Like a Cork Bobbing in an Ocean of Memory

Early April in Lake Worth Beach feels a little like August in the Pines.  You enjoy it more because imminent departure makes everything a little sweeter.  

I accompanied Chris to the fancy mall in Palm Beach Gardens.  His expensive watch (who knew?) needed repair.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that Venchi, where I enjoyed the last gelato of my trip to Northern Italy last fall, had a store in a South Florida luxury mall.  Or on Columbus Avenue, less than 20 blocks south of 47 Pianos.  Mercantile homogeneity is one of the downsides of globalization, particularly for the well-heeled.

The Folly Chariot makes it so much easier to vary my walk routine, with final excursions to Winding Waters where a lightning-struck tree offered insect housing,

. . . and Wakodahatchee Wetlands, 

. . . where I hoped the nests I had visited with Anthony and Zoltan before spring's arrival would be filled with fledglings instead of eggs.  They were but faint chirps provided the only evidence.

Flying into Manhattan, with sky-high perches, still thrills this old snowbird.

The colors may not be natural but they ARE intense.

I don't think I've ever taken a prettier spring photo in Central Park thanks to azealeas blooming and reflecting in the Ramble's Gill stream.  

Both the park and my photography have come a long way since the 70s and 80s.

It didn't take long to resume my steady diet of art and theater.  Since returning from Florida I've seen 19 exhibits at eight museums and galleries, and seven shows, not including various public art installations like "All One" in Hudson River Park.

The exhibits included "Two Strikes on a Snowman" in Chelsea

Collage by Lucy Sante

. . . and "Fool Disclosure" in Long Island City.

"The Trojan Horse" by Pat Oleszko (1980)

I couldn't tell if Ohad Meromi's "Sunbather" is affiliated with the nearby Sculpture Center or not.  It's definitely a good landmark if you're looking for the museum, just around the corner.

Since I retired from the Health Department 12 springs ago, the neighborhood is almost unrecognizable.  The contrast of sunlit building materials can be eye-catching.

The walk back over the Koch Bridge reminded how thankful I am to have lived in Manhattan for as long as I have, if sometimes a little bewildered by the pace of construction.  The longer your life, the more change it encompasses.

Since my return in mid-April, I feel like a cork bobbing in an ocean of memory.  Blame my reading choices (an oral history of Hollywood and Sammy Davis, Jr.'s autobiography as well as steady strip mining of 30+ years of stored Vanity Fair magazines for collaging material, begun last fall.  Who could have predicted the awful trajectory of this recently remarried mercurial buffoon in 1993?  Former editor Graydon Carter probably can take some consolation that his snarky cover isn't hanging in the White House.

New discoveries at the Guggenheim like Gabriele Münter (who's waiting in vain for Kandinsky, her lover, to arrive in Sweden at the beginning of the first World War) 

"At the Clockmaker's"(1916)

. . .  and old passions at the International Center of Photography provided welcome distractions from the unceasing greed, corruption and belligerence that characterize the current commander-in-chief.  On more than one occasion in the Diaries, Andy complains that 47 and Ivana, wife number one, swindled him.

And I just hate the Trumps because they never bought my Trump Tower portraits.  (May 2, 1984)

Photo by Stephen Shore

Until "Matisse:  Pursuit of Harmony," I can't remember ever having to line up outside a gallery.  The demographic definitely skewed older but the show was definitely worth the wait, especially for odalisque fans.

"Nu couché" (1921)

An exhibition of hunk portraits at the Artists Space lured me downtown.  I followed Broadway past Madison Square Park where "Alfarero del Barrio" by Roberto Lugo celebrates Lin-Manuel Miranda, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Roberto Clemente on this gazebo

. . . and "Dreamland Sirens" by Charlotte Colbert flanked the Flatiron Building.

"Paul Anthony" by David Armstrong (Jefferson Avenue, Brookly, 2004)

On the graffitied alley outside the Artists Space, one man computes on a landing, while another runs past.

Photography isn't permitted at the Frick so I had to stick my camera through an iron fence to get this shot.  Would you believe it was my first visit to the building, if not the collection, which moved to the old Whitney while the Fifth Avenue mansion was being renovated?

I went to see "Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture," which turned out to be more interesting than I anticipated thanks to back stories of his subjects, like this young singer whose husband--the much better known English playwright (The School for Scandal)--forced her to give up her career before she died of tuberculosis not long after giving birth to his child in her late 30s.  A beautiful portrait of a haunted woman becomes a tragic one.

"Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan" by Thomas Gainsborough (1785-87)

These pooches almost compensated for the absence of the artist's most famous work.  It hangs in the Huntington, which does permit photography.  The Frick Collection needs to get over itself, although there's no question that it hangs in one of Manhattan's most beautiful interiors.

