i fell in love with a dead boy

for various reasons, i am (as it was accused of my character naldo in the silent concerto) “living the monastic life,” and doing a lot of soul searching.  i’ve been stuck with my rewrites of adrian on the island (but i am seeing ariadne auf naxos this week at the met so that may be inspiring!).  i’ve been cleaning my apartment a lot.

i’ve also been spending more time with frank o’hara, particularly brad gooch’s biography city poet.  i admit i have a bit of a crush on someone who’s been dead since 1966.  he was strikingly handsome, a lover of music, a stunning poet, a modern art curator, a piano player, and 5′7″.  what more can you want?  well, a pulse yes.  i am fully aware that had i known o’hara in real life, he’d probably have no time for me.  and i am also aware that this crush is very much intellectual as i very much need to sit with some words these days.

on my journal i have an o’hara quote from “mayakovsky,” which is the poem don draper read aloud on mad men (which is how i came to read o’hara):

i love you. i love you,
but i am turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

hello, he is my new imaginary bff!

i’m pretty early on in o’hara’s life in the gooch book, but his young obsessions with hindemith, joyce, and stravinsky resonate with me (i had a strong connection to joyce as a teenager as did any artistically inclined person with a penis).  his love of movies, of the arts . . . and his pursuit of a vision of himself in these things . . . i understand that too.  perhaps i am seeking a new vision of myself.

i have decided to pay a small tribute to him in adrian on the island.  i read selections of lunch poems aloud while working on the play.  i am not sure if our voices are at all similar, but the fact that he was killed by a jeep on the beach at fire island pines makes me feel he is linked to my experience there and why i am writing this play.  i don’t know if gooch tells us where the death occurred, but i have walked the length of that beach several times, and i am sure i have walked past the spot with my ipod on and perhaps an incredibly good song comes up on shuffle.

he is buried out in long island along with jackson pollock.  as soon as the weather gets better i am planning on taking a day trip to visit.

blog stats

i love that the two posts that get the most hits on my blog are this one and this one.

david bailey and madonna ftw!

uganda

i just saw this on gawker:

[moses, a gay man from uganda seeking asylum in the u.s., hides his face at a press conference in d.c. today while announcing a multi-city tour to help decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. image via getty]

it puts so much in perspective for me.  this is incredibly tragic and awful and barbaric of the ugandans to do this.

and not to mention the conservative christian taliban of this good nation for supporting many of these anti-gay (and in this case “kill the gays”) legislation in africa.

freewill astrology: aquarius

last year taught me the oracles really can’t predict a thing.

aquarians had jupiter (in astrology the planet of good luck) transiting their sign all year last year.  for me, aquarius rules my 7th house which is the house of committed relationships and business relationships (such as agents).  no agent or boyfriend came my way last year.  in fact i didn’t really date anyone seriously last year.  and i actually reached out to a couple agents via recommendations from industry friends and i got zero response (i somehow have managed to build some sort of career without an agent and instead of feeling really proud of that, i still feel like i am not a “real” playwright because i don’t have an agent).   i learned that i couldn’t take the oracles literally anymore.  well, many of you have common sense and could have told me that.  i have many things, but common sense is not one of them it seems.

however, i still keep checking the oracles.  especially this week since i am 36 tomorrow and birthdays are very sensitive times for me.  i’ve been looking at them as tools for contemplation and inner understanding.  i also use them for writing prompts (i have a great book that uses the i ching in this way).  i love rob brezny’s horoscopes because they are so enigmatic and require real thinking and processing.  he is the first astrologer i’ve read who has addressed my gripe with jupiter last year:

i got an email from an aquarian reader complaining that the astrologers she consulted in early 2009, including me, were wrong about the year ahead. all of us said it would be a time of expansion and opening for your tribe, a phase of rapid growth and fresh energy. but according to this reader, 2009 turned out to be very different. every aquarius she knew had a tough ride. here’s my response: expansion and opening did indeed occur, but their initial effects weren’t what you expected. they shattered the old containers of your life in order to make it possible for you to create new, bigger containers that would be more suitable for the person you’re becoming. and this year, 2010, is when you will work in earnest to create those new containers. now’s a good time to dig in.

