Matthew Gallaway

On Waltraud Meier: We're Sorry We Missed Your Isolde Friday Night!

In which The Gay Recluse regrets not seeing Waltraud Meier's Isolde.

Before Friday night's show at the Met, both the lead Isolde and her cover were sick and had to cancel. This sometimes happens!

At the last minute, the Met was able to track down Waltraud Meier, who agreed to fly in from Munich for the show.

Though a very experienced Isolde -- and who has recently worked with Barenboim* -- this production was new to her; and then the weather was horrible and the plane circled JFK for five hours! (Omg jet lag!) By the time she arrived backstage, there was no time to rehearse, so the director quickly coached her through the staging as the minutes ticked down to the prelude.

It was a sold out house: adrenaline was running high on both sides of the curtain.

It could have been a disaster, but by most accounts (except sadly, ours!), Waltraud Meier's performance was filled with a remarkable fury and vulnerability made all the more incredible by the fact that she hadn't slept or rehearsed.

Though sorry to have missed it, we're consoled by the idea that even at the highest levels, things in the theater can and do go wrong, yet can sometimes be restored with such serendipitous brilliance.

It gives us hope as we consider the inevitable mishaps our own life, to understand that an alchemy exists by which these failures can be transformed -- at least for a little while -- into something better than we could have ever expected. *You can find a YouTube clip of Waltraud Meier from last year's production at La Scala. 

On the George Washington Botany Project: In Search of Lost Bamboo

In which The Gay Recluse remembers old plants.

Growing up in the 1970s, there were a lot of plants in our house.

Having plants was a sign of liberal thinking: our mother, of course, was involved in the women's movement, so she had a mix of spider plants, cactus and marginata; our dazed-and-confused sister did macrame and partied a lot with our dazed-and-confused brother*, so they both had a lot of plants, too, although for reasons that escaped me even at the time they favored waxy philodendrons.

And ferns, in the case of our brother, although he didn't exactly have a green thumb: even our mother -- not one to ever be critical of her children -- used to refer to his "magnificent collection of brown ferns." We can still remember them lined up on his window sill, and how we used to sneak up there when he was out of the house. His room smelled faintly of the cigarettes and joints he used to smoke while locked in his room, but we braved this to touch the dessicated fronds, the dust from which would mix with the ash on the sill. All of it -- the dead plants, the smoking -- felt impossibly illicit to our five-year old brain; we couldn't understand what would ever lead our brother to be so "bad," at least with regard to our parents. (We weren't bothered at all by the idea of spying on him!)

Our favorite plant was a potted bamboo that our mother had bought before we were born. It lived in an enormous terra cotta pot, and was the focal point of our mother's 1970s living room (yes, the one with orange shag carpet). Once when we were six or seven, we pulled up a dead stalk and found an earthworm; it never occurred to us that the natural world could live undetected in the suburban one! For many years after, whenever the subject of the bamboo came up, we were always compelled to point out that an entire civilization probably existed in that pot, if you knew where to look.

As the 1980s approached, however, she wanted a change of scenery, and the interior decorators (terrifyingly gay!) thought a well-trained ficus would be more in keeping with the new decor. With no place to put the bamboo, it was sent off to college with my brother, where somewhat miraculously it survived four years of hard partying -- there are photographs of my brother, his friends and the bamboo, all drunk! -- and then came back to our basement. By that point we were ready to leave home, so it went with us to boarding school and then college, where it lived by our side for seven years.

Rather than come to New York, though, it ended up back with our mother, who by this point was in a new house with room for a ficus and the bamboo. She cut it down to nothing, but unlike The Giving Tree, it grew back, fuller than ever! Which is to say it's still alive, and we make a point of saying hello -- or maybe just nodding, because we're not very good with hellos and goodbyes -- whenever we go back to visit.

It's easy to make fun of those who aren't capable of loving other people, and instead resort to plants and animals.

But any love that's honest, no matter how small, is better than one that's fake, no matter how big it seems to be. *Note that the entire teenage population was dazed and confused at this time; we don't mean to single out our brother and sister for special treatment in this regard: to the contrary, we admire them for having experienced this suburban anarchy firsthand.

On Senso

In which The Gay Recluse loves Luchino Visconti.

After scouring the globe, we were finally able to obtain -- from South Korea! -- a copy of Senso, Luchino Visconti's 1954 film about the Austrian occupation of Venice during the war for Italian independence.

