After holding out for 15 years, I have begun reading JK Rowling's Harry Potter series. The experience is sort of like reading Hamlet for the first time. Not because the writing is similar, but because both have become deeply ingrained in the culture. The first time you read Hamlet, nearly every line makes you go, "So that's where that came from." The Hogwarts gang hasn't had anywhere near the same impact, of course, but I do think it's amazing that although I have never read any of the novels before or seen the movies, I recognize most of the characters, have a basic idea of what happens, and even know the rudiments of Quidditch--information which I have acquired by no means other than being alive at this particular moment in history.
I'm not a very good conversationalist. At least not with people I don't know very well, which is the only situation where it matters, right? I always worry that the other person will think I'm boring, so I'll clam up to avoid saying something inane or I'll be so busy trying to think of something interesting that I forget to listen to what we're actually talking about. So you see the paradox is that by worrying too much about being boring I end up being boring. (You'll notice I have no qualms about being boring on this blog.)
I can't seem to keep myself from watching closely for signs of waning interest in whatever face I'm facing: the yawn, the glazed-over look, the eyes straying in the direction of a wristwatch. I envy those who can soldier on with their cat stories or toddler anecdotes in spite of the palpable misery of their listeners. Cocktail parties must be so enjoyable for them.
The worst type of person to talk with in a public setting is one of the ultra-horny. Sure, they'll let you talk about the reliably engrossing subject of sex, but, on the other hand, they're always scanning the room for someone to have it with. It makes me extremely nervous. I'd just as soon they come right out with it and say, "Would you please stop talking so that I can give my undivided attention to getting my rocks off?" At least then we could stop pretending.
ELSEWHERE:
My short review of the Annoyance's Steamwerkz: The Musical (speaking of the ultra-horny) is in this week's Chicago Reader.
Books
READ: Contested Will by James Shapiro [an entertaining and insightful history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy].
COMING UP: Ben Jonson, Alastair Brotchie.
Movies
THIS WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
THEME: Notorious Women.
KITO'S SELECTION: Evita (dir. Parker, 1996) [they shouldn't have gone the sung-through route for the movie].
MINE: Marie Antoinette (Coppola, 2006) [it's inert. I guess that's part of the point, but still].
Art
SAW: "Program/Suffer/Abstain/Deprogram" @ President's Gallery at Harold Washington College [I had a hard time understanding the concept of this group show, which has something to do, according to curator Bert Stabler, with the Stoics and their philosophy of "positive refusal." If you say so, Bert].
Current Interests
My day job, Chicago history, dogs, Kito, Pride, Istanbul, books, musicals, the Palins, attractive men, television, summer, my family, faith, the presidential election, prisons.
Fool's Four
DEPARTED CHICAGO GAY BARS THAT HAVE ACHIEVED LEGENDARY STATUS:
1. The Manhole [because of its name and naughty dance floor].
2. Madrigal's [because of the rumored prostitution].
3. The Eagle [because of IML goings-ons].
4. Voltaire [just kidding; I'm the only one who misses it].
Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "I have become a reverse bulimic."
TWO YEARS AGO: "O, Chowder, forgive me. I was young and afraid."
THREE YEARS AGO: "How did people live before air conditioners? No wonder they never smiled in photographs and were racist."
FOUR YEARS AGO: "WOMEN ONLY PLEASE!"
Here's an excerpt from a diary entry I wrote on this date 11 years ago. I was 21 and had just graduated from college.
6-23. Home. 5:55 P.M.
Back in Evanston. Billy's gone, and I don't know who I am anymore.
I mean, honestly: what am I? What do I do? Why do I get up in the morning? Yesterday, I was filling out a health insurance form and at "Occupation" I faced an identity crisis. What could I possibly list as my occupation? Man about town? Loaf? Hobo? Writer? Waiter? Guttersnipe?
For so long I was a student, and now I've got nothing.
Which can only mean one thing: I need a new hairdo. I'm even thinking of switching salons. After all, each new era in my life has begun with a change in hair stylists. I jumped from Dave to Ted shortly before coming out. From Ted to Melanie when I chose a major. Now from Melanie to someone else, just in time for the start of my post-undergrad life.
