In Garden News.

We had a windy thunderstorm two nights ago, and both tomato plants were battered pretty badly. The bigger of the two -- the one that has a couple small tomatoes on it already -- took the worse beating. I learned my lesson: those metal cages are not big enough or tall enough. Next year, I'll use 6 foot stakes and tie the plants up as they grow.

I tied both plants to stakes and hoped for the best. The smaller plant seemed like it was going to be okay. There were several places on the bigger plant where the stalks had been bent, and those branches wilted as the day went on, but this morning they seem to have bounced back.

The first two little Thai chilies ripened. They're fire-engine red. Dozens more green ones are waiting in the wings.

Two sunflowers bloomed! They must be over 8 feet tall. And the zinnias continue to pop out all over. J. cuts them from time to time for the kitchen table.

Drawing.

I just read Craig Thompson's "illustrated novel," Blankets. I was going to take it back to the library yesterday when I returned the Judy Garland Show videos. (What a treat those are. Lena Horne, Mel Torme, the Count Basie Orchestra, all up close, not to mention Judy who blows me away every single time. She sings "Old Man River" -- "Old Man River"?! -- and you just think her heart is going to explode. Nobody comes close to Judy.)

But I decided to keep Blankets for a few more days, to savor the drawings. The story is so moving -- and moves so swiftly -- that it's easy to miss the beauty of the illustrations.

Blankets is the first graphic novel I've read. I just hadn't come across one that drew me in. J. read it and loved it so much, I thought I'd try it. (And his recommendation coincided with my discovery of some gay erotic comics that I loved, so I'd been exploring that whole world. Sex and drawing are two of my favorite things.)

I'm a big fan of good drawing, and Craig Thompson's book is relentlessly full of beautiful drawings, pages and pages of them. It's almost overwhelming.

It dawns on me. Maybe everybody but me already knew this. Sometimes I'm late to the party. But it seems to me that the comics world is where good drawing is happening now. It's not happening in the contemporary art world. Not that it doesn't exist there, but it's not the rule.

I'm basing my theory on a dilettante's understanding of comics. I've barely skimmed the surface. And I don't keep up with the art scene as thoroughly as I used to. But it's pretty stunning, a work like Blankets, with hundreds of pages of really fine drawings compared to most of the sloppy, ugly stuff you find on contemporary art gallery walls.

Wisdom.

I spent Sunday evening (yesterday) with Z. We walked the trail around Town Lake, which I think is about an eight mile walk. I thought, since it was Sunday and a beautiful, almost cool evening, the trail would be mobbed, but it was more like deserted. Z. speculated there must have been a season finale of some show or other on TV last night. (Z. -- maybe even more averse to crowds than I -- checks the TV listings to plan trips to the grocery store.)

After our walk, we went to Magnolia Cafe. I had a beer, a Sierra Nevada, and the "Martian Landscape," which is roasted potatoes topped with cheese, scallions, and jalapeños. Z. had some kind of turkey taco thing, a salad, and a root beer float. We lingered long enough that eventually I ordered a gingerbread pancake. Just one.

We were together for over 4 hours, talking non-stop. He works in a field -- I guess I shouldn't say what it is, since I don't feel comfortable revealing the identities of people I write about here -- that I am endlessly fascinated with, so we talk about that a lot. We talk about love and sex a lot, too.

Z. is a remarkable man. He's quite a bit younger than I am, but so smart about people and relationships. He knows things that I'm barely beginning to understand. Nothing escapes his notice, he reads the most subtle signals. He often knows what I'm talking about before I do.
What I most enjoy about the time I spend with him is that he is as committed to honesty, directness, clarity, as I am. He asks himself the same question I try always to ask myself as I move through life and try to make right choices: "What is really going on here?"

And he reads me like a book. I find this bracing, and a wonderful relief, because, when I'm with him, I am unburdened of my irritating need to explain myself.

Drag.

