Paper, Rock

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.

 

That Asian Thing

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.

 

Red Carpets

Ryan Seacrest has been gaying it up on the E pre-Oscar red carpet show. I’ve been junking on this trash tv channel for the past few hours now and I think my IQ has dipped quite a few points. (There’s only so much that my brain can take from this idiot box and I think it’s reached the threshold with Ryan’s quips on dogs as pets with Jessica Biel. Who writes this crap?!) If I were not such an Oscar convert and a fan of good fashion, then all this bad writing would really be unbearable. David Carr in the NYT writes about the red carpet as being a conceptual as well as a physical space. Ryan’s interviews would prove this untrue if his dreadful Q&As were not such abstract concepts. (I’m not even getting to his cohorts – Mr. Fake Tan and Ms. Whiny Hiney.) Thank god for the green light at the end of this tunnel – Ellen de Generes on at 830 pm.

But, as much as cable tv brings me all this transient bad junk, its family in new media also allows me diversionary (if not sanity-saving) options. (I’ve just muted the tv – Ryan Seacrest is interviewing Celine Dion. I still shudder every time I remember her oversinging the Titanic theme song.) I have the web to keep me preoccupied. I’ve been exchanging IMs with Eric, my friend who lives in NJ.

I’ve known Eric for quite some time now. I hooked up with him a few months back after meeting him at a party in Park Slope. A nice Jewish boy in his early 30s, he’s going through finalizing a divorce after being married for many years. I’ve taken quite a liking to him, beyond the fleeting fancy of a fun trick, since I see in him myself from soo many years back. (Of course, he is also a cute Jewboy which really is right up my flavor alley.) No, I didn’t come out against the backdrop of a fraudulent marriage with a woman. But I do relate to his feelings of confusion and tense aggression at what is a new life realization. I listen to him talk and I hear the onslaught of life unraveling before his very breath. He talks about his separation from his wife and his splurge on a new pair of jeans. He chats about being bisexual and finding his new roommate who, apparently, also is. He speaks of being bothered by an unreturned phone call from this new boy he went out on a date with. Ah, yes, these are the first few rejections that will lead to that first substantive heartbreak. I can still recall my own memories of these experiences as if they had just happened yesterday,

Eric and myself go through our own red carpets every day. Gays (and the gay bi man) have to live up to this social expectation of good fashion. (I’ve known more than one homo who goes into debt for a good pair of shoes.) It gets even more amped up on the dating trail, where walking down 8th Ave in a good outfit is just as important as talking smart about the latest hip movie over candlelit dinner. I do feel though that the daily homo red carpet is better than the awards show ones. Homos can be tart but they are also often smart (as one is saved from E tv’s bad writing.) From the bitchy judgments that fly to the subtle stares of approval that are observed, the content in the correspondence is satisfactorily fleshy if not satisfyingly sensual. As the red carpet has its barriers in the edges of the mats as well as the velvet ropes that keep out the non-celebrities, the homo red carpet also portrays its own barriers. Some homos are more admired than others; other homos are sidelined to be on the outside admiring in. The Chelsea bar of well-defined muscles, a good home address and a trophy profession still hold strong. Eric is still working his way through this tension – having walked a few steps and fumbling at his pace, still adjusting to his new set of heels. (He is already working on bulking up and at purchasing a pied-a-terre in Manhattan; he is already a successful marketing professional.) I have happily seated myself from outside the ropes; content at viewing from the distance, with my bf, Tim, at my side.

I guess such is the key to the red carpet. It is never the end in itself but only a means to get to the real show. The goal is not to walk it but to get to its end, which in this case, is to win the approval of the target audience as one sits down for whatever show is in sight. (Yes, the date, or the bf, is also the treat that comes with the ticket.) The tragedy is to indulge in the illusion of superificiality and to keep on walking on it, dazed and lost.

 

Excerpt

Snowstorm
(for Brendan)
by Danton Remoto

I wake up at dawn
to a storm of snowflakes
like small bits
of dead stars.

Everything is blinding
and empty,
like my bed.
No slope of your body

leaving its shape of sweat
on the sheets.
No fingers mapping
the unknown depths of skin.

No tongue rousing
the soul from its sleep,
drawing sighs as startling
as the flowers of spring.

