that's beautiful. and has me in tears. the joke here, for me, is that sara and steve once spent a whole morning rescuing horseshoe crabs. they did the exact same thing. and some queen swanned over and said "they are hatching their eggs. they just crawled the eqivalent of however miles to a hatching ground."

and steve and sara had placed them back in the water.

irrevocable climate change. did you read that report. it's done.

that's where i'm at and why i've been quiet.

xo j

The Rest of Us

Hey there. Troubled times, so I'm really just reading around trying to make sense of what I can. Just finished another novel. It's just come out in French. It's by Stéphane Audeguy, and I'm liking it much much more than his first one which I read when it came out. It's called Nous Autres in French, and I think it should be titled The Rest of Us in English. A "we" narrates the novel, and we readers are given to understand that the narrator is basically all of the attentive dead of Africa. Here's a translation of its last paragraph, which has me on the verge of tears.

"One morning, Pierre discovers an extremely bizarre trace of something all the way at the end of the beach. It’s a kind of ribbon made up of little twists. It’s impossible for him to imagine what had left such a wake in the sand. He slowly follows it, trying to understand, trembling at the idea that this mysterious mark might just stop somewhere, thereby forever keeping its secret. At the moment the hesitant writing of this unknown life seems to him to be the most moving sign of the world’s grace. It goes on for another twenty yards. Finally, he sees a little shellfish quietly making its way with uncertain steps. Pierre calculates the fact that, in proportion to its size, this hermit-crab has just covered the equivalent of two thousand kilometers in this sandy desert. But he’s done so walking parallel to the ocean: the animal is moving surely towards a hideous and slow death. Pierre watches it for a long time. And then he can’t take it anymore, he picks up the animal, it quickly folds itself up into the bottom of its shell, he goes down to the sea and places it carefully into shallow water. He waits. Soon it goes about its business, incomprehensible, indifferent to the miraculous rescue of which it has just been the object. Pierre goes back towards the bungalows. His joy is as pure as the ungrateful crustacean’s joy, now entirely absorbed by the delicate pleasures of life in a lagoon, and the craziest wind won’t be able to shut us up, and our words on the earth one vast tomb."

Dancing Barefoot: A Triptych

Sunday afternoon

When I came across the drum corps, I didn’t realize it was carnival time. There were probably about thirty of them, with their different drums, dressed more or less the same. Coming upon it from our place, once enough of the people standing in front of you had filtered away, you had a great view of the drum corps leader who raised his hands to signal the upcoming shifts in rhythm. He would lift up his chin, often several times over in sync with the rhythm he was getting ready to modulate. He would lift up his eyes, too, and seemed almost as happily surprised as the rest of us listeners were once the crew got where he had been telling them to go. Then he would turn around, dancing with his own drum, making a grimace of pleasure. People watching them couldn’t help but be moved, often physically, letting it go into their hips or their heads. All of that rhythm illuminating all of our faces.

As we were walking away from it, T said exactly what was on my mind. I said, Qu’est-ce que j’adore ça, a drum corps, rhythm you can’t escape and that makes people giving themselves up to it so beautiful. T responded, Ca me donne envie de pleurer. The tears T named and that I felt welling up, too, come from being ravished at the sight of people's implication in that beauty, but also from the realization of all that we’re missing out on when we’re isolated in front of our various screens. And from finding what we were missing, by surprise, in the street.

“What’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ plenty of things missing…”

Thursday night at the movies: 35 Rhums

They’re on the way to a concert when her much beloved taxi breaks down. It’s pouring down rain as the four of them get out of the car to push it with a chorus of entirely understandable yet jovial screaming. They find a bar that’s open and go in for a drink. The bar owner’s son waits on them, telling them that it’s closing time and he can only serve them one drink. They leave, and the taxi-driver calls her colleague Pierre, speaking to him so loudly that the other three keep telling her not to scream. Pierre won’t be able to come and get them until much later. The concert will already be over. Still drenched, they go to knock on the door of a café that we soon realize is the one they’ve just left. One of them insists that the owner let them in, and he is so beautiful that the owner eventually concedes. While the taxi-driver calls Pierre back to tell him they won’t be needing him to come pick them up, “Nightshift” (“Marvin/ sang of the joy and pain…”) comes on and they start dancing.

The film’s story is about a love between a father and his daughter, and that is the pair we watch start the dance. Much of the beauty of the dancing, though, comes from the way who ends up dancing with whom, who breaks in on whose dance when, how the one lets go of the other is a choreography not only of their rhythm, but of the forms of their relations to one another. None of these relations are simple, but as they dance, everything becomes clear. They are stranded in the rain without transportation, and, instead of panicking, they allow themselves to be who they are, essentially in relation to one another. They make me want to be a part of us.

