby, and the beautiful exie who left me a phone message (well, the first beautiful exie who left me one!). This raises the question: Am I in shape to love only one? Did I not just admit (over margaritas) that it is my own fault that I was unable to love the last two?

For example: right now -- yes, at this very second -- I'm flirting in another window. Well, actually I'm waiting for the results of my last pathetic flirt. And I'm flirting with disaster and uselessness. Because I can't help it. Because a few words and a small picture and -- well, I mean you know how people are? They have two legs and two arms (usually), and they're just stunning. How can you not love four limbs? I mean, really?

* * *

I'll be earning a drunk tomorrow, too, with my new friend (hi!) who has visited Zauberwelt and actually seems to enjoy it. We're having dinner at Fior d'Italia and then catching Richard Lewis in his late show at Cobb's. (Stalkers: I'll be signing MUNI transfers. Please form a zero-file line just outside the club.)

In drunken rhapsody I scribbled this in my little black book on the way home (after stumbling into the Gap in search of a black blazer for tomorrow):

"O lovers past and future! Tonight I sit [illegible] writing to a music so divine -- and [illegible] when I feel it [illegible] from me [illegible] a finale [female?] form so divine -- Ah! I would kiss every stranger."

And I couldn't agree more.

Louis

2008-03-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Historically, I’ve been driven to write when I’m feeling most sorry for myself. I’m beginning to break out of that -- sometimes by patently censoring the negative feelings (which comes in the form of typing a paragraph, selecting it with the mouse, and pressing delete -- followed by retyping a slightly different version of the paragraph, selecting it again, and pressing delete again) and sometimes by distracting myself with one of those things we ought to be grateful for.

For example: Sure, I may be completely ungrateful that I seem to be a reverse black hole pushing everything in the universe away. I may be completely ungrateful that I’m attracted to such a wide range of beauty while the only thing attracted to me is ex-boyfriends (as I texted someone during a solo dinner last night). I may be ungrateful that a recital I give is a long-grown redwood falling soundlessly in a peopleless forest. I may be ungrateful, in fact, that I’m perfectly mediocre in every way.

BUT! I am grateful for the concert series put on by San Francisco Performances, which allows me to sit in the second row just feet from incredible performers and all for cheapies. Last night I saw pianist Louis Lortie (whom I’ve marveled over since I first got his CD of Ravel over a decade ago, and which I gave to C.B. in an unusual display of selflessness) in a program of some admittedly unenjoyable Liszt. But he began the recital by talking a little about the relation between Liszt and Wagner and the music he would be performing, and he was so charming and human and informative . . . Well, naturally I fell in love. And then his octaves beat Liszt into submission.

The program mentioned his website, and THIS is what I am grateful for. LouisLortie.com is the best musical artist’s website I’ve come across. Speaking and playing for us intimately and casually from his own piano, he is a god putting on a divine Punch and Judy show amidst the muddy filth of Web Street.

Recital time

2008-03-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

It's time for a recital again! It seems like we just had one, but my records show that it was way back in August. This time we're focusing on the second Mendelssohn trio. I've been working on it diligently since the beginning of the year. It's terribly difficult for me, but much more manageable than the first Mendelssohn trio.

I'm kicking musical things up a notch. We three trioers (G., D., and me) took a movement of the Mendelssohn to a chamber music workshop last month. It was the first time the three of us had been coached by a professional. He was very encouraging and gave us all kinds of helpful advice. I've also applied for private lessons at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It's been a long time since I've had a real lesson, and I think there will be a real difference now -- I won't be reliving history with the ol' lozenge thrower, and I won't be bound by tuition and professor-freshman relations to a tendonitis-causing Southern gentlewoman whom I don't really respect. Instead, I'll be seeking advice and encouragement through a program designed to help music stretch throughout the community at large.

Granted, I'm still contemplating ways of becoming an honest musician . . . going back to school, ideally in a combo bachelor's/master's way . . . where my enthusiasm and accompanying skills could be put to good use . . . where I could come to terms with being slightly above mediocre but still helpful to the world of music . . . poor, perhaps, but aligned with a passion . . . (make it happen!!!)

And putting that aside, let it hereby be officially announced:

A Casual Recital of Music for Piano Trio

March 15, 2008
3 p.m.
Berkeley, California

Featuring
Mendelssohn's Piano Trio No. 2 in c minor
with music by Beethoven and Frank Bridge

Crabs

2008-03-02T16:15:00.001-08:00

I could tell you about how water started pouring into my apartment at about 5:45 this morning, and about how I repositioned my neighbor's various chamberpots, but instead I'll share with you the happy experience I had yesterday.

Armed with my new camera and a zoom lens, I headed to the Union Square Celebrity Crab Festival (all your favorite crabs). I hoped to take crowd pictures and people pictures, as well as to try out a few of the crab samples from San Francisco restaurants. The crab was great, and the people were even better. In fact, people are magic:

See the entire set here.

Reveille

2008-02-27T22:02:00.000-08:00

The wind zipping through the slats reminded me of that morning several months ago. He had leaned across the back of the bed to grab the pull of the blinds, and his bare back had competed with the sacred sunrise -- shoulders wide as the ocean beyond the horizon, torso strong as ten thousand years of delta, waist narrow as the stream just above the mouth.

Beyond the blinds, the ferns were dancing in the storm. Beyond them creaked a neighbor's trees. It was easy to fall asleep. As the wind picked up, his breathing became more peaceful. Let the walls fall in -- the arms, I knew, would be there in the morning.

I slept. There was beauty, stunning outward beauty of biology: places of sun and shadow, fens and prairies, creases, joints, whole mechanisms of destruction and creation. There was spirit, frightening cosmic spirit of unknown atomics: dark galaxies of uselessness, moons of longing, dusty thoughts combusting at the slightest spark.

My mouth moved, and another's voice spoke: "Leonard." We had not moved in sleep. He was still breathing against my back. His hands were still curled around mine. "Leonard," the voice said again.

His arms were completely still, and the rise and fall of his chest varied only for a name not my own: "Ricky?"

My own voice wanted to speak but could not. My fingers formed an unfamiliar shape within Leonard's hand. A force moved my tongue through the shapes of "Yes." Leonard seemed to condense around me, aligning his own pores with mine. The wind had stilled. We rested still for nights.

When I heard the ferns shuddering, I knew my body was becoming my own. Leonard breathed through an untroubled sleep. My tongue was free but could not repeat those few words. My fingers grasped to retain that foreign sign, but already my hand was curling to its own shape.

It's my party.

2008-02-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

Well, all in all I had a nice birthday. I'm pleased to be 32. Thirty-two is flirty, too.

I spent the bulk of the day in intense jury deliberation. I'd love to tell you how it's going, but I'd have to kill you. Maybe next week. After court, I stopped by the library to get in an hour of regular work-work before going to the ballet. It was Giselle, and we all gasped when Maria Kochetkova was inducted into the Wilis and spun out of her veil.

The future, the future: My Anjuska-inspired detox is proceeding according to plan. Now it's time to address the boyfriend problem, the friend problem, and the job problem. Easy-peasy.

P.S. Thank you, Maria, for the beautiful and tasty cookies!

Tchaikovsky and a special guest

2008-02-15T19:46:00.000-08:00

The concert Wednesday night was so stunning I barely had enough time to feel sorry for myself. One of life's chiefest glories is to be within a dozen feet of a human who has turned his or her body into a machine of incredible skill and passion.

I sat in the second row directly in front of the Steinway thundering away at the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto. True, from my vantage point I could not see Nikolai Lugansky's fingers do their magical rat-a-tat-tat -- I could only see those magic french fries when he threw them in his lap or to his side to relax and reset his wrists. But I could see the musician's determined face, could note the way his mouth worked at the multiple layers of the music or his cheeks puffed out slightly in time with the orchestra, could watch the slender ankles working at the pedals (with their strange -- but surely intentional -- hesitant and tinny release of the dampers), could very well detect and follow the pianist's quiet breaths.

The concert was obscenely indulgent. Why not give the public exactly what they want? An old rock band playing only its number one hits, none of this new crap: the first piano concerto followed by the Pathétique symphony.

I should mention that all this was mine -- Lugansky, two Tchaiks, the hundred musicians of the orchestra, the return of conductor laureate Herbert Blomstedt, spitting distance of the miraculous prestidigitation in a seat I selected by clicking on a map online -- for $60. Sixty dollars: namely, one dinner date, three DVDs, four books, six decent lunches. Incredible value (and I'll complain about the relative value of the San Francisco Opera some other time).

As I was wandering around on my lonesome paths before the concert (up and down Market Street, through the library in search of books on Mendelssohn, to a bookstore to check their collection of used sheet music, to a sushi bar for what must be my last solo sushi meal), I began to think about going back to school for music. Have I not demonstrated sufficient skill to make a living as a musician? Have I not exhibited sufficient love, AKA stickedness?