this is what i am going through at the moment.  artistically speaking–since i try to keep this blog as artistically oriented as possible–it’s been very strange.  i feel i have been doing some good work, but i somehow feel very ambivalent about my career at the moment.  it’s like after being reminded time and time again that the system in place for me to do work in this city is not helpful and often downright hostile, i really don’t know how to conduct my career.  i don’t know what to aspire to. i keep writing.  writing every day is important to me.  but i don’t just write for myself.  i want to be produced.  i want to connect with an audience.  i want to collaborate with other artists i respect.  and it’s just a constant struggle.  i used to have a shape for what a writing career would look like and now i really don’t know what that shape is.  i feel i have a very busy and very active life being a member of the new york theatrical community.  but it’s like we live in a world with very little understanding of artistic vocation.  if i don’t make a living or win some awards, lay people just look at me like they don’t know what i’m talking about . . . and sometimes i find i too just don’t know.

perhaps i just need to reorient my inner compass.

working on adrian on the island these last couple days.  i’m starting to love this little play.  we’ll see.

this weekend

1.  scrubbed the walls of my apartment.  for realz.  i have a big cheap place to live, but it’s hard for 1 person to keep the thing clean and it’s old and in need of paint and repair.  i just signed a 2 year lease so i will be there until 2012 . . . and will be as old as my ex was when we met in that apartment september 2002.

2.  i was rejected from the sundance theater lab . .. again.  i took a chance this year because they were doing it in new york and i wanted to get some more developmental time for marea, which needs to be completed, but we have very little funds at packawallop these days to undertake something that huge.   our four day workshop at here arts center was intense and expensive.  i was very proud of it, but the project is half done.  i really hoped sundance would have given me some time to finish the miami sequence.  guess not.

3.  i read in bed with the cats.  i was remarking that it’s one of the things i miss about having a boyfriend . . . reading in bed with coffee on sunday mornings.  i realized i didn’t need a boyfriend to do that.  it was me, the cats and bach’s brandenburg concertos and the double violin concerto (with stern and perlman doing the honors).

4.  i got halfway through rebuilding my itunes library, which i needed to do thanks to one of my hard drives crashing.

5.  i cooked.

6.  i took a yoga class.

7.  i slept . . . and i think i finally kicked my cold.  knock wood.

8.  i enjoyed albums by annie, beach house, charlotte gainsbourg, spoon, owen pallett and shearwater.

9.  i finally watched tropic thunder.  and i loved it.  i really think robert downey jr. is a brilliant actor.  and i am going to have nightmares about tom cruise with his uber hairy chest doing some nasty hip-hop moves.

10.  i did not look at adrian on the island.  i think i needed to get away from the play for a few days.  rewrites begin today.

11.  i celebrated my friend steven’s birthday on friday, which was very fun and involved lots of food and wine . . . which reminds me . . . thursday is um approaching.  oh joy.

adrian on the island

i just completed a draft.

it’s a giant mess.  it’s really just awful.

but it’s a draft and i can work with that.

i went into the bathroom at work and i cried.

a single man

after farting around for a while, i finally got around to watching a single man this past weekend.

first off, i really loved the movie.  i have always had a big crush on colin firth who is just an extremely talented actor and an extremely handsome man.  he gives a performance here as george falconer that rivals his turn as mr. darcy in pride and prejudice. julianne moore also delivers a very delicious supporting turn as  george’s friend and one time lover charley.  i loved the meditative quality of the movie and its lapses into dream-like lyricism.  i loved the time-specificness of it (although i admit now that between this film and mad men, there is little chance for my play the october crisis to really do much of anything as both employ the cuban missile crisis and 1962 chic in a similar way that my play does), particularly the contextualization of a gay man such as christopher isherwood (who was very progressive for 1962) in 1960s los angeles and the world of gay rights.  i find the trajectory of gay popular culture and high culture fascinating and i’d like to think my work responds in many ways to that trajectory.

many critics have responded to how stylish the film is.  and it did at times feel a little overstyled, particularly in the casting of the younger men who looked a little too much like what a fashion designer would consider to be paragons of male beauty (male models are to gay men what female models are to straight women . . . often incredibly impossible looks for us mere mortals to achieve and triggering for many of us with body/appearance issues).  however, ford’s aesthetic for the most part meshed with mine.  i thought a lot about the way scott and i labor over the look of a packawallop production and you can bet (william bell was a good example) that even if we had $10 to do a show, it would be styled within an inch of its life.   logically i can defend this by stating that i appreciate the way style can create a structure of sorts and it can reveal much about the way experience and observation is inherently aestheticized–something scott and i got from susan sontag’s notes on camp.  but speaking from a purely personal level, is my insistence on creating beautiful theater and writing (it’s highly important that my work has a linguistic beauty as well being presented in a theatrically beautiful way) a response to my feelings of insecurity about my looks or my body (my lowercaseletterness, if you will)?  it led me to wonder what are the reasons various artists gay or straight would choose a highly styled aesthetic?  it also led me to wonder what are the different kinds of beauty one can aspire to in art?  i wouldn’t necessarily say richard strauss’s score to salome is beautiful in a pleasant way, but i think (like the hustler in a single man points out), its representation of ugliness and perversity achieves a level of beauty that is unique and unmistakable.

