Matt and I saw the first preview performance of The Ritz on Saturday night. This is a revival of a 1975 Terrence McNally farce about a member of a mob family who winds up hiding out in a gay bathhouse to escape a hit on his life.

I didn’t care for the show. In fact, parts of it really irritated me. I don’t know who decided that a revival of a dated 30-year-old play with jokes about “chubby chasers” was a good idea. The apex of my irritation occurred late in the second act when the show seemed close to the end but wound up going on for another 10-15 minutes. The show wasn’t all bad — I thought Brooks Ashmanskas (as a flamboyant bathhouse patron) and Rosie Perez (as an aspiring songstress) were particularly good, and there’s a funny sendup of Pippin in the second act. But overall I was disappointed.

Better entertainment came from the elderly couple sitting next to me. I felt bad for them because they seemed confused about what was happening on stage and didn’t seem to get most of the jokes. During the intermission I heard the husband trying to explain to the wife what a gay bathhouse was. “It’s like a spa for gay people,” he said.

Then I heard them conferring quietly about something. A minute later, the husband turned to me with his Playbill opened to the cast photos. He pointed to the photo of Brooks Ashmanskas. “Which one is he?” he asked me.

I pointed to the part of the stage where Ashmanskas’s character’s bathhouse room was located. “He’s the one who uses that room,” I said.

“Oh… the gay?” he said to me.

Um…

“They’re all gay,” I said.

“Well, the prominent gay.”

“Yeah.”

I turned back to Matt.

“You know you have to blog about this,” Matt said.

And thus…

I purposely didn’t blog anything about 9/11 yesterday. On past 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve sometimes blogged about it and sometimes not, but I think yesterday was the first time that I purposely refrained.

Yesterday felt like the most normal September 11 in a long time. We had our first chorus rehearsal of the season last night. At first, a few weeks ago, it was weird to see that our first rehearsal would be on September 11, 2007, and I wondered if that was appropriate. But then I thought, you know what? Enough. It’s just another day of the year. We shouldn’t be held hostage to the calendar.

Sure, I thought about the day at certain points. I recorded MSNBC in the morning, because it was rerunning the NBC TV coverage from that morning six years ago and I wanted to save it (which I’d meant to do when it was aired last year). And I thought about my friend Doug. And after work I returned a library book at the Jefferson Market branch on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, the same intersection where I first found out six years ago what was happening. It gave me a little shiver. And at night, from our apartment window, we could see the twin beams of light shining up from Lower Manhattan.

But I don’t know what I could have said yesterday that wouldn’t have been either mawkish or callous. While the New York Times and Washington Post websites gave top coverage to the Petraeus hearings, CNN.com’s main story yesterday morning said something like, “Six Years Later: We Remember.” That “we remember” that made me want to barf. The sentimentalization of it all. As in, if you don’t cry today, you’re not a good American. Just give us the news! Don’t try to tell us what we’re feeling.

Life continues.

I think I found a new timesink.

[via kottke]

Rest in peace, Jane Wyman.

I used to watch “Falcon Crest” in the mid-80s. The first thing that pops into my head now is the earthquake that Angela Channing and Cesar Romero’s character got caught in. I remember being unable to dissociate Cesar Romero from his role as The Joker.

And oh, the stories Wyman must have had about Reagan.

Happy birthday to Matt!

For the next 109 days, we’re the same age and I don’t have to be the older one. Yay!

As of today, there are 500 days left in the Bush presidency.

Closer than we were…

This morning I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” which appears in his anthology of the same name. (The piece originally appeared in Gourmet Magazine in 2004 and is online.) Wallace was assigned by Gourmet Magazine to attend the Maine Lobster Festival, and what he wound up writing was an exploration of the morality of eating living creatures.

In the case of lobsters, they are literally living right up until you toss them into a big pot of boiling water:

The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came in … whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster is fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain…

Therefore, as is not the case with cows or chicken, the chef can’t avoid the fact that the food he’s cooking used to be a living being.

I made a sandwich this morning to take to work for lunch. After I finished reading the article later on my morning commute, I thought about that sandwich: in between the bagel halves, along with the piece of munster cheese, were several perfect, sterile, oval-shaped slices of turkey meat. They had been wrapped in plastic when I bought them. They couldn’t have looked less like food. They looked like they’d rolled off a factory conveyor belt — which of course they had. And when I’d taken the plastic-wrapped package of sliced turkey out of the refrigerated case and put it in my shopping basket, it hadn’t even entered my mind that a big bird had been tightly crammed into an enclosure with hoards of other big birds, probably scared to death, or at least very unsettled (chicken producers remove the chickens’ beaks from their bodies so that the chickens don’t peck each other to death from the stress of overcrowding), and sliced pieces of that bird were now in my shopping basket.

I wound up going out to lunch with a friend instead (he’d just come back from vacation and we decided to catch up), and I got a veggie burger. I never get veggie burgers. But I got one today. This was partly because my friend is a vegetarian (well, a pescatarian) and he ordered one, but also, I just felt like not eating an animal.