Saturday night: MoNA

Friday, our sex-buddy O came over with a big fat joint and we had a lot of fun, except for the unfortunate moment when the tilting world threw T for a curve and he scampered off for loud retching in the bathroom. So Saturday, we took it easy all day long. Our traditional morning-market forewent the traditional Saturday chicken, and we headed out for an Indian lunch. We followed it up with a stroll in the neighborhood, a coffee and some pinball, and an exhibit up the hill at this nifty little place called Le Plateau. N, of Romy Schneider fame from the last entry, had invited us to come for drinks at his studio on Friday, and saw right through T’s stutters when T explained we had other plans. N got to make fun of us for that on Saturday night. It so happened that we’d bought a big enough roast beef at market and I was raring to make a gratin. We had fresh green beans, too, so N and his beloved G came over for a meal. We invited Babar, who’d been on our mind and was on the other end of G’s cell as they walked in the door, at even more of the last minute. N’s cell phone had run out of batteries, so he hadn’t received our text message saying that we wanted to check out MoNA, a club night just down the street. As a result, they were all a little taken aback at the idea of going out. We’d also been talking about MoNA with S, who’s happily still around, and he came over after dinner and after thinking he was going to be able to see the YSL collection that’s been making headline news since then for showing that in spite the apparent dearth of it, there are some people in the world who have lots and lots of money to spend on famous people’s art. He and a friend had gone to the Grand Palais where the collection was on display for all to see before the auction started, had looked at the line, and S apparently decided it was time to join us and go dancing. In other words, we were porous and wanted to go out.

I haven’t danced that much in a long time. The porous we I was a part of is I think largely to thank for how easy it was for me to get going. Probably, too, the fact that for some reason I found myself at the threshold of the dance floor giving an archaeology of the term “queer” to G. French people of a certain ilk use the term, and fairly often these days, in English. Queerly enough, it ends up sounding like the French word for leather, cuir, especially when I use it because I like both so much. Translation takes time and effort, and I found myself explaining to G how “queer” got mobilized in the late 80’s and early 90’s, that it means weird, but has always had the undercurrent of sexual ambiguity. I explained how modernists like Woolf and James used the term in ways that we started to pay attention to back then, and that it’s sad to lose that genealogy when we use the term without translating it, really, in French. At some magical point, our conversation dwindled down and the rhythm picked us up. G and Babar left around 2, but T and S and I kept shaking our booty until 4. T invited S up, but S politely declined, saying he was a little pompette, which is a cute way of saying tipsy. So T and I stumbled upstairs, went at it until about 5 and slept late until the next day.

There's more than one way to show myself letting myself go.


the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face
the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself
grave visitations
what is it that calls to us?
why must we pray screaming?
why must not death be redefined?
we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms
and whirl on a pane of glass
an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree
the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women

showing myself letting myself go.

that was careless of me, and i apologize. when that song came on i was thrown back to toledo. spain. it was mid-summer and we'd endured an almost unendurable train ride from madrid. in the dead heat of the day, i forgot to watch the clouds and the sun; those incredible formations in el greco. storms came in, without even coalescing, just a wall of mist and electricity and streamed through and left as soon as they came. i'd fallen asleep, drooling. i know this sounds almost too much, but someone had a guitar. so i fell asleep to the guitar, privacy falling around us, and the heat was so dry. it would suddenly start raining and disturb the earth and the rolling fields, the grasses that had two sides, shining and dull with dust so that it came in through the windows. and we were going to read st. theresa's hot manuscripts, with god's heat and his burning landscape. but just then i was sleeping and uncomfortable. maybe i was afraid the guitar string would snap.

so there was like, this church of privacy around us. out of my mind, disoriented and groggy, in my dream, and a man came around selling cokes. so david got me a coke and i sat up, grumpy, and then was really easily charmed. blinked like a baby owl. i love you, coke! the guitar player still wasn't very good, a german student with a backpack and lots of little braids, colors and strings in his hair. pretty sure he was square-jawed and solid. i leaned against the window and watched his forearms. they had the golden fur i love so much. the corded muscles from rock climbing. it's a small mystery of arms that just kills me.

anyway, tomorrow and the next day i'm also pretty sure work is going to be a fucking jerk so it's nice to remember those very strong, very furry and masculine forearms and really how very bad his rendition was of "wild world' or whatever cat stevens it was and how cold my drink going down. my dear, be bright. remember this.

that secret that we know, that we don't know how to tell.... is that christmas morning? 19a. Jesus said: Blessed is the one who existed before coming into being.

