Haus of Dressel

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Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:55:24 -0400

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Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:37:20 -0400

[Candy Darling by Anton Perrich] Friday was the opening of XXX:...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:37:00 -0400

[Candy Darling by Anton Perrich]

Friday was the opening of XXX: Sensuality Through the Eyes of the Photographer at Leslie-Lohman’s basement space. A cut, hirsute gentlemen sans shirt, but wearing houndstooth dress slacks, was serving the requisite cheap red & white gallery wine, along with a strong and unappealing punch made from vodka. He was tanned and chatty. Several gentlemen in their 50s or 60s strolled the space in their leathers, getting a little culture before the weekend’s Black Party, perhaps. A guy who was always bustling through the crowd, presumably associated with the gallery, was wearing a shimmery silver tunic for the first half of the night, but at one point after I returned from a cigarette break had affected a costume change into another shirt of the same design, only in hot pink. The show, the night was, due in part to its subject matter but also its audience, evocative of but obviously not at all like a Z-man Barzell joint.

On the way to said smoke break, D and I were stopped in front of a painting near the coat check. “What celebrity does that look like?” we were asked by a young black dude wearing sunglasses and surveying the piece with a friend. The image was of a thick-necked, plump-lipped blonde. “Channing Tatum?” I offered.

But no. D said “Chris Evans” which was the right answer, for them, and they cooed appreciatively. And it did so, the painting, resemble Chris Evans, but only if you brushed past quickly and didn’t linger.

“Y’all aren’t leaving are you?” the guy asked.

“No, just having a smoke,” I responded.

Get me some drugs or bring back some drugs or something similar, he said, jokingly, and as I climbed the stairs I tried to remember the last time I’d bought, or done, anything illicit.

We made a few more laps before heading out, and I texted a friend an image of one of Mick Rock’s photos of Bowie. Priced at only $2,000 which, for the photographer and subject, somehow seemed reasonable.

Making our final exit, we saw the guy from in front of the Chris Evans photo chatting with a woman dressed in black, who earlier had try to interest me in her friends’ photos but when I hadn’t showed appropriate enthusiasm—I was in line for my first drink—had avoided me since. He was an artist, we overheard, and it seemed as if he were working his hustle. I lit another smoke. We lingered by the railing of the space, faintly eavesdropping, and I had a moment where I briefly was not sure which year or decade I was existing in, in this city, if it were 1979 or 1989, or 2013, and if the distinctions mattered at all in this context.

A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:38:00 -0500

A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs, careening from West to East by way of the underpass through the Park. What difference does it make to be here alone? Even now, just after eight in the evening, the trucks are starting their delivery of the Sunday Times.

File under: found notes; I don’t even…

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 22:05:51 -0500

File under: found notes; I don’t even…

But what did Jobriath sound like? Mick Jagger doing Ethel...

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:25:00 -0500

But what did Jobriath sound like? Mick Jagger doing Ethel Merman doing Axl Rose doing Elton John doing David Bowie doing Mick Ronson producing Chopin’s next album if Chopin was a glam-rock fairy alive in 1973.

"I was temping at the New York Public Library, the big one, with the lions out front; I was assisting..."

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:21:38 -0500

“I was temping at the New York Public Library, the big one, with the lions out front; I was assisting a research librarian named Arnold Hathaway in the Rare Literary Manuscripts collection. I had to wear white gloves to work in Arnold’s department, naturally, since on a daily basis I helped Arnold lift and display and file rare papers and manuscripts of long-dead but very famous authors whose work had suddenly been chosen to come out of Archives for an advertised public viewing. That was Arnold’s chief responsibility at the library, to curate the new exhibitions, which changed about every six weeks or so. I was extremely intrigued to have a job that involved the mandated use of a fashion accessory—I thought of the gloves as a costume piece that helped me get into character as a temp who worked in the Rare Literary Manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library—and I couldn’t help that the gloves, which were soft and slightly shabby in a vintage way, with a dainty mother-of-pearl-button at each wrist, made me feel like a person from a dressier, more formal and romantic time; truth to tell, not as much Mr. Darcy or Algernon, as I might have expected, but more like the pencil-skirted, red-lipped models out of the pages of a 1959 Harper’s Bazaar. Also the gloves made me think of those old movies set in New York of the fifties and early sixties, where young starlets like Hope Lange and Barbara Parkins were seen running around clean, gleaming midtown Manhattan on glamorous lunch hours from their office jobs, wearing smart suits, pillbox hats, spike-heeled pumps and, yes, white gloves, while gloriously made up in matte red lipstick and penciled-on eyebrows, and just generally popping off the screen in super-saturated Technicolor.”