Last night at the bar I go to, there was a drag show. There's never been a drag show at this place when I've been there. It's not the kind of place where you would expect a drag show. On Wednesdays there's live music, but it's rock bands or, like last week, art noise. (Two skinny twentyish flannel shirt-type guys making extremely loud feedback by twisting knobs on some sort of electronic consoles mounted into old suitcases -- only entertaining when one of the guys looked like he was trying to close his head inside the suitcase, and when one of the queens sitting at the bar shouted "Take off your shirt!).

Anyway, the drag show. It was the Royal Grand Court of something or other, every city seems to have one. A bunch of older guys in matronly formal wear with lots of jewelry host events to raise money for AIDS charities. They were hosting the show, but the performers were another mixed bag entirely. One or two standard queens lip-synching disco songs, okay, but then some guy gets up there, just a guy, 50-ish, in jeans, shirt, leather vest, sneakers, and he lip-synchs a very bombastic rendition of "America the Beautiful," by someone who sounded like an opera singer slumming. He just stood there and guys were flocking to the stage to hand him dollar bills.

As if that wasn't weird enough, the next performer ("and just to show we don't discriminate, she's straight and she's a real woman!") barely made an attempt to lip-synch, she just kind of shimmied and smiled like a 6-year-old in a dance recital, wearing a plain, dark blue dress, no makeup or nothin'. And she got lots of tips, too! It was less a drag show than karaoke with no singing. Bizarre.

When I lived in Nashville for the second time, four years ago, I lived a couple blocks from a huge gay bar, or more like a complex of several bars, called The Chute (I never could figure out if its name was intentionally derived from "poop chute," which would be, well, tacky, but certainly no tackier than the names of a lot of gay bars I've seen. (There was one in Madison, Wisconsin called "The Rod," and in the neon sign for it the tail of the "R" extended down in an arc underlining the word with a neon penis.)

The Chute consisted of a piano bar in the front, then a small pub-type room which you walked through to a big open dance club, all painted black with a raised dance floor. Behind that was the Western bar, where they played country music. There was a smaller dance floor in this room, in case you wanted to boot scoot boogie or whatever. Then a darker, dungeoney room with a pool table, the leather bar.

And the crown jewel of the Chute was the show room. It had a fancy name that I can't remember now, maybe the Rainbow Room? It had a small stage with a curtain, a runway, and tiny cabaret tables and chairs, and a bar in the back. Every Friday and Saturday there were drag shows, two shows a night, by a troupe of performers. I lived for those shows, couldn't wait for the weekends.

The host was Bianca Page ("the pantomime rage of Miss Bianca Page!"), who had a voice like late Lucille Ball (really late, like death-bed), and a face like Imogene Coca. I was amazed by her every time. Her routines were sometimes very complicated comedy recordings from the 40s or 50s, or old novelty songs. She also did some pop songs and more current show tunes, because that's what the boys really wanted, but you could tell she loved the weird stuff more. At the mid-point of the show, she came out onto the catwalk and did a little stand-up, singling out any straight people in the audience, good-naturedly embarrassing them with her boozy scatological humor.

One of the queens was always introduced as "our very own choreographer, here at the Rainbow Room." Her name was Dakota something. Dakota Moon? Dakota Blue? She was a big, tall redhead, and she put together routines they would all do together. A little Bob Fosse, maybe? God, I wish I could remember some of the songs. They had lighting design, sets, what looked like very expensive costumes with lots of beads.

One of the girls was a little further along the transgender line than the others. She was a big sexy black girl with real breasts and hips. She usually wore skimpy sheer outfits, and she had piles and piles of shiny curly hair, which I think was her real hair. Her songs were usually kind of raunchy hip-hop or R&B. She had a polarizing effect on the crowd. Most of the guys seemed to love her -- she had some title or other, like Miss Gay Southeast Region 1997 -- but there were always a few grumblers, those disturbed that she had "taken it a little too far."

And Stephanie Wells, the Lena Horne of the Rainbow Room, very classy, always immaculately made up, tasteful wardrobe. Her songs were often Dionne Warwick, sometimes Anita Baker, you get the idea.

And a third black queen, this one skinny with huge eyes, and sort of a Carol Channing twitch to her face. She would do "Toxic," the Britney Spears song, and her arms and legs would pop when she danced, as if she were double-jointed.

