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five points: fake blood in the drinks. yum.

on saturday, i went to the adrian piper exhibit at the new museum on broadway and houston. i love adrian piper, how strongly she talks about racism and race and being mixed race (like me). "i am . . . the obscenity of miscegenation" still resonates inside me years after i read her writing of it. it's difficult to make sense of her work, especially today when racism manifests more frequently, at least in the expensive, liberal world that i live, as subtle ignorances, race-based sex fetishes, and soft-eyed, well-meant questions. but i remember how much she meant to me when i discovered her, and my devotion holds.

another thing i like about her work are when she talks about relationships. one essay talks about her best female friends growing up, and how virtually all of them abandoned her at one time or another to focus on a guy's attentions.

walked up to the 2nd floor, where i forgot how gay the pierre et gilles' exhibit was. for a brief, paralyzing moment, the last years of college hit me back—back when i really disliked being a gay man of color. there was something so polarized and disruptive about going from the first exhibit, attended by nerdy soho art watchers, to the throng of handsome, muscular gay men looking at shellacked, handsome, muscular gay men enframed. what do i think when i see a beautiful, hulking, probably filipino guy looking at the photos with a white guy (boyfriend?)? he's wearing a maroon polo shirt that struggles to hold his beefy chest and arms, and in my head i think panic, betrayal, fucking hoarse-voiced desire, and then i-gotta-get-outta-here.

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it's hard to know what to write about these days. i used to be very content to come home, kick back, and spend the evening with myself, but lately i've wanted to be around people. more on this later. for now, i am too lame to write, but that doesn't mean i haven't been written. just call me bitchboy. see:

• Swimming along here.
• oh i just don't know anymore
• if you must know
• human progress. who'd have thunk it?

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cut-up pics from last night's halloween party. thanks to my darling maurice for inviting me, and for matthew for donning his robin-from-the-batman-movie-not-the-comic costume in a split second to come along.
 

 

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In grade school, it's O.K. to do well. But by high school, being smart gives people ideas. Science teachers start bugging her in the halls. They tell her Eastern schools have Montana quotas, places for ranch girls who are good at math. She could get scholarships, they say. But she knows, as soon as they suggest it, that if she went to one of those schools she'd still be a ranch girl—not the Texas kind who are débutantes and just happen to have a ranch in the family, and not the horse-farm kind who ride English. Horse people are different, because horses are elegant and clean. Cows are mucusy, muddy, shitty, slobbery things, and it takes another kind of person to live with them. Even her long, curled hair won't help at a fancy college, because prep-school girls don't curl their hair. The rodeo boys like it, but there aren't any rodeo boys out East. So she comes up with a plan: she has to start flunking. She has two and a half years of straight A's, and she has to flunk quietly, not to draw attention. Western Montana College, where Andy Tyler wants to go, will take anyone who applies. She can live cheap in Dillon, and if things don't work out with Andy she already knows half the football team.
-Maile Meloy, "Ranch Girl," New Yorker Oct 16, 2000.

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i got written up at aOnline. they quoted one of the dumbest things i've ever said on this site, but otherwise, rad.

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le acque chete rovinano i ponti: silent waters make the bridges crumble.

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hey, big j --

And love was like a girl walking down a road on staggering legs with the wind blowing through her hair. And love was like a girl with wonder in her eyes. And love was like a girl with a flaming heart and impulsive arms. And love was so many things, so many variations on one theme: humility and equality - for when those men said: 'Is it possible? Could you love me?', thrones and kingdoms were of no account against the power of love."
-Bessie Head, A Question of Power

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hey jami --

you asked cinde if she discovered the magic of woo, but i also discovered the magic of cinde with an e. congrats on finishing the sex book. i was really looking forward to watching gill* get in a fight with tandie's* new boyfriend*, me hitting on said boyfriend, and you getting pegged with tandie's* homemade cupcakes, however, singing "word up" by cameo as we ate sushi in the east village while trying to figure out which country you'd have to move to to purchase http://www.joma.ma or http://www.crackwho.re more than made up for it. then we walked toward liquids on 10th street and avenue a, and i passed by my friend, who stopped me and told me about the secret radiohead concert that i'll be missing tonight. rats.

* names changed to protect their identities

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radiohead's optimistic is playing on my stereo right now (3:03am). you-know-who-you-are: i wouldn't mind if you were here right now, listening to this, maybe with me lying on my back, you straddling me, my hands on your ass, my cock inside you (again), and both of our breaths reeking of pot. mmmmm....