It’s possible that the world would be better off if we were all vegetarians. For one thing, crops take up much less acreage than does the ground required for livestock to graze. For another, we’d have less heart disease; we’d be collectively physically healthier as a society. And for another, we wouldn’t have to deal with the messy question of eating animals.

And yet,we human beings have a natural taste for animal flesh. Hamburgers taste good! And animals are fantastic sources of protein. And didn’t the Native Americans of the Plains — those indigenous peoples we idolize as having lived, unlike our selfish selves, in harmony with the Earth — eat buffalo meat?

I don’t really have a big moral problem with eating animals. After all, we’re bigger than they are (usually), and we’re the owners of this planet (except not really), and we as a race do wonderful things (except not always). As you can tell from the parentheticals, I have some doubts. And I wouldn’t be particularly happy if some giant aliens came along and decided to stick us humans into overcrowded pens, pull out all our teeth, fatten us up, and then slaughter and roast us and wrap perfect, oval-shaped human slices in vacuum-sealed plastic.

And yet, after finishing this entry, because I didn’t eat my turkey sandwich for lunch I’m going to eat it for dinner.

We’re complicated living creatures, we humans.

Yet another request for a doctor recommendation: can any of my readers in Manhattan recommend a good shrink who has the power to prescribe medication? I need someone who’s on my health plan. I have a list of docs on my health plan but I don’t know anything about them.

Feel free to email me or leave comments.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of the Edsel. They first went on sale on September 4, 1957 and they were, of course, a huge flop.

The following anecdote seems unreal.

After months of sluggish sales, the crack PR team gathered to brainstorm ideas for selling Edsels. They were battered and weary and devoid of ideas until an adman named Walter “Tommy” Thomas blurted out a suggestion.

“Let’s give away a [bleeping] pony,” he said.

Much to Thomas’s amazement, his idea was not only accepted, it was expanded. The geniuses at Edsel decided to advertise a promotion in which every Edsel dealer would give away a pony. It worked like this: If you agreed to test-drive an Edsel, your name would be entered into a lottery at the dealership, with the winner getting a pony.

Ford bought 1,000 ponies and shipped them to Edsel dealers, who displayed them outside their showrooms. Many parents, egged on by their pony-loving children, traipsed in to take a test drive. Unfortunately, many of the lucky winners declined the ponies, opting instead for the alternative — $200 in cash — and soon dealers were shipping the beasts back to Detroit.

Now the Edsel folks were not only stuck with a lot of cars they couldn’t sell, they were also stuck with a lot of ponies they couldn’t give away. The cars were easy enough to store, but the ponies required food. And after they ate the food, they digested the food. And then . . . another fine mess for Edsel.

I’m very curious about this new novel about a gay teenage superhero, whose author is profiled in the Times today.

Jim McGreevey writes about Larry Craig in today’s Washington Post. Despite McGreevey’s flaws, this is a beautifully written piece. He writes, about the shame he felt as a gay young man:

How do you live with this shame? How do you accommodate your own disappointments, your own revulsion with whom you have become? You do it by splitting in two. You rescue part of yourself, the half that stands for tradition, values and America, the part that looks like the family you came from, and you walk away from the other half the way you would abandon something spoiled, something disgusting. This is a false amputation, because the other half doesn’t stop existing.

He even touches on his own real misconduct, the hiring of Golan Cipel onto his staff.

I went to Barnes & Noble today. I’d done some online research and wrote down the names of a few books on writing that I wanted to look at. Then I walked up to the huge Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue and 18th Street, the academic-oriented one where they sell everything under the sun. In the writing section they had all the books on my list, so I looked them over. But the one that drew my eye was the one that wasn’t on my list: How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights, by Ariel Gore.

I leafed through it, twice. I didn’t buy it because I’m trying to be very careful about buying new books after spending so much energy on getting rid of books in the past few weeks. But the title really cuts through all the subtext and gets to the core of what I want.

On the other hand, online I came across this old interview by Charlie Rose of one of my idols, David Foster Wallace (video; text). It’s the first time I’ve ever seen video of him or heard him speak. There’s something off-putting yet sexy about him.

Toward the end of the interview, they talk about fame. And this segment really made me think.

DFW: I did — I did some recreational drugs. I didn’t have the — I didn’t have the stomach to drink very much and I didn’t have the nervous system to do anything very hard. Yeah, I did some drugs. I didn’t do as many drugs as most of the people I know my age. What it turned out was I just don’t have the nervous system to handle it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention and I got it really quick and —

ROSE: By writing.

DFW: — and realized it didn’t make me happy at all, in which case, “Hmm. Why am I writing?” You know, “What’s the purpose of this?” And I don’t think it’s substantively different from the sort of thing — you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant, right, and be a partner of his accounting firm and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. “The brass ring I’ve been chasing does not make everything okay.” So that’s why I’m embarrassed to talk about it. It’s just not particularly interesting. It’s — what it is, is very, very average.

ROSE: Yeah. Do you see yourself chasing a brass ring now?

DFW: I — this is what’s very interesting is I — there’s part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn’t really make very much difference to me because I learned in my 20s that it just doesn’t change anything and that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway…

I don’t know why I obsess about fame so much.

