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the man keeps holding up all the things she will miss seeing, and she answers with what she has seen. "you've never been to niagara falls?" "i've seen water—it's water, that's all." it's about outer abundance—all the great stuff like niagara—versus the inner abundance that comes from being able to see what's right before you. the song opens and contracts; smallness becomes bigness, the man's idea of big becomes small, and then you can't tell which is which . . . it doesn't matter which character is answering or asking, it is the exultant feel of expansion and contraction, of acknowledgment and release . . . and then the music opens out like sky, full of feeling, and björk's voice opens even more, in an electric combination of pain and joy—because almost any woman would care. her joy is that of a person with so little joy in her life that she's been forced to find it where she can, and both singers understand this: "i've seen it all, i've seen the dark, i've seen the brightness in one little spark." yorke and björk sing this line in a duet, west side story style, and together they give reality to lyrics that, taken strictly at face value, could be new age treacle.
-mary gaitskill, "see me, feel me: björk and thom yorke's 'i've seen it all,'" village voice december 27, 2000 and january 2, 2001

 

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back in new york. the city is covered with snow, and since it's still falling, it's still white and clean and pretty, which is rare for new york snow. it has a muffling effect, so the city is quiet for a first too. the city seems to be waiting for the new year. my puerto rican barber shop ("if your hair is not becoming to you, you should be coming to us" on the business card) is open and we exchange happy new years as i pay and tip for my skin fade, numero tres on top, don't shape the hairline.

i got lots of reading and re-reading done waiting in the san jose and salt lake city airports, as well as waiting on the runway to get back home to new york city. check this out,

daniel picked me up and took me to his house. as we went through his front door i was pushed against the wall and kissed violently. ideas flashed into my mind. is this what i'm giving off? am i constantly inviting harsh treatment? we seemed to move in one fluid motion from the hall to the bed, squashing me underneath him. he held my arms above my head, firmly staked by his huge hands and stuck his tongue deep inside my mouth. as he pulled out, he lifted his torso up over me, hovered, then lowered himself down and pressed his crotch into my face. this felt predictable but at the same time sent a spark deep into my stomach and seemed to prickle something in my balls. holding my wrists with just one hand and the heavy weight of his body, he opened his fly and groped for his dick. taking it in his hand he pulled it out. it was warm and smooth and smelt incredible. he pushed it up against my nose and in the sockets of my eyes. this felt reassuring. i understood his teasing so kept my mouth closed but i couldn't help but nuzzle round his shaft, his hair and balls. again the smell reached far inside me, overriding consciousness and thoughts. his softness and hardness turned me inside out. i became consumed, physical and responsive, sensitive and lost. now his dick prodded my mouth, lifting and teasing, pre-cum sticking and wetting. i wanted so bad to lick my lips, to open and swallow the whole of him. the grinding action of his hips pushed his dick slowly inside my mouth, not stopping to rest, but straight on down to the back of my throat. daniel groaned, 'jesus christ.' i wasn't going to stop him and i loved his response, him loving the feeling i gave him. all i wanted was him to carry on, to keep giving me the ability to give. fucking and fucking he attacked my throat, so much pain and all i wanted was him to carry on. i freed one hand and tried to control his hammering, but he seemed to only go faster with more aggression. i reached for my own dick and pulled it free from being wrapped, so hard, in cotton and pre-cum, so swollen and desperate and aching. i jerked and was taken further into the scene, now right with him, as far gone and mean. my own excitement allowed me more, to except (sic) more of what he was giving. now so close myself, i let go of my dick and got my hand around his arse and it was perfect and pumping and loving me, so smooth and solid and mine. i forced him against me harder and harder. he loved this and so did i. "fucking yeah, baby." he laughed and moaned, getting faster and wilder and ramming and ramming so far in, then crying, 'fucking hell.' he spasmed and jolted and froze where he was, as he burst in my mouth and came and came. i shook and trembled, swallowed and choked, my dick squirting as i gasped for air. i could smell his cum. i could taste his cum as i fell back into my life. daniel stayed just where he was for several perfect minutes, his sweaty crotch spreading his cum over my now slimy face. i was happy. pulling out of my mouth he rolled over, then jumped up with a smile and a wink, then gestured some kind of washing action and headed towards the bathroom.
-aiden shaw, brutal

