a week of first paragraphs–friday

“‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again…’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.” –Salman Rushdie, “The Satanic Verses”

a week of first paragraphs–thursday

“Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, “Give em to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.”  –Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain” (from her collection of short stories, “Close Range, Wyoming Stories”)

a week of first paragraphs–wednesday

“We’re going for a midnight boat ride. It’s a cold, clear summer night and four of us–the two boys, my dad and I–are descending the stairs that zigzag down the hill from the house to the dock. Old Boy, my dad’s dog, knows where we’re headed; he rushes down the slope beside us, looks back, snorts and tears up a bit of grass as he twirls in a circle. “What is it, Old Boy, what is it?” my father says, smiling faintly, delighted to be providing excitement for the dog, whom he always called his best friend.”  –Edmund White, “A Boy’s Own Story”

a week of first paragraphs–tuesday

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.” –Evelyn Waugh, “Brideshead Revisited” (Book One, after the Prologue)

a week of first paragraphs–monday

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train… Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and Dodgers, call teh counterman in Nedrick’s by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat–trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: “I think you dropped something, fella.”"  –William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch”

rosebud (rose, bud; eros dub; bro dues)

have you ever watched orson welles’s masterpiece, “citizen kane”?

that is all.

i guess i could tell you that i had to watch it maybe 80 times (alright, an exaggeration, but regardless, it was many, many, many times) when i took a film criticism course at the u of i — chicago circle campus in 197_. this then was when the ‘new’ journalism was all the rage and pauline kael, the movie critic for the new yorker was the ne plus ultra of criticism, dividing the world into those who worshipped at the end of her pen and those who would have thrown her and her ink pot on the nearest pyre and gladly struck the match to ignite the fire.

in spite of having to watch “citizen kane” a gazillion times, what did happen was that i began to understand movies in a new way; firstly, as works of art (which i hadn’t considered before then, sure they were entertainment, and yes, they told a story, but i hadn’t, in my 22 years on the planet, really thought of them as works of art until then. that doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?)

for, just as i had had to do in my french ‘explication de texte’ courses, we had to dissect every little aspect of the movie, actually dismantle it and put it back together again in order to completely inhabit the mind of its creator (shudder, orson was a man of many, shall we say, appetites); how scenes were framed, at what angle they were shot, the use of black and white, its chiaroscuro not unlike a renaissance painting by caravaggio, the foreshadowing (i’ll repeat that: the foreshadowing), the language, the grammar, the way the characters were drawn/conceived, how they interacted, archetypical symbols (my love for carl jung springs from this course of study), and on and on and on.

and then you take all of the parts, considered and parsed for meaning, and toss them all in a light vinaigrette (your perspective) and re-present them on a plate as your understanding of the film and how it affects your world (or doesn’t). “tasty, isn’t it?” you might ask (to no one in particular, it might even be sotto voce or mumbled to yourself) or you may even not think a thing about it, having thoroughly given yourself up to the experience of enjoying the work of a great artist.

isn’t it funny?

 

isn’t it funny when we use “funny” instead of “odd” or “weird”?  are you chuckling when a unusual coincidence (can an coincidence be anything other than unusual?) occurs and you say, “that’s funny, i thought x would have happened instead of y.”?   does “funny” make it easier to accept the “odd” or the “weird”?

you would not be surprised to note that i had a “funny” dream last night.  it was the dream that preceded waking, which i’ve found are often the most disturbing dreams.  that is if i’m having disturbing dreams then.   (you know what’s odd?  helen’s beauty is not mentioned once in the “iliad.”  that’s not funny, but it does seem odd, does it not?)  which is not always the case; having disturbing dreams just before waking.

but when the dream i’m having is disturbing just before waking, it does seem “funny” in that shocking “if i call it funny maybe it won’t be quite so much of an odd/weird/freak me out/shuddering-with-fear-kind-of-dream.

but then you realize it’s only language that you’re using to dissipate your anxiety, the anxiety produced by the odd, the unusual, the weird, the other-worldly–let’s say it was a dream about vampires starring colin firth; okay, it’s a bit of wish-fulfillment, but still, it was a dream filled with friends and acquaintances dying in the valiant revolution being waged against the blood-suckers–and even with all of that going on, language was not quite enough to dispel its weirdness, its oddness, its anxiety.  it’s just not funny.