 

A SoCal State of Mind

This is now my last day of my trip out in SoCal. I actually still have tomorrow morning out here but I really couldn’t count that as a full day anyway. A big part of that day will be spent for traveling back east. Friday was also majorly travel day. I would’ve arrived at SD earlier if not for the mishap at my plane. Blame it on my travel karma that I would pick a plane with a female pilot (which is a good thing) running on auxilliary power because the right generator was not “fixable but deferable.” But I arrived anyway and had a quick taste of SD with a late lunch at the W. Saturday was also travel day since we drove from SD to LA for a short weekend. Monday was travel day too since we had to drive back from SD to LA. Even much of today will be spent on traveling as we drive to the Cove at La Jolla. It’s not even over yet and I already realize that this week-long vacation is quite full of traveling. I can safely say that I have not been in (car) transit this much in a few days in a long while. I can also proudly say that, despite the bumpy flight on Friday, I have enjoyed every moment of riding around in a car from one point to another, whether planned or not from the point of origin. I know it’s cliché but this certainly is one of those trips where the journey is more important, if not more enjoyable, than the destination.

I hate going to places where a car is a necessity because I hate driving. The places I love to visit are the big cities where mass transit is well-established and where walking is more a preferred option out of healthy habits rather than as a mark of car deprivation. SF. Chicago. Seattle. South Beach. Toronto. Montreal. Honolulu. London. Vancouver. Boston. Ptown. Nova Scotia. Vegas. Fire Island. These places are all manageable on foot, or through mass transit, and I have managed to enjoy them much. SoCal has always been initmidating because of that basic need for a car. I saw Crash last year and was struck by that line about how the buses in LA have clear windows because people want to make a spectacle out of the busriders. It was more than a need; it was also a mark. The car is a metaphor for SoCal.

Putzing around on Manhunt, I was certainly amused by one reply that I don’t get back in NYC which is, “do I have to park the car on the road?” He must be asking if my building had a garage. (Damn. If it had to be this complicated back east, then I really don’t think I’d even bother half the time.) This just reaffirms this city’s fixation with the car. Understandably so, since the car is the lifeblood of connection. Every point is a few miles away and the lack of a car is sheer social suicide.

The car is a metaphor for Socal. SoCalifornians seem to be obsessed with the surface, as much as the car is just as sleek as its shine. (Posers, of course, also exist in abundance back in NYC, but Hans and I agreed that the posers back in NYC do so to make a comment about themselves — where they went to school, what they do, where they live — as opposed to the poseurs I met out here who do so to make a comment about other people — what they don’t look like.) They are also suckers for status, as much as the car is, of course, an object of symbol. Needless to say, there seems to be an inherent need for alcohol, reminding me of the gas guzzlers including SUVs that this region luvs to parade around in. (I still can’t get over the tables next to us at Cafe Etoile in Weho for Sunday brunch — there were the 2 homos already drinking martinis before noon who followed the vodka with a crisp bottle of champagne; and the woman who was just having a glass of chardonnay that she plunks down the bread basket for her dog to enjoy.) Shine, symbol and that constant search for liquid sustenance, it is too much of an appropriate image to not be worth stretching. The car is also the means by which the people get to the coast, in as much as Socal is defined by the Pacific. All roads lead to the ocean and I believe that the car is the means that is just as good as its end.

I particuarly enjoyed the drive back from LA to SD. Hans and I rented a Ford Mustang convertible and drove it down the Pacific Coast Highway (which stretches all the way up to Seattle.) (Luke had to drive back on his own car early Monday morning to make it to work.) It was just a lovely drive down. The wind was blowing against our faces; the sun on our skin; the surf as if kissing the tint of our shades all the way down. We saw the dolphins off the whaling point in San Vicente. We zigzagged down Palos Verdes and stopped for lunch at the Queen Mary in Long Beach. We eventually hit the suburbs of San Diego just in time to catch the sunset off Del Mar. Then, I began to realize why artists wax so much about California. More than the glare of superficiality in what is bred inland; its heart bleeds from the ocean where the glow of beauty is but natural. I have certainly been impressed by the (west) Hollywood cultture where a glass of chardonnay is light lunch and a few martinis will effectively make them full; where an endless parade of boys coming to and from gym are not an unusual sight on a midweek morning when everyone else would have already been in their offices back in NY; where it seems every second is a show as riding a bus at 10 AM on 90-degree weather warrants a boucle-suit and pearls; where everyone always seems to be on an altered state induced by alcohol or by a chemical drug, as if the glare of Hollywood has numbed everyone around it warranting the need for aids to procuring palpable emotion. But I know that what will linger in my memory will be the coastline at day’s end. Stripped of any artifice, refreshing and reassuring is the horizon melancholic in its burning, orange fading into purple melting into pink, submissively, helpelssly into the edges of the Pacific. With the top down. Hans quiet on the wheel and myself, sunglasses heavy on my windblown cheeks, smiling, simply moved by the Pacific passing by and life coasting on.

