Drunk Heterosexuals' Babies.

We're all abuzz about the ruling by federal judge Richard Posner striking down the gay marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin, and yes it's a pretty great takedown of the absurdity of the arguments these anti-gay yahoos trot out, less and less credibly, every time. But I got stuck on this particular passage:

At oral argument the state‘s lawyer was asked whether “Indiana’s law is about successfully raising children,” and since “you agree same-sex couples can successfully raise children, why shouldn’t the ban be lifted as to them?” The lawyer answered that “the assumption is that with opposite-sex couples there is very little thought given during the sexual act, sometimes, to whether babies may be a consequence.” In other words, Indiana’s government thinks that straight couples tend to be sexually irresponsible, producing unwanted children by the carload, and so must be pressured (in the form of governmental encouragement of marriage through a combination of sticks and carrots) to marry, but that gay couples, unable as they are to produce children wanted or unwanted, are model parents—model citizens really—so have no need for marriage. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.

It's kind of a perfect illustration of the tension between the 2 schools of thought about what marriage is. The sentiment that has been so incredibly fertile for the "marriage equality" movement is that marriage is a special and sacred privilege or reward for people who are in love and should be extended to everyone who falls in love, no matter who they fall in love with. The other view -- and it's the view I've taken most of my life, though naturally it has been complicated by events in my personal life -- is that marriage is a form of social control. A way for men to control women, for women to control men, for the church and state to control people's sexuality and family and intimate lives.

I think marriage is certainly both, and many other things, and mostly it is what we want to make of it. So Posner loses me a little when he ridicules the idea that marriage provides some pressure on men to support the babies they make even if they hadn't considered the consequences before the fact. Because it is true that straight people are much more inclined to reproduce accidentally, and if the state has an interest in the welfare of children (which neither side in this debate disagrees with), then its support of marriage for heterosexuals has a quality not necessary for homosexuals. That seems pretty straightforwardly true and when he dismisses it so snarkily, I think he undermines the seriousness of the implications of laws and policies governing marriage and family life.

The "shotgun wedding" aspect of marriage is maybe outdated in most cases (now that single mothers and divorce are so ubiquitous and accepted) and it's obviously only one among many reasons that people might want to marry, but I think it at least deserves to be addressed seriously. I think this is the first time one of those Christiany "it's for the children" arguments has struck me as even ever so slightly convincing.

News Flash: New Yorkers Are Rude.

Not that I haven’t been irritated often enough by men who sit like this on the train, but I hate how these complaints become gendered, as if men are the only rude people on the subway. New York is full of rude people, filthy with them. In spite of whatever so-called corrective you’ve heard to the so-called myth that New Yorkers are rude, New Yorkers are rude.

It's exhilarating when you first move here from the Midwest ("Yay! I don't have to give a shit about anybody else's needs!"), but I think eventually it's spiritually corrosive. I'm not the first to suggest that regularly feeling nothing more than annoyed at a young woman with a baby in her arms asking for money or an old man with no shoes or toes shuffling the length of the subway car begging for food can't be good for the soul. But that's another conversation.

I want to take apart this vitriol toward men who sit on the train with their legs spread, taking up 2, sometimes 3, seats.

1. A lot of it is expressed in a way meant to ridicule men’s bodies and question their masculinity: “Nobody’s balls are so big that they need to sit like that,” etc. (I’ve even said this kind of thing, so I’m addressing my criticism to me as much as anyone.) I don’t claim to know anything about the real estate requirements of women’s genitalia, but I do know that men’s are on the outside, and, no matter the ball-size, sometimes need a little room. Maybe not this much room.

2. Women are rude too. For every man with his legs spread, there’s a woman with a huge handbag poking into your ribs. (I definitely don’t want to create a boys v. girls who’s ruder contest. Again, rudeness is genderless.)

3. Though it has no gender, sometimes rudeness has to do with gender. These complaints usually come from women, and I can’t help but connect them to the strange brew of female entitlement that comes into play on the train more than any place I can think of. It’s that glare I get not infrequently from women who are obviously half my age but think I should stand and give them my seat. Because they’re female and I’m male. Not only am I a feminist, I am an old man, I’m tired, my feet hurt, and it’s a long ride home.

Husbands.

C and I flew down to North Carolina last Friday for his family reunion -- well, my family reunion but you know what I mean -- in a Hampton Inn by the Raleigh/Durham airport. It was the first trip we've taken in a long time when there hasn't been some thunderstorm or hurricane or whatever to deal with.

We came back Sunday but C went straight to the Pines for 4 days. He’ll be back tomorrow some time. While it's probably not bad for our marriage to have time away from each other from time to time, I miss him every minute when we’re apart. I really still do.

I’m watching a lot of “Chopped.” I could easily become addicted to “Chopped.” Every time they open a basket, it’s another story. And before you know it, another one has started and I want to know how it ends. Just one more. Just one more. Just one more.

The only channels I can watch when C is out of town are the Cooking Channel and the Food Channel. Like I literally don’t know how to make the TV do anything else. TVs got really complicated in the years when I wasn’t watching TV and I never got back up to speed. Their workings are opaque to me, the learning curve too steep.

Husbands are the best argument for gay marriage I can think of.

Please.

I’m finding all the outrage about the opening of a Starbucks in Williamsburg hilarious. Like a Starbucks will finally make Williamsburg no longer hip. Like Williamsburg has been anything approaching hip since like 1998. At this point, even Starbucks is hipper than Williamsburg. Williamsburg is the stinking corpse of the idea that there can ever be another hip neighborhood anywhere ever again.

I recently made myself a secret promise that I’d tone down the complaining about gentrification. I guess I just wasn’t ready. Sorry.

Truvada.

This article in New York Magazine is a fairly sane and comprehensive piece on the response of gay men and their various institutions to Truvada.

There are lots of reasons to be thrilled, to be afraid, to be for, to be against, but my hunch is that one powerful reason lurking behind the extremely negative reaction of some gay men to a drug that nearly prevents HIV infection is that it forces sex back into the public conversation about gay men after we’ve spent so much time and energy convincing the world that all we want to do is get married and have children. We’re just like you! Just don't tell anyone that we generally have a lot more sex than you.

Switching the conversation in the last ten or fifteen years from our right to have anal sex to our right to “marry the person we love” has been a boon to acceptance of homosexuality, obviously. “Straight allies” are constantly coming out of the woodwork. Our president loves us. Our lawyers are Republicans. We’ve come so far by talking about weddings, and children, and love, and families. Now you want us to talk about semen and rectums again? Whoa.

The fact that Larry "stop having sex!" Kramer is so vehemently against this drug is, well, a red flag.

It’s an incredibly complex issue, an almost incomprehensibly fraught moment for our community, and my theory is just a hunch, maybe not even a fair one, and I might change my mind. But I think the notion of injecting right now into the mainstream conversation the idea that gay men still want to have “consequence-free sex” makes lots of gay men -- who as a group have become more and more conservative in the wake of the plague years -- very apprehensive.

14 More Queer Books.

Last week I posted a list of 10 Queer Books, and that night my husband told me that my list was no less pretentious than the list I was criticizing. 1) I thought I was not so much criticizing the other list as just saying that it made me feel a little dumb because I'd read so few of them. And 2) ouch. But I guess what's the use of having a spouse who won't tell you when you're too big for your britches?

