Musings

We have been watching (in installments) a documentary on Andy Warhol over the past few nights. It's from the PBS American Masters series — quite good, I recommend it. When T picked it up at the video store, I sniffed with disdain, in part at its four-hour running time. More significantly, however, I have just never been an admirer of Warhol or of his work, or at least the parts of it with which I was familiar. T, on the other hand, is a huge fan ever since attending a large exhibit of Warhol's work some years ago; T has frequently cited this in-person exposure to the overwhelming collectivity and scale of Warhol's original work (rather than reproductions in books and magazines) as being key to appreciating the man, and he repeated this dictum at the video store in response to my apathy. I retorted with some pique that an artist should not require that we view their œuvre in person in order to appreciate their greatness.

The documentary served me up a modest slice of humble pie, however. Warhol's early commercial illustrations (mostly of shoes for fashion mags) are really quite wonderful, as well as his more private drawings of dreamy young men in the all-together. His inked line demonstrates, as the documentary discusses, a mastery of the blotting technique — a nice trick that creates a "printed" effect at once clumsy and delicate — but what the documentary doesn't talk about is the "continuously drawn" effect of the line in his figurative work, reminiscent of Cocteau and even Schiele. It's a technique (also called "blind drawing") that I've always loved but haven't had much success with personally: drawing without removing your eyes from the subject, in other words, not looking down at the page. Of course, the truth is that the great practitioners of this technique probably did look down at the page quite a bit, but their genius is in leaving the impression that their drawings occurred in one breathless unstoppable line, as if the act of creation were reduced to the pen and the subject, with the artist subsumed into one or the other.

But I declined a second helping of pie. Warhol was a fairly cold-blooded character — not that this should affect at all our appreciation of his work and, indeed, it was to an extent this aspect of his vision that made for his early Pop Art successes — but sooner or later, I think, this quality began to overwhelm his art. The celebrity portraits become repetitive, ditto the consumerist works, and the film work seems sort of lazy — a laconic quality that feels generally true of all his work from the mid-sixties on, as if once he had obtained fame, he realized he need do only the barest minimum to maintain it.

The commentators in the documentary wax eloquent about his extraordinary grasp of ideas — but these are their ideas, not Warhol's. Sure, Warhol provided an œuvre po-faced enough to support the projection of all sorts of ideas, but is this artistic genius or simply a gift for deadpan? And must I really be an art scholar to be elevated by his work? I don't know. One critic spoke of him as a sort of seer, predicting the furture of celebrity culture — but I don't know that Andy so much predicted it as perpetuated it. And from our vantage point in history, is this really something worth celebrating?

The Birthday of DemonDoll

Today is the lovely DemonDoll's birthday. When I first saw DD, I was just a little scared of her beauty, humour and fierceness, and in my heterosexual confusion, imagined I should bed her in order to overcome that fear. She dealt with it as she deals with most things — elegantly, directly and summarily: she snogged me. A snog (for those of you who are not familiar with the term, or who may be more familiar with the British colloquial definition of "kiss") entails having a hand clamped over your mouth, and then air blown up your nose. It is followed by a fair amount of dizziness and disorientation, as well as, if administered by DemonDoll, the sound of demented giggling and the irrefutable declaration that you have been claimed, just as if you were a branded heifer. And indeed I was: owned by her ever since. She has made me laugh probably more than anyone I know (or at least as much as Yatsu; combined, they are lethal); she has also dispensed some of the most reasoned and loving advice of my life; she is generous and brave and literate and bawdy and she loathes the word "utterly". There is, in short, no one with whom I would rather chew a bun. Happy birthday, I love you.

Tired, cranky

Hello. I'm tired. Why am I so tired? I eat well, I ride my bike about an hour a day. I go to bed early. I don't, however, always sleep immediately: T likes to read himself to sleep, and though he uses a discreet booklight, he has a habit of rubbing his feet together at every semi-colon — don't know why the semi-colons make him do that, they just do. Actually, I have no idea if it's the semi-colons; that's just one theory. I have many theories, as many as the sleepless, self-defeatist minutes I lie there, anticipating and timing the foot-rubs, interpreting, qualifying, codifying them, parsing the satisfied foot-rubs (a particularly elegant turn of phrase?) from the dissatisfied ones (a clumsily hanging participle?). They take on a feel of punctuation themselves, commas and EM dashes and ellipsis for the tedious ramblings of my insomnia. I need more coffee.