- Here I was content to believe I would have to thumb through my well-worn copy of The Music of Your Life whenever I wanted a hit of Rowell fiction, resigned to the idea that he’d published that single volume of stories and then gone silent. But behold, a new selection, excerpted from a forthcoming novel no less, People Come and Go So Quickly Here. That’s something.

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Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:55:58 -0500

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Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:34:00 -0400

The Met began their Summer HD festival this fine evening with a...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:41:00 -0400

The Met began their Summer HD festival this fine evening with a screening of The Enchanted Island, a Baroque mash-up conceived by Peter Gelb (as Anthony Tommasini notes) but concocted by Jeremy Sams, who wrote the English-language libretto. And oh, the libretto, she is a fresh steamy mess (sorry!) that borrows plot elements and characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Too on the nose at times, a smidge corny at others, and, yeah, “chatty.” But luckily that mostly matters not! You are forgiven for playing Dr. Frankenstein, when assembling your monster from some exquisitely lovely musical corpses. Despite some production missteps (Caliban is costumed like some sort of pro-wrestler?) and a bulky run-time, there was more to enjoy sitting out on the plaza tonight than to pick at, especially the performances by Joyce DiDonato as Sycorax and Danielle de Niese’s Ariel. Also, on the plaza watching the screen, you can totally stretch and move around and change seats and even slink off to the street for a smoke break when the deployment of arias in the first act becomes unwieldy, and which are actions frowned upon in the hallowed halls of the opera house.

But on the subject of mash-ups, I’m grappling with my rationale for obsessively listening to Alan Cumming’s “Someone Like the Edge of Firework.” I am not insincere when I say I’m glad he was the one to string together Adele, Gaga, and Katy Perry into a Top 40 assemblage that is not unlike the Voltron of earworms (from the German Ohrwurm, apparently? You learn something new every day on the internet!). Is it the hint of his Scottish burr or his restrained delivery that keeps the whole enterprise from going pear-shaped? Unclear. As with Enchanted Island, ambition and execution are the metrics on which to judge (and where, if at all, the joke is situated).Thankfully he didn’t try to shoehorn one more element, like “We Found Love,” into the mix. That would be the aural equivalent of topping your hot fudge sundae with a big blue ball of cotton candy.

Hey chorus boy, what you doin’ uptown?

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:28:00 -0400

Hey chorus boy, what you doin’ uptown?

Well, October is promising me all types of musical treats. I am...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:46:00 -0400

Well, October is promising me all types of musical treats. I am almost like let’s speed up into fall. (But actually no I would like a few more beach weekends, please.)

Besides the aforementioned release of the February House cast album, Reuben Butchart will be celebrating the release of his album Nameless and Awake with a show at the Wild Project on October 3rd, which promises a “staged concert [that] will have lights and sets and the full ensemble of musicians.” Sold! (I previously expressed my admiration for this album, and so will likely probably be attending the concert. Also the Wild Project is a really lovely space in the East Village and if you haven’t been for any type of artsy event then do, go. Friends got married there a few years ago and it was the perfect location, with food catered by Mama’s Food Shop—RIP—and an ice cream truck. All of which is to say it is a lovely place with good memories and a very choice venue for the album release.)

October 16th seems so far away.

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:50:00 -0400

October 16th seems so far away.

As indicated by the screenshot above I’m going to be part...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:48:00 -0400

As indicated by the screenshot above I’m going to be part of Liars’ League NYC’s September outing City & Country. It should prove to be a fun night. If you don’t know the Liar’s League, well, in their own words:

Liars’ League is a monthly live short fiction night featuring professional actors bringing to life the best in original fiction from both established and up-and-coming writers. Or, as we like to put it: writers write, actors read, audience listens, everybody wins.

Who doesn’t like winning?