That was a drag show. Come on. America the Beautiful? At least put on a dress.

Update: I found a link, but the cast is a little different now. Bianca Page is still hoofin' it, though.

A Farm Wife's Life.

A farm wife's life would be a good life for a writer.

Today we picked up our box of produce from Johnson's Farm, and I spent a couple hours prepping vegetables: washing everything, blanching and freezing chard and green beans (keeping a few out to make a salad with red potatoes, arugula, and green beans in a mustard vinaigrette), scrubbing and paring carrots and beets. We also got asparagus, summer squash, dandelion greens, red potatoes, spring onions, fennel, broccoli, and I think that's it.

If we were completely food self-sufficient (which would not be hard in this climate, if we had the land, the time, and a big freezer), I would be doing this stuff -- gardening, prepping, cooking, putting up -- every day for quite a bit of the year, since the growing season, if you plan it right, runs year round.

So much of writing is thinking, requiring time and some measure of quiet but not the use of my hands. And then there are periods of time when not much is happening in the garden, time for typing and revising, tasks that do require my hands and more focused effort. There would even be time to tend to a couple goats for milk, a few chickens for eggs.

Beans.

We have the most beautiful green beans, ever. The vines are in the narrow bed across the front of the porch, and they shade that half of the porch in the afternoon. I've been picking 6 or 8 of them a day for the last week. The more I pick, the more they grow. I used what I had accumulated in a green curry I made a few days ago, along with snap peas, turnips and rutabagas from Johnson's Farm. I also used one Thai chile (still green, but I couldn't wait) from our garden in the curry.

The snap peas, next to them, were killed off by powdery mildew, and I pulled them down a few days ago, so I think next year, since they did so well, we could plant green beans across the whole front porch.

The jalapeno plants are full of little fruit, and the poblanos have several fruit on them too. And there's one little green tomato so far.

I spent 10 hours today sitting with a friend of J.'s who has been dealing with leukemia and a bone marrow transplant for the last couple of years. Now he has some complications from the transplant, so he's been very weak and in and out of the hospital for the last week or so. He's home now, but needs someone with him most of the time.

I didn't do much all day but sit and read when he was asleep and sit and chat when he was awake, but I was exhausted when I left. When I got home, I drank a beer on the porch and then made myself a delicious omelet with some of the climbing spinach leaves, cheddar and garlic.

Dept. of Men.

I emailed Z. to see if he wants to get together soon. I had told him a few weeks ago that I needed some time off from him so I could focus on getting a few particular things done: two screenplay contest applications, the first draft of the script I've been working on (working title is now "Public Sex"), and all the admissions and financial aid stuff for U.T.

All those things are done or moot. But I haven't missed Z. a bit, and that makes me wonder what I'm doing. I was talking with J. about this and came to the conclusion that I just don't have what's necessary to create new relationships right now -- desire, stamina, emotional generosity, I don't know? -- whether friends or lovers. That's probably a natural state at my age, since most people in their forties have already established the significant relationships in their lives.

But it always gets complicated doesn't it? No wonder men lie to get sex.

Last week I went out carousing a couple of nights. Nothing wrong with that. One night, I met two guys, good friends, we talked and laughed a lot, drank a lot. The three of us went back to the one guy's house and spent the night. I'll spare you the details, but it was a lot of fun. The guy whose house it was -- he has a boyfriend, open relationship, etc. -- and I have called and missed each other a couple times. I wouldn't mind seeing him, or him and his friend, again. Why not?

I'm very good at this first part, and I sometimes wonder why I can't just do this over and over. I guess because eventually I would run out of guys to dump. (When I was younger, I would just stop returning phone calls. What an awful thing to do to someone! I'm determined to do better.)

But another night, I met another guy. This guy's story is eerily like mine. Same age, songwriter, artist/academic, writer, filmmaker, has lived in many places. We talked for a couple hours at the bar, he gave me a ride home. We talked on the phone for quite some time over the weekend, and he said he would call me today, which I'm looking forward to.