I have also seen the improvements in my playing and musical understanding in the sideways time I've spent on it in the last couple years. It's hard to believe now that I once thought a Beethoven piano-violin sonata would be unapproachable. Three years ago, I could never have guessed that I would now be giving three or four chamber music recitals a year or that I would have acquired a real live piano and recorded over two discs of music. (Not to mention learning to play the flute.) How much would be possible if all my energies were put to music?

I sit here wondering what to write next, or how to talk about my reservations. And my head just goes, "No, no, no, no, no! This is preposterous!" You see, I'm grasping at straws of happiness. I'm especially dissatisfied with my job. I've been thinking in terms of whether I'm "aligned with my passions." My work is partly aligned: yes, I do actually enjoy looking for and finding errors. I was more aligned when I was copyediting assorted nonfiction back in Georgia, but that was backbreaking work that barely paid for soup. I was also more aligned when I was accompanying back in Georgia, but it was even more backbreaking and I couldn't afford soup.

Unfortunately, as in other things, I'm also waiting for someone else to tell me what to do. Making one's own decisions is so selfish and arbitrary -- don't you think? -- all the way from "What do you feel like for dinner?" to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I seek just the right person to tell me what I already believe, and then I justify my actions as following the wise counsel of that other person -- and if my actions fail or have negative consequences, I wouldn't dream of blaming the other person. Because that's not nice, and I recognize that no one can know anything for certain. But if I am the sole decision maker, then there's nothing stopping me from dousing myself in a part-Catholic slick of guilt, shame, self-doubt, and self-hatred and setting myself aflame.

NOW WITH NEW SOBRIETY!
These thoughts brought to you Guinness free!
Tune in every hour on the hour for the news you trust.

P.S. The other thing I want to do is take photographs of everyone on the planet. More proof that humans are painfully beautiful -- follow the links to the profile of the commenter here.

Adventure

2008-02-09T20:05:00.000-08:00

One would think, in the face of Deutsche Grammophon's recent DVD release of Ariadne auf Naxos (with Gundula Janowitz, Rene Kollo, Trudeliese Schmidt, and Edita Gruberova), that I'd no longer be able to fuck around with life. But I will. I'll continue wilting under the weight of an ugly job, and I'll continue self-medicating and hiding behind useless activities.

Only 4:50 pm, and it's been an incredible day. I started the morning rewatching Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I had seen several years ago in the theater. As I was watching and rediscovering it, I felt it may very well belong in my top ten. Certainly it would lead in the category of Films Speaking to the Beauty and Inevitability of Human Connection.

After the movie (which I enjoyed with coffee and a ham-and-cheese croissant from Nibs), I spent an hour and a half on Mendelssohn. I made a few forays into the Chopin waltz I had hoped to record. I've managed to memorize the thing through all the repetitions (and its relative simplicity), but it's still too fast and capricious for me to play through without major crashes.

Then, since the sun was out and it was warm enough for short sleeves for the first time in months, I decided to go on an adventure. I blinked my way out of the cave and walked through Golden Gate Park the thirty blocks to the DeYoung museum. Almost two years in this neighborhood and I still had never been. I corrected that by getting a membership (which also lets me into the Legion of Honor, where Madeleine would sit and watch Carlotta) and strolled through the stunning building (filled, alas, with more than a few rooms of boring art). And then up the elevator to the observation tower, which was more beautiful that I had expected.

I moved quickly through the museum since the sun was shining and I could come back anytime. I continued through the park (steering through the happy couples) to Haight and stopped in at Amoeba. I hoped to pick up some cheap CDs, maybe even chance on Strauss's Intermezzo, which I had seen there before. Just for fun I looked at the classical DVD new releases -- where, shiver me timbers, the Ariadne was waiting.

But the muses were not finished with me. I clutched the melancholy heroine to my Busen and strolled down to the regular classical DVD area. Alas, no Rheingold with James Morris, and nothing else I needed to shell out the big bucks for. Wait. What's this? Ah, their little dance section. And who is this? Jacques d'Amboise? Ooh. Expensive. Well, let's see what's on it. BAM. It starts with Apollo, that marvelous little ballet I saw clips of on a Balanchine documentary, could not find evidence of a complete recording of, and managed -- through an insistence on experiencing at least a few important things before I die -- to see live at San Francisco Ballet and New York City Ballet.

These things should be enough. Sure, there's the matter of "Who will I share them with?" A friend told me I was better off without a boyfriend.

ME: Yeah, but to actually love someone -- What's that like?
HER: It's pretty annoying and gets in the way a lot.

Attack!

2008-02-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

I watched Golden Girls last night. It was the first episode of the fifth season -- a double episode in which Dorothy has chronic fatigue syndrome. I had several good laughs, but before long my eyes were closing. It had been a long week of courtroom testimony and standardized-test mumbo-jumbo.

I was awakened to a sound of violent knocking. Then I heard a sound like the locked gate to my little yard being opened. I lay still in bed, listening and wondering if I'd truly heard anything. Was I being attacked? I grabbed my phone, crawled out of bed, and crouched against a wall away from the windows. My heart was beating with dangerous adrenaline. I considered grabbing the knife I'd used to cut my pizza earlier, and I wondered, still dazed from sleep, whether I ought not acquire some longer ranger weapon.

Ah, was this a friend? Only seconds had passed since the supposed sound, but I opened my phone. A missed text. "Hey mccutie! Just wanted to give u a good night kiss. :* cant help it. Sleep well...." Not my late-night visitor; just my ex-pseudo-boyfriend who seems to like me a whole lot even though he's Bloomingdales and I'm Sears and I'm a serial monogamist and he's a professional bachelor still in love with his widower. A cheery text giving me a little strength and calming my heart just a little.

I typed in 9-1-1 and crouched there, waiting for the person who broke into my backyard to make the next move.

Several minutes passed. I considered facing my fear, opening the front door. Was I prepared to defend my cave? Was I ready to die? I waited, waited. I was so tired. I considered lying down on the floor of the kitchen -- bullets would have to go through the bathroom wall or the kitchen island before hitting my body.

Who was I kidding? This was not TV, and this was not court. This was a half-asleep weakling with dream-inspired imagination. My heart still beating, but feeling safe again, I crawled back into bed.

A quick look out the door a little after seven this morning showed no evidence of murderers or vampires.

The ballet

2008-02-06T22:13:00.001-08:00

I went to the ballet the other night and sat a seat away from a young woman who began chatting me up.

"Do you have a favorite performer?" she asks.

"Oh, no, not really. I don't know these dancers very well," I reply.

A few seconds later: "Do you dance?" she asks.

"Oh, no. No," I reply. Then, feeling I've been too uncommunicative (and not yet sufficiently strange): "I do music. Not dance. Play piano."

"Oh!" She pauses. A man comes and sits in the empty seat between us.

Eventually she draws me out of the program I've been perusing: "So how did you come to be interested in ballet?"

I attempt to answer, and before long she's managed to ask how I come to be attending the ballet alone.

More of same

2008-01-30T21:44:00.000-08:00

5:41 P.M.
The prosecution rests. We're off tomorrow and Friday, and the defense starts its call of witnesses on Monday. As we left for lunch today, we saw none other than Vic Lee of Channel 7 News in the audience -- that means no KGO news for me tonight. Off to Mendelssohn. Tonight's proposed schedule: practice until 7:30 or 8, then walk briskly down to Safeway for food and soap, return and watch either Danny Boyle's Sunshine or bits of American Idol.

6:45 P.M.
Little break. Talked to S. for a while on the phone. We went to the Castro Theatre last night to see Hangover Square as part of noir week. It took me several minutes to notice that something was weird in the Castro. There were old cars along the street, different signs over the stores, and lots of people milling about. Turns out Gus van Sant was around filming a scene for Milk. We joined the crowd in waiting for something to happen. I expected it was simply the arrival of a star or van Sant himself. But before long filmhands were yelling, "Cue cars. We're rolling, we rolling!" Ye olde cars started driving up and down Castro, and a Milk-looking man came out of a bar across the street. The police seemed to harass him, and he fought back. This drew a few others. There was pushing, then some shoving, and before long it was a wild mob scene.

7:23 P.M.
The ants are not at all ashamed of their nudity. They're just prancing all about.

Walking down to Safeway. Ears, prepare for bitter wind!

8:26 P.M.
Back from Safeway. Right after I left, I got a phone call from my upstairs neighbor -- poor woman waited until I was done practicing the fourth movement again and again at incrementally increasing tempos. She wanted to let me know that she's going in Monday to have a knee replacement. No fun, for sure, but the surgery is at the hospital where she works, so she was able to handpick the whole team that will be working on her.

The pizza's cooking, AmIdol's on, and tonight's tragedy is that the Netflix movie in the mail today was Sunshine. Oops. Bad planning. Should I watch the copy I just rented from my local video store, or the one that came in the mail? Both?