Have you been to http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/? Extremely diverting.

Holy expletives

I'm full of adventure-clicking today! I followed one of DemonDoll's "Not so silent lurking" links to Crazy Aunt Purl, who seems like a delightful loon. Her rantings brought back many a fond memory of steaming, gut-searing road-rage on the freeways of Los Angeles. I cannot tell you how unfit I was to drive in that city, possibly any city. That I escaped alive and (so far) ulcerless is a work of the Good Lord. Speaking of the Good Lord (and, boy, did I, during the righteous fury of my daily commute!), Aunt Purl shares a particularly fine example of one of my favourite cursing sub-genres: the Christ-based expletive phrase. Hers, which I intend to adopt and spread liberally north of the 49th, is "Jesus Christ on a cracker!" I love it! In Catholic school, two decades ago, I may have coined (the memory is dim) my stock favourite ever since: "Jesus Christ on a bicycle!" (Of course, Catholic school was a hotbed of heretical fecundity in these matters, including the irreverent alternative lyrics to the Christmas carol, "These Three Kings": "These Three Kings of Orient are,/One in a bus and one in a car,/One on a scooter, blowing his hooter,/Chasing his fat grandma." Also: "These Three Kings of Orient are,/Tried to smoke a rubber cigar,/It was loaded and exploded,/That's why they followed the star." Ah, the religious education.)

Back to the Christ-based expletive: though while not strictly a phrase, "Jesus H. Christ!" is probably the oldest living relative of this form, which counts amongs its ancestors such bygone gems as "'Sblood!" and "'Swounds!" And then there is the ne plus ultra of Christ-based expletives, the one that makes even a heretic such as myself blush, that I reserve for only the most insupportable moments of crisis (or no more than three times daily on the 101), the appalling, the effective, "Jesus Fuck!" And yes, it is with a considerable amount of shame (and just a soupçon of wicked pride) that I must confess to being its progenitor.

Next blog deux

Oh dear, sometimes "Next Blog" yields some very dirty results. Does "Horny Asian Girl"'s mother know what she's up to?

Next blog

I have never clicked the "Next Blog" link in the header before — until today. I was taken at first to a goth blog called RESURRECTION, written in Spanish. I returned to my blog and clicked "Next Blog" again: now, one called "Poor Since 1959". A delightful, time-wasting feature.

In other developments, the emoticon labs have come up with thrilling new technology: the unibrowed smiley-face, l:) , and the unibrowed grumpy-face, l:( . A momentous step for multi-culturalism. [Credit to DemonDoll and WGD for inspiration.]

Nouveau look

My blog needed to feel pretty again. Does anyone know how to change the little image at the top-left?

(Dear faithful DemonDoll...when all others had abandoned hope! ;) Which reminds me of a little-known fact, or to be precise, not-at-all-known by me prior to recently: the adorable smiley-face emoticon turned 25 this week. I think the winking emoticon is somewhat younger, and younger still its party-hatted cousin. I wonder, among the emoticons, which is the youngest? And are they agreed on their various ages, or is there acrimonious, ageist in-fighting going on behind the scenes?)

In the wind

Hmmm, seems nobody's reading. Well, come on, what does one expect? Absent for seven months, people have lives! That's fine, though...sort of comforting, the idea of not being heard, sort of like talking to yourself in a public place, something I love doing but so rarely indulge in, for propriety's sake.