In what is arguably the most operatic of Visconti's films, we follow a beautiful-but-aging Viennese countess (which in the 1950s meant that she was about 26 or so), who against her better judgment falls in love with a younger Viennese officer. The story is not complicated: as the officer flits in and out of her grasp, she increasingly longs for him, until after a series of encounters she impulsively gives up her entire life -- at this point, with political tension escalating, she has been safely sequestered in the countryside -- to flee through a war-torn country to be with him. But the affair is doomed: we learn that the officer essentially played her, and when she arrives, he is drunk and cruel; he flaunts a young prostitute who emerges from his bedroom and lectures the countess on the impossibility of attaining happiness in such a detestable era of history. In a fit of vengeance she leaves and immediately turns him into the Viennese army -- from which he had used her money to get a fraudulent discharge -- and a few minutes later he is executed as she staggers through the streets of Venice while drunken soldiers leer at and molest her.

It hardly matters that you know the plot: rather, to watch this movie is to enter into a reflective state similar to what we sometimes experience at the opera; it's almost as if your mind is bifurcated, but in the least neurotic of ways. You take in the sumptuous colors and costumes (Technicolor!); the decadent, decaying walls of Venice; the lush score, which employs Anton Bruckner and Giuseppe Verdi (trivia: Senso was used to reconstruct/renovate La Fenice after it was scandalously burned down -- arson! -- in the 1990s); and as you do this, you are somehow able to ponder the the threads of your own life as if you were viewing it serenely, like a piece of art, instead of pulling and tugging at this tapestry, as so often happens in the course of our daily travails.

As much as we loved Senso, however, it's not our favorite Visconti film. We would never argue with those who claim that his greastest works -- The Leopard, The Damned and Death in Venice -- all came after.

But we watch Senso anyway, to understand what turned Visconti away from the neorealism upon which he built his career and led him to the intoxicating, extravagent decadence and -- somehow -- resignation that permeate his later works. We want to reconcile the idea that the same man who made the La Terra trema, the Sinclarian documentary of a small village ravaged by capitalism, also created Ludwig, for example, the obsessive rumination on the last (and even more obsessive) monarch of Bavaria.

In fact, we are never convinced by Visconti's embrace of communism, any more than we would say he was a monarchist; in this respect, Visconti brings to mind Walter Benjamin, who -- as much as he would flirt -- was similarly incapable of embracing a political ideology. Just as Benjamin lingers over the fruit sellers on the snowy streets of Bolshevik Moscow in prose that can only be described as romantic, Visconti allows his camera to caress his young male actors just a little too much for us to ever consider them political statements.

Much like reading Benjamin, when we watch Visconti, we are left with the sense that all great art is rooted in a philosophical pessimism, a constant dissatisfaction with the present and everything it has to offer, but one that ironically enough leaves us oddly joyous and satisfied as we take it in.

On the George Washington Bridge Project: Remembrance of Gay Things Past

In which The Gay Recluse remembers art class.

Yesterday we read about Alton Dulaney, who won the gift-wrapping championship of the world in a wrap-off at Rockefeller Center. Watching Alton's performance, we couldn't help but regret all the hours we spent growing up watching football and hockey and baseball on teevee, when we could have been watching wrap-offs (assuming they showed that sort of thing, which they obv didn't)! Except that would have been way too gay for a closet-case like us, right!? But fine, like so much in our life, let's just file in the better-late-than-never folder.

What's depressing interesting is how many people -- mostly men, but not always! -- seem to assume that because sports like football, baseball, basketball and hockey (hereafter the "Big 4," and let's leave aside women's professional leagues for purposes of our observations here) are dominated by men, and because 100 percent of current participants at a professional level in the Big 4 are not openly gay, that to watch these men somehow transmits to the viewer an inviolable shield of straightness, i.e., watching "the game" on Sunday afternoon is never considered gay, whereas watching a gift-wrapping competition maybe probably most definitely is! But why?

It seems to us -- and we've probably spent more time watching sports than even being gay -- that short of having a cock in your mouth, for men, watching professional sports on teevee (or really anywhere) -- especially the Big 4 -- is pretty much the gayest, most homoerotic thing you can do! After all, what exactly do you think is going on while you're sitting around for hours and hours and hours ogling and drooling over a bunch of young, athletic guys with hot, firm asses, bulging shoulders/arms, and -- especially in baseball, thanks to the cups they wear -- enormous-looking cocks? Plus all the steroids they take make a good percentage of them look like Tom of Finland. You might as well be cruising the internet.

