My demographic ages

My parents left Sunday. Seeing them in the city reminded me of those penultimate days of summer, when one has come to terms with the calendar and the fact that September is only just around the corner, when the sun has begun to dim and the sharp opacity of winter strikes the leaves, brick, and concrete, and when the days aren't quite as long as they were in July. I've been maudlin lately as well, and speaking almost entirely in analogy and metaphor. New York in these months is eternal dark and grey. I can understand why Georgia O'Keeffe left Stieglitz to repeatedly paint the vagina in New Mexico. Incidentally, is this not a novel euphemism?

Parents and I went to visit the magnificent old Boar at the end of 57th next to my grandmother's building and there he was, presiding over the East River as if it wasn't 30 degrees outside. I'll revisit him in the spring, and if my childhood memories hold true that park will have filled up with a bacchanal of flower and bloom come April. I miss her, Margaret. I would've loved to have visited the Frick with her, to have painted with her, to have talked politics with her, to have heard her turn of phrase, to have felt her kindness, to have watched the boats on the East River from her kitchen window, to have glimpsed the joy spread across the creases of her face when she, the first to know, would hear her favorite granddaughter was pregnant. She is, my cousin and her husband surprised parents and I before dinner. I couldn't believe it! I had no idea and would never have guessed. I'm thrilled, happy for them, and I have to in some way help them find a two bedroom because I would be devastated if they left the city, especially with the little fluffle, or "the business" as she's calling her (they're to have a little girl).

Kim and I went to my favorite place in Soho last night, Ciccio, which I write with some trepidation as I feel the hordes have yet to discover how pleasant it is, the quality of the homemade pasta, the feel of the place as one in which one can simply share a "second kitchen" with friends, as remark the French. It reminds me of the little bakery on Ninth where Taylor and I used both to collect breakfast before this whole "ambassador" campaign was formally announced.

Kim I've referred to many times, but have never described. How to talk about Kim? I had to convince Kim I would make a good friend, when we became close, years ago, in the months following her return from South Africa. Kim is a professional gossip, and used to, within a half hour of meeting someone, if she determined this him or her worthy of her attention, would ask how many people he or she had slept with? Kim at her worst is aggressive, contradictory, unpredictable, generally volatile, and will delve into obsession monologues relating to her high school social life. Typically, however, she's entertaining, a wonderful and reliable thread of get-togethers, and a devoted friend. Many a charming afternoon I've spent on the couch with Kim, discussing this or that or nothing at all, and I cherish these occasions, as we're both busy these days. Kim went corporate, she's doing very well, and she lives in the West Village.  

Kim isn't happy in New York, and she keeps on talking about Seattle, San Francisco, even San Diego. I'm not sure she'll be happy anywhere if she can't be happy in New York. She did break up with her boyfriend, which was too bad because I liked him, but I could see that he wasn't right for her, for so many reasons. Since Lindsay is the root cause of the split I feel it is up to her to find a replacement. We were both sort of down because one of our most attractive friends got engaged to her boyfriend in the Jardin du Luxembourg this weekend, which is elegant and whatnot, good for them. I don't dislike Angelica, I don't dislike her now-fiancee, Jay, but the fact of their engagement distresses in that it illuminates to both Kim and I how poorly off we are when it comes to romance. Angelica and Jay are both beautiful, they're a beautiful couple, though of course Jay isn't good enough for Angelica, but who is? I'm happy for them, though, and she's moving to New York so I actually am glad they're engaged and that's out of the way so he can't coerce her into remaining in LA like last time. Angelica is sharp and prone to flail about, she's stunning. She's in publishing and arrives in February. Jay wants to act; I haven't seen him act, but, thinking only of his appearance and his personality, he has a much better chance in New York than he ever had in LA. I don't believe in his prospects here, he possesses a elfin beauty that's distracting in a supporting character, and I can't imagine him playing anything else. These people who want to act, like Tina, on her third nose job, what are they thinking? They're suited to a plethora of trades, and yet they wish to act. Not everyone can be Pacino, not everyone can be Streep.

Cash went back to our hometown and his girlfriend mentioned marriage again. He's into her, but can't envision spending the rest of his life with her. To this I replied, "well, there is always divorce." I don't understand why people don't just accept divorce as a fact of life--so many of my friends and acquaintances, weighing the decision of whether to marry or not so carefully. Divorce exists! I feel to an extent divorce has taken on the moral ugliness of the fifties, with so many of my peers resenting their parents for daring to divorce, to have the gall to separate. These demanding children! Would they rather the parents hate each other for the duration of their time on this earth? Anyway, the conversation with Cash threw me--it was different to hear him talk about deep, serious realities of love in a somewhat quotidian manner--ie, these are things he is thinking about, these are everyday matters.

