From East to West

I have always been a musical theater queen. Growing up back in the 80s. my second cassette tape (after my first purchase of Madonna’s Like a Virgin) was a compilation of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Broadway hits. (I still wonder why I never came out sooner. Of course, I blame my parents’ atmosphere of naivete/sexlessness at home but I also blame myself for not making the connections. I mean, Weber and Madonna were as simple a formula as 1 + 1 back then – now, where everyone can seem to be into just about everything without falling into a box, is a different story.) I had known every word to I Don’t Know How to Love Him after listening to Yvonne Elliman’s rendition of this anthem to the circumstantially celibate and their crushes everywhere before learning what was material to school and homework. Now, in NYC, I go see Broadway musicals as much as I happily can. Plays, not so much. I have recently enjoyed Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed last fall and the Public’s Theater in the Park presentation of Brecht’s Mother Courage (from a Tony Kushner translation) last summer. (But even the latter seems some sort of musical hybrid with Meryl Streep battering her heart on stage both with word and song.) The ratio of plays to musicals that I go to see is quite heavily disproportioned. Dance doesn’t even fall on my radar. (My two left feet are more than enough explanation.) Opera remains the other frontier.

So it was quite a welcome treat when I went to go see Edward Scissorhands at BAM on Thursday night. I revel in every new opportunity and going to see a dance performance is as fresh as they come.

However, I was not without prejudice. I knew this was a much-hyped Matthew Bourne piece. But I had seen Mary Poppins at the end of January and I was so underwhelmed, or, rather, unimpressed. Bourne had also choreograohed this Broadway spectacle. Maybe I had such high hopes for it that night that I had set myself up for such frustration. But could I blame myself?! Mary Poppins is, after all, up in the canon of great musicals and to do a mediocre stage adaptation of it would be a disservice to the Sherman brothers and their company and a dishonor to everyone who made the 1964 film a classic like, ahem, Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke.) It had also been a London import and I shamelessly have more respect for the West End than for Broadway. (I had seen Mamma Mia in London when it first came out and was bowled over by it. I saw it again on Broadway last year to take my family out to see it and regretted paying such a high price for something so flat.) I thought Bourne and his fellow English would deliver Poppins on Broadway. But I was disappointed. I mean, Gavin Lee walking like SpiderBert all over the the 4 corners of the stage was fascinating and Ashley Brown flying into thin air as if SuperMary was heart-stopping. But it seemed the gimmickry took precedence over the choreography. When the flying umbrella becomes the highlight of the show (like the flying car in Chitty Chitty Gang Bang was) instead of the people holding the umbrella, then I think the artistic draw from the audience becomes problematic.

Taking the train from the city into Brooklyn with Tim and his college roomie (who went to see it with me) Thursday night, I pondered over the Poppins disbelief and decided to suspend it and box it under Bourne Disneyfied. As soon as I sat myself , I looked around and began to wonder if I was indeed in Downtown Brooklyn watching Scissorhands at BAM or in Midtown West watching Terrence McNally’s new play, Some Men. The audience was (mostly) gay. gay, gay all the way. (I even bumped into 2 friends I knew in the restroom, but not in the George Michael sense.) There were, of course. hetero couples too and some family couplings. I, unfortunately, had to sit right behind a girl (who kept on asking her mom what was going on through the show) and her brother,a boy who had an incessant cough problem. (Her mom’s female friend kept on giving her water. I could only stop myself from pulling her hair and telling her to give the kid a cough drop instead to stop the annoying coughing.)

I’d have to say it was an odd choice for a ballet adaptation, Tim Burton, long shears and all. But, like a Tim Burton movie, it was terrific. Hearing the movie’s dreamy music live was otherworldly and watching the sets come to life (since they were integral in telling the story on stage as much as the performers were) was enchanting. The stage’s transformation from the dark cemetery atop the hill to Middle America’s everysuburbia to a lavish Christmastime banquet hall all tied in by the topiaries constistent in their form but constantly changing in their attire was thrilling in their seamlessness.