showing myself letting myself go. so i'm just saying don't stress the lengths of your sentences. it reads better to me in everyday language, colloquial (the way we breathe, have sex, meander, star-gaze on a cold winter night)... but i also have this kind of joyous quirk when you veer off into exhaustion, when your "self" blurs. like that nice moment with you and t. after your debut. that's all. also... grief and missing someone that much. what's left but to turn to someone you love and take them in. i'll represent you in this wilderness as best i can. because i love you and i'm starting to love myself, and you will change, or (please, no. not again. do not leave yourself) leave. but stay if you can and love me. thank you for loving something in what i'm sending your way.

and how did all those books start? in the kitchen of the murray house, and then somehow charles wallace and meg always goes for a walk to the star-watching rock. thats how they start. one foot in front of the other. and you know, like 3 immortal beings and a unicorn or a seraphim thrown in there. (and someone in the murray family is always making someone else hot cocoa. swear to god). they become about love and time travel and getting back to something like trust and grace with things that are familiar, and so readily problematic to the larger society. like dirty gay bathroom sex, for example. that the relativity of connection has no underlying foundation, there's no ethics to breathing so why can't that be so for love.

i re-read a swiftly tilting planet last summer. happily crashed out on the daybed on my mother's porch with the morning sun, my little sherpa hat, wool sweater and coffee; and realized, startled, that you could change time. (also, i'm wearing the exact same things tonight. i used to wear this hat after i got out of the pool, during winter practices. it was dead cold outside and this awesome hat, brought back from macchu piccu in peru kept me warm. i was warm and my muscles hummed and there was a sweet ache thru my body all day. i could shrug and feel the last sprint, the last careening 100 yards all the way through my back. the stretch of it, and black ice-hot concentration). 52. His disciples said to him: Twenty-four prophets spoke to israel, and they spoke of you. He responded to them: You have deserted the living one who is with you, and you spoke about the dead.

like, what do you actually go through waiting on line to get into the club. you text, you talk, smoke, imagine the sex... and then all that convolution stops with a smile, or eye contact and another contractual agreement starts.

and then you wait for the bus, exhausted.

so exhausted. follow that through. make your grief sing for you. let it appear scattered and corralled by glimmering shadows, there's a cascading hill behind you, thoughts dripping with honey, lick your cigarette. because the loss is there. and you need to take it thru it's paces.

i feel like the commitment, however small, to constellations is fine as far as it goes. but this really is about you. your ability to understand that you're dealing with something that is both utterly material, with material consequences, and utterly immaterial at the same time. no contradictions need to be resolved. "but that this act requires fundamentally transforming the dominant logic models of Western science. It requires moving beyond the mutually exclusive, non-paradoxical model in which all contradictions must be resolved."

i think it's slightly hysterical that science is catching up with being. "your blood like so many ribbons in a tornado" frank o'hara. he says somewhere else "What an oak!"

i was born to adore you
as a baby in the blind
i was born to represent you
to carry in the sun
to carve your face into the back of the sun

antony, the crying light

so let me finish with frank o'hara, again:

We dust the walls.
And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

a song just came on:

Let I
I was born to adore you
As a baby in the blind
I was born to represent you
To carry your head into the sun
To carve you face into the back of the sun

Caroline's First Turn

So, last week, on Tuesday we inaugurated Obama and on Friday Caroline took her first turn on stage. Obama declaimed a sober and sobering speech, which didn’t stop any of us from getting giddy about, for example, Aretha’s hat, weepy at what it means when Aretha sings “Land where my fathers died,” cranky about how over-determined – my word, like you say, although it is borrowed – is this handsome and potentially great man’s load and how little margin for maneuver it would seem he’s going to claim for him- and ourselves, and happy at the reality of people dancing in the streets, singing with each other to praise him. Caroline – you know this, as no doubt do many of any people who read this site – is me in a dress. Her turn on stage was a brazen attempt at “La Javanaise,” one of the most well loved songs in the popular French repertoire, at a little self-labeled “boite des frissons” in the capital for a night in honor of the quintessential dirty old man with incredibly chiseled lyrics, Serge Gainsbourg. The audience knew the chorus, and they are the kind of audience who can’t help themselves from singing along. This might have been a good thing, because apparently, they were having trouble hearing the incredibly chiseled lyrics of which I miraculously did not flub a one. (It may be one of the most well loved songs in the repertoire, but nobody I’ve run across yet knows the lyrics to the stanzas, just the chorus.) Which is a good thing that’s also too bad considering nobody could hear them. This is a technical problem that may find solutions. The other queens have been known to complain about the insufficiency of the microphone set-up at said “boite des frissons.” But I think it was, as Mistress of the house Madame Hervé said right after the show, “that you didn’t sing loud enough! Nobody could hear you!”