At dinner, Kim complained that she doesn't like Cash, but mentioned that he was looking very attractive the last time she saw him (Saturday). This is a problem with Kim: she'll often choose to dislike friends of mine, and voice her displeasure to me. It's one thing to dislike certain qualities in a mutual friend, and even to complain about these qualities to the friend-in-the-middle, but to actively dislike, exclude, or make decisions based on this dislike, that is a character flaw. That's unclear--let me try it another way: I might dislike a dear friend of a friend, dislike certain personality traits or dislike them generally, but I'll rarely, rarely give this feeling words, especially to my friend about their friend. It's bad breeding.

The dinner was opulent and delicious. Ciccio is an excellent restaurant. I took parents on their first night in town, and they loved it.

I mentioned the Lauder Cubism Collection at the Met in the last mini post--has anyone else had enough of this parade of Picasso? I saw Jacqueline and Picasso at Pace: overly intimate and bizarre, Jacqueline glowering at you from every corner of the room, and Picasso and the Camera at Gagosian, which contained two or three arresting works but not much else. It is clear both galleries are trolling out whatever might sell while everyone is in New York for the winter. Aunt Kate knew Jacqueline when she worked with the Hermitage, and found her absolutely detestable, haughty and affected but nondescript, bland. Cubism (at the Met) was the same, with too much early Braque and Picasso in angular constellations of brown and carrot, though it did reward with an exquisite and enormous Léger and the admirable Juan Gris' striking portrait of his mother.

Princess, Cash, and I are going to see Philip Glass do the Piano Etudes at BAM this weekend, and I may also see Sharon Jones at the Apollo. Princess is a friend enmeshed in the fashion world. I can't wait to see her--she's sociable, brilliant, unusual, amusing, but most of all, we'll be able to gossip! Not that I know very many people in fashion, but Princess and I know many of the same people from our days as earnest, beautiful club kids, eyes full of the conviction that what could be might really come to be. Princess and I almost lived together in Chinatown, but now she lives in Bushwhack--it's just too awful. She had a cramped flat in Alphabet City but it was just so much for so little. This is a problem with New York, the so much for so little issue when it comes to housing.

I haven't been to Harlem in some time and I also need to visit the Cloisters, so maybe I'll make a day and night of it. My friend Jean lives up there and, like Princess, I haven't seen her in awhile. It's never too late to reconnect with friends with whom you've fallen out of touch. Friendships aren't like leftovers: while whatever you've brought home with you might spoil, you'll always have the memory of the original meal. Well, I have some wonderful meal memories, and it's time to find these people. This is why I'm going to flight attendant friend's furry soiree all the way out in Kew Gardens, Queens, and why I continue to make the effort. Especially because the new people I meet tend to be so fucking crazy. For example:

Remember the women I nearly roomed with in Brooklyn Heights? I went to the apartment of said women the other night for hot toddies. One, the sometime WA assistant, proceeds to explain she's due to leave for Colombia in the morning and can socialize for a moment but must return to arranging her things. The other begins to monopolize the conversation, the one with the intense interest in Kafka, and proceeds to go on and on about how she identifies with Anne Frank. She once mentioned this to George Saunders at a book signing, and with what wide-eyes he stared I can't imagine. This is unkind of me, but her monologues reminded me of Bad Charlus, and I felt uneasy and a little tipsy and generally queasy. I might've enjoyed it if I hadn't been trapped with her, if there had been one or two other people around, but there was no escape, no Brooklyn in whose eyes I might find confirmation, eyes to share feelings of incredulous delight and discomfort. No, I just had to listen to her go on and on, it was dreadful. I didn't end up leaving until after one in the morning, and because of this I missed the birthday party for Princess and a general mess of a party at a Dean's in Bed Stuy that I would have really enjoyed. So this is why I want to reconnect with people I like, people who aren't crazy. Proust has a wonderful moment on the experience of discovering madness in passers-by, I'll find it and quote it in the future if I remember to do so. We then discussed the difficulties of finding like-minded people in New York to befriend, how New York can be rough, socially. I couldn't think, I don't believe I said anything of note, I was capable only of a weak mumble. It is hard to find interested, interesting, genuine people who aren't fucking crazy in New York, I suppose, but aren't we all a little bit crazy? I'll contact Brooklyn Heights girls again in the near future, lolz. At least they aren't women who over-utilize inflection, a behavior I cannot endure. You hear it on the street, often: "I JUst DoN't knOw WhAT I Am GoIng To Do?" I could write that phonetically but that would require an incredible effort and I think what I am describing is obvious enough: either you yourself are guilty of this, or you know people who do it and don't really consider it an issue, or we're soulmates and you know exactly what I mean and you also despise the sound of these creatures who belong in Chicago or Houston or whatever pit of degradation out of which they crawled. These people will be important in the upcoming requisite entry on New York and gentrification.  