Anyway, despite the sweeping title, that list was meant only to be a list of those books that I used to own and love, books that affected me, changed me, changed the way I feel about being queer in the world, and not just how I feel but how I am and what I do. If I were to make a list of Essential Books for Young Homos, I would add a few.

Of course, this is totally subjective. Tastes vary. And there are tons of other books that could easily be included but aren't because I've forgotten about them or I never read them. And then there are lots of unexpectedly wonderful books that loom large in my queer reading life mostly because of how ordinary they are. Like the Dave Brandstetter detective novels by Joseph Hansen that I discovered and devoured in my late twenties. They're just a great series of pulp detective novels with a main character who happens to be gay. Nothing all that radical, but they were.

Anyway, here's my list. Add these to the previous and you have my queer canon. I reserve the right to add when I remember the ones I've surely forgotten. (For the record, I think #1 totally makes up for #13 in the pretentiousness calculus.)

1. Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin), and its many sequels, if you enjoy the first one. They depict a 70s San Francisco that is embedded in the DNA of gayness but doesn't exist any more. The stories began as a serialized newspaper column about a group of young people who live in an apartment building and become a sort of family to each other, sharing in the ups and downs of each other's lives. This is what older gay people mean when they talk about "acquired family" -- a notion that becomes less and less important as it becomes less and less common for queer people to be rejected by the families they grew up in and as we're increasingly allowed to model our own families on the straight status quo, marriage, children, ec..

These books are nearly scripture, but they're also just a great read.

2. States of Desire (Edmund White). Travelog/guidebook of Gay America just before AIDS changed it so radically. It's a snapshot of the liberation we were certain we were on the brink of. Or I should say it is a snapshot of that brink. It's the world I came out into, it hadn't been there long when I got to it, and it didn't last very long after, which is probably why I'm obsessed with it.

3. The Joy of Gay Sex (Charles Silverstein and Edmund White). Also, just pre-AIDS. Unabashed encyclopedia of the pleasure that men can find in each other's bodies. I'm sure it looks a little cheesy now to our oh-so-knowing eyes, but you have to consider just how radical it was to even say the word gay in most places in the world in 1977, let alone assert that butt-fucking was a good thing. The illustration of rimming has stuck with me for 35 years.

4. Faggots (Larry Kramer). Now that Kramer has been officially gay-sainted, you should know where he came from. It might be hard to imagine a time -- now that we've bought wholesale the conservative argument for the normalization of homosexuality promoted by Kramer and then later Andrew Sullivan, et al., a view that has led to such a huge leap in the acceptance of homosexuals in society -- a time when its proponents were vilified and ostracized. Faggots was banned in the only gay bookstore in New York, kind of a breathtaking fact, not least because it's hard to imagine the community now caring so much about a book.

Faggots -- which introduced Kramer to gay America -- is moralistic and obvious and in the end very affecting, like a lot of Kramer's work. The takeaway, I guess, is that Kramer came out strongly against sexual promiscuity, and lots of us thought that was the wrong attitude at a time when we felt that celebrating our sexuality in the face of oppression was not only spiritually and emotionally healing but also politically important. We saw Kramer as self-loathing and anti-pleasure. So, at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, when he started shouting at us (literally) to stop having sex, his message seemed not far removed from Jerry Falwell.

5. Dancer from the Dance (Andew Holleran). Sort of the other side of the Faggots coin. Same milieu, post-Stonewall sexual freedom. I'm not sure you could say that Holleran is less negative about the drinking, drugs, and promiscuity, but this book was not reviled like Faggots. Holleran seems to love his characters more than Kramer, and his book -- which sort of has the same message, that a life of compulsive pleasure-seeking can be soul-crushing and lonely and no substitute for love -- is sexier. Read them together, or back to back.

6. A Single Man (Isherwood). Gore Vidal called Isherwood "the best prose writer in English." I will not argue. This is such a beautiful, moving novel. It's really just perfect. And I think it's one of the first books with a gay protagonist that is not about being gay.

7. Myra Breckenridge (Gore Vidal). Speaking of Gore Vidal. I didn't read this book until a couple years ago. It's weird and very funny. I'm not a big fan of Gore Vidal, I think his books are kind of bloodless, but this one is fun. It's one of those iconic queer books that you come across references to, and it's nice to know what people are talking about.

8. The Celluloid Closet (Vito Russo). There are not superlatives invented to suit this book. Because homosexuality has lived hand in hand with shame and fear for so many centuries, it can be difficult to unearth and de-code it in history and culture. This book looks at the entire history of film and teases out the gay. It's incredibly entertaining, moving, and provocative. Your Netflix queue will double overnight.

9. She's Not There (Jennifer Finney Boylan). This is a book that might change forever how you think about transgender experience. It did me. The subject can be a political minefield, and Boylan makes you feel safe. She's funny and warm. It's like sitting down with a transgender friend (okay, a very smart and articulate and funny transgender friend) who is willing to say, "This is what it has been like for me and this is how I understand it."

11. The Persian Boy (Mary Renault). My father gave me this book when I was in my twenties. It's told from the perspective of Alexander the Great's eunuch lover in the 4th century Persian Empire. Renault's most famous books are historical novels set in ancient Greece, and she deals with the male homosexuality straightforwardly if sentimentally.

12. The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin). You should read everything Baldwin ever wrote, but start with this one. I was going to put Giovanni's Room on this list, because it's his "gay novel," and it's good, but the essays and memoir are where you really get the meat of Baldwin's insights.

13. Against Interpretation (Susan Sontag), especially the essay, "Notes on Camp." To be honest, I'm not sure how well this holds up, but it was very, very influential. She describes a gay aesthetic that maybe hadn't been regarded so seriously before, but the problem for me is she posits it as amoral, or she says that it rejects a moral view. I believe the opposite. The reason I love drag (the most obvious example of camp performance) is that it is deeply moral, grounded in love. Read it to disagree.

14. Virtually Normal (Andrew Sullivan). Like him or not, you can't understand the breathtaking progress of the LGBT rights movement in the last 20 years without understanding the conservative argument for gay marriage Sullivan made in this book. This is the foundational text of the modern movement. Justly reviled in the 90s and 2000s (not just for his reactionary views about queerness, but for his cheerleading for Bush's invasion of Iraq) Sullivan's ideas by this time have been swallowed whole. We are all gay conservatives now.

In spite of my strong negative feelings about his politics, I found sections of this book very touching. He writes honestly and tenderly about himself, about the experience of growing up a gay boy, about how it feels to be gay and male, and about the emotional stakes in the struggle for simple acceptance by our families and communities. I am drawn to Sullivan as strongly as I am repelled by him.

My 10 Queer Books Everyone Should Read.

A friend the other day posted this list on Facebook and it struck me as a little highbrow and obscure but maybe just because I was surprised by how few of them I had read and I like to think of myself as 1) more erudite than average, and 2) pretty well-versed in gay culture. I mean, really, Resident Alien instead of The Naked Civil Servant? That’s just silly.

As you’ve probably guessed, I have my own list.

In 2000, when Jay Byrd and I sold everything we owned, moved into a camper, and set out for a 2-year adventure in music, polyamory, heartbreak, and self-realization, we unloaded hundreds of books, sold them cheap in a big yard sale along with our furniture, clothes, dishes, everything, and took what didn't sell to Goodwill. I don’t miss many of them. But there are a couple dozen books -- my queer books -- that I miss terribly.