Or perhaps you're fascinated by the announcers, those big macho daddies sitting around exchanging nothing but the most vapid cliches but so in love with each other it doesn't even matter? Oh, so you played sports in high school and that's why you need to spend ten hours every weekend watching it? Umm, yeah ok, whatever.

It's not even an argument, but a conclusion: watching football (or baseball, etc.) is definitely gay. Which is not a bad thing! We just want people to start admitting it, i.e., so that "gay" won't so often be associated with "stupid" as it will be with something closer to "homoerotic," which is an impulse that everyone should acknowledge, whether you're totally gay like us or not. We envisions conversations around the country going something like this (and ladies, we're counting on you to instigate!): Wife/GF: "You're watching the game again? That's so gay!" Husband/BF: "I know, but I can't resist because these guys are so smokin' hawt! Get me a beer, would you?" [Farts]

Ha ha, ok, we'll stop this stupidity now. The truth is, to see gift-wrap champion Alton Dulaney -- who was the only male contestant among what appeared to be nine or ten other ladies -- reminded us of when we were like ten years old and loved to spend an inordinate amount of time gift-wrapping our family's presents and adorning them with stark, angular ribbons -- or perhaps a single loop -- for reasons that were not really ever explored beyond attributing the behavior to any number of other similarly obsessive ones (e.g., reading bird books, making thousands of paper snowflakes, our pencil collection, etc). And how one summer around the same age we signed up for art class and were the only boy out of about 20, because somehow without noticing, we had reached the age where the idea of art was "gay," and so most boys didn't do it. The same thing happened to us in seventh grade when art became an elective, and we were the only boy in the class. But in a way it was easier for us, because we played travel hockey and were already on the junior varsity high school team -- the only seventh grader! -- and we watched a lot of sports on teevee, so how could we be gay?

It's pretty safe to say that growing up like this almost destroyed us, because underneath our easy athleticism and somewhat inexplicable -- and to some, exasperating -- interest in art and music, we were filled with an implacable loneliness that came from the certainty -- although we couldn't acknowledge this -- that we were completely alone in the world. It was quite painful to realize that our older siblings would never really understand us, and the day this occurred -- although again, we didn't understand what was happening -- we spent hours staring out the window in tears, but with no idea of exactly why we were crying beyond a vague sense of disappointment over something quite trivial. We hated crying, of course, because that was gay, too.

This is also why -- more than anything -- we used to hate it when people assumed things about us. There was a period of time -- like most of our twenties, by which we mean some of our thirties, too -- when we pretty much tried to throw our life away, just to prove them wrong. But we weren't really even capable of embracing that role, which also felt like a cliche. This sort of explains how we graduated from Cornell and watered plants and then NYU Law School before becoming a record-store clerk. Basically we wanted to replicate the unresolved, ambiguous conflict of our youth. Had we been straight, there's not much doubt we would have been trapped forever, doomed!

All of which brings us to the bridge, which on this cold December afternoon beckons with the certainty of taking us to places we'd rather not go.

On Seduced and Abandoned

In which The Gay Recluse watches movies.

Tonight we watched Seduced and Abandoned, the 1964 film by Italian director Pietro Germi. Set in a small town in Sicily, it follows a family with a 15-year-old girl who in a moment of passion sort of consents (but sort of not) to have sex with her older sister's fiance. In short order she's pregnant and her parents find out, after which the father is yelling and hitting and throwing things, while the mother weeps and plots with her husband to save their daughter's honor. Lol, crazy Sicilans!

But underneath the exaggerated stereotypes that provide much of the film's comic humor -- and at times it definitely could be considered madcap or rollicking -- there's an equally cutting satirical element rooted in the family's complete disregard for the truth as they attempt to arrange a marriage between the daughter and a man she doesn't love. Increasingly elaborate measures are taken to ensure that the rest of the gossipy town have no reason to think that she's a "whore" or that her father is doing anything less than begrudgingly giving her hand in marriage to the most ardent of suitors.

