Less Is Lost (4*)

I'm generally not a fan of sequels, but one that chronicles a gay--oops, I mean Dutch--road trip through America?  With a pooch?  Count me in!  How's this for evocative writing about the Southwest, the land where I spent my formative years?

 . . . the sun, monarch of the Southwest, has been exiled behind the peaks, and the whole valley can now relax into this cantaloupe glow, which brings out the intricate tooled leatherwork of the mountainside, below which a concatenation of surfaces (windows, puddles, chromed vehicles) reflect this afterlight, one after the other, like the fine notes of a symphony repeated in each section of the orchestra, until the rim of the half shell lets off one last flare and the event is concluded. 

Of course, after reading Andrew Sean Greer's self-effacing break-out Less, you're primed for chuckles galore and the author delivers these (this time usually at the Land of the Free's expense) on nearly every page.  

Gay Sex, already an advanced course of study, was nothing compared to that higher-level curriculum for which nothing in life in the 1970s—not high school or television or movies or library books or  even gropings with girls or boys themselves—had prepared these young men:  mastery of Gay Love.

*  *  *  *

He can think of nothing to say about Delaware.  It is like trying to describe an airplane meal you had half a century ago. 

*  *  *  *

Arthur Less breaks down in racking sobs that are equal parts relieved sorrow and musical-theater joy, and show me the homosexual who could sift out which is which.

*  *  *  *

In fact, Less Is Lost, which suffers a little from somewhat confusing narration, IS a love story with an ending as satisfying as a witty rom com that cleverly defies expectations.  And when have we--people from the Netherlands--ever had that?  To quote Arthur Less, again:

America looks fine from here.

Artists @ Work

The annual Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival gives local artists a temporary opportunity to exhibit their works in chalk.

The "Chalking Dad" knows what he's doing.

 

Aquatic creatures are a common theme.

Is it any wonder America has a gun problem when Scarface's Tony Montana glamorizes their use?  In Florida you can carry a concealed weapon.

This work seems to be a bad Banksy knock-off.

Mr. Wilder & Me (5*)

What an intelligently conceived and executed novel about Hollywood, one of my favorite topics.  But Jonathan Coe also integrates timeless themes about aging and young love as shrewdly as I.A.L. Diamond, the titular director's grumpy writing partner,  and ends his lovely, fact-based tribute with a punch line almost as sweet as the one Joe E. Brown delivers at the end of Some Like It Hot.

Here's Billy Wilder (much of the dialog has been lifted from actual interviews) on the difference between his movies and those made by "the kids with beards," including Steven Spielberg who ends up making Schindler's List, the movie that Wilder optioned but couldn't get financed in the twilight of his brilliant career.

"You don't need to go to the movies to learn that life is ugly.  You go because those two hours will give your life some little spark, whether it's comedy or laughter or . . . just, I don't know, some beautiful gowns and good-looking actors or something--some spark that it didn't have before.  A bit of joy, maybe."

That's exactly the feeling this novel left me with.  

Coe himself is no slouch when describing the taste of Brie, or the power of a good joke:

"You don't know the story of Nijinsky?" [I.A.L. Diamond] said.  "He was a great dancer, but he went nuts.  He ended up in a mental asylum suffering from terrible delusions. There's a funny story about that, as well."

This seemed unlikely, but Mr. Diamond was determined to tell it anyway. 

"Billy was in a meeting once, with a producer.  And he was telling him that he wanted to make a film about Nijinsky.  So he told the producer the whole story of Nijinsky's life, and this guy was looking at him in horror, and saying, 'Are you serious?  You want to make a movie about a Ukrainian ballet dancer who ends up going crazy and spending thirty years in a mental hospital, thinking that he's a horse?'   And Billy says, 'Ah, but in our version of the story, we give it a happy ending.  He ends up winning the Kentucky Derby.'"

And this time I did laugh, partly because I thought the story was funny, and partly because I liked the way Mr. Diamond told it, the way his eyes shone as he reached the punchline, the way that for him briefly, the telling of this joke brought an instant of strange joy and clarity to the world.  And I realized for a man like him, a man who was essentially melancholy, a man for whom the ways of the world could only ever be a source of regret and disappointment, humor was not just a beautiful thing but a necessary thing, that the telling of a good joke could bring a moment, transient but lovely, when life made a rare kind of sense, and would no longer seem random and chaotic and unknowable.  It may me glad to think that in the midst of the world's many intractabilities he still had this one source of consolation.

Amen!  Great cover art, too.

The Chiffon Trenches (3*)

It's a lot easier to like André Leon Talley than to admire or respect him after reading this score-settling memoir about the famous people who befriended and dropped him, (Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour, first and foremost).  He self-pityingly addresses his weight problem early on, describing himself as "a huge galleon slowly sailing into harbor, broken from so many battles" but ignores how the other elephant in the room--his particular kind of blackness--simultaneously gave him front row access to the fashion world he craved and blocked his professional ascent.

