Matthew Gallaway

Showtime's New Way Out Documentary: Casting Call

Showtime is putting together a new documentary about ppl 'coming out,' and someone affiliated with the show wrote to ask me to help spread the news.

In their words: "Showtime Networks and Bryn Freedman (an Executive Producer of A&E's "Intervention") are developing a new TV documentary series about gays and lesbians coming out to important people in their lives. Our aim is to create a show that not only helps the people we profile and the LGBTQ community in general, but also uses television’s vast reach and power to enlighten and increase understanding of what it’s like to feel compelled to hide an essential part of oneself." Anyone interested -- or who would like to be cast on the show! -- can learn more somewhere.

Although the merits of the show will obv be in the details/production -- i.e., 'proof/pudding' -- I think it has a lot of potential. Let's face it, on the rare occasions when Hollywood manages to include gay characters/plots/motifs, they tend to trade in tedious if not openly malicious stereotypes and cliches (via Judd Apatow) or worse; meanwhile, if everyone who was actually having (or dreamed about having) 'gay sex' admitted it -- not that sex is necessarily the only component to this equation (but it's a big one!) -- our society would clearly be a much different place, at least with regard to non-heterosexual/vext/LGBTQ rights.

So if you're still 'in the closet,' why not 'come out' on cable teevee? You might even 'get famous' (via YouTube or a 'bloggable meme')! Take it from me: no matter how old/young/middle-aged you are, you'll feel better for having done it.

Srsly, I've never met a single person who regretted it, no matter how painful it seemed at the time.  (Have u?)

The George Washington Bridge Project

This first shot was taken yesterday at around 6pm, when the entire sky had turned a bleak and hopeless shade of blue; the bridge, of course, had completely disappeared like a ship in the fog and it didn't help that it was Sunday night at the end of a vacation: even the cats were moping around!

Eventually we all fell into a troubled sleep, but in the morning woke to this, which made the bad dreams/vibes/omens from the night before seem as transient as the clouds.

In this post, the bridge is a metaphor for 'faith' in something 'bigger than us' (via a meaningful HBO series like Season Three of 'Big Love').

The good/bad weather -- which is far more timeless, however -- represents the cycle of self-creation and discovery, neither of which is possible without the other.

On Hellebores (A Short Tribute To Alma)

This morning Stephen and I received the sad news that the mother of a good friend of ours had just died; though I had only met her a few times, I was always struck by the ideal balance she seemed to maintain between earnestness and irreverence, so that she seemed genuinely pleased to see you, but then just as eager to share a laugh over some tribulation or pleasure -- an obnoxious neighbor, a corrupt politician, the antics of one her beloved dogs, a good meal at a new Polish restaurant in the East Village -- the city had offered up in the course of her daily life. In short, she was attractive and engaging, which seems like as good a recipe as any for long life -- she was close to ninety -- or at least one that could be characterized as relatively 'happy' (though like anyone of a certain age, it cannot be doubted that she suffered her share of tragedy).

She also died at home in her sleep, which seems like something we would probably all choose if given the chance. It seems fitting that someone who lived an admirable life would achieve the same in death.

This afternoon we went out into the fog to buy some fertilizer for the garden, and seeing the hellebores in bloom I was reminded of a poem I once wrote in a creative writing class in college; it was from the perspective of someone who was finally able to 'accept' -- to the degree this is possible -- his own imminent death once he had looked outside and seen the earth covered with the new flowers of spring. (To be honest, I didn't get a very good grade in this class, and in fact almost failed out in the first half of the semester due to an addiction to the Winter Olympics that led me to watch something like 81 of 84 hours of coverage; unable to meet the minimum word-count requirement for the course with prose, I scrambled at the end of the term by writing heaps of 'poetry,' which if nothing else was rewarded with a triple word count.)

I still think I would prefer to die in the spring, with the world outside in bloom and the air filled with the consolation of so much new life to replace the one about to give way.

On Life In Dead Golf Courses

In Florida, where I recently spent a few days, my mother was very excited to take me on a bike ride through the golf course -- currently for sale and maintained at levels from barely to not-at-all --  surrounding the condominium development where she and my father live. "Everyone around here thinks it looks awful," she confided to me, "but I think it's wonderful."

I inherited at least some of my mother's sensibility in this regard, the difference being that I -- more of an extremist -- would probably not have moved next to a golf course in the first place.

The terrain was marked by wildflowers and crumbling paths that led us through the ruins of one of the twentieth century's leisure activities. 

I was hardly immune to the notion that this golf course symbolized the economic state of our society.

