xtcian

11/20/02 This was one of

11/20/02

This was one of those decompression days that immediately follows a large gathering of people here at the farm, typified by the kind of inertia that would slow the planets to a crawl. Tessa, after rallying four days straight for guests, food and a trip to Madison Square Garden, could scarcely get out of bed. We gathered enough adenine triphosphate to get over to Great Barrington to see Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes' new film that beautifully apes the "women's films" of Douglas Sirk (some of which are the life blood supply of Tessa's moviegoing consciousness), and it was an understated treat. Not just for the 1950s-style ludicrousness of America's civil liberties, but the art direction was fabulous; several rooms in Julianne Moore's house are the exact replica of our unchanged rooms here at the farm. I've renovated the downstairs, but the upstairs has not been altered significantly since 1955:

one of our bedrooms: note "maple leaf" single bed (no sex please), gold-plated cherubs on wall, and sunburst clock with wood paneling and green-flowered wallpaper

There are about fifty incredible shots in this movie, but the last one stands out as significant: after a homosexual tryst dissolves her family, and our heroine is left with a bittersweet goodbye from a forbidden love across the racial divide, the camera pans up slowly from the cold snow and into a tree limb showing the first buds of spring. I took it to mean "don't worry, Julianne: the 1960s are just around the corner and pretty soon it'll be okay to be gay and cool to date a black man."

Then about two hours after the movie, I thought: nope. White, straight America still hates queers, and they're not too fond of black people either. It was enough to make me want to go back to bed.

11/29/02 Even though we were

11/29/02

Even though we were deep in Thanksgiving lethargy, miles upstate, blanketed in snow and wind chills in the teens, the mighty Tar Heels' thrashing of paper tiger Kansas on Wednesday night lit a bunsen burner 'neath all our asses, and we decided to trek into the city for the second game, this time against Stanford.

A more worthwhile two-hour drive was never had, as the electricity at Madison Square Garden was intimate, the food (all crap, of course) was comfortingly bad for us, and Tar Heels put on another show. Again, I must always disclaim the whole "being a fan" thing for those of you who couldn't care less about sports (or who are fans of, say, the Blue Hens of the University of Delaware) but there's something very comforting about entering an entire section of folks dressed in your colors, a feeling that is even more heartening when you're out of your hometown and miss seeing games with 21,444 rabid fans in baby blue. Old friends crop up at these things: I saw Juliette Dickey (late of Mammoth Records), Beth Smith (from the Lab!) and even Alex and Wendi were there. Attending away games reminds you that your clan is always lurking beneath the gritty exterior of an otherwise harsh town.

sarcasm, delight, witticisms and absurdist humor in row E: Sam, Tessa, Jordana, Sean, Seth and Jon. not pictured: me and Chip

Tessa's nephew Sam has been so captivated by our constant game-fed frenzies that he became a serious Tar Heel fan about two years ago (at age 10) and now refers to them as "we." When we asked him what high school he wanted to attend, he mentioned Concord in Cambridge, Mass and when Tessa said she thought it was a Morehead school, he said, "well that seals it then." Gotta start these kids early, what with Dick Vitale mentioning Dook every five seconds. I'll take any chance I get to spread my hatred of that goddamn place around.

The game, you ask? We won it going away, with several moves on behalf of Raymond Felton that have to be rewound to be believed. I tell you, I have survived on the mother's milk of Tar Heel basketball for seventeen years now, and I don't think I've ever begun to love a team more (except for Dean's '96-'97 crew) nor ultimately cared less about the outcome of each game, since watching them is so much fun.

Yeah, I know it all sounds goofy to those of you who don't care. I pity you - without sports teams we deprive ourselves of the delightfully irrational; and without a tribe, we deprive ourselves of belonging. All that shit George Will writes about baseball? The PBS series from Ken Burns? It all melts away in the white-hot glow of a 2-on-1 fast break with a streaking trailer for the no-look pass and dunk, I swear to God.

Jackie Manuel goes up against the double-team as Sean May waits for the rebound (click for bigger)

11/28/02 First off, you need

11/28/02

First off, you need a table. King Arthur, in the underrated musical "Camelot," brainstorms until he comes up with the Round Table, at which no knight can be exalted above any other. For me, a good table needs to have two or three leaves as to extend itself deep into the livers of those around it. You can imagine my (and Tessa's) jubilation at finding an antique table at the furniture place in Millerton that has ten leaves and extends to a length of fourteen feet. That pretty much settles the argument; you're having Thanksgiving at our house.

