in the hall of mirrors

Glorious

A truly beautiful day, a glorious day.

There have been many fine days this summer – no question about it, the hottest year in history has given us the summer weather that seems proper to me, a real summer in the seventies Fahrenheit, with sun and breezes and all.

I am unfortunately so mechanistic (really: mechanical) that when there is a long stretch of gray days (such as the two weeks after my visit to Spain) I go all depressed. And on a day like today I am happy.

Unfortunately, the gray days still vastly outnumber the bright days (of both sorts), and I still am not getting things done that would enable me to survive in my career; so I still need a changed life.

But today it does not seem important....

•••

The workmen across the street – staunch British working class all – call out to each other a few words of Spanish, clearly referring to their vacations in Spain and the wonderful weather. Perhaps they also wish they lived in the south.

•••

While I'm replanting some of my window boxes, messing about on my small back deck, a local Goth girl goes by: long black dress, buttons all the way down. Arms crossed, rather sullenly. She has to walk the dog – and I can't believe that, at some level, she doesn't thoroughly resent her fashion choice in this weather.

Augusts

[Los Angeles, 1991]

My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to establish the month’s meaning, its varied characteristics and echoes – aside from the obvious ones such as vacations and unbearable heat. My quiet, gentle father, with his rooms of shelves of memories on film, of papers in disarray.

Two years ago I slept through the month of August. That sounds like an exaggeration, and perhaps it is one. Basically, for some weeks of the month and well into September, I rarely left my bed, and even more rarely left the house. The mechanism seemed quite simple: I just didn’t care what happened to me. I spent the entire time barely holding down an overwhelming guilty panic, which had many facets: would I be evicted, would the piano rental people come and take back their shabby upright? Would my friends besiege the door and not let me sleep, and would everyone stand in a row, horrified, pointing at my wasteful lethargy, this disgraceful depression?

I actually did panic enough to do something about it: I went to the university’s psychiatric clinic to ask for anti-depressants. But it took several weeks to get an appointment, and by then my tendency to sleep was fading – not gone, but distinctly lessened. And the idea of the pills themselves was making me as nervous as anything else. So I argued against myself with the kindly psychiatrist, and we finally agreed that I could survive this one without drugs.

Characteristic of that time was the obsessive fear of systems collapsing, of walls falling in a heap of plaster and dust. If I didn’t take better care of my skin, my psoriasis – which already covered most of my body and, most of the time, disfigured my face – would become even worse, and I would have no days remaining on which I could pass for normal or healthy. The tangle of unpaid bills, the disastrous pile of mail: my income would collapse just ahead of my credit. Selling everything, getting in the car and going far away – these seemed like distinct possibilities. If the web of people and actions that held me in place was slowly disintegrating, its strands cut by unreturned messages and the dead weight of my trussed-up body, then perhaps I could step away from it entirely. Somehow I would magically get rid of ten thousand books and the computer, and the battered furniture, the shabby bed I slept in; walk away from everything, carrying just some cash and the car keys, my eyes heavy with sweet, forgetful sleep.

No, I couldn’t see it either. Walk away from my library? Unthinkable. And, of course, how long would it take for me to construct any sort of new life anywhere? I have never had a talent for making money or for making a home for myself. For me, the mere fact that I was living in a place that was beginning to look like a home was cause for celebration, and for careful movements, making me hoard the present against a probably worse future.

For anyone in academia, August has the awful, dead quality of the Sundays of my childhood. Reading the Sunday funnies as the dreaded afternoon slogs on, everything is depressing and tiresome and the sunlight through the trees a fake, mocking the emptiness of the day. Your vacation time is up and your freedom and happiness are ending. And of course you haven’t done the work you promised, you’re not ready to start all over again. You’ve wasted this time, and it will never come back. Perhaps bitterest was the realization that the free time hadn’t been very free, that you’d made no special trips, hadn’t had fun, hadn’t hopelessly debauched yourself, or perhaps sat on a hill somewhere watching things grow. No work, no play – the proverb seems intended to reflect some progressive present, but it’s so much worse when it’s all in the past, and unchangeable.

Somehow I got through that month in bed, really five weeks or so, August leaking vaguely into September. It even seemed rather wonderful in retrospect: I discovered I could drop everything for a month and still survive. Nothing was repossessed, although the bill collectors took a certain amount of convincing; no one freaked out, although people wanted explanations of where the hell I’d been. I didn’t lose everything, I didn’t go anywhere. I could pick it all up where I left off, though perhaps a bit more selectively. I’d been dangerously irresponsible, but the results weren’t too different from those that came from being energetic, being good.

That was a psychic watershed. I’d given up, and found that I could change my mind. My therapist said I discovered that I could survive alone, that my desire for some father-figure to save me fizzled, as always, and I was thrown back on myself...

Throughout the past month of July, the flashes of heat seem to be echoed by glints of coldness inside of me. I don’t like opening the mail. There are several bills that have become quite seriously overdue, and I dislike the cheerful, greedy voices on my answering machine. I don’t always respond to my calls this past few weeks.

My father’s birthday is in two days. Today I slept all day, putting my head under the pillow when the answering machine whined. I’m sitting on the sofa, looking out into the darkened street. My car keys are in my hand, my books in rows behind me. I wonder if I’ll make it to September.

[Los Angeles, 7/31-11/2/91]

Nothing

What are our friends doing, when we don't see them?

What are our favorite short story writers doing in the long periods when they aren't polishing the paragraphs we finally love so much? Or novelists when they aren't hewing away at the massive structure of their newest Bildungsroman?

