more, 'cause I'm bored.

January 1979; I'm six, and yes, those are, in fact, blue suede shoes.
This is my Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Bob's house in Atlantic City. I think she was actually my great Aunt. My great grand-mother was in a nursing home there then and my cousin Steve worked at a casino and we went to visit a lot. But they were tacky, and we talked about that. They cubed the turkey at Thanksgiving with an electric carving knife and this was a very bad thing, it was explained to me. But they gave me butterscotch krimpets, so I learnt not to say anything.


June 1983. I'm 10.
I played Ko-ko, the lord high executioner in the Mikado. That's me with the axe.
I had, up until that point never gotten a goof part in a school play. I had ben relegated to playing a horse on Hades's chariot when he stole Persephone, stuff like that. When they showed up the scripts for the Mikado I decided I _had_ to be Ko-ko, because I could be sarcastic! I had just learnt that word and thought it was very exciting. I got the part and the other kids were mean to me, because I never got parts, was never competition. Ha. The daughter of David Merick ("the meanest man in showbiz") was in our class, and so her family donated the professionally made costumes.


This is my mom at some point in the mid-late '80's. It exemplifies perfectly the worlds I, all of us, had to figure out how to live between. Formal and artsy, monied and not, but a New York that was certainly slipping away then and now, a world of boutiques and never buying food from a grocery store, but going the breadmaker and the butcher and the cheese shop and so forth. This was our life in the otherworld. And yes that coat is covered in decorative, yet functional buttons up the sleeves; my life is funny like that.

Goya's Ghosts

My review is finally unembargoed.
If you need a way to kill some time before the HP book release this week, this is the _perfect_ movie.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977041813

(no subject)

While songs like this always grab me, this one is particularly squeezing my heart today. And as much as the book is not a romance, it makes me think of Mairome.

http://moses.last.fm/download/28674504/Lord%2BBateman.mp3

the book was just a bystander

I have written, at length and not infrequently, over the years about why the Harry Potter books mean something to me, but those statements have been almost entirely about the child I was and the actual content of the books -- characters, themes, etc.

But, at risk of repeating myself, it is also important to me to note that one of the big reasons I am so ticked about the spoiler thing isn't just because I want to experience certain events of the book contextually and in the moment, but because when that book comes out, a big chapter of my life comes to a close. And I don't even mean the Harry Potter chapter, really, since I'll be at Terminus and there will still be the movies and so forth.

But Michael introduced me to those books. I remember sitting in his apartment in Brooklyn the night Book 4 came out. Urban Fetch delivered it, and he said he wasn't going to talk to me until he finished it and handed me the first three.

When I finished the fourth one, I whined to Soren, that I had nothing to read and I was obsessed with Snape and I needed something to take my mind off of it. Soren gave me Swordspoint and said Alec reminded him a bit of me.

So the Harry Potter books have been with me through four apartments and many jobs. They've been with me from before I decided to be an actor. They are directly responsible for several of my romances, two of my most pivotal friendships, and an astounding writing partner. They are indirectly responsible for my life as a fencer, for Patty and I meeting (and she's not even into Harry Potter), and a number of other odd and lovely circumstances in my life.

So while I may grieve the conclusion of the series and the possible passing of characters who have essentially held my hand through a lot of the blinding stupidity I've engaged in in these last years, there is also the simple grieving of this particular story -- not the one about Harry and Ron, Hermione, and yes, Snape -- but the one about me.

It would be intense under any circumstances, but under the circumstances of getting my first credit in a major motion picture, under the circumstances of Patty moving in with me, under the circumstances of Rose's Turn closing, under the circumstances of my finally making real and solid progress with my novel, and under the circumstances of yes, Michael and I being able to exchange friendly emails about his family, it all feels very solid, important, circular. That all these things reach such points of demarcation at once is a little weird, you have to admit.

So when people say "how can these books mean so much to you, they suck for all these reasons?" my overwhelming feeling isn't that they don't get it, or that they're wrong, but that they've overlooked the way the weave of my world interests me so constantly in my own peculiar serendipitous brand of self-absorption.

Sure, I can't wait to read what happens. And the grief part, after tensing up for it for so long, will be a relief. But the secret is, I half expect to wake up on the afternoon of 21st, after having stayed up all night and into the morning reading, and discover that I finally look my age.

And that is probably my last word on that, at least until I've read the thing.