"Pomeranian and Puppy" (ca 1777)

Keith Haring at the Brant Foundation gave me an excuse to walk uptown.  I never tire of his work and will finally get around to reading the latest biography by Brad Gooch this summer.

Untitled (1982)

Keith might have appreciated the snacks scattered on the sidewalk outside the Brant.

 They echo the lines of his work a bit.

Untitled Vinyl Tarp (detail, 1982)

I stopped to take this photo on the corner of First Avenue and East 11th Street because I'd never seen so many parked delivery bikes. Only later did I notice the split-image mural of Michael Jackson who is definitely having a moment among amnesiacs. Apparently, it's easier to ignore the transgressions of some artists than others. Just listen to this podcast for the reasons why.

A less controversial mural loomed above the colorful exterior of an empanada restaurant.

Believe it or not, the Tifereth Israel/Town & Village Synagogue has roots in the German Baptist Brethren who built it as their own house of worship.  Ukrainians turned it Eastern Orthodox in 1926, adding the domes. Jews have observed Shabbat here since 1962; New York City finally landmarked the spiritually versatile building in 2014.  

St. George's Episcopal Church, another landmark building, looms above Stuyvesant Square. Two spires were decapitated in 1889, although you'd never know to look at it now.  

"Knots," a second exhibit of collages by Lucy Sante, took me for the first time to another long-established institution,  the American Academy of Arts & Letters in Upper Manhattan.

I walked back downtown on Broadway from 155th Street.  My alma mater has redeveloped Manhattanville, an area I haven't frequented since I stopped parking Herr Cucaracha in a cheap garage on W 134th Street in the early 90s.

Grad students and faculty have new housing that actually resembles an ivory tower.

It must offer great views of the Broadway local train, which is elevated at 125th Street, the Hudson and New Jersey.

The Union Theological Seminary emphatically observes Pride month!

"Memory," by Augustus Lukeman, gazes out over Straus Park on West 106th Street, which honors Isidor, co-founder of Macy's department store, and his wife Ida.  Before going down on the Titanic--together, she refused to get into a lifeboat without her husband--they lived around the corner on West End Avenue. Check out the magnificent Straus tomb in Woodlawn Cemetery, adorned with an Egyptian funerary barge.

Back to Chelsea again for a show of Gerhard Richter landscapes at the David Zwirner gallery.  At 93, he may very well be our greatest living artist.

Chapel (1995)

"GIVE US MOM!!!" by Nora Turato doesn't require quite the intellectual bandwidth of Richter's oeuvre.  It "channels an urgent collective plea for nurturing and protection," a void in my life since 1975.

My usual reading bench in Central Park is a great place to observe other people's morning routines, including dozens of sweet, wide-eyed pre-school children with their minders, a friendly woman with a walker who always wears the same floral print dress and hijab, a sleepy dog walker in dreadlocks whose look suggests a pit bull should be at the end of his leash rather than a cuddly poodle mix and a greying man in a Stephen Sondheim t-shirt that boasts "I'm Still Here."  

Four shy young Koreans, who barely spoke English, approached while I was deeply absorbed in John of John.  Using sign language they asked me to complete a one-minute survey about a scented shampoo bar, including questions about where it should be sold and how much it should cost.  Could they have found a less likely consumer of their product?  Only in New York!

Can I Be Frank (4*)

While re-reading my journals--I'm nearing the end of my 50th blue hardcover, each 120 pages long--I find that topical jokes really pinpoint a moment in time that may have receded from memory.  Like this one during the AIDS epidemic:  

Do you know the hardest thing about an HIV-positive diagnosis?  Convincing your parents you're Haitian!

You probably have to have lived through those awful early years to find that mordant joke funny now that marriage equality is the law of the land and we've entered an era of "gay elder" appreciation.  The latter is a driving force behind "Can I Be Frank?," a frenetic Pride month performance during which Morgan Bassichis, standing in front of a life "preserver" backdrop, pays tribute to Frank Maya, America's first openly gay stand-up comic. Sometimes, homage can be a form of resurrection; Maya died in 1995, just before protease inhibitors commuted AIDS from the death penalty to life imprisonment.

Unfamiliar with Maya, I watched him being interviewed by Dick Cavett, who I normally enjoy, but whose supercilious discomfort with homosexuality in 1991 was more than a little off-putting.  Maya, three years my senior, seemed pretty laid back: the kind of "masc" hunk instantly recognizable only to other friends of Dorothy and their "hags," but whom few other people would peg as somebody who enjoyed getting fucked.  Bassichis, on the other hand, is a screaming queen who aptly describes himself as something that walked in "out of a folk tale." But he adds a contemporary patina of knowing, ironic fierceness to Maya's routines, some of which have aged better than others.  Celebrity letters from heaven, for example, is hilarious if you get the references.