This California same-sex marriage thing is getting my goat good. WTF??? This law has passed twice now, twice! What difference does it make to Schwarvbcjhgvznegger? And what right does he have to ignore the will of his legislature and millions of Californians. He stupidly claims that prop. 22 indicated the people's will to ban same-sex marriage, but this was passed seven years ago! Things are heating up, though: first, a call for his lesbian chief of staff to resign in protest, now the news that San Diego's mayor will sign the resolution to overturn prop. 22 and become a "friend of the court" in constitutional hearings currently underway, after learning that his grown daughter is a lesbian. This is what needs to happen. People need to start realizing their interconnectedness. Your Republican mayor has a lesbian daughter, your Republican governor has a lesbian chief of staff, your friends, your neighbours, your co-workers are queer. I don't think most people want to discriminate, but I think these connections are not easily made for many people in conservative communities: the media offers only stereotypes and provocations, and the queers who occupy these people's lives are in many cases too terrified to come out for fear of repercussions. I was just ranting off about Jodie Foster the other day: no, I'm not asking her to become a political mouthpiece for queers, all I'm asking, expecting, is that she realizes that her silence implies shame (whether she feels shame or not), and that she should not in any good conscience be able to continue profiting from silence while millions of queers are suffering for being out. Visibility is going to turn the tide, and one celebrity (for better or for worse) can count for thousands of non-celebrities. I am considering a boycott of The Brave One.

Here's an abstract nude I just drew; started out as a doodle, but I sort of like it. Not sure yet, but it may still be in progress.

Anger-management yogi-style

My therapist-counsellor who told me I had difficulty expressing my anger — the same therapist-counsellor who ditched me to go into private practice with nary a hint that I might follow him with sliding-scale benefits (express this, dick-sweat!) — offered the following constructive, non-combative technique for dealing with anger:

• Kneel beside your bed
• Raise your fists above your head and breath in deeply
• Bring your fists down forcefully on the bed, at the same time pushing the air out of your lungs
• Repeat until serene

I tried it once with good results — however, red wine, preferably half a bottle, combined with a slab of dark chocolate, is most consistent.

(Two in one day, nay, one hour — impressive, no?)

Long time coming

It has been almost seven months to the day since my last post, and though I've experienced the odd twinge of contrition, I can't say I've lost too many hours sleep over it. Am I not suited to the blogopshere? What makes for a compelling blog, anyway? And by that I mean compelling for the blogger. Most blogs are about the blogger; the blogger is, therefore, the main subject. Does it follow then that if a blogger is not interested enough to maintain her or his own blog, said blogger is not interested in themselves? I am starting to suspect I require a more compelling subject. Take this dedicated soul, for instance: pancakerecipes.blogspot.com. Clearly this is a compelling subject, for both blogger and reader ("bloggee" is not, I believe, an appropriate term in this case; a bloggee would have to be one about whom a blogger blogs, and despite my fondness for batter-based breakfast foods, I cannot bring myself to anthropomorphize them) — or is it simply a cry for help?

TO allure

An uncommonly charming (though obviously not recent) view of the city I currently call home (Photo credit: my boss, aka Toronto's Biggest Fan):

White stuff

A view from my office building (though, alas, not my office):