We observed this plant with daisy-like flowers. A few years ago, when she and my father first developed a passion for gardening, I remember her saying to me: "I like any flower in the shape of a daisy." (In this respect, I am undoubtedly more discriminating, but here I could only agree.)

We both share a love of any plant that has red or -- even better -- orange berries.  

As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I began to appreciate the subtle earthen tones of the most arid portions of the golf course. My mother was keen to point out the pleasing clumps of wild grass taking shape at the edge of the water.

Most exhilarating were those spots where the contrast between the old and the new was greatest; I was reminded of and consoled by the idea that people -- no matter what we build -- are always going to be temporary and ephemeral in comparison to 'the natural world' around us.

Here's a dying sand trap, giving way to the jungle.

Often I tried (and failed) to crop out any evidence of humanity. (For these purposes, I ignored the ubiquitous telephone pole.)

We arrived at a lush water hazard, the borders of which were completely overrun. I imagined the muddy floor and the hundreds/thousands of golf balls 'at rest' there.

My mother spotted an alligator -- it was only about eight feet long -- that eyed us for a few moments before scampering away into the shallows.

Back on the path, I stopped to admire the pines and began to lose sight of my mother.

At one point, it seemed as if I was on the verge of losing her altogether. (This is a metaphor for the more rebellious phases of my youth, obviously.)

But eventually I caught up to her again, and found her resting on the side of the path.

Behind us a zany couple hit golf balls into the wild. In this particular retirement community, the pressures of capitalism sometimes seem as far away as the cold weather.

In front of us was a canal, which represented one version of the future.

There was new life on hand.

A gray crane appeared, and I felt thankful for my zoom lens.

My mother and I discussed this and other benefits of modern society as we contemplated the bird, which provided helpful context for this conversation. We tried to imagine what the landscape looked like 100 years ago, before there were so many roads and cars, when the internet was still 'dial-up.'

The surrounding plants seemed oblivious to us, as usual, even when we complimented them on their form and color.

A heron flew by and left us wistful as we considered our grounded state, and a certain inelegance that characterizes all human motion.

The path again beckoned and each of us took a track, not bothered by the certainty that in just a short distance, it would give way to an impenetrable field of green. 

 

On a Small Cluster of White Flowers

Recently I spent a few days in Florida, which -- at least from a landscape perspective -- is a state of great contrasts.

At times it was overwhelming to consider the eyesores -- the traffic//strip malls//sprawling fields of McMansions -- just as it was overwhelming to confront the ocean, which I had not seen in several years (via life in New York City//Washington Heights). Perhaps to accommodate these extremes, I decided to focus at least some of my attention on 'the small things,' e.g., in this case, a cluster of white flowers (genus ____) at a condominium development.

In this post, Florida is a metaphor for 'the blogosphere' and flowers represent beauty amid much ugliness (via a blogging 'template' that offers only limited satisfaction).

Sometimes it's helpful to fixate on a small thing, and in this way keep the barren landscape beyond from encroaching too much (via the frustrations of switching from one blogging platform to another).

The George Washington Bridge Project: Fender Repair Edition

 

For the past ___ years, I've been neglecting my guitars and amplifiers; for example, I stored my 'blackface' 1960s Fender Princeton Reverb at my friend John's house, and everything else sat in the forgotten recesses of closets, which is not exactly the best thing for intonation (in the case of the guitars) and -- for some reason in the case of the amps -- reverb, which was shot on both. After the long, slow and oddly painful (via 'learning to be an adult') denoument of my old band Saturnine, I wasn't sure that I would ever really want to play any of them again; they seemed to represent a feckless quality to my youth that had left me careening from one pursuit to the next, without ever really considering whether I had sufficient skill/talent/devotion to 'make a living' at any of them; at the same time, the idea of doing anything 'as a hobby' seemed 'too mainstream,' and so I ended up taking jobs that in most cases could not qualify as the foundation to any kind of traditional career, e.g., I sold lens-cleaning fluid, I watered plants, I worked at a record store, and -- most humiliating -- I 'temped' at law firms where my former classmates were a$$ociate$.

In retrospect, of course, all of this can be understood to represent a desire to fuck/buck/rebel against tradition without acknowledging the most obvious way in which I would never be traditional, i.e., the state of being gay/vext/non-heterosexual. This is also why when I see movies about wayward youths who have trouble 'settling down,' I tend to project my own past and conclude that he/she must be gay/vext/non-heterosexual, although I've learned to be somewhat more delicate in phrasing this opinion (if I phrase it at all) via all sorts of disclaimers, after being told quite vehemently on numerous occasions that 'not every1 is geigh, u know.' (To which I always respond with a smile and a nod and an unstated mental rebuttal: 'that's what u think.')

