The best thing about that Tim's Vermeer movie (without having seen it), is that the Tim in question is the guy who developed the Video Toaster. The Video Toaster! Hooray! It makes visions of late '80s CGI demos dance in my head. It's all like Babylon 5 up in there.
I'm not sure I'm buying the premise of the Vermeer thing. Its not like Vermeer was so far outside of the tradition of Dutch Golden Age painting that he could only have done what he did with a special mirror contraption. He was the best at what he did, but he wasn't the only one doing it.
Heh, the author of the article about No Parking (which I went to a time or two) is named Lance. There really are some names you shouldn't give your kids unless you're just so fond of the gays that you want to help make more of them. Mine* is one of them.
*Mister, that is.
Oh and then this goes on to be about how central is dance to the queer experience. Barf. Why don't I liveblog me reading this article? Yes, Smearcase, that doesn't sound tedious at all, they said in once voice.
This looks like maybe an article that is unwittingly about what it is like to age as a queer person. Whither Twilo?! Ou sont les tea dances d'antan?!
Isn't it just that, when people were mostly closeted, the clubs functioned as an out-let, and now that people are mostly out, it turns out only some of them want to go anyway?
Ok, yeah, I feel like there's some point-missing. Yes, it's gratifying to clutch one's pearls about the specter of the rich white gay guy who only cares about circuit parties and HRC fundraisers, but the plight of the more downtrodden queer doesn't exactly find its most urgent expression in the closing of No Parking. (At last count, there was a newer club more expressly for the neighborhood's Dominican population and less for the curious gentrifier one neighborhood up, where it replaced the only good burrito place within a mile of my old place.)
At this point I am aware that the guy is not entirely wrong and I am just picking rather than do any work.
7: That and it used to be the only way to meet people and now there are many options for dating (that are better and worse in various ways) and many, many options for more fleeting acquaintance (same deal.) I'm more sympathetic to old queens who mourn the closing of the baths than those who can't make sense of things without Limelight.
Oh, maybe I'll read the last paragraph.
This concludes my remarks. It has been wonderful having this dialog with all of you.
I am excited for the sequel! "More Tales of Reading Tales of The City (No, Not This City, That City)", you could call it.
Anyhow I was going to ask if it is really that easy to separate (except, I guess, temporally) the baths and limelight?
Also Michael Alig is getting out of jail so everything should be back in its natural order presently, right?
I had a roommate named Lance. He seemed better at heterosexuality than almost anyone I knew.
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So it turns out that Clivendy Bowen is a huge racist. Who coulda guessed?
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Oh and then this goes on to be about how central is dance to the queer experience. Barf.
Ha, I was just thinking that...
Anybody who ever had the pleasure of visiting No Parking will admit that the place is--was--completely filthy, with an unsettling odor and strippers who didn't seem to consider bodily maintenance particularly important.sounded totally hellish.
The only Lance I know well is as gay as a tree full of parrots.
I like Smearcase's commentary so much I'm going to ignore the actual article.
Also, a friend dated a lovely guy named Lance. He was extremely good at heterosexuality but less so at monogamy. The name seemed like a time warp, like meeting a guy in his 20s named Bruce.
16: It wasn't even filthy. It was just nondescript. But it wasn't really there for me and I didn't go much.
I dated a lovely guy named Lance. He was extremely good at heterosexuality but less so at monogamy.
Or maybe that was me.
Heh, Bruce was the name of the guy in all the gay jokes in middle school, before they were about AIDS, fount of all hilarity.
If you're really good at monogamy, nobody really knows if you're good at heterosexuality (or homosexuality). You might just be in love with Ellen.
You could be excellent at monogamy, but still terrible at hetero/homosexuality. The only thing that being good at monogamy rules out is displaying your possible aptitudes for the other alternatives.
15: Bonus points awarded to Jon Chait for this:
In that spirit, I would absolutely concede that, while I find Bundy's case completely unsympathetic, it is 100 percent possible to agree with his views on grazing rights without being racist. Where we differ is that, I'd argue, it's not exactly a coincidence that Bundy also turns out to be a gigantic racist. Just like Ron Paul's longtime ghostwriter turned out to be a neoconfederate white supremacist. And like the way Rand Paul's ghostwriter also turned out to be a neoconfederate white supremacist. Presumably all these revelations have struck Tuccille as a series of shocking coincidences. Why do all these people with strong antipathy toward the federal government turn out to be racists? Why do all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?
Come to think, I had a friend date a Lance. Not a terrible person, but failed at not being a complete bringdown. Actually, I think we still have a picture of him on our fridge -- it was a group shot with her and my kids, and everyone else turned out great. We put a magnet over his face. (Actually actually, they broke up and then got back together and then broke up again. Which involved moving the magnet over his face, off again, then back over.)
Why do all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?
Clearly bad at monogamy.
Hey, flower aesthetics can go in the gay thread, right? I'm getting more sure by the day that my fantastic cream-colored roses that are all along the back fence didn't make it through the winter, sure enough that I'm going to buy replacements. Will I forever regret going pink even if there's a good story and the girls will presumably love it?
