06.30.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:21 am by Beau
Back around March of this year, I made mention how I’d written my first ever fan letter to an author I’d been reading over the years, Thomas Disch. I’d written this letter mostly because I was pretty sure it was going to get to him since he lives just a few miles down the road from me. None of this sending off a note of thanks to an author in care of a publisher or any such nonsense; just a heart-felt note dropped at the local post office and put into his post office box about five inches from our own. All said and done, I was pretty happy with myself for actually doing the thing, since I’m more of the type to admire quietly from afar. You can imagine my surprise when Thomas Disch appeared on our doorstep this past Saturday just to drop by and thank me for the note.
I actually stood there with my mouth open for a full two beats before I remembered myself and invited him in. We sat down and I fawned over him and we talked about his books and the different kinds of critical review he writes (art and theater), his poetry, his science fiction, and his new passion, painting. Of course my real interest was in his writing process and though we didn’t get into it in depth, I gathered enough morsels for our next time together which will probably be when I take him up on his invitation to go over to his place and see his paintings.
I was actually trying not to be such a wide-eyed gawker around him, tempering my enthusiastic “I just love ‘em” gushing and talking about what about his stories that I loved. When he asked me what my favorite book was (The Sub), he confided in me that although that series of books (The MD, The Priest, The Businessman, The Sub) are considered his supernatural Minnesota series named for their repeated location in that state, The Sub was very much written about Barryville and Sullivan County, a depressed, rural area whose main industry is hunting and prisons and while I can’t admit to actually having known that for fact, it became obvious to me that I had imprinted his story over where we lived, being able to pick out landmarks and geography for the last few years. It was as if two worlds finally touched and it rang like a bell for me.
Anyway, it was totally cool and I’m looking forward to talking to him again sometime. Anyone in for a good read along the horror vein should check out his books, though a few are now out of print. They’re very well written and have a thick streak of black humor that makes them even that much better.
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06.26.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:15 pm by Beau
“Anyone born and bred in Massachusetts learns early on to recognize the end of winter. Babies in their cribs point to the brightening of the sky before they can crawl. Level-headed men weep at the first call of the warblers. Upstanding women strip off their clothes and dive into the inlets and ponds before the ice has fully melted, unconcerned if their fingers and toes turn blue. Spring fever affects young and old alike; it spares no one and makes no distinctions, striking when happiness is least expected, when joy is only a memory, when the skies are still cloudy and snow is still piled onto the cold, hard ground.”
Oh my God. When I read this first paragraph from Alice Hoffman’s new book, The Probable Future, I just about crapped myself it was so good. I’m only on page eleven but it has only gotten better and better. I’m so excited about this book I’m going to wet myself.
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06.25.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:49 pm by Beau
With nothing better to do with my days and nights right now, I’ve taken on another whimsical fascination, one that’s addled my Gemini brain like just about every other time it’s happened. I think I’m sort of in love with Augusten Burroughs. I mean, I love Jeff but I sort love Augusten, too right now. I knew it for sure when I was IM’ing Gatsby’s Ghost today and bemoaned Augusten Burrough’s self-confessed ‘stable relationship’ with his partner of four years. “It just figures,” I thought to myself and slammed my mental fist on my mental desk I keep neat and tidy up in my head. “All the good ones are taken,” I finished. Of course I know that I’m taken too, I’m just saying, it’s hard for me to fantasize about someone in any kind of realistic way when I know they have a boyfriend hanging around interfering; and not just a boyfriend but someone who he qualifies his relationship with as ‘stable’ which to me means they’re just not even into looking around for greener grass. Then again, when you have to use a qualifier, isn’t that a signal that maybe something’s amiss? Maybe there is some room to squeak? It doesn’t matter, though. I hear ‘boyfriend’ and that’s it, the fantasy is sort of over. Still, my fascination has held on and bloomed into a beautiful, fragrant obsession.