I want to say one or two little things about Ferguson: fuck the police! Racist fucking country! Makes me want to move to Europe or back to Latin America, but I won't really do that because I love New York so very much. The tragedy may be, for people of a certain age, similar to the Dreyfus Affair, in terms of how I have observed it opening faults and chasms between friends, leaving some on one side and some on the other. I'm just glad to be in New York. Parents and I followed the protest after dinner with Katy on the Upper West Side, on the way back to Chelsea, where they were staying, we were all upset, shaken up, etc. We didn't get mixed up in it because it exhausted us, it was too raw, we were too sad, too tired by the expectedness of the decision not to indict.

I'm in a really good place with New York, very happy to be here.  

Two treats tonight: Diana and Dreams. 

Celery, Paris, Addie, Woody, 1Oak

Improved post titles await. For now, a series of semi-disconnected subject-thoughts. Charlus returned from Paris about a week ago and it's been incredibly difficult and psychologically/emotionally devastating. I've been in the process of moving for the past two months but now I really must decamp. Charlus seems out to destroy my spirit--he's a man of ups-and-downs, and will admit himself to be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which alarms me. He's an older gay man, had a partner years ago but things fell apart and they parted ways, and I think he's terribly lonely. He's wealthy, successful, and an aesthete--he went to Yale--but seems unable to find a new companion. I believe this may be due to horrible rage and resentment that reveals itself periodically, without warning, razor-tongue my mother calls it. I've been living in his apartment temporarily while I find my feet in the city, and he hasn't been at all supportive or understanding, which has caused me only sorrow. He's my mother's favorite brother, and she has four from which to choose. We were once thick as thieves, co-conspirators, Charlus and I, but he's put out with the fact that I'm interested in women. Charlus reaches heights of righteous indignation, and seems to resent anything and everything at some point, as life and people and family and friends continue to disappoint his standards.

So, I must move. I've sought out Harlem and Chinatown walkups, made sycophant with wealthy friends and acquaintances who perhaps might not mind a semi-permanent guest, and scoured Craigslist for intriguing roommate-wanted ads in the city, all to no avail. So: Hello, Brooklyn! Actually, I spend a significant amount of time in Brooklyn, and though I take an aesthetic pleasure in mincing along with the Blue Jasmine-esque attitudes of the elite toward the borough ("Imagine! I couldn't afford my apartment in Brooklyn."), I tend to miss the trees, the quiet streets, the less homogenous population, when I return to my current neighborhood in the city. When I walk around Chelsea these days and see a particularly yuppie/bougie/posh posse I tend to make an obnoxious and audible comment: "these white neighborhoods sure smell like piss" or "really grotty this area" or "imagine, people live here!" But my perverse tendencies extend far beyond Chelsea: I'm wont to point out to friends who live on the Lower East Side or in Alphabet City the following: if she/he had an immigrant ancestor who came through Ellis Island and spent some time in New York at the turn of the century, these were the neighborhoods this ancestor struggled to escape. Imagine how this ancestor would turn over in the grave should he or she ever know that the beautiful granddaughter or grandson had--out of choice--moved back to the terrible tenements, forking over a substantial sum each month for the privilege. Chelsea's pedigree might be somewhat superior, the home of James Stewart in Rear Window after all, and though I do love the east-west blocks between Ninth and Seventh, I detest Eighth, and can't abide the bridge and tunnel fiasco that's developed in Gansevoort. I went to 1Oak for the first time in a few months, just horrid. There was an atrocious has been C-lister in attendance, and I, being thoroughly a little fuck, couldn't resist loudly remarking to the Portuguese Kate Moss look alike to my left what a drag it is to run into people like [C-lister]...can't one go anywhere? Well, one could go to Brooklyn. Or Queens. Or the Bronx, to which I've made several food-related pilgrimages of late, for Ghanaian and Oaxacan cuisine, both excellent. But it's to Brooklyn I go, and this Sunday.

