BLOG | SUBSCRIBE | SEARCH, ARCHIVES, ETC.
so after a rousing game of spades to pass the rain storm (during which jamie and i totally kicked ass) i bundled up in faggy blanket wrap and took some pics of the ridic surf. high tide. right up to the frickin’ dunes. here you go : (click the “more” link at the bottom to see all 9 photos)
no that’s not a photobooth background. i took that shot with the isight on the company macbook pro that i’m borrowing this weekend to do some script work for an event. i snapped that shot right before it started to drizzle.
yesterday, out here in the pines, i overheard some guy say that a 20 foot long fish washed up on the beach near fisherman walk. that walk is only a few down from the house we’re staying in so i thought it would be worth it to check it out. bobby and i went down there after having a cocktail and lo and behold : no fish. bollocks.
last night we all went to ‘tea’ - which is another way of saying ‘get drunk during the day.’ our friend - and favorite broadway gypsy - jose lana bought us some drinks. rock on.
i don’t think i really ate dinner last night except for some nuts and snickers bar. i think i’ll go eat something. i promised everyone that i would make breakfast this morning but there are only six eggs and six of us so .. oatmeal anyone?
ah, life. (what a fag..)
hubbell. hubbell gardner. you are so many men. we all have one of you in our lives. that intellectual lothario. that dashing deviant. why must you taunt us so?
we, the k-k-k-katies of the world. our sex scenes are all about face, hair and nails. we swallow sleeping pills with a casual, spastic toss of our fabulously straight-ironed hair. a bell-bottomed flower print pants-suit is the perfect uniform for beach volleyball, and you simply can’t escape our brisket.
this one time, i was drunk at the opening of the bryant park film festival - you know, when they show films on a big screen in the park - and they were playing ‘the way we were.’ i was obnoxious - screaming lines at the screen before the characters spoke them. “i want… oh i want… i want us to love eachother!” yelling to babs that she was too good for him! forget him while you can!
it was a mess.
but alas, i always find my hubbell. someone blonde, in character at least. and who writes stupid books that wish they could be films. and yes, someone who always runs off with some pinch-faced bore in the end. but that’s what us big-nosed geniuses always get, eh?
and you’ve always been that nice gentile boy?
oh, hubbell. how you tease.
fire island : seminal epicenter of sun-drenched gayness, pillar of homo joy. i’ve been to this place twice. both times working the fire island dance festival, but this weekend, i was able to experience it for the first time divorced from hauling heavy platforms up and down boardwalks and dealing with hundreds of dehydrated patrons.
my affair with the island started long ago. i met this girl, remy, at an acting summer camp and she told me about her favorite film, parting glances - starring richard ganoung and steve buscemi. in this film, michael (ganoung) and nick (buscemi) are dealing with the reality of nick living with AIDS while michael fantasizes about time they spent living it up on fire island. this film is brilliant. the direction is blissful and each shot seems to be embraced perfectly by the score (mostly excerpts from a mozart rondo and snippets of bronski beat). this film began my infamous affair with the island.
last night i saw a jihad for love at ifc center. this movie was produced by the same guy that made ‘trembling before g-d,’ that film about gays and lesbians in the orthodox jewish community. a jihad for love deals with gays and lesbians living in the muslim world and reconciling their religion and their sexuality - a personal struggle that is exacerbated by the strict and discriminatory laws of the countries they live in.
the screening included an intro speech by the filmmakers - producer Sandi Simcha Dubowski, director Parvez Sharma - and Imam Muhsin Hendricksman, a south african muslim man who appears in the film. the filmmakers expressed joy that their screenings have made a huge impact on how gays and lesbians are dealt with in the muslim world, if not legislatively, then sociologically - screening to sold out theaters across the world. unfortunately the turn-out at ifc was weak. we rushed to the theater to get the best seats only to find a nearly empty house peppered with a couple of gay men and the filmmakers themselves. we got some free popcorn with jess’ auteur membership card and camped out in some cushy, center seats.
the film was fascinating/disturbing/heartbreaking/inspiring/informative and beautiful. in contrast to trembling before g-d, a jihad for love featured people who’s lives i could relate to easily. they were all relatively young and - i’ll say it - attractive. the ‘characters’ portrayed could easily have evolved into stars in the next big, gay sundance hit from the muslim world. the only thing this movie lacked was individual throughlines. most characters were only represented in one continuous segment and their stories weren’t given the freedom to resonate off each other.
another issue that was touched on but not thoroughly fleshed out, was the different experiences of gay men in the muslim world versus lesbians. gay men are persecuted and banished from society, but lesbians - specifically because they are women - simply do not exist. one scene in the movie showed a lesbian couple searching an islamic law book for verses against lesbianism and coming up nearly dry. in fact, one could make an entirely separate film about the struggles of lesbians in the muslim faith. there were so many unanswered questions that could have been posed to the women featured in this film. i wanted to know how their experience as a woman rates to their experience as a lesbian. do both just totally suck? does it even matter?
there was minimal discussion of transgender issues in the film - e.g. this one drag party that was documented in a trippy way and looked cool. but other than that there was only one man who described living as a woman and then realizing that it was displeasing allah to change the body he had been given, so he quelled his transgendered feelings, got a wife and had gay affairs on the side. as in most films (ye, any mass media representation) gay issues and gender issues are usually kept separate. unfortunately, the intersectionality of gender, sexuality and religion was kind of thrown to the wayside in this film - a mistake that may have limited a jihad for love to only scratch the surface of a tantalizing and fascinating world of issues.