I came to know Augusten Burroughs (“or is it Auggie to his closer friends and maybe someday, me,” I wonder) three beautiful days ago when I started reading his first memoir, Running With Scissors, which promised me a tale of pedophilia and a whole lotta crazy but you know, in a funny way. I was intrigued as I live for horrifying despair masked in humor. But when I started the book the words paled to what I found in his author bio on the back cover. Not to be too shallow, but lets be anyway; he’s a total who-ha hottie. He’s a snack. I can overlook a lot of bad literature for a humpy author and he has it in spades. Then in the author bio, it said he lives in New York City and immediately my mind starting wondering, “I wonder if I could bump into him? I wonder if he’d meet for lunch?” You can do this with celebrities of any kind of media in NYC. The city lends itself to fulfilling astronomical odd chance meetings. I mean, out of 4 million people in the city daily, why shouldn’t we bump into one another? He probably hangs out at all the clinical research lunch bars I do, right? So I dove into the memoir, finishing up this morning first thing and it was all it promised to be and more: pedophilia, really super-duper crazy, but funny. Also, it contained the most interesting (and admittedly bizarre and sad) childhood events and I became even more in love with him because he had the childhood I’d never had; one interesting event after another. While writing my memoirs, I would rhapsodize over the incessant feeding and watering of my father’s exotic bird collection including pheasant, quail, and bob-whites, Augusten is standing in the bathroom of his shrink/adoptive guardian with the whole family reading the turds floating in the toilet bowl. I mean, how can mine even compare?
So then today, after I finished the book, I Googled his name in hopes of finding out a little bit more about him and by God, he’s got a website all to himself and he’s brave enough to not just have his author readings, bio sketches, and tour dates, he’s got pictures and lots of them. Never mind over half are of his boyfriend, who not for nothing, is also a fucking hottie (dammit) there is also their dog and all the trips they go on and so forth and so on and thus the bloom of my obsession flowered hard right around 1pm today. The flush of the crush stayed on into this evening and in a fantastically honorific and rather touching moment, I ripped out his Entertainment Weekly IT biography from last week where he’s standing barefoot at the bottom of a drained pool and stuck it in the book to have for all time.
But like all obsessions of mine, this one is arcing and heading for home soon. In the picture from EW, as I was scoping out minute details a common observer might overlook, such as package size (you can’t tell, I think they Photoshopped out the tell-tale hang shadow) and whatnot, I noted a very icky and worked over right foot. I thought I saw dirty toes and a bunion. I can’t tolerate bad feet in others because mine are too gross to even describe. I need some superiority in the ones I long for and bad feet…my God, I just don’t know (a noticeable package might have taken the edge off the feet thing for me, though, I think). I shouldn’t be surprised, though. My last literary crush, excluding Sarah Vowell, who as a woman could only flirt around the edges of a mad crush, was Donald Antrim who wrote one of my all-time favorite books, The Hundred Brothers. Also a great book and also a woofy author’s photo that had me hooked right away. He set my gaydar off immediately though I have no idea what his preference was and again, that sort of wrecks the fantasy for me in the long run. I took his obsession all the way to an author’s reading and signing night at Barnes&Noble one night a few years ago. I was as nervous as a bee in springtime, looking around the room for him and trying to see who he came with or who was there with him, as if I had some psychic way of figuring out who he was sleeping with and what my chances were. I told Jeff I was just in love with the book, which inconsequently was his newer one, The Verificationist, which I could hardly finish from all the strange plot twists having centered on some guy having an out of body experience over a syrupy pancake dinner with his work colleagues. When Donald Antrim finally got up to read, I was enraptured UNTIL, under careful scrutiny and looking for his package which was hidden behind the podium, I noticed he had a facial tick; a constant and significant nose wrinkle like he was sucking back a snot wad. I don’t hold this against him, but it was enough coupled with the unreadable but still very coolly titled book, that my crush faded and I moved on.