But since subsequently working in a corporate office for almost 1000 years (via the evaporating publishing biz) and experiencing the true weight of 'fiscal responsibily' (via lawsuits and Manhattan real estate); I not only became more resigned to the idea that I would never be 'Steve Malkmus,' it was a thought that seemed vaguely disturbing and repellent to me, not unlike the way I think of myself as having 'tried to date girls.' But as much as I once tended to disavow the past completely, it has more recently occurred to me -- via iTunes -- that it was not a complete lie; I still genuinely love/admire much of the music from that period of my life -- even if it's not 'geigh' like Britney/Madonna/Cher/Coldplay -- and moreover there was still a certain satisfaction to be found in writing/recording songs -- via Apple Macbook -- even if I no longer have a band with which to take them 'on tour' and play them to a thousand ghosts in as many empty rooms.

So I took a few months and gathered my gear; I drove to John's house 'in Yonkers' and picked up the Princeton, I threw out ten bags of garbage that had accumulated in the closets on top of the guitars. I plugged them in and like any neglected child, each one had issues -- there was hissing/crackling/moaning/howling -- and I gradually set about finding repair shops, which due to the 'vintage' status of this gear is never an easy (or at least obvious) task in New York City. In the past I had used some stoner in the East Village for my guitars and a toothless genius/punk rocker in Brooklyn for my amps, but nobody seemed to know what had happened to either one of these guys, though everyone agreed it was unlikely that either had endured the most recent decade, which may/may not go down as one of the worst of all time (via Dick Cheney/Alan Greenspan/the Donald/Tumblr).

But eventually for the guitars I found a guy who (miraculously) lives/works on the Upper West Side, so that wasn't too difficult, while amp guy was in the middle of Queens, where the grid system breaks down and Google Maps will torture you by say, directing you to take an exit from the Grand Central Parkway that doesn't exist. But luck was with me, and both were technical savants, which you can tell pretty much instantly from the decor of an apartment/workshop, i.e., are there amps/guitars/wires/soldering irons/blowtorches everywhere and no art on the walls, except for perhaps an autographed shot of Stevie Ray Vaughan? (In short, these guys are never geigh.)

Today I picked everyone up and was informed that -- after some minor repair$ and adjustment$ -- they were all in excellent shape.

 

This has been a post in which 'repairing your vintage guitars and amplifiers' is a metaphor for 'coming to terms' with your past. (These guitars/amps are part of me, now.)

I have some vacation days coming up, and can't wait to spend a few hours playing, even if nobody ever hears them sing but me.

The George Washington Bridge Project: Death, Cruelty and Fiction

 

Today I read a disturbing post on the NYT's City Room blog about a pair of teenagers who broke into a vacant apartment in Brooklyn, doused a cat with lighter fluid and then set it on fire. According to the article, "[t]he cat was later 'found outside crying, unable to move, but still alive'... It was taken to an animal hospital with severe burns, and was put to death."

Coincidentally, I was reading Richard Rorty on the subway, who (via Judith Shklar) defines a 'liberal' -- philosophically speaking -- as one who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing a person can do.

He also describes the role of fiction in our culture as a means to 1) empathize with those who are suffering and 2) understand our own capacity for cruelty.

It's not difficult to imagine telling a story about two teenagers and their decision to torture a cat that fills both of these purposes: in terms of the kids, we might describe the bleak terrain of the neighborhood in which they were raised, the loveless existence they endured for the first ___ years of their lives, the physical and mental abuse they suffered at the hands of others; the slow escalation of mayhem and violence that led them on this particular day to hatch a plan for such a pointlessly repulsive act. We might even try to imagine them as they ignited the cat and listened to its terrified screams, and whether to witness this was as satisfying as they had hoped, or whether they looked at each other with a familiar expression of disappointment. What did they say as it happened? And later, did they laugh or cry or simply not acknowledge it at all, as if they had simply shared a bad dream?

I remember being in Paris 20 years ago, when I happened to go see A Short Film about Killing by Krzysztof Kieslowski; the story involves a young man who directs a taxi out into the countryside, where for no apparent reason he brutally murders the driver; he is quickly caught and sentenced to death, and throughout the proceedings shows absolutely no remorse or really any sign of 'humanity,' despite the best attempts of his defense lawyer. It is only near the end -- after he shares a painful memory from his childhood -- and as he is being led to his death, that we feel any compassion for him; in one miraculous shot he looks up at the lawyer, who is watching from the window above, and we understand from the prisoner's expression that something has melted in him, that he no longer wants to die, and we -- as the audience -- no longer want him to die either.