an unfinished sentence (world a.i.d.s. day 2011)

i woke this morning in the middle of a sentence.  i was unable to complete it for what it meant fled with my waking.   it could have been angel wings (or crow’s wings) that pulled the rest of it aloft, the flap-flap flutter of their beating the only aftereffect i can recall with any clarity.

an unfinished sentence is a building under construction and then abandoned.   you may have watched the workers as they laid the bricks, the architect standing on the sidewalk pointing at his renderings and then at a window on the 2nd floor, the crew foreman taking notes as the cement truck rumbles up and lets its air brakes release in a whoosh of harsh air.   they’re busy for weeks, maybe even years, consulting, constructing.   and then one day, no one shows up for work.  the quiet alarms you, its sudden silence disturbs.  the next day it’s the same and the day after, a year goes by, the building crumbles, weeds grow up around it, the structure nothing but a faint shadow now.

i wish i could begin that sentence again, maybe pick up where the verb exhaled, the real action set to begin.    perhaps it was about love just found, happiness abounding, the joy that propels our lives, perhaps it was none of those things, it could have been just a simple declarative sentence, “i am alive.”

a pictorial example of this sort of sentence is often found in photographs you have taken that don’t always turn out the way you had hoped they would.   they’re dark at the edges, obscuring part of the scene (and sometimes other people, the ghosts) and if we were only better able to divine the future, perhaps foretelling of the blackness that would wash over your subject, closing the door, the book, leaving the sentence incomplete, then we might be able to write the rest of the sentence.

that’s the sentence i’d like to write for mark and his lover martin, dead within weeks of each other in 1987.    if i had really looked at this photo of him from 1976 and thought about its meaning, would i have been able to do anything to stop what happened or did i just see a crappy photo of a smiling boy who was my friend and not the ominous nature of his life closing in on him?   i wish i had an answer.

have you ever seen so many mustaches in one photo?  even the photographer had a mustache.  it never occurred to any of us in 1981 that we might want to distinguish ourselves with a cleanly shaven upper lip.  of the seven of us only three are still alive, two are h.i.v. positive, i am not.  how i slid through the war on homosexuals without becoming infected is a mystery.  but it happened (a miracle?  genetic? dumb luck? fate? pick one or all.)

it wasn’t until i scanned this photograph that i realized how blurry it is, our faces smudges without structure with little raisin eyes, some smiling, others unsure of the pleasure of the occasion.  jimmy and dick (on the floor) so in love with each other it was palpable, you could taste it, it was that rich a love.  michael, the host for this soiree  (standing left, his lover the photographer) the first of our friends to die.  he left something in his will for jimmy which i delivered a few weeks after michael left us (unfinished, dangling);  jimmy and dick died a few weeks later, dick first, then jimmy.  lee (sitting next to me on the right) dissolved sometime in the late 1980s and i wish i could say he was still alive with something approaching conviction, but i cannot.

the winter afternoon i delivered michael’s ______ to jimmy and dick’s apartment, cold  sunlight slanting through the windows, dust motes and cigarette smoke a mask hiding the truth, jimmy couldn’t even get up to greet me he was so sick; i went over to him and hugged him, sat down beside him on the sofa, held his hand; all we could do was look at each other and

i never saw him again after that last sad day.  there, i finished the sentence.

(please note that it does not give me a sense of accomplishment this finishing, this end;  i would have rather woken up, the sentence complete, but the story still unfinished.)

dual citizenship (and other mishaps)

