Yesterday, we went to see the Matthew Bourne production of Swan Lake, which is in NYC at City Center for just one more week. And while the production was not flawless - the dancing overall was exceedingly sloppy - I found myself really really moved, to the point where I got pretty depressed thinking about queerness and suicide and Tchaikovsky and 1890 and 2010.

I’ve always loved the music for Swan Lake. And in a way that’s hard to describe, I’ve always felt like that music - and most of Tchaikovsky’s music - is very queer. How music can be queer when it doesn’t have any words is a good question, and one I’ll be trying to articulate in a blog post later this week - so - stay tuned. But for now I’ll just say that there’s something about the beauty and the melancholy in his music that really resonates with my experience of queerness. Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful pieces have always seemed to me to be expressions of queer desire or queer identity (his brother and biographer said that “Romeo and Juliet could not have been written” without his agonizing and unrequited love for a classmate named Vladimir Gerard (thanks, Mark, for the tip on that story!)), but because of the repression and hostility of his age, they had to be written in code - translated into an achingly beautiful format that nevertheless obscured and hid away their true meaning. So it’s easy to hear and feel and love the music while missing what their composer was trying to say.

And then - in 1998 - this production comes along. I don’t know a lot about Matthew Bourne or the history or creation of this piece - whether it was all him or another unsung artist or a whole lot of awesome brilliant folks collaborating - but to me it’s something of a miracle: the time and the place and the people were finally right for this message to be deciphered, for the layers or code to be peeled back to reveal the gorgeous tragic queerness at the center of the story Tchaikovsky was trying to tell.

And whether the actual story of this production is specifically the story that Tchaikovsky wanted to tell is not the point (remember, he did not write the scenario for the original). For me, the essence of the story gets to the profound truth of Tchaikovsky’s life as a gay man who felt that he could not live openly, whose whole life was an attempt at cryptography, a way to take the real message of who he was and distort it so no one could see the truth (Leo Tolstoy said “I am very sorry for Tchaikovsky… sorry as for a man about whom something is not quite clear”). This Swan Lake is about trying to embrace who you really are, even if it kills you, because to live without embracing it will kill you too.

P.S. - The depression lasted until I was in my costume and about to head out for Halloween partying. Stay tuned for a much more upbeat blog post about that.

The Dyckman Street stop on the 1 train, which is a block from my house, has been shut down until… I don’t know… AUGUST 2011!!!!!!!!!! Which pisses off a lot of people. Including me. J. took this photograph on the uptown 1 train platform at 168th Street. It eloquently gives voice to our whole community.

Steve Almond, who I’m starting to share Stephen Elliott’s crush on even though I’ve never met or seen a picture of him, has an amazing article on The Rumpus that does a pretty solid job of making me feel like I can understand some of the shit I just can’t understand in political discourse these days.

I have nothing productive to add. I just wanted to repeat some gems:

“People enjoy feeling wronged. This is why Republicans refuse to believe (for instance) that Obama has cut their taxes, even when presented evidence. They need to preserve their sense of victimhood, so as to experience their aggression as self-defense.”

“The Germans… didn’t think of themselves as mass murderers. They were victims of the Jews, the Communists, the Allies. They projected their darkest impulses onto their adversaries and victims so they could feel heroic. They traded the sound of moral surety for a genuine morality.”

“Most Americans have no sense of genuine heroism. We live in a cloud of entitlement. The government provides us cheap food, clean water, electricity, medication, roads, everything. We still feel helpless. We don’t know how to fix our cars or grow food or find enduring love. We wander giant emporiums like children, full of wonder and jittery need. Corporations fleece us, then convince us to blame the government for our problems. ”

“When I ask political reporters why they write about polls and fake scandals, rather than real crises and policy solutions, they say because it’s expected of them. Ask a Wall Street trader why he flouts regulations, or a soldier why he shoots at strangers.”

“The undercurrent of violence in this election doesn’t feel political to me. It feels moral.”

“I suspect… that the very expression of such vulnerable emotions – whether hope or desire or mercy – has become somehow too painful or frightening for you to bear, and that you find it easier therefore to retreat into ancient grievances, to regard the world as a cold, hateful place, full of violent strangers with dirty bombs, or naïve nincompoops like me, who have the Communist Manifesto tattooed on our genitalia.”

Where’d they get this Phaedra lady? They found the tackiest woman in all of Atlanta, for the rest to tear apart. And it’s AMAZING.

So………………..

I’ve loved Nick Swardson for a while. His character on Reno 911 is one of the best, and his stand-up specials have been funny too. Even when I found out he was straight, I still liked him.

