one thing today

  Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie Bob Dylan When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong And lonesome comes up as down goes the day And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin' And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin' And yer sun-decked desert and everg...

  I thought I lost more than six hundred pages of journal tonight.  Fooling around with margins and things and thought it might help if I changed the Pages doc into a Word doc and tried it ... and it came up blank in the new doc and vanished in the original. Ugh. Panic. A call to Apple and a thirty minute wait for help. Called Elizabeth instead and after a short while we - meaning she - found a way to retrieve it. Sixteen years of life account was rescued. My thoughts swirl at the possibility of that great loss and I travelled from desolation to relief as this year closes and we see what awaits us.

                    p                e         e           e                   e      l                               l s                                       s                                                                                                                                       ...

  George Clooney was an inductee tonight on the Kennedy Center Honors program. His father Nick recounted that on the day Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated he was trying to write news copy at a local California tv station.   Seven year old George came into the green room and dumped a bag of his toy guns on the coffee table. He told his dad he didn’t want them anymore.   Nick stopped writing his script and reported what his son did to his viewers.  

                                                                                                                                      Go to CNN                               and search for                                  Sha'kyra 

  elegance:  dignified gracefulness or restrained beauty of style : polish. I watched the 2016 best movie Moonlight .   There is a scene where a boy rides in the passenger seat of a car and sticks his arm out the window. The wind pushes his hand back and forth and up and down.   He tries to control it and then surrenders to the strong air.   Is there anyone who hasn't done that as a child?  

  Spent Christmas day feeling a little like the only living boy in nyc in a cushy OK kinda way - listening to early Rhymin’ Simon, Glen C, Blossom Dearie, Etta James, Hoagy C, Bix B, Beyond the Sea Bobby D.   I’m reading his bio and, like Jack You Can't Handle the Truth N,  he found out late in life that his sister was really his mother.   

  Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart. Maureen Dowd

  This is the first piece of art I liked in our house growing up.  When my mother died, it was the only thing I wanted of hers, besides her wedding ring - which when I was twelve - she left me upon my request.   I have no idea about the origins of Chinese guy. His water jug is chipped and it used to hold flowers. I’m not sure why I liked it so much. He was so weird: his two black buns and nutty necklace and outfit and red pencil point nails. He's the opposite of a boring bounder.  

  I don’t know if it’s the time of year … or having this bug and all I’m pretty much doing is vegging out and ruminating - but I’ve been thinking about people who’ve come and gone and their spirit suddenly comes to mind.   Like my oftentimes  exasperating yet most always well intentioned mega Waspy, Upper East Side co-worker for more than two decades RIchard.  A colleague of ours used to call him Ricardo just to piss him off. He was a little older than me - dog years in gay life - and called me “Star." He told sometimes interesting stories that went on and on and sadly, he was in the closet his entire life and didn't have anywhere near as much fun as he could have had. One afternoon, we had lunch across the street at the Flame diner on 9th. On the way back to the office I bought two candy bars at the newsstand and handed him one.   “You’re in love aren’t you?” I said yes and asked how he knew.   “ T hat’s what people in your situation do.”  

I am watching the Paul Simon special - Stevie, Sting, Bonnie, Garth and Trisha, Jimmy Cliff. The music has run through our lives: blasting out of cars, on beaches,  bars, movies, stores, elevators, parks, offices and diners, out of our mouths and motions, making life more full and fun. His is a stunning thing and I've enjoyed witnessing it seep deep into our shared spaces and times.  

I have never felt more Scrooge-ish than right now as this crappy year craps out. I just finished watching the Hallmark Channel’s first gay Christmas movie. It’s Velveeeeta cheesey but thats the brand. The two guys were OK and the kids weren’t as cringe worthy as they could have been and the straight guy characters seemed more gay than the gay guys. It was just a little humdrum   just like me right now. Lately, everything seems cornball and I don’t mean like the ones flavored with caramel and molasses. Ho, ho, ho and  Merry C.

  have been out of commission - probably have that rsv thing - coughing my brains out ... but really feel at a loss for things to note, too - maybe because I haven't been out and about and noting stuff ... times change ... this too shall pass ... and I will once more enjoy breathing freely, sleeping well, a good sandwich as Warren Werewolf Zevon reminded us near his end. 

It rained all day. I didn't go out and wonder if I'm getting another sore throat. I'm drinking tea with lemon out of a big white cup with the Universal Studios Hollywood logo on its side. I took it from an ex friends house when I visited her maybe twenty five years ago. Her husband worked for Disney and they had a life size portrait of Walt above their fireplace. I am no longer friends with her because she once said her husband was "nigger rich" in my apartment, right after she said she was really surprised that a mutual friend of ours didn't have matching towels in her guest bathroom. It was time. 

  I went inside the Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth this afternoon. It’s the 1841 church where Tony Soprano almost had a heart attack during a wedding and had a lot of trouble taking off his shoes for the Feds. It’s a beautiful church with a gorgeous mural above the altar that almost makes me go there.   And it makes me go back to going to Mass before school during Lent when you were supposed to do something or give up something to prove you’re better than your normal self for forty days. It is wild how being in a setting like that can make you go somewhere inside and move more toward belief than wish, at least for a moment.  

He did everything - magazine and paperback illustrations, movie posters (his first was  Breakfast at Tiffanys )    espionage, Westerns, romance, Gothics. Saturday Evening Post,   Good Housekeeping, True Detective, Esquire, James Bond.    As a pre-teen, he got me excited and ultimately disappointed.   I thought once I grew up and left my hometown and moved to the city - I’d meet and live among his amazing, sexy, alluring, crafty, enigmatic and ridiculously beautiful men and women.    Well, once in a very rare moment I did.   But either their style and time had come and gone and I was too late for the party or, more likely, they never existed in the first place.   

