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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.
Wednesday 02/11/2004
The guy playing Marcello was a hottie and other stories where nico just sits back and watches
I had lunch at the Coffee Table in Silverlake last weekend, a chicken sandwich thing with a slightly undercooked potato salad, although the dressing for the potatoes, including whole seed deli mustard, onion, dill, slivers of lemon zest, and capers was good enough to almost make up for that. Overall though, the food was not half as interesting as the battle of the laptops going on around me. Table on table on table of aggressively Funky, calculated Hip, Alt-culture folks, both queer and non, fought a fierce yet silent competition of who looked the best working on their laptop while drinking coffee.
While I found myself wanting to root for the lone Mac user, sadly he was sort of a slob; and worse, he wore sunglasses indoors. Regardless of the fun/hipster attitude that Apple uses to sell itself, sunglasses in a darkly lit room? That�s either a sign of someone who prefers fashion to common sense, or that the person in question is dealing with a bad hangover and is trying to hide their bloodshot eyes. Either way, Apple solidarity can only be carried so far.
I think the winner of the fight was a hip mom typing away at some generic black windoze laptop. She projected confidence, and outdid the gay men and women surrounding her in groovy clothes and choice of ironic eyewear (funky white granny glasses). She even managed to talk to and treat her child like a real mother would and not as an overly large fashion accessory; going against the Edina stereotype I was failingly attempting to dump on her.
Maybe this is all envy on my part, if I had a laptop, I probably would have been tapping away at a keyboard as well. Well, in truth probably not. Assuming I had the machine and felt the need to work in public, I wouldn�t have driven across town to do so.
Eh, whatever. Here�s some stuff concerning the past few weeks of the life where I have done little more than play spectator:
One:
John and I were at a super bowl shindig, less party, more a small gathering of friends, when I was told about Ever Ready Freddie, an older but still quite popular dog who is often at a nearby dog beach. As his name suggests, Freddie is ever ready to hump everything and anything in sight. More often than not, if it is of the four-legged variety, it�s more than willing to be humped, regardless of gender. Freddie is just that good.
The Freddie stories led to stories about Sam, a dog that was adopted a couple of years ago by some friends of ours. Abused by his first owner, Sam is now extremely wary of men. Men make him nervous and it takes him a long time to calm down and stop barking. On the other hand, he gets along fine with women, which has made ownership by a lesbian couple fairly easy. A loving home has had a good effect on Sam and he is getting better, slowly mellowing out a bit.
Folks joke that of course a couple of dykes are going to have a man-hating dog. Being the humorless stick in the mud that I am, I always feel the need to point out that it wasn�t women, but a man who felt the need to beat a puppy who taught Sam fear.
One and a half:
I�m purposely not writing about the Janet Jackson breast-baring incident. There is already far too much of that as it is. However, if I did comment on it, I would have mentioned that watching commercials trying to sell male erections and unneeded merchandise by featuring bestiality jokes and images of horses farting on women�s faces were far more damaging to the nations morals than a one second peep at a lone bare breast.
As it was, the only person at the party who enjoyed the quick flash job was the lone straight man. The rest of us just thought it was an odd publicity stunt and paid it little attention. Not to be too superior sounding, but it�s too bad the rest of the nation can�t seem to get over it as quickly.
One and three quarters:
The first half of the game was fairly dull, and at one point the conversation turned to the L-word. I found out that sports dykes around the nation are secretly laughing at the Lesbian tennis pro, because the actor is not the most athletic looking thing and the details are all wrong. I�d never have guessed it, but apparently the sight of a pro tennis player taking a spinning class was a laugh riot.
Despite this, and despite the lack of nonmoneyed and nonlipstick lesbians, the women at the party have enjoyed the show so far. I�m finding the show interesting as well, although I�m also having some problems with suspension of disbelief (The blond Mom to be already has food cravings after being pregnant for what? a week? And how fast is the baby developing? Is she going to give birth in less than a month? And is Shane even employed? She's never at work. If there is no job, how can she afford custom fitted leather pants?).
Two:
John and I saw Suzan-Lori Parks� Topdog/Underdog at the Mark Taper. It was a good performance, if somewhat difficult to watch at times. In it two brothers attempt to survive life, one aiming to conquer it, trying to stay on top; while the other allows himself to be swallowed up, and dragged under. The obvious question of course, is which brother does which, although the answer is decidedly not.