If you don't like them as flowers you could use them as a kitchen countertop.
It's a great story, but I don't like the color. On roses, I like them red, white/cream/yellow, or barely pink -- that bright bubblegum pink doesn't work for me at all. If you're asking, my guess is you feel that same way about bright pinks.
I do feel that way, but it's not just MY garden. I guess it actually sort of is, though.
And the other roses I'm buying are green and blue. Maybe I'll just buy those now and leave the decision about a climber for later.
If they never know there was a bubblegum pink option, would they care when the better colored rose bush showed up?
I don't love the rose in that picture. It doesn't look like the individual roses have a nice shape. Is there something appealing about it that you want? The additional fall bloom? The scent?
It's being used to sort of create a privacy screen, so growing fast and filling a lot of area would be good. Blooming a lot and being thornless would be best. What I had and may just replant was rêve d'or but this was such an awful winter I sort of think I should plant as if I'm in a colder climate now. I lost a lot.
Maybe this is super predictably Berkeley of me, but a Lady Banks? Can't go wrong with a Lady Banks.
34: Yeah. And I know the girls would love them. But I just read something else online where someone from my area complained about dead antique roses and was encouraged to just mulch and fertilize the hell out of the probably-dead stuff and see if they revive. So I'll do that and see what happens.
Our garden is probably going to look so bad for the garden tour this year. Lee says she doesn't care, though she was horrible about it last year. I'm sure I can pull something together, but I just don't have the time I used to and I can't imagine things will look that much better in six weeks.
I suppose I should start by asking you your zone.
What's your zone, pretty lady?
35: We're way too cold for that. Technically 6b, I think, and Lady Banks is for 8 and up.
My two pieces of great garden news are that the tiny front garden in front of the porch looks fantastic this year and only has one spot I need to fill (flowering maple) and that I planted a couple of strawberries last year and they came back through that whole area of the garden, so we'll get tons of strawberries in around all the flowers.
And this is my contribution to the death of gay clubs, I suppose. My time and energy go elsewhere.
That color of pink, from a distance, makes them look like carnations.
Anyhow I was going to ask if it is really that easy to separate (except, I guess, temporally) the baths and limelight?
I'm not 100% sure I understand the question. I guess they're both stand-ins for how queer life was in some ways more interesting before the giant lurch toward societal acceptability of the late 90s through the now, one of which (promiscuity) I find a lot more compelling than the other (strange gyrations of the human body to accompany the lovely rhythms of the waltz).
42: I was more thinking that the same people, or at least some of the same people, went to and/or were involved in creating both the baths and the disco scene which became the club scene. With Larry Levan as the connecting link, more or less.
Thorn: Don Juan. Deep red, super fragrant, fast growing, hardy to zone 6.
Here's a serious question that I should know the answer to, but don't, and maybe some of you can help with. "Electronic music" as a category is booming, as I know from the fact that I am now being asked to think about suing DJs for contract violations. But are nightclubs per se booming for (gay or straight) kids? I really don't get that impression, the hold that big clubs had in the 80s through early 90s just doesn't seem to be there for the kids of today, maybe because for both straight and gay kids there are now easier ways to buy drugs and meet people to hook up with. But on the other hand I'm an old man and wouldn't know anyway. Is the (money making) electronic music scene basically the Electric Daisy Carnival + festivals and not in nightclubs?
(I guess the Vegas nightclubs advertise heavily here, but that seems pitched at 29 year old accounting professionals who want to spend a weekend doing cocaine.)
@47:
At least when I was in Grad. school during the 90s, the action was at raves rather than formal nightclubs. Maybe that was a Baltimore thing. I suppose the Limelight in NYC was experiencing its glory days at around the same time.
Anyhow, if there's been a decline in the popularity of big clubs I'm sure it's because Michael Alig isn't around anymore...
"Why do these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?" is one of the greatest punchline of all time. Sadly, the same future generations who will never get to go to No Parking will also not get why it's funny.
49: The class of 2023 will never have lived in a world where this joke has not been made.
47: Nah, there's still plenty of money in nightclubs. A bunch of the well-known EDM DJs have residencies at various clubs in Las Vegas. And you can't blame being an old man for not knowing about this; there was an article about it in the New Yorker a few months back.
51 cont'd: Here's the article in question.
43: Oh, I see. Yeah, of course it's some of the same queens mourning the loss of both things, you're right. Or, um, not mourning because dead.
The Vegas nightclubs are huge money-makers, yeah. EDC is definitely also a profit machine. Mostly what's happened is that "raves" per se (that is, one-off, locally produced events) are pretty much dead, and there has been a lot of consolidation in the club world. Or, to summarize, it started being an actually profitable thing, and the small actors (on the DJ and promotion sides) are pretty much frozen out of big events. Of my (former) raver friends in LA who are still involved in anything like that, one promotes a club night that used to be kind of a small intimate Monday night thing for DJs that were hanging around after playing a massive over the weekend and is now a $50 a head VIP table bottle service shitshow, and the other is CFO of the company that puts on EDC. So that sort of sums things up.
