Field Music – (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing by memphisindustries

Right click to download “DIY.”

Alex Testere will be playing the role of THE INGÉNUE in this year’s performance of “Why Do I Live in New York?”.  You may find him tucked safely inside a sweater on his fire escape, or talking to a Stevie Nicks record over a concoction of cardamom pods.  He revels in voracious daydreams, opaque paint, Oxford commas, and the clumsy stumbles of a tongue with a task.

_____

At the end of my first five months in gay ol’ New York City, among encounters with men of all shapes and sizes (heh), with razor blade lips and high-fashion pouts, with glistening eyes and affectionate brows; after inviting into my home countless opportunities for romance and profound mutual discovery, I have reached this ultimate conclusion: I’m better off with bread.

My restless Monday (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday?) evenings with empty shot glasses and the lofty arrogance of personal politics always lead to the same question: how am I ever going to fall in that perfect pit of love with a man who feels the same, and when am I going to get laid, G-d damn it?! (Liquor loosens the lips.)

So I stumble, liquid, into the trite realization that love is private, unique, personal, and ultimately, a one-sided endeavor. What solace could there possibly be in this realization, you might wonder?  That my love is a warm, malleable mess that I have the power to put into anything I please! I can fall in love with my Fleetwood Mac record, my needlepoint portraiture, my Tuesday nights on the couch with my newfound Netflix account. Love will live wherever I leave it, and I’ve left mine to leaven in a loaf of sourdough.

Right now, it’s a simple concoction of complex carbohydrates sitting on my countertop. A little lukewarm water and a little bit of flour form a beautiful pair.  In up to my elbows, I formed it for myself, turned it in my hands until it was smooth, and left it to ferment.  My little, sludgy friend is taking on a life of its own. Natural bacteria in the flour are now mating and multiplying—there’s an orgiastic microcosm in this little bowl.

Now, why the hell am I in love with this? This stinky schlop is the starter for a loaf of sourdough. Once it starts to smell like the inside of a piss-filled beer bottle, it needs feeding. I’ll fill it with more flour and water—and rid it of its excess—in the same delicate routine every morning until I’m ready to act. One teensy tablespoon will make it into the final loaf.

Like a helpless little monster, this bowl of shit needs me to survive. But it’s not an exasperating dependency. He provides for me as well: companionship on a dreary Sunday morning (what else can make me laugh as heartily as sneaking a peak beneath his raggedy blue towel!), a sense of urgency to return home at the end of the workday (I hope he hasn’t toppled out of his bowl!), and when the time comes, a smell like a crackly harvest morning filling my kitchen while I recline in bed with a book.

I may sound like a crazy person—and I am, to be sure—but there’s still something to be learned from this. Romance and beauty should be fostered wherever they can be claimed. Sure, there’s nothing in a loaf of bread like the clasp of a lover’s hand (though the uplifting aroma may parallel that mystifying cologne which always goes straight to my head), but there is certainly romance. There is romance in any private act of creation and discovery. And it is profound, it is beautiful, and it is my own; and I am blissfully, unabashedly, foolishly in love with a loaf of bread.

Right click to download “The Unsinkable Fats Domino.”

Right click to download “Nuclear Seasons.”

Future of the Left – ‘Polymers are Forever’ by Xtra Mile Recordings

The Postelles – ‘White Night’ by plus one

The Postelles – ’123 Stop’ by plus one

10/19 New York, NY Webster Hall (CMJ) w/ The Wombats
10/21 Washington, DC 9:30 Club ”
10/22 Brooklyn, NY Prospect Park-Rock ‘N Roll Marathon-free 10am set
10/22 Philadelphia, PA Johnny Brenda’s w/ The Wombats
10/24 Charlottesville, VA Jefferson Theater ”
10/25 Chapel Hill, NC Local 506 ”
10/26 Atlanta, GA The Loft ”
10/29 Houston, TX Fitzgerald’s ”
10/30 Austin, TX The Parish ”
11/1 Dallas, TX Granada Theater ”
11/2 Kansas City, MO Record Bar ”
11/4 Columbus, OH Outland on Liberty ”
11/5 Chicago, IL Subterranean ”
11/7 Minneapolis, MN The Varsity Theater ”
11/10 Portland, OR Wonder Ballroom ”
11/11 Vancouver, BC The Venue ”
11/12 Seattle, WA Crocodile Cafe ”
11/15 Philadelphia, PA The Trocadero w/ The Kooks
11/16 New York, NY Webster Hall ”
11/17 New York, NY Webster Hall ”
11/19 Boston, MA House of Blues ”
11/20 Washington, DC 9:30 Club ”
11/22 Montreal, QC Club Soda ”
11/23 Toronto, ON Sound Academy ”
11/25 Columbus, OH Newport Music Hall ”
11/26 Chicago, IL The Vic Theatre ”
11/27 Uncasville, CT Wolf Den-Mohegan Sun Headlining
12/6 Los Angeles, CA Bootleg Theater “