Tessa and I try to look like a Norman Rockwell painting, but I just look learning-disabled

Tessa and I do a little tug of war over the issues of Privacy vs. Gragariousness a lot, and I have to say, she puts up with a lot of my desire to gather tons of people in one spot. I think after our first successful "Men and Mayonnaise" party as freshmen I was hooked; I may have been an oversexed moron in college, but I threw some of the best parties the late eighties and early nineties ever saw. Shit, we just made a whole movie about a particularly depraved one.

Sometimes there are grumbles, but everyone always ends up having a blowout weekend at the farm, which is exactly the way we'd like it: a mixture of the steadfastness of age combined with the dipshit silliness of adolescence. Present at this year's Thanksgiving: Tessa's sister Michelle and my sister Michelle; Tessa's brother-in-law Dennis; their children Katharine and Sam; my Mom; my sister's best friend Anastasia; John Kelleran and his family; and even Chip drove up from North Carolina. We had a white borscht soup courtesy of John's wife Justyna and her Polish mom (who cutely speaks ten words of English), my mom's orange rolls (who cutely threaten to send you to the cardiologist), and an 18-pound turkey that was so golden and delicious as to be an absolute clich. I added a flair for the dramatic by stacking the dining room full of fifteen or so pumpkins I grew this summer, as we were too late to carve them for Halloween, and many toasts were hoisted aloft in the general spirit of desire to keep our loved ones as close to us as possible in this wicked world.

Later we played "Celebrity," and Holden Caufield's sister Phoebe came up twice.

our family says Happy Thanksgiving to my family 24 years ago (below) and yours too

11/27/02 Happy Thanksgiving to all

11/27/02

Happy Thanksgiving to all four of you actually on the internet today! My family wishes you all the best. My family from 1978 does too:

11/26/02 I'm basically the most

11/26/02

I'm basically the most liberal person I know, which is saying something, because most of my friends love opera. I grew up in a household where you could get grounded for a month even quoting someone saying "the n-word" about African-Americans, and what with both of my parents being artists and all, we dogpaddled our way through the Nixon years and the Reagan decade with epithets hurled at the TV by both father and mother. I've been sickened by Republicans since I was able to barf applesauce, and I'm now angry at Democrats for not being liberal enough. This makes me a pinko fag nut when compared to the other Home Depot shoppers I saw today, but somebody's gotta do it, right?

There are a few exceptions, though. I have a knee-jerk reaction to people who live in this country without speaking the language; I feel like that's just part of what you give to the country in return for living in it. I plan on speaking as little English as possible when we get to France, and I'd do the same for any other country (except China that shit is too hard!) Yes, I know this country is full of people too poor to learn the lingua franca, but there's something that gets my gut when wandering into Monterey Park in Los Angeles and not seeing a single sign in English. I fully accept that it is irrational and probably mean-spirited of me, and I'm working to change it.

The other thing I'm having trouble with right now? I'm developing a strong disgust for young, angry Islamic fascists all around the world. I know they seem like an easy target, but my dime-store Buddhism has helped me dispel a lot of rage I've had since youth (not that you'd know, fellow basketball players) and part of that is giving up on long-held assumptions about groups of people I don't know. But the goings-on in Nigeria this week are so sickening as to foment newfound revulsion to a community who think it's cool to run wild in the streets of Lagos and stab innocent bystanders to death because of something a columnist wrote.

My loathing of Al-Qaedian terrorists is .000001% tempered by the fact that I agree with several of the things they want: the U.S. should get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia, we should have nothing to do with propping up bullshit foreign governments, we should cut our oil consumption IN HALF, and we should have LONG AGO forced Israel to grant Palestinian statehood no matter how complicated it might be. This shit, to me, is common sense although if I saw Bin Laden in the street, I'd still want to crush his face with the business end of a tire iron, even if just for the chaplain Mychal Judge.

But I probably wouldn't, because I'm fucking civilized. I believe in a literate, kind, sensitive society where you don't kill people, period. And for some reason, the situation in Nigeria is as disgusting as anything else I've heard this year: the minister of information for one of the northern states has issued a "fatwa" on the head of Isioma Daniel, the columnist who dared speak her mind in the local paper. The actual government is telling their frothing, mad mobs to find her and rip her apart.