This is it

2008-01-28T21:43:00.000-08:00

3:50 P.M.
We finished with a witness early, so the judge sent us home. We started at 11 this morning, so I went in to work and got a few good hours in. I'll work a bit more later this evening. I'll also check in with you from time to time to let you know how I'm doing. (And to see how you're doing.) I'm a little starving, even though I just had a slice of zucchini fritatta and Mediterranean salad from the cafe across from the court house. Soon, chips and salsa (cheapies from the corner mart). But first, let's work on that fourth movement of the Mendelssohn second trio. I think G. and D. and I were accepted as a preformed group for the Chamber Musicians of Northern California's next workshop, so we'll have an all-day coaching on this trio on February 17, two days before I turn . . . 32 or 33. What's 2008 minus 1976? Looks even. Must be 32.

4:30 P.M.
Went through the second and fourth movements. I might indulge in some salsa and reflect on my day.

Tsk, tsk. I've attempted and deleted several paragraphs in these thirty minutes I've been Mendelssohning, eating, IMing, and boiling water. The very same problem I've had the last many many weeks. Back to the piano . . .

6:09 P.M.
And now I'm compelled to watch the damn president speak. What a buffoon. Hmm. I'm biting the insides of my lips just like Pelosi is, only I'm not on TV.

I expected jury duty to be a painful exercise in Americanism. It has not been. I expected to see traces of Bush and Rumsfeld in the court room. I have not. I have seen something called the Law, which is at times ridiculous and at times mysteriously respectable.

The Law, like ballet, is a wonderful example of how a small number of creatures can create something complex and beautiful in a very short amount of time. Both are nonsense against their wider backgrounds.

7:27 P.M.
Well, that's enough Mendelssohn for today.

9:24 P.M.
Got in a little work and a little videogaming. Not much left to accomplish today. Got to finish watching Tom Tykwer's Perfume. I watched the first half last night but wanted to stretch it out to relish it. Speaking of the magical powers of Ben Whishaw, I saw the most amazing nose the other night.

I had gone to see Ian Bostridge sing Schubert at Herbst Hall. I sat in my seat (within a person's length of the singer, as I like to be) and began looking at the translations. A soft middle-aged gentleman sidled down the row toward me. I decided to be friendly and smiled and said Hi. He looked at me like I was a pesky ghost he was intent to ignore. An older gentleman in the row in front of me remarked to a companion that his regular friend wasn't coming. My neighbor said, "He's not coming today, George? Oh, do you mind if I move up?" And he took his diaper-looking khaki ass up a row.

And then: the nose. It was below dark curls. In a small face. The largest triangle you ever saw attached to a human. I couldn't stop watching as it made its way down the row. It was beautiful. I looked away, sentences thundering in my head: "You have the most beautiful nose I've ever seen. I could look at your nose forever."

Packing musings.

2007-12-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

Three brown shirts and a burgundy. John Adams's Fearful Symmetries to pep me up -- and I should be able to finish packing in 28 minutes. Though there's always some dallying. Matching socks for the journey. (They like to swim single in the drawer.) Three jeans and a brown pants for the flight. Six underwears (I'll do some washing) and some sleeping shorts. Time for new sleeping pants. Too many holes, and not exactly becoming.

Grooming supples? Tom's deodorant stick (drunk with hops). In a plastic baggy.

Damn. Took too long. Now I'm going to have to pick some more music. These are difficult decisions. I still haven't decided if I'm going to take Flutey. Let's see. Can't put on the Bowie DVD. Would get too involved. Liza with a Z it is!

Oops. Forgot about you over there. I've been packing, you know. Just packed my month-at-a-glance. Reminded me of another Christmastime vacation home, where I wrote a few notes of things to do back in SF to keep myself busy in the new year: join a writing group, take up a martial art, take an adult education class, relearn German. That was before S. and before I found myself here. After this vacation, I'll return to some firm planting.

You know, I still have some negativity toward that older man who befriended me at the Movie Groove and wanted to "help" me. He was the opposite of me; he could not see the humanity in Fellini, despised anything "unreal," and thought I could be happy as a clerk working for the state of California. As usual, part of my negativity is my anger at myself for having been silly enough to feel romantic toward him. Ah well -- that was when I was still working on the ol' youth-in-Georgia model where you have to love whatever gay person comes along because you're the only gay in the village. (Please Google "the only gay in the village" if you do not know Daffyd.)

What I must say is that he was right and magical in one respect -- just like Dr. R was in one (as mentioned here). One of his silly exercises was for me to write down a list of three-year goals. Forcing myself, I wrote a few things. Involved in something creative. Steady job using some of my skills. Financial stability, represented by my ability to buy a new car if something happened. (I'm always expecting the ol' Ford to die -- and in those days I lived in the suburbs of SF and actually needed a car.) And love (it's on vacation, but I had love to write home about at least twice).

Did writing the goals make things happen? Surely I hadn't the slightest hopes back then. Nor could I imagine the mostly happy and healthy life waiting for me three years off.

I'm packed. The random gifts and random clothes fit with the Patricia Highsmith book, sheet music, and flute. Take the trash out, have a pizza, watch a little Red Dwarf, and hit the sack. Leave this great state at ten after eight.

Happy birthday.

2007-12-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not looking forward to this evening. The original plan was a concert of Beethoven in honor of his probable birthday today. A clarinet friend was arranging it, and I would play piano in the E-flat wind quintet. I looked forward to it because it would a concrete musical goal with a definite outcome. I would be challenged to play in a more public forum, and I would not be afraid to invite coworkers and friends -- as I am for our casual house recitals in Berkeley, since they are farther away and too personal and intimate to broadly invite the people I work with.

But the recital plan fizzled, and somewhat outside of my control (though I should have suspected) the evening has become one of sightreading a wider range of music for piano and wind quintet. Before I fully realized that the Beethoven quintet was only one of a number of pieces we'd run through, I had spent a good deal of time on it. The piano part is quite difficult and beautiful. It warrants real learning, total absorption.

There's a general frustration. General frustration because I'm not as good as I could be (though I try to remind myself that I'm plenty good for a nonprofessional who gets under ten hours of practice a week), and general frustration at the pianist's role. How I hung on my coworker's words -- a pianist who has a doctorate in music -- who, like me, is pursuing a new instrument! Not even knowing I played regularly with other instrumentalists, she mentioned how much more difficult the pianist's music was, how difficult it was to play with others. She trailed off imagining the joy the other instrumentalists were capable of in casual collaborations . . .

Sightreading is difficult. Torture. Humiliating. I've come a long, long way. I made incredible gains when I accompanied students at the University of Georgia, and I've made even more incredible gains over the last couple years reading things with G. -- and she and D. and I are on the exact same page reading sightreading. We are always a little in awe at the process -- the spontaneous reading of those arbitrary dots and squiggles, the coordination of the motor skills, the miraculous result painted out in time.

Ah, well. I'll quit whining. I'm sure tonight will be fun . . . All turned out well the last time I played with a stranger, an SF Conservatory graduate in cello -- and that was damn Brahms in a damn house he shares with a damn professor of piano at the Conservatory (who was no-doubt cringing upstairs).

But let me bring something upon myself by saying it aloud: in the next year I want more formal public recital opportunities. Give me a reason to buy a suit.

I'll also continue recording solo music -- I surpassed a CD's worth some time ago and am now approaching two hours. Thanks to all who have been my audience and helped me find new joy in solo piano music.

Ah, yes. Something else to bring upon myself. Somewhere out there is someone who cries at the Nutcracker's transformation and thinks Mrs. Wealey-Heginbotham-Stahlbaum is the pinnacle of humanity. Please find me soon -- we're running out of time!

Johnny Mathis . . .

2007-12-02T23:20:00.001-08:00

Further reason to live . . .

Long ago I was involved in a local play. Mrs. S. appeared in Peachtree City, forced south from New York. She brought her son -- you know him, of course. He could not bear to see a blade of grass torn from the ground. (And he thought chicken noodle soup should boil twenty minutes.) Mrs. S. wrote a play, and I was the slide show operator -- it was possibly unbearable, or possibly the most real thing the city had ever seen. The slide show: useless, useless, except for those few minutes emotionalized by Johnny Mathis.

And I was seventeen going on fifteen, in love with another technical hand, his name lost in the fifteen years. It was the year R. died . . . R.'s boyfriend was in a cast, walking on crutches. They picked me up from the MARTA station. The boyfriend was rough trade. I was jailbait.

Oh, how I loved R.! But didn't we all? That little fire, that mustache. "We are blood brothers," I wrote, though I little understood the death in blood. He is the only friend I've known to die of AIDS, thank god.

Other things: Michael singing to Macaulay: "Remember the Time." These phenomena: proof that is is not useless. Macaulay in The Face, a wounded, desperate adult.

It was five years ago December that I came across that magazine. What does it represent to me? I tried to tell A. I had not seen the stupid holiday movies. I am generally not attracted to my blond brethren (with one powerful exception). Was it the obviousness of the Britten-style corruption? Was it simply the celebrity disappearance and reappearance in platform shoes and a boa?

Sure, sure, I may be watching a video of Michael Jackson wearing a see-through skirt and tights in "Remember the Time," and sure, I may believe the rage in "Black or White" is on par with Rothko, but we're talking about Johnny Mathis, who is trying to seduce me to support PBS. (He even tried working the Johnny Carson angle.)

