snap, fizz, gulp, burp, ahhh

I have it on semi-good authority that my favorite soft drink is back on the market, even though it’s not at my local market. My friend Earl in Florida has assured me, perhaps a bit pompously, that's it's true. That would be Decaffeinated Diet Pepsi Lime. Since it seemed to have disappeared, at least from my ken, I have gone so far as to buy Decaffeinated Diet Pepsi and laced it with Real Lime Concentrate, which pretty much creates the same flavor and effect. My next best choice has changed a bit since I discovered
Canada Dry’s Diet Decaffeinated Green Tea Ginger Ale, which is readily available locally and is pleasing to the eye. Prior to that I was a fan of CD’s Diet Cranberry Ginger Ale but it has fallen to third in my pantheon of saccharine influenced libations since its color is reminiscent of a low grade of gasoline. Sometimes, you know, the visual is as important as pleasing the palate.
There has been much hoopla about how diet beverages are just about as dangerous for one’s health as the real stuff but I’m not influenced by good advice a lot. I don’t eat candy all that much but what’s life without a Snicker’s once in a while? I guess they are bad for you but they’re really Snickerlicious.

Happy Birthday, JessCat...

Ticked-Off Titles

Along with The Hurt Locker, Up In the Air, and Julie & Julia I think you can add Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives to the list of movies I’ll probably never see. The film, even though ostensibly a comedy, concerns three deadly divas taking revenge on the dastards that treated them wrong and it will be shown as part of the Tribeca Film Festival next month.

Speaking of off-the-wall names I had occasion to drop into the Partners and Crime bookstore last week and, among other things, I picked up a free copy of The Bookseller magazine (just because I could). This issue included the list of winners of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year--and here they are in the order in which they placed:

1. Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina.
2. What Kind of Bean Is This Chihuahua? by Tara Jansen-Meyer
3. Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A. Yannes
4. Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton
5. The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl
and Maria Dubinsky.

Come to think of it that Trannie movie doesn’t sound all that bad.

More Naked Men

There are 31 of these moody, nude dudes scattered about near Madison Square Park in Manhattan. Well, not all of them; some are loitering a little further a field including a parapet on the 26th floor of the Empire State Building (on the northeast side) and even higher up on the Metropolitan Life and Flatiron buildings. Only four are at ground level so you can make eye contact if you dare and even fondle there cast-iron behinds if you are so inclined, and they can’t fight back even though they are 6’ 2” and weigh 1,400 pounds each. The other 27 figures have been placed on rooftops and parapets of mostly historic buildings and it’s a mad game of ‘I Spy’ to see them all. These 27 are made of fiberglass and weigh about 70 pounds each so if they fall on you you might survive even though it would hurt mightily.

These sculptures, called “Event Horizon,” are the work of Antony Gormley and are castings made from his own body. They were first scattered about London in 2007 on bridges, buildings and streets along the South Bank of the Thames River. The Manhattan “Event” is sponsored by the Madison Square Park Conservancy who raised the $400,000 in production costs to bring it here. It doesn’t cost thee or me anything to gawk but, if you have the time, it’s also very interesting to see how the majority of pedestrians don’t give them much more than a cursory look, if that. But they are fun, in a way, even though seeing four or five of them looking down at you from various heights of strategically chosen buildings give them a gargoyle effect and are, thus, sort-of threatening in a way; even ghoulish, especially on a misty, murky Monday. But fear not, they are essentially a harmless work of installation art with the humor built in through the sheer audacity of their multitude. Unless, that is, one of them slips his bindings and conks you on the noggin.