Or actors when they aren't getting deep into the role on stage, on film? Even commercial actors, when they aren't doing one of the hundred or two takes it needs to get the spoon into the cereal exactly right. The politician, the...

well, you get the point.

What have I been doing when I'm not blogging?

Nothing.

Really, virtually nothing. Even less than usual: sleeping very long, being depressed but not very, having some long, tangled dreams of living in the room next to John, of traveling with Mitchell, both clearly dreams about some sort of trusted human contact; and being... well, nothing much.

Last Wednesday, in the midst of this fog of nothing (a familiar fog, unfortunately – I spent much of the mid-90s, and much of the last five years, in this fog; in addition to various other times, it's something I've done off and on) I met with Melinda, my therapist. She had the results back from several tests that measure depression and dysfunction; I was getting fairly high (i.e. low) marks, which didn't surprise either of us, though I'm still clearly in control of myself, etc.

She, and I, were however surprised at how many different things seemed to be quite wrong on one of the tests – as she said, "rather a lot of spikes" – spikes in, in fact, the areas named: depression, anxiety, dysthymia; lesser spikes in narcissism, negativism; and then lesser spikes than that in areas named dependent, aggressive, schizoid, avoidant, etc. Rather a depressing list in fact (though you'll be glad to know I scored very low in areas named compulsive and histrionic; but I scored high on 'disclosure' – i.e. the kind of thing that made Anne Sexton a 'confessional' poet).

Now Melinda takes this seriously, but not too seriously, as she knows me well and knows how well I function (she did after all put me in charge of the HIV patient group for the past three years). She knows things aren't terribly different for me right now than they have been for a long time (though she thinks Vanessa's and David's deaths were triggers of a kind, indicating the shrinking and fragmentation of a social world already too small to support me) – my unhappiness may be more fully experienced, because the newly reformulated HIV medications don't seem to be damping my feelings as much as they may have been for some years – but on the other hand she also knows I've really wanted help this summer: not so much because I'm exceptionally a mess, but just because I'm truly sick of being a mess, feeling energetic about doing something to make me feel energetic, if you follow my rather circular meaning. Besides, these spikes can be taken as evidence of the artistic personality indulging itself in orgies of interesting emotion (admittedly fairly true) and/or as evidence of exaggerated claims reflecting a cry for help, or for attention (also admittedly true, and not atypical of me). So, as I said: seriously, but not too seriously; or, to paraphrase an old joke, critical but not dangerous. Or something like that.

In fact, I haven't written about all of this here – although I thought I should write about it, given my tendency towards 'disclosure' – because it seemed structurally too hard to explain, too easy to misunderstand. Something Mitch told me during my analysis, in the late 1980s, was that I had a rather unusual personality structure – that my actual personality was indeed rather diffuse, fragmented, confused; but that my persona (i.e. the mask offered to others) had become unusually focused and strong, well-articulated and decisive, as though the persona were taking charge of things and telling the rest of me what to do. Which made an odd sort of sense: this is apparently not unique, but it's not very common either, which is why a lot of therapy and social interaction don't cope with it very well. It's not a disastrous personality structure, but it doesn't work terribly well of course, since various forces are sort of turned on their heads – and, ultimately, too much pressure is brought to bear on a part of the self that is not really made to grow and become stronger.

Although that is now nearly twenty years ago, and I've developed a lot since, I think my internal structure hasn't radically (or sufficiently) changed. Although many parts of my personality are stronger and more confident than they once were, when I'm depressed/uncertain/unhappy the persona is still the one in charge – which, of course, gives everyone (including the therapist) the impression that I'm in better shape than I experience myself as being in (pardon my grammar).

All of my blurrier, unhappier internal bits are made worse by what is called by depression specialists 'rumination' (which has nothing to do with cows, so skip the 'sad cow' jokes) – just as depression patients who seem to have benefited from treatment, if left to their own devices, keep thinking in the same old circles and get worse again, so someone who is too isolated from other people (i.e. me – and note that I am also very 'dependent' as mentioned above, which is no surprise) will simply think themselves into a more and more depressed, fragmented, helpless state (thus creating lots of slightly alarming peaks on certain psychological tests). Which is pretty much the story of my life, especially in recent years.

Ah well. So, all these messinesses: what to do?... and I insist on doing something, I'm frankly sick of myself as I am. (I never said that the hall of mirrors was a nice place: but it's where I live.)

She's going to have me doing some CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy – it's a dicey acronym; aside from computer-based teaching, it also stands for something rather kinky – they should have come up with another term) on a computer in her department, especially anti-depression CBT. I'm going to do some equally pragmatic work on my own with several books I have to hand, and see if I can get somewhere.

I don't mind the rather simplistic, rather mechanistic work that CBT involves: especially as I'm experiencing myself as almost self-hypnotized into depression – repetitive patterns (television, computer solitaire, web surfing) and isolation – I've pretty much been driving myself into a ditch, psychologically speaking, for years, but especially since moving here. And no, it's not enough to simply dig into office work, etc. – I need to develop an internal world that functions well, since my important work is done alone at home; getting focused and energetic about other people's needs will do nothing to change the important parts of my life and career. I need to turn the structure of all of this energy on its head....

I guess it's that, or write poetry.

•••

Postscript: 'House'

Though perhaps television is not always my enemy: an episode of House titled 'Meaning', where the bitter doctor, thrown off balance by change and improved health, is especially and pointlessly nasty to everyone, only to become increasingly bewildered by his own emotional fractures and reactions – I laughed out loud at the episode, although it had no jokes in it: Hugh Laurie did a brilliant job of projecting the discomfort of change, when it comes as a cure for despair....