Shortbus and other bits

So, yes, we finally went last night to see Shortbus. A lot of the momentum has dissipated around it - it clings resolutely to the lineup of a lone theatre - but we both really felt we wanted to support it, not only for John C. Mitchell's sake, but also for the queer cause. My capsule review: "Less fun than Caligula." Yes, I was disappointed, but really could it have gone any other way? My expectation was huge after Hedwig, and this project has been germinating so long already in my awareness, that it was sort of doomed from the opening credits. However, having said that, I do think it was more than a failure of expectation. In a small part, I do think a few of the performances harmed it - it is clear that not everyone is trained to act, and it should be said that I don't fundamentally doubt the ability of untrained actors to perform well, because there were to be fair some very good performances from actors who were very likely here enjoying their debuts. But I think the bigger issue was the script, or at least the process that engendered it. Improvisation can be wonderful for a film (Mike Leigh anyone?), but it needs a firm hand, and I wonder how easy it would be to exert such control while also trying to create an environment of sexual liberty. Whateva...I'm no expert, I just know that it reeked of improv, and worse still, beginners improv workshop. The best scenes were definitely those that had nowhere to go, I mean no beats to hit, revelations to arrive at, and there were some really lovely ones - but in so many scenes the mechanics of story advancement or character exposition were downright clumsy. The question is: am I a prude? Not a sexual one, because the sex scenes were wonderfully unremarkable, peripheral to the people, as I think was JCM's intention, but a formalistic prude, requiring a certain cleanliness of intention, delivery, structure. Maybe JCM wanted to dispense with all that, in which case I'm the closed-minded fuddy-duddy. T loved it, found it daring and moving and clear - but I think he puts little stock in formalism, lets himself enter without appraising the building first. Anyway, blah blah...I'm sure you couldn't wait to hear my thoughts on the topic, well you can all relax now. Oh yes, one last thing: as I said, none of the sexual activity, including auto-fellatio, orgies and rim-jobs made me in the least uncomfortable; the finale, however, a bizarre cabaret number delivered with peculiar earnestness by a sort of MC proxy, capped off by a brass band and a sing-along, made me squirm with embarrassment and long for an act of coitus to avert my eyes to.

Other bits, or bit, I suppose: Made contact, sort of impetuously, with an old classmate whom I barely remember. Found his name online and had a vague recollection of our having been friends in my last two years of high school. This recollection is troubled by another of our having been openly hostile to one another at an earlier time. Not entirely sure which impression is the greater in his memory. Anyway, he wrote back very briefly, citing a pressing appointment and making a promise to write in greater detail at another time. What exactly is the point of reviving high school contacts, expecially in cases where the contact is only vaguely remembered? It's not as if any conscious affection exists. The point seems fairly clear: Time Regained. Taking stock of the past 18 years of my life in the hope of finding some sense of purpose, validation hidden in it.

One of the loveliest moments in Shortbus: an ex-hustler, now suicidal artist, sits in a closet and confesses tearfully to a dominatrix that when he now reads what he wrote aged 12, he finds he is still striving for exactly the same things all these years later.

Bloogle?

Imagining I would be ahead of the curve for once, I foolishly migrated my blog to the new Blogger Beta managed, it appears, by Google - despite the rather ominous warning during the migration that once performed, it could never be reversed - and now my blog is not recognizing some of my most faithful readers. DemonDoll, for some reason, is dismissed as "Anonymous" in all her comments! What have I done? Has anyone else trod this same wanton path? Will life ever be the same again??

A moment from my mouth

For your enjoyment - and perhaps also to serve as warning to those of you guilty of tooth-neglect - a snapshot from my recent tryst at the dentiste's, taken midway through the procedure:
Allow me to point out some of the more delightful features:

• The gently snaking hand of the dental clamp, ensuring that my tooth did not shatter during surgery;
• The flexible steel spikes - although only three are visible, there were in fact four - each inserted all the way down into one carefully hollowed-out canal of my root; and
• My favourite, the sort of fluid elegance of the adjacent tooth's root, curling back, recoiling as it were in horror.
• Not pictured: a blue rubber dental dam, stretched and pinned across my mouth, and perforated to allow access to the one offending tooth. I have to say after my first experience with a dental dam, they seem like a very inexact form of protection - don't you agree that lesbians deserve some improved technology after all these years?
  

Enough local anaesthetic flowed to fell a herd of after-Thanksgiving shoppers. My jaw still hurts today, two and a half days later, from being propped open for two hours. They did not, to answer DemonDoll, provide any of the lovely pills one comes to expect as reward for enduring such torment. Tylenol 3 with codeine was the best on offer (and indeed, would appear to be the wildest that most Canadians dream of - the sweet soothing waves of vicodin have yet to wash these shores), so I opted to stick with our impressive stash of leftovers at home: the one benefit in T's chronic back-woes.

Wednesday will see the completion of this phase of the ordeal: a permanent filling - although, a crown will ultimately have to go over the whole mess, but not until I've saved for it. In the meantime, soups, puddings and purees and no teeth-clenching activities...well, almost none.