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despite a late nj transit train (princeton junction, babysitting my nephew and niece, to new york city penn station) and slow-as-molasses-going-uphill-in-january taxi, i made it to bowery ballroom to see saint etienne, meeting matthew and lapo at the door (tried to find rachel and erin, but they had their own tickets and fended for themselves). great concert (especially the extended, delicious triptych of "how we used to live"), but i wonder if i'd like anything that came out of that band's collective mouth? some highlights:

• matthew: those two guys are gorgeous because of their ears. i'm a sucker for small ears.
• dante: earrist.
• matthew: true.
• dante: i would say i'm a hair-lengthist. a guy with long hair is just not interesting to me. i guess i'm a lengthist in general.
• lapo: *ears perk up*
• dante: y'know, tall is important, big (read: long) dick, short hair. length.
• lapo: your staples?
• dante: exactly.

webblogs with unreadable color schemes must end. go here, it can help.

lapo also asked why saint etienne has such a big gay following. although this just fell out of my mouth, maybe it's a worthwhile thought: because many gay men don't get to experience an open sense of crushes and boycraziness when they're actually boys, they get into saint etienne because that's basically all that sarah cracknall sings about. wait a second, though; the only gay man who ever talks to me about s.e. is jonno (back when my website was titled "hug my soul"); are there really other fags who like this stuff?

at the concert they were giving away trojan's new "pleasure mesh" condoms. they stretch like a muthafucka, over my whole hand and down past my wrist with not a hint of breakage. i don't know about the pleasurability of the mesh, but they could definitely handle a serious bump 'n grind.

after the concert, lapo reminded us that the post-concert cruising can sometimes be the most rewarding (you immediately can determine the guy's musical tastes, a definitive compatibility benchmark), and sure enough, gentle readers, 'twas. besides, who doesn't hang out in front of the venue after a concert? us three boys were standing off to one side hoping to catch rachel and erin before they went back to brooklyn, and we saw this rather cute boy looking at us, repeatedly. we weren't sure at whom his gaze was directed, so i instructed them to scatter, and see where he looked. lapo was identifying the three french words for the evening: saint etienne, odeon, and one other one i can't remember. the boy kind of stayed looking at me. we played this game for about another ten minutes, then his friends started to walk away, him following. but he looked back again and this time i got some balls and tried to wave him over. he smiled and kept walking, so i ran up a little ways and flagged him down again.

while i was doing this, lapo came up with the fourth french word of the evening: repertoire.

this time flagging him was successful, so we small-talked a little bit (enjoy the concert? yeah, i'm a big fan. is one of those guys your boyfriend? no, but they used to be boyfriends with each other. what do you do? web design. you? i work for ***** magazine.) and then i asked for his phone number. no pen, tell matthew pointedly reminded me that i have a real-live cell phone that stores real-live phone numbers just for this purpose. so i'm calling him tomorrow. oh, and over dinner at first, lapo's fifth french word of the evening became au poivre.

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i'm showing this because it made me laugh and my friend elizabeth, who's sitting across from me, is too busy to enjoy it.

"by the way, high-tech workers won't be the only ones taking advantage of the new visa rules. the new york times explained that 'other foreign workers who receive the special visas include architects, engineers, university professors and even distinguished fashion models.' shame on the media for keeping us in the dark about america's critical shortage of supermodels."
-jen muehlbauer, theStandard.com: the melting pot gets geekier

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from my party:

 
 

 
as i was walking home from the grocery store tonight, i passed by a cutie, young, east village scuzball walking his dog. i resisted the urge to catcall and yell, "i got a treat for you, puppy"

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philip glass at brooklyn academy of music (bam) tomorrow, saint etienne at bowery ballroom on sunday. yessir. it's gonna be a good week.

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okay, drop everything if you know where i can get a pair of these red/gold-lensed, The-Fly-meets-Cyclops-from-the-X-men goggles that niconner alexander, trinidadian-tobagan relayer wore, and tell me so that i can wear them with my new, icarus (who's going out of business, it appears from dropping in to their mercer and spring boutique -- but what do you expect when you name your store after the demigod who put on his dad's wings, flew too high, and plummeted to his death when the beeswax melted?) uber-conservative medium gray single-breast three-button suit to my current wall street client.
 

 
i gotta do something to shake them up.

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