I’ve never been a good critic of dance but I was struck by how good, not great, most of the pieces were. Some of them actually left me wanting for more when the pieces, each an amalgam of pantomimic deftness and dexterous ballet, ended. But, almost at the end of Act II, during the Farewell Duet, where Edward danced alone on stage with Kim, I saw the genius, if not the conceit, in Bourne’s show. Here was a man dancing ballet with a woman while he had foot-long shears attached to his hand wherein one small mistake in movement could end up being a big bloody one. (I knew these shears were not merely dull blades as, in a display of brilliance in the middle of Act I, Edward actually made a topiary, cutting and shearing through leaves with the blades on his fingers.) The two principals were gliding and comingling and, yes, dancing in every possible sense all across the stage that was both grand in its effort and most graceful in its execution. It was riveting and breathtaking, all the way into the end, when in one final moment of spectacle, confetti rained from the ceiling which, coupled with brilliant lighting, gave the illusion of falling snow.

I wish I had seen Swan Lake. Tim’s friend saw it and claimed that this piece, Bourne’s big all-male coming-out piece, was genius all throughout. But I’m glad I saw Scissorhannds. I enjoyed the whole experience — the sublime sets, the wordless music, its pure dancing. It’s always a good thing when I learn to like even more a new genre. I find it even better when I renew my admiration for someone I’ve quite fallen less fond of. I mean, I even bought the CD of Bourne’s show as I rushed out of the theater, holding Tim’s hand on the street on the way home that rainy night.

Spring is supposed to turn this week. Yet, I look out and I still see snowdrifts on the sidewalk. The weather is still freezing, my scarf , just worn, is slung visibly on a chair and my boots, still wet on the soles, are drying on the rug. I know it’s still winter and these conditions are not supposed to be unusual but the chilly weather and the snow have been more like the exceptions than the rule this season. The noreaster 2 days ago that dumped over 4 inches of snow on the city served as some sort of wintry interlude; a seasonal spell that cast a break from the rut of springlike weather coming too soon.

It seems that the recent weather has been sympathizing with my life, or vice-versa. It’s been exactly a week to the day (and a few days shy of the big noreaster) that I had my own winter interlude. What began as quite a spell has ended to be more like a curse.

I was hanging out with my good (gay) friend, Eric, the writer(who is not to be confused with my other friend, bi Eric), last Saturday night at Barrage, this bar in Hell’s Kitchen. We had just finished watching Talk Radio, Eric Bogosian’s play reincarnated on Broadway and topbilled by Live Schreiber (who gave a solid performance), and were catching up on each other’s lives when we bumped into Conrad, a 35-year-old software programmer, who was also there with a friend. Conrad is an Irish-German boy who grew up in Connecticut, went to Northwestern and now lives in Astoria. Eric and I were talking about getting glasses and there was Conrad, geekchic in his own (and recommending his optometrist). We ended up exchanging numbers and hanging out the following night. I had spent the whole day shopping for my chair and ottoman with Tim, and dinner with my aunts at a Chinese restaurant in Queens, when Conrad and I decided to catch the last showing at Angelika of The Namesake, Mira Nair’s faithful adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel. Tim and I had discussed about how we were not yet ready for monogamy but were content enough with each other to admit to not even look to date with anyone else anymore and, yet, that night, I found myself handholding with Conrad throughout the whole movie. We went to Mr. Black for a nightcap and, at 2 am, both headed back home to my apartment for what turned out to be a sleepless night. (We were in pjs and shirts when we lay in bed; we were both naked when we woke up.) I lent him my copy of The Namesake, then, walked him to his train back to Queens at 7 AM while I clung to my transit reading, Rupert Everett’s autobiography, as I boarded mine to work. I grappled with undefined relationship dilemmas (in between yield analysis reports and client conference calls) through the haze of caffeine, Catholic guilt and a cloud of sleeplessness all throughout Monday. If I knew then what I know now, then I would have simply spared myself the terrible hassle of having to deal with the unnamed conflicts. It turns out I didn’t even need to. I called Conrad on Wednesday to discuss my issues. It is now Sunday and he still hasn’t called back. After a whirlwind of a weekend, it turned out to be like any other no-strings-attached Manhunt hook-up; but with a movie and a sleep-over (and promises of watching a Puccini opera at the Met in April coupled with the loss of my Lahiri novel.)

