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February 8, 2006Everybody who was anybody was there,and some who weren’t.I don’t remember feeding Joe Puccio that line however many years ago, because I asked him what was the first line of his novel and he told me it was that, and was disappointed when I didn’t recognize it as my own. I’d said I like it fine, and suggested that I would possibly cast it as “Everyone who was anyone was there, and some who weren’t anyone at all”—rewriting myself 30 years later. I like the first because it’s terse and blunt with a twist, but it feels like it ends too soon; some who weren’t what? There? You just said they were. It reminds me of the time I stopped short on my tiptoes right at the grill of the car that almost mowed me down. The other I think has a more balanced rhythm and a more hang-dog feel, though a tad redundant. Such are the debates that go on in a writer’s head. Can’t decide which I like better and for the purposes of this column I don’t care. It’s possible I remember everything Joe said and he remembers everything I said but neither of us remembers what we ourselves said. My favorite line of his was the opening of a letter responding to the news that I was leaving Philadelphia for Portland: “Color me surprised!” OYSTER KILLER!Anyway there were plenty of somebodys at Marc Powell’s (www.rotten.com) New Year’s Eve party, the crowd ebbing and flowing throughout the night. Yes, the conversation was interesting and stimulating; I remember thinking a few times, damn, he’s smart! Shit, she’s smart! At one point Mark’s brother Ian—and he’s smart—focused on my dozen strands of thrift shop pearls and informed me they come from death. Death? Say what? Death? Huh? What the f he was talking about, I still do not know, but I countered that no animals, or mollusks, die to produce pearls—isn’t it like a stone, calcified sand, that forms inside oysters? Do the oysters die as a result of this, or do they just get irritated? (Some day they’re going to be mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore!) Or are the pearls harvested and the oysters then eaten? Cultured pearls, I think, are farmed. [Yes, cultured pearls are “nucleated” by surgically implanting a shell bead and the oyster secretes layer upon layer of a hard, smooth crystalline substance called nacre for up to three years before being harvested. It is true that a percentage of oysters do not survive this procedure, but they are far more likely to die from disease, fresh water infiltration, the “dreaded red tide” (a plague of plankton that exhausts the oxygen supply and suffocates them) typhoons, predators and parasites, or lack of sufficient nutrients in the water. The life of an oyster is not an easy one!] Still, call me crazy, but oyster death is not the first thing I think of when I see a woman wearing pearls. Whatever! HAPPY NEW YEAR, GODDAMN IT!Anyway, there was lots and lots of talk, talk, talk, but no mention of midnight or the new year. It was 12:20 by the time someone thought to ask what time it was. I yelled “Happy New Year!” into the crowd and it seemed somehow inappropriate, like I’d yelled “Fire!” I’m thinking, did I get the date wrong, or was this just the Friday salon, New Year’s Eve edition? At one point, Bruce Wolfe and Krissy Keefer had been hashing out the ins and outs of running for Congress, when someone came over to get some punch and said, “This is the worst New Year’s Eve party conversation ever!” It was even funnier when he returned an hour or more later and said the same thing. Krissy and I got onto the topic of my copious bracelets, and I told her, this is the kind of shopper I am: I was at the Sea Ranch Lodge gift shop and saw these dozen bracelets on a velvet holder and told my friend, I love the look of that—but only all together in a bunch as displayed. “I’ll take them,” I said instantly and bought the lot of them. Another time I went into a gallery and surveyed the walls and said without hesitation, “I’ll take that, that, that and that.” I observed Bruce looking bored out of his skull, and said to him, “This is the worst New Year’s Eve conversation ever!”