Merry Dickens, with Gore and Mayhem

JessCat, who lives in San Francisco, is my bookish resource/consultant in all things novelistic in the mystery/detective vein. You think you’ve found a new author in that genre? JessCat can give you the titles of his/her previous eight books plus a synopsis of their plots and whether or not you should actually read them. Her tastes are rather indiscriminate since she reads a lot of crap including some highly suspect best sellers but she’s very careful in what she recommends to me since I don’t really read a lot anymore and what I do read I get all bent out of shape if the book turns into a waste of my, admittedly, not very valuable, time. It is a rare book indeed that I have read before JessCat gets her hands on it and even more rare if I recommend it to her. When I told her I liked Louis Bayard’s “Mr. Timothy” and, knowing her dislike for graphic violence, I warned her of some action-filled gore about three-quarters of the way into the book. Her reaction was thus:

“It seems a lot of recent mystery authors now feel compelled to explore the gross and evil, describing in detail the horrible physical aspects of the crime, the twisted psychology of the perpetrator and the psyche and angst of the detective. Even some of my old favorites have succumbed to the lure of the disgusting. I prefer my corpses bloodless, the detective brilliant, and the solutions literate and elegant and not necessarily realistic. I have always loved the genre, but not when the evil gets too graphic or too lovingly explored. I don't feel the need to experience it in my gut or my dreams to appreciate it.”

I’ll be interested in her reaction to Mr. Timothy, presuming my warning hasn’t, well, warned her off reading it.

Mr. Timothy is a very entertaining take on what happens to a peripheral character in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, that being the lame and limpid Tiny Tim of “God-bless-us-every-one” fame. According to the author, Louis Bayard, the poor tyke never had a chance of developing into anything other than the damaged adult he portrays here even though, against all odds, his basic moral goodness continues to lurk somewhere deep down in his damaged psyche. The book is written in “period” style and, although not exactly Dickensian, it’s still rooted in the rococo language of literature produced in 1860. To be more precise, in late December of that year which, if you think about it, would be an anniversary of the ghosts and mayhem suffered by Ebenezer Scrooge a couple of decades, or so, earlier. But, although “Uncle ‘N’,” as he is referred to here, is indeed a part of the book and its plot, it is our Timothy who is center stage and Tim’s ghosts are of an entirely different nature. (By the way, one needs to remember that Tiny Tim is not related to Scrooge in any way, but is the son of Scrooge’s overworked and abused clerk Bob Cratchit and is, therefore, literally an overnight charity case upon whom fortune is suddenly thrust. How’s that for rococo writing?) Anyway, the plot of Mr. Timothy gets dark and murky and, yes, horrific and gory as Tim falls into solving and, of course, eventually dispatching a spectacular horde of criminal horror-mongers with some pretty icky perversions. It is this plot turn that I warned JessCat about.

Mr. Timothy was published in 2003 and I’m sort-of amazed I didn’t stumble across it before. But I was still both charmed and horrified by it. Mr. Bayard’s subsequent book is named Pale Blue Eye and I understand he delves into the psyche of Edgar Allan Poe in that one. Uh oh, JessCat, uh oh.

Full Disclosure: JessCat is my sister.

tempus fugit

More and more I realize I’m becoming my own mother. This thought is prompted by the fact of Daylight Saving Time kicking in this Sunday. My mother never did buy into the whole concept of DST and, in yet another attempt at attaining elderly eccentricity, for years refused to change her clocks. She was right in her quirky way and I didn’t care really because it only took very minor math to know what time it was at her place.

Since its advent and as the decades passed, adjustments were made as to when DST starts and ends. I suppose I could do some research on this but I choose not to. It’s not my imagination but once a decade, or so, some bureaucrat decides to expand it, for a whole phalanx of rationales. As I’ve grown older, like my mother, I have started to doubt them and although I do change my clocks when I’m supposed to (my eccentricities lie elsewhere, and are less minor) I just know the whole thing is a ridiculous hoax.

Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is right on, that is, the passage of time is really a dreamscape and we shouldn’t fool with it. I have this idea that over the next 50 years, a decade at a time, DST will expand in about 10-day increments and will therefore eventually meet and fold into itself and we will come out the other end and we will never have to change our clocks again since it will forever more be Daylight Saving Time, and the reasons behind it will continue to be more bogus. However, the upshot might be that we will either lose one hour forever or we will have start over at square one by adding an hour each year, changing it to a spring-back-fall-forward mantra and further confusing generations to come because the reasons behind DST will have been lost in the missed of time.

One afterthought: the correct term is Daylight Saving Time; not Daylight Savings Time which has slowly entered into common usage. Eventually, in this electronic age, it will be known only as DST and no one will actually know what the acronym stands for (and no one will care). Not even the cranberry farmers who ostensibly benefit. Or the purveyors of fossil fuels. My mother could be right; ignoring DST might be the noble thing to do. It certainly says something for eccentricity, which can be an attractive and charming asset, even though sometimes annoying as hell.

