Saturday, July 17, 2004
36 Hours In The City Of Light
My friend Denis, taken last weekend in Paris. My blog server's best new feature makes it much easier for me to post my own photos here. I no longer have to go through the intermediate step of loading the photo first to my web page. Sun, Summer, Saturday Morning... Outside I go, shortly, for a gallery hop and a long-dreamed of elevated adventure (details to follow, if I pull it off).
I found an amazing art site, Insecula, that lets you comfortably browse some great Paris and New York museums, inlcuding Orsay, Pompidou, the Met, and MoMA. Collections are very complete, images are nice and large, and downloading is easy (except for the tiny Insecula copyright in the corner of each artwork). Well worth checking out! In addition to art, there's plenty of architecture and monuments, including over a hundred pictures of Cambodia's immense Angkor Wat, which I hobbled through on crutches in January 2003.
More Paris pictures:
Denis and Chrisitian's building faces the romantic Canal St Martin:
Denis works in a palatial building on Avenue Montaigne, with his office on second floor center. Yes, the one with the balcony! Evita, Evita.... : - )
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Friday, July 16, 2004
Complicated Is The New Simple
Blogger.com, my host, apparently upgraded its system last night. Arrgh. This means I have hundreds of new choices and options, but that I'm not sure I know how to do anything anymore! These changes are usually a net plus, once you've absorbed them... Also transformed is Allmusic.com, my ultimate music reference.. Now it's slow and cumbersome. Less Is More. Simple Is Sophisticated. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. : - ) Pictured left: Birds from my childhood. You get it, right? Movie time! I have plans to see movies with both Bart and Christi, tomorrow and next Friday respectively, but we haven't decided which movies. I came up with several possibilties, as follows, with links to their New York Times reviews: the gay comedy Touch Of Pink, the Italian thriller Facing Windows, Jeff Bridges' acclaimed performance in the John Irving adaptation "Door In The Floor," Will Ferrell's Anchorman, the Chinese love-triangle import Zhou Yu's Train, and the well-reviewed romantic drama The Notebook. Already seen, and really loved: Napoleon Dynamite and Fahrenheit 911.
Quotes Of The Day:
"Condoms are easier to change than diapers." - Bumper Sticker
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language." - Buck Henry
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Thursday, July 15, 2004
This just in: The full name of Fiedel, my ex Brian's dog, turns out to be Fiedelis Barkingsworth : - ) Surnames considered and discarded include Chihuahuaberg and Poopington... Todd Solondz watch: Toronto Film Festival in September will see the debut of "Palindromes," the new film by the genius of "Happiness", "Dollhouse", and "Storytelling." Check out this cool Todd Solondz site.
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Lucy In The Field With Flowers
I love Lucy. Boston's amazing Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) began with this attempt at painting gone awry...No obvious Bad Art in this collection, such as Elvis or puppy dogs on velvet: MOBA accepts only ingenious Bad Art. Basically, competent painters having a very bad day, or that took a major wrong turn... MOBA provokes hilarity by brilliantly satirizing museum-speak and art criticism! For example, describing "Lucy":
"The motion, the chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the expression on her face -- every detail combines to create this transcendent and compelling portrait, every detail cries out "masterpiece.""
"As with all great art, extended viewing reveals endless layers of mysteries: What is Norman Mailer's head doing on an innocent grandma's body, and are those crows or F-16's skimming the hills? "
MOBA can be found in the basement of the Deadham's Community Theater in surburban Boston, conveniently located just outside the men's room...
p.s. Bill Clinton boogies down with Kevin Spacey at a London gay club, and later provokes mayhem at a London straight club, in the July 14th post of his fake blog.
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004
How To Fight Loneliness
I'm still enjoying the Fake Bill Clinton Blog, which is gently funny, picturing him as slightly depressed and lonely, on the road promoting his book. It's kind of like how I'd feel if I were him... Here's an excerpt:
"I feel pretty lonely. With all my friends, my supporters, Hillary and Chelsea, I feel all alone, because all these people are connected with the politician Bill Clinton, not with me personally. How many friends do I have? How many people like me? Tony Robbins is right. It's over. I need to put politics behind me. Problem is, I am politics. If I have to move on, I'll have to start from scratch. All of a sudden, I'm 57 and I'm nobody and I have nobody. When I look around right now, I see the security guard leaning back in his chair. He notices me and gives me a disinterested look back.
I see the housekeeper cleaning the window. The look on her face tells me she'd rather be somewhere else. I see the spots she left on the window. I know I'll have to talk to her about her work pretty soon and I know she's so beaten by decades of hard manual labor, she won't even care if I fire her or not. "Quotes Of The Day:
"Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals, dying of nothing." - Red Foxx
"Today, we will settle this Indian problem." - George Armstrong Custer
Happy Bastille Day, Denis and Christian!!!
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Tuesday, July 13, 2004
40.5' N 73.3' W
New York's latitude and longitude have nothing whatsoever to do with zebras. Nor are either the subject of this post. : - ) Slander and Guilty Pleasure. Here's a hilarious excerpt from a fake on-line biography of Zachary Taylor, our 12th President:
"Taylor was the philanderer that JFK could only dream of being, twice the lush that Benjamin Harrison ever was. On a slow day, he was a bigger crook than Nixon, a worse gambler than James K. Polk, and more of an insufferable whining brat than George Bush. Few people are aware of this today." and "The story of exactly how he acquired the peculiar nickname "muskrat head" has unfortunately been lost, but we do know that he was plagued with it almost from birth."Here's the correct Taylor bio, from the White House web site.
Quotes Of The Day:
"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." - Rod Serling, 1958
"Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age." - Victor Hugo
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Monday, July 12, 2004
"Some editors are failed writers, but then, so are most writers..." - T.S. Eliot
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Out Of The Closet....
.... And On To The Music Charts
Great article on Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters in NEXT, one of NY's two gay going-out guides (the other is HX - Homo Xtra). Can an openly gay music group that doesn't fit into any one musical genre hit it big in the US like they did in Europe? Stay tuned - their CD comes out here July 27! It's 5am and I can't sleep - Arrgh. this entry's permalink
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Je T'Encule, Connasse
That's colorful language here, which I learned last night from Christian and his friend Thierry as the 4 of us feasted at "La Boca", a local eatery with mile-high tin ceilings and soft pastel colors. Amazing food, but the waitress brought Denis beef insisting it was veal, as if we were credulous idiots. :-) Denis wound up eating very tasty lamb, half an hour after we'd all finished... To add insult to injury, they brought Denis the wrong dessert. In this country, that translates to no tip at all, since the waiterfolk here are paid a living wage. To Denis' relief, I have finally realized, after 11 years of visits, that it is not appropriate to leave 15% or more :-) Today will be long, as I arrive home 2am Paris time. Au revoir, my friends.this entry's permalink