I don’t know exactly where my thing with Augusten Burroughs will lead? Right now it’s back to Borders tomorrow so I can pick up his new memoir, Dry, where he talks about getting sober, not something I tend to think of as particularly hot but then again, I wouldn’t have thought that about decoding poop in the toilet and look what he did with that. We’ll just have to see. As it stands, he was having his last book signing in Manhattan tonight which I only found out late enough today to not be able to swing it. All the better for him, I suppose since I’d be using all my untapped, undeveloped psychic energy to push his boyfriend down behind the new non-fiction aisle and kick him in the head for having such good universal luck as to land a hottie author. Oh well.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 8:32 am by Beau
On my way through the living room last night to take a pee break from the horrific and horrifically funny Running With Scissors, I was sucked into HBO’s Project Greenlight premiere. Luckily I had skipped all the early suspense and gotten right down to the top four directors audition shorts and the winners announcement. Putting the reality part of the series to the side for the moment, the four directors respective take on the bizarre, incongruent two pages of dialogue that they built a film short off of were brilliant in their own unique ways. Though they ended up picking Kyle Rankin and Ephram Potelle to direct Erica Beeney’s script, The Battle of Shaker Heights, it must have been a killing decision between them and Joe Otting whose own short was nothing less than amazing.
Back to the reality part, why is it the crazy chicks are so easy to spot anymore on these shows? Director finalist Jessica Shaw eventually had be told to shut up because she was repeating herself in her interview with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, saying she was the most passionate, right person for the Shaker Heights script over and over and over without mentioning what her vision for the story was. Then in the after-interview she started calling the script ‘…her baby’ and you could see the crazy in her eyes when she said she couldn’t believe they’d pick anyone else but her to direct it. That of course made the immediate camera pan to her pale, stricken face, after they announced Kyle and Ephram would be directing it, priceless.
Anyway, go check out all four director finalists and their shorts. It’s good watching.
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06.23.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:00 pm by Beau
Being so out of the orbit of anything remotely gay (though gay square dancing called by a gay caller sort of bumps us back into that flight path) as Jeff and I have been for these last few years, I was completely taken by surprise at my local newsstand last week when I picked up my first issue of Instinct magazine. I’d heard about it a month or so ago because supposedly there was an article about Sullivan County but by the time I hauled over to Borders, it was sold out, but last Friday, they had the new June issue on the stands so I thought “what the hell” and picked it up.
I will say that even though I was a founding subscriber to Out Magazine way back in the early 90′s when getting a non-porno, gay publication sent to home without the brown paper wrapper was avant garde, my toleration for endless renditions of Fabu-Abs pictorials, inane chattering by what I’d imagine to be wiafish twinks on Tina, and really horrible eroto-lite fiction, hit it’s limit pretty quick and I was burned out. I stopped buying Out and Genre, even when the covers screamed “I’m too hot for you NOT to buy me” and was fine with the situation because I’m more than willing to be that bad homo who doesn’t go to Pride parades and doesn’t know what’s what in the seemingly endless world of fabulous.
Starting out with Instinct, I had high hopes for something more real and edgy and 21st century. They practically promised just that on the cover and in the editor’s piece. And then I got to the “Spice Up Your Couples Life” feature and no, no, no, it all crumbled away, quickly. I was apparently reading Cosmo for Queers: have a three-way, have a FOUR-GY, pretend you don’t know each other and hook up at a bar telling each other you have boyfriends and can’t go to one another’s home and have dirty, forbidden bathroom sex. Oh, and take a violent class together to get your frustrations with one another out so you can have sweaty make up sex. Pick a fight so you can have make up sex. Blah, blah, blah make up sex. This is how you spice up a relationship? When did just regular bedroom sex become something that needed theater? As I said, I guess I’ve just been left off the Gay Memo.