Naked Truth

You may want to avert your eyes from this entry because it contains full-frontal male nudity. You’ve been warned!

In late November of last year I went to an art fair at The LGBT Center in Greenwich Village and met an artist name Branden Charles Wallace. I liked his work and I guess he liked the cut of my jib, and we negotiated terms regarding my posing for him and then, for two months, we played phone tag. Eventually we made contact and set the time and date for our first session and flinging caution, and my duds, to the winds the deed is almost a done deal. Branden works in oil on linen canvas and I posed in three sessions, two hours each, three Thursday afternoons in a row and it is this experience I hereby chronicle. If you haven’t already done so, now might be the time to avert your eyes.

People who know me are (probably distressingly) aware that I’m no stranger to public nudity; being an aficionado of au naturel beaches and clothing-optional resorts in Key West, Palm Springs and elsewhere. I am not shy (is that the same thing as having no shame?) nor do I give a hoot about what other people might think about my particular physical attributes, or lack thereof. So posing for Branden was no big deal…all I needed was a glass of water and a thermostat set on “comfortable.”

His studio is exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s cluttered and “arty.” There are various canvases (blank or in various stages of completion) leaning here and there and walls covered with artwork, his own and by others, with every flat surface and windowsill holding all kinds of interesting stuff to look at. It was the right atmosphere for the adventure/experience at hand.

Branden works differently than what I had expected. That is, he doesn’t really face his subject but turns sideways from his easel (he’s a lefty), which means the model can watch the work-in-process. What was more than surreal to me was that he seemed to be waving his brush in the air, not even touching the surface of the canvas, and yet a ghost of a person started to take shape before my eyes. My first idea of a comparison was like the early days of the Polaroid camera where, after the photo was taken, you had to wait for the image to appear. This time the image came from the end of a long-handled paintbrush and, as I watched, a figure started to coalesce. And that figure was me! I can’t think of any other word but “surreal” to describe it.

Oddly enough, as we went along and despite the loss of feeling in various parts of my body (you think it’s easy to sit still for two hours at a time?), it became more and more a nice, quiet carnival ride with a great view of other people working, and in 3-D. I think Branden understood what was going on with me and, in the painting, he has come close to catching my mood in both facial expression and body language. He was the perfect starter-kit for my future success as a nude model, even though I’m pretty sure this is a one-shot deal.

Branden is not chopped liver in the art world although he’s only 37, the darling. What is impressive is that he loves the work. He loves painting. I mean, you can tell he just has himself over the magic he can perform and he is an enthusiastic show-off, which was lovely to witness. For the six hours I was with him we talked a lot and our mutual appreciation of what we think is good art and what isn’t coincides fairly well, so it’s no wonder I admire his taste. Having me model might be a new low for him but, hey, the painting is small and everybody has their career glitches. You can check out his website at http://www.brandenwallace.com/ and he has a blog that makes me wonder if he realizes he might be exposing a tad more about himself than he intended (www.passengersseat.blogspot.com); check out the self-portrait with his mom!

FYI: the painting is still a work-in-progress and is not finished; just my participation in it is (unless Branden drops it down his stairwell, by accident of course). The background needs to be filled in and he has a couple of ideas for that and I’m anxious to see one of them come to fruition. Anyway, my job is done and what becomes of the final work of art is moot. For me it was the ride that counted and I have to thank Mr. Wallace for furnishing the carousel; and even though my particular horse was stationary, my mind gave it flight.

Update May 10, 2010: The painting is finished and is now in my possession. I have it propped up next to my computer and I think it's just amazing; both as a work of art and that I actually went through with it. My mind is again abuzz with a mixture of surprise at myself which includes, yes, a bit of an ego boost (and perhaps a tad of missplaced pride) but also I must confess I'm slightly bewitched by the possible consequences of my own audacity. But this painting is going to last a whole lot longer than I will and in a hundred years who cares? Branden gets the credit; I'm just the joker who posed, which is perfectly all right with me!