My five year old next door neighbor's babysitter is standing in front of our building facing the street. Two men face her. One kisses her on the mouth quite Romeo like, he stands back and then moves in again, she raises her head again and he completes a second similar delivery. He then looks over at the man to his right, waits a beat and then lightly smacks him on the back of his head. Tapped head guy kisses the babysitter on the cheek, the three of them get in a car and drive off.   

  If you haven’t introduced yourself to Roy Wood Jr. - you have a great time waiting for you. He is stream stone smooth and incisive and wildly funny. He’s a correspondent on Comedy Central and at the top of his game all on his own. My op - nobody tops him. Watch his hour long “Father Figure” on Youtube and go from there. He’s the best put-things-together-wrap-the-story upper ever. He’s high art. Don’t trust me. Find out yourself.  

  This is the second time I’ve mentioned my favorite photograph (by Ruth Orkin) here. Backstage at opening night of Member of the Wedding 1950. They are a Holy Trinity. The storyteller and her two acclaimed acolytes. Ethel Waters pure, toothy smile. Carson McCullers hungry for her bosomy comfort.   A twenty eight year old Julie Harris playing twelve. Her demitasse cup, her little rings and earrings and choppy hair and pinched mouth. The half empty cushy brocade couch. Carson's and Julie’s blouses blending. Ethel’s headband. What is she looking out at? Carson’s cufflink and curled fingers. What’s inside the box?

  I like when I hear a word or phrase or song I haven’t heard since my childhood - like “dry up”, “like fish”, “so funny I forgot to laugh”, "Blueberry Hill", “take a picture it lasts longer”, “Stranded in the Jungle.”   I’m reading about post World War 1 NYC. One of the soldiers favorite marching songs was “we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here” sung to the tune of   “Auld Lang Syne.” I read this and flashed on my youngest sister Jessie singing it a lot. I wonder where she heard it. Probably in a cartoon. It was good to picture her young and singing and happy and alive.

  Either Monica Vitti had the best hair in movies or she employed a peerless wigmaker.   I Google.   Is there anyone better than Miss Vitti to make us reconsider the rules of modern beach hair? Trekking around the shores of the Aeolian Islands in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film masterpiece L’Avventura, she eschews air-dried waves for a windswept, bouncy blonde bob as relentlessly voluptuous as her pillowy lips. Throughout the rest of the decade—as Antonioni’s lover and muse—the hair remained glamorous, the mystery firmly intact. She’s a study in self-possessed bombshell sensuality that somehow feels fresh again in its willful femininity, its unself-conscious acknowledgement of having made the effort. Hot rollers, a hairbrush, and liquid liner for the beach? A million times yes.

  On a grey, drizzly afternoon, I sit at my desk and stare out the window. Suddenly, like an apparition, a young, strolling Japanese  bride and groom appear - pale, beautiful, peaceful. They wear small smiles, the bride drapes her train elegantly over her arm, they walk on.   I get a very strong feeling the scene holds some lasting point for me. I don’t know what it is.  

  I’m ashamed of myself.   A man on the subway asks for a hand out and I hand him a dollar.   He asks if I have any food.   I do.   A spaghettini pie and two little bakery carrot cakes.   I tell him I don’t for some fucked up reason.   I won’t do that again and I will volunteer at Gods Love We Deliver.  

  ... from me and these three kings of Orient who are bearing gifts from ravishing stars. 

    Judy Collins concert with two friends from my so early days and sister Suzanne.  A splendid rendition of  Mr. Tambourine Man  brings out timeless treasure in diamond words … and  Who Knows Where the Time Goes  down as wonderful as decades always and brings sudden tears to Amanda and me. Judy’s shining notes soar out and back thru our fortunate lifetimes  A perfect holiday season marking after a  supper in an ancient home with a warm fire and soft, easy talk about this then that. 

  Went to see You Will Get Sick tonight.   Linda Lavin aka TV’s ancient Alice - she’s 85 - and the sweet, naive Asian stock trader in Billions.   Linda has that IT theater thing.  Real  star wallop even though you're not sure why.   The play is semi surrealistic, beautifully staged, wanting in several ways.    It’s become clear to me that Times reader comments deliver much more impact and are more on point edifiying than the august paper of record reviews.  They  are more spot on trustworthy, less invested in advancing an oft times esoteric deconstruction.   Warhol was right, i.e. - besides being a guy’s name …  ART is whatever you can get away with.  

  Mayor Adams says he hates rats more than anything else and he's initiated an extensive hunt for a Rat Czar/Overlord, our first esteemed Director of Rodent Mitigation. According to his spokesperson, the key requirement is "determination." And according to a city public relations failed poet, this upcoming urban hero must ooze "a swashbuckling attitude, bad assery and a virulent vehemence for vermin." The mega challenging gig pays up to 170K, including state benefits and a key to the down and dirty kingdom - a lifetime Metrocard. 

It’s World Aids Day.   S till.   The only perfect thing I ever did was care for my best friend Michael who died on my birthday in 1990 right in the midst of the raging war.   He was sick for five years and close by, a floor above me on Grove Street. He kept his dry humor until the very end. For some reason I can't recall, we were obsessed with Scorsese's Bible movie. One day I walked up to his hospital bed and said "how are you my last temptation of Christ?" And, hardly able to speak, he answered "holier than thou." His mother visited during his final days in Saint Vincents. “Oh, son, I just had lunch in the cafeteria and ate the worst hamburger I ever had.” His response - “why?” I was on a GMHC buddy team.   Ten of us twelve members - along with all of our clients - died.   My friend Jim and I thought maybe it was because we smoked .   Was a dark time.   Glad it’s gone.  Kinda. For me anyway.