"our valued destiny comes to nothing"

There is a difference between watching a real murder videotaped and a staged one filmed. I want to explain what that difference is, what it is I feel right now having watched the “1 Lunatic 1 Icepick” video making the rounds on the back alleys of the Internet, the video of Luka Magnotta dismembering his victim, Jun Lin.

I could say I did not want to watch this video and a certain part of me wishes I did not, but if I am to be honest I have to admit that I wanted to see it, that I heard the warnings not to watch it, and that I failed to heed them, steamed right on past them in my curiosity (or perversity) to see this thing. I would encourage you to exercise a bit more will than I did, that you will wish you hadn’t watched it if you do decide to. You don’t need to see everything. There are reasons, very good ones, why your parents, why mine, told us to avert our eyes at times, that certain things affect us profoundly.

I know I have crossed a line. My body tingles with pain as a part of me hollows out, certain things dispersing never to be regained.

The video was originally posted to a site celebrating gore videos, presumably by Magnotta. A lawyer in Montana tried to tip off the Toronto police to the video, that it was most likely the murder case they were dealing with. The lawyer was ignored when he tried to phone this in, was told that the video was a fake, was told “why would a killer film his own crime and then post it on the Internet?”

Why indeed? The question perplexing a great many people now that it appears police were too slow to accept tips about this video because they had too reasonable views of human nature. But the question, in 2012, might be why not? This case intrigues me so much because it sits at the intersection of so many narratives – gay killers who seem to kill because they are gay, that the issues of dealing with their sexuality in an inhospitable world seems to bring about a particular form of violent madness; the egomania and belief that everyone is entitled to stardom and riches that also brings about madness and depression in those that never realize the absurd ideal of a great life that mass media can instill in a person; the documentation and exhibition of anything and everything, the need to broadcast all our doings to the world online; the viral nature of content on the Internet and its ease of distribution for content that would have otherwise never made it out of sealed court documents and police evidence lockers; the increasing disappearance of standards and practices in journalism with the competition from the motley, uncensored torrent of content people otherwise have access to (as recently evidenced by Gawker’s gleeful publication of the Miami “cannibal” attack victim’s face).

In this Luka Magnotta case, you have an insane Dennis Cooper novel come to life. Magnotta seems to have emerged from mysterious origins, going by various aliases over the years through his careers as a stripper, escort, porn star, and aspiring reality television star. What brings a person to this point in their life where they are sadistically chopping up men on camera, using New Order’s “True Faith” as a soundtrack to the thing, a blatant reference to American Psycho’s usage of the song, and then posting the whole thing on the Internet? The question eats away at you and you wonder what conditions brought this about, how far removed you are from whatever these lines are that were crossed. Is watching this video a step in that direction, one step closer toward whatever lines he crossed?

There is also the theme of aging, a Dorian Gray horror aspect to the story. Maybe I imagined the quotes I read yesterday as I can’t find them anymore, but be they imagined or be they real, they have created another narrative of this story for my mind to focus on, that of the vain gay male upset about aging. The quotes were from Magnotta, or maybe I entirely imagined them in my fever dreams about this murder yesterday. He was talking about his career as a porn star and said something along the lines of how he had to do lots of work at whatever age it was that these quotes were given because no one wants men when they are over thirty in gay porn. I must have imagined this. Regardless, I thought about this man whose main source of income had been monetizing his youthful looks through either escort work or low-budget porns, and thought about what torture his vain mind must have been going through in his 29^th year with that terrifying number of 30 approaching, with his ability to sell his twink status soon to finally come to an end.

And here I am, along with lots of other Internet viewers, giving him his shot at fame finally. Finally, it’s all paying off. Fame has come his way.