215 people died this week in Lagos, and I promise you most of them were Christians. Yes, Christians can be awful too, they initiated the Crusades, they gave us Anita Bryant, they can be meaner than shit, blah blah blah. And you can't hold a religion accountable for its worst adherents, just like Jesus probably didn't ask that deranged pro-lifers kill abortion providers. But there's only one major religion in the modern world that commands death for "insulting" its leader, and it ain't Mormons.

I'm trying to get it, I'm trying to understand. I'm even going to buy that book that caused an uproar at UNC, just to scratch the surface of this faith's appeal. But to issue a fatwa on a writer for half a sentence fragment? I'd like to take this moment to issue my own message, this one going out to the singer Cat Stevens (now "Yusef Islam") for his unwavering support of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie: a big, hearty, long-overdue FUCK YOU. When "Peace Train" comes on the radio, I slam the OFF button, pull over to the side of the road and hock a loogie into the bushes. It helps get the taste of you and yours out of my mouth.

11/25/02 Things That Fellow 7th

11/25/02

Things That Fellow 7th Graders Don't Find Appealing:

- the violin solo to Vivaldi's "Spring" in the Franklin Junior High School Orchestra Concert

- ham radio booth at the Boy Scout Jamboree

- not knowing how to dive

- your mom dropping you off right in front of the main door

- Mork thermos filled with Strawberry Quik©

- getting an A-minus on the geology test everyone else failed

- striking out with two men on

- sheet music to Bartk's "Mikrokosmos" stolen at lunch

- red hair

trust me on these

11/24/02 Well, if you're going

11/24/02

Well, if you're going to have an I Heart NY weekend, you might as well document it especially me, since I've had a dearth of those lately. Once in a while the city reminds you why you flocked here in the first place, a gathering of such incredible minds and quixotic ambition that, for a brief second, you forget about all the bus exhaust, the urine, the insanely rude people, and the mixed drinks that cost $14 before the tip.

Saturday night we saw Take Me Out, a play about the repercussions of a major baseball player revealing his sexual identity. Our friend Dan Kois wrote a similar play a few months back for the 24-hr Plays, except that Dan's was ten minutes and "Take Me Out" had two intermissions. Still the dialogue was terrific, and though the play never knew what it wanted to be, it was never boring (which is my big beef with theater) and our friends Fred Weller and Dominic Fumusa were terrific. The real revelation to me, however, was Denis O'Hare, whose delightfully, slightly-repressed gay accountant to the "out" player is so good as to defy convincing. Just go see this thing; you'll understand. He delivers a soliloquy that should be a prerequisite for all actors who want to work in the biz.

Afterwards, we went out with Fred Weller and his girlfriend Ally to Haveli's on 2nd Avenue, and had a terrific hang with them both. I've known Fred since I was a spastic 18-year-old freshman, and watching his evolution from gorgeous, surreal fratboy to serious Broadway actor has been really satisfying. He always told great stories, which is fitting, because most of other people's stories are about him. I'll also be forever indebted to him for his impeccable work on the Pink House movie at a time when other actors were being rather difficult, he was a breath of fresh air, nailing his lines and looking damned dapper as our 1929 antagonist.

me, Fred, Ally and Tessa freezing our asses off

Tonight after a botched day of sleeping through hoops, then missing my own team beat ODU while I was looking for parking – ended nicely at a dinner party held by Colin Beavan and his wife Michelle. Among the crowd were the writer Pippin Parker, the hilarious Jen Albano, our own Matty Dawson, and some other folks I'd seen at Tuesdays@9 over the years.

It was the kind of conversation that I thought New York would offer every night, but alas, you only get concentrated intellect like this every month or two, even in this city. I brought the evening to a weird halt by asking our hosts what they considered to be the "basic fight" they keep having over and over. To be fair, I offered the one that Tessa and I keep having ("she wants me to do stuff and I don't want to do stuff") even though this got us off on a tangent of the etymology of the verb "to nag," and then, of course, to birthin' babies. As we sled headlong into the snowy plains of our thirties, I imagine this is a conversation that will only increase in intensity.

One thing, though: if you're a guy, don't tell anyone you want to have lots of kids with your fiance. It makes you look like a sexist, hegemonic breeder with serious cock issues. Take it from me.

on the way home, Tessa nestles into the company of a gaggle of Jewish Orthodox French schoolkids

Oh, and HI Liz Benjamin!