As the movie continues in this vein, the characters -- including the town itself, filled with garish priests and nasty old men in the square -- begin to acquire a grotesque quality that effectively undermines all of the conventions the family is trying to uphold: marriage, justice, honor and even the law, in which a marriage (if it can be arranged) can trump any other charge, including statutory rape or kidnapping. As for the man who initially persuaded the girl to have sex with him, he claims he no longer wants to marry her because she's "impure" and he wants to marry a virgin! Eventually we end up hating everyone in the movie -- even as we laugh at them -- except for the girl, the sullen and serenely beautiful Stefania Sandrelli, who resists her parents' plans and dreams of escaping to the city.

The genius of this movie lies in the fact that by the end, you're not quite sure whether to laugh or cry.

It makes us think of the 1960s and how society in many respects went through a revolution. You can't watch this movie and not think that marriage is a ridiculous institution, clearly on its last legs!

To see it now is painful to the extent that we understand how far we've regressed -- how sickeningly conventional we've become, and in more subtle, odious ways than Germi could have ever depicted -- but at the same time it makes us eager to see a new revolution. 

On the George Washington Bloom Project: The Northern Clemency

In which The Gay Recluse reads dead flowers.

When we first read about The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, we were excited! Not only was it short-listed for the Booker Prize, but it was rated the #1 Editors' Pick for Best Book of 2008 by Amazon.com* And oh yeah, Hensher is "openly gay" -- kinda hate that expression, but whatevs -- and has "written trenchantly about the lack of gay actors in Hollywood," so without knowing that much about the book, we expected some insight into what we tend to think about as gay identity, or the gay voice.

The first quarter of the book is stunning. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Hensher describes the interactions among and between two families in a northern British suburb, one that has lived there for some time and another that is relocating from London. It's the early 1970s, and as Hensher easily shifts perspective -- at his best, reading him is really like getting wrapped up in a good teevee series -- from the mothers to the daughters and the sons, he perfectly captures a sense of suburban ennui on one hand, and a kind of crushing terror of adolescence on the other. There are a few scenes -- e.g., one of the mothers sort of loses her shit after her husband goes A.W.O.L. and kills her son's pet, another in which a boy's leg is broken during an elementary school recess -- that are shockingly disturbing and brutal and ultimately heartbreaking, because we are taken back to the inexplicable cruelty and horror of youth as it plays out under the tranquil sheen of the suburbs.

Moreover, we are left with the sense that one or both of the youngest boys in the families are -- or will be -- gay, because they are nervous and obsessive and uncomfortable in ways that resonated with our own 1970s suburban upbringing, and so as the first section of the book ends, we look forward to learning more, not only about the boys, but about their older siblings, each of whom has appealing quirks and charms and less-appealing faults.

At this point, however, the tone of the book completely changes as we jump the shark lol ahead perhaps a decade into the future. We briefly meet the boys -- both are out of high school -- but they are now beyond our empathy: one is sort of a freakish communist/Marxist who now hates his parents and agitates with some snobby leftist students on behalf of the local union, and the other has dropped out of college and moved back to London, where we don't learn much about him except that he occasionally dates women (but without success), likes classical music and works a boring job. In short, we kind of suspect that he's probably gay, but we don't really get any insight or exploration into his condition, just a kind of blanket denial -- at one point he sort of holds out that he's asexual -- that ultimately fails to hold our interest. Meanwhile, none of the other characters are developed with greater resolve, so that as we trudge forward, we find ourselves longing for the beginning of the book.

Also, instead of focusing on his core characters, Hensher allows the plot to seriously drift and instead offer pages and pages and pages -- to give what is perhaps the most pointlessly egregious example -- of a subplot involving a drug-dealing/money-laundering scheme. (We cannot help but wonder: did anyone edit this book? It could have easily been 200 pages shorter without losing anything.) True, the mother had an affair with a man in the scheme, but do we really need to follow him to a country house and meet his mafioso boss and family, when all we're interested in is the fact that the woman had the affair and the ways it has impacted her relationship with her husband (i.e., the father of one of the boys)? If Hensher's objective was to elevate the mundane into the dramatic -- and he does this brilliantly at the beginning -- why introduce a cheesy teevee plot device like this?