The dark mirror of the skin

It is strange, and trivial, and serious, and ambiguously embarrassing: to write about my own skin, about my psoriasis.

The factual: I've had psoriasis since I was eighteen (I was devastated when the doctor told me, as though I could already foresee what it would mean throughout my life, or perhaps what I would make it mean); it doesn't matter at all, as it doesn't hurt or itch. It gets a bit better at times, it gets a bit worse at other times. Extensive mucking about with steroid creams, sun beds, and various treatments can improve it a bit, but not all that much (at one point in the mid-nineties I was taking a semi-experimental retinoid that helped immensely, but it was hard on my stomach and disastrous for the liver and pancreas, so I'm no longer allowed to take it). Not to mention – vitamin E, evening primrose oil, homeopathy, diet, avoiding proteins, avoiding dairy, acupuncture, and all sorts of other promised miracles. It's genetic, systemic rather than infectious – my father had small patches on his leg; my eldest sister has it, not as badly as I did when HIV made me more fragile, but probably about as much as I have it when I'm normally healthy.

In the real world it doesn't matter at all. People hardly notice, most of the time – though when I was intermittently at my most ill in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a large part of my skin was affected (the phrase 'seventy per cent of skin surface' comes to mind, but I can't believe it was ever really that bad – on the other hand I can't really remember; one of the tricks is that psoriasis appears, not because the immune system is weak, but because the HIV virus is present – an unexpected and counterintuitive aspect of treating people with AIDS and psoriasis). I looked fairly terrible for a long time – which was fine when I was dying (or when I thought I was), but which I resent when I feel otherwise just fine.

And I do feel fine: and it's summer, and I got some sun. Now, and for most of the extended now that is my late forties and fifties, it's only patches on my elbows and knees, and a bit of scalp; it doesn't matter at all. And yet it does: I hate it – it changes my relation to younger, prettier, healthier, happier people; it makes it impossible for me to get past my other physical defects (of which, as Fran Leibowitz once said, everyone has at least twelve). In the late 1980s, when I met the guru Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, she made me jump in a swimming pool as a healing ritual; my skin didn't change, but I was obscurely grateful that she confronted it in that strange way, rather than seeming not to notice it.

Ultimately, what is hard to convey is how deeply embedded it is in my sense of self: the ambiguity of beauty and ugliness, of health and disease, of pride and shame, are fixed in these skin lesions, these scales, at every level of my experience. I often tell students to pay attention to the immediate psychologies of the writers they read, including the supposedly above-the-fray scholarly ones: that everyday details of people's lives can completely change the way they write music, the way they write words, the entire shape of the universe for them; that bodies matter to biographies, and biographies matter to ideas.

Well, for me, this ridiculous and trivial skin disease, which no doctor would consider worth a moment's serious attention, is a constant wound – an Amfortean wound, strangely enough (and I've never thought that until tonight, but now that I have it's clearly true). It is a mark on me, that thing that shows me to be not quite right, not healthy, not acceptable; it is the thing that bars me from happiness, from sex, from, well, everything. Absurd; utterly. And yet true.

(Think of Marat in his bath: but no, Marat must have had eczema, not psoriasis – he must have itched, been perpetually miserable, almost mad with the endlessly changing discomfort of it. Otherwise the baths would not have been worth it; he merely would have concealed himself in layers of clothing....)

I remember once, at a time when it was particularly bad, and my life particularly unstable and hopeless; when I was at Bill's apartment in San Francisco, in the kitchen, next to the window and fire escape in the middle of the apartment, my gentle, melancholy friend Mark Rhynsburger responded to my oblique but endless complaints about my skin by saying: Take your shirt off. I said, what? He said: take your shirt off: let me see. I took my shirt off; at that time there were red lesions and scales scattered in a band across my chest, in the same place where I had shingles another year. Mark looked at me thoughtfully and said, I would think somebody could see right past that.

I remember being stunned, shocked almost tearful, at his words, which are of course simple and obvious and evidently true.

For me, I cannot see past my psoriasis, which I have constructed as a terrible wound, as a dreadful armor against the world, against happiness: but he pointed out the revolutionary, radical possibility, that someone could simply not care, that they could see through it: and see me....

Fragments of the day

Acquisition and maintenance

One of the somewhat pathetic aspects of my life – not just in the past five years of English exile, but since I was started to lose faith in my creative abilities and future career, at the age of seventeen – is my tendency to spend much (and I mean: much) of my time in the acquisition of things (for a long time, books, and then music; and later video, foodstuffs, electronics); and in the maintenance of those things, of my living quarters, objects, clothing, body, and the organization of all of these.

This of course creates an environment that tends to (at least partly) enchant the casual visitor: the bibliophile enters my living room, full of bookshelves of tidily organized, well-kept volumes, with shelves of equally neat CDs, DVDs and other media. The gastronome looks through the kitchen pantries for exotica and strong and complex combinations of flavors. Visitors to my apartment, if they have certain tastes, have entered a charming playroom of things that will amuse them – certainly when spurious comes by for a meal, he spends much of his time browsing the shelves (blah-feme not quite so much, possibly because he is more a gourmet than gourmand in the world of books, or possibly because of his more extrovert/conversational relationship to social events).

Unfortunately, this static world of cared-for things, though as pleasant for me as it is for visitors, tends to exist as a world of potential, of accessible value – a sort of consumerist world of culture, a museum of history. It makes me a librarian rather than a writer; and perhaps I would have been better as a librarian – the daily minutiae of care and organization as a living, combined with lower expectations of innovation and creation, would certain match my activities better than the career I actually have.

