Man Versus Fridge

The epic battle of our times, presented in a short fiction form by me. Well, posted and hoisted onto the internet courtesy of Across the Margin. The origins of this story began with the Collected Letters of John Berryman. One of the entries is not a letter to Saul Bellow or a TMI correspondence with his son Paul, but rather an angry missive to the real estate company managing his apartment in NYC. I thought this might be an interesting kind of tale of woe to work with, and work with it I did. To results deemed satisfactory to Across the Margin. Read and enjoy. Then listen to the humming coming from your fridge. 

In Bed with Gore Vidal: A Book Review

In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master

296 pages

Riverdale Avenue Books

Thanks to the Simpsons, Gore Vidal is one of the first public figures I ever knew was gay. In one episode, Lisa and marge have this exchange:

Marge: Well, did you call one of your friends?

Lisa: Hah! These are my only friends: grown up nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys than I ever will.

Marge: Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls.

            Fans of the show know that John Waters played a gay character who befriended Homer, while Jay Sherman spilled the sexual orientation beans about Harvey Fierstein in another episode. But the reference to Gore Vidal stood out more to me. Strange how such a remark can make an impact. Perhaps because Lisa’s comment touched on a physical aspect of male same-sex relations, or maybe it was the shot of Gore’s yellow cartoon face on one of his books, looking masculine, marvelous, and tough. The show’s use of Gore Vidal brought home two points to my young mind. Of course, I knew gay men existed but seeing Vidal meant that gay men could be famous authors and that his gray hair meant they had been around long before I was born.

            However, reading Tim Teeman’s book one wonders if Gore Vidal actually did kiss that many boys. In Teeman’s portrait, it seems Gore would have preferred mouths to be used for other functions, and that they do so quickly. Through this exhaustive and thorough sexual biography, we learn that Vidal often readily embraced physical intimacy, but had trouble opening himself up emotionally with anyone, including his partner of over fifty-plus years, Howard Austen.

            Yet, Gore Vidal would have approved of the way the Simpsons identified him, by the act of kissing boys rather than by an orientation towards them. One of the surprising revelations of the biography is that Vidal never identified himself as gay, despite the general public’s willingness to categorize and accept him as such. In his view, there were no homosexual people, just homosexual acts. Therefore, everyone was bisexual, perfectly capable of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction. This position, widespread before the nineteenth century, put him outside the mainstream of both American society and the Gay community. Unlike a writer such as Burroughs, Vidal did not even embrace a label such as “queer” and while rejected attempts to be labeled a “faggot.”

            But there was a downside to this self-declared independence from sexual categories, which Teeman thoroughly documents. Because Gore refused to identify as a homosexual, he did not lend his fame to the cause of gay rights. Occasionally he would donate to certain organization and fought against sexual puritanism in his essays. But he remained largely absent from the fight, which grew more noticeable once the AIDS epidemic hit America and claimed the life of one of his nephews. While Gore was attentive to his family members’ needs in private, in public he was weary to find a common case with such controversial figures as Larry Kramer and his ACT UP organization.

               There was an emotional cost to this attitude as well. Despite being out in a physical sense, when it came to his feelings, Gore was still deeply closeted.  Sex for him was about dominance and superiority (and of course orgasm) more than any expression of a deeper commitment. While he didn’t care if people knew he had sex with men, he took great pains to let everyone know he was the one doing the fucking. Gore was always a top, never a bottom, and stressed this.  As a result, he missed out on the potential for genuine emotional intimacy and this affected his relationship with Howard Austen, who the book depicts as a long suffering companion, a victim of Gore’s withholding. They were partners but had a largely sexless relationship during that time. As the book explains, Gore felt that he could live together with a friend but not a lover, only to realize how dear Austen was to him before it was too late. In heartbreaking detail, Teeman relates how Vidal broke down at his partner’s death in 2003 and subsequently never recovered from the loss.

            One aspect of Gore’s sexuality the biography investigates is his assertions of bisexuality. He did not claim it as an identity or orientation, but rather a description of his sexual life. It only made since to describe himself as such, since he did not identify as either gay or straight and wanted people to believe he was perfectly open to sex with men and women. Yet nothing in Teeman’s research suggests he was as flexible as he claims. While there may have been a sexual encounter or two with women early on in his life, after the publication of his novel The City and the Pillar, Gore seems to have only had same-sex relationships. Despite ample opportunity to sleep with women, including several Hollywood starlets, Vidal instead sought after the company of men, particularly male hustlers in Italy, whose willingness to sleep with him for money while dating women only further reinforced his views about the inherent bisexuality of all people.