Where to go for a night out these days is a tough subject, one I'll tackle at some point. The short answer is I am without a favorite--I did the club kid thing when I was young(er) and capable of it and when the area still had a feeling of avant garde-ness, the LES/Chinatown scene that's developed in recent years but which is too cramped, too sweaty, too contrived, too full of euro-trash (ie Le Baron). I don't like $Skid Row and Bushwhack is just so far, so contrived...where on earth to go? I haven't had a great night out venue-wise since The Jane became trendy. What a loss. I simply no longer know where to go out, and I'm not wild about speakeasies. I believe New York has hit a nightlife nadir. 

Charlus has talked for as long as I can remember, like Kate, of Brooklyn as the origin of grime, a savage and frightful farrago of disaster and blight (here's to you, Vladimir). I rather relish that sort of thing, because in speech it evokes a New York for which I've inherited a nostalgia, the New York of the nasty old Canarsie Line, the street crime, the brothels, the depravity, the disuse, the neglect, the potential. That potential is in the midst of being realized, and I wonder where the vision became crooked. Charlus in Paris discovered that many upmarket, contemporary, and otherwise of the moment lounges, bars, and nightclubs, have actual Brooklyn "Nights", and that it isn't uncommon to refer to this or that as being très Brooklyn. I immediately thought of Odette, and the shocking tendency of le Faubourg to pepper conversation with bits of vernacular English.

The other night I went to Duck Duck Goose on Montrose. Beforehand I stopped by my favorite Chinatown dumpling hovel and walked to the J at Essex. Hungry again, but wanting to purify myself, I found a Korean grocery near the Broadway J where I stepped off the train in Bushwick and picked up some carrot-orange juice and two bunches of celery, which I pronounce salary. It was once unintentional but has become an affectation. I brought the salary to Duck Duck Goose and began to eat it, gesticulate with it, point, toss, share etc., and received a lot of attention. My friend Lindsay, whose birthday party I attended in the last edition of this diary, was there when I arrived, and, at once assessing the situation, with jerky violence I reached into my inside coat pocket, detached a stalk and began to munch on it, a la Bugs Bunny. Lindsay, eyes-wide: "You are the most eccentric person I know." This was a real compliment--she knows everyone. I went on to tell a number of bar-friend-strangers that the two new things in Brooklyn were: (1) bringing fresh vegetables to the bar; and (2) mispronouncing the names of vegetables (salary, arigula, tranups, skosh, you get the point). Eighteen hip little creatures noted with their eyes this occurrence, to write about later on their hip little blogs. I wish these people could make their own fun. I suppose it's hard for some. If salary shows up at a Brooklyn bar, well, you saw it here first. We went to Brooklyn Bowl later on for a CMJ party, what a cemetery.

I almost moved into a room in Brooklyn Heights, a sublet. One of the potential roommates has been WA's personal assistant and the other reads Kafka's letters and George Bataille. They both like film.  Unfortunately I didn't get the room, though it looks as if I'll see them socially.

I'm reading Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, increasingly entertaining though I feel again it is impossible to translate Russian. Tonight I found a book I've been searching for since 2008: The Fruit Palace: An Odyssey Through Colombia's Cocaine Underworld by Charles Nicholl. Found at The Strand, which would have a book one has been searching for for five years. I wonder if they have a nice edition of Ibn Battutah?

Cash told me several years ago I needed to read Eugene O'Neill's Iceman, and I searched in every used bookstore I visited (San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, DC; I once travelled), but each time left without finding a copy (though I did locate a good many other books). Well at the NYPL I found a copy and have finished the play. Cash told me that Iceman would remind me of our friends back where we come from. It's a depressing play about career alcoholics slowly inching towards death in a last-chance saloon in the West Village when the West Village was a filthy numbered ward. The play does not remind me of our friends.

The Knicks lost to the Bulls, but defeated the Bron-returned Cavs. What does that mean for the L? I don't know, but my loyalties are elsewhere. I'm in the no-longer-a-fan stage with a small market team I won't reveal because I'm keeping this anonymous. A high school classmate of mine who, due to religious conviction, remained a virgin until after college, has begun a career with high public visibility. This person recently slept with most of the roster of said NBA franchise. Mad world.

I can't decide whether or not to go out for Halloween tomorrow. Will I regret it? A significant part of me wants to visit Aire, lounge in the baths, and have an early night in.

I haven't been to an unusual or fascinating event of late, but in the next few days I'll do the Out to See in the Seaport, Phong Bui in Chelsea, Birdman (the Gone Girl of late October it seems), Angélique Kidjo, some other shit probs totes. In a few weeks I'll visit my great friend Brooklyn Zoo in DC.

I'm new to this, so future entries will have some tangible organization and will appear more frequently. Bye for now.