There is a long Internet trail that one can follow, old videos and photos he posted to YouTube and to XTube, fascinating to see, pieces of a puzzle that I am trying to assemble into a narrative. Then there are the kitten snuff videos he is also responsible for newly making the rounds of these same back alleys. There needs to be a story that we can follow. It helps the world seem more sensible, orderly, that our religion of cause and effect can stay untarnished, infallible. And so we read news story after news story about this thing, or about this Miami cannibal, or about this or that horrific event, or at least I do, reading to see what new details have been uncovered, wanting to understand these things, wanting to continue to believe that we possess even vague notions of how the world and humans work.

I watch this video and I try to grasp it. And I can’t. It’s real, the death of a real human being with a family that was worried when he went missing, and I watch his limbs get cut off, I watch his flesh cut apart with a fork and knife, I watch a dog nibble at his flesh, I watch this limbless torso get sexually defiled, I watch Magnotta jerk himself off with a chopped off arm. The whole time I don’t know why I am watching. I am struck throughout by the juxtaposition of the bloody dismemberment and the old movie poster for Casablanca that hangs over Magnotta’s bed; there is something in this though I don’t know what. There are memories of that film, the feelings it inspired, and then there are the feelings brought about by this snuff film, a massive and unbridgeable gulf between the two. I gag and want to vomit and hate myself for watching this video and for living in this world where this is done, where it’s filmed, where it’s watched by hundreds of thousands online, where I am one of these, and where snarky comments are written about it like it’s a late-night B movie and not an actual person’s murder and dismemberment on video. And yet, it is a late-night B movie – increasingly this world becomes more and more of one.

Acme

Food has always presented me with great joy, a joy sometimes bordering of hysteria. The first clear memory I have of an elevated food experience was at some fairground, I can’t remember where or what age, though it was an early age, probably around ten or so, having a turkey leg. It was an entirely new experience and one in which I was overcome with a sort of awe at the sensations that overcame me as I ate this, the absolute pleasure overwhelming me. It was a memory that stuck with me and an experience that I wanted to replicate. Whenever I was at a fair, not a common thing, I would keep my eye out for turkey legs, and would always get one if I was able to find one.

The other early culinary memory that I always think back to as one of my first heightened appreciations of food is when I was also a young child and went to the Minnesota State Fair with my family. There was delightful thing after delightful thing being sold at stand after stand. My mom ordered a big thing of fried cheese curds and immediately I experienced a bliss that food had never given me before. The easy analogy here is a sexual one with food. I am trying my best to avoid using them but it’s very difficult because sex is one of the few other times when you experience such physical and sensory delight. Food is just about the only thing that will make you moan with pleasure other than sex or a good massage.

It’s a mystery to me how food works, but indeed it does work. It is capable, when prepared certain ways, of inducing a range of emotions that when prepared expertly has a way of shutting everything else in the world down other than what is going on in your mouth as textures and flavors cross your tongue at that moment.

A couple nights ago, I went out to eat at Acme with some friends and I am still tasting some of the things I ate, trying to taste them again for as long as I can, holding on to these already fuzzy memories of taste before they fully fade away. There are times when spending a decent sum of money on dinner can seem extraordinarily wasteful and decadent, that you have nothing to show for it the next day, even at the end of the meal, that all you are left with are empty plates and a bill for a lot of money. But more and more those concerns have little hold on me, as I become more certain that the pleasure that food gives is worth it. Yes, there are memories that we will hold on to of the meal, though they will get foggier and foggier with time, maybe remembering what was ordered and that it gave you such pleasure that you were in fits of mmms, but the sensations of those fits will be secondhand, sketches of what the original was.

We started with the bread and some delicious cocktails, already luxuriating in the tastes that both offered. Next we had some oysters, which as oysters most usually are, were delicious and full of sensation. These, however, were paired with pickled cucumbers that added another layer or both taste and texture. This was followed by a plate of beets and a plate of shrimp and bison, the strings of the symphony starting to swell as I am became more and more overcome with delight, with happiness as I tasted bite after bite of perfectly prepared plates. Then we shared bites of the raviolo, which I can’t remember much about at this point, the filling for instance, but I do remember that this was the dish that began to elicit the mmms. Then we had the farmer’s eggs, which visually was the most stunning dish of the night, beautifully presented. It was egg foam, parmesan, and cauliflower whipped together and presented in hollowed-out eggshells and served on a bed of hay. The plating alone would have made me love this dish, but it was also so insanely delicious.

