June 30, 2013

A long line of mornings when I woke with sense of physical well-being is broken today. Feverish, monstrously loose in the bowels.

Excellent morning in the studio yesterday. I painted joyfully for hours, then left just as others were arriving. Typically I have a quarter of my day before the rest of the world awakes.

Drinks and a light supper with DJ at Magnolias, then over to see C’s play. It had been getting interesting reviews, the kind that hid more than they told, but what they told was that the subject matter of the play was righteous and that a first-time playwright is to be encouraged. Both those things are true, but what the reviews avoided saying (and why Asheville can never in the foreseeable future possess a truly sophisticated art scene) is that the play was awful on a dozen different levels, and the fact that it was both righteous and intelligent made it, curiously, worse. What the playwright intended was beyond her powers, and the part she had written for herself as narrator/Muse/sibyl was the worse calamity I have seen on stage in an age, long on self-congratulation and pointless wordplay, very short on sense, devoid of dramatic necessity, an intrusion and irritation every time it appeared. I’m not a great fan of the “development” process, but did this play have one, and if so with whom? People who hated the playwright and wanted to see her mortified? Even had the play been decently written, the flaw in its politics would be difficult to overcome. The time when a gay playwright can use the sorrows and trials of being gay as her sole subject is thirty years in the past. Yes, each person goes through it in her own way, but the differences between one such story and another may be far less to an onlooker than the writer supposes. What is unique when experienced is not necessarily so when observed. Art is not, finally, merely self-expression. The unmediated sorrows of one’s soul are for whispering over a late table with a good friend. Each gay artist may need to address this life incident before going on to other things, but only the lucky generation at the outset of the new consciousness could expect an audience to find it fully engaging. We in these latter days get it privately out of our systems and go on. We put it in a drawer and thank our lucky stars the wide world never saw it. The abstract struggle of gayness is no longer news. It was never a very good foundation for an entire work of art. The performances could not possibly be good, and weren’t, though you saw good performers struggling courageously against the material. There was one rather lovely scene between a transvestite and a phone sex worker. I wanted to tell C, “This is your play. Start here and explore. Drop the rest.” It was, one would think, the scene farthest from the playwright’s own experience, and thus not freighted with the weight of apologia that brought the rest to the ground.

Our waiter at Magnolias told us in some detail about the antiques store he’s preparing to open in Black Mountain as soon as he retires in so many weeks. There is a play.

Woke in sadness–as well as dyspepsia–for in a dream I had scheduled two obligations at the same time, and couldn’t think of a way to make it right, couldn’t decide whom I wanted to offend.  Leland was one of the people I was going to disappoint, and I was trying to make my excuses to him when I awoke.

June 29, 2013

Painted a little. Went to the Apothecary to hear Frank’s band. Longed to hear Frank’s band. Arrived at 9 and left finally at 10:40 without hearing a single note. I was told we were on “punk time.” Unfortunately, I don’t do punk time.  Lovely conversations with the boys, though, which I cherished as long as I could, before frustration began to drown pleasure.  Asheville is alive and happy at night.

June 28, 2013

In a dream I hired Belve Marks to be my gardener. When I returned from somewhere he had bulldozed the ground flat and bare, and sold the detritus for a few bucks. He had the notion that I wanted to start over, which I did not. Plus, it was my house in Akron, and not here. In the dream I was shouting at him, dismayed that I could not shout loudly enough fully to express my wrath. I think the dream was related to the fact that I went to bed realizing my Shakespeare play had taken the wrong turn, relying on sleep, as I often do, to do the intellectual work.

Wasting time, as I have so much of it now to waste.

June 27, 2013

Woke to the roar of sudden downpour. I had been dreaming of travel. I was stranded temporarily on an island between Britain and Ireland, where was taking a kind of seminar in a series of dreary buildings, all of which seemed to be surrounded on three sides by a gray sea. Meryl Streep was also taking the seminar.

The Defense of Marriage Act is put down by the Supreme Court, as well as several other measures enacted, it seems to be, not out of any need but out of pure meanness, to insure some advantage certain people had remained exclusive to them. My marriage is somehow less if you can marry too; you have gotten pregnant- the fact that I can’t or haven’t would not be so satisfying if you weren’t forced to carry that burden to the end regardless of consequences.. Not one of the people in government who say that every baby is a gift from God believe it, or has thought about it enough to have the right to an opinion.

Heavy flowers blooming in the wet heat: voluptuous male roses, soaring stalks of acanthus.

June 26, 2013

J’s nieces weed the studio garden to earn pocket money. Immediate annihilation of the day-flowers and the volunteer sunflowers, which I was nurturing. I decide it’s best to go home and leave everything to its fate. Late coffee with DD, hearing about his progress as a poet, which is meteoric because he’s good and works hard. Thinking that it’s time for rain.