Madame Hervé is a notoriously hard nut. My girlfriend Julie Guirlande told me afterwards as we were jiggling in our boy drag on the dancefloor that you just have to let whatever she says flow over you like water, but certainly not to let on that she might be getting to you. It took all Saturday for it to become water. Before she told me I hadn’t sung loud enough, Madame Hervé had already called me to order because I’d been out of the dressing room before the show. This is in large part because the dressing room measures all of about 15 square feet and involves no more than a curtain that sections off a sliver of dancefloor space right next to the stage. Iow, you want to get out of there. But apparently, staying in the dressing room before the show is a house rule that nobody had told me about. My girlfriend Melissa sheepishly apologized for not having said something. The other girls who’ve had a little more experience know that you can go out of the dressing room without incurring Madame Hervé’s wrath, but only if you’ve brought another dress to wear. Preferably with another wig. That’s what Jacqueline Genoux did. And then she had to come back to the tiny dressing room to put the elaborate feather-construction down the back of her second dress. Melissa had the same elaborate feather-construction to put on because they were doing a really funny duo together. The elaborate feather-construction involved a stick from which sprouted three feathered prongs. Which meant that wherever you were in the tiny dressing-room space, there were feathers under your nose. So there I was sitting in my dress waiting my turn on stage fighting with the feathers, trying to remember the terribly chiseled lyrics that I sometimes forget, vaguely hearing Taillefine do “Elisa,” Julie Guirlande do “La Madrague,” Lady Zoa do an incredibly vigorous “Pull Marine;” before it was my turn.

In her boy drag after the show, Julie Guirlande also underlined how nice Madame Hervé’s introduction of the “petite nouvelle” who would be me was. She asked everybody to give the “petite nouvelle” who would be me a warm round of applause. Which they did. And I haven’t mentioned it yet, but, in case you can't tell in the above picture, I was really pretty. And, like a big girl, I had done almost all of my makeup myself. But the whole thing really felt like a catastrophe. Madame Hervé did get to me. People couldn’t hear what I was saying. I had a whole bevy of supporters, like, among the most important, B, who had canceled a night out elsewhere to come be adorable and supportive with his adorable new “petit” P and with E, B’s office mate and fellow Thursday afternoon cake-partaker. While I was out working the crowd in restricted pre-show territory, B saw me and put up his fingers like I was a vampire. I think he has issues with the whole gender trouble thing. Or at least with my whole gender trouble. After all, he did fall for me as a topping boy in leather with a beard. And that is actually one of the things I’m having trouble getting my head around. I mean, myself in make-up really tends to fuck with people’s minds, and there is a whole elaborate distance that settles in between me in makeup and, for example, the people with whom I had just a couple of hours earlier been drinking wine while trying to find a bimbo’s song that I could sing for the next Folle Académie night at the Tango. There is a whole choreography of how to negotiate that distance and make it work for me and for them that I’m only just now becoming aware of. And apparently people really don’t recognize me. Which seems very strange to me, because, strangely enough, I do. I mean, when I look in the mirror while I’m doing the make-up, it’s just as strange as when I look at myself in the mirror without make-up. It’s all strange when you’re staring at yourself in a mirror.

My friend N was there. Once I’d taken off my makeup and dress, I went out for a cigarette with Lady Zoa and N came out, too. N has this idea that I don’t give enough of myself away, and he saw what felt to me like Caroline’s catastrophe as yet another incidence of that. And he said I had something of Romy Schneider about me. Which is a useful reference. N rattles on a lot. And as he was rattling on, Lady Zoa turned to me and said, “If this is a friend, you need to get some new ones.” She was wrong. Because N was more or less right, even if it didn’t sound exactly like he was being supportive. Because like I said to my shrink yesterday on the couch, I felt like it was a catastophe because it wasn’t. Because Caroline doesn’t yet know how to let the catastophe that is her mother and father rolled into one show through her yet. (The height of my outrageous ambition here is Antony singing through his fear of the middle place.) I thought it would be enough to put on a dress for that catastophe to be obvious. It’s not. I have to learn how to spend myself in a dress so that people can hear the catastophe that is breaking me up and giving my body (its hands, its legs, its voice) its rhythm.

We had long, raucous, rhythmic, sex the night after that. In our leather drag. At some point, I told T that his was the name of my expenditure. Which is a little differently intense than being married. It calls up other things to be named.

no i meant like nina simone's 8:46 fantastic "west wind" that her friend miriam makeba asked her to sing. i mean, whoa. holy fuck. so don't be worried.
the sun is coming up right now.