Or maybe this is as good as it gets:

(And don't you go gettin' no ideas. You know I'm a bastard.)

It's hard to say what is most responsible for keeping us all here.

It could be this:

Or this:

But it is probably the beauty of this

Combined with the reality of this

and of course this:

And naturally the other things: Bowie, Tolkien, Nina, Fellini, Judy, Demy, Kris, Kristen, Catherine, Joan, and eyelashes.

It's hard to believe it's all real -- the returnings, the lunch dates, the coming weekends, the blond exes, the photographer bums, bless them -- but it is!

Haleakala

2007-11-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

I shed a few pounds yesterday. I left bright and early for Haleakala, the volcanic crater that dominates much of the island. I feared that the twisty drive up to the summit would be as difficult as the road to Hana, but it was fun and lovely. I passed through areas that looked like California and Kentucky. The curves were extreme, but I felt confident in my rental car (and have learned that one doesn't need to brake at every turn). The views became more and more spectacular. It was clear at Haleakala, so I never passed through a cloud layer, but I could see clouds down below me in surrounding directions.

A few steps up from the parking lot of the visitor center was a grand Martian vista:

Exactly what I had been hoping for out of a crater.

I applied my suntan lotion, packed my bag with the necessary things, and began climbing down the Sliding Sands Trail, which would lead to the crater bed. I took a side trip that looked promising and was delighted -- no, I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and thank the goddess Pele -- that the path led around the narrow rim of a cinder cone. So I walked all the way around Ka Lu'u o ka 'O'o. My own closeup pictures didn't turn out very well, but here I am looking at people (very far away) walking the rim:

Extraordinary. It was climbing up one steep side of the rim, however, that I first came close to death. My little heart was a conga set. I stopped to rest and reapply some suntan lotion (I'd probably been hiking for an hour and half already, and I was 10,000 feet closer than usual to a cloudless tropical sun.)

I continued walking, and walking, and walking, taking picture after picture and enjoying the landscape of red, yellow, black, brown, and gray rock. I came to a great turnaround point but saw the flat bottom of the crater in the distance. I'd been walking about two and a half hours. I forged on and eventually made it:

That meant, alas, it was time to climb back up. I was amazed how just a few minutes of walking up a moderate incline would make my heart beat like mad. Of course, much of the path was loose sand, giving the muscles a little extra torture. I walked. I took a sip of water. I walked. If a rock offered a few inches of shade, I rested. At one point I propped my bag up and stuck my face in its shade. Eventually I made it back to people, and they livened me up a bit. "You're not gonna die, Paul! Look at all these oldtimers and youngtimers!" But the last hour, having climbed up many, many steep switchbacks, was the hardest my body has ever worked for me. Eventually I would walk for two minutes, rest for one.

I made it back to my car, grateful for the beauty and experience, but exhausted. More pictures are here in my Hawaii set.

Thanksgiving dinner, a little strange, consisted of ahi poke, a spider roll, a hamachi roll, and the sushi chef's special gift: raw shrimp.

Boyfriends in Hawaii

2007-11-21T21:40:00.000-08:00

Not as much to report today -- not of the concrete stuff, anyway. Or maybe I've lost a little steam. This morning I drove up around west Maui, as far as I could go until the beginning of the winding section with one-lane roads I now avoid like boobies. The mountains I passed were beautiful. I passed also lots of resorts and condos, took a few side streets, stopped at a beach or two. But it was a little rainy, so I decided to head back to the southern shore. My guide book told me that Keawakapu Beach was beautiful and that Stephen King had a home nearby.

I stopped and sunned and swam for a couple hours. It was lovely, lovely. The sun was amazing and I listened to Callas singing Lady Macbeth. Never again, never again, never again -- or will there be another singer like her? Now I realize: that was probably my last beach trip on Maui. Tomorrow is a drive up Haleakala, some 10,000 feet above sea level, a walk down into the crater, and then a stumbling back up. If you don't hear from me by midnight tomorrow, Pacific time, I broke my leg and am drinking my own urine to stay alive.

That's all the news from Hawaii. In other news, my pseudo-boyfriend used the L word in an instant messaging chat last night (we've been seeing each other about once a week for the last two and a half months), and an ex is returning to San Francisco. I dare not say he wants to try again, but he says he does. (Foolish boy, there is a Matthew Barney out there for you somewhere. No need to settle for a mediocrity -- and a talent to be "tackled." Take that! Always reeling them in with the humility and then a quick punch to the kidneys!)

The L word. It's totally cazh. That's how I'm taking it. I like to pretend I have magic powers of gravitation. I like to pretend I suck in men and change their possible orbits forever. (Most of all, I like exes who have never really had another long-term relationship. And I do not approve of blond exes who have somehow found romantic happiness with someone other than me.)

My pseudo-boyfriend is totally Bloomingdales. Totally gorgeous. Totally smart. He's totally wounded, totally drunk, totally tall.

But I forgot to tell you! It's raining tonight. I'm sitting on the lanai in warm, tropical rain!

Hell, connecting in Hawaii

2007-11-20T22:55:00.000-08:00

Well, I didn't take any pictures of myself today. That's an accomplishment.

I slept in a bit, woke up around 8 not really knowing what I was going to do all day. I couldn't go back to the same beaches, though they were glorious. Today wasn't the day for the large trek to Hana or up Haleakala. I checked my map. Right in the center of Maui was a state park. I read the description in my guide book and decided to go.

It was a pleasant drive. There's a lot of Florida and California in Hawaii. A lot of mainland United States. We have achieved incredible homogeneity, from guard rails to lane striping, K-marts to Starbucks (there were two within shouting distance in the Honolulu airport). But as I approached Wailuku, the mist-shrounded mountains sprung up. A left turn, and I'm passing through a neighborhood along the bottom of a valley. (Pictures are here in my growing Hawaii photo set.)

Since this small adventure had taken me nearly to the northern coast of Maui, I decided to head east toward Paia (which I'd heard was a cute hippy town) and to Ho'okipa Beach, home of big waves and surfers of all kind. And having missed the turnoff for the beach, I decided, hell, I'll drive a little ways along the now-famous road to Hana.

The Road to Hana: Fuck the road to Hana! The deepest level of hell is the road to Hana, and its basement is the return trip. Now, some people will undoubtedly love the road to Hana. I'm thinking of men with small penises and fast cars.

But let me start at the beginning, because I died a little today and I want to remember it. I was attracted to the road to Hana because it supposedly curves through a tropical jungle (and I like jungles). I started off on my trek, and I was pleased to be behind a wimpy driver. That meant I could be wimpy, taking the curves as slowly as I liked. And the curves weren't bad at all; one disappointment was that we were not oceanside . We were stuck in the middle of Florida-California. We weren't going steeply up or down. So all was well until . . . the one-lane sections started to appear. One-lane bridges and one-lane stretches of road the twist around a bend so you can't even tell if another car is zooming around that one-lane device of death. But, like I said, I was second. The car in front of me could crash, and I and the ten cars trailing me could do our best to turn around in that one-lane madness and head back to two-lane civilization.

It was 11 when I started on the road to Hana, and I told myself, sure, I'd drive for an hour and then turn back, unless totally compelled. (The 50 miles to Hana generally take 2 to 3 hours.) After 30 minutes of near misses with cliffsides and Pontiacs (the dominant rental car here), I was ready to turn around. I waited for a chance. I missed a couple. Finally I found one, just past the so-called Garden of Eden. I turned around and lay in wait for a car to follow back (I did not relish competing on the one-way switchbacks with the eager Hana-bound caravans).

Even Bush, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, and Mukasey would recognize this as torture.

Eventually, magically, I made it back to the land of two lanes. And this time I managed to pull off at Ho'okipa. And although no one was in the water (presumably too rough) and no one was evening sunning on the sand, it was incredibly beautiful. Not Florida and California, not even Earth. Don't believe me?

Look at that gosh-darn ocean! That clear substance covers and cleanses this dirty earth and is undoubtedly sentient.

And it made me hanker some beach time. I headed back down the center of Maui to the southern shore and stopped at Kameole 1, 2, or 3. I'm guessing 2. I battled the sand and relished it. I caught a little sun before applying lotion. Even went swimming a little before applying. That meant I was covered in sand (especially the hands) at lotion time, making for a little sandy exfoliation. I lay back and enjoyed the breeze and surf, counted to sixty over and over as I tend to do when lying in the sun. Listened to Verdi's Macbeth in anticipation of seeing it at SF Opera next week, and listened to Mozart because he fits in with the sparkle of the ocean.

Tadzio and Aschenbach were playing the games of Apollo together (Frisbee and football toss). Tadzio was a dark-headed lean thing with a vulgarly defined abdominal muscular structure -- as if such musculature were possible! Other beach meats: I begin to admire manblubber. Old and young men alike are neatly padded for winter. Sometimes, true, it looks healthy, like a warm seal.