All this bitching put to the side for a moment, I’m one of those look at both sides of the fence and don’t criticize unless you can do better, so I started thinking why MY article for spicing up a relationship might entail. My list, so far, has ‘take a pottery class together’, ‘learn to quilt’, sit in opposite rooms doing the things you like to do to waste time without feeling guilty’, and the number one thing that can spice up a dull relationship: choose jobs that require you to spend five hours a day in a car together. I’m telling you, ain’t nuttin’ like good quality time in the ol’ Edsel to enliven a dreary, rainy weekend. I’m not talking about giving each other hand jobs in the car, either; I’m saying, spend two hours fighting over the radio station or talking about the weather or just sitting in silence watching the sun come up. Shit, anyone can have a four-gy, it takes an iron giant to weather a daily 4am alarm.
So I’m not sold quite yet. The pictorial of AmazingRace 4′s Shhh-Lets-Not-Tell-Them-We’re-Gay Hottie, Reichen, of course was a boon to the rest of the magazine, but lets be honest, I can get better porno out of my TLAVideo cataloge. So we’ll see.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:21 am by Beau
As most everyone I know was incommunicado this weekend because they were holed up in their big, overstuffed, comfy chairs, pajama-clad, hot tea on the table next to them voraciously drinking in the big tome sitting on their laps, I’d like to say that I was all about that too. I actually was exactly all that because in the drenching downpours all weekend what else is there to do, however I wasn’t reading The Book as we haven’t landed a copy yet, however I was drinking in and drilling through The Crown of Swords and Winter’s Heart, books 8 and 9 of, yes, let’s say it all together, the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. So after 9,000 pages of teeny-tiny little font, I’ve finally arrived to the latest WoT book, volume 10, Crossroads of Twilight. Since no one I know is particularly interested in anything having to do with WoT, I’m posting my current summer reading to-do list to help recover my waning reputation as a legitimate bookworm:
Beau’s Summer 2003 Summer Reading To-Do’s (so far):
1. Crossroads of Twilight
2. Following Foo
3. I Am Not Jackson Pollack
4. Running with Scissors
5. Dry
6. The Probable Future
7. The Doll’s House (Sandman, Book 2)
8. HP: Order of the Phoenix
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06.20.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:53 pm by Beau
My new drag name is Penny Dreadfuls. Just FYI
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06.19.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:56 am by Beau
Because we stayed at the pish-posh Mandalay Bay, we weren’t subjected to National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation antic’s like the “I’ll have some of the blue stuff and some of the yellow stuff” buffet or “pick the number I’m thinking about” style gambling. Actually, since this was my first time in Vegas, I’d have to fully endorse it as a birthday destination spot. The fabled dry heat of 110-degrees was by my estimation, still fucking hot, but where else can you go and lay out at 9am and be done and ready for the rest of the day by 11am? Add all that in with seeing the most amazing Cirque Du Soliel show so far. O has to be the must see for anyone traveling out there; that is until their masturbatory, S&M show, Zumanity opens up at the New York, New York in August. And as is Jeff’s and my rule of thumb for gambling, never take more than you can afford to lose, we actually left still down a bit but not near what we had allotted for ourselves. That was due in part to one of us being down almost the exactly the same amount as the other being up. It’s the story of our relationship; between us, we just always break even which isn’t such a bad way to be, I think.
I’ll say the greatest joy for us was just being there with my brothers and their wives. Easy going day in and day out, we ate together and played together and had our alone time when we needed it and despite a bout of food poisoning and a trip to the Las Vegas shit-hole hospital for some premature contractions with my sister-in-law (fearing she would have to name the baby, Lucky, she got the contractions under control eventually), it was all good. Not only just good, but good enough that we’re thinking this could be an annual trip for us.
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06.16.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:18 pm by Beau
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06.12.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:35 am by Beau
While I’ll freely admit Clay Aiken’s just released single is better than Ruben Studdard’s, even though I was glad Ruben won American Idol, the real music find from all the releases this week is Annie Lennox’s new one, Bare. It has nothing to do with me losing my virginity to her first album, Diva, and everything to do with it having all the right sounds. Very cool.
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