PUBLIC SPACE

For some reason my thoughts started drifting recently to Uncle Joe's, which used to be Jersey City's gay bar.  It had been a Prohibition era speakeasy, and then who knows what kind of bar, then when I first moved to JC in 1993 it was a bar in a desolate area of downtown that cops and some artists frequented.  Then it turned into a gay bar, and for a few years it was our local: then it got sold and turned into a straight live-music bar; now I think it got knocked down so they could build another skyscraper -- gentrification.  Anyway, while it was a gay bar it was a particular kind of public space, which I've been thinking about because I've been working on an article about the use of streets as queer public space.  New York City gay bars tend to be pretty specialized, but in smaller towns they draw more of a cross-section of the community, so when you hang out in one for a while you meet a lot of different people.  My mind started drifting to people I'd met in Uncle Joe's, and knew only there, for one little slice of their lives -- and hadn't seen or thought about in years.  (A few people from Joe's became friends, but that's another story.)  Public space is an ephemeral thing: take that bar -- it existed for a few years, and became a regular stopping place for a lot of people.  It was a hang-out place rather than primarily a pick-up bar, so you could end up having lots of different conversations, and finding out a lot about the lives of the regulars.  It seems to be a function of queer space that this kind of mixing happens -- what people have in common is their queerness, which cuts across other identity category lines, so I had conversations with people I might not have met in my usual social paths.  The conversations may have been casual, but the fact that they stuck in my brain indicates how stratified my social paths are these days; the older I get, the more I can predict exactly what kinds of people I'm going to meet unless I make some effort to branch out a bit. (And that's a subject for another post.)

            Many of the people I saw regularly in Uncle Joe's, I've never seen again, even though we have a new gay bar in town, just a few blocks away.  In the eight-year gap between one and the other they must have found some other place to serve as a social nexus.  But that's puzzling.  So I ask myself what I did when there was no local gay bar: what purpose did Uncle Joe's serve for me, and do I no longer have those needs?  Because, truthfully, I myself don't got the new bar very often, even though it's very friendly and nice.   Apparently, this type of public space doesn't work for me anymore, perhaps because my connections with the Radical Faeries have created a substitute community that's more nourishing and meaningful to me.

            When I would go to Uncle Joe's, I could sit there quietly at the bar, not necessarily be at the top of my game, and maybe have some casual conversations with the bartender or other people sitting there.  The more I went, the easier it was to have those casual interactions, because familiarity adds ease -- you don't have to know anything much about the person sitting at the bar, just that his continued presence there means he's accepted the social contract of that space.  And of course it was usually a "he," which is important because men occupy public space differently than women do.  Men are really comfortable going to a bar by themselves; women aren't.  Men feel entitled to sit there as long as they want, to drink slowly or fast, to talk or not to talk.  But I always went with my girlfriend anyway, so that wasn't quite such an issue.  Uncle Joe's was a bar for everyone, but it was still mostly men, like many "mixed" spaces tend to be.

            Going to Uncle Joe's was sometimes just a relief, of course -- a place to have a beer and not get hassled, a place to watch people pursuing whatever they were pursuing, while not necessarily taking part.  You could go there without a particular purpose, even though it's always problematic to be excluded from the sexual economy of a social space (doubly excluded when you're both in a monogamous relationship, and a woman in a male-dominated space).  The sexual economy of any gathering space is always such an important line of energy that to be removed from it is to participate less than fully, not to be your whole self.  That's a conundrum I've never figured out: it's not about what you actually do or don't do, it's about what you've ruled out in advance.  Having made a decision not to participate sexually changes one's entire relationship with a given community, yet not in a way that is ever openly articulated.  I know very few monogamous gay men, so it's my experience that this is far more an issue for lesbians -- and I know very few lesbians in long-term committed relationships who've managed the polyamorous balancing act successfully. (Is it my age? Are younger lesbians managing it better? I hope so.)

            Maybe that's what's interesting about public space: a place like Uncle Joe's exists, and you choose to go there because that decision also enables you to choose which parts of yourself you want to bring to the table.  Maybe it's your sexual self, maybe it's your neighborhood self, or your community organizing self, or your bitter old queen who wants to talk about movies self.  Maybe you want to remind yourself every now and again that you are indeed capable of talking about the weather or telling jokes or just shooting the breeze.  But public space is not the same thing as community, because there's no pressure to bring the rest of yourself: you can always opt out, you're never obligated, or invested.  Sure, I've watched Last Call at Maud's and seen the way a bar could in the past be an actual focal point for a real community of dykes, but I've never myself experienced that, and anyway, that movie was precisely about the demise of that scene.  At this point in my life, I need more, I need real community, and so I give the bar a miss.  But public space always has that tantalizing potential to coalesce into something more: the Cedar Tavern, Maud's, the place where the right people meet each other and start some fabulous project.  Maybe I should give it another try, and bring my most creative self to the barstool.