I got my sun and water and decided to head back to the inn. I'd had nothing to eat but a bagel and cream cheese (which really is probably more than most of us Americans need, at least a couple days a week). So at 4 I walked over to the sushi place next to the inn. (One of the gays at gay night last night told me that all the tuna here was so fresh it was to die for.) I ordered ahi poke, a local favorite consisting of diced raw tuna in a spicy sauce. It was some serious fish. And delicious. I added a roll of eel and avocado, also tasty.

And then it was nearly time for sunset, so I walked along the beach and snapped a couple dozen photos. With the sun behind them, I couldn't tell how these people were gesturing. I should have guessed they were connecting. That's what people do.

Lava in Hawaii

2007-11-19T23:52:00.001-08:00

On the lanai. It's nine o'clock. The fountain is gurgling and the wind is blowing.

Things: things to tell you about. The little things: Big Beach and Little Beach, though it seems like centuries ago I discovered: the water is clear. I can see my feet on the sand. (Where I'm swimming, there's not much down there but sand. Which is good, because I don't want to touch something living or slimy.) And of course the water is warm. The sand is white and the water is warm. Some of the sand is so deliciously smushy.

Little Beach is the combo gay and nudist beach. There is a surprisingly large contingent of old people who like to be nude: what could have passed for my grandparents at a family reunion was lounging about in the nude a few feet from me. There were only a few gays. No true love, no sex, not that I'm looking.

But also the very beginning: getting in the car and driving south, technically aiming for Big Beach (and Little Beach, its next door neighbor), and thinking, "California is the place I love. This is like California, in some ways more dramatic, definitely warmer, but it is not California." I have found a place that makes me resonate: California. California, and I've only scratched your surface.

I stopped at Starbucks (and don't think for an instant that all of this is supposed to be interesting!) and I thought (racist-like), Why is one of the whitest boys I've ever seen working in a Starbucks on Maui? Shouldn't he be in Georgia, or Kansas? I had a bagel; I was surprised how delicious (warm and crispy) a bagel from Starbucks could be. Sitting there, having finagled my boat of a rental car into a spot in some damn strip mall's parking lot, I mustered the courage to continue driving.

(Why am I here? The senselessness and the shortness of life! One must live and experience and have stories to tell at Heavenly Bingo? But why am I alone? Why am I alone? So I think I'm living the high life. So my bills are paid; I've worked long and hard enough to earn six weeks of vacation. People don't go to Hawaii alone. Freaks do, maybe, and people who go unattached in order to maximize temporary attachments. But you? You are in Hawaii?)

(Fuck yeah, you're in Hawaii, and it's a goddamn state in these goddamn United States of Connect-a-gezoink. No big deal. And being alone? You have a minor introversion disability, but you're hardly alone. You relish your individual freedom as much as you hate sleeping alone. Who could be here with you? No one, really. It wouldn't be Hawaii you were exploring; it would be him. People always trump places and things.)

I continued driving through Californian landscapes and reached Big Beach, possibly inferior to California except for two things: the water was not freezing, and it was crystal clear. And so I had to float in it -- the ocean of California is an evil brooding thing, full of caprice and not little force. The Maui ocean is a humongous mother who lulls. But clouds are possible even in Hawaii. With the coming of shade, I drove south.

And this was an old-fashioned road, the kind with little regard for lanes. This was a road surrounded by what I took for dirt; but it was lava rock. Cooled lava had been blasted to the side so that asphalt could be laid down and a 1.5-lane road built. Scary, driving on a road where you or the on-coming must pull to the side (side permitting, of course).

(I am reminded how common my experience is. Thousands come to Maui each year and experience the same beaten tracks. How do they write about it? More directly? Less personally? More poetically?)

I reached La Perouse Bay. Many come here to snorkel. Fuck fish. I just want to see "lava fields" and "cinder cones."

And I must say: Magma truly bursts through the surface, and lava pours out and out and out and eventually cools. In a perfect world, I would have walked up those streams of lava rock to the source. In a perfect world, I'd bounce on the moon and swim straight through Jupiter. La Perouse Bay's lava fields were incredible: Rock, piles, masses of scratchy noisy rock, born in an instant, creating land beneath your feet. I took dozens of pictures, realizing that they would not capture the reality.

I'm not sure what's planned for tomorrow. Possibly some driving; possibly some self-indulgent sunning and swimming.

Pictures!

2007-11-19T19:54:00.001-08:00

Narrow road to La Perouse Bay
Originally uploaded by Zauberwelt.

Just a quick note to say I've uploaded a million pictures to my flickr site, here. I liked the lava fields at La Perouse Bay even more than I expected I would. Pardon the several self-portraits. It was an exercise in existence. More later, possibly tonight. Maui's one gay bar appears every Monday evening, for two hours only. I'm headed there now.

Robot lungs in Hawaii

2007-11-18T23:38:00.000-08:00

I am sitting on the lanai outside of my room. An artificial fountain hidden by tropical plants and the dark gurgles gently, while the wind, a real wind, flutters the palm fronds. I'm sitting on a medium-height bar chair at a medium-height bar table. A glass ashtray tempts me, but I can never smoke until they invent robot lungs.

It's dark in Kihei, in Maui, in Hawaii. Travel here was not glorious but fine, bearable thanks to my practical distaste for anxiety. Certain things I expect to happen: I expect to feel uncomfortable and burdened behind the wheel of a rental car, and I expect to accidentally pass the resort on my left, then drive too far for a turnaround, then pass it again on my right, drive too far, and just barely manage to get it right the last time around.

It's only 9:30. I could hop back in that strange car with low windows and drive up and down the strip. But I'm choosing to relax on the lanai. I will wake shortly before the sun; I'm facing west, there will be no fiery birth from the ocean (but certainly a cooling dip tomorrow evening), but curiosity, a reliance on my eyes and on light will compel me up.

During one of my airport struggles (beware: you can land in Honolulu to total desertion, not an airport attendant in sight) I ran into a lesbian couple. They were seeking help from a driver waiting for the person indicated on his sign. I listened in, sorta butt in, since they seemed to be having the same problem as I was. Overheard that they were from San Francisco as well. We ended up near each other on the shuttle and talked a little more. They asked where I was staying, and after I told them they warmed up a little bit: "Oh, so your family!"

Ay yi yi, maybe it's time to ditch the beard and long hair and put on another fauxhawk? And definitely double my testosterone suppressants.

Pina, usw.

2007-11-17T01:27:00.001-08:00

A little tipsy, but that's okay. It's Friday.

Haven't written in a while. Been busy. Work and a wonderful pseudo-boyfriend keep a thirty-something busy.

When I'm drunk I sometimes say strange things, like "Ideally I'd love everyone exactly as long as they want to be loved," or something like that.

Tonight I say, "I love everyone." My exes, even my blond ex still (even though that passion was apparently a delusion; oh, H., why do I care about you tonight? Is it sex, and the memory of deep stares? Sex was by no means perfect, though I do not remember a waning), and of course my pseudo-boyfriend. Though not love. I don't use that word. And not using it is freeing. We are exploratory, I and this tall dark beauty, this sad redwood with the poetic back. I am afraid to admit him; it insults exes and may discourage trueloves (you know, the ones who love you at first sight and want to spend every moment basking in your literary and musical genius?). But he is there.

And I love a new person, by way of review: Pina Bausch, the choreographer whose Ten Chi did strange things to the people of Berkeley and the Bay Area tonight. Pina Bausch -- until a week ago I thought it the somewhat senseless name of a dance troup. It is Pina Bausch, the dancer and choreographer in Almodovar's Talk to Her and my favorite movie, And the Ship Sails On. (Ah, if ever humanity's beauty were doubted: look only at Mirko -- and again, and again, and again, until your heart overbeats.)

But I mean Pina Bausch, and let me throw out a few phrases, lest I forget what was seen: Zellerbach, second row on the aisle, feeling air moved by dancers. The two ladies, one makes me think of Marianne Faithfull (unknown until S. and that mysterious, passionate theatrical moment, The Black Rider) -- and no, not the tearing of the gauze, but Marianne's black dress, the heels punching out the belly like my own, the voice coming from a smoked lung. Old dancers, dancers of a different sort, dancers who speak. The sheer audacity of three hours of nonsense, rapidly combining the humorous with the beautiful. And the snow that began in the first half continued to fall through intermission and throughout the whole second act. I worried about the dancers' slipping feet, but they played surely in the paper snow. The main narrator reaching to the audience's fingers and counting them: uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco. The old blond man's wispy hands, encouraging us to snore. The memory that escapes me, and the most important: when was it I loved the narrator most? The second narrator: "Chopsticks! Hara kiri! Samurai! Sushi!" The first narrator, ah! Her grandmother would sit in the rocking chair, and she would sit . . . here!

Alone I was. True, I prowled that intermission audience like a lonely seventh grader. Surely, I thought, surely my aura and energies will attract something, somewhere. Next week, alone on an island. Intended, hoped for: rebirth (again). Reorientation to the (useless, temporary) majesty of this (inconsequential) orb.

But not sad: magically programmed to believe that one scruffy jaw is worth more than a hundred vindicated gods.