It is the case that clubs have gotten much more expensive and upscale-ish in a VIP table bottle service shitshow kind of way; I don't know exactly how that squares with the Skrillex-Aviicii nexus of youth-oriented superstars but if I had to guess I would guess that the latter acts tend to be playing in more traditional concert-ish venues with a limited number of openers, rather than in a traditional "bunch of DJs playing a party" kind of setting.
Or, um, not mourning because dead.
Right. The depressingest confounding factor.
Smearcase, have you ever read Dancer from the Dance? Having that be the frame for the story was sort of the weirdest part of the article. I was 16 or so when I bought and read it and I don't think it resonated with me at all then, nor should it have. But I may still have my copy and should probably check it out.
And thanks, Jesus and kr. I'll keep the Don Juan in mind if I end up needing to buy more and console myself with bitter laughter when gardening.
Mostly what's happened is that "raves" per se (that is, one-off, locally produced events) are pretty much dead
Although from what I can tell the non/low-profit side of things is still going strong, even if at this point a lot of it involves camping with the kids in tow. I mean, my friends who live in the area still complain about Decompression every fall.
Thorn, I haven't. I have a vivid memory of 1989-1990ish, typing "gay" as a subject keyword in the public library catalog and they had like seven novels and I think that was one of them but I didn't read it for some reason. I did sneak home A Boy's Own Story and The Lost Language of Cranes and maybe that was it. Neither is a really good book. They kind of are what they are.
Jeanette Winterson was the first queer lit I read that didn't feel like "well, this is all we have, so take it or leave it." I think I'd find her awfully mannered now but I did love The Passion and Written on the Body in college. I'm kind of sad I didn't find Faggots which is insane but more fun.
Dancer from the Dance is a terrific book. At least I loved it. I think "A Boy's Own Story" is a great book, although it is much denser and less easy to read than Dancer. White followed it up with two more books tracing his life through the early 80s. The story arc of a certain kind of gay male life in America from the 50s to the 80s -- total repression, then unprecedented liberation accompanied by some of the biggest sexual bacchanals in history, then a devastating plague -- has fantastic literary possibilities.
Oh, maybe I should give it another read. I devoured it when I was 16 because it was there and then later on felt a kind of frustration with it (I remember describing it as alternating between sentimentality and soft porn) that may have had to do with coming out in the AIDS era when a lot of the joy was gone.
You might try one of the other two books in that autobiographical trilogy -- "The Beautiful Room is Empty" or "The Farewell Symphony" instead. They are written in a more relaxed, easy, conversational style than "Boys Own Story", which is the most showily literary book he wrote, clearly heavily under the influence of Nabokov. I think all the literary pyrotechnics work but they do make for heavy sledding in places. The later books are more like listening to a good raconteur and are a fascinating look back into NYC in the 60s and 70s.
I wonder if it is almost easier to appreciate 'Boys Own Story' if you're straight, as White has a very particular vision of male homosexuality (strongly linked to sexual promiscuity, artistic creativity, and freedom from bourgeois restrictions) that I an imagine might be annoying if you don't share it. It's an honest vision he lived in his own life, but he's an unusual guy who had an unusual childhood -- I heard an interview with him where he casually estimated that he had had sex with several hundred people by the time he was 16, and that was 'unusual, particularly in the 1950s'. Also, the Freudian view of homosexuality really pervades 'Boys Own Story' -- distant father, smothering mother are much in evidence.
I generally trust Elkins to be be pretty keen on weird technical / experiential projects. If he's sus, I'm sus.
I read States of Desire when I was like 16. Definitely shaped my ideas of gay America in quite idiosyncratic ways.
57: kinda? The "everybody's old" thing gives it sort of a different flavor. But yeah, some other friends do free daytime park parties in LA all summer, and there's vaguely BM associated stuff all the time, and in SF Space Cowboys are apparently blowin' up, as the kids said decades ago. But the mainstream/youth culture/EDM piece and the burner/old school piece seem more firmly bimodal than they used to.
Although it is true that some of the current superstars (bassnectar, lorin, kaskade) came up through more undergroundy stuff, so what do I know.
...the most showily literary book he wrote, clearly heavily under the influence of Nabokov. I think all the literary pyrotechnics work but they do make for heavy sledding in places.
It's also where I learned the verb "to cornhole."
I think even bubblegum pink roses look charming in the sunshine, and I believe in planting really hardy plants, and it's a rebloomer?, and that's a great story. Of course, I'm so impractical that I now have to don eye protection regularly to get my Gold of Ophir mostly off the garage. (Old-fashioned climber: thorns that would make a *great* defensive hedge, huge, single-bloomer... but so fragrant and hardy.)
One time, I was at a rave, and I totally verbed a cornhole.
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 is one of the better combined pop culture and social history books I've read (his book on Arthur Russell and the 80s downtown scene is also great). I gathered from that that there were class splits among gay clubs from very early on.
Link in 71 fixed:
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Saves-Day-American-1970-1979/dp/0822331985/