Perhaps it's a reflection of my own white privilege, but I enjoyed the early part of the book most when ALT (the title of his earlier, undoubtedly more circumspect memoir) describes how Diana Vreeland plucked him, then just a "black American string bean," from a group of volunteers working on what eventually became the Met Gala based on his can-do attitude and resourcefulness.  He impressed her with his Ivy League education and his fluency in French and they remained friends until she died in 1989.

Thanks to Ms. Vreeland's glowing recommendations and the connections he made while working at Interview, this regular church-going naif with an encyclopedic knowledge of who wore what when started hanging out with Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev at places like the Anvil, a notorious sex club in the Manhattan's Meat Packing District.

A black man in crotchless leather pants sidled up beside me and I accidentally made eye contact with him.  He began making gestures, rubbing his arm, from his elbow to his wrist, and nodding.

“What is he doing with his hands?” I said.

“He is trying to seduce you,” Nureyev said.  “He wants you to anally fist him in the back room.”

Wearing matte jersey by Scott Barrie, a necklace made from a metal pipe on a grosgrain ribbon, and my Rive Gauche velvet trousers, when I was told this, I shrieked and ran toward the door.

I feel you ALT, I really, really do.  Pre-AIDS New York could be terrifying!  But the world of fashion seems just as depraved in some respects.  How could a man of your obvious intellect not see through all that kiss-kiss phoniness?

Like a fusillade, I fired off into the uncharted domain of YSL versus Karl Lagerfeld. Somehow I felt at home with these newfound friends.  All the principals were gay, something that was understood and never discussed.  In this world, there were no victims, only high-octane egos.

The answer, I think, stems from the fact that ALT had a mother who abandoned him and a father who didn't get him.  His beloved grandmother raised him by the book, and her nurturing style seems to have rubbed off on him to such an extent that many in the fashionista crowd turned to him juice their high-octane egos with the kind of emotional support that doesn't get you promotions or increase the size of your bank account, although you may acquire closets full of swag and live rent-free on somebody else's property.  Until you can't.

You've also got to wonder why he made the mistake of choosing Anna Wintour as a proxy mom.  He certainly understands that power makes her tick, yet he repeatedly allows himself to be used as basically nothing more than a dresser.  Wintour may have seen their relationship quite differently, but if it's true that she turned to him for comfort after the death of her own mother, then why did he fly to London to be at her side after she had freezed him out for months?  A slavish lack of self-respect?

Still, until the epilogue,  ALT doesn't completely burn his bridge to Vogue, where Wintour still rules although her kingdom of expense accounts and town cars is much diminished.  He bitterly ends the book with this anecdote, published not long after the murder of George Floyd and shortly before his own death at the age of 73:

[Anna Wintour] will never allow anything (or anyone!) to get in the way of her white privilege.  When discussing a long list of ideas about my February column one year, she said to me, from behind her desk, “Andre, Vogue is not here to run a column about your ideas on Black History Month."

My takeaway from The Chiffon Trenches:  sucking up to people only gets you so far.  And gossipy revenge like this only diminishes whatever legacy you might have.

 

Burt Bacharach (1928 - 2023)

So many melodies, so much buoyancy, such longevity--I loved Burt Bacharach and his brilliant arrangements long before I knew who he was, beginning with "What's New Pussycat?" AM radio singalongs as an eleven-year old in 1965.  By midlife, he had become my favorite composer and an obsession:  I titled one of my first mixtapes "Pop Goes Bacharach" and was astonished by the range of artists who had covered his best material. Hal David's  lyrics and Bacharach's own arrangements (those strings and Tijuana Brass horns!) blasted these 60s ear worms from radio confections into timeless perfection.  Of course no one added more value to their craft than Dionne Warwick except perhaps Burt's most unexpected, late-in-life collaborator:  Elvis Costello.  "God Give Me Strength" ranks right up there with Dionne's "I Say A Little Prayer" and "The Look of Love" by Dusty Springfield.

And Burt kept on giving into his 80s:  stream Jennifer Holliday singing "Every Other Hour" RIGHT NOW!

Oddly, I only recently have begun to appreciate the merits of a Bacharach song that I pushed from my consciousness because of its association with HIV:  "That's What Friends Are For."  We needed government-funded treatment, not charitable schmalz in 1985!  I watched the Dionne Warwick doc on HBO just four days before Bacharach's death--he's interviewed, of course, looking frail--and got hooked for the first time, nearly four decades after its release,  just as I begin to mourn his own passing.

Thank you, Burt, for so much unalloyed joy and a lifetime of nostalgia!

P.S.  As a gay boy obsessed with Hollywood, your status as the archetypal silver fox and connections to Marlene Dietrich and Angie Dickinson didn't hurt either.

Burt Bacharach & Marlene Dietrich Touring Israel (1960)

Burt Bacharach & Angie Dickinson (1965)