            Of course, one cannot blame Gore for the position he took. As those who are interviewed in the biography stress, he was a product of his time and his class. Homosexuality was illegal when he was born and gays were viewed as weaklings in every sense of the word. Gore came from an aristocratic background and was expected to take a leading role in the country’s politics as his grandfather, a senator from Oklahoma, had done. However, Gore’s sexuality stood in the way. There were other factors as well, but he would bitterly claim to the end of his days he would have become president if it was not for the issue of who he slept with. It makes sense he would try to downplay any notion of orientation and was in full control of who he was attracted to. But his extensive experience with prostitution and his penchant for Latin male pornography reveal otherwise.

            Much of his reaction to the sexual politics of his era can also be traced to Jimmy Trimble. Jimmy was a classmate  who Gore claimed was the love of his life to the very end. According to Gore, the two of them fooled around physically and shared a deep bond which was shattered when Jimmy was killed in World War II, an event which probably shaped his anti-Imperialist stance as much as his sexuality. The first part of the biography delves into the mystique of their relationship and contrasts Gore’s claims of intimacy with denials from Trimble’s family. Gore’s continuing attachment to Jimmy is no mere speculation. He was always willing to talk about his attraction to him and  how he could never love anyone else. Unfortunately, he did so around Howard, who was both pained and annoyed by the mention of the young man’s name.  He would make a jerk off motion behind Gore’s head whenever his partner brought it up and often brought Gore’s discussions to an end with a repeated refrain “Oh Gore, basta basta with the Jimmie Trimble!”

            While depicting Gore’s struggles in a sympathetic light, Teeman’s book does not shy away from the dark side of his character and the cost his emotional denial took on him. Vidal extrapolated his own desire to be sexually flexible and saw bisexual and homosexual romances behind every relationship between two men in literature and history. At the same time, Vidal internalized certain aspects of homophobia. His family hatred against a certain kind of effeminate gay man made him enemies with anyone who embodied those traits, such as Truman Capote. Thetwo famously feuded on and off for close to thirty years.  Besides these mental gymnastics, projections, and compartmentalizing, there were also years of heavy drinking and a mounting paranoia which led Gore to reverse his will at the end of his life. Convinced his family was out to get him, he revised the terms so Harvard University, which he never attended, would get the bulk of his estate.

            There is also the issue of how old Gore’s sexual partners were. While it is certain he enjoyed encounters with males in their late teens, there were rumors he slept with adolescents who were much younger. Gore was particularly worried that his arch nemesis William F. Buckley had information related to these encounters. However, Teeman can only guess about what he knew, since Christopher Buckley found his father’s file on Gore after his death and promptly threw it away without giving the content inside even so much as a curious glance. Complicating the picture was Gore’s early involvement with a fundraiser for an organization , part of which evolved to become NAMBLA. Gore defended his presence there years later by pointing out that he was unaware of what the group would become and that at the time he was giving money to help a cause devoted to liberalizing laws between teenagers and older men, though not children. Others claim the meeting was directly responsible for founding the group, despite what Gore contested.

            This back and forth between the sources and Gore Vidal himself is one of the more frustrating aspects of the book.  Since the subject is the sex life of Vidal, a lot of outrageous claims can be made because the acts occurred in private. Some of the most notorious statements do not involve Gore at all, but rather allegedly gay actors in 1950s Hollywood. They come from Scotty Bowers, who wrote about his time supplying closeted stars young men and women in his memoir Full Service. Unfortunately the veracity of his claims is often suspect and he has a history of retracting them.  Gore Vidal approved of his writing, but I doubt Katherine Hepburn, Tyrone Power, and Charles Laughton would.

            Besides the issue of contradicting sources, the book can be confusing at times, since there are dozens of characters who come and go through the text and one forgets their relationship to Gore, particularly those in his family.  His mother remarried and through this union, he gains a set of half and step-siblings. A glossary of names might have been helpful. In addition, the chronology of the biography becomes warped in several sections since Teeman tried to order the book thematically.  A great deal of context is lost this way.  However, In Bed with Gore Vidal remains a fascinating read, in no small part because of the complex personality at the center of it, a man who had wealth and fame, and yet was never satisfied in his private life. 