Some of them are out of print and irreplaceable. A few were possible to replace, and I have. But all of them were invaluable to me because they were either given to me or I bought them myself with the explicit intention of learning more about my people and myself and my place in history and culture. They were marked with my yearning. They were pieces of me, and I think about them very frequently.

1. Word Is Out

When I was a senior in high school -- in spite of my agonizing over how and when to come out -- apparently it was not news to my friends and family that I was homosexual. One of my closest friends, Laura Deer, gave me for my birthday a copy of Word is Out, the book based on the revolutionary documentary film. The film, which was re-released a couple years ago, never made it to Greencastle, Indiana, but I pored over that book, stared at the pictures till I felt like I was in them.

I was always a reader, and I worked in a library in high school, so by 17 I knew I wasn’t alone. Not alone, but also not happy. Word Is Out was the antidote to the Kinsey Report, the antidote to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). Word Is Out gave me my first inkling that possibly everything was going to be okay.

2. A Boy’s Own Story (Edmund White)

My first encounter -- the book came out in 1982 and I’m a little shocked that it was so late (I was 21) but I have to keep reminding myself how much times have changed in the last 30 years -- my first encounter with a gay character in literary fiction, and, at that, a story about a teenage boy’s sexual coming of age. All that pubescent desire (feelings that I recalled from my own puberty with deep shame) cast in beautiful lyrical prose. I read it several times. I learned what cornholing was.

3. Christopher and His Kind

My dear friend and roommate Joan’s best friend Matthew was an Isherwood fan. Matthew was an artist. He moved to Berlin in the early 80s. Joan followed him there. Matthew died of AIDS a few years later, but Joan stayed and made Berlin a second home for many years. Joan gave me a copy of Berlin Stories and soon I was obsessed, too. I love all his books, and I’ve begun replacing them on my shelves. But I only list this one because it is my favorite of his post-coming out books. Christopher and His Kind sets the record straight, adding back the homosexuality to his previous memoir-ish books in which he’d censored it. Knowing that there was a thriving community of deviants and outcasts long before Stonewall expanded the world for me. It was a model for the kind of community I wanted to be a part of.

4. City of Night (John Rechy)

The protagonist is a gay hustler with an insatiable need to be desired. Boy, could I relate. Parts of it, in fact much of it, out of context reads like porn. It’s not.

City of Night was my introduction to what I’ve posited before as a vast realm of male sexual compulsion that always exists everywhere just under the paper-thin surface of social control and pops out at the flimsiest suggestion of privacy. This is the realm -- bus stations, parks, alleys, beaches, anywhere that’s dark or shielded, abandoned or avoided by respectable traffic -- the realm that gay culture doomsayers predict will disappear once we’re all allowed to marry and bring up our brats in the suburbs. I say, relax. In a death match between horniness and respectability, my money is on the sex.

5. Our Lady of the Flowers (Genet)

Okay, now I’m in art school in New York, can you tell? Transgressive sex, ecstatic violence. No turning back now. The deepest, darkest, stuff in the pit of your soul can be beautiful, can be art.

6. Maurice (E.M. Forster)

But it’s not all about fetishizing our marginality, worshipping our deviance, there’s also love pure and true and innocent. The perfect book to bridge my love of everything queer with my love for big romantic novels. I read Maurice and Our Lady of the Flowers around the same time. We have never, ever been able to decide if we’re radical outsiders or just like you. I’m still keeping my options open.

7. Macho Sluts (Patrick Califia nee Pat Califia)

In which I learned that porn can change your mind and still get you off. Or I should say that it can change the way you think because it gets you off. Also, gender fluidity is incredibly hot. This book planted the seed of my hypothesis that gay issues are not only necessarily allied with trans issues but that “gay” is a trans identity.

8. Urban Aboriginals

Seminal book of essays on what we used to call leather culture. I was very drawn to this stuff for a while in my late 20s but eventually realized it was too much of a commitment, like having a really expensive, time-consuming hobby with lots of rules to memorize. The clubbiness of it was a turnoff. But, this is a fascinating and surprisingly moving book -- what stuck with me most is a lengthy, somewhat scientific explanation of why getting fisted feels so good. Useful information.

9. Modern Primitives (RE/search Publications)

Essays, interviews, photos, all about tattooing, piercing, scarification, corsetry, pain rituals, etc., grounding these practices in history and culture. It came out in 1989. I bought it at St. Mark’s Books when it used to actually be on St. Mark’s. I think the story is that there was a bit of buzz about body modification starting to gurgle up but this book kicked it into high gear. So you can thank this book for the fact that every other suburban college kid has a bad fake tribal tattoo.

I got my first tattoo in 1989 and I had 10 holes in my ears and one in my nipple. An Austin firefighter took out the nipple ring when I was unconscious on the pavement after plowing into an SUV on my bike 5 years ago, and I took out the earrings because they were always getting infected. But I still have the tattoos.

10. The Motion of Light in Water (Samuel R. Delany)

The great science fiction writer’s memoir of the early 60s in the East Village. If you don’t read any of the books on my list, read this one. It's incredibly candid, which is I think why it's such a page-turner and so moving, but it crackles with insight into sex and love, blackness and maleness, poverty, art-making, memory, writing, the passage of time. I’d put it on my top 5 list of books of any kind. There’s nothing like it.

Dreading 2016.

I can't help but wonder what's in Hillary Clinton's head as she ramps up her campaign against the backdrop of Iraq falling apart. It's no surprise, what's happening in Iraq right now, but I imagine Clinton hopes it would have waited till after 2016.

“Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote. And I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."

Yeah? Sometimes I feel like everyone has forgotten that there were millions of people all over the world passionately against that invasion. We knew the WMD story was dubious and probably trumped up. We knew that an invasion would probably result in the death of thousands and political chaos. We knew. That's why were were marching and shouting in the streets.

And Hillary Clinton knew. When nearly every Democratic Senator supported Bush's war, it struck me as so craven, so cynical, so beyond the pale, that I vowed never again to vote for any of them. They had crossed a line. I'm not stupid, I know politicians have to make compromises, have to make unpleasant calculations in order to get anything done. But voting for a candidate who made a political calculation she knew would result in massive death and destruction and then lied about it repeatedly for years and continues to lie, just makes me a sucker.

I remember the protest march in New York. The crowd was huge. There was a feeling in the air of optimism, of power, of being heard. I marched with a group of friends I can only assume are not the same friends who are gushing now about Clinton's upcoming campaign.

As much as anyone, I'd love to see a woman as president. But not this one. She will say anything if it will make her come out looking like the good guy. There's no end to it. She'll tell you the Bible is her favorite book.

I guess every election comes down to finding some balance between, on one hand, making a choice between two evils, and, on the other hand, deciding which candidate might represent my values. And then making a calculation regarding whether voting my conscience (or not voting) will actually turn out to be a vote for the Republican. Even though the Democratic candidates in presidential elections seldom represent my values in any meaningful way, I usually end up voting for them because they might do less damage. This time I just can't.

Doh!