Audience and Affect

This past few days, I saw an interesting sequence of events: on Saturday, the full screening of David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly (the 13-minute sequence plus the 7-minute reel, at Gallery Aferro in Newark -- I'd never seen it before; then, on Sunday afternoon, at La Mama, John Kelly's Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte (his meditation on Egon Schiele); then on Tuesday, Sondheim's A Little Night Music, with Bernadette Peters.  I don't usually go to so many cultural events in a row, but it was just happenstance that they all fell together (I even had to pass up a chance to go to A Free Man of Color on Thursday -- sometimes a person just has to get a little work done).  But the interesting and rare occasion of seeing those particular things in a row got me to thinking about audience and affect. It's something I've thought about a lot in the past, in relation to my favorite performers -- John Kelly is one, so is Justin Bond.
    A Fire in My Belly was a revelation: it's from 1986-87, so I was worried it wouldn't hold up, but it packs the punch of a steam plough.  I don't want to speculate why the Catholic League hates it so much; that can only stem from an utter misunderstanding of what the film is trying to do.  But we can thank them for making so many of us able to see this film -- and the whole thing, which many galleries are now screening, rather than just the 4-minute excerpt that the Smithsonian censored; but parts are now available on YouTube, which is great, and the New York Times ran an excellent article on the front page on Saturday, December 10 (by Holland Cotter, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/design/11ants.html?src=twr).  The film is hard to watch: it's about the violence people inflict on each other and on animals, about the brutality of everyday life and the way we block ourselves from feeling anything about what we see in order to just keep on going on our mechanical round of daily life.  Anyone who saw it in the late 1980s, with their friends or themselves dying of AIDS, must have found it unbearable -- it completely captures that strange tension between the heavy inertia of mundane daily routine and the flaring intensity of pain and suffering that punctuates it (if you ever let it in).  It reminds you how much work we all do just to keep feeling out of our lives.  And if you couldn't keep the pain of AIDS out of your life when this film was made, then the deliberately built carapace of indifference that the rest of the world chose to put on was a form of torture.  There's a shot of some ancient plaza where ritual sacrifices took place, and a herd of modern tourists filming it: perfect -- pain and suffering tolerated only at a far remove.  But this film, paradoxically, doesn't allow the viewer that remove: we have to watch, and see pain, and see indifference, and see co-optation and complicity.  We have to know.
    The very next day, still pondering that intense 20 minutes of disturbing brilliance, I went to see Kelly's Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte.  I remember the first Kelly performance I saw: Constant Stranger, at the Joyce Theater.  I remember where, because the experience was so upsetting: there was Kelly on the stage, performing a piece that made me weep, and there around me in the audience were a bunch of people who had season subscriptions, who didn't know or care anything about Kelly, and who were laughing because he put on a tutu: surely you're allowed to laugh at a man in a tutu? (even if he's dancing in a circle of skulls in the middle of the AIDS crisis?)  I loved his Joni Mitchell shows and his performances at Wigstock, and even performances that I thought didn't quite come together, like The Paradise Project.  But that night got me thinking about the ways that the audience defines the performance, despite the best intentions of some spectators and the artist.  Performance is an experience, so the audience shapes the experience for all who are there.
    Pass the Blutwurst is different; it's from the same period as A Fire in My Belly -- the original performance was 1986 -- and it's about the death of artist Egon Schiele in the flu pandemic of 1918, when he was only 28.  Everything Kelly does is beautiful: the way he moves, the music he chooses, the colors, the film projected behind the stage.  I have no way of knowing what this felt like to watch when it was first performed, but it didn't make me feel the way the Wojnarovicz film did -- I could see and appreciate, even wonder at what Kelly was doing, and yet not be utterly moved: the pieces stayed separate, and didn't coalesce into a whole that swept me away. I puzzled over that for a while, till surprisingly my next event, the Sondheim, clarified things a little.
    I am no way a Broadway queen, but I went to A Little Night Music because my girlfriend loves Bernadette Peters (the only other show she's managed to drag me to is Gypsy).  So I tried to appreciate the wooden acting of much of the cast, the dated heteronormativity of the seventies lyrics, the supposed daring of a whiff of sexual liberation (only represented by stereotypical actress characters and servant girls: we might as well be in an 18th-century farce).  I have to say it was pretty interesting to see Peters (who is totally wonderful) sing "Send in the Clowns."  But since many audience members were willing to share their thoughts during the performance, I feel able to comment on how they were affected: from behind me, "Oh, isn't that sad!"  "How funny!"  etc. etc.  Apparently, most of the audience saw the play as a series of set pieces, each to be appreciated in itself rather than as part of a flowing whole (luckily, since there is no flowing coherent narrative in this play).  And seeing it that way helped me to retrospectively appreciate Kelly's Pass the Blutwurst better: as a series of tableaux (tableaux vivants).  Odd that Sondheim could help me see Kelly more clearly, but there you are.  I have a tendency to want things to build step by step, to carry me along; so the gaps between set-piece tableaux bother me and let me fall through, lose my spectatorly momentum.  But if I think about Kelly as a series of aesthetic fragments, if I lose my desire for emotional plot, maybe I could be swirled away on a different momentum, a less rational one. 