I'm also thinking of joining the Evanston Athletic Club--another sign that I'm in a transition period. During transition periods, I tend to think that everything would be fine if only I were in excellent physical condition. This could in fact very well be true. I wouldn't know--I've never been in excellent physical condition.
I've burned another CD for the BFF. I don't think she even owns a CD player anymore, but maybe she can put the disk with her 1990s memorabilia and gaze at it whenever she gets nostalgic for the era of dialup modems and Janet Reno.
I've also created a Spotify playlist and attached it to this post. All the songs have to do with work. Track list follows.
1. "Welcome to the Working Week," Elvis Costello
2. "The Company Way," How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (original Broadway cast recording)
3. "Fitter Happier," Radiohead
4. "No Surprises," Radiohead
5. "Call It Stormy Monday," BB King and Albert Collins
6. "Hard Times," Gillian Welch
7. "Coal Miner's Daughter," Loretta Lynn
8. "Sixteen Tons," Tennessee Ernie Ford
9. "I'm Working on a Building," Brother Grady Coffee
10. "Joe Worker," The Cradle Will Rock (original 1985 cast recording)
11. "Pirate Jenny," Bea Arthur
12. "I Never Picked Cotton," Johnny Cash
13. "Take a Job," Do Re Mi (1999 original cast recording)
14. "Inutil," In the Heights (original Broadway cast recording)
15. "The Inch Worm," Tony Bennett
16. "The Company Way (Reprise)," How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (original Broadway cast recording)
I've drawn up an itinerary for the Fifth Biennial Great Gay-Bar Bar-Crawl, my final tour through Chicago's homo-friendly gin joints. As in 2010, I'm only stopping at new places and old favorites rather than trying to visit every single gay bar in the whole goldarn city. Here's the preliminary schedule:
Week One: The North
Sidecar Bar
Parlour
Touche
Jackhammer
Granville Anvil
Lizard's Liquid Lounge
Week Two: The South
Club Escape
La Cueva
Downtown
Prop House
Manhandler
Week Three: Boystown
Elixir
Little Jim's
The Closet
Wang's
Cocktail
Roscoe's
Scarlet
Lucky Horseshoe
Berlin
The Crawl kicks off the last weekend in June, with posts detailing the experience to begin appearing here the following week. I'm tired already.
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Kid Brooklyn Productions' Wild is in this week's Time Out Chicago.
At church on Sunday, Kito and I were received into the congregation as new members. All we had to do was go up front when the pastor told us to and answer three questions in front of everybody. We had been told beforehand that the correct replies were "Jesus Christ," "I do," and "I do," so there was little risk of failure.
When we were standing up there, I forgot to pay attention to what the pastor was actually asking, so I have no idea what we agreed to. I'm pretty sure the first question was something like, "If you had to pick a savior from among the world's major religious figures, which one would you go with?"
To make my life easier, I'll assume the other two questions were as follows:
1. Do you promise to remain pretty much the same, occasionally making a halfhearted effort to be a better person, provided it doesn't cut into your TV time?
Books
READ: Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass, trans. by Michael Henry Heim ["Nor could I bear to come out with things long lurking within me: the questions I had failed to ask...my petrified faith...the Hitler Youth campfires...my desire to die a hero's death like Lieutenant Captain Prien of the submarines--and as a volunteer...the Labor Serviceman we called Wedontdothat...how Fate had saved the Fuhrer...the Waffen SS oath of allegiance in the jangling cold: 'If Others Prove Untrue, Yet We Shall Steadfast Be'...And the Stalin organ and all the deaths it caused, mostly among the young and unprepared like me...the song I sang out of terror in the woods until an answer came...the Pfc who saved me but lost both legs to a Russian grenade while I was spared...my belief in the final victory to the bitter end...the lightly wounded soldier's feverish dreams of a girl with black braids...the gnawing hunger...a game of dice...the disbelief at the pictures of Bergen-Belsen, at the piles of corpses--look at them, go ahead look at them, don't turn away, just because--to put it mildly--it is beyond description..."].
COMING UP: Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates.
Movies
SAW: I Wish.
THIS WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
MINE: Carol Channing: Larger Than Life.
KITO'S: Private Romeo [take it away, Men on Film!].