Remember a few years ago when the GOP nominated a Mormon and a Bible-thumping compulsive liar for president and lots of so-called sane Republicans started hinting that things had gone too far with catering to the glossolaling yahoos, and the GOP lost the election, and then youtube videos of conservative politicians tearfully professing their support of same-sex marriage began to appear in a trickle and then a stream and it was all so heartwarming, and then, oh my god, the attorneys fighting Prop 8 in California turned out to be Republicans big-as-life telling us that marriage is the civil rights issue of our time, and we were all like, "Yay!" and we were certain it was only a matter of time until we'd see a huge political realignment in which the GOP shed their lunatic Evangelicals, splitting the party in two, and then liberals win every election!

Well.
 
It looks like we'll get our realignment. But it won't be the realignment we dreamed of -- in fact, it looks more like our worst nightmare.

No longer will it be a liability for Republicans to pander to Evangelicals. They can drop their homophobic dog-whistling. "Family values" will no longer mean "We hate fags." And all the conservative white middle- and upper-class gays and lesbians will no longer feel compelled to vote for Democrats whose agenda, besides the gay stuff, they probably never really supported anyway.

When queer people can safely return to the churches that rejected them, there's no reason -- well, except maybe a conscience -- they can't safely return to all the other causes dear to that crowd: guns, wars, subjugation of women and the poor, union-busting, EPA-bashing, slut-shaming, what have you.

Or, to put it more simply: more queer Republicans = more Republicans. Doh!

Progressive struggles are all connected. Unfortunately, gay rights is soon to be no longer a progressive struggle. We might want to be a little more careful next time we're considering turning our whole movement over to an agenda articulated by Andrew Sullivan.

I'm not one to say I told you so, but ...

Further Glory.

Portland Center Stage's production of LIZZIE opened last Friday. The Oregonian, Portland's major daily paper, gave it a rave the next day, and that made us all feel pretty good, as you might imagine.

A little later in the day, Broadway World (a fan site) weighed in with, well, not a rave. More like a grumble, or a grouse. This guy seriously hated the show. So of course we broadcast the Oregonian review to the four corners of the earth and bury the other one in that special place in the pit of our souls where we keep all the other voices that say "You suck, you're ugly, everybody hates you."

I felt weird ignoring it. The older I get the more ruthlessly honest I try to be. I don't have room in my brain for secrets, and self-mortification can be soothing in a strange way. Still, you don't necessarily want to call attention to bad reviews when you're trying to sell tickets. So ... I was very glad this morning to see the first comment to the Broadway World review:

I think you missed so much of what this show was about - caught in an old paradigm. I saw this show on preview and worried that the older audience would have difficulty adjusting its expectations. I don't know your age, but your opinions smack of someone stuck in yesterday. This was the most glorious and strenuous and artfully crafted sample of women's rage I have ever seen- in music or otherwise. I hope folks can see its beauty and promote it to further glory.

Not only does this neat (and, I should say, coherent) take-down put the negative review in context, it places it within the conversation about audiences that every theater institution in the U.S. is having now: old/new, old/young, fans of pop-rock/fans of whatever that other thing is, etc.

To further glory.

The Eighties.

There used to be a twenty-something guy in my office who listened to a college radio station -- the guy still works there, I just don’t work in the same room with him any more, so I don’t know what he listens to now -- a college radio station out of I think Olympia, Washington, and I would play a game in my head which I called “Eighties Band or Just Sounds Like Eighties Band.” It seems like everything I hear these days either sounds like the Cocteau Twins or is the Cocteau Twins. I’m glad I like the Cocteau Twins.

Everyone is obsessed with the 80s now, especially New York in the 80s, and most especially the East Village in the 80s. It’s hard not to get caught up in it: as I say and say and say, that was my 80s, my New York, the East Village 80s, and it was that cool and we knew it at the time. Nearly everything I do and believe and think about now is deeply rooted in that era. My politics certainly, my experience of the art world, my notions about what New York is and means, how I dress and cut my hair, the theater and music I love. I used to even say back then, probably like to my parents, and I blush to remember, but it was true that what I loved about living where I lived was that we were “at the vanguard of culture.” It was true of art, of music, of fashion, of theater, of urbanity itself.

I think, because of how communication/media/technology has changed in the last 30 years becoming so quick and ubiquitous, that that time and place may be the last time and place about which you could really say that. The vanguard no longer has location.

It was a very different time as far as documentation. The artifacts are few and precious. I wonder how this era will look to us in 30 years, the relentless constant self-surveillance, every gesture documented and uploaded. Back then, it was a big fucking deal just to get a crappy videotape of a show and usually you just didn’t. What few reminders we have on VHS are rotting quicker than we can convert them to digital files. So the moments we did manage to preserve are like holy relics, inspiring worship and sweet tears.

I found an old poster I’d saved from a CBGB’s gig. In my early 20s, I was in a band called The Woods with my boyfriend at the time and a lesbian couple from Baltimore who had just moved to New York. One of them, Linda Smith, made a name for herself in the indie cassette scene that thrived at that time. She released a handful of gorgeous albums of her songs, all recorded by herself on a 4-track Portastudio and released on cassette. I was very influenced by her ideas about music and art being things made by hand at home. (They lived in Greenpoint, in 1985. Let that sink in. It was a horrible neighborhood -- in a completely different way from the way in which it’s horrible now.)

The Woods played probably a total of 15 gigs, including a few live radio spots, over the course of about 3 years, put out a 7” single and recorded a bunch of other songs that we never released. That night at CBGB’s we were on a bill with Hugo Largo. Great band. We listened to their record “Drum” a lot.

I posted the poster on Facebook this week, tagged my old friends and bandmates, which inspired a flurry of nostalgia and spurred Linda to dig out our old recordings and send them to us as mp3s, rough mixes of some of that stuff we recorded and never released.

And this is a quick little movie I made with a handful of photos of us coming and going to various gigs. The song is I think maybe the second or third I ever wrote. I love listening to this old stuff. I hear the seeds of everything I’m doing now.

Neighbors.

The people who lived below us moved out a couple months ago, our landlord renovated the apartment, and last week new tenants moved in. There are only four apartments in our building, one of which the owner lives in, and one of C’s dearest long-time friends lives across the hall, so the situation is more neighborly than your typical New York building, but still it was surprising when a little over a week ago a small orange envelope slid under our front door with a yellow card inside that read, “Hello neighbor! Just a quick note of introduction and to let you know that we will be moving in this Monday. Apologies in advance for any move-in noise you might endure this week whilst we get settled. Thank you and we look forward to being your neighbor.”

Do you suddenly miss your childhood and a simpler time that may or may not have been simpler but that at least contained birthday cards from your grandmother with brand new five dollar bills in them? My mother, when someone moved in next door to us on Lesley Street on the northeast side of Indianapolis, would take them something, a cake? a casserole? I don’t remember, but something. Why would you not do that when you know full well their pots and pans are not unpacked yet, and they are likely full of apprehension in an unfamiliar place, and the smallest gesture might be all they need to feel welcome?

Last Saturday night, I said to C, “I’m going to make peanut butter cookies tomorrow night and take a plate down to them on Monday. We’ll keep half for ourselves.”

C had come home from work on Friday sick as a dog, with a fever and achey joints. I was sure he had the flu despite the flu shot he got and I didn’t. Our plan for Sunday afternoon was to go out to Jackson Heights in Queens, to scope it out, look at a few apartments, see if it might be a neighborhood we could live in. Apartments listed there looked to be very similar to the ones here in Inwood but quite a bit less expensive. C was still feeling poorly but it was a sunny day so he rallied.