It is as though the whole is waiting for a user: as though I would make an acceptable partner for someone who really got work done, who really created things – and I could sit quietly in the background, making sure dinner was ready on time, that the timetable of appearances was kept up to date. As though I am really a secretary to my own potential ability, to my own talent: and, fatally, not its executive....

•••

Listenings

Particularly interested, lately, in two very different, though perhaps equally talented, musical creators: Porcupine Tree (which is apparently mostly Steven Wilson) and Stephan Micus, the German multitalented instrumentalist and singer.

Both deeply expressive, intelligent, complex: naturally Porcupine Tree is more cynical and contemporary (was there ever anything more savagely accusing than their new video for 'Fear of a Blank Planet', which is more exactly and cruelly critical of the disasters of our culture than any naively angry burst of traditional punk?); I was first drawn to them through what is still my favorite song of theirs, 'The Sound of Muzak', which is something I clearly need to use in teaching my first year students exactly how contemporary Adorno's ideas really can be.

And what could be more strangely, ambiguously, wistful than 'She's Moved On'? – the material, and fragmentary phrases, from a simple two-dimensional relationship gone predictably wrong – but with all the bizarre and inappropriate weight of feeling implicit in any rejection packed into the music, making its impact vaster than the apparent 'trigger', making the whole a universe of emotion.

But then Micus: so sad, and yet with so much belief in time, experience, reality, life – implicit in his music is something that is the exact opposite of cynicism, an implicit sense that life and music are worth everything.

Alternating them: a roller coaster....

•••

Fear of the future

Though it is still mid-August, I am already intimidated, tired, by the oncoming train of the next school year. It is a shame it all feels so heavy, so unfulfilling, so insistently chaotic, so essentially full of the noise of nonsensical demands and confused mismanagement: some of this is, of course, the nature of the UK university, with its endless, tangled puppet strings leading from every tiny thing we do all the way up to a faceless government bureaucracy that has no sense of academic values. But unfortunately a lot of it is also my dread of the students themselves – their demands, their irresponsibility, their emotional desperation.

It is ultimately a hard thing to be a teacher, at least for thinking types such as I am: the circular repetition of years, where every successful relationship with a student is replaced by one where one has to go back to the very beginning; such that every student who grows into a wonderful colleague worth talking to is abruptly replaced by a nervous, sullen seventeen-year old who has to be convinced that there is some good reason for them to be here.

And the return to the same topics, to the same beginnings, each year – terribly stressful, at least for me; fortunately we are allowed to teach different topics, different specialist courses each year (though the foolish bureaucrats of the university and government tend to dislike this, wanting predictable and repeated courses so that they can impose the simplistic check-boxes of quality control). But even a new topic is not so satisfying when so much time has to be spent just engaging the students – so much time convincing them to do the work, to care about the material, to think about it all; by the time they are actually doing the work enough to enjoy themselves, and for me to enjoy talking to them, the year is over and they move on.

Madness, really. How desperately we all need an entirely different kind of university: one where teachers drop in intermittently, talking about what interests them at the moment; one where students come to what interests them, only (with no curriculum or programs), and return when they have interesting questions and answers. In such an environment, of course, it gets harder and harder to tell student from teacher (also as it should be).

Sort of a Black Mountain College, or perhaps some kind of Neillian university. And why do we put up with any less?...

Handing it Over: Living in Hong Kong Now [1997]

[Original version of an article published as 'Hand it Over', Frontiers San Francisco 16/7 (7/31/97) and Frontiers Los Angeles/National 16/7 (8/8/97).]

Flying into Hong Kong’s famous airport, which lies practically between rows of apartment buildings, I thought: Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that Hong Kong was beautiful? Because it is beautiful: behind the crowds and freeways, the mountains always rise above, the sea below. The great natural harbor is vaster than anything manmade – it is one of the jewels of the Pacific, as dazzling as Sydney or San Francisco.

Welcome to China

It’s easier to understand Hong Kong if you see it as the Miami of China: its southernmost big city, a sprawling mix of races embedded in a background of humidity and palmetto bugs, surrounded with apartment buildings and freeways. The main difference is that Miami has a lot more crime; in fact, as in European cities, Americans are surprised (and even confused) by the safety of the streets and crowds.

I first arrived last March after three months of nervous indecision, of trying to answer the repeated question: Why would you go to Hong Kong now? But that’s an American attitude, rooted in our long distrust of China. From here, it looks as though the negative media blitz – special issues of Time and Newsweek, more than eight thousand visiting journalists looking for stories – is all an exaggeration, a panic generated to make news. Some of that panic serves other purposes, of course: it turns China into an Evil Empire, giving our military something to fix on after the end of the Cold War. Besides, if we construct an Us-and-Them universe, it implies that the Brits are good guys, allowing everyone to ignore their ruthless greed.

So far nothing has really happened to alter Hong Kong. Some things have changed: by July 1st, civil servants had filed the embossed Queen’s head off of post office boxes. And the name of the city has changed, at least officially – we now live in Xianggung, which is Mandarin for the Cantonese name Heung Gong, or Fragrant Harbor. And those two names may give you a taste of the complexity of living here, where the barrier of languages and cultures is so high that only the most educated can cross it effectively. It may seem a trivial matter – whether I can communicate with a taxi driver in Cantonese, or whether a retail clerk can help me in English – but the constant slight mutual incomprehension reflects the endless confusion between China and the West.