Tale of a Toilet

My girlfriend and I have been talking about moving, for lots of reasons: we own a little house, but taxes are high and going higher, and while the little house was what we could afford when we bought it, it's really not what we want now.  Not to mention the fact that our relationship is in major transformation (future still unclear), and the living space has taken on some of the freight of the negotiation of our individual needs.  (Sometimes we talk about a place where we share a bedroom and living room, and have everything else separate: cuddle, sleep, have sex, watch Glee, and then split up to do whatever else we do -- trying to escape lesbian co-dependency.  It's hard to avoid the dream that a simple reorganization of space will resolve all personal problems.)

Thinking about moving, of course, means considering new neighborhoods -- from the next train stop up the line to radical shifts: Brooklyn?  the Bronx?  And so it also means consideration of what new neighborhoods (especially the ones we can afford) would really be like to live in.  And that brings me to my theme of the day: the tale of a toilet -- or, more precisely, the reframing of a toilet into a desperate narrative about self.

Moving to a new neighborhood involves a new narrative to weave the problematic bits of a new place into a story that sells the new home to one's friends and fits it into one's self-image.  Maybe this is the marker of being middle-class (a dividing line I've puzzled over for years, being English and thus obsessed with subtle class gradations, and with the lack of translation between those and American class).  Moving to a new place requires justifying it -- it can't just be a place to live, it has to be a place that mirrors one's sense of self.  One's abode is a signifier of one's worth -- not monetarily, necessarily, but in terms of style.  You can live in a crummy neighborhood, if it signifies that you're a cool hipster; if you're cool enough you can be the first to move into a new neighborhood as long as you can tell people why it's cool -- it's not enough just to live there (and god forbid just to live there because it's cheap), you have to tell a story about it.  Take Bensonhurst and Williamsburg, for example: they have a lot in common, but people managed to sell one as cool, while the other remains a real problem, in terms of image.

This is a tale of a toilet because a toilet figures in my quintessential tale of how to tell stories.  Twenty years ago I was living temporarily in Paris as a poor graduate student; one of my professors was also there for a while, living in a much fancier neighborhood, of course.  She was a very insecure person, though it took me years to recognize that, because I couldn't yet understand how such a successful academic could still be so insecure; her need to spin everything she did -- coupled with her inability to do it effectively -- simply puzzled me intensely.  One night we went out to dinner at a little restaurant near where she was staying: as she described it to me, it was "an unpretentious little couscous restaurant, really authentic."  The two words unpretentious and authentic were of course the key: the restaurant was in fact a completely blah, unmemorable place with -- the only thing about it that stuck in my mind -- a Turkish toilet (a hole in the floor, basically, still common enough in Paris then; you squatted on a kind of draining board and peed into the hole).  I'd seen plenty of Turkish toilets in Paris, especially in the places students lived, but the actual puzzle was her attempt to weave it into her narrative.  If she was a sophisticated academic, and she chose to frequent a restaurant that served so-so couscous and had a Turkish toilet, then she had to weave a story that made sense of the anomalies.  It had to be unpretentious and authentic, loaded signifiers that transformed it into values in her cultural worldview, and that signaled those values to others like herself, who could then judge her on her taste.  The real question is, why couldn't she just say she went there because she liked it?  If she'd been brave enough to say that, she'd have been one of those neighborhood pioneers, the ones who make taste instead of following it.

Barbara Corcoran (real estate mogul) once wrote a column about changing neighborhoods, saying you could tell when a neighborhood was gentrifying when it had gay pride flags hanging on houses with flower pots on the stoops: she identified gay couples as the first wave of gentrification in so-called dicey neighborhoods -- and I suspect it's not just because they bought houses and fixed them up (without needing to worry about the school system) but also because gay couples were especially good at telling stories about neighborhoods that made them cool.  After I read that column I went outside and looked at our house: yup, we were the first on the block to strip off the vinyl siding (some of our neighbors thought we were insane, since clapboard requires much more yearly maintenance than vinyl), and there were the flower pots and rainbows.  Surprisingly, we'd moved into a neighborhood that later became gentrified, so we no longer had to tell so many stories about why we lived there (oh, don't worry, it's full of artists, and there's such a cool little Cuban restaurant where the ropa vieja is just great ...).