Anyway, though the party was lively enough, I did not get the requisite dose of New Year’s glam that I require on that most glamorous night of the year and how often do those of us who are not “swells” as h calls them, get to be glamorous? I had assumed my royal persona of Czarina Alexandra, wearing basic black velvet dripping with those deathly pearls (thank God I left the tiara home). A few people had dolled up for the party, in vintage cocktail dresses and gauzy wraps, etc. Ray Tobey looked snappy in a raw silk white blazer and black shirt. But lively as it was, it was not the gala occasion I required to greet this new year which we all know HAS GOT to be and CANNOT HELP but be better than the last. I wanted to dismiss ’05 and welcome ’06 with fanfare so I threw a last-minute Russian Christmas affaire because I cancelled last year’s after the tsunami hit. With one day’s notice an intimate circle of people I really like showed up and I got pleasantly pixilated on vodka punch and h’s great schmoke. I got every millimeter of mileage possible out of “ramming Texas ass” jokes with Kevin, which ran out of gas by the end of the evening. To approximate that New Year’s Eve aura of excitement I staged a ritual observance of the passage from January 7th to January 8th, that particular year that starts January 8, 2006 and ends January 7, 2007. As midnight approached I announced with much hooplah, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….IT’S JANUARY 8TH!!!!! Champagne and kisses made the rounds. I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOUR CLEAVAGE“Does my cleavage look 50 years old?” I asked h, arching my back as only Playboy bunnies do. He assessed it at 40, the kind soul. “I don’t want to see your cleavage,” said Kevin, “a gay” who secretly loves me but doesn’t know how to deal with it because biologically I happen to be a woman. “I just don’t want to be foisting any crepe paper cleavage on anyone,” I continued, but the topic was spent. The Penis Atlas got passed around. Somehow in my, let’s see, 33 years of sexualizing, I have never happened to encounter a fully dressed specimen and assumed most American men have had their bananas peeled. Au contraire, mon frère; h told us circumcision in America is a generational matter of style and that plenty of men his age were not circumcised. For my own part, seeing the dizzying array of penises wearing overcoats in the Atlas was like discovering a whole new sex organ. The other white meat, as it were. Intriguing. Come out, come out wherever you are. Conan O’Brien claims that in New Jersey the foreskin is referred to as the “penis mullet.” (Rob Anderson: there I go with that sex stuff again! Rob thought I must be young and said that stuff would “thin out” with age. Au contraire, mon frère!) Mostly I just want to talk about something other than politics, although according to Hunter S. Thompson it’s “better than sex.” John F. Kennedy, he said, who in seizing the White House from Nixon, turned a generation of Americans into political junkies, “got shot in the head for his efforts,�? a statement dripping with irony considering how he ended his own life. So I’ll just stick to preferring sex, for now. It’s safer. Although, I would add, there is no such thing as safe sex. One always risks something in a bodily interaction with another, whether “protected” or not. As Jude Law put it in “Closer,” “There is no security.” JAPANOPHILIAYou know, I’m a Japanese film buff. Temple University Center City in Philly had a little screening room where I saw virtually every damn Japanese film ever made. Cynthia at the bookstore called a bunch of us “Japophiles” because we were ensconced in the works of Mishima, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Oe, Abe, Murasaki, Kawabata, et al. I remember this highly embarrassing incident that started at the shop, where Joe Puccio also worked. I was frequently at the front information desk of this four-story bookstore and a regular patron of ours had a very noticeable stutter, but I was always nice and patient with him, acting like I couldn’t detect it at all. He was obviously fond of me, or grateful that he didn’t embarrass me. He’d stop in frequently and we’d always chat. He had to be nearing middle-age. When I quit that job and began working at a nearby art gallery, he’d come in to say hi, and one time he suggested we do something together; I was a little uncomfortable with that but couldn’t think of a way to say no so I suggested a movie. To my subsequent horror the feature we settled on was Masohiro Shinoda’s “Double Suicide,” a film about the passionate affair between a courtesan and the struggling married man who could not afford to redeem her. The film contained some intense sex scenes, including cunnilingus (not graphically shown) and a writhing, tortured encounter in a graveyard. I could not have been more embarrassed. Afterwards he called the gallery as I was leaving to make a bank deposit, and started in on something about the “p-p-p-p-p-pyramids of G-G-G-G-G-Giza,” and I somewhat impatiently told him it was not a good time to talk. Later he saw me walking down the street with my handsome young boyfriend Mark and looked to be stricken. Though we made eye contact, he didn’t stop to greet me, nor I him. It seemed better that way. Never heard from him again. Masohiro Shinoda, by the way, is so masterful a craftsman that you can pause his films virtually anywhere and find a beautifully composed still life. Though I’ve seen but a smidgen of his 30+ films, I put him right up there with Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa, Yasojiro Ozu. THE POINTMy point is, though, that though I adore Japanese cinema, you don’t hear me talking about it everywhere I go—so why are the same political wonks talking politics no matter where they are or what’s happening (like New Year’s Eve). I can take only so much of that stuff before I delve back into the world of art and private life. In fact I am tempted to take an exacto knife and excise the entire San Francisco local politics scene from my life. Staying current takes so much time, and seems to