all that said, it was still an important film screening that every gay person and their mother should have attended (don’t worry, i called mine to tell her about it). unfortunately new york gays are too ghettoized to realize that their community reaches outside the borders of manhattan and their cushy junior one bedrooms. just as the rich, white, gay intelligentsia has difficulty in associating with the transgendered community, gays in the muslim community also remain as strangers. the ramifications of a community of people discriminated against for the same reason, coming together to solve problems and actualize the goals of their social movement would be huge. unfortunately, most people had better things to do on thursday night. i only hope that like, trembling before g-d, a jihad for love makes an impact on the netflix circuit - maybe it’s easier to stomach international atrocities with cosmo in hand, on your crate and barrel sofa.
i’m laying on a king-sized bed in aka, a hotel near central park where my friend amanda’s company is putting her up. we’re watching top chef on a sony flatscreen across the room. there’s some drama on tv with a team of chefs that’s trying to execute an asian food menu. shit’s going down.
earlier tonight we had some good sushi at omido. the desserts rocked. i ate this awesome mango parfait with marscapone cheese and amanda had this choccy cake. our friend ashley had some crazy truffle thingies that you dip in tea sauce and eat with a vanilla flan. weird. but yum.
this place is sweet. the bathtub looks awesome. amanda said she took a bath but didn’t notice the awesome, designer bath salts so she has to try again.
once we got back to her hotel we watched a show on the CW called “farmer wants a wife.” it was ridic.
omg. i’ve been here for over an hour and amanda just told me that she has beer. i guess it’s ok. i still owe her 20 bones. i want a nice hotel to escape to in other cities. rock.
so i just recently worked on this amazing piece by kristina satter called, ‘the knockout blow.’ the above image is from a video i made for the piece featuring jess looking like a freak. this piece was fucking amazing (if i do say so myself). i should have posted about this four days ago to tell you all to come see it (’you all’ - who reads this anyway?) but alas i was too busy working on it.
aside from doing some crazy video (which i’ll hopefully be able to post on this site soon) i also wrote a bunch of songs from the amazingly ridiculous text that tina wrote. it was an utter joy. the score ended up being kind of soul-funk-jazz-musical theater-ass jams, and was received very well.
don’t feel bad if you missed it though, we’ll be back at the ontological hysteric theater in august, with some new songs and awse moves.
(btw, tina is a genius who uses words like “awse”)
the piece also featured eliza bent and julia sirna-frest - two kick ass performers with kick-ass pipes - and of course the ‘diminutive and charming’ jess barbagallo playing a fucking werewolf slut. how is this not the coolest thing in the world?! oh wait.. it is.
today i had to get up early and help load in a show for my job at broadway cares/equity fights AIDS and i ended up being all done by 9:30am. i headed home and went to the farmer’s market down on skillman avenue in sunnyside (where i live) for the first time this season. i bought some green garlic, thinking it was leeks and ran into my friend tom and his dog.
it was daytime on a saturday, and i didn’t have anything to do. i decided to make the most of living in sunnyside and get on my bike and see some sights.
first stop was the queens library.
i had passed this place a bunch of times on the bus and i wanted to step inside and see what they had. the selection was limited but i decided to get a library card anyway. it’s really thick and makes my wallet too big. the only book i noticed and thought about picking up was Thalia: !Belleza!: Lessons in Lipgloss and Happiness - a book by thalia, the telenovella star - but unfortunately i didn’t have backpack on me and didn’t want to bike with it. (don’t worry, t, i’ll be back.)
if i were megaman and i had a million lives
i would walk through the fire for you
i could shoot energy from a hole in my arm
and if it’s cold, i’d keep you warm with my helmet.
this evening, i sat waiting for my friend jo williamson to meet me to talk about her website that i’m developing. it was windy and the light hit the buildings at a sideways angle. a park official tried to talk two homeless people out of setting up camp and two middle-aged gay men were standing near a card table with a banner that read “jackson square alliance.” a man sat by himself on a bench in the center, wearing large headphones and glasses - beside him a large clear plastic bag filled with many opaque plastic bags. at the other end of my bench a woman sat with some fashionable flats and an iced coffee in a translucent plastic cup from a deli. a man dressed like a hip bike messenger came along with piercings and what seemed to be a tour group. he asked a colleague if the spanish couple from the top floor were coming and if he remembered their names. an older couple walked diagonally in front of me. the man was gaily smoking a cigar and the woman walked with a smile and bunchy, red curls. they sat by a bird-bath-type sculpture in a corner.
the fountain was fully operational in an area enclosed by a fence, dotted with what looked to be miniature maple trees, but not japanese maples. i looked at the other taller trees around the park. i heard a subway pass underneath, the A C E trains. i thought about how deep the strata reached before it opened unto subway tunnels. i thought about cramped roots, breaking through a subway car’s ceiling as it whooshed uptown.
then in my mind the ground began to shake.
i felt my sacrum press against the newly replaced wooden slats of the bench i was sitting on as i was thrust upward. the entire island of the triangular square began to detach from the earth below and the entire park and its contents began to slowly climb upwards into the sky. the seat felt comfortable and safe, like on an old-fashioned rollercoaster. no one tried to jump to the ground even though our rate of ascent made this more than possible. instead we all seemed to be content with our exodus - somehow procrastinating thinking thoughts about what actual life would be like on our floating island. we didn’t think about food or water, or about what was going to happen to our families. we just sat and stood content with our imperfect utopia as it rose further and further up through the sky. soon there was no more earth to be seen and we were swallowed by clouds. the light and the wind somehow magically remained an it was as if time was frozen in a graceful snapshot. we continued floating upwards until the end of time - and we explained all there was to explain about the world as we left it, and we shared imaginative stories about what had changed since we’d gone, and gambled on earth’s continued existence. i can’t say we were happy, but in my hallucination there was a sense of ease i imagine all utopias must grow from.
in walked jo, to the park. she had on a beautiful scarf around her head, which she later questioned wearing. i told her it looked great, because it did.