June 24, 2013


This is from the New York Times, cited as “GTW, June 10):

Loves of Mr. Lincoln Surprises
I didn't really know what to expect, but I knew what I didn't want to see when I went to the opening of The Loves of Mr. Lincoln presented by GayfestNYC. The provocative title alluded to possible hanky-panky of the most unwelcome kind besmirching the good name of a great man. Much to my delight, what I saw on stage was none of that, and, if anything, elevated the character and behavior of our 16th President in ways that were really quite affirmative. Playwright David Brendan Hopes has walked an incredibly fine line with nary a misstep. The production values (especially the gowns floated by Mary Todd Lincoln, played by Leah Curney and designed by Carrie Robbins) were unexpectedly high for a 99-seat OOB production, and the entire cast impressed: Tyrone Davis, Jr.'s beautiful tenor served him well as an everyman who sang us from scene to scene with period folk tunes, Don Burroughs filled the shoes of first, dilettante McClellan and then grounded U.S. Grant and assumed both roles to the hilt of his burnished sword in such a way that if you hadn't known they were the same actor, it wouldn't have occurred to you, Stacey Todd Holt as Lincoln's early roommate and life-long friend Joshua Speed, Ms. Curney as an appropriately tart if somewhat lithesome First Lady, and in a completely convincing performance of Lincoln from stripling to a gnarled oak of a man, Steven Hauck, who was perfectly cast and delivered a fine, absorbing performance. It could have gone either way, "The Loves of Mr. Lincoln," but it took the high road, and I was pleased to be along for the ride. I recommend you take it, too.

http://theater.nytimes.com/show/120289/The-Loves-of-Mr-Lincoln/overview

From a theater goer, friends with Jim Bassi:
Dear David,
I'm following up on Jim Bassi's message. Thanks to him, I had the good fortune of seeing your poignant play The Loves of Mr. Lincoln. I was mesmerized by its beauty and power. It struck me as the film Gandhi had years ago; I didn't want either one to end. Your play is a considerable work of literature, one that deserves greater visibility. I mentioned to Jim that it would even make a remarkable opera. I do understand, however, that new operas take years to develop and that the returns are often negligible. In any event, I wanted to make your acquaintance, poet to poet, to express my admiration.
Fondly,
Dean Kostos

Meeting at Apothecary with local group with which we might want to form a liaison. Much talk of “new media” and opposition to “object based” art. A “show” was up in the space, junky and unkempt and self-indulgent and trashy, all those qualities clearly visible through the windows. I took the fact that they apparently didn’t even notice what ignited me as a sign that I am, to some degree, immune to the charms of some of the art they approve and invite. “New media” is, for the most part, fooling around with expensive toys then explaining why the thing you did should be shoe-horned into the box called “art.”  Art to me is a process which achieves an end. Always the end, never the process. The process is fascinating, but it is not the art. Trash scattered about and a room that looks like a living room in a trailer park might be interesting in some ways, but those ways must be explained, and it is thus a literary form and we needn’t be burdened with the actual sight of it, I thought. One sincere and eager boy wanted to celebrate cheap, bad prints. His enthusiasm was lovely, and though I could hear myself saying the words, “I want to celebrate cheap, bad prints,” I would mean it as a joke–a piece of performance art achieved in an instant–and leave it at that. Much of the contemporary art scene is a construction of words that contains the word “art” but not necessarily discipline, skill, vision, good will or particular intelligence. What shall I do with this? At Apothecary I let it pass, because my colleagues are so open to everything that I’d sound like (and would perhaps be) a curmudgeon if I suggested more stringent principles of selection. Asheville is a great city of art, but is is also a great city of crap, which depends on– I suppose– politeness or circumspection for its extended life.

June 23, 2013

Party at Bill’s last night, where we abided until the moon rose white and round over the identical houses.

The French Broad River District art scene came to an end almost silently, while one looked away. We thought we were going to be gobbled up by the city in one “master plan” bite, but instead it was nibble by nibble by rapacious and insensitive commercialism. New landlords with a different vision bought up the buildings, and where there were once independent artists working in quirky, productive studios, there are little shops behind which the artist may be glimpsed at work like a rat on its wheel. Artists which didn’t fit the plan were evicted. Artists who were unsightly were evicted. Jolene at Phil Mechanic is the lonely holdout. Most artists are now required by their lease to be present every day for a full workday, like shopkeepers. Landlords who protected artists turned into those who exploit them. Fine art has practically–and predictably– disappeared, leaving space for the crafts factories and fifty eight different kinds of mugs. Asheville has always been at war with its arts community, which is, paradoxically, besides scenery its only attraction. It’s like New York resenting Broadway. The Asheville business community has in particular resented the arts community, as if the tourists would still come to buy shoes or nicknacks–or even beer-- once the artists and the street performers were gone. It’s shameful, but I– and maybe others–didn’t see it coming. The natural growth of the area was so clearly lovely and superior that someone’s desire to change it for profit did not seem a likelihood. I couldn’t even tell you where the creative kids in their cubbyholes and garrets have gone. Perhaps to another town altogether.

Dream of the most profound redemptive power. I was a child seated in a van under a complex series of road overpasses. There was a woman with me, and I knew from the dream that I had always thought that woman had kidnaped me, setting into motion a series of circumstances that had ruined my life. But this time, from a distance, observing my own life, I saw the woman smile beautifully, and I knew that had misinterpreted what had happened, that she had saved me from something very terrible., and that everything would be all right now.