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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
Monday 02/24/2003
The tepid life
The plumbing gods are unhappy with me. I don't know what it is I have done, but they are mighty displeased. In the previous entry, I mentioned in passing that John and I replaced our houses� water heater. This was because it was decrepit, sediment filled, and leaked. This past weekend, we had to deal with a spontaneous leak at the kitchen sink faucet, a spontaneous leak from the downstairs bathroom toilet water tank, an overflowing washing machine, a sudden problem with rain water coming through one of the living room windows, and an ongoing problem with water leaking under the front porch into the crawl space below the house every time it rains. Water everywhere, except for where it actually belongs. The house on the hill has become a soggy place, not a good thing considering it is nothing but wood & stucco. Neither of which is particularly happy when constantly wet.
Home ownership is not overly amusing at times. I should probably try to make myself feel better by figuring out how much rent John and I would have paid over the past six years of having the house. Then again, considering that obscenely large sums of money, regardless of being "good" or "bad" have been known to induce nausea in me, I better not.
Time not spent straining with wrenches, molding plumbers putty, and trying to get spanky kittens out from underneath kitchen counters, was spent splayed out on the couch watching TV feeling defeated, or hunched over at work feeling defeated. Not that exciting.
A tepid life makes for dull reading when examined in too much detail.
I wrote the above last week, but never got around to finishing the entry. The idea of writing seemed exhausting. The idea of doing anything seemed overwhelming. I am in one of my hermit moods, and have been sliding towards unfriendliness and moody introspection. The kind where I find fault in all aspects of my life and neglect to respond to e-mails.
The best solution to this mood would be to drag myself out of the house and actually do something.
The best solution to these boring entries would be for me to not only get of the house, but to write about it as well.
Unfortunately, I am not about the best solution for anything these days. I am actually all about the lying on the couch watching TV losing brain cells by the minute. Which is not to say that I haven't done anything interesting. John and I went to a museum exhibit and I managed to have lunch with Kristen this past weekend, so I haven't been a total waste of life, but still.
Anyway, let's try for something interesting. John was invited to a private showing of the John Singer Sargent (Sargent in Italy), and Ansel Adams (Adams at 100) exhibits at LACMA. I saw an exhibit of Sargent portraits at a show in Washington DC a few years ago and it was so crowded about the only thing I could see clearly were the backs of dozens and dozens of heads. I jumped at the chance to see his work sans crowd.
John had invited his friend Eric to come as well, but he couldn't make it at the last minute. ChrisX went in his place and ended up with the Eric name tag. While John was doing the smoozing/networking thing, ChrisX and I ate 'spensive food* and joked about her successful gender reassignment.
The Adams exhibit was very cool. Part of the show focused on the ways his techniques and vision as an artist changed as Adams got older and spent less time in the field and more time making prints form older negatives. His earlier work was soft and had a quiet voice, while the later was harsher, with far more dramatic use of contrast of light. It was louder, larger, and possibly more popular with the public.
The reasons given for this change ranged from an artist growing with maturity, to an old man loosing his sight. Personally, I prefer the idea that he did not feel like recreating the exact same photographs decade after decade. It seemed less depressing.
In addition to the nature landscapes, there was one small photograph of New York. Surprising because it is a city scene, but still similar to his other work, in that it feels like a photograph of some deserted location, only one with weird very tall monoform mesas.
The Sargent in Italy exhibit focused on work I wasn't to familiar with, not portraits of the rich and influential, but watercolors and landscapes he did during summers spent in Italy. There was a softness, a sensualness to much of his work. My favorite pieces were a series of watercolors of Venice.
I knew and still know relatively little about Sargent, but I started wondering about certain facts of his life when I read that he never married, lived with his family his entire life; and that he was very good friends with a female author who wrote lesbian laced fiction under a male pseudonym. All very suspicious in my book.
I spent a whole ten minutes online seeing if Sargent was in fact gay, only to hit a big wall of heteronormalcy. Again, I did not spend that much time searching, but the majority of sites I looked at just assumed that yes of course, this man was heterosexual. After all, he never said he wasn't. He never jumped up and down screaming at the top of lungs "I'm a big fat Nelly Uraninan Homosexualist Queen!"
Never mind how unlikely it would be for a man of his station and of his time to do such a thing.
One site did mention the idea that Sargent might have been a closeted homosexual, but immediately disregarded it because his portraits of women exuded sensuality, and "besides it doesn't really matter anyway."
In order to enjoy a work of art, no, the orientation of the artist doesn't really matter. On the other hand, when looking at the lost and whitewashed history of Gays and Lesbians, yes it does matter. It matters that people actively "straighten" out historical figures. Lovers become friends; spinster women sharing households were of course sexless beings; and life long bachelorhood becomes not a sign of a reluctance to oblige heterosexual expectations, but a sign of being such a rabid womanizer, that you never bothered to settle down with just one woman. It matters that merely mentioning that not everyone is the world is or ever was 100% straight as defined in 20th century America, is seen as gay propaganda.
Anyway, since when did the ability to paint a woman make you straight?
I did find one site that assumed Sargent was a gay man; however, it was just a list of queer artists and gave no reason as to why these specific artists were included. No proof as it were.
I'm sure somewhere there is a book or web site that makes a precise and overwhelming argument that Mr. Sargent was likely what we would consider a gay man, but I don't seem to have the energy or desire to find it right now. As I wrote before, I'm in a tepid mood. We'll see if I can change that for the better.
More later,
nico
* 'spensive food means a spread that according to ChrisX probably cost a couple thousand dollars. The food itself consisted of so-so chicken, salmon in a scary white sauce, beef (tri tip?), Caesar salad with flayed anchovies, another salad heavy with bitter greens and blue cheese (way good), horseradish/potato pancakes topped with thin sliced greens and pansy flowers, asparagus, and a couple more things I no longer remember. Desert had a spread of small cakes and meringues which followed ChrisX's rule that the uglier the desert, the better it tastes. In this case, the ugliest thing being pistachio meringue cookie things that looked like moldy minihamburgers. Way tasty.