It was so bizaare, like a dumping of snow last Friday after the temperature hit 69 degrees on Thursday. Totally unexpected and yet, the snow blanketing the city in white as if in a dreamy Christmas wonderland, welcome as it was happening. Now, there are only pools of melted snow clogging the streetcorners, murky and dirty. Snow has turned to slush which has turned to muck.

I don’t even know why these things happen. What I am left to see and hold (and maybe even try to begin to understand) is what had indeed happened and what lies in its aftermath. One thing I do know though is that sense of relief in realizing that time turning on its wheel will be moving me past this bleak winter episode and onto the bright clarity of spring shining in the foreground.

My desk is just a clutterfuck right now. I still have piles of documents from my old office mixed in with paper credit card bills I’ve been meaning to stack away; the IRA rollover forms I have to submit and tax papers I should be attending to. There’s also my old IPOD and sticky notes filled with names, numbers, IM handles and email addresses of countless notables and forgettables. (Finance and management books I hauled away from college which are bookended on the corner seem like the only ones in any semblance of order.) If I spilled my coffee on this desk right now, then it would be like (french roast) lava running over villages of paper. I wish I were a lot like other homos who have this compulsion to organize. I mean I am basically a neatfreak, (I get bent out of shape when I see dustballs on my [pre-war] wood parquet floor and I think the Swiffer is god’s gift to people everywhere with parquet flooring.) But is there such a thing as selective OCD? I wipe my kitchen clean every night and scrub the tub of mildew like there was no tomorrow every time but I think the compulsion ends at my desk. (I’m pretty sure the computer has something to do with it. My compulsion displaces itself onto multimedia. Putzing around online seems more cleansing than cleaning though. Maybe if my PDA were charged in the kitchen, then things would be a lot different. Hmmm…) Then again, wishing that I had compulsions similar to other homos could be misleading. OCD may not be such a bad thing (unless you’re dating someone with a severe case which has happened to me) but there are a lot of other compulsions out there that I’m happy not to be subject to.

I saw Rock Bottom last night at the Quad. This is a docu that follows the lives of 7 gay NYers who are addicted to crystal meth. There is an ex-porn star, a current porn star, a web designer, an HR executive and a caterer. Their backgrounds run from whitebread professional to black blue-collar to twink hustler. But no matter how disparate their backgrounds are, they all share the same destructive and fatal crystal meth obsession. Apparently, the given reason for this addiction is that primal desire for the ecstasy of unobstructed and unadulterated sex. I learned that crystal meth allows you more than 12 hours of non-stop sex. But more than the time, it is the state in which they do it that matters. Instruments for altered states like alcohol and pot break down ego barriers and diminish inhibitions leading to a more free-spirited interrelation. Meth does more than unleash the free-spirited; it ends up being free-wheeling (and, apparently, also always unsafe.) A lot (if not all) of these men are HIV-positive and indulging in meth affords them an underground by which they forget their disease (including the stigma attached to it) and only remember the pleasure of sex pre-infection. But, as always, sex and objects of addiction including meth are never acts isolated in time and space. They are consequential in a continuum and the effects narrated in the docu are disastrous and ultimately fatal. They are fired from their jobs; get others sick and themselves even sicker; go even deeper into the hole of alienation that they have dug for themselves. (I can’t forget the story of one of the interviewed wherein he would go to bathhouses while on meth and get blown by a lot of other men on the same state even though his dick was then oozing green gonorrheic pus.) One of the men interviewed even dies in the course of the filming due to complications from drug overdose and disease.