I loved the neighborhood, C did not. I was seduced by lunch at an Indian buffet restaurant which I’m pretty sure is the best Indian food I’ve had in New York, but I’m always saying this or that is the best this or that, so would you trust me? At any rate, it was very good. We have a few good restaurants in our neighborhood but not much variety and no Indian food at all. Jackson Heights is the New York neighborhood for Asian food and that’s a strong draw for me. But I do agree with C that it felt cramped, landlocked, remote. We’re spoiled up here, so close to the great Hudson River and our little patch of primeval forest.

I do love Inwood and I do hate the idea of moving so far from from our dear friends here, to a neighborhood where we don’t know anyone. Anyway, we won’t be ready to seriously think about buying a place for several months, so we have time to mull over staying or going.

When we got home that afternoon, I told C that since we were tired and he was still sick I wasn’t going to make cookies after all, I’d wait and make them later in the week. He looked stricken. “No!” Once you have your heart set on peanut butter cookies …

So I made them. I put about a dozen on a plate and covered it with plastic wrap, the rest in a container for us. Monday night, we’d forgotten that we had tickets to see the preview of Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway, so we couldn’t take the cookies down to our new neighbors that night. Tuesday we went down and they weren’t there. Or nobody answered the door. Wednesday I had a writing session downtown and was gone all evening. I wasn’t going to give our new neighbors four-day-old cookies, so C and I finished them ourselves. We’d already gone through ours.

Yesterday, Saturday, we had T and his 15-year-old godson up for dinner and games. T’s godson’s birthday was last week, and he’d gotten a new game called Pandemic. It's one of those very complicated strategic games that many people seem to enjoy very much and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I like this game, though, because it's played cooperatively, not competitively, so nobody gets irritated when it's my turn and I say, "Just tell me what I should do."

Since we had evening plans, I wanted to spend the day writing and not cooking. (I’m so close to a first draft of my play -- which is actually the fourth or fifth draft, being a complete overhaul of a play I began writing a couple years ago based on a screenplay I wrote about ten years ago based on a story I wrote about a dozen years ago, but who’s counting. It’s been a complicated story to get down, and the last couple weeks it's all falling together, so I wanted to spend the afternoon with it.) I made a Szechuan beef dish that requires only a bit of prep and then several hours in the slow-cooker.

C decided to make chocolate cookies from the one-bowl baking book I got him for Xmas. They’re super-chocolatey, delicious, and very rich. We'd have them for dessert and then take the rest down to our neighbors, finally. You didn’t ask, but here’s some advice for you. Don’t put a plate of cookies in front of a teenage boy and expect to have leftovers.

I don’t know where the expression, “It’s the thought that counts,” came from. Obviously it’s not. I’ve been thinking about cookies practically non-stop for over two weeks, and our new neighbors are still probably cowering in their cold, stark apartment, far away from everything familiar and reassuring, surrounded by unpacked boxes, wondering why their new neighbors are so unfriendly.

A Puzzlement.

Articles like this seem to appear every month or so. This one is focused on the “guy problem” -- Broadway audiences are mostly women and gay men -- but others lament the lack of young people, all of them coming from a general anxiety about the shrinking "Broadway audience." How do we get young people, “guys,” and just more people to come to Broadway?

I’m puzzled by these articles, mystified by this conversation.

On one hand, the Broadway industry (theater professionals, media, etc.) are always fretting about shrinking audiences and the particular demographics we seem unable to attract.

On the other hand, we constantly talk about what is or is not a “Broadway show,” which is to say, “What does or does not appeal to the Broadway audience?” This speculation is usually in the context of trying to get a handle on which shows or types of show are risky or not, in business terms, to produce in Broadway houses.

So, how can we be so concerned with what will appeal to the Broadway audience and at the same time be obsessed with the fact that that audience needs to be something other than what it is now in order for Broadway shows to be successful and for the industry to thrive, that is, in order for producers and the rest of us to make money (and make more shows)?

In case it’s not obvious, my interest in these questions, my puzzlement regarding them, is not academic. It comes from the fact that I happen to know of a show that does appeal to young people, that does appeal to straight men (and older people and gay men and women!), a show that is not expensive to produce and would look amazing in a Broadway house, but we keep hearing from person after person in the industry that it’s “not really a Broadway show.”

How is it we’re so certain, and simultaneously so uncertain, what a Broadway show is? Why are we scrambling to find shows that will appeal to the Broadway audience while at the same time we’re obsessed with changing that audience?

I recognize that these questions are ultimately about large sums of money and the livelihoods of many well-meaning people. I’m not (at least not just) trying to glibly make a point here. I really do wonder.

This Weekend.

Today, Saturday, I had a conference call at 11 and then C and I were going to walk to Target -- a 10 minute walk over the bridge to the Bronx -- for things one gets at Target: laundry supplies, potting soil, dishwashing liquid, toothbrushes, etc. Tomorrow we had planned a trip to Jackson Heights to check out the neighborhood.

C practically had to beg me to make weekend plans. On Saturdays I want nothing more than to do absolutely nothing, I think mostly because that’s how to make time pass most slowly until Monday. The only way to make time to pass more slowly would be to go to work. During the week, the days are excruciatingly slow (except evenings which are like lightning) and I can’t even describe the elaborate hugeness of my resentment of the injustice of that.

C, on the other hand, likes to have plans on the weekend, to do something, to get out of the house, to use the precious few hours he has dominion over. I get it. It’s soul-crushing to contemplate how little of our lives we have any say over how we spend.

C and I are saving for a downpayment on an apartment, and we’ve been sort of casually looking at listings to see what’s available. We hadn’t seriously considered any neighborhood other than the one we live in. Because we like it here, and because we want a 2-bedroom apartment and this is one of the few areas in the city where there are ever any 2-bedroom apartments listed in our price range. In Manhattan, that is.

To be honest, ever since I read House of Blue Leaves in college I’ve thought of Queens as a sad, remote place where people dream of Manhattan but never get here. I lived in Brooklyn for 4 or 5 years in the mid-80s. It was what it was, which is to say it’s not that any more. To be frank, it was a little bleak and most of my social life was still in the East Village where my friends lived. My partner and I moved to Fort Greene in 1984 from the East Village because it was affordable (let’s just have a moment of silence for that: we moved out of the East Village in 19 fucking 84 because it had become gentrified to the extent that two artists making their living as a bartender and waiter could no longer afford to live there).

Needless to say, Brooklyn is something entirely different these days and I have about as much desire to live there as I do to live in the East Village. Which is to say, none. But Queens? Jackson Heights is actually closer to midtown than where we are now. It looks like the buildings are similar to the big pre-war brick buildings in Inwood, and the neighborhood is filled with South Asian restaurants. There’s a gay presence there. (Just last week, C and I were lamenting the fact that there’s not a gay bar up here where you might stop for a couple beers at happy hour on a Friday. There are of course lots of homosexuals up here, like everywhere, but the bars we know about are very young and dancey and no one goes out before 1 a.m.)

