By 1990 he has taken on an almost mythic status

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January 11 – February 17, 2024

Cyrus' Grammy outfits drew comparisons to Cher but paid homage to another icon

Why Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American) divided listeners

It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame.

The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience.

In the spring of 2002, Geoff Dyer published a piece in The Threepenny Review called “The Despair of Art Deco.” It’s a wonderful piece about nothing, really, meaning it’s my kind of writing, in which for seven pages or so Dyer recounts a recent visit with his girlfriend to South Beach, Miami, where he plans to write about the art deco hotels that attract visitors. Instead, he sees his first dead body, or at least the soiled socks of a woman who has jumped from a balcony to her death on the sidewalk, careful to avoid landing on anyone.

Earlier on the visit, Dyer and his girlfriend are asked to take a photograph of a couple standing in front of the house where Versace was gunned down. The patch of sidewalk has become a site of what I would call “dark tourism.” Dyer doesn’t call it that, but he understands there is some attraction people feel to standing in proximity to where something gory and grisly has taken place, in order to feel the double thrill of not yet being dead and also being reminded that every life goes in only one direction.

How fungi, cacti and other ingenious solutions are helping to transform fashion

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Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine?

Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right.

Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant.

[Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004]