I was actualy surprised to find someone I know of in the film. I recognized Ben, the ex-porn star’s (now former) bf. I had met him during one of the parties in my Fire Island house 2 years ago. It really was an unremarkable encounter since he was quite quiet and aloof. Henry, my friend whom I saw the movie with, and I were caught off-guard when he started opening up about his relationship with CJ, the ex-porn star meth addict. He recounted how he would be tolerant during CJ’s many instances of physical abuse through the course of their relationship owing to the latter’s meth intake. CJ had hit him in the face one time (while he was driving) and he was understanding enough of the moment by blaming the drug and not the user. (I always believe that the drug does not take itself; there needs to be a user who is basically and ultimately responsible for the choice.) I didn’t know what was sadder; his crystal-stoked bf hitting him in the face or himself sober putting up with it. I’d like to think it was because of love but I can’t convince myself of such. I think he was just turning a blind eye to the reality of abuse because that need to be with someone and that fear of not being with anyone outweighed the reasonable and, needless to say, available option of being alone (and healthy and happy) yet not lonely.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the problem is basically that human condition in an overbearing sense of loneliness. I distinctly remember the web designer’s narration of one of his sexual experiences while on meth. His fuckbuddy who was also on meth was smoking and chatting endlessly about his mother on one end of the bed while he lay on the other end, whacking himself off and saying nothing. He described the scene as a state of two hells on the same plane, where even though they are on the same bed they lie worlds apart and, yet, somehow are able to foolishly give themselves the comfortable illusion of being together. They want to be with and yet are unable to offer nothing more than a zombie version of themselves to the other. It is a cycle of regression into irredeemable isolation and, ultimately, death, both metaphorical and physical..

But it doesn’t have to end in death. Hope can and must always have the final word which is the sentiment of Eric’s mother shown in the docu’s end. Eric, one of the meth addicts featured, comes clean and celebrates Christmas sober for the first time in so many years. His mother and family welcome him with open arms and shower him with love. Sober and sensible enough, he breaks down in tears and in recognition of the warmth around him. Meth-free, he is able to respond back in love, pure and powerful.

I know that no one wants to be lonely. I believe that no one should be alone. Yet, it is how we search for company that defines the human from the inhuman. It is how we treat our own selves as well as who we find that separates the dammed from the loved.

I’m drinking coffee right now while I nurse a sore throat. (My colleague came back from a vacation in Mexico sharing lots of trip stories as well as the virus he picked up while down there.) I realize I should be drinking OJ instead of more caffeine but I’m really excited about my replacement carafe that I just can’t get enough of home-brewed coffee right now (since I broke my pot dishwashing it and had to wait 2 weeks before some obsucre SF kitchen supplies firm delivered this pot from a discontinued Krups line onto my doorstep). Besides, after an unseasonably-warm springlike day yesterday, the weather has again turned to freezing today (since, after all, there still is a month left to winter) and lazing in with this warm cup o’joe against overcast snowstorm skies through my window seems the best way to go.

I actually haven’t been lazy all day. Tim and I had brunch at Café Luluc, our fave French bistro on Cobble Hill, that, to my opinion. serves the best eggs benedict this side of town (along with fresh greens and their yummy seasoned fries.) We then went strolling in Chelsea to look for a new chair and ottoman (or recliner, or chaise depending on my mood), for my apartment. I fell in love with an $1800 chair and footstool combo from BoConcept on 18th/7th. It really was twice than what I had wanted to spend (especially since the Ikea combo it means to replace is only roughly a 10th of its retail cost.) But its sleek, mod outline and hip, retro chrome base tugged strongly at my imagination. Tim persuaded me to defer the purchase and pursue further (albeit less expensive) options. But, now that I am home, I realize that I will end up going back to that store and buying that damn chair and stool. I know myself well enough to realize that when something grips at my imagination that strongly, then it is worth pursuing through.

Take in case this NYT article in its Sunday Styles section. Tim was still in bed at 9 AM (owing to his late night OffBway show) when I started going through the Times with my 1st cup of coffee for the day. I was on my second cup when I got through Mireya Navarro’s article, “Trying to Crack the Hot 100,” that basically posited the question, “where is the Asian-American Justin Timberlake?” It lists several Asian-American singers including Harlemm Lee, the Filipino-Chinese male from Detroit (who apparently won the NBC reality series, Fame, in 2004) and Phil Chen, the leader of an all-Chinese band based in SF, 8PAST, who all echo the same sentiment when posed with the issue of a dearth of Asian-American artists in the Billboard charts: what ultimately hinders their success starting from being signed on at the outset to being able to sell records afterwards is “the Asian thing.” Now, nothing tugs at my imagination more than “the Asian thing.” In fact, I don’t need a jolt of fantasy to induce the issue; I don’t need an outstanding object to grip at my imagination to spark it; I only need to stop and look at my life. I deal with the reality of “the Asian thing” on a daily basis.

