Tuesday, September 22, 1998

September 22, 1998

"Summer is a time of random magic such as this, of surprising spirits conjured up between the sheets of my bed in a room overlooking Provincetown harbor. Here, stranger's kisses expose souls to me. The uneven scar on one boy's abdomen, the crinkles at the corners of another's eyes reveal more truths than I could ever discover in a more consistent lover.

"It is the last summer in which I am to be young." -- from the opening chapter of The Men From the Boys (q.v. September 17, below)

This sounds like more fun than it probably would be: I freely admit to being a Disney fanatic. The films and feature-length cartoons are great, of course, but what really enthralls me are the Magic Kingdoms, the theme parks in Anaheim and Orlando, DisneyLand and World respectively. I honestly believe if I were permitted to set up housekeeping in one of the World Villages at EPCOT Center, I would be happy. Disney parks are, after all, billed as the happiest places on Earth. But let's consider just the Anaheim park for a mo: Could one man ride every attraction old Walt's kingdom offers in just one day?

And things like this annoy the hell out of me: Jon Carroll rails at the cold efficiency of centralized customer "service."

Tried to call your bank lately? You can't. You can call a woman in Omaha who can give you account information, but suppose you have a different sort of question. Maybe you want to ask if the ATM machine is fixed yet, or if you left your sunglasses behind on your last visit, or even if your branch handles trust accounts.

Destined for my "To Read" Pile: D.A. Miller's Place for Us, a contextualizing essay on the Broadway musical and its relevance to po-mo (and possibly even po-gay) gay men. [Salon review]

Compare and contrast: Mr. Starr, Mr. Flynt. Mr. Flynt, Mr. Starr. Both would have probably been impossible under the CDA, but how does Hustler Online really compare to the web-readable special prosecutor's report?

Wicked cool: LEGO is going Asimovian, with neato-mosquito robotics kits that will probably appeal as much to big kids like me as to little ones.

Meanwhile, in TV Land...

It's time to start picking the weak and infirm from the new fall lineups, so head on over and hang with The Vidiots for the latest round of the TeeVee Ghoul Pool!

Of course, everyone scans the fall TV sked and thinks they could do it better. I mean, c'mon, Meego was a joke, right? Something that got blurted out at a pitch meeting while the network execs were high on crack?

Well, maybe some folks can do it better. The New York Times Magazine asked some to try, and a few of the tongue-in-cheek ideas might actually fly. Hell, I'd tune in! Check out what Conan O'Brien and Tony Kushner suggest putting on the air.

Must-She Monday First Impressions:

Suddenly, Susan: Suddenly snoring.
Caroline in the City: Not for very much longer, she isn't.
Will & Grace: First effort was funny, if stilted. If it survives, it could fly.

Thursday, September 17, 1998

September 17, 1998

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play." -- Immanuel Kant

Just finished reading: The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Now in the middle of: Media Circus: The Trouble With America's Newspapers. Added to the to-read stack: Gossip by Christopher Bram; The Men From the Boys by William J. Mann; and The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up by Andrew Tobias (nee John Reid).

I can't say I'm terribly impressed with The New Hollywood Squares. Whoopi Goldberg is funny, but she's just going through the motions here. She's certainly no Paul Lynde, but then, who is? And, "Rosie O'Donnell to block" is no replacement for Rose Marie. (In St. Louis, you can see the travesty at 11:35 p.m. on Channel 4.) Maybe I should subscribe to the Game Show Channel, where George Gobel lives!

Macintosh columnist and inveterate smart-ass Andy Ihnatko has landed over at MacCentral with a weekly gig. His hilarious supersite Colossal Waste of Bandwidth is still homeless, but promised to return soon.

A problem for the Information Age: What happens to your files after you die? A surviving daughter contemplates what to do with her dearly departed dad's disks.

Burning Man 1998 is now a memory, and Halcyon, one of the Internet's most compelling egos has his own photo album and reflections from what passes for the counterculture this decade.

Another empty promise? The Daily Instigator sez it's finally going live on Monday. Will it be worth the wait?

<SITENEWS> The Ice Rhapsody page has been updated, with new photos and news of the team's exciting win at ISI. </SITENEWS>

Wednesday, June 3, 1998

June 3, 1998

"28. I will meet somebody nice, away from a bar or the tubs or a roller-skating rink, and I will fall hopelessly but conventionally in love.

29. But I won't say I love you before he does.

30. The hell I won't."

-- three of Michael "Mouse" Tolliver's "Valentine's Day resolutions" from More Tales of the City

What I'm reading now: Goodnight, Nebraska: A Novel by Tom McNeal. [A taste of chapter one, courtesy of the San Diego Union Tribune]

Another addition to the 'To Read' pile: A Boy Named Phyllis: A Suburban Memoir by Frank DeCaro. (I'm also planning to re-read David B. Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed in the next week or so, and it's about time for my semi-annual re-reading of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City sextet, apropos to the airing of the new mini-series adaptation on Showtime.)

Speaking of which, props to Showtime for producing and airing the latest installment of Maupin's Tales for the screen, but what programming genius decided to debut this as counter-programming to the Tony Awards? Are they honestly expecting a massive gay exodus tuning out Broadway in favor of Barbary Lane? We shall see.