But it’s going to be rainy and cold and windy tomorrow, like today, not the best weather for strolling around a neighborhood to get the vibe, so we decided to put off our trip to Queens till next weekend and take our chances with the rain tomorrow, see if we can get to Target and back without getting soaked.

So today after my conference call, the rest of the day is free. C is playing a video game. He’s not the type who plays them all the time, but he’ll get on a jag now and then with a particular game. This one is something about pirates. It makes him happy and somehow that makes me feel calm, his happiness, because -- I know it probably sounds silly -- I see his happiness as my responsibility.

I’ve been in the office all afternoon watching the rain and reading about Wesleyan Perfectionism, which is what makes me happy. I’m neck deep in the background research for our Scarlet Letter musical. It’s like crack to me, exploring the connections between the Puritans (when the story is set) and the 19th century Transcendentalists (when the story was written) and then how those ideas have come to affect how we see ourselves and live our lives today. This never-ending process of deciding what it means to be American. I’m like a pig in shit, with my stack of books on women itinerant Evangelists during the 2nd Great Awakening.

I took a break from my reading to start a big pot of carne guisada in the slow cooker. Tacos tonight.

So C and I both got what we wanted this weekend, which is better than neither of us getting what we wanted. That’s what I know so far about marriage: it’s usually one or the other.

Something New.

We are working on something new. That’s always how people put it: “something new,” in contrast to whatever it is that’s currently in front of an audience, which in our case is LIZZIE. “What’s next?” “Oh, we’re working on something new.”

Though I’m learning that nothing is ever new, or old. To most people who encounter it these days, LIZZIE is new, and I understand that, to them, it is, and even to us there is a sense in which it is new because we’ve radically re-written it several times over since that first presentation in 1990. But it’s hard for me to see this latest iteration of an idea that we had 25 years ago as “new work.” And it should go without saying (though I will say it anyway so I don’t give the impression that I’m complaining) that it’s a very good thing that LIZZIE is new to so many people. I can’t think of thing one that’s bad about that. We’re going to Denmark next month. Fucking Denmark.

The “something new” we’re working on is again something very old, nearly as old as LIZZIE, but this time we’re not just dusting off an old piece and making it longer, clearer, better. We’re taking a completely different approach to a book we adapted in 1992, The Scarlet Letter. Shortly after the premiere of LIZZIE, Tim, as director, pulled together about 25-30 writers and performers and we tore apart this book that everyone knows because they had to read it in high school and we put it back together again, turning the Ohio theater into a total environment that the audience moved through on their own, encountering songs and recitations, conversations, spectacle, plays within plays within plays, all riffing on the ideas in the book. To use the current vernacular, I think you’d call it a hybrid between devised theater and immersive theater. Back then we called it “environmental theater.”

Speaking of new and old, I’m amused, bemused, something, by how trendy this “new” form of theatre (Sleep No More, Natasha and Pierre, etc.) has become, how it has a reputation of being radical and rebellious, when Tim and I left it behind years ago and now find ourselves neck-deep in a more conservative, straightforward type of storytelling, the Broadway-style book musical, finding it more useful for communicating the ideas we want to communicate to an audience.

Those who now call LIZZIE “edgy” and “out there,” well, I sure wish they could have been at the Ohio Theater in May 1992 to experience A: a Carnival Adulteration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.” I don’t mean to say that we in particular were doing anything all that new. There’s a tradition, a lineage. Wooster Group. (I fully accept that I’ve become one of those old people who scold the kids for not knowing their history. Fully accept. The most surprising and disconcerting thing about getting older is realizing how much is lost, forgotten, and paved over.)

In the way that it’s interesting to think about how a work of art is new or old, it is interesting to think about how the artist is young or old. I offer no conclusions on that subject. It’s just something to muse upon on this warm and partly sunny Sunday morning. All that to say that we’re working on The Scarlet Letter again, this time making a more traditional musical.

Speaking of new and old and the kids not knowing their history, did you see this article in the New Yorker? It’s good. Worth a read. But this made me go hm:

Sondheim ushered in a new way of writing show tunes, one that favored liminal states—ambivalence, regret—over toe-tapping joy. ... This was groundbreaking.

No question Sondheim changed the medium irrevocably, but ambivalence and regret? Rogers and Hammerstein, anyone?

And not just R&H:

I am by no means an expert in musical theater history, I’m just someone who loves the art form and has a few favorites, but those 5 songs popped into my head without even thinking about it too hard. There are tons of songs by Rogers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Gershwin, that use the medium to explore “liminal states.” I think even Sondheim bristles at the characterization of his work as revolutionary. He relentlessly acknowledges his debt to forebears and mentors and describes his work as the continuation of a project.

It occurs to me that, if Sondheim didn’t introduce the emotionally complex relationship in musical theater, his groundbreaking contribution might be to have separated it from a social or political context. To me, what’s revolutionary about the era of the greatest American musicals, the 40s and 50s, is that those writers (mostly R&H but others, too) set conventional love stories in situations where the lovers were forced to confront a difficult, complex, changing world: Oklahoma and the American frontier, race and imperialism in South Pacific and The King and I, class mobility in My Fair Lady. Now, I’m less familiar with Sondheim’s oeuvre, so maybe someone can school me on this, but it seems to me that Sondheim is much more interested in how people feel about themselves and their friends and lovers than in how they respond to social and political pressures.

This has been a very full week. Tuesday, Tim and I were going to meet for our regular writing session, where we’re working on another something new (we canceled at the last minute in favor of working on our own separately), then Wednesday was a new weekly writing session (2 weekly sessions now, which is intense but necessary and just seeing them on my calendar lessens my anxiety about time passing too quickly and too little to show for it) with Tim and our friend and collaborator Liz who was one of the original writers on that long-ago version. I’ve fallen head first into The Scarlet Letter, reading and re-reading the book, underlining furiously on the subway, poring over 17th century sermons and passages of scripture. The two periods of American history that most inform the story are two of my favorites: the early years of the Massachusetts colony (when the story is set) and the second half of the 19th century with the various reform movements and the New England transcendentalists (when the story was written).

Thursday was Mom’s last chemo treatment in this latest round. Now she (and we) have to wait for 2 weeks when they’ll do some kind of scan to see if the cancer is gone. Two weeks.

Thursday night our co-writer on LIZZIE, Alan, whose day job is playing bass on Broadway, hooked us up with discount tickets for a preview of Rocky. Friday, C and I had tickets for Stage Kiss, a new play at Playwrights Horizons, which I loved. Before the show, when we couldn’t get a table at that cheap Greek restaurant across the street from Port Authority, we stumbled into some of the best Chinese food I’ve had in New York. Right there in a nondescript Szechuan restaurant on 42nd St. Delicious pork soup dumplings, fiery hot and intensely flavored cumin lamb. I was in heaven.

Yesterday, Saturday, I went alone to 12 Days a Slave. C is adamant about seeing all the films with Oscar nominations in the top categories before the awards ceremony. For me, that's usually a recipe for a lot of time and money I'll never get back. This year I was more susceptible to the hype and went to a few that I was on the fence about. That’s the other striking thing about getting older, all the lessons you never learn.

David Hill.

This is David Hill in my bedroom in our house in Indianapolis. I would guess this is about 1973. We left Indianapolis in 1974 when I was 13. I don't remember how I met David. Boy Scouts, maybe? His family lived in Lawrence, a rich white suburb. In the early 70s, as black families began to move into our neighborhood on the northeast side of Indianapolis and white families fled more or less en masse, the city reacted by bussing white kids in from Lawrence to keep the schools integrated.