1001 Albums I’m Trying to Hear Before I Get Bored, Part 2

Well, I have finally finished my aural Odyssey (but alas, it involved no Oracle). In case you are new to the blog and missed my last post on the topic, I have been making my way through the collection 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, which was made possible due to the wonderful folks over at Radio 3 Net, probably the best thing to come out of Romania since Vampires and Nadia Comaneci. They have been kind enough to post the albums up on the Internet as streaming audio. Gentlemen and ladies, Mulţumesc! I am much obliged to you, without your disregard for copyright law, my knowledge of popular music would be seriously stunted.

This has been a project that I began seriously in the fall of 2009. Ah, how far have I come since then (from Arlington to Montclair, New Jersey), but farther still has come music. The first album on the list (the original 2005 edition) is Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, released in 1955. The last album on the list is the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan, which came out in 2005. In between was the rise of rock and roll, the British Invasion, psychedelia, funk, glam rock, the coming of the Nashville Sound, heavy metal, disco, punk and post-punk, rap, hip-hop, alternative, grunge, house, nu metal, electronica, and a hundred other smaller movements in music, some lasting no longer than a single year, band, or album.

This has been a real learning experience for me, listening to not just songs, but whole albums, and doing so chronologically. It really helps to put different bands and their work in perspective. One comes to understand the why of a specific genre of music and not just the what and when. Except for a few music lovers, I don't think there are many people out there who have listened to more than a hundred or two hundred complete albums. They may know thousands of songs by heart and understand their nuances, but knowledge of albums (i.e. LPs), especially in this age of downloads, probably leaves much to be desired. Go ahead, try and make a list of every album you have listen through completely.

I was the same way. I knew plenty of songs that I had picked up through burned CDs that mixed them together, or that I had downloaded through various channels. But when it came to whole albums, there were gaps in my knowledge. I had listened to most of the Beatles' work, and I had a few of the other greats like Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin IV, along with various "best of" collections. I also had plenty of disco and old funk to listen to as well, but this was also in the form of single songs and compilations. So I had only scratched the surface of popular music, even for those acts that I claimed to love (except for the Beatles). I also had a good store of classical music, but this is not a form that lends itself to the album age particularly well. It exists beyond the limmits of all discs, tapes, cylinders, and files. It was paper and ink that constrained Mozart and Mahler.

Not only were there deficiencies in my knowledge when it came to the classical period of rock and roll, but I knew very little of music from the 1950s and the music that came out from the late 1970s to the current time. I still don't know enough about world music as a whole, but at least through this project I became a little bit better acquainted with Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Buddy Holly, Elvis, and Miles Davis and at the same time came to know the Sex Pistols, NWA, Radiohead, and the White Stripes for the first or second time. Before listening to these albums, many genres had not been explored at all by me. My knowledge of the punk era was largely limited to the Clash, rap and hip-hop were represented by Blackalicious, who I now realize probably should have been on the list, and a few scattered singles from the Sugar Hill Gang to Jay-Z. My exposure to the various forms of synthetic/electronic/mixed/remixed music was also less than I desired.

Since September, I have been listening to music that came out after 1980. Having been born in 1985, this is music that arguably I should have known better than the classic rock I had made the staple listening of my teenage years. However, this was not the case. When it comes to music made between 1980 and 2004 (roughly when the list ends) I was largely in the dark. After 2004, I went to college and was exposed directly to what was coming out. Before then, I was in a bit of a cocoon. The advantage of this isolation is that I do not have a stack of CDs that I regret purchasing or dozens of songs that I wish I had never downloaded. Nor did I waste time going to concerts for acts I find repugnant now in my more mature years. I went for quality over quantity, classic over contemporary, and I was content with what I listened to.

When I began to really start listening to music, in the later half of the 1990s, what I heard on the radio or saw on MTV (fun fact kids: the M used to stand for music!) did not appeal to me. It was either too slick or too in my face and offered nothing substantial to me. Since my parents did not have much music around the house and I had no older sibling to guide me, I had to educate myself about music, the same as I did about philosophy, eastern religions, poetry, writing, radical politics, and world history. This resulted in a knowledge that was incomplete, but nevertheless treasured because I had come to it on my own terms. So when I realized I had an opportunity to try and fill the gaps of what I had listened to, the audio autodidact in me eagerly jumped at it.

So listening to this quarter century, 1980 to 2005, of music has been educational because I came to it knowing so little. When I listened to those albums that were released between 1955 and 1980, it was less of an ear opening experience. I did find out about many new bands and artists I had never heard of, but I could place these within a familiar context of those albums I had already listened to. I could not do that with this era. Almost everything I heard was a discovery and was new to me. I supposed this puts me in a unique position to be a music critic, as I did not grow up with an immediate connection to either early rock n'roll, classic rock, old school hip-hop, punk, grunge, techno, or alternative music. Until 2004, there was nothing that I liked to listen to that I could defend by saying, "you had to be there."