Round after round of cocktails were had, someone was Instagraming the meal of course, and we all talked about how delicious it all was as we shared stories about our lives as of late. We then split a couple of main courses, the chicken and eggs dish and the sea bass, both of which continued the mmms. The sea bass was cooked so well, in a way that I never understand how to do when I attempt to cook fish at home. The surface was a bit charred, covered in a buttery sauce, and the inside was perfectly flaky. The contrast of textures provided so much delight. And then this chicken and eggs dish – this is the one that I have been thinking about pretty much anytime I have found myself hungry over the last couple of days. Everything about this dish was so perfect. There were bits of chicken in an insanely delicious sauce, topped with deep-fried poached eggs served alongside fingerling potatoes, and all served in a clay pot. I have no idea why this dish works so well, but it tastes comfortable and then some, throws you bodily whole back into some childhood experience when you were sick and your mom served you chicken soup and you felt cared for and loved in a way that you probably never have since. Those memories wash around you, as well other less clear ones, as well as the absolute delight that this food brings about, its wonderful combination of flavors doing magic on your tongue, and by extension your whole body.

We then sampled three of the desserts, the Danish doughnuts, the chocolate crisps, and the beer and bread porridge. They were all fantastic but the beer and bread porridge was particularly so, doing some of that magic that good food is able to do, making you crawl into yourself, letting out moans, as you try to mentally hold on to what the moment feels like, this pleasure that you are experiencing, trying to hold the feeling as tightly to yourself as you can, not wanting to ever let it go.

This is why food is so meaningful. A good meal teaches us how to live, how to accept pleasure and its passing, how to let things go and how not to. Relationships and friendships that we have will end. People and things we love will die or disappear. So much work is put into a great meal, hours and hour of preparation, months or years of plants or animals growing and maturing. And all of that work will be expertly plated and consumed in a very short window of time. It will disappear, but what matters is knowing how to savor those moments that the food is still on your fork and enjoying every moment of that experience, every taste and sensation that crosses your tongue. What matters is knowing how to remember these experiences, to attempt to, and the seeking out of new ones, the plans for the next meal.

arrival

I went to the first barbecue of the summer at Metropolitan last night. Summer is here apparently. The temperature reached 90 today, it is Memorial Day, the scent of gasoline and charred meat fills the streets of Brooklyn. I installed my air conditioner this afternoon.

Time continues to move at a pace that frightens me, that seems quicker than it should.

Jacob and I left the barbecue after one pitcher of beer yesterday. We felt awkward but were a little stoned and so it was certainly our own fault. Every summer the crowd is a bit different, composed of less familiar faces, the experience less fun. There were pushy people trying to get counter space to set disposable plates on, not friendly guys serving food, and a man who talked like an elementary school teacher asking me how I would feel if there was ever a vaccine for HIV. I told him I didn't want to talk about that right now, when really I didn't want to talk to him. He tried to give me yo-yos and lollipops and seemed offended that I didn't want them. I saw a couple people I had slept with years ago. We left the bar and bought ice cream on the way home and watched various music videos on YouTube.

There is a passage in Middlemarch that I keep thinking back to ever since I read it a week or so ago. That is is now apparently summer already, that I again feel like I am not keeping pace with the march of time, has me again thinking to this, thinking in broader terms about how I am failing to keep pace with aspirations once a little more firmly held:

"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!" (144-145)

"show them all the beauty they possess inside"

It has been nearly nine years since the first time I saw the Gossip perform at the now defunct Luxx space on Grand Street in Williamsburg, a small, sweaty show that is mythic in my memory as one of the best concerts I have ever seen, a religious experience, Beth Ditto, the evangelist, working up a sweat, filling the crowd with the spirit. I was so blown away that I saw them perform again the next night, at the Knitting Factory's old Manhattan location. I have seen them numerous times since those first times, still recalling what that first experience felt like and wanting to relive it. I have never been able to relive that first night's magic, but have come awfully close.