Finally watching the masterpiece

2007-10-24T22:41:00.001-07:00

How did I live before La Dolce Vita? And why?

In which everything is happy

2007-10-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening was perfect. After work I called my dad to wish him a happy birthday and had a nice conversation while he was cleaning house at canasta with the grandparents. Then I stopped by the San Francisco Public Library to browse and pick up some music to play through with G. and D. (violin and cello) on Saturday evening. There were some exciting things, including modern pieces by women composers, but both of them looked just a little too modern and difficult for reading. I settled on a Fanny (Mendelssohn) Hensel, an Edouard Lalo, and a Frank Bridge.

I dropped the scores off at my car and decided to check out Hayes Valley for possibilities of solo eating (though I had half expected to skip food altogether -- lunch had been sufficiently meaty). The nice bookstore Bibliohead drew me inside, and I was tempted by a piano-vocal score of Rheingold. Would I actually make time to sit down with it and follow along with a recording, absorbing the language and the shapes of the lines? In anticipation of a live Rheingold at SF Opera next June, hell yeah.

With the score and an anti-No Child Left Behind article I'd picked up at work, I was fully armed for some solo eating. I decided on the kebab place and had a nice chicken gyro. (Well, I mean, you asked what I did last night, didn't you?!?) The article didn't say much new, but it's still always nice to remember that a mandated focus on math and reading forces other things to atrophy (and especially in the most challenged schools, further widening the divide between the have-already-had-for-a-long-times and the still-have-nots).

I encouraged my dad and the other Georgians to vote for Hillary. All I could get was a promise they wouldn't vote for Mitt. It is time for the men to concentrate on fingerpainting and macrame.

Hands washed, chicken bits toothpicked, and lipstick applied ("Middle-Georgia Peach"), it was time for Davies Hall and the San Francisco Symphony.

I am totally converted. I had been pooh-poohing symphonies: "Give me the precision of recording devices! Give me the immediacy of earbuds!" And "Give me a singer, for crying out loud, and some postmodern scenery!" An evening at the symphony seemed a torture of staying awake.

Not so anymore. The San Francisco Symphony has reinspired and reinvigorated me. The beauty and genius of this music, the body-shaking excitement of real instruments right before me . . . Last night, Louis Lortie on the piano in Liszt's Totentanz, playing alternately with affection for and mischievous camaraderie with the orchestra. Several people stood afterward, and rightly so; among other things, he combines fiery capability with a very likable modesty. (Somewhat by chance, I'm seeing him perform an all-Liszt recital next March, which I now anticipate with considerable enthusiasm.) Lortie returned to the piano for Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, which I'd never heard before (being generally frightened off by choruses), but I was delighted by its opening piano solo and clever spare writing for orchestra. The addition of voices became a happy icing on the cake.

The second half of the program was Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky. Somehow I had forgotten that its original form was as the score for the Eisenstein movie I watched that black February back in 1997 or 98 -- possibly the same day I watched 8 1/2 and (coincidentally) plummeted into several years of despair . . . Live, the Prokofiev was glorious, the thirteenth-century Russians never more rousing, the frantic battle on the ice never more exciting. Nancy Maultsby mezzoed beautifully, proving again that you don't have to cram your chin between your bosoms to be a contralto.

* * *

P.S. As I was leafing through the program before the concert began, I noticed that the symphony was performing Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture on Halloween. Suddenly desperate to hear this amazing piece (really perfect upon perfect upon perfect, and no amount of overplaying or overloving can harm it), and knowing for sure that Paul has no plans that night, I ran downstairs to the ticket office and bought me a ride.

Appomattox

2007-10-17T13:08:00.001-07:00

Philip Glass's new opera Appomattox is not a great opera, or even a good opera, but of course it is immeasurably superior to the dozen or so operas I have never created. Going into it, I knew it was not the best opera for me. Glass is pretty in movies but can be pretty dull on the stage. Based on the little bits of his operas I've heard, I've gathered that language is not very important to him. And an opera on the Civil War? Premiering in San Francisco? I thought to have left Robert E. Lee etched on a stony monolith far behind me . . .

The opera begins with the wives of war. The wives of Ulysses Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and Lee sing over and over again that "war is always sorrowful." From the beginning, Grant's wife, played by Rhoslyn Jones, seems to be the noble star of the show, especially compared to Mary Todd Lincoln (a caricature of petty given little chance to shine) and Mary Custis Lee (played by Elsa van den Heever in the most terrible make-up and costume this side of the mighty Mississip). Glass's vocal lines are slightly more melodic than I had expected, but still the sorrowfulness of war (an awkward line, especially over and over) becomes heavy-handed. There are some audience titters as the subtitles underscore the line over and over.

Lincoln arrives, played wonderfully by a bass I've had the pleasure of dining with several times, but is overshadowed by the understated, slightly less iconic figure of Grant. Grant is a tired old man in a beard, plagued by subtle demons we never see. Glass seems convinced the both Grant and Lee are somehow better than the men of today (as he says, "there are no people in public life today with the stature or moral stamina of these two men"), but despite this grumpy-old-man idealism, Glass's Grant does ring true. Andrew Shore played Grant with the quiet dignity and humanity all of us are born with.

But I do injustice to Shore's abilities as an actor. Shore carried Grant entirely -- voice, gesture, posture, expression. This subtlety was missing in the caricature of Lee (though it may be good to caricaturize Lee) by Met veteran Dwayne Croft. (I could detect no similarity between the Dwayne Croft onstage and the headshot in my program, however. A decades-old headshot? Or good make-up?) Shore's Lee moved around with operatic claws, these fake hands that are supposed to convey strength and passion.

As Julia Grant, Rhoslyn Jones did perform on a different level from the others. This was a largely a new cast, a young cast, often unable to match the gravitas of our esteemed singers moving through their forties (or living in our memories). Jones sang with strainless grace and incredible focus of character and moved in a dress as only the great divas can.

* * *

I am . . . unable to go farther. I haven't the strength or discipline to criticize the heart of the opera, its lack of intellect, the soullessness of most of its characters, its sloppy aesthetic (beautiful metal walkways marred by cheesy 19th-century photographs and too-literal costumes; dead horses moving up and down on ropes; fire seemingly left over from Tannhäuser), its terrible heavyhanded descent into "and later times," where we find out (who'da thought?) that the Civil War didn't exactly end racial injustice in this country, and where possibly the longest aria goes to KKK member Edgar Ray Killen -- and Glass relishes, relishes this aria recounting the murder of a black man (and possibly a communist and a Jewish man). I shudder at the thought that it might enter bass-baritone anthologies.

* * *

What I do have the strength for is whining . . . I had miscalculated. I thought that the joy of going to these concerts and operas would greatly outweigh the loneliness of going to them alone. It falls a little short. I am lonely. I feel alone sitting alone. At times, I feel like the whole audience is actively choosing not to be my friend. I feel invisible as I walk around the lobby.

Eh, snap outta it.

P.S. A friend, a good friend, joked that I should win the Nobel for Most Boring Blog. Please, please write to the Swedish Academy on my behalf!

And

2007-10-14T01:55:00.000-07:00

Ideally, I would love everything that came my way exactly as long as it wanted to be loved.

Pretty boring, that.

2007-10-11T13:30:00.001-07:00

I am so pleased. I managed to learn all the notes of the first movement of the second Mendelssohn trio this week! "Learning the notes" means solving fingering problems and being able to play the music at a low but measurable tempo (currently quarter note at 72).

On Sunday night I met with the clarinets. I was feeling a little sulky; it was my only commitment over the weekend, and it seemed like I wanted nothing more than to claim those final two hours of the weekend all to myself. (There are movies to watch and video games to play, after all.) Doubly unattractive was that a stranger was going to come to coach the two clarinets on the Mendelssohn Konzertstuck they're playing with orchestra next month. But I gathered my music (including the Gary Schocker that I am never in the mood to practice) and stood on the street waiting for P. to pick me up.

The clarinets were lovely, and the coach was lovely. After she left, P. handed out some music (Wilder? Wilding? Wild?). I was in a good mood by then: "Oh, heavens. Paul doesn't read wacky modern music. Paul doesn't read handwritten music." I sat down and played the first line; it sounded cool and jazzy, not atonal. "Dear god, Paul can't read jazz. Paul only reads major and minor chords." But we read through several movements, and my mind and fingers surprised me; Paul did in fact read jazz.

A reminder, when I feel utterly useless, when I feel like my greatest musical fans are the people farthest from me, when I feel (in fact) some shame and embarrassment that I merely play classical music, or that I'm merely an amateur, or again, that I'm wasting time in some semi-creation that that no one really cares about . . . my own pleasure. It can be enough.

Rubbed lengthwise against a tree

2007-10-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

Saw San Francisco Opera's production of Tannhäuser last night. Overall, I enjoyed the four-hour experience, but I find I have become a grumpy old man in a box seat on The Muppet Show. One expects perfection from something as large as San Francisco Opera (and as expensive, though I realized that my one ticket wouldn't pay half of what one orchestra member deserved for the gig). The last thing one expects is to be reminded of the dramatic productions from one's elementary, middle, and high schools. These arms and their juvenile gestures must be cut off!