One joke, in particular, pretty much sums up the differences between comedy then and now, and between Maya and Bassichis.  Maya asserts that fame is the only cure for homosexuality, which Bassichis initially interprets as the compensating reward that material comforts and acceptance provide.  Maya, however, got the laugh because going back in the closet and insisting you're straight is the only way you can maintain fame once you achieve it.  Just ask the much better-remembered Pee-wee Herman.

Bassichis shifts gears at the end, adding a kind of teachable moment about how the LGBTQ+ community has persevered in the face of discrimination and tragedy. Like Maya, he incorporates music into his performance, transforming the title of a 1989 essay by Douglas Crimp, another gay elder, into a requiem he sings over to a suddenly quiet, sobered house:  mourning and militancy, he drones again and again.

It's advice about carrying on that, unlike humor, doesn't seem to have aged at all.

John of John (5*)

Imagine Falabay, a remote place in Scotland where Nature brooks no quarter, where the land and the sea have offered only meager employment for centuries, where an older generation still takes pride in speaking Gaelic and where, in a winking concession to the times, the bellwether ram has been replaced by an ewe on the Macleod croft now being worked by a handsome but stubborn weaver named John. 

Imagine that John, the father for whom you have been named even though everyone calls you Cal (your middle name) has guilt-tripped you into coming home from a life of listless couch surfing in Glasgow after graduating from fashion school because your gran's feet have turned purple.  

Imagine returning to an insular community where everyone is hiding something but there aren't many secrets except one that has been kept in your own home.  Where John, who leads the congregation in song on Sundays, punches you in the face because you've bleached your already dyed long hair with peroxide instead of cutting it before accompanying him to church.

His father put all his faith in the Presbyterian penicillin. For whatever ailed you there was only one cure: work and prayer.

Imagine you've brought Ella, the grandmother who raised you, an unusual gift because she loved teaching you filthy expressions as you beach combed together during your childhood, when your discerning eye for subtle gradations of color told your father one thing and her another. 

By now, you've probably guessed that Cal carries the Macleod family secret. Not so fast. Douglas Stuart pulls the rug out from under the reader, if not his title characters, almost immediately with an omniscient revelation less about sexual orientation than the very real and sometimes cringey costs of hiding it.

To pay off Cal's student debt, John forces his battered son to help him weave the wool they gather from their flock even though Scottish law allows only one person per croft to work a single loom as a form of quality control.  After passing inspection, their work--which is indistinguishable, even to expert eyes--officially becomes Harris tweed, named for one of the islands in the Outer Hebrides.  

In middle age, I outgrew a brown sports jacket made of the same material, ignorant of its origins until now.  My own father called it "snazzy," his highest form of sartorial praise. I lamented donating the jacket to the Salvation Army as much as I loved Stuart's novel, which is just as intricately and colorfully woven,  even if its resolution--which appears to have been engineered by a martyred saint weaned on romantic comedy--does defy credulity a wee bit. 

But before then, Stuart thrusts the reader into a pre-internet world where rural "benders"--men who have sex with men--don't think of themselves as gay.  Cal discovers his sexuality by watching videotapes with Doll, whose family isn't as religious as John.

He had liked the T’s best. T for Top Gun or Total Recall or Terminator. And it was on a November afternoon, when Arnold Schwarzenegger first landed naked in a car park overlooking LA, that Cal sat with one of Mrs Macdonald’s cushions clamped over his lap. He lied to Doll about having diarrhoea, then he went home and prayed for forgiveness, crouching behind the sunken caravan.

(No wonder queer Scots seem so hung up on masculinity!  See also Half-Man.)

College cures Cal of the need to pray, and he learns something from a friend with benefits who proposes they live together after graduation.

Sammy was the opposite of his father in all things, and the moment he had realised this was the moment he realised he could never love him.

And like most gay men still in the closet, he was relieved to have a female best friend, Isla, who also functioned as a "beard."

There had been a tacit expectation, a faint, cheering hope amongst the faithful that when they were older, they might reunite, court properly, marry quickly. The sweetness of their relationship had brought him uncomplicated happiness and at the same time a sense of protection.  Whenever the men looked at him with that faint unease, whenever he laughed too loudly, or stood with all his weight on one hip, she came to mind and soothed whatever doubt they had. She had been like an overcoat that let him blend in, a skinned fleece he could tie around himself that let him wander amongst the flock without fear of rejection.

Stuart anchors John of John in a place as far from "gay" urban culture as Kansas is from Oz yet much of his gripping melodrama seems oddly familiar and not only because I've taken the same ferry that Cal does when he returns from school. I had a couple of beards, our Walkmans played the same new wave music (his amusing reference to the Smiths is spot on), I've replied to a personals ad, people have told me I was in love with my father, and, like so many gay men who flee their hometown,  I've faced the exact same question that drives the novel's narrative.

Will he stay, or will he go?  The answer left me in a puddle of skeptical, if hopeful tears that once again had me counting my lucky, lucky stars.

More Douglas Stuart:

Shuggie Bain

Young Mungo