They are a much more popular, more known, band at this point and so play much larger venues that make that type of experience near impossible. Last night, I made the trek over to Terminal 5 on the far west side of midtown Manhattan to see them play along with CREEP and Ssion.

I was already drenched in sweat by the time they event took the stage, having danced hard for Ssion, who were really fantastic, and who I am liking more and more as a band each time I see them perform. When they played "Psy-chic," I lost a mind a little, arms flailing all over the place, trying to physically express how happy that song makes me.

The Gossip played a long set, taking the stage around 9:45 and ending near midnight. Along the way, the band played many gems that set the crowd dancing and screaming and Beth worked in bits of covers into several of her songs, doing brief versions of Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl," Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" (though now I am doubting that I am remembering that cover correctly), Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and of course, the show closer that Beth did, the preacher we would only be so lucky to actually have, leading an a cappella singalong to Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All."

It was a fantastic show. I left soaked in sweat and with no voice, my throat sore from screaming. I had to buy a bottle of water at the subway station to rehydrate myself. It was the best kind of feeling to have after a concert - absolute physical exhaustion paired with awe and bliss and inspiration. I had wavered about buying tickets until only a couple of days before, thinking that either I was too old for this band or this band was too old for me now, too big now for the experience that I wanted. I am so glad that I purchased tickets despite my doubts. It was absolutely amazing.

pomp and circumstance

I don't know how it is the middle of May already. To be even more to the point I don't know how it is 2012 already. I don't know how it is May in 2012. Time really does seem to be flying and I have very little, if anything, to show for it.

Jacob graduated from college a couple days ago and that event and his preparations leading up to it led me down trails of thought in which I pondered the progress (or lack thereof) in my own life, that I am still doing the same thing I have been doing since I met him - working a hotel job which pays me enough money to be comfortable but which isn't challenging at all and which is beginning not to seem like such a comfortable sum the older I get and the greater my desire becomes for meals out and proper cocktails, let alone the idea of vacations here or there. So there is that. But ahead of all of that is my failure to create something worthwhile, that all of these writerly ambitions that were at one time so strong have become less and less so. I work and I go the gym and then I make dinner and get stoned with Jacob and watch a silly movie before going to bed. I am not unhappy doing these things and some days I am even satisfied doing them but when I think of them in some aggregate sense, my days, my years, I become very unhappy with the way I have spent them.

The commencement speaker at his graduation was Laurie Anderson, who gave a really beautiful and inspiring speech that spoke to these concerns of mine. Commencement speeches usually tend to this and I get quite a thrill usually out of listening to any of them but this one was particularly apt because it was about art-making and having priorities in one's life. If one wants to be artist, one needs to make art. Simple really until you are no longer in school and have to spend most of your energy and your time working to put a roof over your head. The portion of the speech that really hit home for me was when she talked about priorities:

Around this time, I had a friend, an older artist, and I was always complaining, saying things like "I want to be an artist, but I have to figure out how to pay the rent and get a place to work. And how would I do this? How would I have time to work?" 


He just kept saying in the most irritating way possible, "Just do your work." 


And I said, "But Richard, that's really easy for you to say, but I have to be practical. I have to pay the rent." 


And he kept saying that. And it took me a really long time to figure out what he was saying, and it was basically about priorities. If your priority is paying the rent, then you will probably pay the rent but you might not get around to making art. But if your priority is to do your work, then that's where your very, very best energy will go and paying the rent will just kind of automatically happen. I know this sounds kind of ridiculous. But please believe me on this. You just have to take this one completely on faith.