A few years ago, I happened to have a brief conversation with a young woman who told me that her apartment in Greenpoint was worth more now simply because she'd lived in it.  She was a trust fund baby who could afford to do a full-time internship after college because someone else paid her rent, so I was perfectly willing to be outraged at her chutzpah, and make fun of it.  But in retrospect, she was right: she'd probably decorated her apartment with all the right things -- the Williams-Sonoma kitchenware, the original art, the complete lack of plastic flowers.  So when the next yuppie walked into her apartment to rent it, it had become legible to a new group of people -- people who'd be willing to pay more.  They could see it as the right sort of place for people like them, because the little intern had re-framed it in that particular way. Her taste-markers made a new narrative of the space.

So have I finally reached the point where I can move into a neighborhood simply because I like it? Maybe it feels safe, has the perfect building, has some restaurants I like, has a good park for the dogs: maybe I can tell people they can visit me there if they want to see me, not just because it's the next up-and-coming place where you can still get in on the ground floor if you hurry ...

Even a good Thanksgiving has pitfalls

Thanksgiving was friends, not family, as usual this year so the only fight came from the dogs: stress about desiring turkey scraps caused a donnybrook under the table, complete with scary (to those not used to it) high-pitched basenji screams; no blood, no foul, and afterwards, everyone sighed with relief that the traditional Thanksgiving ritual had been accomplished with so little lasting misery.  What's Thanksgiving without a family fight?  On to the apple pie!

But then talk turned onto a dark track: how much better things were in the olden days.  We were a mixed bunch, ranging from 10 to 69: the young end checked out early and went to the playground, but the rest of us fell into that familiar rut -- "when I first came to New York, artists could afford to live here; you could be creative because you didn't have to work all the time to pay the rent; we did so many creative things [fill in the blanks]."  Till a 30-something person rebelled and said there was still stuff going on, but maybe those nostalgia-whiners weren't aware of it.  It was interesting: some people really couldn't stop talking about what they'd done in their heyday, and how dull things were now; so the room divided, and the 30-somethings sulked a bit, not willing to insist that the oldsters shut up.

I'm coming up on 53, and moved to New York in 1974.  I spent my late teens at CBGBs, playing in third-rate bands, never pursuing the scene with full energy and ambition, just hanging out around the edges full of odd ambivalences and the certainty that I could never possibly be cool (an investigation for another time).  So I've thought plenty about what the old days were like, and about my reaction to them.  I've tried not to do revisionist history: those days weren't wonderful for me -- I was not cool, and not happy, even though I was in the right place at the right time, and saw lots of cool things and people.  I heard lots of great music, but I didn't create myself into the vision of the person I thought I could be, and I never felt I fully occupied my own space.  So after a while, I changed my life, and went to graduate school, and that's a whole different story.

Now I have a different relationship to nostalgia: when you're older, it's way harder to have the energy to commit yourself to a creative life, and I suspect that's what people really mean when they say things aren't what they used to be -- they displace the disappointment in their own energy levels onto the creative scene itself.  But of course it's true that tons of interesting things are going on out there: it's just that younger, more energetic people are doing them.  It's also true that there's not much tolerance for older people, and that makes it even harder to feel part of a scene.  I've been thinking about feeling old since I turned 50, when a switch seemed to flip and the downward slide began: dying my hair was no longer a choice between mouse and red; the number of annual preventive medical tests that I as a lucky person with good health insurance was told to schedule multiplied exponentially; I got glasses and a hearing aid (all that loud CBGBs music coming home to roost); I often couldn't remember why going to a club was fun -- and I just don't do it anymore.  When I do go out, I can't imagine that anyone will care what I look like, and it seems a waste of time to hope that someone will find me attractive: that's a hard one, rarely getting a charm check.  In fact, all of this stuff is hard: it's the conjunction of having my body change, and living in a youth culture that doesn't value my body any more anyway, and also of the more subtle issue of re-evaluating my life after 50: stuff I've been doing for years (being an academic) no longer makes much sense to me, and the way I organize my life and allocate my time clearly needs a complete revolution.  I feel the lure of easy nostalgia: it would be so great to blame the scene out there rather than blame myself for being unable to maintain a nourishing creativity -- or, even worse, to turn a cold spotlight on my life and realize that what I thought was nourishing was in fact rather empty.  Remaking my life in middle age seems like a herculean task, and I really wish it felt satisfying to shift the blame.

Apparently, there's no escape from holiday gloom, even when you've cleverly avoided the obvious misery of family dysfunction.