It was interesting to see the same sort of peaks and valleys in music after 1980 that existed before it. What I mean by that is how a spate of really good albums would be released together in one or two years, and then nothing substantial would come out the next. For instance, the mid-1970s were bracketed by two very productive periods of music, but it produced less that was memorable. I found that the middle of the 1980s was the same way. I admit I once held the stubborn view that little good came out after 1980, or that the music somehow did not speak to me, this I realize now was a wrong opinion for me to hold. However, most of what I uncovered that I liked was not in circulation on the radio or television and without the Internet, how was I going to be exposed to any of the music?

Overall, I think the list of albums was too heavily weighted towards this period, a reaction against over-emphasizing the sixties and seventies in music history, no doubt. Older Baby Boomer critics are being replaced by younger ones who grew up in the eighties and nineties. They want to makes the case that these eras are just as glorious and revolutionary and have tried to elevate bands like Nirvana to the pantheon with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. A reaction against this reaction is probably going to be needed in the future, perhaps lead by members of the Internet generation, who have grown up with all music simultaneously streaming into their ears. The accolades given to many artists for supplying raw presence and shock value may disappear, to be replaced by more of an appreciation for craft and skill.

But, who knows which bands and musicians will see their star rise or fall? Who could have predicted Nick Drake would be rescued from near-oblivion? The Internet will only make these cases all the more common. This is why I feel the list of 1001 albums should have refrained from passing judgement on the music released in the last ten years or so. It is still too fresh and recent to be given proper critical consideration. Contemporary music rests in that odd middle ground between being new and in need of immediate comment, and being old enough to be savored because of its age. It is hard to write about music that is five or six years old. A critic can do it, of course, but the task is difficult. Debating whether or not it belongs in the canon seems premature.

Yes, I found music in this period that I liked. No, none of it was by Yes. Here were some of my favorites:

Dexys Midnight Runners – Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Talking Heads – Remain in Light

Brian Eno & David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Tom Tom Club – Tom Tom Club

Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message

Orange Juice – Rip it Up

U2 – War

Cocteau Twins – Treasure

Billy Bragg – Talking with the Taxman About Poetry

Paul Simon – Graceland

U2 – Joshua Tree

Nirvana – Nevermind

U2 – Achtung Baby

Wu Tang Clan – Enter the Wu Tang

Morrissey – Vauxhall & I

Jeff Buckley – Grace

Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

Wilco – Being There

Radiohead – OK Computer

Smith, Elliott – Either/Or

Manu Chao – Clandestino

Lauryn Hill – Miseducation of…

Sigur Rós – Ágætis Byrjun

Air – Virgin Suicides: Original Motion Picture Score

Le Tigre – Le Tigre

Coldplay – Parachutes

Strokes – Is This It

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Gillian Welch – Time

Gorillaz – Gorillaz

Ugh, writing this list out and trying to find space for everything is difficult. That's how much enjoyable music came out of this era which I had previously written off, although there were a lot of albums that I sort of passed over without remembering at all. There are probably twenty or thirty more albums I could add to the list. This is just what immediately comes to me. I am a pretty eclectic guy as you can see from the artists above.

Were there any albums that I didn't think belonged? Sure. There were plenty of them. A hundred or so probably could have been cut out from this period and the spots given to music from before 1980. I still have a lingering feeling, though unsupported, that the fifties could have used more love from the critics. On the whole there were too many electronic albums on the list. Each time one came on I had a Pavlovian reaction, the taste of an overpriced martini suddenly filling my mouth. There is plenty of good electronic music out there, the genre has really evolved from just being dance music in the past couple of years, but the albums the editors chose all blend together. I also would not have put Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, or A Grand Don’t Come for Free by Streets. Those are the only ones I can recall by name right now.

A few acts from this period could have been added and I am sure in future editions of the book (there is already a second edition with Ys by Joanna Newsom in it) they will find a way in. Besides her and the above mentioned Blackalicious, some possible inclusions are: Philip Glass (if the Virgin Suicides soundtrack can make it, why not one of the ones he wrote?), Rilo Kiley, Sufjan Stevens, Ratatat, Of Montreal, and Dr. Dog. Yes, the list is biased in favor of recent artists, but only because I know these are missing and I have listened to them. I can't think of anyone from the 1980s who deserves to be on the list or a missing album, since my knowledge of the period has largely come from the list itself.

Well, now I need a new project. Perhaps finding a job?