Photo Pest: February 2025

Sunday, February 23, 2025

Duck Lip Grannies

Humor is sorely absent from the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival so this colorful selfie spoof really made an impression.

Andrew and Steven took the Brightline--that's the deluxe, high speed commuter train infamous for mowing down pedestrians--up from Brickell, their latest winter getaway in Florida. They joined us in South Palm Park for the first time in 2020 and have been moving farther south ever since.

They're standing with Chris in front of a J.C. Leyendecker-inspired work. We'd all seen an exhibition of the early 20th century illustrator's homoerotic work at the New York Historical Society.

Andrew & Steven now live much higher on the hog with glorious views from their pool deck. We drove down on Super Bowl Sunday for a look/see at their Airbnb, in the same building as the W Hotel. A tatted Latina wearing pasties in the elevator grabbed Thom's butt. That's the vibe in Miami: young, beautiful and sexy, 24/7. Chase the dream before you get too old, boys!

But Lake Worth Beach definitely draws a huge crowd in late February. Nature is a common theme among street painters.

This guy appeared to be celebrating immigrant pride, just a few miles from Mar a Lago. Good for him!

Women appeared in the work as often as they created it.

The 3D beauties behind me are waterskiing, something I haven't done since 2001.

Men were few and far between. You almost can hear this guy's piercing whistle.

I liked this abstract work a lot, too, although don't ask me what it means.

Chappell Roan certainly put West Hollywood's Pink Pony Club on the national map. How about her amazing, bedazzled performance at the Grammy's?

Wicked inspired a lot of artists this year but only a few with any real facility for portraits.

I recently re-watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest with Louise Fletcher and Jack Nicholson. It really holds up.

Freddie Mercury is instantly recognizable, even in abstraction.

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Blackouts (4*)

I won't pretend to have entirely "gotten" this rather high concept novel, but Justin Torres definitely kept me intrigued over its lyrical course. Reading it printed on paper would have enhanced the illustrations, of which there are many, including a fascinating, alphabetized glossary of mostly timeless gay slang.

The title refers to words that have been censored by Torres in Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, an actual book published in 1941 based on extensive interviews conducted by Jan Gay, a lesbian pushed aside by the credited author, a man with a medical degree but no real understanding of his topic. The pages look very much like a heavily redacted Freedom of Information request and while the text in my digital edition was too small to read, I'm pretty sure Torres intended what remains to be meaningful for those who can, adding another dimension to his hybrid work.

"Blackouts" also allude to gaps in the memory of the older Puerto Rican gay man named Juan who was briefly adopted by Gay and her partner, a whimsical children's book illustrator. Juan has tasked "nene," the book's anonymous, much younger narrator, to fill his dying wish by setting the historical record straight (oops I mean gay!) about Sex Variants which, despite its serious flaws and prejudices, represents one of the earliest attempts to address homosexuality from a clinical perspective. Yes, the novel definitely meditates on queer identity, but not so seriously that Torres doesn't leaven it with a little death-bed humor.

"How old am I?” [Juan] asks. “What do I look like?” “Handsome,” I say. “Distinguished. Hung.”

I guess size matters even at the end of life!

What resonated most about Blackouts is Torres' recognition of what Ethan Mordden, another gay novelist, calls "the knowledge," which has been passed down orally from one generation to the next.

"You know, nene, in my time, we all prayed to our private idols, some famous woman, usually an actress; we memorized her lines, her looks, practiced throwing ourselves down onto the divan, overcome—all of us old-school sissies, we carried these women inside, or alongside, our consciousness, private icons, whose mannerisms and wit we’d call forth … mimesis, Dionysian imitatio … though I suppose that kind of thing has gone out of style.”

Perhaps not. Juan's reminiscing vividly recalls a tutorial my Pines housemates and I led for a guest, a generation younger, who had never heard of All About Eve and The Women. After listening, with interest, to all of us natter on about these and other lodestar gay films, he commented "You guys should start a school."

But the transmission goes both ways. Juan also encourages "nene" to describe his own past as if it were a movie introduced with a perfectly chosen metaphorical image: a hand on a knob, opening a door into a different world in each new scene, providing the older man with a vicarious thrill.

Towards the end of the book, Torres baldly articulates his inarguable and profound thesis statement:

Juan had pushed me to grasp two concepts: (1) the idea that stigmatized persons live in a literarily defined world; and (2) the value of getting lost, or absorbed—sometimes haunted, sometimes enriched—by what’s been said and written about you and your kind, and what’s been erased or suppressed.

It's probably safe to say that few winners of the National Book Award for Fiction have ever been as meta as Blackouts. Torres has done exactly what Juan requested of "nene," and then some.

Friday, February 14, 2025

FLASHBACK: Parisian Cemeteries (Thanksgiving 2005)

You could say I first fell in love with cemeteries at Père Lachaise on a Thanksgiving trip to Paris. Until then, I'd more often thought of them as the lame joke my mother made in El Paso when we passed Restlawn, one of the city's few non-desert landscapes, on the way home from the PX. "People are dying to get in there," would make me giggle, as if she'd said something naughty.

Like thousands of other baby boomer pilgrims I'd been weaned on classic rock, and Chiffon wanted to pay tribute to Jim Morrison. The Doors, my first LP purchase, definitely lit my fire.

An Italian fan left behind a freshly addressed post card to Jim. Twenty years later I can translate it for the first time thanks to Google. I've smoked a lot of joints but I've never changed teams. Well said. I feel that way about Joni Mitchell.

I came for the rocker and stayed for the utterly bewitching scene: more than a hundred acres of exquisite sculptures, fresh flowers, fallen leaves, ceramic decorations and stained glass, to say nothing of the friendly ghosts, eager to be resurrected, however briefly by their descendants, or curious visitors. Serenity enveloped me as I contemplated the finality of death and eternity in an otherworldly environment also imbued with French chic.

Although this tombstone did remind me a bit of Carrie's ending.

I first learned about the murder of six million Jews when we lived in Orleans. My father took me to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris which had opened only a year earlier, in 1962. Lampshades made from human skin were among the horrors exhibited. "Never Forget" has been imprinted on my brain since childhood. Nothing--not even adult visits to Dachau and Auschwitz--has had as powerful an effect on my psyche.

Some tombstones resonated more than others. A young fella, buried at the age of 27, the same year that David died--you tell me. I wept for a handsome stranger.

But the siren call of even dead celebrities cannot be denied. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are buried side-by-side. A witty fan left behind a pair of reading glasses.

The modesty of Marcel Proust's tomb was surprising

. . . particularly in comparison to that of Oscar Wilde's.

If only I'd brought my lipstick!

Edith Piaf

Famous names appear in the columbarium, too.

A few days later, I also toured Montparnasse cemetery late one afternoon. Smaller, with fewer expatriate deaths, but no less interesting.

Serge Gainsbourg

Snow flurries reflected my camera's flash over the final resting place of the father of existentialism and the mother of feminism.

But the grave that provided the strongest frisson was that of an American actress with a pixie cut plucked from teenage obscurity in Iowa by Otto Preminger to play Joan of Arc in a Hollywood adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw play. After Jean-Luc Godard cast her in Breathless, the iconic French New Wave film, she married Romain Gary and adopted France as her home.

Persecution by the FBI for her support of the Black Panthers likely contributed to her tragic death at age 40. Read up kids, it's a fascinating story, or watch Kristen Stewart credibly impersonate her--at least physically-- in Seberg.