One intriguing thing about this guy is that he's circumspect when our conversation turns to making plans to see each other. At first I was a little confused by it -- does he want to see me or not? -- but I realized that he was doing exactly what I often do with guys I meet. I avoid making plans. Instead, I make plans to call and make plans. I don't think it's a case of wanting to be free in case something better comes along; it's just a case of wanting to be free.

The bar that I go to won't be around much longer. It's sitting on some very valuable downtown real estate. The area has been sort of a no man's land for years because it floods regularly, but the city is planning a major flood control project which will open several city blocks for development. It's the only gay bar in town I've been to that I have any desire to hang out in.

Lizzie Borden.

Here's the New York Times review of that 1994 production. Not exactly a rave, but getting in the Times was cool. The comment about the story-telling was likely true. Traditional narrative was not a goal with the Tiny Mythic folks, and that was one of the reasons I loved working with them. The creative freedom. Still, we held ourselves to some standard of being responsible for creating an experience, a journey, for an audience, and we probably failed in some way with Lizzie Borden.

That's one reason it's so exciting to get to try again. I still don't know much about this new production, whether or not Tim will direct it, or to what extent I will be involved. But I do know that Tim and I will at least have a chance to revise, to improve the material. (The husband and wife team who have approached us about a production told us they think there are problems with the structure, which they would like us to fix.)

Tim wants me to write a couple, a few more songs. In its ALR incarnation, it was a one-act, about 45 minutes long, with I think 4 songs. The last song was an epilogue -- a post-acquittal socialite hostess Golden Age Lizzie -- a radical shift in mood and style that was fun but didn't really work, cut from the later production. For the 1994 production, I wrote 5 more songs and the whole thing got more Gothic, less campy. (Less campy, which is not to say not very campy.)

By the time of this later production, Y'all was very much underway. J. and I were touring a lot. I wrote the songs, recorded guitar and vocal demos, and dropped them off. I didn't spend much time with the cast or with Tim.

This was radically different from the first production, where Tim and I and the cast spent weeks poring over the court documents and biographical material, discussing, dramaturging the thing together before Tim and I even started writing. I was listening to a lot of Lita Ford, the Runaways, and Heart that summer, and the music reflects it. (In 1994 I was listening to more Loretta Lynn, and that probably shows in the later songs, though subtly I hope.)

It's still in the germination phase, but still I'm hoping like crazy that I'll get to spend some time in New York working on the show next year. The folks who want to do the production are talking about raising real money, so I could actually get paid. What a strange and wonderful idea.

History.

I have a neurotic need to explain myself, to give my every utterance the proper context so I'm not misunderstood. I'm better than I used to be, but ... this sentence is a perfect example of it, so I will abandon it right now. It slows me down in so many ways. I think my phone phobia is a symptom of this neurosis. I revise and rehearse every greeting to get the maximum context into the first few words.

I've been thinking a lot about the musical Lizzie Borden play my friend Tim and I wrote and staged together in New York, which may be produced again next year. As I began blogging about it last night, I found myself unable to express the simple thoughts I was having without also writing layers and layers of history, from my involvement with Tim and the Tiny Mythic Theatre Company in the late 80s and early 90s, how I met those people through my first long-term boyfriend, who got me started playing in bands and writing music, how those experiences in the theater awoke in me the notion that I wanted to change my life, which led me to leave that boyfriend.

Everything at this late stage of my life seems to be way too entangled with a longer story, with the long story, for the telling of any small segment of it to be simple. There's too much diversity -- of geographical location, creative medium, philosophy of life, haircut -- for any part to convey the whole. I want too badly for it to make sense.

The other thing I feel slightly neurotic about -- and this is related to the above because they are both parts of a larger need of mine to feel that I have done something important with my life -- is a need to state and confirm that I have participated in history, that I have not just swum in but have contributed to the cultural stream. Simply, that my work has been important. Maybe all artists feel this, but it is very much at odds with my overarching Buddhist philosophical view of the uncertainty of things. You can take the boy out of the Judeo-Christian narrative paradigm but you can't, etc.