the most aggravating thing, should i be so bold as to rank life’s aggravations, which i will be, bold that is, and come out (not that i’m not already out, you know) and say, perhaps exclaim would be a better choice, if you’re going to put an order to the vagaries of living that drive you crazy (metaphorically, obvsly, what i’m saying is that i’m not crazy, but aggravated, although i imagine if one were so inclined — not to be crazy about it — aggravation could be closely associated with crazy, if one were to take the meaning of crazy as a state of aggravation, but not being that one, it’s hard to say how it will be met and what meaning will be ascribed to the word–we all have our own experiences with definitions and english, god help us (if you believe in that sort of thing, god that is, not english, although for the sake of this argument–were we?–you should probably believe in english, as well as god and country–a rick perry moment if ever there one), filled to the brim as it is with subtle shades (not redundant) of meaning and innuendo, the most aggravating thing is, i’m not sure there is a most aggravating thing.  surely there are times when i’m aggravated (as i was moments ago when i sat down to write this post about the most aggravating, annoying ____________), but the fact is i’m fairly certain that someone who can’t sit still (that foot tapping, jiggling leg of anxiety) is aggravating — you do notice that one’s self is never aggravating, only other people, objects, roadblocks to your serenity are truly aggravating, so the roar of  the neighbor’s vacuum cleaner just as you’ve laid down to take a nap is aggravating, but could you, with a clear conscience, say it was the most aggravating thing, or only the most aggravating thing at that moment?  and now that time has entered into it, it’s whole new ball game (trite phrases are also aggravating, truth be told–see you just can’t get away from it, well, i suppose if you were a henry james or a jane austen, you might not even come near a trite phrase, avoiding it like the plague [see what i mean?], but for the rest of us, it is just one of life’s many aggravations.

you know what else is aggravating?  post titles that are tangentially and diametrically inconsistent with the contents of the post itself.  i may be accused of that as i often have a title in mind, and it may have something to do with the photograph, it may have something to do with what i want to say, it may have something to do with the inspiration for the post or it may have nothing to do with anything, but it is something that has just come to me and i feel it’s important to get those thoughts down before they flee my peaked little brain, possibly i find it important to make those notes (and what is a blog after all, if it is not a gathering place for ideas, notes on this topic or that one, something you may reference later in a larger work or never again because you’ve forgotten you’ve written it.)  if i’ve aggravated you today or in the past, please note that i will more than likely aggravate you in the future, it is in my nature to be aggravating.

the sky report (and obituaries)

this time now, if i hadn’t lived through the 80s/90s/aughts as a gay man in the time of the plague, is when my contemporaries will begin to drop like flies.   the paper is suddenly filled with the death notices for ____ _____ who died at 5_ of __________ and leaves behind his loving wife of 35 years and 5 kids, numerous grandchildren and the odd spinster aunt or the occasional widowed uncle.  it gives you pause.

when your heart skips a beat (and whose doesn’t, i ask you?), you think to yourself, “is this it?” and of course, it isn’t, but you think it regardless, because now is the time for all good men (especially the men at this age) to come to the end of their lives.

when that escalade swerves in front of you on the freeway going god-knows-how-fast and you think to yourself, “is this it?” and of course, it isn’t, but you think it regardless, because now is the time when you find yourself contemplating the end of your days.  (and here, particularly, in southern california, my one fear is dying on the freeway, anywhere lord, but on the 5, i pray–and i’m not one who talks that often to god, but should there be one — or a goddess — please deliver me from death on a freeway at 75 mph.  is that too much to ask?)

when you stand up too fast these days and all the blood drains from your head and you think you’re going to drop to the ground in a heap of limbs — and will you wet yourself, you always have to pee these days anyway, it would only be fitting that as death claims you, you would piss all over it.   who’s laughing now, you black-hooded, scrawny, scythe-carrying bag of bones?  well it won’t be you because you’ve died.   that fucking last laugh.

this time now is when i start to think about my obituary.  should i prepare one, of course, is the top concern–it just seems more practical that way–this from someone who has spent the majority of his working life manipulating language to sell something.   i know i could trust m. to do right by me, but what if he’s gone too, would there even be one?

what would it say–”robert patrick died yesterday after a long battle with life, his own as well as that of others.   he leaves no survivors (as if it had been a ship-wreck of a life, all lost at sea.)  patrick leaves a considerable legacy of prickliness, obsequiousness and the bad habit of speaking the truth.  it is known that he loved several dogs during his lifetime and at one time a parakeet.   his career in the arts was his passion and his last request was to be cremated with his beloved 1400 page copy of paintings in the louvre.  no flowers please (he was allergic) instead he requested that donations in his name be made to father flanagan’s boys town.”

“if the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined past is not worth possessing; it bears fruit only by being held continuously up to the light, and is as changeable and as full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, as the future.”      –brendan gill via this link.

don’t be surprised if one day i say, “i told you so.”