 

Sunset Blvd

I can’t believe I’m saying this. I’m writing on the terrace of a nice hotel overlooking Sunset Boulevard. It actually looks a lot less imposing than with what I have culled from memory. The movie leaves me with a picture splashed with bitter nostalgia. It is a bright, quite brisk Sunday morning out in LA and the boulevard is uneventfully quiet and uninterestingly drab, hinting at no trace of any notion of biting bitterness imagined from that camp classic. I look up at the Hollywood hills as it looks down upon Sunset. There is the constant hum of cartraffic below as the occasional bird flies overhead, in between adboards for Charles Schwab and Hustler Casino. I am enjoying a quiet start to a Sunday out here in California. I still can’t believe it (since it was only a few days ago that I was trudging through the unbearable cold brought about by some arctic winds back east.)

This West Coast trip has been flying by fast which is quite unexpected since I have been meaning to pull back from my pace back East and enjoy a laidback schedule as they do out here. Flying in from NYC Friday into SD and driving in from SD into LA yesterday all now seem to be a blur. I still haven’t gone to the Zoo and I still haven’t been to the Getty Center and yet, I feel like I’ve already immersed myself in a SoCal schedule. The many enjoyable meals I have had out with Hans, my friend from Seattle and Luke, his bf based in SD, and their friends both in SD and now here in LA have filled up my schedule. Brunch at Rice at the W SD. Dinner at California Cuisine on Hillcrest. A late lunch at the Abbey yesterday and a nice dinner at Le Petit Bistro in WeHo last night. The food was decent and the reds full-bodied; the company enjoyable. But what lingers most in me is the scene. Buff, blond boys in their tight shirts and Dolce sunglasses sipping martinis at 2 PM, disengaged and self-absorbed. (I found it quite surprising, but then, understandable from a market point of view, that the salads cost more than the staple dishes at the Abbey.) I have always heard of that Socal criticism on the area’s premium on superficiality. (It is, after all, ground zero for Hollywood.) This is the first weekend I’ve actually witnessed it firsthand. (I’ve been out to California so many times but I just realized I’ve always gone to the Bay Area.) It is one thing to be riveted by the occasional group of shirtless, runners in Balboa park, smooth, lean chests soaked in sweat and sun, all incidental to the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle. It is another thing to be surrounded by a shocking display of conscious effort at looking good – the ubiquitous fauxhawk, the diva sunglasses, the parade of pecs, the matching sneakers — wherein to be seen out is in itself a show. (Seen as scene, I am a dork for alliteration, but I digress.) I don’t mean to make it sound like a musem spectacle but it is quite a consuming space to be in. I was eating my salad and observing the scene and suddenly, subconsciously slipped into thoughts of my own physical insecurities compared to the hot boys around me; thinking twice about all the adboards claiming cosmetic services that bombard one on the interstate coming into LA. It didn’t seem to matter that I had an exciting new career waiting for me in a week (since I start at my new job on the 12th.) It didn’t seem to matter that I had a great boyfriend and healhty group of friends back home where the assurances are unsaid; where my words define me more than my body weight. I just wanted to be like them, sipping an Appletini and being stand-offish. Of course, I know it strikes at hollow but it seemed to be the standard, and I found it enviable. This is where the brunches in NYC and LA seem to diverge; Sunday brunches out east will be a venue for therapy where me and my friends bitch about our lives. Brunches out here will push me to therapy.