I'm unequal to the task of fully reviewing. Janos Gereben has reviewed the production well. I might add that Ji Young Yang was indeed magically refreshing, the choreography of the harp was ridiculous (wholly inexcusable -- where are the artists of yesteryear?), and, most importantly, until last night, I had never seen a young boy picked up by the shoulders and feet and rubbed lengthwise against a tree.

I cannot emphasize that last bit enough. A boy was picked up by the shoulders and feet and rubbed lengthwise against a tree.

In other news, I was revisited by a though-feeling that came to me at the symphony last week. Going solo is fine, sure, but I hella deserve a companion at these things. Paul should not have to go to the symphony alone. He deserves to be accompanied by a slight, dark-haired pianist with fine but nearly mousy features. Paul should not have to go to the opera alone. He deserves to be accompanied by a stocky, curly-headed blondish Australian baritone. (For the ballet, naturally, Paul deserves to be accompanied by a red-headed marble column.)

Trinking and Mahler

2007-09-28T09:36:00.001-07:00

I am happy. Whether I've explicitly admitted it or not, I'd gotten into a habit of drinking by myself every night, making goofy faces at myself while brushing teeth too recently doused in Guinness, then stumbling into bed, having to get up some hours later to get rid of excess beer. I've broken the habit -- three weeks now -- and am, alas, a boring person again. (Cue other late-night drugs: emailing, blogging, videogaming, movie watching, TV watching, Rupert G. dressed as Ugly Betty.)

I am happy. Last night was the first of my San Francisco Symphony concert series. A Mozart symphony (36? who knows? it was in C and was delightful -- the slow movement quite clever and beautiful) followed by my so-called desert-island music, the CD or score or preprogrammed orchestra I'd most like to have with me while unable to make babies to save the human race: Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. For my subscription I selected a seat in the rear "boxes" of the orchestra section. This was a free-standing chair that came with its very own program, just sitting there waiting for me, and my very own armrests. A small wall kept us roxies (short for rear-boxies) safe from the riff-raff of the rorchies (rear-orchestries). Thank god.

And the song of the earth . . . Wonderful, wonderful. The audience stood and clapped, except for that slight majority tunneling out toward their Jaguars. Some criticism, with the caveat that I don't know how to criticize orchestras: Stuart Skelton barely broke above the full orchestra in "Das Trinklied," and the high notes were things to fear (fear hackling for every millisecond of their scoopy approaches). He pointed at us when saying "du" and conducted various other phrases with his own right hand. He seemed unequal to the stature of Thomas Hampson, who performed hampsonlike (mellow voice, big hair, and pre- and postorgasmic expressions) and off music.

Skelton's most sucessful and enjoyable movement was "Der Trunkene im Frühling." He came well above the orchestra and sang light and lovely, though his sibilants were particularly thick. (I have a thing for detecting so-called speech impediments in my singers and actors. Schwarzkopf is another with freakynesses.) Hampson was particularly effective in the long-lifetime-long "Abschied" that closes the work.

This weekend will be lovely. Anjuska is coming to visit, unless her premonitions get the better of her. On Sunday I'll be meeting with my Berkeley friends for trio music for the first time in many, many weeks. I'll bring the flute and torture a bit. I've also decided to hunker down and start learning the second Mendelssohn trio -- which is going to require (let me just throw out a ballpark figure here) some 112 hours of practice time. DJ Desultory is also spinning Sunday night, so I'll groove to some cool jazz. And sometime in there I might get to see ProfessorPuppyeyes . . .

As mom says, keep those cards and letters coming.

Straight ballet

2007-09-22T10:28:00.001-07:00

I decided to pop in the DVD of Born to be Wild: The Leading Men of American Ballet Theatre for a quick peek while I finish up some cereal and try out some newly cold-brewed coffee before heading out to do laundry. After five seconds I realized I could not support this mini documentary by watching it. The movie begins with this quote from dancer Ethan Stiefel:

The single best thing about being a male ballet dancer is that you're working with women all day. [Smiles] And you're working hands on [Smiles and chuckles] with women all day, and they're pretty fit. And you know, that's the thing people don't know they're missing out on.

Is it really necessary to beat us over the head with straight masculinity at the beginning of a documentary about leading male dancers?

Well, shit, now they've turned to Mark Morris, and he's choreographing the four men. All is forgiven.

Various dancers

2007-09-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

A few fun things to talk about, but feeling a little under the weather.

An old friend and I went out for dinner and drinks on Wednesday night. At the first bar, an androgynous sprite overheard me say that I had never been to the bar before. He took great pains to explain that the "event" of Wednesday nights was up the street at a different bar. We decided to get drinks first. The bartender said we were a cute couple, and we explained that we weren't together. He said, "Well, you should at least do porn together. Now, which one wants to be the boy on the cover?"

At the second bar, we got busted for analyzing a certain guy (who was not up my alley), but there were good-natured smiles all around. A second goof of a guy was charming at first, for having come up to us and asked whether we were also immune to the charms of the boy dancing in and out of the back of his underwear. The second time he stopped by he had morphed into a demon, first blitzing us with lies about his age and then insulting us directly (he threw something at us about TJ Maxx). By then we were on go-go dancer number 3, but I was distracted by the full mob in the bar and the clothed orgy that moving and even standing had become.

In all honesty, I must say I was surprised. I felt quite strange and ugly when I first reached the Castro. There is a certain predominant style, or range of styles, or way of life. Part of it is simply urban, part of it is urban gay, part of it is Castro. (I believe in Atlanta we used to say there was a culture of Midtown gays, so geographical cohesion is not so very strange or even problematic.) The first bar was in fact quite country, quite rural, quite Sears like myself. The second bar was not, but even still I never felt invisible or repulsive.

There were other dancers this week: the Mark Morris Dance Group with Mark Morris's Mozart Dances, based on the 11th piano concerto, the sonata in D for two pianos, and the 27th piano concerto. These were performed live and gloriously last night by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra with Garrick Ohlsson on the concertos and Yoko Nozaki joining for the two-piano sonata. I love Mark -- always and in all ways. He has proven himself and can do no wrong.

I prefer Mark when he is being clever, but I admire him when he is being precise. The evening was solid music and dance, movements calmly reflecting the tacit beauty of Mozart. Naturally, I was most moved by the circle of men in the slow movement of the sonata. The reflected sunshine of Noah Vinson is almost too easy, but even in this movement he was not made too delicate.

I sat, it is true, near at least four other singletons. A middle-aged blond woman to my left, a fiery-headed younger woman to my right, a crazy white- or bleached-headed older man on the other side of her. After the first intermission he engaged the fire-head in conversation; I joined in when I realized she was asking whether he had seen Hell's Kitchen Dance in Berkeley last year. I jumped in, and she said it wasn't "Aszure Barton" but "Barton Azoooor." Before long, bleach-head was offering us water from his bottle and telling us that he had run into the Mark Morris dancers at the nude beach (Baker, presumably) he frequents. (I had noticed the men were in various states of tan and sunburn and figured they were just back from Hawaii or something.)

Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark. I will see you again in December for the Hard Nut, when Drosselmeyer and the Nutcracker Prince will make me cry again . . . (As well as the Prince and Clara at the very end -- I'm not so very gay that a woman will ruin it!)

Finally, to the bulbous white truck that hit me at Bancroft and Fulton: No worries. All is forgiven. I was able to push off your hood to the safety of the sidewalk. My only wound was some dirt on my palm, which was easily brushed off.

Virgin

2007-09-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

I had cause to open my chest of little-used objects, and I was compelled to reach into a plastic container of personal histories and pull out an old journal. I'd been thinking about dredging up something from the past and slinging it around here. And not merely for humor. I've gone through a fair amount of transition and upheaval recently, and it feels like it's time to look back and reconnect to the old PG, so much younger and inexperienced but hopefully closer to original hope and imagination. The journal I chose seemed to be full of the usual useless adolescent pining, until I turned a page and landed on this entry.

It is 15 years ago. I am 16.

5 August 1992

As I said to Donald earlier today, either I've broken a great oath or the two of us must get married.

Yes, what an interesting night it was. Completely wonderful, yes, and interesting.

This is not how I had expected it. Perhaps my expectations could not have been met without an incident like this, though. Perhaps if I were not thrown into the water I would never feel it. I believe that.

I regret in no way what has happened; I do not even regret the breaking of my oath. Why bar things that are of no known detriment and plenty known benefit? Why not smell the flower that's in your hand?

There are two reasons that I see, but they are not enough: personal health and possible loss of focus. The first I have no fear of. We were quite safe and neither of us has a known problem. The second I have no fear of either. I maintained focus throughout the night, and I am focused now. Some things are pleasurable, yes, but I do not believe they will overcome my focus to be at least marginally beneficial to the world's inhabitants.

What am I now, then? I'm the same little boy but more knowledgeable and more happy. Some words no longer apply to me, and some others now do, but that is of no consequence.