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oscar liked to kid himself that it was only cold, anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it would all end, but the truth was he couldn't extricate himself. he was totally and irrevocably in love with ana. what he used to feel for those girls he'd never really known was nothing compared with the amor he was carrying in his heart for ana. it had the density of a dwarf motherfucking star and at time he was a hundred per cent sure it would drive him mad. every dominican family has stories about niggers who take love too far, and oscar was beginning to suspect that they'd be telling one of these stories about him real soon.
-junot díaz, "the brief wondrous life of oscar wao," the new yorker december 25, 2000, and january 1, 2001

take the case of flaubert. i revere him, as many other novelists do; i reread him constantly; i cite to myself and to others his wisdom and practical advice; i agree with him that prose is like hair and shines with combing, that a line of prose can and should be as immutable as a line of poetry, and so on. but when, as a twenty-first-century english novelist, i feed a sheet of a4 into my ibm 196c, i do not refer to a nineteenth-century french novelist who held a goose quill. i write in a different language; the novel, like the technology, has moved on. it would be pointless and stultifying to seek to write like him. after all, he wrote like him, so why should i?
-julian barnes, "single-handed: infuences by julian barnes," the new yorker december 25, 2000, and january 1, 2001 (italics added by dante woo)

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i'm too tired not to be with you.
-laura, high fidelity

when i was 12, seeing when harry met sally (don't laugh) made me want to live in new york. now, double(d over) in age, seeing this flick makes chicago seem kind of cool in that i-could-be-melancholy-and-run-a-record-store-and-still-have-a-nice-sized-apartment-and-still-have-friends-like-joan-cusack kinda way.

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weird new yorker snob moment: church services out here in california seem so, um, unprofessional! silent night sung out-of-tune, with candles melting down the sleeve of your red argyle abercrombie and fitch sweater, accompanied by a guitar, and, oh yes, a harmonica. i guess all that high church i get in manhattan has me spoiled.

while it was cool to watch my nephews and nieces squeal over santa claus and barbie bake-with-me ovens and legos and those lawnmower-cornpopper things, i got totally shafted by my secret santa and emerged from the tree gift-less. my family does s.s. because there's too many of us, which is great unless you get the family flake as your givee. unlucky me. i'm treating myself to an extra slice of pie now.

bah humbug (but doesn't really give a shit about all this christmas gift-giving crap in reality),
dante woo

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thanks everyone, for the nice and solicitive messages. i'm fine, just swamped with work and life and neglected this site a little bit. hope the updates ameliorate things. in california now, enjoying the mild weather and onslaught of mom's awesome cooking. not enjoying the interminable lines, screaming kids, treacherous shopping carts, bad driving, more lines, more waits, more delays, that remind me why i purchase everything for myself online.

for new year's: parties in williamsburg, carroll gardens, jersey city, east village, and harlem, what's a girl to do? i don't wanna be on a subway all night, y'know?

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celebrated with matthew and his design studio tonight at miyagi. i remember when he brought me here for the first time; i'd just broken up with my worst boyfriend ever and was finally ready to really be a single guy in new york. the waiter had hit on me in japanese, matthew told me, and i tried some of his hand-picked selections. sea urchin was traumatically yucky, but the rest was a treat for my broke ass at the time. then matthew gave me a jockstrap, since i had never worn one, and sent me off to escuelita, where i got stoned, then fucked by the huge-dicked puerto rican boy that i wrote about in of. so i guess i'm saying that i'm really grateful that i've known matthew long enough to celebrate anniversaries, and not just because he got me laid.

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burnout. tired of everything, which makes me wonder if it's the job or the season. cancelled a date, flaked on a holiday party, blew off a bar gathering where claudia wanted to set me up with a friend of hers. rest (and a sweet, totally comfortable hook-up) instead.

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but then i saw crouching tiger, hidden dragon, which fuckin blew me away. it's shockingly beautiful and complicated; i love the governess as the supreme bad guy created when the dead good guy would fuck her but not teach her his warrior ways. it takes guts, also, i think, to stage the first fight scene in low-contrast murky darkness, so that you see motion and thrusts but can't tell where or what they're hitting.

(it reminded me of a series of photos that adrian piper took, where she's appearing in varying degrees of dress and undress with the camera held up to a mirror in partial darkness. the contrast is low and you can hardly make out where she melts into the background. i did some photos like this in school too, except mine turned out really grainy and of discrete parts of my body, sometimes with the words "you stand on the shoulders of" projected onto them.)
 

 
people running up walls, on tree fronds, jen, the young bad-but-really-good seed delivering a soliloquy tantamount to whitman's song of myself as she's kicking ass of about 30 men in a saloon. michelle yeoh doing these graceful moves and kicks and parries but as soon as her weapon hits something (looking like it's light as a feather), whatever surface it touches is utterly destroyed. gotta see it some more.