i have no real conclusions, but it’s something to turn over in my head with adrian on the island (which is about a whole lot of things at the moment, but the beauty/worth issue is something that runs through it).  perhaps it’s not so much to do with beauty as it is to with the sensual or the desire to experience something sublime in art?  ford’s images were certainly sensual in the film and many of them deftly tugged at my heartstrings.  but why is that?  and how come i responded in such a way when others felt the film too shallow (something i accused almodovar of being with broken embraces)?  is it what we bring to a film?  is it my personal definition of beauty?  is our perception of beauty in art as varied and subjective as the way we perceive it in people?

10 things i love right now

1.  getting a “like new” copy of brad gooch’s city poet: the life and times of frank o’hara for $2.99

2.  downloading the new beach house album off itunes on my iphone.  easy peasy.

3.  my sailor sapporo fountain pen (inked with sailor blue ink) and my pelikan m205 fountain pen inked with (private reserve american blue ink).  i really don’t think i want to use anything else (although i do on occasion).

4.  the poetry of james merrill

5.  beverly sills singing the final scene of roberto devereuax

6.  tom ford’s a single man

7.  tchaikovsky

8.  my space heater

9.  new albums by owen pallett and spoon

10.  picasso’s minotaur (which has found its way into the new play now titled adrian on the island)

oh dang (or how mcnally nabbed bellini before me)

i just read about terrence mcnally’s new play.

my obsession with la sonnambula made me want to try writing about bellini, but i see that will not be happening.  of course, mcnally’s plays about opera are wonderful and mr. man got me into callas and introduced la sonnambula into my life when i first saw master class. . . so i gotta give it up to him.

speaking of, i wish the met would not listen to the haters and bring back sonnambula with dessay (a met season rumor site does not have it on the roster  . .. dessay is expected back next year in lucia and there is a rumor of her doing i puritani in a couple years) . . . or at least release it on dvd.  i really loved that production and i am sad i didn’t see it.

more homophobic bs, this time in indiana

warning: bad language ahead . . . sorry, but it has to be said:

i just read (and commented on) this post on towleroad.

between haiti, the recent defeats of gay marriage in ny and nj, the current prop 8 trial (and the supremes banning the broadcast of the trial), and the shitstorm that is massachusetts, i am just feeling like why bother with 2010?  can we just fast forward to 2011?  why is the world so fucked up?

to senator yoder of indiana, no matter what you say, your actions are an attack on gay and lesbian people.  you are essentially saying that our relationships are trivial.  they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.  we don’t deserve to have the same rights that a heterosexual person does with regards to their life partner.  i don’t care what your beliefs are.  i seriously don’t give a fuck.  personally, i believe marriage should be reserved for two people in love, but that doesn’t stop young bimbos marrying old geezers for cash or teenagers getting married because of an unwanted pregnancy or arranged marriages or drunk assholes getting drive thru marriages in vegas.  however, if i were to meet mr. right tomorrow and we date for a while and fall madly in love . . . i cannot marry him.  this does not compute.

every week on towleroad i read about some victim of violence or harassment.  recently, a friend of mine was attacked on the streets of new york city by a couple of homophobes.  actions such as yours, such as the votes by our lovely ny state senators, by grade a bitches like maggie gallagher, by the mormon and catholic churches contribute to this kind of harassment and hate.  what is it to you?  is your right to hate so precious to you?  are you unable to reconcile whatever your religious views are with secular society (newsflash: we don’t all believe in god/your god/your sect . . . so why should the rules of your religion apply to me?).

sometimes i wish i were a political playwright.  i probably should try.  i’d like to write a play about you or maggie gallagher, because i just don’t understand.  i don’t comprehend how you can spend so much energy–especially considering the devastation in haiti, the state of the economy, the state of our schools, health care, etc–on something that has zero impact on you?  you and your cronies are hateful, evil people.  plain and simple.

i know you all resent being called bigots.  but that is just what you are.

edit: you can email senator yoder here.