NEXT WEEK'S THEME: Notorious Women in History.
Current Interests
The presidential campaign, books, prisons, faith, musicals, food, the closet, LGBT youth, country music, The Wire, fashion, movies, my new apartment, Game of Thrones, New York, Madonna, Kito, Chicago history, journalism, the weather, the BFF, the Internet.
Fool's Four
MY FAVORITE HYMNS:
1. "I'll Fly Away."
2. "Amazing Grace."
3. "Blest Be the Tie That Binds."
4. The theme song for Amen [see Glitter, below, to refresh your memory].
Flashbacks
FOUR YEARS AGO: "Meryl Streep spreads eagle."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "Nothing says 'I love you' like dispassionate deductive reasoning."
Glitter
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Collaboraction's Sketchbook: Reincarnate is in this week's Chicago Reader.
Mark St. Germain probably intended his two-person play to be an evenly matched battle of wits. The combatants are dyed-in-the-wool atheist Sigmund Freud and Christian apologist CS Lewis. St. Germain contrives to put the two men in the same room in September 1939, when Hitler was invading Poland and Freud was dying of oral cancer. On Freud's invitation, Lewis pops over from Oxford to pay an imaginary visit to the psychoanalyst's London office, where pretty soon the two are arguing over whether there's a God or if He's just a manifestation of our desire for a strong father figure.
Trouble is, the battle is not evenly matched. Freud the unbeliever wins handily, and not because he has the better argument. Lord knows the man could be as rigid and arbitrary in his convictions as any religious fundamentalist--the crucial difference being that the all-explanatory system Freud adhered to was one of his own creation. No, he wins handily here thanks entirely to the force of Mike Nussbaum's performance in the role.
When Tyler Marchant's staging of the play opened at the Mercury Theater earlier this spring, it opened with Martin Rayner and Mark Dold reprising their roles from the Off-Broadway production. When the show was extended, it was recast with locals Nussbaum and Coburn Goss. I didn't catch Rayner's take on Freud, but it's hard to imagine an interpretation more powerful than Nussbaum's.
Playing against his naturally gentle demeanor, he creates a Freud who's fierce and exacting, yet racked with pain from the cancer burning its way through his mouth. He's frequently seized by terrifying coughing fits that seem to both humble and enrage him. Watching him rail and suffer, it's impossible to sympathize with Goss's Lewis and his unconvincing and, under the circumstances, rather insensitive efforts to suggest a divine plan. How can we believe the universe is anything but cruel or indifferent when faced with the image of an old man dying in horrible pain as Nazis lay siege to his continent? Nussbaum makes Lewis look childish and smug by comparison. As St. Germain's Freud puts it, "I have two words for you: grow up!"
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Rock of Ages is in this week's Time Out Chicago.
When I was a teenager, my friend Sare and I would occasionally watch the Trinity Broadcasting Network for a laugh. We called it the Crazy Christian Channel on account of the faith healers, end-of-days prognosticators, Pentecostal screamers, and gold-suited fire-and-brimstoners who filled its programming. You'd think we'd be more forgiving of this sort of thing seeing as how we grew up in a pretty flashy church ourselves, but, then again, maybe that's precisely why we weren't more forgiving of this sort of thing.
Our favorite on-air personalities were Paul and Jan Crouch, who looked like Captain Kangaroo and Tammy Faye Bakker, respectively. Jan talked like a baby, and she often cried and dressed like one too. She also had pink hair. One time I persuaded Sare to call the number that was always posted at the bottom of the screen in case you wanted to telephone with a prayer request or, more importantly, a donation.
"Why does that lady have pink hair?" Sare said when the operator picked up.
Tense pause.
"Honey, that woman is used by God."
Tense pause.
"Yeah, but why does she have pink hair?"
Dial tone.
Trinity and its stable of televangelists feature prominently in an essay by David Lumpkin in the current issue of the Oxford American. Taken from the author's upcoming memoir, the piece--titled "Church Is Wherever You Are"--is a funny and moving account of a time in Lumpkin's teens, following the mysterious disappearance of his mother, when he and his father watched religious programming, well, religiously. It made me cry on the bus.
ELSEWHERE:
My short review of The Rock and the Ripe is in this week's Chicago Reader.