So I was super excited to see he’s got a show.

Until I watched it.

Two episodes in, I’d say the overall quality level of the skits is a 5.5 out of 10, with some as high as 7.5, but none that are amazing, and quite a few that are 2.0.

He’s said in an interview “I have this memo thing on my phone that’s packed with horrible ideas, immature jokes.”

And it feels like a lot of these came straight outta that phone memo.

I’ll keep watching, but not forever.

(in that same interview, he was asked about how come he plays gay so much, and said: “It literally just snowballed. It was just a random choice for the Reno 911 character… then Art School Confidential all of a sudden got greenlit, and I was doing Scotty Kangaroojus on The Showbiz Show—but you’ll never see him again… I don’t want to do any more gay characters. I just don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want my MySpace clips to all be like, “Heeey, guuuys!” … it’s really just a personal, creative choice. None of my characters are gay anymore…except for in Chuck and Larry, where I’ll be playing Jessica Biel’s gay brother”).

Season’s weak so far, but HERE’S the show I love. Hilarious, uncomfortable, inappropriate, and then - suddenly - deeply moving. Michael’s voice mail to Holly is incredible.

My hometown paper (the surprisingly good Register-Star) just ran a solid article about the state of homelessness in the county where I grew up.

The prompt for the article is a forthcoming report on that subject, from William Moon, “the Social Services Commissioner of Delaware County, who has over 35 years of experience in the field.” On principle, I disapprove of this methodology - an “expert” agency bureaucrat who (presumably) has no direct personal experience of the problem he’s studying, developing an analysis and set of recommendations for how to deal with it. Unless he’s incorporating extensive, substantive involvement from the homeless men and women of Columbia County, I believe his report will have a lot of blind spots. But I like a lot of what he says, and he minces words only the slightest bit when it comes to the cause of the problem - rich folks moving in:

“For years there had been an adequate supply of cheap housing in the city of Hudson,” the report states. “In the 1990s, this pattern began to shift as older tenement houses in Hudson were bought by individuals more interested in classic architecture than in using them as rental housing on the low end of the housing market.”

And if Hudson takes this guy’s advice in one important area, it will be light years ahead of New York City:

“Moon does not recommend the county open a shelter, citing capital costs and staffing/support costs to run it that may actually increase costs per person…  “…homeless persons should be provided emergency housing in a congregate setting leased and/or owned by the county.”"

The “shelter-first” model in New York City has led to the creation of a big, bloated, expensive shelter-industrial complex - spending $856 MILLION last year, to house an average of 38,000 people a day. New York City is a very different landscape than rural Columbia County, but one important factor is absolutely identical: people want housing, not shelter.

…. massive amounts of perfectly-good delicious terrible starchy sugary treats, salvaged from the garbage.

One of our Board members, who spends a lot of nights in Grand Central Terminal, frequently comes in in the morning dragging a big sack of pastries from Zabar’s and Junior’s and Hot and Crusty and all the other vendors in the station, who have to throw their leftovers away at the end of the day, even though it’s in really good condition.

And I always say I won’t eat any. And I always do. And it’s always delicious. And it always makes me feel fat.

The first season of Rubicon is almost over, and I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts. I’m glad I waited, because my thoughts after three episodes were a lot less positive than my thoughts now, after ten episodes. Solid from the start, but the first few episodes were not as strong as the recent ones. Here’s my high- and low-lights…

HIGHS.

1.Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson): I’m such a sucker for a character who’s 40+ woman who is having to re-create her life. Especially when they’replayed by someone as amazing as Le Miranda.

2.Will Travers (James Badge Dale): HOT AS F*CK, in a weird way I keep trying and failing to put my finger on. I think it’s his lips. There’s something sullen and childish about them.

3. With a couple of exceptions (Grant Test (Christopher Evan Welch)), most of these characters are interesting and appealing in a broken damaged kind of way.

4. Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer): I just like this guy. I’m scared of him, but I like him.

LOWS.

1. For the first few weeks they were trying a little too hard to substitute breathy silence and meaningful stares and weird pauses for real tension… they still do it from time to time, but not as much.

2. Atlas MacDowell.  I’m sorry, but as a big evil corporation, this doesn’t cut it. We know barely anything about it. We’ve gotten no actual evidence that they’re bad… just that a bunch of roads lead back to them, but so what? They’ve got offices in Tribeca, for crying out loud. Of course they’re evil. But I need to see some more development of this.

A suddenly warm day, after a week of frigid rainy October, and I’m at work on a Saturday, and there’s Mister Softee, with his music off, as if he knows it’s past his time and he doesn’t want to push his luck.