Bleached, “Searching Through The Past” by The FADER

10/19 – Noisey.com Showcase – Santos Party House
10/19 – Lost Angeles Showcase – Cake Shop
10/22 – Village Voice/Panache Showcase – Cake Shop
10/22 – Panache Showcase – Public Assembly

Right click to download “Oblivion.”

(via Gorilla Vs Bear)

Right click to download “Don’t Move.”

Right click to download “The Vision (Let Me Breathe).”

The Weeknd – Initiation by The_Weeknd

Strangest Feeling by JessieWare

Weekend, Andrew Haigh, 2011

The creation of gay culture, for as long as something called “gay culture” has existed, has had as its primary driving force the desire for a queer utopia. Constrained by politics, ostracization, and misunderstanding in society, queers turned to art as the one realm in which some utopic vision of their lives could be attained.

Thus everything from Sappho, performing poetic transformations of the island of Lesbos into a playground of female homosexual desire, to Jean Genet‘s Our Lady of the Flowers, with a canonized drag queen whose lovers perfuse the streets of Paris with adoration, to gay bathhouses, constructed social spaces where homosexual desire was not only permissible but suffuse. Thus also the gay predilection for Camp, a sensibility of exaggerated emotion and loud desire, a utopia where the only consequences are aesthetic ones. These utopic visions not only offered an escape from the realities of gay life, but thoroughly rejected any vision that impinged upon their gayness.

But one wonders if Oscar Wilde would have changed his mantra from “art for art’s sake” if any other sake for his art had been allowed. The recent film Weekend inhabits another, decidedly recent camp of gay culture: gay naturalism. In the film, it is not non-gayness that is rejected, but instead any illusion that such a rejection is possible. The characters capture something very real, almost painfully so, about modern gay life. After all of our progress in realizing some vision of gay utopia–after Harvey Milk , the AIDS crisis, gay marriage, the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, to name just some milestones–there remain some very basic problems that each gay person must sort out for him or herself.

For one, coming out, and the eternal recurrence of it. We see this dealt with here without the sheen of “fabulousness,” most touchingly in the interaction between Russell and his straight best friend as Russell breaches the awkwardness in talking about his gay lover with him. Another problem very basic to gay lives is finding and creating meaningful sexual/romantic relationships when the percentage of those compatible in the world is so small, and will probably always remain so. So, in the movie, we see Russell and Glen meet at a seedy gay club that neither really want to be at yet both want to be with the people it contains. Also, of course, the problem of gay sex–not any more a problem than straight sex–at times difficult to navigate, uncomfortable, indomitable (no pun…well, some pun intended). The director of Weekend, Andrew Haigh, depicts this with a frank, unflinching eye, so much as to raise serious wonders whether it’s simulated or not (it’s simulated).

Certainly, the conditions of modern gay life allow for a film as nuanced and internal as Weekend to exist. After all, it was not in a time of great social turmoil that naturalism first emerged in the literature of the late 19th century, but precisely because society at large had reached a stage of ease and comfort in its modernity. Writers, unoppressed by their own social standings, turned to tell the stories of those who were to remind the readerly public that problems like these still existed. Likewise, the outward social standing of gays in mainstream culture has now reached a point of some resolution, so instead of turning to others who are more oppressed, gay voices can turn inward to tell the parts of themselves that are still oppressed. This film is a reminder, to gay and straight audiences, that there are still problems to be resolved in gay lives.

Yet it offers no resolution. Without giving away too much, suffice to say there’s no marriage plot, and no magical salve to remedy the deep-set issues of internalized homophobia in each of the characters. There is, however, art. Glen wants to create an art piece from interviews with his hook-ups and lovers, and Russell keeps a diary recording each one of his sexual encounters (Glen’s like a sort of Sam Steward “Stud File” and Russell’s like John Maynard Keynes’s sex diaries). This art is presented as creation without resolution, which could be said to be a theme for the whole film. We never see Glen present his art piece, and Russell’s diary is kept very private, only shared with embarrassment when he reads it to Glen. Such are the principles of naturalism: artifices that reject artificiality, depictions of reality that don’t believe in the reality of utopias, even a sort of pessimism that accepts resolution as never fully attainable.