Norma Desmond’s vanity led to her tragic end. It is a chilling message to me as I enjoy the start of this sunny Sunday out here in California.

We’re doing brunch with another group of LA boys in a few hours. (Hans and Luke are still in bed.) I’m already trying to figure out my outfit.

 

The Queen (Hail Helen!)

Until Thursday, I can’t remember the last time I cried while watching a movie in a theater. I remember the first time I cried though — watching What’s Eating Gilbert Grape at a tender age and witnessing the death of the obese mother unfold. It must have struck a sensitive chord in me at that time (since I, until now, am certainly not the crying type) but which one, I don’t recall. (Maybe it was ominous of my struggle with my own mild [?!] case of body dysmorphia.) I saw The Queen two nights ago and found myself helplessly tearing up towards the movie’s end. It was during that scene when Queen Elizabeth II begins her humbled effort at acknowledging Diana’s death publicly starting with her viewing of the flowers on Balmoral Castle’s gate (where she holed the royal family in France for a week into Diana’s death, insisting on a private mourning as opposed to the British public’s clamor for a public one.) Alarmed yet grateful, I felt the tears stream down my cheeks as I watched her duplicate the effort, on a grander scale, outside Buckingham Palace, especially when she is astounded by a young girl who offers her a bouquet of flowers, thinking that they were not for her but for Diana.

I had been meaning to see this movie for a long time (since I’ve always been a sucker for any movie that the NYTimes critics pick and this was one of them.) Somehow though, my hectic and erratic schedule always gets in the way. But now that it’s Oscar season, I am more vigorously pursuing my movie sched. (Carter, my ex, got me into the habit of being a cinephile and an Oscar junkie. We would watch docus and foreign films at Film Forum and the old classics at Moving Image; then, we would always resolve to watch all the films nominated for an Oscar during the two years we were together which we never got around to accomplishing. I know feeling the sting in this kind of failure seems petty but, in hindsight, it really was another marker in the death of us, a big part of which were being [pretentious] amateur film critics and cinema junkies, together.) Tim, my bf, shares in my desire to actually finish watching all the films nominated this year.

I hardly knew anything about this movie beyond it being about Elizabeth II and now, an Oscar nominee for Best Film. (I’m sure I read the NYTimes review but since it came out a long time ago, the details escape me.) I spent my childhood in Asia and am more familiar with the preoccupations of Japanese royalty than with those of the English. (Do the Marcoses, the Philippines’ pseudo-royals, also count?!) A movie about Elizabeth II seems to tug at my heart just as much as a movie about another forgettable European royal. What I didn’t realize though was that this movie was about the Queen dealing with the death of Diana which was, practically a universal event. (I recall, still in Manila, coming home on a Saturday night with my brother, in front of CNN, telling me that Diana died in a car accident. I vividly remember being helplessly drawn to sit by my brother and watch the news unfold on tv.) It was a most interesting frame.

A friend has already dismissed the film as a vehicle for the monarchists and Stephen Frears, the director, and Peter Morgan, the writer, among their apologists. (Frost/Nixon, the play coming into Bway, is written by Morgan. I am certainly going to see it.) I really didn’t care for this angle. I cared for the portrayal of the human face that holds the crown. I cared for the woman who was cringing in her nightgown as she watched footage about her estranged daughter-in-law on nightly news. I cared for her in a hunter’s parka and boots driving a truck and getting stranded on a shallow river, allowing her time to gaze at a 14-antlered deer. I cared for her leisurely walking her colties in her summer home — okay, so it was a castle — in the French countryside. What I found most striking about this otherwise ordinary woman was the level of commitment she as a Queen is pushed into giving. She has committed her whole life, and her commitment is lifelong. The tension between her private beliefs (insisting on the funeral issue being a private one for the Spencers since Diana, after her separation from Charles and her subsequent estrangement from the Royal Family, was no longer a royal) and her public trust (which is to listen to her people who are clamoring for a public manifest of grief for their princess) was most palpable. Needless to say, Helen Mirren was the anchor in this exposition. (To say that she delivered an Oscar-worthy and winning performance is somehow still understating her phenomenal acting in this film.) In the end, her decision was most inspiring and, yes, quite moving.