The way this latter thing looks is that when I talk about the Lizzie Borden piece, I want to say that it was the final show in the first season of the American Living Room festival in 1990, which was the first summer theater festival in New York. Now there are lots of them, but there was no summer theater festival season in New York before the American Living Room. What we did that summer changed New York theater. (Just to be clear, I didn't create the ALR, but I participated in many ways throughout that first summer.)

Well, there's so much more to tell about Lizzie Borden, and about everything else as well. I'll get to it. In the meantime, that's Loren Kidd with the axe. She played Lizzie in the original ALR production as well, but this photo is from the longer version produced by HERE in 1994.

FADE OUT.

I did it.

I farted around the first half of the day and avoided it. But eventually I was bored with all the distractions I created for myself, and I hate being bored, so I sat down and made myself push through to the end. 111 pages.

Two scenes in particular I know are not right yet, and I'm sure to discover all kinds of other problems, but I'm going to let it sit now for at least a week before I look at it again, because I want it to feel slightly unfamiliar when I read it straight through.

Think I'll go out and get drunk tonight.

Scary Endings.

I told myself as I was going to sleep last night, "Tomorrow is the day." But now I'm feeling chicken. It would be much easier to just read my Alice Munro book or look at Internet porn all day instead of finishing the first draft of my screenplay.

I'm so close to the end of the story. Just a few short scenes. I'm not saying it'll be done -- it's a big hairy beast at this point and I know I'll be working on it for a long time -- but I will have written the story straight through from beginning to end. The first pass. It's a huge milestone.

The draft will be about 110-115 pages, a good length I think. I can trim the fat and still have a feature-length script. (A page equals a minute of screen time, so you want it be be at least 90 pages.)

But, endings are hard. Everyone knows that. Endings are the hardest part. So I'm shaking in my boots this morning.

When I was writing a synopsis for the Sundance lab program application, I came upon a new idea for an ending, which read well in the synopsis, but now I'm not so sure. It contains a surprise. Not a Sixth Sense-type surprise, just an unexpected turn in the characters' lives. And now, as I try to create the scene, it feels like too much is happening right there in the last few pages.

I love neat stories, but generally I'm a fan of the open-ended. The original ending was less an ending than just a point where we stop and walk away from these characters. The lead character was obviously changed by the events in the story, but subtly, and in a way that wouldn't have a big effect on his life except over time. The change was interior. Interior can be a problem for film, but stories where most of the action is emotional or psychological are the ones I find most interesting on screen.

Here's an idea: write two different endings. That could be less scary because I won't be committing to anything. I don't know -- two endings just feels twice as scary as one ending.

Peas and Dreams.

It's 7 a.m. I woke up at 6:30 and couldn't get back to sleep because suddenly I'm not sure if the sugar snap peas that I blanched and froze last Saturday are not actually English peas. Finally I just got out of bed. I almost always wake up at dawn, with the light and the birds, sometimes lie there as long as an hour, but I seldom have the energy to rouse myself, and eventually I go back to sleep and wake up again at 8:30 or so.

In my dream this morning I was at my dream hotel, the one with yellowish light and tangled sheets in the room I am always -- because these are dreams -- trying to get back to. I never do, I am always waylaid in elevator banks and long hallways.

It's All About the Cilantro Pesto.

J. is doing a cleansing fast and only consuming a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup, sea salt, cayenne pepper, and water for three days. So I'm cooking for myself. I'm completely enamored with the cilantro pesto I made last week. I already went through the first half pint and took another one out of the freezer.

Last night for dinner, I lightly sauteed asparagus and spring onions (from our CSA box this week), added some cooked rice, cilantro pesto, and crumbled feta cheese and tossed it till everything was warmed through. Delicious. The feta is especially good. It's Armenian or Bulgarian or something, I can't remember, but it's creamy and rich and tasty, and it was not expensive.

Today for lunch I made a sandwich with a Quorn pattie (those meatless things that vaguely resemble chicken but they're made with some sort of cultured fungus or something -- they're very tasty) on toasted Italian bread with salad greens (from the CSA), roasted poblanos, feta, and .... cilantro pesto.