be about 10% policy and 90% gossip. It wouldn’t be hard to lose touch. Skip some parties, unsubscribe from the Sentinel, click off the internet, tune out Channel 26, delete h brown’s emails without reading them, neglect to pick up the paper, abandon monitoring the ever-changing landscape of Chris Daly’s facial hair. Then it’s back to music, poetry, film, the artistic life, which to me is the stuff of life. But like it or not, which I don’t, “everything is political” and there is no turning back. If you give a shit about anything, you need politics to facilitate change, create and maintain infrastructure, get things done and conditions corrected. I am just not one who can devote my entire lifeblood to its pursuit. If you are, God bless. FUCK ART, LET’S DANCE“Did you get that at City Lights?” I asked the fellow lounging at Center Camp, Burning Man last year. The button, that is, with the above legend. I have one too, on the pantry door where I install my political relics. How cool it was to be in a tent in the Nevada desert making this little connection. Well I say, fuck politics, let’s dance. Fuck politics, let’s fuck. I had a boyfriend who used to say that to me. We’d be sitting in a room, and he’d say “let’s fuck.” We generally did. HARD CORE NOIRWhere but the San Francisco Noir Festival? Overheard in the lobby: “It’s the dame in the tight red sweater.” “You are the hard core,” Eddie Muller praised us, on a miserable rainy windy Tuesday night from the stage of the Noir Festival, Palace of Fine Arts. You don’t need music, you don’t need a personal appearance, you just want to see rare noir. January was packed with conflicting events, so I made it to only a few of the noir shows, but I rushed after work to make the 7:00 start of the premiere, featuring “Strangers on a Train.” Now I’ve seen that film a half dozen times I’m sure, but never was it done more justice to than in that dark expansive theater full of noir heads all biting our nails, when that merry-go-round ground to a halt and the packed theater burst into applause—wow! And then moments later—Farley Granger himself walks out on stage! Completely without notice to me, when he appeared out of the wings, tears of joy began streaming down my face. A validation of some sort. He’s trim, white-haired, a little slow in gathering his thoughts, but still has that boyish sideways smile of his. “Soulful,” Muller called him and he hit the head on that one. He said he prefers live theater to filming because it has a beginning, a middle and an end, unlike filming, where you sometimes shoot the end of the movie at the beginning of the process, and because of the energy of the live audience—it’s an “upper,” he said—and he sure got a blast of that radiating from his diehard fans, with standing ovations to greet him and send him off. “Thank you,” he said, humbly, sincerely, “thank you—I love you all.” Christ, I’m crying again! Muller told a story about Robert Walker, Jr. who apparently looked just like his father, getting up in the audience of another festival and saying to Granger, “I’ve got a proposition for you.” Ya gotta love it. A MILLION LITTLE LIVESI wish I had a million lives to pursue my interests. I’d spend one of them doing nothing but watching film. Another reading, anything and everything. Another devoted to music. Another traveling the world, another just riding trains. Another drawing and painting, another writing, natch. Another protesting and crusading. Another fucking politics and dancing. Another loving a man. Another monitoring the ever-changing landscape of Chris Daly’s facial hair. Another walking down the street not knowing what’s going to happen, and letting it happen. But this one little life in which they all mix up into one crazy salad is the one I like the best. IS IT LOVE IF IT DOESN’T HURT?Have you ever known a love so hopeless that double suicide was the only way out of it? How noirish of me. Noir lives and dies on such situations. Have you ever found that your passion for someone is more intense if there is some sort of mitigating circumstance, like a spouse, unrequited love, star-crossed circumstances, or its for whatever reason forbidden nature? Sure ya have, you’re human. I left my hometown of Philadelphia because of love, because it was impossible to be in the same city with the man I loved, and not love him. And it was not possible to love him. You’d better do something, sister, I said, shaking my own finger at myself, or you’re never going to have a life. It wasn’t just that, of course. I had to, at age 26, get out of town to grow up, to make that break from my family or I was never going to have a life. I had to check out of that bourgeois motel! No more jello for me, mom! And I’d never traveled cross county, so I moved, all the way to the other side of it, 3000 miles away from Larry, one of my best friends of 30+ years, now living happily in Philadelphia with his second wife. IS THIS THE FACE OF LOVE?“Double Suicide�? is a great suffering in love film, but the ultimate suffering in love film is “Children of Paradise�? (Les Enfants du Paradis). The characters are on a merry-go-round on which everyone loves the one ahead of him or her and is loved by the one behind. They’re all reaching for the brass ring but no one captures it. This is one merry-go-round that will probably never grind to a halt. If you’re lucky you get a few good days a year for your trouble. Four-star in my book is as good as a movie gets; it could not have been made better. But “Children of Paradise” is one of only three films to rate my beyond-the-call-of-cinema five-star status, when a film goes beyond the ordinary realm of moviemaking to create a world of its own, with an epic sweep of drama, seeming to say everything about being human on the planet earth. The others are Sergei Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace” and Powell-Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes.” It is perhaps my personal bias that two of them deal with the passions of the artist for both art and love (which for me are the stuff of life). Look at these stills from “Children of Paradise.”