David is the first boy I remember having a serious crush on. I probably spent very little time with him -- he lived what seemed at the time far away, too far to ride my bike to, and there were tons of kids right there in our neighborhood -- but I thought about him all the time for about a year. His older sister had a Volkswagen van with flower power stickers and an ooga horn.

I hadn't looked at this photo in a long time. There's a lot of 70s going on in there.

Mr. Kincaid.

Though when I heard last night that Dave Madden, who played Reuben Kincaid on the Partridge Family, died, I felt a little rush of sweet affection for him (or for my memory of him), I have to say I was always a little put off by Mr. Kincaid. I was generally, as a kid, very leery of bachelors, and his relationship with Danny (who I also never much liked -- too mouthy) made me uncomfortable, the two of them fighting like an old married couple. For that matter, I can’t say I was even a fan of Keith. I was mesmerized by David Cassidy but terrified, the same feeling I had toward the cutest boys at school: obsessed but afraid to look at them directly for fear of betraying that I was not a boy, not like them. I loved Laurie. I had intense crushes on girls back then, and Laurie Partridge was the gold standard for the kind of girl I loved and wanted to be near. Tall with long straight hair, monotone and aloof but easily hurt. Almost all my best friends until I was in college were girls, but especially when I was under 12. That’s why I get angry/hurt/amused (I need a word for that) when I see parents of very young children sexualize their kids’ opposite sex friendships. “Oh my son is definitely straight. He loves girls! He and his little girlfriend are inseparable. ” Whatever you say.

January 3.

I was going to write a year-end blog post, because on and off in December I felt like I had something interesting to say. It would come to me, sort of linger around the tip of my pen now and then.

New Year’s Eve passed, and I changed the verb tenses in my scattered notes, and then changed them again yesterday as the notes cohered. Well, they did cohere but not into anything very interesting. I seemed to want to blather for a while about how everybody was hating on 2013 in spite of Boy Scouts in Utah and Sonia Sotomayor and the ban on horses in Central Park, but then I admitted that yeah there were a lot of ugly things like the duck guy (not so much the guy himself because who cares about one pseudo-Christian hatemonger, but all his fans -- a large and influential percentage of the U.S. population -- who believe that advocating the killing of homosexuals and the enslavement of blacks is just one worldview among many and should not be condemned. So maybe the world is not slowly slowly becoming what we imagined, dreamed of, fought for.

And I mentioned drones, because obviously that’s not what I ever hoped for, and the Pope, who everyone is totally in love with just because, spurning tradition, he does not support the killing of homosexuals. He does, however, take a dim view of their being allowed to raise children. The Pope, to our disappointment, still shits in the woods. We take the good with the bad.

And I went on for a while about my mom. Not even really about my mom but about how she’s on my mind nearly all the time and when she’s not, and I suddenly realize I haven’t thought of her for a couple hours, I feel sad and guilty as if I haven’t held up my end of a bargain. But today she’s home from the hospital and feeling better than she has in a long time.

And then I mentioned that we’re in hot and heavy talks with some big-deal producers for LIZZIE and that’s very exciting but also very stressful because of all the contract negotiating and feeling like at any moment you could agree to something and inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings or ruin your life. Not really, but it feels like that sometimes.

And I thought I had a deep point to make about the vicissitudes of life and my New Year’s resolution to resume my daily meditation practice. I wanted to take a stand against the anti-resolution sentiment this time of year, I think spurred by the fact that most people don’t keep their resolutions. But since when is failure a good excuse for not trying? The practice of making resolutions, or setting intentions, for the New Year is ancient and crosses cultures and religions. It used to be that people would make promises to a god or gods or God. I think now we mostly make promises to ourselves. To exercise, eat better, smile more. Why not?

But when I read back over my draft, it was boring and didn’t even make much sense, so I didn’t post it.

Come to think of it, that’s sort of the crux of the problem I’m trying to solve, that my thoughts never settle, never clear, as my mind is pulled from this excitement to that dread.

New York is no help. There’s so little quiet or open space, everyone pushing. I remember this feeling from the last time I lived here, tense and angry much of the time, but back then I had nothing to compare it to. Now that I’ve been away from the city and back and know how unnatural and unhealthy this environment is, I’m less willing to defend it. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I heard Fran Leibowitz say that to be a New Yorker is to walk around in a constant rage, which is true, and sad, and frightening when you imagine 8 million people rushing around to an internal monologue of murder.

So I have resolved to start meditating daily again. Ten minutes a day, to start. It’s a small commitment. It has to be because when is there time? How is adding yet another activity to an already hectic schedule going to help anything? Isn’t that the source of so much of the anxiety in the first place. The times when I was religious about meditating I wasn’t living in New York or I wasn’t working a day job. But I can make 10 minutes in the morning. Wednesday didn’t count because it was a holiday, but yesterday and this morning I sat for ten minutes and was surprised when the bell rang -- I thought it had only been 4 or 5. I’m out of practice, so it wasn’t easy, but it gets easier and that’s the point, to train your mind to stop wandering and spinning and torturing you (and everyone around you for that matter -- I’ve come to completely rely on C to cushion me from my neuroses because I know that he will put up with just about anything and still love me. But that’s no reason to push it to the limit. I aggravate myself, how could I not be aggravating him?).

Good things will happen and bad things will happen and both are powerful and compelling. I can’t change that. I want a way to receive all this stuff without freaking out at every little bit of news, every question, every decision required. In meditation you practice putting aside your thoughts and returning to your basic sanity.

Advent.

We put up our Christmas tree on Saturday. We bought it the same place as last year and the year before, from the people who set up in front of the C-Town on Broadway and 207th Street. I don’t think it’s the same man every year but it’s always a sort of woodsy-looking young guy with a beard. This time there was also a very sturdy woman and a teenager who was cutting and wrapping the trees. I always imagine them having a little farm somewhere in the mountains where they live in a cabin heated by a woodstove and churn their own butter.

My job the last 2 years has been to talk C down from getting the biggest tree on the lot -- yes, it’s a beautiful tree but our ceilings are only 9 feet tall -- but I don’t love being the Scrooge in the family and this year I just wanted him to have the tree that made him happy, even if it takes up half the living room.

We both fell in love with the first tree we saw, some kind of fancy fragrant breed, very full foliage, blueish. The bearded man warned us that it was heavy because the trunk was thick, but we were unfazed. It was heavy (our shoulders are still sore) but we got it home. What we didn’t consider though was the width of the stand. It didn’t fit.

We went to Target to look for a bigger stand. On one hand, a trip to Target is not such an ordeal for us -- it’s a 10 minute walk across the bridge to the Bronx. On the other hand, it’s December and what is the last place on earth you would want to be on a weekend afternoon in December? Okay, Walmart. But second to last?

They didn’t have a bigger stand at Target. So we bought a saw. I won’t re-litigate the saw choice here because we’ve moved on, but the only saw they had was a hacksaw, which is not the saw I would choose for sawing through a tree trunk. It took a while, but we cut the tree down to size, and now it’s up and decorated and beautiful, and that’s what counts.