Handover: The First Party

On the Thursday before the Handover, we went to a salsa party called ‘Adios Gweilo.’ Gweilo is Chinese for foreigner, or more accurately ‘foreign devil;’ it’s not a word for polite company, but foreigners frequently use the word to expose, and hopefully discharge, racial and economic tensions. The party is held in a restaurant that looks over the straits; the terrace has an amazing view, and we can see across to Kowloon, where someone is experimenting with green lasers across the sky in preparation for a light show. The skyscrapers behind us are covered with vast neon dolphins and Bohenia flowers, symbols of the new Hong Kong.

This week saw a change in the atmosphere, in the way people talk about the future. Hong Kong residents, whether ‘expatriate’ (the nicer name for foreigners) or ‘local,’ had been calm about the changes for a long time. Everyone seemed sure that life would continue to be normal after the Territory became a Special Administrative Region, or SAR, of China. A few Cantonese colleagues even showed enthusiasm for the ‘reunification,’ especially since China has made it clear that it wants educated Hong Kong residents as its new business elite.

Change

Prakash, an Indian, grew up in Hong Kong to run one of its many tailor shops. On a weeknight in March, he has gathered some friends – a tall black American, a quiet French Algerian named Mohamed, and two Chinese boys with the incongruous names of Wendell and Terrence – for a drink at Post 97. This ironically named café is above the chic Club 1997, which is only gay on Fridays from 6 to 10 PM; after that, it closes for an hour for “restocking” (of beer and customers). Upstairs, in comfortable chairs among the well-dressed crowd, I ask Prakash: aren’t you worried about being an Indian in Hong Kong after July? – especially as the Chinese government has said that only “racially Chinese” will be considered citizens of the new SAR. He shrugs and says, I’m not worrying, we’ll see what happens and roll with the punches. I start to laugh, saying: well, that sounds like a thousand-year-old philosophy; and he begins to laugh with me.

But in the week before the Handover, Prakash is not so sanguine. Walking through Yau Ma Tei, he comments on the posters, the red flags – and seems anxious for the first time since I’ve know him. Suddenly it is unavoidable, this event that has been talked about for years – and it may have serious consequences for him. Fortunately, when we reach our destination, a Japanese noodle shop, he relaxes and we check out the men, from the henna-dyed headwaiter to the Japanese chef; but man-watching can’t always compete with history.

Among the Chinese

Some basic words to learn: m’gai (with a rising tone) means thank you, please, excuse me; yau lok means stop here, useful on buses; and, most important of all, gweilo means foreigner – actually foreign devil. That last is slightly rude, like “queer” or “wop” – my Chinese teaching assistant is shocked when I say it, complaining, with a flip of her long black hair, that it’s “not a nice thing to say.”

If I may generalize about the more than five million Chinese in Hong Kong, I see  a division between two broad age groups. The older Chinese are often small and tough-looking; they look hardy, and many of them are survivors of war, revolution and extraordinarily brutal invasions by Europeans, Japanese and by their own people. Their children, on the other hand, are tall and smooth-looking, well-dressed, polite, and often exquisitely beautiful; they stroll laughing through the expensive malls and streets of shops, protected by umbrellas from the frequent rain – almost as their parents, who might have immigrated at any time in this century, have tried to protect them from the past.

Handover: The Rave

On the Saturday before the Handover was the grand disco/rave Unity, which attracted thousands of people to a hotel ballroom in Kowloon to see Grace Jones and Boy George. Grace couldn’t quite manage to get through her long show (face it, it’s twenty years since her heyday), but the crowds were ecstatic, and stayed until early morning. Many gay men were in evidence, and no one seemed to feel the need to act straight, or to behave well at all. Unexpectedly, everyone seemed to be from the West – huge numbers of Aussie, American and European partygoers had flown in for the event, including a number of tall Germans. And that was strange: these hordes of pale faces seemed remarkably big, loud, pushy, even boorish – I thought, have I gotten that used to life in Asia?

Sex: Oriental

STUD ALERT: David Wu, the athletic, charming VJ on Hong Kong’s video channel, can be seen any night tossing a baseball around on the Wu Man Show. He teaches a strange but hilarious crash course in American slang, wearing hornrimmed glasses and a Hawaiian shirt, where he buzzes along the strange interface between Cantonese and English, trying to explain the word “short” as in “I’m a little short today” or “Man, you got the short end of the stick!” His video presentations specialize in Cantopop, the local rock music, which involves a vast industry of bands and production companies, with listeners all over Asia.

Gay life in Hong Kong comes in two varieties. The first recalls the years of concealment, since homosexuality has been legal only since 1991: it is a social life of dinner parties and private meetings, featuring moneyed expatriates and their boyfriends. The other is the bar-and-bath circuit, filled with gym-built, stylish boys flaunting gold watches and cel phones. In fact, most of the time it looks like West Hollywood, but with fewer blonds.

In navigating this multiracial environment, you might learn a few new words. “Rice queen” (probably a familiar term) means someone who likes Asian men; you might figure out its uncomplimentary opposite, “potato queen,” meaning someone with a sexual preference for white meat. You may also guess that “sticky rice” means Asian men who prefer each other. Given this labyrinth of desires and fixations, how is a gweilo potato queen like me to get by? Should I chat up the British Airlines stewards who dash in every week, or chase down American sailors at the Fleet Arcade? Or should I change my tastes, as everyone suggests?