In time, I may write a similar story about two teenagers from Brooklyn who torture animals and live to regret it.

But for now I would like to think about the cat, about how small and defenseless it was, and how the universe showed such little regard to its fate, and how in this sentence 'cat' is a metaphor for 'any of us as individuals at any given moment.'

And how when we grieve, it is really for ourselves, and -- finally -- how we look to the sky with a certain anger and longing and forgiveness as we remember that despite everything -- and this by turn cruel and comforting -- we are still alive, at least for now.

The George Washington Bloom Project: Memory and Focus

 

It is in the nature of certain people (ahem) never to be satisfied, which -- depending on the context -- can be a curse or a blessing.

For example, I just finished a very delicious chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting (but not too sweet!) and am already aching for another. This is also why it's sometimes better to leave the contours of life blurry, so that we can be distracted by questions of interpretation instead of fixating on crossing boundaries that all too often we realize in retrospect might have been better left uncrossed. But at the same time, relentless dissatisfaction can sometimes yield work of improbable beauty, and this too can provide a measure of unexpected relief.

It seems like the unhappiest people -- by which I mean 'the happiest' -- are those who never give in to either extreme, and exude satisfaction and contentment. I was like this once, until I broke my glasses and everything was a blur for several weeks. I grew to appreciate this, so that when the time came to pick up my new glasses, I told the optician to grind the lenses back into sand; this made me happy for a little while, until I grew fatigued with everything this new world offered, and more than anything else, I wished to possess what I had once had. Now that I am older and a 'productive member of society' I sometimes attempt to nostalgically recapture these extremes through photography, and intentionally blur images; I am vaguely aware that this is actually an exercise in memory, which is equally susceptible to distortions in the attempt to make them more beautiful than real life.

The George Washington Bridge Project: Mind Games

 

Today I finally read the New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace, which was by turns inspiring and depressing; inspiring because (and this is hardly a surprise) he seemed to genuinely believe in fiction as a means to reflect/analyze/transform currents of our society, and depressing because of his unending doubt about everything from his ability to write a compelling novel to his own mental health, which was apparently precarious for many many years before he finally committed suicide.

His unfinished novel, which will be published next year, supposedly examines boredom as a potentially transcendent force in modern society; it's set in an IRS office in Illinois, and describes a group of tax auditors, some of whom are better able to deal with the mind-numbing tedium of their work than others. Ultimately, it sounds like DFW was unable to resolve -- or at least to his own satisfaction -- the fundamental dilemma of how to make a novel about boredom not boring.

Whatever the merits of the novel, it seems that he was touching on an important theme in our culture; seriously, are there not days when the meaningless implications of everything you do at work becomes such a towering wave of ennui that you wonder how you can possibly live another minute, even if by most measures you have a job that is 'interesting' and 'valuable' and possibly even 'lucrative'? (In this post, 'work' may/may not be a metaphor for 'life.') And do you -- as DFW postulates -- resign yourself to these waves? Do you quit fighting and simply allow them to pass through you so that you emerge on the other side more 'mindful' and able to 'live in the moment,' so that perhaps you can find gratification in composing say, an elegant e-mail to a senior VP or finally figuring out a mathematical function on a spreadsheet or even participating in a 'team project'? Ultimately, it seems to me that the issue DFW confronted was (in two parts): 1) 'how do we stop thinking, when thinking is so painful?' (or, via Huysmans via Pascal: 'The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon') and 2) if we do stop thinking, can we still feel 'meaningful' or 'human' in modern society, and not like 'just another corporate drone'?

In this post, there are four photographs: three of them contain an airplane, which may/may not be a metaphor for our desire to 'leave our lives behind,' whereas the one picture without may/may not represent the desire to contemplate that which we have seen so many times before with the (irrational/sustaining/instinctual) hope that we will find something there that we have never seen before.

Death Culture at Sea: Field High and Burning

In which Death Culture at Sea* is a light that turns to blue. *Since there seem to be a few new folks stopping by here, a note of explanation: I used to play in an indie-rock band called Saturnine and this --" i.e., Death Culture at Sea --" is my new 'band,' consisting of me, myself and I.

Listen on Tumblr.

"Field High and Burning"

Let's walk through this religion Searching for the kind of things we know We never really know The streets so full of people Had never looked so empty in the night So empty in the night Here beside you is something you can never really touch Beside you is something you can never really touch Fear has seen the morning, and he felt slightly wasted with the sense Of being split in two He asked if you were serious, and then he fell asleep inside your arms Crushing him in you His soul was rather jagged, but all he craved was feeling something new Besides these waves between us He woke beside you, and smiled in a light that turned to blue A light that turned to blue