The story of mine chosen for the evening involves alcoholism! The South! A Stevie Nicks reference! And, as the title implies, buzzards! If that isn’t enticing…

I don’t agree with you that Jackson [Pollock] was painting atomic fission; I believe he was...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:57:00 -0400

I don’t agree with you that Jackson [Pollock] was painting atomic fission; I believe he was painting the labyrinthine circuitry of the human mind. And, of course, Jackson was Sebastian, wasn’t he? He was not only the great martyr of modern art; he was that martyr. Sebastian! To give the martyr who was, it has been said, before his conversion the beloved of the emperor Heliogabalus, a hard on-on in Paradise! Profoundly gay. Meanwhile, is there any such thing as a form of sexual activity that doesn’t either lead to death directly, or lead to contemplation of it in some way? It’s as if they were right after all, that playing with yourself will drive you crazy. And another thing hit me with stunning force that afternoon about Sebastian and faggots. Do you know why Saint Sebastian was so popular in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance? He was the protector against the bubonic plague—the Black Death! Does that not add a new and utterly eerie dimension to the configuration? Anyway, I got the poster of him and brought it home. I think it belongs in the Gay Pride Parade on a banner next to Judy. In the Salute, Sebastian stands next to Saint Rocco; I think he makes more sense standing next to Judy, replacing Punch. You carry Judy and I’ll carry Sebastian. You sing ‘The Man That Got Away’ and I’ll sing ‘Full Moon and Empty Arms.’

Sex and death, dear, sex and death—you can’t get away from their conjunction. As somebody said, Age comes, the body withers: mere anarchy is loosed upon the tits and ass—and that always reminds me somehow of the single flower growing out of the girl’s asshole in The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado.

—Odette O’Doyle, from James McCourt’s Time Remaining.

[N.B.: If anyone were to record an audio book of TR, it would need to be Justin V. Bond.]

My copy of James McCourt’s Time Remaining was sitting...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 22:38:00 -0400

My copy of James McCourt’s Time Remaining was sitting outside my door this morning. Which was lucky, as I was taking a mental health day and needed something to escape into. (I was recently taken with the notion I was cracking up a bit, for sundry reasons, but after today I decided to disabuse myself of that narrative. The heat is just weather and no one is completely on your side etc., so get over it already.) (Though: Time Remaining is not exactly a beach read, unless it is? But a very particular beach. It is definitely a L.I.R.R. read. Regardless I located myself somewhere north of the umbrella line and dug in. I’ve had trouble locating myself lately—refer to my previous comment about my mental state—so I’m keenly on the lookout for signposts, the more definitive the better.)

McCourt’s New York (and later, globe). It is not mythic (though it is a Czgowchwz [gorgeous] world, still, with all its attendant recurring players), but more real than reality? Like a glittering, adjacent mirror Manhattan, sorry, “Gotham,” that takes dedication to locate. Because it is in time and looking back on it, on places like the Old Met and the Everard Baths, things that were sort of grappling with their own legends even when they were functioning. Then the locations beyond the city that have their own piquancy, relevance: Venice, Vienna. And of course throughout an invocation of certain saints, actual and assumed, as guides and touchstones and counterpoints: Augustine; Pollock; O’Hara; Marlene; Judy.

The book—and granted I’m only 1/3 through so these statements may not bear out—is much like a master class in a kind of faggotry that is ill-utilized of late. (I don’t mean, however, camp. Or what camp has sort of come to stand for. McCourt calls the book “an Irish wake, more laughter than tears.”) It is a dexterously performed text that reads, well…not as code. It is not sub rosa but rather the opposite? It is definitely for an audience, but not in a veiled, wink-wink way. Too, as Sontag says on the back cover, “One of the many pleasures of James McCourt’s books is that he never writes down. Only up-up-up.” At times reading McCourt’s prose is like trying to recall a foreign language you’re not sure you conned well enough in the first place; Or like practicing telepathy.

Anyway. There are a million sentences already that are worth underlining and posting here, but then the narrative is so discursive and webby that one brilliant segment bleeds into the next and to separate a few lines out is to do it a disservice. But here are two that might mean everything and nothing and that I just read:

All the same, dear, like any metaphor—like any man, too—it works best the first time you get it up. Later, even an afternoon later, there are bound to be…which doesn’t mean you discard it, not necessarily. Only that you note diligently its deficiencies, and come to terms. Ditto fusion texts and holograms, cyberspace and autofellatio…

And:

You see, dear, anybody can talk like a John Ashbery poem, just as anybody can lisp like Holly Woodlawn, but, after all, just as only Holly Woodlawn is Holly Woodlawn, only a John Ashbery poem is a John Ashbery poem.

In the wake of a long, rather sweaty weekend that managed to...

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 22:42:00 -0400

In the wake of a long, rather sweaty weekend that managed to include both #LadyBookClubbing and #MeditationClass along with more spontaneous activities, I find myself contemplating the age old summer question: Was wird aus einem Wochenende Schlafzimmer Freund werden*? Whatever the answer, I’m currently living for this mash-up of Blondie and Philip Glass.

An old friend from way back has been getting all photo happy on...