And so, here we are in the middle of May in the year 2012.

over/under

My body is not getting younger and I become acutely aware of this each time I drink heavily these days, feeling its aftereffects in a way that I never used to. Hangovers become an all day, if not a two day, affair. I just want to sleep and am fairly useless for much else. That is what today has been.

It started at brunch. Jacob and I ate in the backyard of Santos Anne, a really cute Mexican/French place in Williamsburg with a beautiful and green backyard. We had a cocktail there and then wandered around Williamsburg, through McCarren Park, down Bedford, down to the waterfront, through the stalls of Brooklyn Flea, and then met up with Erica and some friends of hers. We first went to Matchless, which was rather awful, and then went to Spuyten Devil, which was much more pleasant. From there, we went to Night of Joy where they had really yummy cocktails and I drank way too many of them while sitting on this nice roof and then playing pool downstairs. From there, we went to Burnside and ate burgers and cheese curds and drank more.

We all came back to my house and watched Evil Dead and I fell asleep in the first ten minutes. I woke up this morning in pain, my body feeling drained of every life force. I drank cup after cup of water trying to restore it. I laid on my couch, spent too long (as I often do) looking again and again at Facebook and Gawker. I tried reading Middlemarch but after about two paragraphs of gorgeous prose fell asleep.

he's so bloody tall

I woke up a few times in the middle of the night. One of those times was because I had a nightmare that for whatever reasons the sealed holes where my wisdom teeth once were became ripped open and started gushing blood all over my mouth. I knew this dream meant something but for either reasons of wanting to get back to sleep or fear of what the dream might portend, I didn't think too much about it.

I also woke up several times because my stomach was hurting, bloated, full of gas, and feeling sick. I drank a ton of whiskey and drunkenly ate a burrito soaked in hot sauce yesterday evening. I felt absolutely awful all day long and had intense stomach problems that are only now abating.

Once home from work, I took a nap on my couch and woke up and watched the Kentucky Derby with Jacob. A horse called "I'll Have Another" won.

"With monopoly money, we'll be buying the funny farm"

It's 4/20 and I am high and listening to Aimee Mann's "Bachelor No. 2" and I have decided that it is my favorite album of all time at this particular moment in time. It was always high up there in the rankings, top three or top five, but in the last several months it has shot ahead to number one. A decade or so after falling in love with this album, I still cannot get enough of it. Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)" used to be up there at No. 1; now it has been bumped down to No. 2.

What exactly this says, I am not sure. I am quite sure though that it says something.

I went to see a play this evening with Erica, my third Broadway excursion of this week with her. Tuesday night, we saw "Leap of Faith." Wednesday, "The Lyons." And tonight, "Seminar." It has been so long since I have seen any Broadway shows. It really brought me back to somewhere, this past week, a desire to consume these things, to engage with art, engage in this cultural conversation that goes on about theater, to think about life in ways that theater narratives really are able to do so in ways unique to theater. If I had to suggest one of these for you to see, far and away I would suggest that you go see "The Lyons." The script by Nicky Silver is really brilliant and witty, fantastic and funny line one right after the next. It's dark and brutal in its attitude toward life, refreshingly unsentimental, and yet also, despite that, maybe even because of it, hopeful about what it is that we can get from life on this planet.

The play has funny one-liners shooting one right past the other, a fireworks show of verbal zingers. My favorite series of lines were in the opening when Linda Lavin's character is complaining about their living room to her dying husband and says:

"I look at the sofa. I know it was cream when we bought it, but now it's just some washed-out shade of dashed hopes. The chairs are the color of disgust. And the carpet is matted down with resignation."

I wanted to write that line down when I heard it, wanted to remember it. I didn't do that because I didn't have a pen, but more so because even if I did there was no way I would disengage from the play for even a moment to scratch something funny down. Luckily the Internet has already recorded this quote on several webpages. 