With the warning sign in the lobby that there would be gunfire on stage, and the brothers having been named Lincoln and Booth by their father, there was only one way the play could end. Both men were doomed from the start. Despite the dark story, it was engaging, if more than a bit depressing.
The staging was interesting, with attention paid to lighting and the use of shadows to create iconic imagery to enhance the story, with large dark figures of Abraham Lincoln and street card swindlers dominating the actors. Even the situations created by the story played with historic images. Instead of a white man in black face playing the buffoon, there was a Black man in white face playing a dead president, employed in a job where he spent every day being assassinated over and over again for peoples amusement. It is not a simple story, and I still haven�t absorbed it all.
Three:
We went with some family and friends to see Varekai, the current Cirque du Soleil North American touring show. It was largely good, although of the touring shows I�ve seen; I think I prefer Quidam or Dralion. They seemed to have something more, although I have no idea what.
Like Quidam, this new show has some sort of an idea of a plot, this time around a vague thing involving an Icarus like figure falling from the sky and crashing into a mysterious jungle that just happens to occupy the stage. Through the course of the night, winged boy is hurt, he gets the hots for a green animal woman, she evolves into a nongreen nonanimal woman who is very, very flexible, his injuries suddenly heal, they hook up, and the show ends. All very heterosexual and all wrapped around various typical cirque acts.
A few of the acts felt like filler, meant solely to increase show time, but others were cool, including a muy macho Russian swing act, a gaggle of bird women maneuvering on a multiple trapeze, a pretty good juggler, and two brothers dressed as bird boys engaged in the obligatory homoerotic swinging through air on fabric act. If it had been part of Zumanity, they would have gone without the feather headdresses and probably have flown around the stage in tight calvins, turning the act into a comment on self-loving, or perhaps a thing about masturbatory fantasies involving hot twins.
Ahem, strangely enough I feel that the clowns may have been the best part of the show, a strange opinion for me, since I am not a clown person. Luckily for me, later Cirque shows have featured nonscary clowns who don�t use traditional (creepy) bozo white face make up. Interestingly, this show's clowns, with their bad magician and lounge lizard acts, would also have fit in fairly well with the sexy atmosphere of Zumanity. They would have needed only minimal �tarting up� and would certainly be funnier than the fake puritans clowns that are currently running around the stage in Las Vegas.
Four:
At 36 I have finally attended my first opera, the Baz Luhrmann version of La Boh�me appropriately enough. I told a friend that I had tickets for the thing, and felt the need to add that it was part of the subscription and not something I had gone out of my to go see. She laughed and said my going to the opera was very gay. I sort of enjoyed the thing, which I guess is gayer, although I think I enjoyed the staging more than the singing, which is probably the gayest of all.
Even though I am not an opera person, I did sort of know what the story was, mainly that a het couple fall in love really fast, have problems, and that by the end the woman, like many, many, many other tragic female roles gets TB, and croaks just in time for the show to end, all while singing loudly in Italian.
In this production, the story has been reset to a bohemian, late 1950�s Paris, where French folks sing in Italian, and curtains never fall, allowing the audience to see costumed stage hands scurry about, moving buildings and tossing snow around, but in the end, it was not so different from a traditional version of the opera, in that a gravely ill Mimi still dies of a �romantic� disease while loudly belting out songs.
While it�s unlikely that I will make an effort to see other operas, I must admit that the final act of a Paris in summer with a sweaty looking Marcello was certainly an experience, even with all those other singers getting in the way of my view of Mr. Brancoveanu just because someone else was busy kicking the bucket.
Five:
For some perverse reason when hearing about Ever Ready Freddie I was reminded of another story I heard earlier that week. M is outgoing, 42 year old man, and despite being very good looking, has some body image issues. He met J, a young, attractive, 21-year old Persian man, online and had been looking forward to meeting him, but the date did not quite met expectations.
Unfortunately for M, every sentence the young man said started and ended with the word dude, as in Duuuude, and between all those dudes was a whole mess of self-involved drivel. During dinner, Mr. young man spent a lot of time explaining how annoyed he was with his parents because they bought him the wrong kind of BMW.
Mr. young man is unemployed at the moment, but that doesn�t worry him, because he has decided to go to medical school so that he can, in his words: �milk my parents for money for the next seven or eight years, before I have to decide what to do with my life.�
I guess there is some truth to the old dating rule that you should never date anyone younger than your waist size.
More later,
nico
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