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 15:02:00 -0400

An old friend from way back has been getting all photo happy on Facebook. Did anyone ever think black Dickies coveralls and maroon Converse was a good idea? I’m here to tell you someone did.

Oh the peaks and valleys of experience between a Friday afternoon and a Sunday night! But! I wanted...

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 01:53:00 -0400

Oh the peaks and valleys of experience between a Friday afternoon and a Sunday night! But! I wanted to mention, since it is worth maybe doing so, that author and poet Wayne Koestenbaum was at the MoMA this past Friday afternoon for their Lunch Poems series, to talk about Frank O’Hara.

Impish and engaging, dressed in a pair of white jeans, a pink shirt, and blue and white blazer that was very Hamptons A-Gay meets Fred Schneider (but mostly in a good way, like, academic-rock star summer chic?), he read his way through selections of the distinguished author’s poems which he interspersed with assignments, prompts for the inclined assembled to write their own Lunch Poems, and also pithy highbrow observations interjected as winningly as cocktail party chatter, including a bit about the poet and his connection to his time and his work’s timeliness—I believe the phrase was “the bottled air of the now” but I could have mis-heard—and also about that one dust jacket photo that is dreamy to the utmost.

Koestenbaum read “Naphtha,” pointing to the line towards the end of the following verse as an indicator of O’Hara’s cheeky self-assessment:

how are you feeling in ancient September
I am feeling like a truck on a wet highway
how can you
you were made in the image of god
I was not
I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver

“I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver.” Indeed. I don’t remember being struck by it when I first read Lunch Poems, I must’ve glossed it, but now I can’t shake it.

Of course I am always a sucker for the end of “Steps” which remains forever perfect:

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

Isn’t it just? Even if it is not your actuality now maybe it has been or will be? Still isn’t it just? I’ve often believed so.

Having just seen and deeply ridiculously enjoyed February House...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:33:00 -0400

Having just seen and deeply ridiculously enjoyed February House (#FebHaus) at the Public, I am dismayed by the, albeit minor, criticisms leveled at the show—that it is precious, meandery, undercooked. (Also: “the score is musically underwhelming, with much of it sounding like a pale imitation of Sondheim.” Disagree. It is sad that the only barometer we have when someone writes something that isn’t super pastiche-y or just a retread of ___ musician’s catalog is Sondheim, but there it is! Always be trotting out that comparison and failing people for not hitting that difficult and not-always-satisfying-in-itself mark.)

Briefly: The chamber musical, based on Sherrill Tippins’ chronicle of actual events, concerns the Brooklyn Heights townhouse occupied in the early 1940s by the likes of Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Erika Mann, and Gypsy Rose Lee; the experiment in communal living the brainchild of former Harper’s Bazaar editor George Davis. (“Like Brook Farm. But without vegetarians.” Auden says very early on to McCullers. “You’re not a vegetarian are you?”)

Surely you’ve encountered this set-up before, in your consumption of entertainment products? Odd/lost/charming/broken people come together, whoop it up, somewhere along the way cruel realities intrude, they go their separate ways, finis. It is never the action in these types of stories but the details that delight. And delight the details do: there’s a gay marriage, a raucous house party capped by Gypsy Rose Lee doing a striptease, Auden tries to strangle his lover. Benjy Britten and Peter Pears sing a hysterical duet upon the discovery of bedbugs in their room. You were missing, what? A shoot out? Pyrotechnics? Must it now only be bombast or bust? Like Mark Blankenship, I’ll take the whisper.

I want to wonder too if its spare, intimate delivery really unsettled some critics, or its queer sensibility/sensitivity?

If you want to go there, I’ll happily indulge an argument on which character the beating heart of the piece belongs to: McCullers, both flinty and ethereal, young and preternaturally wise, or George, the dreamer and harried mother hen, swanning around in a dressing gown attending to the whims and inclinations of the occupants, succeeding, if only for a time, in assembling his ideal makeshift family. That is the kind of conversation this piece provokes and which I will engage in. (Spectacle in musical theater doesn’t provoke conversation as much as stifle it; gosh did ya see that chandelier fall/actor fly/car explode/hologram of Ethel Merman? Well yes duh I was seated right next to you in E14, let’s grab a drink at Angus McIndoe.)

Sure the piece is not for all comers, but as a dear friend said, “If you are gay, a writer or ‘intellectual’, or broke in NYC, this musical is highly relevant to your interests.”

It was definitely my pleasure to spend two-plus hours with this beautiful menagerie of bruised souls.