What of our relationship, then? It seems to be there. I have a certain amount of love for him -- more now than then, what say? -- and he tells me that he loves me. I seriously doubt that Donald considers me more than a close friend; indeed, he may not think in terms of "life companion," as I do. I don't think that we are the complementary pair I had in mind, but we may work out that way.

Several things are certain: We each are delighted by the other. We each respect the other's differences. We are ultimately comfortable with each other.

If that is insufficient for a substantial relationship, I don't know what wouldn't be. I predict we will stay close -- though at any moment either of us could see a "better" man, and other other would be gone.

How pleasant, though, it is to enter his room in the morning and join him in the bed and be well-received! How wonderful it is to touch lips! How wonderful those animal anti-procreation instincts are! Ah!

I'll calm down.

We shall see.

* * *

I must be careful, though. I do not want to end up with a bunch of lovers. I don't want to go through life moving from one body to another. This now is either a transition or a hidden lasting love.

But it is true: At any given moment of the day I would rather be entwined with Donald. There I must be careful. If such feelings last and grow even the slightest bit, I would risk becoming something I do not want to be.

Perhaps I should take Zorba's philosophy? I should fill myself with what I desire until I want no more?

No.

I miss Donald considerably.

* * *

Now I am quite restless. I miss the company of Donald greatly. I am sure this will pass soon, but right now I want him.

Why? Do I rationally desire him? Mostly, methinks. His tender sincerity -- which I am tempted to pray is not his adroit acting, which I doubt -- is wonderful. Coupled with his humor and internal and external beauties, it is not odd I should like him. I do not like only his flesh.

Admittedly, I like what he perhaps represents: at least moderate love toward PG. This is most evident in actions, so I would miss that.

Oh, Donald! Will you forget me? Will you find another and look back on me and laugh? Will I become like my best friend? Please, no.

And yet, what am I doing? I'm placing myself too low. Come back up, PG! Donald is Donald, and you are you. Donald's feelings toward me could perhaps be best described as inconsequential (if they are not the feelings I would like).

I want to be singular in your eyes. Not that I think I always should be, but right now that would be quite nice. Quite nice.

Happy

2007-09-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

At the risk of seeming blind to the realities, I must say I'm a little happy now (being, say, since Monday). The weekend was a little insane, as somewhat captured in this previously censored paragraph:

The last postings have been insane. To those of you who could have chastised me but let me go this time, I thank you!

I'm not sure things are improving. I was rather insane this weekend. How insane? So insane that I avoided my usual coping methods for fear that they would take me too much farther into the insanity. (Are they gone forever? Let us hope.) Why was I insane? No reason. The usual. A transition period. A sore back (stupid people shouldn't attempt exercise without stretching first) led naturally to fears of being stuck in my apartment in pain with no one to call. There are people, of course; the greater obstacle is something akin to pride.

Still, one looks around an apartment on a Friday night . . .

Also censored were some feelings about something new in my life. These feelings (old now) have been fully restored and are now available on a Criterion DVD:

I'm engaging in . . . an affiliation . . . that is against sense and reason. Sure, it made me a little insane this weekend, and for all the reasons typical of the weakest of my Piscean brethren (combined with what I must be able to claim as my very own weaknesses). Not it so much as all it entails: my aloneness, the wacky power of emotion, the reminder that who I am is partly a reaction to who is around me to love.

Should I or shouldn't I mention this . . . affiliation?

In general, some amazing things have happened:

- Seeing one of my favorite gay movies, William Friedkin's film of Mart Crowley's play The Boys in the Band at the Castro Theatre
- Going a week without fermented self-medication
- Checking out the fantastic new Olafur Eliasson exhibit at SF MOMA, including a few minutes spent in a humongous freezer (7 degrees Fahrenheit) examining Eliasson's ice car while snuggling in a MOMA-provided blankie
- And the affiliation, doomed but delicious

And there are also a lot of other random things I love. These bear thanksgiving:

- The people on the bus -- how I love you! Especially today. We really all came together on some of those sudden stops.
- Old friends on the phone -- you're fantastic!
- Text-messaging friends -- keep 'em coming!
- Instant-messaging friends -- you're wonderful!
- Clarinets in my little apartment making music against my own little piano
- The bushes in my backyard that are turning yellow despite California's Eden
- The Castro Theatre -- tonight it's Friedkin's Cruising with . . .
- My dear friend, may the gods protect him from leather daddies
- and, finally, the nice couple at the corner with their coffee and bagels

Thank you

2007-09-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

My darling Esses, thank you both for talking with me today. How easy it is to take for granted those we love and who love us!

The ramblings become inappropriate

2007-09-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

I have to say something. Even if it makes me a fool later. Because I want to be a living fool. This programming . . . is so very successful. These human chemicals, so very powerful. The forgotten joy impossibly returns. Tomorrow, sure, the remembered sorrow. But tonight -- tonight we sleep with the memory of the forgotten joy!

Everything is tempered: Emotions, chemicals, are heightened with cocktails, with these winds and fog, and with Strauss, that damn composer who these couple years has kept me tied to earth, to the West, to history, with his damnably Wagnerian and Mahlerian emotional soup. Strauss, whose Die Liebe der Danae nearly rivals Daphne in consistent perfection. "Wie umgibst du mich mit Frieden" -- this heart-bearing jewel of an aria.

Temper, temper. I sleep to awake to the eternal joke. But tonight I dream of far away lands, of my uncle Wotan, my uncle Wotan who . . . loves me? No, it is not Uncle. It is Wotan. Morning: ticky ticky ticky ticky tappy tick. In the blood: flavors, scrapes, and invisible scenes bubbled in oblivion.

Review: Sweeney Todd

2007-08-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

Gosh forgive me, I left A.C.T.'s production of Sweeney Todd at intermission. It was not entirely their fault. There were slightly extenuating circumstances and various biologies. The production held exciting promise: the cast itself doubles as the orchestra. One imagines (if one did not see) Patti LuPone lugging a tuba, doing double duty as character and oom-pah.

What I saw last night was a beautifully lighted but stagnant set, the character-musicians sitting in chairs along the side playing (from memory and well) while whichever characters took center stage and sang (well and faithfully). The plot, reality, and drama were distilled. This was essentially a concert performance of Sweeney Todd, and after being disappointed by my favorite song (the judge's dark "Joanna"), I knew there was nothing in the second act I needed to see.

I (we) left, allowed a stranger laden with tennis rackets and yoga mats to share a cab, and went to a (his favorite) bar to continue building this passionate (dare I say violent?) friendship. Men -- real men -- real men still exist. They are staunch. They are swirling galactic gases trapped in crystal. They are for loving, hating, fearing, learning. Oh, heavenly Guinness!

We great friends walked our thirty and forty blocks home, in love with this town. "What the fuck's wrong with this place? We're walking block after block at midnight, the streets are completely peaceful, the fog is full of kisses. There's not a soul to harass and attack us or rob and take from us what we never deserved anyway. We must be in heaven."

Night -- damn -- alone!

2007-08-29T22:56:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting alone in my apartment, possibly a little tipsy. It's been a rough day. That friend I mentioned two posts ago -- (no, not Alberto) -- he decided to read my blog for the first time in a long time, and it affected him. We exchanged inconclusive emails today. And I instant-messaged with a darling ex, flirted with a blog friend (hello, S..! Let's by bloggyweds!), and chatted long and hard with an extremely eligible coworker who has arranged a goodbye lunch with a ray-of-sunshine (and possibly Baptist, based on his dashing khakis) temp who is returning to (gulp!) college next week.

But I digress: I'm sitting here somewhat late at night, possibly tipsy under the influence of a delicious drink-meal called Spaten Optimator, watching Joan Sutherland sing with Gerald Moore on a DVD from the BBC called World Singers. It is 1961, and she has never been more mannish, never sung with looser diction, and never been more divine. Holy sweet child of Jesus's illegitimate child john Jr.! Trills in "Care selve" to restore the Acropolis to its former glory, and pearls? Joan, let's talk about pearls.

Good god, now Elizabeth Schwarzkopf is singing "Drink to Me Only." Maybe I'll stay with you all night. She's got wild vowels. "Dreeenk tooo mih ohnly weeth thiiine iiiyes." I've always been bothered by her slight lisp. But she does have a substantial gap between her front teeth, which according to popular urban legend means she is oversexed, which is always good. And now she is saying "Zank you, Gee-rald. Auf Wiedersehen!"

Oh, sweet Jeezlebub. Now it's Christa Ludwig, presented as a "young singer." Oh, Christa, you are forever my love for Das Lied von der Erde. Gerald says this is your first appearance on English television. Let me listen to your Brahms . . . (Alas, you look old already, already the lady with one buttock from Candide.) Note also that Gerald has just defined mezzo-soprano as if it is an unknown thing -- a combination of the richness of the true contralto with the brightness of the true soprano. Oh, heavens, she's singing Mahler. "Rheinlegendchen." My first hearing was Janet Baker. This is serious . . . Perfect. And followed by Christa's "Tod und das Mädchen." The perfect nightcap.

I love you all. Night, night.