Maybe I cried because I was still dealing with the death of my aunt and this movie allowed me a visceral outlet for it. Maybe it was because I was touched by the power of generational imagery — a young girl giving flowers to an older woman is heartwarming in its raw innocence. Maybe it was due to being witness to the unwavering hope for radical change in even the most stoic and most traditional of people. Maybe it was because of my own envy for someone like Elizabeth II who seems to have had an easier journey at finding her lifelong commitment; it was already an option that she was born into(, and yet, that she still had to accept.) Maybe I cried because of all these.

What is my lifelong commitment? I don’t know yet. At the cusp of a new job and almost a year with my bf, I am consoled knowing where my current ones are.

 

On Death

My aunt died 5 days ago. She was 71.

She was my dad’s older sister, the second in a brood of 5 girls and an only boy. She lived in Manila as well as spent a few years out here in NYC during her late 50s. She has always been regarded as the siblings’ wild child, partying hard during the 60s with the high-flying friends she had met while in the country’s top university. (It’s pretty hard to imagine how she could have trumped the playboy antics of my dad who was simply seen as one of the boys, nothing extraordinary. I guess a playful woman is viewed as more difficult to manage than a playful man owing to the overtly sexist lens of that era.) Her carousing even led her to be a mistress to a wealthy businessman in a Southern town with whom she adopted a child. The businessman has since died, her youth gone and her wealth and health gravely diminished. She has since gotten around aided by a cane as well as by a female servant; her adopted daughter all grown up and with her own kids, still dependent on her and yet highly unreliable for any semblance of payback owed to gratitude. My aunt underwent a successful tumor operation but suffered a fatal cardiac arrest a day into her convalescence. Her life, in a Joan Didion moment, was gone in an instant.

My tricoastal family has since assembled to meet for the funeral in Manila — my mom and my sister’s family flew in from Honolulu; my aunts from Queens. I wasn’t able to go since I couldn’t afford any vacation right now. I’m starting a new job in a month and have not accrued enough days in my old one to get paid leave for such a trip. I am staying here in Brooklyn while I confront my grief over this event. Or my lack of it.

I really wasn’t close to her to begin with. Except for the occasional holidays that our small family would spend together (since except for my dad and 1 sister, everyone else are spinsters), there hardly was constant contact. Yet, this death is particularly poignant as it becomes the first in this small family that I have lived through. It is a chilling reaffirmation of mortality that hits terribly close to home. We are all going to die. My aunt has just gone; someone else will be next. Will it be my dad? another aunt? me?

Morbid thoughts really aren’t healthy expressions of grief, if they are at all. (Joan Didion, my new guide into the wasteland of human death looks into grief as the wellsrpring of consolation.) They are nothing more than dull needles that prick into this cushion of petty bourgeois indifference that I call my life. My self-absorption has apparently gone pathological that I could hardly be affected by a family tragedy. (To make this claim guiltlessly is quite disturbing. I was, after all, a product of a Catholic all boys’(!) high school and a few Jewish boyfriends.)

I was watching the Golden Girls on Lifetime [yes, that TV for women and gay men] this morning (since I took a day off work) and serendipitously caught an episode on how the girls dealt with the death of their cranky neighbor, Mrs. Claxton — they put her in the cheapest casket they could find and hurriedly held her wake. Rose, bless her soul and Betty White’s, eventually saved their pitiful efforts by scattering her ashes on a grand oak tree on their block which prevented its getting cut after being designated as a “burial ground” due to that selfless act. She battered her naive Midwestern brain for some meaning for the death and found something more. She found something redeeming.

I know that to look to pop culture references for a response to this tragedy is pathetic. (No matter that the reference in question was the long-running, Emmy-winning, Bea Arthur immortalized, homo canonized Golden Girls.) But I find myself challenged by Rose Nylan to wrack my burnt out tropical mind for a proper response. (My aunt did get cremated and, no, I am not going to look around for a Save-a-Tree organization that needs to instrumentalize her ashes.)