Which -- i.e., the drug-dealer subplot -- may have been forgivable except the rest of the book never recovers from similar digressions -- e.g., an Australian we meet on one page kills himself in act of auto-eroticism ten pages later! someone starts dating a working-class girl, whose parents of course are sweet and lovable and dance the tango and earnestly offer tea in their best china -- so that by the end, we don't really have much sense of -- or feelings for -- any of the characters (much less insight into questions of gay identity).

We're not saying that Hensher -- or any gay writer -- has a responsibility to explore these issues, but after setting them up so beautifully, he seemed to miss an opportunity to explore the truth as it's so rarely done.

If the book at its best feels like it was made for teevee, this is also its flaw; it's like one of those series that starts out with promise, but quickly drifts into hackneyed melodrama, leaving us with a longing -- even if we choose to watch -- to change the channel or perhaps fall asleep, where we can dream in images that while at times blurry at least hold some sign of our true selves.

*Despite our mixed feelings, we still encourage everyone to buy this book and judge for yourself.

On Guest Blogging by the Editorial and Technical Assistants: Aren't You Sick of Living in the Dark Ages?

In which Dante and Zephyr take over The Gay Recluse.

Friends! Aren't you tired of getting on the subway and listening to two teenage assholes engage in a loud debate about whether it's "gay" or not to touch shoulders in the kind of "bro-hug" you see on the teevee when a team scores a goal/point/tee-dee? Wtf? And aren't you sick of watching all the other asshole passengers -- even a few who "looked" pretty fucking gay if you ask us -- laugh and smile at these two cut-ups, as if they were really fucking hilarious? And aren't you sick of having to stand there quietly, pretending to be above this constant barrage of unchecked bullshit, knowing that in 2008 you can still be mocked and stereotyped as if you were a _____ fifty years ago or a _____ before that? Aren't you sick of living in the dark ages?

Yeah, well we're pretty fucking sick of it too, which is why today we leaned over to these assholes and said: "Why don't you STFU because from now on, to be 'gay' means one thing: having your cock in another guy's mouth or ass or vice versa, which is basically the most awesome thing ever, and if you have a problem with it, keep your mouth shut or you're gonna find it on the floor, got it?" Lol. We wish.

Friends, not every cat is lolcat.

On Once Upon a Time in America: There Is Only One Marcel Proust, and He Did Not Make Movies

In which The Gay Recluse remembers Sergio Leone.

Recently we watched the director's cut of Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Lione's epic Jewish/New York City gangster movie from 1984. When originally released in the United States, the producers imposed a chronological sequence onto the movie to shorten it, whereas Lione intended it to dreamily drift back and forth between three eras (roughly: youth, middle and old age) through the prism of one man's memory.

There is much in the film to admire: Lione creates beautiful atmospheres in almost any context, and Robert De Niro is always a pleasure to watch. Even James Woods -- who often bothers us -- is well cast here, and his homoerotic obsession with the De Niro character is a compelling subtext.

There are problems, though! All of the childhood scenes are coated with an annoying sheen of nostalgia that makes them difficult to endure, so that while watching, we long for the return of De Niro & Company. Although at times brilliant -- e.g., the Muzak version of "Yesterday" with exactly two words sung -- the music too often crosses the line into a sort of dated kitch (two hours of Peruvian flute is perhaps one-hour and forty-five minutes too many?) that distracts from the unfolding story. Finally the Jewish component of the movie -- primarily in the form of a few Yiddish phrases here and there, some Hebrew-lettered Lower East Side storefronts and a penchant for deli meats -- did not really resonate for us. The problem is that there's enough that (brilliantly) cuts against the grain of stereotype (namely, De Niro's crushing melancholy and his opium addiction) that we are less forgiving of Lione when he succumbs to cliche.

The greatest flaw of the movie, however, is one that we're beginning to suspect is intrinsic to the medium, i.e., the difficultly of conveying both the weight of memory along with its magic. Several times in the movie, Lione attempts to draw us into Proustian episodes of the "memoire involuntaire," triggered by a range of objects and settings familiar but long lost to the De Niro character; ultimately, however, these transitions feel awkward and forced, and it takes several seconds for the narrative to recover from the jarring (but in the wrong way) effect of these memory sequences.

We are reminded of Visconti's ill-fated attempts to similarly capture memory in Death in Venice, and are left to conclude that the novel is the best form to capture the subtle mix of real and unreal as we shift in and out of the present. For this reason, we don't hold it against Leone that he failed where nobody else -- at least that we know of -- has ever succeeded.