I harvested the cilantro just in time. I noticed today that it's beginning to bolt. In other garden news: we lost one of our tomato plants to a virus. It was the really big one, a yellow pear. But the other two look healthy, the watermelon vines are creeping quickly here and there, the cucumber plants have several pretty yellow blossoms on them, and I saw a few tiny, tiny green beans on the vines this morning.

Spooky Weird.

J. and I are watching the first season of Six Feet Under on DVD. I haven't had a TV for many years, so I missed it the first time around. When I was house-sitting for a rich friend in West Hollywood a few years ago, he had a couple episodes TiVoed, so I watched them, and I was seriously underwhelmed. This was around the fifth season, and it reminded me of thirtysomething, which I thought was the most boring show ever: a lot of middle class people sitting around complaining about their pseudo-problems.

But, because so many people said to me you can't come in on the middle of it and I should give it another chance, etc., I did. Well, of course it's amazing. It's a thrill. Real art on TV.

Clare is a dead ringer for a good friend of ours in Nashville who was around Clare's age when we were spending time with her and her family. Our friend even did one of those wilderness trek things, though she didn't get busted for pot as far as I know. Now she (our friend) is a student activist at a college near Seattle.

Here's what's weird. You know the scene in the art gallery, the opening of Brenda's brother's show of photographs? The exhibition is called Private/Public. The artist character in my screenplay is a photographer, and I have a scene which takes place at the opening of a show of his photographs, and the show is called Public/Private. No kidding. And, just like in Six Feet Under, the photographs are of people who are doing private things and have no idea they're being photographed. How fucked up is that?

I should say it was called Public/Private. It's not called that anymore.

WWF.

As I was waking up this morning, I dreamed I was at a convention in a huge hotel conference center. During some downtime in the activities, all the conventioneers were socializing and relaxing in the hotel lobby. Most of them were in the large main lobby where there were lots of big sofas and chairs, but there was also a smaller smoking lounge. I was in the smoking lounge talking with some friends, but the smoke was bothering me, so I went to the main lobby, where I saw my parents. I sat with them and chatted for a while.

I noticed that a couple people were smoking here too. My mom and dad grumbled a bit, but they didn't want to confront the smokers. I stood up -- by this time several people were smoking and the room was starting to fill with smoke -- and, trying to be very nice guy, smiling, non-confrontational, I don't want to judge you but just FYI, announced, "There's a smoking lounge right around the corner where you guys can smoke, because this is a no smoking area."

One of the smokers, a woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties wearing a denim pants suit and lots of make-up -- what they used to call a bottle blond -- stood up, and I don't remember exactly what she said but it meant, "We're not going anywhere, mister." I said, "If you and all the smokers will either put out your cigarettes or go to the smoking room, I'll wrestle you."

Suddenly three guys surrounded her and yanked her pants suit off in one sweeping gesture (it was attached with Velcro) to reveal a bright spandex superhero outfit. Her hair got bigger and across her chest was a sash that read "WWF World Champion." Everyone moved to the edge of the room, the three guys pushed all the furniture against the walls, and one of them started marking a big square on the carpet with masking tape. The lady wrestler was bouncing on the balls of her feet and punching the air. She looked serious.

I went up to the guy with the masking tape and said, with my hand at the side of my mouth so nobody else would hear, "Just for like 2 minutes, okay? "Cause she'll beat the hell out of me."

That was it. I woke up.

Statistics.

Wow, I think this is the most math I've done in one sitting since high school.

I'm writing this screenplay which is about sex and men, and, in particular, how men go about trying to get it and how that affects the way they see themselves and each other. I've had this opinion for a while that most men are very focused on body parts to the detriment of their ability to function sexually as whole people. I believe a common ailment for men is that we're unable to bring our whole selves into sex. Evidence of this is the way men will fetishize a body part to the extent that they fashion an identity around it ("ass man," "leg man," "cocksucker," etc.)

And I came to think that this phenomenon really stands out in online profiles on dating and sex hookup web sites, where men give limited, directed information about themselves and choose pictures of themselves with the object of attracting somebody for sex. So I decided to check my theory with a little scientific study. Well, maybe pseudo-scientific.

