Friday, July 20, 2007

Weekend not so Harry

Well, my weekend productivity outlook suddenly took a turn for the upside: I realized today that although eight months ago, I'd pre-ordered the newest (and last) Harry Potter book to be delivered on the day of its release, I mistakenly told Amazon to send it to my office, not my home. I won't be in tomorrow and no one will be around to receive it, so the earliest I'll have The Deathly Hallows in my hands is Monday.

That opens up a wide window of time tomorrow and Sunday for house cleaning. Woo!

Monday, June 11, 2007

Tomorrow is Mouse Day in San Francisco

The City by the Bay celebrates my fictional avatar tomorrow, June 12; San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has declared it "Michael Tolliver Day", celebrating, among other things, Armistead Maupin's newest novel, Michael Tolliver Lives. Therein, we find Mouse a little older, perhaps a little wiser and still living in the San Francisco wonderland.

Of the new book, Maupin says:

"I wanted to illuminate the process of growing older as a gay man, and make it easier for people who think life is over," he says. "Gay men who are growing old are incredibly lucky to be here."

Maupin's life hasn't been untouched by AIDS; like so many, he lost a loved one. The optimistic outlook he has today has been hard won.

"But if I'd known that 63 was going to feel this good, I would have been a lot more cheerful along the way," says Maupin.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Boy, finally

After about a million years (well, 12), the movie adaptation of Matthew Rettenmund's witty, sexy novel Boy Culture will open in March. Here's the official website and, naturally, Rettenmund's got a blog.

Derek Magyar, who geeks may remember as Kelby on Star Trek: Enterprise, is a great choice to play X, and Patrick Bauchau also as Gregory. Looking forward to this one.

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Oh, my lucky star!

I have been, for me, pretty patient and my uncomplaining perseverance has been rewarded. My first edition of Joe Keenan's new book, My Lucky Star, arrived today and it's taking every ounce of my sense of duty not to abandon the piles of work on my desk and steal away to a quiet coffee bar where I can read it cover to cover.

The long-awaited third novel from the author of Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz is here! The Booklist precis:

Struggling playwrights Philip and Claire are summoned to Tinseltown by their calculating friend Gilbert to be screenwriters for a legendary diva, Diana Malenfant, and her megastar son, Stephen Donato. When the budding screenwriters are revealed as inadvertent plagiarists, Philip is forced to ghostwrite the memoirs of Diana's toxic has-been sister, Lily, and turn over all potentially damaging pages to Diana and Stephen. Lily is threatening to expose the silver screen's best-kept secret, that Stephen is gay. All are coexisting in a glittery detente until L.A.'s most fashionable madam gets the goods on the entire cast and demands a production credit, prodding the ever-capable Claire to devise the most madcap of rescues.

I have yet to read a word, but I can nonetheless recommend My Lucky Star without reservation to anyone who enjoys smart, fast-paced farce. My friends who have no doubt tired of my endless enthusing over the first two books about the misadventures of Philip and Gilbert, and anyone into whose hands I have thrust copies of the same and refused to speak with further until they've read them, will no doubt be relieved that I have something new to obsess about.

Go get it!

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Mister Horse

In this week's The New Yorker, Paul Rudnick outlines Further Proof That Lincoln Was Gay. Among his discoveries:

The first draft of the Gettysburg Address began, “Four score and seven years ago-ish . . .

When Lincoln was a boy, he would walk twenty miles through the snow every morning to buy magazines.

Lincoln was raised in a log cabin with a dirt floor, which he vacuumed.

Lincoln liked to say, “All men are created equal, except at the beach.”

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Obscene Interiors

Ooo, baby, that's a mighty big chifforobe but what's with the chintz?: My dear friend and spiritual adviser Eric sent me a copy of Justin Jorgensen's new book, Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Décor, personally inscribed by the author and with a kicky foreward by interiors dude Todd Oldham his own self. It is, of course, the dead-tree cousin of this site, a pretty book filled with pretty wretched home "decorating" that's such fun to read.

(Justin's site also has a great gallery of pages from The Witch's Catalog, one of my favorite books as a wee sprout. Oh, how I wanted an Invisible Suit!)

Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Virtual Book Tour Announcement

Virtual tour, real author: This website -- in fact, this very weblog -- will be a stop on the "virtual book tour" for Dennis Hensley's Screening Party next Friday. A few years ago, Dennis penned a delightfully frivolous comic novel, titled Misadventures in the 213 (which was based on a series of columns he wrote for Detour magazine), that's gotten passed around quite a bit in The BradLands and which unfortunately led my friend Jeff to dub a particularly young former suitor of mine "This Many", after one of its characters.

If the Postal Service cooperates, I'll be receiving a copy of the book to read over the next few days and then, on Friday, you'll find out more about Screening Party. In the meantime, you may enjoy learning more about the Virtual Book Tour, organized by the one and only (that we know of) Kevin Smokler.

Thursday, May 9, 2002

To say nothing of the blog…

BOOK 'EM: I shuffled a few things on my reading pile and tore into Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys, a delightful (and physically beautiful) comic novel following a rudderless student through two semesters of art school in the 1950s. Now I'm nearly finished with Connie Willis' thoroughly enjoyable time-travel-mystery-comedy To Say Nothing of the Dog, the first historically speculative sci-fi I've really devoured since Simon Hawke's Time Wars series. (Literati will note Willis' title is derived from the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's century-old classic account of Victorian England, Three Men in a Boat.)

Supplemental: The ever-charming Anita Rowland posted some great notes on the historical and literary allusions in To Say Nothing of the Dog in the "Reading and Writing" forum at Bad Hair Days. Good stuff!

Both of my latest reads, I hasten to mention, were sent along as gifts from my wishlist by visitors to The BradLands. I am very, very grateful for the hours of diversion and enjoyment. Thank you.

Monday, July 27, 1998

Buddy Cole does not go quietly

Some new additions to "Cute Guys With Cool Webpages": Xzigboy, Mark Chou, Eric Powers.

After four (!) years on the New York Times bestseller list, John Berendt contemplates life and another novel after Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. [Washington Post]

Rating the Willie Wonka kids. [Brunching Shuttlecocks]

A few years ago, I read a compelling book — the title and author of which escape me at the moment — about the birth and subsequent ascendance of CNN. Of course, this was before the Gulf War when the network really took off. Now, a similarly compelling cable success story might be spun about kid's web Nickelodeon. [Philadelpha Inquirer]

Talk about "portals" on the Web is all the rage right now, megasites that are mere launch sites to other parts of the great untamed net. AOL wants to be one, and so do Snap! and the Mining Company. But portals work best when, like this weblog, they're free — or relatively free — of commercial interruption and influence. And so concurs the Net Skink with this look at alternative portals. [San Francisco Examiner]

Speaking of commercial interruption, I am thisclose to boycotting GeoCities. Don't get me wrong: providing free webspace is a great thing and there are tons of worthy sites thereabout, but their stupid pop-up Java windows with ads seem to perpetually crash whatever browser I'm using. Let me know if this happens to you.

The Kids in the Hall are more or less splitsville, but Scott Thompson is doing his best to make sure Buddy Cole does not go quietly, and tells about Buddy's latest adventures in Salon. (Also, check out Scott's very own domain, the ever-amusing ScottLand.) [Salon]

Plenty more links to add, but so little time, so little time. More soon!