Hong Kong is heaven for rice queens, and not only because of David Wu. The hot, humid summers, endless construction jobs and self-conscious athletic activity mean that there is an endless parade of bare chests and legs, mostly belonging to the remarkably fit. The city also boasts several bathhouses, the most successful of which is the weirdly named Game Boy Sauna; its clients are mostly “sticky rice,” so gweilos, while not unwelcome, won’t have much luck. It also has not one but two karaoke rooms – and, on my single visit there, I was appalled to see them both in use.

Handover: On the Night

July 30th is a sunny, busy day, and we are all frantically making preparations that suggest a New Year’s Eve of parties. A friend calls, asking me to videotape the ceremonies; another dashes upstairs to borrow money before she goes to watch from a boat in the harbor. Another friend asks if I want to join his bar-hopping friends, watching the broadcast in different pubs descending from the Peak. But I can’t go, as I’ve been roped into playing with the Chinese drum group in the British Handover ceremony – and so, wearing appalling lime-green T-shirts and baggies, we march into the pouring rain to open a pageant called The Spirit of Hong Kong.

After our minute and a half of drumming history, the Chinese orchestra begins playing as beautiful sleeve dancers enter, accompanied by hundreds of children waving swatches of blue silk to represent the ocean, and others walking with red paper junk sails. This classical tableau gives way to groups that represent a modern Hong Kong – eight dancing credit cards behind a bunch of fashion models in raincoats and umbrellas, a troupe of young girls doing a Cel Phone Dance (one, look at your watch; two, raise an invisible phone to your ear) – and something that can only be called the Dance of the Strong Currencies, a roundelay with large disks emblazoned with £, $, ¥, and DM. This is all very graceful and not at all ironic – there’s no sarcasm about prosperity in Hong Kong. Of course, since it is the monsoon, it’s raining – the dancers’ sleeves are waterlogged, but they keep battling through their show.

After the Royal Marines, waterlogged but disciplined, end their long marching band segment, I wait backstage to see the fireworks. A charming but drenched children’s chorus huddles by the stage entrance. One of the guards, with that aggressive tenderness with which the Cantonese treat their children, hustles those of us with umbrellas over to collect little groups of grateful, blue-uniformed kids. Another guard eventually joins me and, when the band strikes up Auld Lang Syne, it turns out that he knows and plans to sing all the words, including verses I’ve never heard. He is tone-deaf but also confident, and it’s impossible not to join in. And so that was my Handover: standing under an immense souvenir umbrella in the pouring rain with four wet kids and a guard, belting out Auld Lang Syne in a slight Cantonese accent.

Sex: Occidental

STUD ALERT: There is a building by the waterfront of the island, past the network of freeways that recall downtown Los Angeles, called the Fleet Arcade. It’s meant for British sailors when they’re in town, but when an American fleet is in it’s full of nervous, muscular, short-haired servicemen. If you want to develop your talent for picking up servicemen, remember: always get them alone, away from their buddies. There’s a special Stud Alert for the tall, blond Brit who runs the bike shop in the arcade.

Some of the more successful bars include the classy, crowded Zip in Lan Kwai Fong, and Petticoat Lane in Central, which won an HK Magazine prize for best gay bar. The Fetish & Fantasy leather store, under the Central Escalator, serves as a community center for party tickets. All of these places are thriving, and the local hope is that, as Beijing opens up its policies (if not the law) on sexual preference, the Hong Kong gay community will be left alone. Unfortunately, as with all of the other British moves towards democracy and liberalization, the legalization of homosexuality was late (1991) and rather tentative; no anti-discrimination law was passed before the Handover, and a recent government poll showed that most respondents would prefer not to watch a movie, go swimming or sing karaoke with a homosexual. Nevertheless, Hong Kong gay life is highly regarded in Asia, where many cities have more cultural and legal oppression; at Zip, an excitable Irish boy with a great chest tells me that he regularly visits from Jakarta, where there is no gay life worth mentioning.

As for lesbian life, I hear that the vast Filipina population – mostly female, mostly working as domestics, and all extremely visible in Statue Square every Sunday – includes many women who have escaped the rigidity of family demands through lesbian relationships. Max and Gary tell me of their Filipina maid and her girlfriend, who – with her muscular shoulders and headcloth – are a startling contrast to the delicate, well-behaved women of the Chinese majority.

Handover: The Aftermath

Bernadette, a colleague from England, went back to the docks on June 30th at midnight to watch the HMS Brittania sail and hear the last piper play while the Royal Marines stood at attention on the ship. She found herself among a group of Brits, and when someone yelled, Three cheers for the British Navy!, everyone roared assent – quite amazing, since apparently even the Scots and Irish joined in. The man next to her turned and said, "We'll never see anything like this again – I'm Evan, and I'm from Dublin," and kissed her. She walked home up the hill, past the Governor's House, now dark, passing a number of well-dressed socialites coming from the last parties thrown for VIP expatriates. She says none of them seemed to know what to do – they looked lost and bewildered, as though they had just realized that they were in a foreign land.

•••

Late one night, I am awakened by a violent rainstorm that flings a river of water against my windows. I walk through my apartment without turning on any lights, and go onto the balcony to stand naked in the voluptuous summer rain. Down the hill I can see the outlines of villas and the vast bay dotted with the white lights of passing ships. And I think: is my view of Hong Kong distorted by my own luck in coming here – by the fact that, for me, Hong Kong has meant my first good salary, my first professional job, my first luxury apartment? But that is what Hong Kong has always meant, especially for the Chinese: a secure home, financial safety, a place where it is legal to prosper. Perhaps Westerners can afford to be sarcastic about mere prosperity; but here everyone understands how important it is to have, and to keep, what is theirs.