I looked at 150 profiles on Manhunt.net, one of the big gay hookup sites, and I compiled some information about the photos. I only looked at the main photo, the one that appears first to anyone browsing the site. There are often additional photos in a profile, including "private" photos that are only available when people "unlock" them for men they might be interested in. It seems to me that this main photo is where men put what they consider their best foot forward.

I've had the impression in browsing these types of sites over the years that a big percentage of the photos are of isolated body parts: an erect penis, a spread butt, leading to an I-am-my-cock syndrome (or my ass, or whatever.). So I wanted to see if the numbers match my impression.

I took the first 150 profiles of Austin men and divided the photos into 8 categories. Some were a little ambiguous, but most of them fell pretty neatly into one column or another. Here's what I found:

Face: 26%
Penis, naked: 10%
Penis, clothed: 3% (This might seem like a strange distinction, but there are quite a few photos of erect penises "hidden" by a wet shirt, or something else that clearly shows the attributes.)
Ass: 6% (I could break this down further, and I might if I decide to do a more detailed study. Some are just shots of a naked butt, but many of them could more accurately fall into a category of "asshole.")
Body, no face, clothed: 1%
Body, no face, naked: 26%
Body and face, naked: 12%
Body and face, clothed: 17%

I had expected much bigger numbers in the penis and ass categories. (Sometimes when I'm looking at profiles on these sites, it starts to feel like an endless parade of assholes and hard dicks, which just feels kind of heartbreaking sometimes, that that's what we're reduced to.) These numbers are probably lower in Austin than they would be in New York or San Francisco. People are more modest or conservative here.

It's heartwarming that over half of the men posted pictures of their faces, in one form or another. And I actually find it encouraging that 12% posted photos of their naked bodies with their faces showing. However, in probably half of these, their penises were hidden, and a large portion of the shots seemed clearly intended to show off a nice chest. Still more distinctions for further study.

Bachelor Dinner.

J. is out of town tonight, and I just made myself the most yummy dinner. One of those dinners that's so good you want to eat it again as soon as you finish even though you're stuffed.

Last night, late, I got a wild hair to make cilantro pesto. The cilantro in the garden is about ready to bolt, so I've been telling the neighbors to help themselves and I've been trying to think of ways to use it. J. suggested cilantro pesto last week.

I tossed a couple big handfuls of cilantro, a couple big handfuls of roasted peanuts -- I was going to use walnuts, but I burned them in the toaster oven; we got a new one, and the controls on it are still a bit of a mystery to me -- a few cloves of garlic, two big pinches of salt, a pinch of red pepper flakes, a splash of lime juice, and probably about 1/2 cup of olive oil in the blender. I had to add a little water to make the thing go, but no more liquid than you need, because you don't want it to be runny. You have to stop and start and poke at it every once in a while until it finally gets ground up smooth. You could do it in the food processor, and it would be less work, but it'll never grind it as fine as the blender.

I froze some of it in small containers and put the rest in the fridge.

So, tonight, I made pasta with a cilantro pesto smoked gouda cream sauce! The sauce is so easy. At the restaurant in Utah where I worked the last two summers, we made a quick mac and cheese for kids that is so quick and delicious, I have to be stern with myself not to make it more often. It's probably the main reason I weigh about 15 pounds more now than I did before I worked there. The sauce is just butter, cream, cheese (use some kind of melty cheese, like Monterey Jack or a young cheddar), and a pinch of salt and pepper.

After I cooked the pasta -- about 1/4 to 1/3 pound for one serving -- I rinsed it in the colander under hot water. Then I melted a tablespoon of butter in the pan and added about 1/3 cup of half and half (at the restaurant we used heavy cream!), and a pinch of salt and swirled it over medium heat until it was bubbling and steaming. I stirred in a big handful of grated smoked gouda. Stir it quickly over the heat, or whisk it; you don't want it to scorch. Lower the heat and stir in a big heaping tablespoon of cilantro pesto, and then the pasta. More salt if it needs it.

Can't beat it. I put it in a big bowl and ate it with a spoon on the porch with a beer and watched the thunderstorm.

Eighties Night.