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saw venus beauty institute tonight at the two boots theater. my first time there and i loved it—it's small and comfortable and red, and there's no tall people sitting in front of me. the movie was a french subtitled affair, with the usual horny but thoughtful french girl who drives herself to the brink of insanity over some guy. the consolation is that he seems to do the same with her. i liked it more than i sound like i did.

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at paulie's holiday party last night, and a semi-familiar face walks in. i recognize him as a guy that i'd had a blind date with. he was cool: handsome, funny and dry, a writer, but the chemistry wasn't there and he was decent enough to say so. but i saw him and he saw me, and in front of a slew of my friends started saying "i know i know you from somewhere, but i don't know where" with his date or boyfriend or whatever standing right there too. inside i think, let's not play this game PLEASE. how embarrassing. i wanna believe that i recognize even all the (hundreds of) bad dates that i've had, but i'm sure i don't. but i think if someone looked familiar to me, i'd probably know that it was from that and not from a mutual friend or the gym that we both go to or something. i guess that means i'm a big fat slut.

church, then brunch at jami's to celebrate her new phat gig—producing the new site for a big, fancy cable station. i'm really happy for her, and glad to've helped the process out a little bit. in addition, i'm loving every friend of hers that i meet, so these events (i wrote this one in my multi-platform [outlook and handspring, natch] calendar as jamibrunch.com) are especially pleasurable.

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that last entry looks like i was playing catch-up with the rest of the seasonal affective disorder blogger circuit. better late than never. last night i went to a gay doctor's party. these "professional" social events are always weird to me—i go to the digital media one regularly, and both events are always filled with handsome, middle-class, reasonably intelligent men. however, they also resemble the aftermath of a banana republic raid, and people cruise but don't talk to each other unless they're already acquainted. maybe the problem is that i'm not acquainted to people, but it's strange to me. the only guy that gave me his number was a really awkward dermatologist, and he passed his business cards around to everyone in my group of people. i later joked that i gave his card to someone else, forgetting that i'd actually done that.

then i lost my cell phone in a taxi; called, and someone picked up who'd found it, thankfully; then schlepped to her apartment at fucking 93rd and columbus to retrieve it; politely accepted her lecture about how to wear it so that it doesn't fall off; cabbed home.

then i hooked up with a cutie israeli whose aol profile said TOP all over it, but whose real-live, analog mouth muttered "fuck me" once we were in his bed. some people hate this, and i did for a second, and who knows, maybe he's always truly a bottom, but i'd rather think it's this good happening—that you can be with someone who, instantly, diametrically changes what you like for that moment.

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i'm sick of worrying what i'm going to do on new year's eve. i'm sick of becoming the kind of guy that i used to get hurt by. i'm sick of getting hurt. i'm sick of getting guys' phone numbers and not calling them. i'm sick of SAD. i'm sick of dysfunctional, insecure, passive-aggressive co-workers.

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after a few life-changing hours, he says, right in my ear, "ready..1..2..3" and i wonder if this is what it feels like to .. i don't know what. it's amazing how much a part of you it feels when the right cock is inside you. he wipes sweat off his forehead and my back, smiles, catches his breath, gently pulls nine inches of rubber off himself, and says, damn, do you do that to all the guys you're with.

talking about that thing we perfected: he's on top, we're both facedown to the bed, and once he's all the way in me, whispers squeeze. i push back, he slowly withdraws, saying si? or te gustas, mijo?

our soundtrack started with d’angelo, then badu, then pharcyde, mos def, common, and finally the handsome boy modeling school. all this booty music, hip-hop, r&b, this is what it's for sometimes.

at some point i got told that i looked like a prince when i was on my back, struggling to give it up in that position. so does that make you king, i asked. the backs of my thighs were pressed right against his chest when he leaned in like that, his eyes getting soft but not easing up (and i didn't want him to) when i bit my lower lip (his cock gets thicker as you go down, until the base is such a trunk that when he gets in deep your head spins, except i'm pushing it down into the pillow to give myself another millimeter to escape) in semi-, no, it really was pain, but i didn't give a fuck. you want it to hurt a little bit.

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