But maybe the problem with this whole post-Golden Girls dilemma is that I think I can come up with a more substantial response than a twit-minded sitcom character. To even want to respond to (a) death, as if in a duel, is in itself a conundrum. To be challenged by death is really quite confounding; it is also ultimately hopeless. Death will always eventually win. But it is what I do in between — after it happens and before it happens again — that is of significant consequence. (We are, after all, a people of consequence.) What I do after my aunt’s death and before the next, even my own, is ultimately the response that seems to have been most elusive. I quickly remember the analogy of the fish in the aquarium my junior philosophy teacher luvd to use back when I was in school: it is hard to realize you’re in it if and since you’re immersed in it. I am already dealing with her death by just going on with my life.

I took Tim (my bf and a disavowed Baptist) with me to a Jesuit church last Sunday where we lit a candle for my dead aunt. There were no tears, only a quick prayer before we headed out for a Chelsea brunch.

 

101010 007

James Wolcott writing about Katie Couric (and referring to her blog entries on this line) from Vanity Fair’s December issue wrote that “no one over the age of 30 should be resorting to all those exclamation marks and capital letters like some juiced-up Crackberry addict.” I thought it was quite a funny and sensible crack at the much-maligned tv diva. I mean, are all those punctuations and capitalizations really necessary for ANYTHING?!!!! Unless your intent is to be rude (which is social suicide in mature and civilized discourse), then there really is no need for it. What lingered in me though, after the initial bite of this juicy barb, was the bar by which Wolcott raised this rule. Thirty apparently is the milestone for crossing over to the new age of soundness in structure and propriety in punctuation. (Maybe 30-year-olds should start running high school papers.)

Then, it hit me. I am turning 30 this year.

I’ll be checking this new box in 6 months. Sometimes, I wish it were as easy to say goodbye to my 20s as it was to my teens. (Only God knows what I did with my teens. Seriously, I can’t remember.) It was such a definitive decade — my big move out west, my coming out, my first great love, my first great heartbreak, my radical reinvention (enough to make me seem like Madonna in the late 90s) among other things — that I feel the need for another 10 to just make sense of it, enough to let it go. But I know I’m not going to be wasting my 30s just living in the past. (I’ve never been one to waste time. Even idling around for webporn is rationalized as creative indulgence in multimedia.) The challenge is always to fully be in the present. It’s bad enough that homos are so ageist. (I might as well be in my old age. Then again, I can always be 29 online for the next 4 years. Heck, I can pass for 27. It seems everyone else lies about their age on their web profiles anyway.) It’s even harder when I realize that it’s not going to be as easy to fall back on my family. (I rarely do anyway — only on money matters.) It’s toughest when I start going all neurotic and start imposing on myself all these delusions of grandeur owed to my new decade. (I’ve already started getting down on myself for still being a studio renter.) But I know that all these petty paranoia are not going to stop me from making the most of the inevitable. Besides, all my friends are in their 30s and it’s just reassuring that they’re all having a grand, old time, pun intended. They’re finding their dream job, buying their own condo, practically getting married. I listen to them and I learn so much. Tim, my bf, is 41 and he’s one of the most well-adjusted people I know. The world doesn’t end after 29. It seems to suddenly start over, refreshing and renewing, in the similar way that a new year begins.

A new year, a new decade. No, not a double whammy but a double whopper.

 

Excerpt

Can you name that tune? Each line below is a clue to a well-known yuletide song. You’ll have to decode some lofty language to come up with the carols, so if you’re ready… get humming!

1. Listen to the celestial messengers produce some harmonious sounds.

2. Embellish the interior passageways.

3. Twelve o’clock on a clement night witnessed its arrival.

4. The Christmas preceding all others.

5. Small municipality in Judea south of Jerusalem.

6. Omnipotent supreme being who elicits respite in distinguished males.

7. Nocturnal time span of unbroken quietness.

8. Obese personification fabricated of compressed mounds of minute crystals.

9. Tintinnabulation of vacillating pendulums in inverted, metallic resonant cups.

10. In awe of eventide characterized by religiosity.

[from the December 06 issue of Reader's Digest I perused in my aunts' bathroom when I stayed over in their house in Queens over Christmas Eve]

Answers: 1. Hark the Herald Angels Sing; 2. Deck the Halls; 3. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear; 4. The First noel; 5. O Little Town of Bethlehem; 6. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 7. Silent Night; 8. Frosty the Snowman; 9. Jingle Bells; 10. O Holy Night.