I’m very fond of my gay utopias, my own and those I admire in gay cultural history. I left Weekend frustrated that it offered no such vision. I went to the mountaintop, and when I looked down, it looked like the side of the mountain I’d just climbed. If art offers no resolution for these utopic visions, where can I turn? Perhaps that’s the point. Instead of sating my desire for a better world to live in as a gay man, it agitated it. I left desperately wanting the relationship of the characters to work out, wanting each to feel out and proud and comfortable with his sexuality, wanting the community that they were in to be accepting and nurturing and fulfilling. I wanted all of these things in the movie, of course, because I want them in my own life. If the movie had resolved these issues, I would’ve never made the turn inward, but since it didn’t, I was forced to look at the conditions of my own life and direct my utopic desire there.

Naturalism and romanticism–the latter of which, ultimately, is where anything in the utopic camp of gay culture lies–each do not necessarily exclude the other. “Natural” aspects of culture are, at times, romantic. The weekend the couple spends together in the film is undeniably so. Likewise, “romantic” aspects of culture can be naturalistic. Take, for instance, the idea of gay marriage, which for so long existed only as an idea, now becoming increasingly a part of law. That gay culture can allow naturalism at this cultural moment means that something romantic in gay lives has been achieved, which is amazing. Hopefully, from here, we will see more emerge from gay naturalism to continue bridging the gap between utopia and reality.

Listen to the track here.

Right click to download “My Boo.”

jj : Your Love, travelling Live at WAH, sauna at Klubi. Monsters Of Pop edition from We Are Home. on Vimeo.

Girls Like Me 7″ by TV Girl

How could you look at that face and not go gay? (courtesy mtv)

There’ve been gay characters and situations on TV since before I was born, but my first “wow, this is real and I am loving it” crush on a gay TV personality was on Danny Roberts from MTV’s first New Orleans edition of The Real World.  As I sit down to write my final article for TNG, I can’t think of a better way to wrap things up than to muse on where it all started.

I was a junior in high school and my family didn’t have cable, so in order to watch Real World I’d hang out with my friend Liz.  Liz and her friends were all Mormons, and Liz and I thought we were into each other.  We gave it our best shot, but really we didn’t stand a chance.  Plenty of gay guys had sex with girls in high school, but I doubt many of them did while hanging out with Mormons and watching a TV show featuring adorable, openly gay, too-good-to-be true Southern hunk Danny Roberts.

It took a few more years for me to fully admit my thing for Danny to myself, and then to tell others.  There were plenty of signs along the way.  But Danny really made things pretty plain.

Ever wonder what the rest of these guys are up to? No, me neither (courtesy wikimedia commons)

That’s one of the huge reasons that I love TV so much.  It’s how we tell stories about ourselves, and it’s how we try on other lives to see if they fit.  We’re lucky – we live in a time when there are so many stories being told every day about how we can lead happy and healthy lives with honesty.  If that means we’ve got to put up with season 2 of Bachelor Pad, well, it’s probably worth it.

So thank you to the Dannys of the world, both in front and behind the camera, who have truly made life just a little bit easier for all of us gays watching at home.

And if, like me, you’re frankly more fascinated by one specific Danny in front of the camera, then you’re probably just as psyched about the new about him that hit a couple months ago – Danny Roberts is filming an as-of-yet untitled project right now, and there are leaked shower make-out pics.  We may not be around to share with you whatever this turns into, but it’s not too hard to imagine what my coverage of the show would be like: “Danny hot. Writing bad. Over it.”

It’s been a real pleasure counting myself as a TNGer this past year.  Thanks to the fantastic group of dedicated people who made this blog a great place to share.  More importantly, thanks to you!  It’s humbling to think that so many smart people took the time to read what I wrote.  If you want to stay in touch, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter (@TopherBurns).

I hope you had some fun, because I sure did.  Bye for now!

PS – Did you know that Danny schilled for a gay soft core video series called Boy’s Briefs? Yowza!

Right click to download “Me and You.”

Real Estate – Green Aisles by DominoRecordCo