Oh, yes, this puts me in mind of one final detail, the most unexpected and perhaps also the most mortifying. After my procedure, T came to fetch me (which was awfully nice of him, though the aftermath was thankfully nowhere near as traumatic as the last time), and we left at around 12:30 pm, as many of the employees were leaving for lunch. The office is located in the gay village area, and as we were walking towards the subway station, a dental employee, an amiable young man who had had, on a previous visit, commerce with my mouth, suddenly overtook us, walking swiftly and with purpose in his eye. He did not notice me, or if he did, did not acknowledge. A few feet ahead of us, he turned down an alleyway - not just any alleyway, but a rather notorious one, as it contains the entrance to one of the city's most popular "gentleman's clubs", and sure enough, as we passed the alleyway, we saw him go right in. It took awhile for this to sink in; I wasn't sure if I had in fact seen it, but T confirms its truth. Am I a prude, or is it rather horrifying to discover that one's dental professional has a thing for lunch-time raunch? Of course, he uses gloves in his work, so really what's the harm? And yet, I am suddenly not looking forward to my next visit.

Radix malorum

One of my teeth is dying, and its death-throes are putting me through hell. It began on Sunday (or so): a low aching in the jawbone that came and went in half-hour waves. It wasn't anything significant then, a minor annoyance, like the occasional nerve-twinges I suffer from (doesn't everyone?) but which go away after a few days. In this case, it did not go away. It has become a walloping pulsing crimson ball of agony. Until this morning, vicodin was keeping me human; I have since either developed an immunity, or the pain is seated at too deep a level for anything short of morphine to affect it. My dentist - she of the exquisite bones and strangely detached bedside manner - saw me on an emergency appointment yesterday. The verdict: root canal, pronto. She scheduled me for next Friday; I called this morning and apparently sounded close enough to an act of homicide to justify bumping me up to tomorrow. At 10:15 in the morning, she will drill into my tooth and scrape away all the dying roots and pulp that make my tooth a living thing, leaving behind little more than a skull. It will look like all the other teeth around it, with one exception: it will be empty, it will be dead.

I've had a root canal before - trust me, my dramatics are anything but amateur. The last one, administered in Glendale, California by a star graduate of the Josef Goebbels school of schadenfreude, left me literally screaming at the wheel of my car to offset the pain. Ten minutes later I was picking painkillers up off the carpet in a scene worthy of Neely O'Hara.

You'd think, with that as a template, I would be terrified about tomorrrow: I'm not. I'm quite excited. The thought of that needle slicing into my gum and delivering sweet numb oblivion is positively dreamy. Any fear is also mitigated somewhat by my sheer seething fury at the cost that this brief jaunt in the dentist's chair will incur to me. Thanks to my employer's sterling health benefits - yes, the ones that are supposed to justify and offset the sub-standard salaries we command - I will be paying for 50% of this debacle: $475, boys and girls. And that's not counting the crown that will eventually have to be applied. I could embark now on a rant about the futility of a middle-class existence, the endless cycle of reversals, the hateful, gall-churning toil of staying afloat, I could curse and wail with stirring rage - but I won't. My ibuprofen levels are dangerously high, and I suspect I would just return sober in a day or two and delete it all.

Shaken and stirred

Suddenly I care deeply about the franchise...

Signs of life

OK. This hasn't been my longest absence. I checked. Once, in August, I didn't post for thirteen days. Although, I suspect that won't stay the record forever. I get busy (imagine whining, overly-defensive tone, please)...writing even a paragraph sometimes seems like more than I can manage. Then there's the issue of content-judgement: Do I really have anything interesting to say? I think back to recent events, and nothing seems particularly blog-worthy, but you be the judge. What follows is an unordered list of items as they occur to me:

• Had psychiatric assessment at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, shit you not. Long story: really just looking for a therapist, but the system dictates that one has to be assessed in this way in order to access free services. Seemed a little extreme to me, but WTF? As I suspected, I did not make the cut: not addicted (not dangerously, anyway) and not clinically unstable (not such that merits medication, that is). Actually, that ended up being the substance of his assessment: to prescribe or not to prescribe. Sort of creepy.
• Went to the boss' house for dinner last night. Sort of nervous for variety of reasons, but relieved at the last minute to discover T & I were not to be the only guests. I'd gotten it into my head that she was inviting us in order to gently sack me. Absurd, I know, but the inclusion of other guests calmed this fear. T had a workshop, a roll-on-the-floor all-day theatre-games thing, and intended to get home and shower and change before dinner. He did not. He rolled up on his bike in sweats and t-shirt five minutes before dinner. I am trying to choose my crises: I chose this one. But I was wrong. My boss didn't give a shit, and I should have known she wouldn't. Mostly laid-back New Yorker who spent 14 years in Rwanda, so not so big on ceremony. Anyway, it all went fine. Conversation mostly lively, helped up to a point by the flow of wine, and then steadily hindered by same substance. Don't expect the ax anytime soon.
• Attended a potluck for the Daddies and Pappas 2B and the Dykes Planning Tykes. Sort of intimidating being in a roomful of fertile lesbians who know nothing of the reproductive challenges of a male couple. The egg is really so much mightier than the sperm. But it was fun too. Met my first Persian lesbian. I think she wanted to take out a restraining order on me by the end of the evening. I glommed on and wouldn't let go. Didn't realize how much I crave the community of cultural/sexual allies. I like lesbians.
• Ali and Ali, shoesellers, who occupy the store beneath our apartment, are starting to get on my tits. Every weekend I have to go downstairs and ask them to turn down their music. To be fair, I don't think they are even blasting it, but I can hear it and it's right under my drafting table. T's work area is way in the back, so he doesn't hear it as much, and in general he is less of a freak about noise-intrusion than I am. When I ask them, they are always very agreeable about it, but for pity's sake, do we have to go through it every week?? I suspect my misanthropic tendencies are not helping my self-esteem issues much...
• ...so implies my therapist, who's actually my counsellor, not being a qualified therapist at all, but a social worker who is trained to give counselling, or some such nice distinction. He's really quite sweet, and I am finding the work fairly helpful. The only problem is it's a short-term program which I am almost halfway through, and it costs money though not a lot, hence item one above.
  
• Hey, it's 11:11 on 11/11/06!!
• Now it's 11:12...
• Just think when it's 2011! 11:11, 11/11/11!!
• Saw Borat...very funny, but confusing in its mixture of real life and staged life. Well, probably confusing only to me who needs to see the seams in order to appreciate something. There are definitely some moments that are staged and cast with actors who are in on the joke; there are also other moments that are not. I suspect some of the most disturbing are of the latter type. More than once I did not want to laugh, but scream.
• Want to see Death of a President this weekend, as I think its run is wrapping up to make way for new Nicole Kidman flick, Snur, I mean Fur. Heard it's amazing, DOAP not Fur. Fur will not get one of my red Canadian pennies. Nicole Kidman must be stopped and I intend to do my part.
• We're off to Montreal again in two weeks time...Thanksgiving in fact. Don't imagine we'll have too traditional a Thanksgiving experience there, perhaps a poutine fashioned into a turkey leg. Makes me think of Mark's stomach-chrurning tofurkey some years back...
• Should I keep going?
• Prime Suspect this weekend!! DI Jane Tennyson's last installment! I could soil myself with excitement. Sunday night, PBS, although the faithful probably already know that; the rest of you heathens, don't start on series seven, get yourself to a video store and watch series 1 through 6 first.
• OK, that's enough. Apologies for the tedium, but I did warn you.
  

Happy Halloween

Seems sort of sad that a pumpkin is one of my proudest achievements, but here it is...

Pig of my Heart

Behold my beloved's pig. More than a little influenced by our having just enjoyed Helen Mirren as HRH QEII. As for the Jocelyn Wildenstein reference, search me. Please note also the absence of any tail. Let me assure those readers who bemoaned the absence of tail in their own drawings — and I can do this with categorical certainty — that there is little basis to the conclusion drawn...