Pauvre Baptiste! This guy is not having a good time! NO ONE WANTS TO BE WITH SOMEONE WHO LOVES THEM!said one George Constanza—no, you want to be with someone who doesn’t like you! That’s far easier to live with. “Love is a precious burden and I can shoulder only so much,” said my hopeless Philly love in a letter to me. And isn’t it odd how when love ends and life goes on there comes the day that you can’t even remember what all the fuss was about? One day you’re on your own feeling perfectly fine and dandy; then He enters the picture and life steps up its pace. All is sunshine and moonbeams and la-la-life is wonderful. How had you ever lived? And when you lose that person, life is crap. “It’s the same matter under the pauper’s cap or the crown,” says Frederic, in “Children of Paradise,” “the dead matter of love rotting in the heads of the unloved.” And your head and heart are rotting. You’ve hit the zazu pits of your soul. You wish you’d never met him! You don’t know how you’ll live. But you do. And one day you find you’re on your own and feeling perfectly fine and dandy. IF YOU CAN CHOOSE, IT’S NOT LOVE – Barry GiffordLong ago, and oh so far away, I fell flat on my face in love with an impossible situation. He and I were partnered up as volunteers on a short-term fundraising effort; I warmed up to him big time, right from the first handshake–but I had no idea he had a fiance until I was introduced to her at a function and it was too late—too late to take back the love letter I’d written him. So then I got to be both heartbroken and humiliated. O Joy! He’d responded by not responding. I knew that was one way it could go, so I wasn’t surprised, but when I didn’t hear from him in short order I knew I never would. If he’d given me that letter I’d have busted his freakin’ door down and given him the ride of his life. Anyway, chalk that one up, dearie. Apparently the intimations of intimacy I’d felt with him were too intimate for comfort. But a fiance had simply never came up. So I wrote another letter that was supposed to be a disclaimer for the first letter but was really just another love letter, thus breaking my own rule, “Any man deserves a love letter; it’s the second one he has to earn,” which was far from the case in this case. He responded by not responding. But he didn’t break my heart; life did. Can you blame someone for not loving you? IF YOU HAVE NOT LOVE, YOU YET HAVE LIFEI’m not sure I wrote that line. I just have it in my head. I have never thought of myself in terms of whether I am with someone or not–in fact I reject the very concept of “unmarried” or “single” as the obverse of a standard I don’t accept to begin with. There is no inherent value in being married or having children; though the social norm and convenient for the economy, they are lifestyle choices like any other. You may say that perpetuating the species is a vote for life; I say right now, as we approach the birth of the 300,000,000th American, there is just as much if not more value in not perpetuating it. The desire for progeny is a human impulse that cannot be denied, but there are also plenty of children extant in the world who need your loving home. Don’t worry, there are plenty of breeders taking up the slack for loners like me. Solitude is in my nature, but that doesn’t exempt one from love, and I’d always known some guy would come along who would challenge everything I “know” about myself, who would be worth anything and everything; it just never entered my head that when I actually met him, I would never get the chance to be happy about it. But yes, there is life after love. Before, during and after it. And I’m just fine and dandy, thank you. What was all the fuss about? CAN I GET A MEDIUM MOCHA MIND FREEZE WITH NO WHIP?
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