[Hong Kong, 7/15/97]

Sitges XI

That last afternoon: a major lunch, utterly Catalan food, in a fascinating but frankly rather bizarre restaurant. No wonder, maybe, that Dalí was Catalan – this was indeed surreal at many points – from the sausage tree (actually a grapevine, shellacked, with a selection of local sausages hanging from the branches) to the garlic soup, the rabbit and snail stew, the sweet wine to be squirted down the throat rather than poured into a glass.

Afterward, I was a wreck – what a meal, though.

Packing, especially all those peculiar purchases, liqueurs, food oddities – hope for me that they all make it home without damage or significant customs interruptions.

And this last night, at four in the morning: the bar next door lets out a wave of men into the street – and a wave of chattering, cheerful noise up the shaft into my darkened apartment; I'm still a wreck, but it's a great sound – and a short burst of rain punctuates it.

Now that I'm getting ready to go, of course it seems way too soon – what will I miss? Balconies. The possibility of that chaotic touch. Strange food to some extent, but even more normal Spanish tapas (sorry about the Catalan food, some of it was frankly more of An Experience than it was really good dining). The lazy wave of the day between large, vaguely labeled sections – in fact the evaporation of so many limits and restrictions and formalities into the sky, where they belong. Susan, and Rob, and Sebastian. The chatter of languages. Sitting by the sea in a restaurant, talking to friends, at midnight, hearing the waves. Walking around in sandals and shorts. The open windows of this apartment, opening out on to – balconies....

•••

And home.

Thanks to all the gods of bubble wrap, everything made it home – liqueurs, candy, bowls, food.

An acquisitive trip: and a strange one for Sitges, as I spent virtually no time in the gay social world nor at the beach. But I enjoyed things, and the break was good.

Now to rest a bit....

Sitges X

Words

Hmm. Over 6,000 words in the past ten posts, since coming to Sitges on vacation.

That's the equivalent, or nearly, of an academic article... okay let's say one a bit on the short side, 7,000 is perhaps more normal.

And only about 300 words of musicology written in that time.

Now I know that I am given to laziness and avoidance; and I know that blogging is considerably easier than musicology (I don't need a distinct topic, I don't need to organize arguments, I can just rattle on about whatever comes to mind). But this makes me feel – well, both pleased (oh look how easy) and displeased (oh look how misguided) – as though this outlines the difference between, say, reading difficult prose and watching television.

What shall I do?... it is an interesting question, at least to me. I know that, to some extent, all writing tends to feed Writing – the action, the energy, the process, grows, as there is more of it, of whatever kind. But how, how to fix myself to the various, and increasingly desperate, tasks at hand?...

A bit like Pessoa, in his various personas: rattling, wandering, maundering, on and on about the day and the people and his boring work as an an accountant; and somewhere on the way somehow managing to write poems, books....

It is, as a certain king says in a certain show, a puzzlement.

•••

Wanting to talk

Dinner – an unexpectedly cheerful, even fairly rambunctious dinner (I hope we can go back there – Rob didn't get in trouble, God only knows why, for lighting the candles by using one of those paper chopstick holders – on fire of course).

Fun, but... afterward, feeling a bit diffuse, a bit complex, a bit like getting over something, a bit like... talking. All a bit amplified by listening to some rather existential pop songs, sch as Barenaked Ladies' 'Pinch Me' ("On an evening such as this / It's hard to tell if I exist") or, very differently, the Eurhythmics' regretful 'Seventeen' ("We should have jumped out of that airplane after all"). In such a mood, I should perhaps avoid playing Porcupine Tree's 'Sound of Muzak' (very Adornoesque).

At least two friends' images appeared in my mind: I could call them – their time, it is midafternoon – but it might be a bit crazy, on a mobile from a beach in Spain. No emergencies, just... wanting to talk. To try out a few complaints and theories and ideas and defenses on someone, to have someone cluck in sympathy, and afterward to think, Ah now I feel better.

Such an important process: another reason to have a solid, centered social/home life....

•••

Saved

An hour or two of being indecisive, out of sorts, again, still: how ridiculous, you will say – I'm on vacation, in a town where there are so many things to do, why don't I just go do one of them?

And my mood, and decisions, are saved: a thunderstorm, torrential rain. I think of a time now ten years ago, when I first moved to Hong Kong, younger and more confused and more excited: and stood naked out on a balcony in the tropical rain...

which impels me to give you the article I wrote that ends on that balcony, which was published in a California gay magazine. Enjoy. Meanwhile, I shall go stand in the rain.

Sitges IX (Girona)

Today, cloudy, gray, a sprinkle of rain on the balcony. What a relief, frankly – much cooler (somewhat like a normal summer day in northern England!) – I feel as though I'm recovering from wilting, like a plant at the height of summer.

•••

A Girona

Yesterday, Girona. Much to do, lots of it tourist-style, but quite classy; also fairly refreshing in giving me change, energy, history.

First arrived at Xevi's place in Caldes de Malavella, an old Roman baths about ten minutes from Girona. Xevi had cooked particularly Catalan food – some tapas (a tortilla, butifarra with manchego cheese, olives stuffed with anchovies), followed by a rather grand platter of mixed chicken and prawns that had been cooked on a traditional base of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil. Very impressive, and odd in that Catalan way that mixes flavors most cuisines will separate.