J. and I did a dollar double-feature last night. U.T. does a free movie night (weekly? monthly? I can't remember) at the student union. Last night was Spike Lee's first film, She's Gotta Have It, which somehow I missed the first time around. From there we went to the Alamo for Music Monday, which is $2, but half price for Austin Film Society members (J.) and students (me, maybe, for now).

The professor who introduced She's Gotta Have It, with a personal anecdote about his friendship with Spike Lee, talked about the film like it was a recently unearthed prehistoric artifact, which felt appropriate since most of the audience were probably born after it was made. And it did look a little prehistoric, all grainy and streaked and out of focus. (I don't know if it was a bad print, or if the original film looked distressed.)

If I had chanced upon this film without knowing its history and cultural importance, I'm sure I would have thought it was just, well, bad. When J. and I were discussing it on the way out, I said that maybe, with our theater background, our expectations of acting and dialog in a film are different from those of the average film buff, or film student or academic. Acting and writing (as in the words that are spoken) are a starting point for me. If they're bad -- and I know these judgments are subjective, but I also think it would be hard to argue that the actors are not extremely self-conscious and awkward in this film, partly because of their lack of skill but also because the dialog is so stilted -- I have a hard time seeing much else.

I can intellectually know that this film was revolutionary at the time -- because it dealt with black people's lives and women's sexuality in a way that was new in American films, etc. -- but boy it doesn't seem to me that it has held up very well after only twenty years.

One thing about it that kept my interest was the Brooklyn setting. I lived with my first long-term boyfriend in a run-down, ramshackle floor-through apartment in Fort Greene at that time (from 1984 - 1989), so the scenes that were shot in Fort Greene Park and on the Fulton Mall made me flush with nostalgia. It looked in the film exactly like it looks in my memories.

Back then, Fort Greene was a very mixed bag: majestic, tree-lined blocks of single-family brownstones in which middle-class black families had lived for generations, next to some of the most severe urban blight I've ever seen. That neighborhood is now one of the most expensive and desirable urban neighborhoods in the country. (I'm one of those homosexual artists who move into neighborhoods before they're safe and can't afford to stay once they become safe.)

Next, a documentary about the Smiths. Sometimes the crowd is sparse for Music Monday, but this one was sold out. I guess the Smiths are pretty hot with the kids.

When I worked as a waiter at Bandito, a Mexican restaurant on Second Avenue in the early eighties (this was when Tex-Mex and Margaritas were just starting to become sort of trendy in New York), the bartenders played great music, and that was often where I first heard new stuff. I remember once the bartender asking if I had heard REM (I hadn't) and he described them as "like the Smiths, but American." They seem so different now, but at the time I think there was a similarity in the sound, and certainly in the feyness of their lead singers.

The doc was good. It was made for the BBC, traditional talking head format (with some bizarre animation for the clips of Morrisey, I assume because he wouldn't allow his face to be included in the show). The doc itself was just an hour long, so they augmented it with some of the original music videos, which I think was unnecessary. The videos were cut into the film, interrupting the pace of the story in a way that made it seem overly long.

It was great to hear the songs again. I had their records, and my friends and I listened to them a lot back then, but I didn't replace them when I got rid of all my LPs. My favorite thing -- and I'm not sure it was a part of the original doc -- was a short film (a music video, really) by Derek Jarman of "The Queen is Dead."

I'm amazed by how much obviously gay pop music made it into the clueless mainstream back then. This stuff was not exactly coded. I guess it was a subject people at the time were still more or less terrified of, so they didn't even see it when it was right in front of their noses.

I saw Morrisey live once, at a big outdoor venue in New York, probably not long after the Smiths broke up. His opening act was Phranc, the lesbian folk comedy singer-songwriter. My friends and I all sort of liked Phranc, even though she was pretty hokey, because she looked like a Beach Boy and sang songs about crushes on girls in gym class. But Morrisey's audience didn't like her at all. She played her entire set, just her and her guitar, to boos and shouts of "get off the stage." I was horrified.

I expected Morrisey to say something about it when he came out for his set. I guess I wanted him to reprimand the audience or something, but he didn't acknowledge what had happened. After that, I lost interest in him.