But I was actually grateful for the unexpected trip to Target, feeling myself become more and more tightly wound as we walked through the store -- a perfect distillation of everything I hate about this season: piles of useless crap, parents growling at their kids, bright lights, terrible music, and everyone bleating “Merry Christmas!” -- grateful because I could see the whole pile of shit apart from what I love about this season.

I came across an article the other day about Fox News’s “war on Christmas” nonsense and how they miss the point (at least they’re consistent) because the weeks leading up to Christmas are not, for traditional Christians, about celebrating or even really about Christmas at all, but about Advent, which is a season of waiting and reflecting, a season of gathering darkness, fear, dread, and, ultimately, hope. There’s nothing merry about it. And then Christmas starts on December 25th with the celebration of the birth of Christ -- the embodiment of all our hopes, for a better world, for love, for peace, for light, for a new chance -- and continues for 12 days. That's when we celebrate, lords a-leaping, etc.

We should spend December taking stock (you know when you've been good or bad, you don't need a pathologically cheerful fat man to tell you), setting intentions, imagining a better world. Not yelling at people in parking lots and maxing out our credit cards. That’s what I think, anyway.

That said, the real work for me is in separating the ritual of gift-giving -- one of my favorite things about Christmas: the shopping, wrapping, giving, waiting, opening -- from the mindless consumer frenzy. They are so tightly woven together. We live in a world where it’s impossible to engage with the culture and not perpetuate its ugliest aspects. So, that’s a project…

Putting aside the Fox News idiocy (which, you know, what else really can you do with it?) and the fact that we know all this already, the article jogged my brain and gave me a path back to how I used to enjoy the season as a time of uncertainty, anticipation, and hope.

Not to mention that I’d much rather listen to this

than Rudolph and Frosty and Jingle Bells and all that shrieking silliness any day.

It does seem a little odd to me sometimes that I love this music so much, the more solemn, the more religious, the better. I am of course not Christian, but isn’t the beautiful story of the miraculous birth of Christ come to save us from ourselves (at least partly) just another iteration of the same old story of birth from death, light out of darkness? It’s only unique in its details. This story works for me because it’s embedded somewhere in me deeper than belief. My parents didn’t believe it either, but marking the end of darkness and the beginning of light doesn’t require belief. It happens every year no matter what you believe.

Dinner and a Movie.

I had one of the best meals I’ve ever had in New York last night. Almost didn’t.

Maybe I’ve mentioned before what a hard time C and I have choosing movies. We both love movies and it’s not as if our tastes are completely exclusive of each other’s but the films at the top of my list are usually artsy and small and C’s are more … popular. I’m also leery of the multiplex experience where 9 times of of 10 some asshole is talking through the movie and phones are bleeping and people are chewing loud. C is not so bothered by it.

(This might suggest that I’m a snob and C is a philistine. I’ll cop to being a snob, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like big Hollywood movies. I did see Les Miz and not hate it. I just don’t like the ones where the men all whisper intensely, kill lots of people, and call it acting. C is most definitely not a philistine, but he has a low threshold for artsy and obscure.)

Farther down, our lists converge. We both wanted to see Dallas Buyer’s Club, and so did C’s friend E (my friend, too, but he’s been C’s closest friend for many more years than I’ve known either of them), and our plan for Saturday evening was for dinner and a movie with E.

It’s showing near Lincoln Center (close to home) and in Murray Hill in the East 30s. I pushed really hard for Murray Hill because I’ve been wanting to try an Indian/Pakistani restaurant there called Haandi for weeks, ever since I read an article about the Indian restaurants in that neighborhood in NYEater. C was up for it, but E wanted to go to Lincoln Center because he had plans tonight to meet friends for Asian food in the East Village. (I don’t know, either.) I like the Upper West Side, but I had my heart set on this restaurant and for some reason it’s always hard to find a good restaurant near Lincoln Center that isn’t expensive. I was pushy. E relented.

Now suddenly there was all this pressure on a restaurant I’d never been to in a neighborhood that’s not easy to get to, and when we got there and C saw that it was a neon-lit hole in the wall with a cafeteria-style steam table, an inscrutable menu, and not much English being spoken, he got cold feet. “I like atmosphere,” he said. I said, “This is atmosphere. It’s just not the atmosphere you were expecting.”

And then we got into a big argument, me railing about how I miss my old life when I used to eat in places like Haandi all the time: super cheap, great food, neon lights, dirty bathrooms, and now I can afford to eat at more expensive places but I reject the idea that low lights and cloth napkins and a wine list makes a restaurant objectively better.

Neither of us much likes arguing, so we got out of this one by looking up the NYEater article, finding the blogger’s second choice, which was right across the street and more sit-down-and-order-from-a-menu. I said I’d be fine eating there instead, and C, also feeling conciliatory, suggested we give E a choice between the two places when he arrived, which he did shortly, looked at Haandi and said, “Well, we came a long way for this.” But when C proposed the other place, E said, “No, we came all the way down here to eat at this place. Let’s go in.”

Vats of various Indian and Pakistani curries, kebabs stacked up on the counter, and different kinds of fritters, a chicken biryani. I asked a few a questions. C and E both ordered a meat platter that came with a choice of two meat dishes, a vegetable, rice, salad, and raita. I had a big lamb shank that was moist and tender with some kind of very spicy dry rub and a bowl of lentils. Everything was served on styrofoam plates with plastic forks and dispenser-style napkins that you have to use about 30 of when you're eating a big lamb shank with your fingers. Both the lamb and lentils were spectacular, and everything I tasted from C’s and E’s plates was exceptional too. A rich chicken tikka and some other kind of stewed chicken that was even better. Chicken tandoori that was moist and spicy and full of flavor. Best naan I’ve ever had (perfect for dipping into the ghee that pooled on top of the bowl of lentils) and the raita tasted fresh and cool and minty. I’m rarely so happy with a meal. I can’t wait to go back and try the goat stew and kebabs. Their meals were $7.99 and mine was a few dollars more because the lamb shank was a special.

Dallas Buyers Club was okay but I was never drawn in, never emotionally affected. Both Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto (both of whom I like) lost a lot of weight, and I guess that’s impressive but I find it distracting when actors do that. I find myself thinking about the actors rather than the characters. And it’s always men isn’t it? It strikes me as a sort of macho endurance ritual rather than a sincere effort to enhance the storytelling. It’s not that far removed from a Jackass stunt.

Maybe I had a chip on my shoulder about the film, too, because it’s a story about a time I remember very well, a scary complicated intense time that now is just fodder for an edgy Oscar-bait movie about colorful Texans and oh my god Jared Leto is playing a trannie drug addict and he lost 50 pounds. The Dallas Buyers Club was a real thing, and it wasn’t the only one. Do you know about the buyers clubs from the early days of the AIDS epidemic? If not, you should. Google it. During the movie, I found myself wishing that instead of this semi-fictionalized film, I could have seen a documentary. By turning it into an Erin-Brokovich-style-charismatic-outsider-takes-on-the-powers-that-be-fable, Dallas Buyers Club takes this story out of the larger context of AIDS treatment and activism of that time. I know not every story can tell the whole story, but this one was, I think, misleading. If you're going to tell a true story, it should be ... true.

It’s Sunday night and I’m cranky. I’m cranky on Friday nights because I already know the weekend isn’t going to be long enough and on Sunday nights because I was right.