"Seminar" was just all right - the script never went beyond surfaces and caricatures. My favorite part of the play was a scene where Justin Long is on stage for a moment in his underwear. My favorite part was this appearance of skin, of a body that was insanely sexy in a way that really surprised me. Justin Long is cut and I was shooting photos on the roll in my mind saved for purposes of images to jack off to.

I rode the train home. A man was singing Beatles songs to people on the subway for change. I smoked some weed because it is the twentieth of April and all and I put a pizza in the oven and I did karaoke to this Aimee Mann album as I got more and more stoned. I read along to the lyrics and tried to say the words to these beautiful and sad and gorgeous songs with something even slightly approximating the way in which Aimee Mann is able to say them, the meaning and sadness she is able to imbue in each of these lines, by saying the words a certain way, by hitting certain notes that I am not even aware of until I try to sing them, until I hear my voice, that of a screechy cat, trying and failing to sing these songs with any of the range, and thus the conveyed emotion, that Aimee Mann is able to sing them.

Jacob came home. I stopped singing along to these songs, which is really if I were to be honest what I would like to still be doing, to be what I was always doing. I put on my headphones to keep listening to these songs and typed here in my diary about these songs and some other things. I just want to put this out there in the internet record books I have been compiling for some reason about my life, documenting this existence, that in the year 2012, in the month of April, one of the things that brought Charlie the most happiness on this planet was being alone in his apartment in Brooklyn, being a little high, and blasting "Bachelor No. 2" and singing along to the lyrics loudly, unashamed, increasingly emotional, and occasionally sipping from a glass of red wine between verses. He thought about all of the other times he has had similar moments to this album, all of the places this album has been with him, my buddy through nights in towns up and down the East Coast, my buddy through a summer spent in the beautiful state of Wisconsin, the number of these emotional evenings over the course of the last decade countless, that this is an album to lose yourself in emotionalism to, to totally embrace what a messy and beautiful place this is, the messiness responsible for that beauty. 

all my friends are dead

The man's blazer ahead of me was of a cheap fabric and didn't fit well. It reminded me of something. I soon realized what that thing was it reminded me of: my father. He had nearly an identical blazer. It was a dark patterned blazer, something in between bronze and khaki. The jacket, in my memories, didn't fit my father well either. My memories of him in this particular blazer are from when he was dying of lung cancer, his body made smaller by both his cancer and his chemo treatment, him seeming smaller in all of his clothes. The shoes and pants this man were wearing also were things my father wore. This man had the same skin color as my father and was bald, much like my father during this time in his life. I occasionally see these apparitions around the city, men who remind me of my father. I watched him from behind as he walked down Broadway, losing the erotic enthusiasm I had been trying to muster to go see this man I often see uptown and who I was on my way to see when I encountered the ghost of my dad.

In the half block between seeing this apparition and this man's house who was going to pay me to suck my dick, I walked past a teenage girl smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a t-shirt that said, "All My Friends Are Dead." Underneath this phrase was a cartoon image of a stegosaurus.

Mixed Emotions

The weather was in the 80s and I had the day off from work. I put on my headphones, listened to various albums I am into lately, and rode the subway and then the bus out to Jacob Riis Beach. One of these albums was the Tanlines album, which seemed quite appropriate since I was determined not to have any. I walked to the end of the beach, where the fence demarcates clearly the start of Rockaway. There were a couple of nude folks down at that end and I spread my sheet in the midst of them and joined them. I read the New Yorker and dove into the ocean, the water still painfully cold. I lasted probably less than a minute underwater before I came running back to my towel. I looked at the dicks of the naked people near me, looked at my own. I snacked on almonds, drank water, and listened to waves crash against the shore.

I rode the Q35 bus and the subway back into the city and continued this exemplary gay summer day by meeting Jacob at the Christopher Street Piers. We drank a bottle of wine as we soaked up the sun and talked about life and the boys that walked past us. We continued the drinking at Rockbar and then Hangar Bar and then came home and ate Mexican food. I had a burrito. Jacob had a torta. The usual.