I look at myself and see dark hair, slanted eyes and brown skin on a slim, lanky frame. I realize that race is a minute slice of the human genetic make-up and, yet, it seems to dictate so much in the greater socio-political arena. Desirability and power seem rooted in this basic physicality. I, for one and as an example, encounter an initial, if not absolute, resistance to a possible mutual attraction based merely on this overt trait. I know so many homos who don’t desire Asian males at all as well as have met those who generally don’t go for them and, yet, do allow for the possibility making my (if not another Asian’s) efforts doubly difficult. In fact, I saw Eric, a friend I hooked-up with after a party a few months back, online at Manhunt and confronted him when his profile listed that he was into “guys 21-35, generally thin to average in weight, caucasian and professional.” I remarked that I certainly didn’t fit that description. He said that I just had a lot of “charisma” at that moment we met enough for him to make an exception. I laughed off his response, (again falling back on humor as my ego’s way of self-defense), and yet, I knew that this was the exception that proved the rule: “the asian thing” really isn’t conventionally attractive. Also, this observation certainly isn’t homo-specific. I know more than enough ex-fratboys from my old firm who would go to an Asian masseuse for a “happy ending” and, yet, affirmed that they generally wouldn’t date an Asian chick they met off a bar.

Of course, there is the inverse to this equation. There are the rice queens who only go for Asian ‘mos. But I believe this is where the problem rises from. The fetishization of the Far East is exactly what fuels this otherness and its subsequent form of ostracization. The exotic Oriental beauty seems to always be that other; mysterious and beguiling. And for as long as “the Asian thing” is strictly orientalized, then Asians will continue to be an object of otherness rather than as a subject of shared standards. This perception seems so pervasive that it permeates even Asian-Americans themselves; issues of self-doubt and self-hatred stemming from internalized racial hatred pervade one’s consciousness. I admittedly went through this stage when I questioned my attraction to my own race. I have since moved beyond this issue but still know a lot of Asian men who don’t date their own kind. (I don’t mean to attach a value judgment to one’s basis for attraction since who you choose to have sex with or find desirable certainly isn’t a moral issue; but I do want to understand where one’s basis for excluding certain traits as benchmarks for beauty come from.)

Tim and I were talking about this article over brunch at the bistro. We both agreed that “this Asian thing” spills off the image of Asians as Orientals; the “others” who are submissive and speak broken English (and predominantly bottoms if they were gay) relative to the bearer of standard, the caucasians, who are dominant and articulate (and such virile tops. This last stereotype is highly-debatable.) Undeniably, every person of color live against the shadow of a socio-cultural stereotype. But blacks and Latinos have made significant inroads into the marketplace that Asians have yet to replicate. Understandably, entrenchment in history and a population majority factor into this conclusion. Diana Ross and J.Lo certainly stand in stark contrast to William Hung. Tim made an illuminating point when he recounted a theory that the American popular market sold itself on sex and danger. Hip-hop arists were perceived as dangerous and Latina booty-shakers sold out well as sex symbols. Asian-Americans, sadly, were viewed as neither threatening nor sexy. Until the current Asian population rate of 4% increases to something more substantial that allows for greater visibility with enough numbers to effect a radical shift in public perception that will yield a view that Asians are strong and beautiful, then Harlemm Lee will have to continue to toil with his day job as a secretary.

The article’s author though writes about a recording producer’s suggestion, that Asian-Americans should try to leverage aspects in their culture to make economic inroads instead of going through the mainstream route. I read that to mean that 8PAST should ethnicize their music (since their look already certainly is) instead of sounding more like Linkin Park (which incidentally has an Asian-American bandmember.) (Of course, it is different if you consciously subscribe to a niche market like my crush-fave, Jake Shimabukuro, who has a solid following in the Hawaiian ukulele segment.) I think this suggestion that reinforces “that Asian thing” will remain to be counterproductive in the ultimate goal of effortless (market) assimiliation. I don’t think they would suggest that Beyonce sing Negro spirituals. But, of course, Beyonce doesn’t need to. Diana Ross has opened the path for her over 3 decades ago. I can’t imagine William Hung to do the same for the next big Asian-American artist 3 decades from now.