Xevi's apartment is almost excessively IKEAcized – and I say that as someone whose walls are covered with Billy and Benno shelves – but very elegant, very restrained, very intellectual. He spoke most of the time about things that were very local, very cultural, very Girona, very Catalan – although I've always enjoyed the Catalan-ness of Barcelona and Sitges, this was much more intense, as is apparently typical in proud old Girona. Certainly I'd never gotten quite so clear about the fascination with and links with France – although this is much more about southern France; northern France can be as deeply resented as Spain itself is here. And, I suppose in keeping with the peripheral-Iberian discussion, we listened to a few minutes of some kind of Basque marimba – and agreed after one or two tracks that we'd both had enough of that, thank you very much.

Then a strenuous but enjoyable tour of Girona's old city: old metal foot bridges crossing the half-dried up river (made, as it happens, by Eiffel's company); an extended and constantly changing mass of old buildings, mostly medieval but overlaid on Roman ruins, with fragments of nineteenth-century imitations blended in and a little bit of modernismo. Very beautiful paths, gardens, arches, winding streets.

Although all of these buildings are engaging, as is the Call (the old Jewish section), the area around the Cathedral is almost alarmingly impressive – one gets an enormous sense of sheer power and money, that the Church was truly the source of everything important in this city. I told Xevi, you could see why anyone in their right mind would have wanted to become a priest. Underneath this – but not far under; there are a lot more Roman ruins left nearly complete than in most places – is the impression of a strongly built garrison, a beautiful but tough home from home for lonely Roman soldiers who were probably stranded here for much of their lives. (Although, even at the time, the distance from Rome to Girona was not so great – perhaps this was considered a rather comfortable post, certainly better than being sent off to battle Huns in the north, or to face weird primitives painted blue up in Britain.)

All seriously impressive, and deeply beautiful (especially the gardens and landscaping at the top of the city, which would please my eldest sister a great deal). Many tourists of course, but not so many as to make things annoying. I'm afraid I continued my acquisitive/greedy streak – we stumbled over the Benedictine-made liqueurs and candies I'd searched for at the store Caelum in Barcelona (because it was closed for holidays), so I bought three bottles. Which gives me a fairly serious task in my last three days: to get enough bubble wrap to pack these bottles up and get them back to my own distant English exile.

•••

Some fragments, from a train

... An air-conditioned train: I should have done this days ago – something different, a view of everyday Spanish life, a new city... inland, passing many small stations and towns in Catalunya: a wind in the trees – and increasingly there are trees: many recently planted, new forests in rows – others scattered, natural. Is Spain being replanted to reverse the ecological disaster from the end of the Golden Age, where massive deforestation for lumber to build ships flattened all its forests? If so, it's about time – and it might transform the land, once again: back from scrub and near-desert, to those endless, ancient deep forests...

... A handsome, athletic young mother with her baby in a pram – Freya would be very impressed. Though she looks very take-charge, even mannish (yes, I do gender theory but I'm permitted to say such things) – broad cheekbones, dark blonde hair and an even tan – when the train is rattling the holds the child with such tender intimacy; you get a sense that this is a child who will never feel unloved, who will have a strong emotional base in later life (and may thus grow up to be as confident and competent as her, or his, mother).

... The slow late night train from Girona to Barcelona, then to Sitges: all chaotic and delayed because of extensive work on the tracks all over Catalunya – evidently they are rather heroically trying to overcome one of the stupider innovations of Franco's era, when Spain rebuilt its tracks to a different width than the rest of Europe in order to prevent invasion by train (? – such a demented, evil old man he was). Here is that European August you don't generally see in Sitges – the one of masses of young people from all over the world, all with backpacks and sport clothing and guidebooks.

... Another time it would be nice to go on to Figueres, to see the Dali museum. Xevi says it's the only thing there is to see there; and normally I treat Dali with some of the scorn that is the inevitable response to his cheesier work – but an entire museum, with bizarre architecture and objects, in that mindset would certainly be, at the very least, different. Next time...

... A favorite Spanish moment: a man, in order to make a gesture that is of course invisible to the person he's talking to on his mobile phone, waves his hand away from himself – with the phone in it – thus becoming inaudible, and having to repeat himself... perhaps, this time, with a different way of emphasizing things...

Sitges VIII

Selling it

I suspect I'm not exactly selling my readers on Sitges this year.

Well, obviously that doesn't matter to Sitges itself – it can take the blow, I think – and most readers will have already decided, quite rightly, that the problems lie with me rather than with the town. But I'm thinking particularly of Patrick and of Mitchell – two friends who do read this blog, and both of whom received a lot of rather heavy-handed cajoling (from me, and in Mitchell's case also from Susan and Rob) to come along with us.

Well, it's true, you might find the gay community intermittently irritating. But if you were here we could go out together to places that would appreciate bears; there are definitely places where the non-perfectly-buff-and-non-circuit can have a good time – in previous years I've been to them – I just don't seem on track this year, sorry about that.

A bigger problem is the heat: neither M. nor P. are exactly hot-weather types (especially Patrick, who is not only metaphorically a bear but appears to actually be somewhat ursine, in genetic terms – perhaps a grandfather emigrated from Kodiak Island). And it is a very hot August this year – indeed all over the world, it's supposedly the hottest year ever. (Like all those who read newspapers, I can't help thinking – if this continues, and gets rather drastic, the era of visiting southern Europe for pleasure may be ending; and what that would do to the entire EU economy hardly bears thinking about.)

Oh well, sorry about that, boys. You know me: alternating polemics and truths....

•••

Storm clouds on the horizon... hooray. I am so ready for a tropical storm... in every way possible.

I'm off to catch a train to Girona (and yes I have my English umbrella with me). Ta ta.