Part of it is that I want to do something I love. My therapist has said numerous times that she wants to help me find a career where I can’t wait to get out of bed every day and go to work. I’ve told her a couple of times that I wonder whether this is setting too high an expectation for myself, something I will never meet, something that will result only in disappointment. (The act of getting out of bed in the morning is itself a pain in the ass, no matter what’s waiting for me once I’m on my feet.)

And what I love to do is to read and write, but the only way you can support yourself as a writer is by getting paid for it, and the only way you can get paid for it – at least for the writing I want to do, not technical writing or copywriting – is by, in some sense, being famous.

Or maybe I should learn how to be a journalist? I don’t know.

I’ve decided that if I want to be a writer, I need to write every day. Write things that are potentially publishable.

But my god it’s hard when you’re trying to write for an unspecified publication from which you can get rejected, as opposed to writing for your familiar blog audience.

Senator Craig will resign tomorrow. My feelings about this scandal have wavered over the past couple of days. As a gay man, I feel a mixture of anger and pity for Craig right now (and pity is not the same as feeling sorry for him). He’s a hypocrite with internal-homophobic issues.

But, as a gay man, I also feel repulsed at how quickly this is happening – four days between the revelations and the decision to resign. Meanwhile, Senator David Vitter cheats on his wife by fucking hookers and nothing happens to him. Craig is ever so quickly being tossed aside or swept under the rug or whatever disposal-related metaphor you’d like to use. The Republican Party is a big Thanksgiving dinner where nobody wants to talk about Gay Cousin Larry. Instead it’s hey how ’bout them Packers, please pass the cranberries, look at all our normal grandchildren!

Craig will resign, Governor Otter (what an Idaho-esque sounding political name) will appoint his replacement, and Craig will sink cleanly below the surface, leaving not a ripple in the Republican consciousness. The Party can remain in denial, ignore its issues and go on pretending that gay people are The Other.

Sickening.

Oh, thank you, Internet. Someone has put together a mashup of Larry Craig’s “I am not gay” speech and “If You Were Gay” from Avenue Q.

[via AfterElton]

I need help, badly. I’ve had the theme song to Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple In All The World stuck in my head for the past two days. Every time I watch an episode, the music lodges itself in my brain and I can’t get it out. It’s worst when I first wake up in the morning.

And since I can’t get it out of my head I’m going to subject all of you to it as well. It’s about 45 seconds into this clip.

I guess there are only so many variations on a theme, which really hits home after you’ve looked at a few dozen political cartoons about the Larry Craig scandal.

Senator John Warner of Virginia will announce tomorrow whether he will retire after his current term, and he’ll do so at my beautiful alma mater.

I went to Jere’s birthday gathering last night at Marie’s Crisis. (It’s one of David’s favorite places in New York, but alas, he lives in Missouri.) I had the pleasure of finally meeting Tim, who moved to New York a year ago with his boyfriend and lives in a far-off land called Bushwick.

We all stood in a small clump near the bar and away from the piano, talking and listening to the piano player tinkle the out-of-tune ivories and the group around the piano sing along. One of Jere’s friends said it was his first time at Marie’s Crisis in 10 years and that as far as he could tell, nothing had changed at all, including the guy behind the piano.

It was good to get out and do something social. I’ve been feeling really bleah lately, but I was cheered up by being around a group of nice guys.

At one point, Tim remarked to me that my blog has been kind of angsty lately. I laughed and admitted that, yeah, that was probably the case, and I explained that I’ve been caught up lately (again) in trying to find my purpose in life. Of course, while I was (mercifully briefly) talking about this, I realized that the piano player was playing, and the people gathered around the piano were singing, “Purpose” from Avenue Q.

Digression: I can barely play the piano at all, so I shouldn’t talk, but can I just say how much I hate it when a piano player plays the wrong backup chords to a song being sung? Well, it’s not that I hate it, because I have sympathy for the accompanist as he tries to keep up, and again, I’m one to talk. It’s that my ears hate it. It drives me nuts.

Earlier this week, I’d decided that I’d hit on the solution to all my problems: I should become a freelance writer in my spare time, and eventually work my way up to things like the New Yorker and Harper’s and things like that. But after looking at various websites and books about how to be a freelance writer, I’ve come away with a nauseating impression of the whole thing. I get the impression that most freelance writing occurs for publications like Woman’s Day or Pet Fancy and so forth and consists of very practical-oriented and consumer-oriented articles. Numbered lists and so forth. And my admittedly unscientific perusal leads me to believe that most freelancers are women and that they love being able to write for Woman’s Day or women’s health magazines or parenting or pregnancy or cooking magazines.

Picture me sticking my finger down my throat and making a gagging sound. (If you could picture a sound.)

My impression of freelance writing might be completely wrong. But if it’s accurate, it’s totally not the kind of writing I want to do – completely disposable stuff. I’m interested in politics and culture and ideas, in which case I should try to write for publications that publish that kind of thing.

Instead of publications that publish Eighteen Practical Ways to Get Along Better With Your Pet!