Middle Earth, Central Park

I’m pretty excited about The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment in the film version of The Lord of the Rings, opening here in the United States on December 19. I’ve been trying to avoid any TV commercials or Burger-King-related promotions (blasphemous!) for the film — I want to see as little of it as possible before I see the actual film.

In advance screenings the film has gotten rave reviews, but apparently Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien’s son and the protector of his legacy, is pissed off that the film’s been made in the first place. In fact, he’s so pissed off that he’s disowned his own son for helping the filmmakers.

In other news, I was kind of amazed to read my own obituary (scroll down). Thanks, Dezz — impressive and way flattering. (I could have done without the Jewish stereotypes, though; you seem to make a way bigger deal of my being Jewish than I ever do. I didn’t think Judaism was that curious a characteristic.)

In yet other news, tonight I watched this TV tour of Central Park on PBS — the newest installment in the televised walking tours of New York City led by Barry Lewis and David Hartman. Barry Lewis is just a walking encyclopedia of New York City legend and lore. Apparently, their next program is going to be a tour of Newark, which should be cool, since I work there.

That’s all for now. I have a headache.

Big Things

With this entry, I have blogged in every month of the year.

I seem to have fallen behind on updating my life. So let’s see:

Thursday night

Mom and dad, if you’re reading, which I hope you’re not, you might want to skip this.

Anyway:

Thursday night was another Wes night. He greeted me with a smooch and an arm around my waist, which was really sweet. The rest of the evening, in short: pizza, beer, TV, a four-hour porn tape (he’d never seen gay porn before), cuddling, Wes falling asleep as I lay against him, with my arms around him, listening to his heartbeat and feeling his chest rise and fall beneath my head. It was sublime.

Then he woke up, and we hooked up.

Porn should be consumed in small amounts. After four hours (heck, after about 45 minutes) it gets really monotonous to the point of non-arousing: you hear the same old grunts and groans and electronic drumbeats, and out of the corner of your eye, the TV screen is the color of flesh.

After about 45 minutes, porn starts to seem like Enya.

Friday night

Friday night I went down to central New Jersey to hang out with my friend Mack. We had dinner at TGI Friday’s, I got to see his puppy, and in the evening, we went to the Den. The Den is a really old gay bar in Somerset, New Jersey, and it’s sort of like a gay “Cheers.” You wanna go where everybody knows your name and everybody has either hooked up with you or knows someone who has or knows someone who knows someone who has. Well, not in my case, because I hadn’t been there in almost a year, but Mack — he’s gone to the Den almost every Friday night for the past ten years, because Friday night is the night to go, and he knows lots of people there.

There’s something cozy and appealing about that idea. Having a regular Friday night gig to look forward to, a nice way to end the week, going to a gay bar and running into a bunch of people you know. New York bars aren’t very neighborhoody, unless I haven’t found the neighborhoody ones yet. They’re always filled with people I don’t know. Maybe weeknights are different, but I’ve rarely been to a gay bar on a weeknight. If I lived in Manhattan, I’d probably do that, which I will someday.

As for the Den, it’s very tasteful and cleanly appointed. One room has a bar and a pool table and two TVs near the ceiling — that’s the “Cheers” part. The other room is darker, cruisier, with a bar and a dance floor and lots of men standing around by themselves. There rarely seems to be anyone on the dance floor; most people seem to hang out at the bar in the main room.

Saturday

I stayed over at Mack’s on Friday night and came home in the late afternoon. I would up staying home for the rest of the evening and night. I thought I might go out with a friend of mine, but he never called me back, because he was at Date Bait, I think. So I stayed in and watched Derek Jeter host Saturday Night Live. Eh.

Sunday

Today I’ve continued to hang things on the walls of my apartment. I’ve still got a ways to go before the place looks homey. I think I need plants. Plants are good. They’re alive, but you don’t have to walk them.

I went for a walk earlier and found a used book sale at a church a few blocks away. They sell used books every Sunday afternoon: a buck for hardcovers, and fifty cents for paperbacks. I bought a biography of Warren G. Harding, short stories by Francine Prose, a book on colonial America by William Cronon (Changes in the Land), and two novels by Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer and Sabbath’s Theater. Not bad for three bucks.

In the meantime, I’m not even a third of the way through The Power Broker, and I’ve read 360 pages of it.

Random hookups have become tiresome lately. Yet I don’t think I want a boyfriend right now, either. I think I need to find something between the two.

I also need some hobbies. Now that I don’t have to look for a new apartment or a new job, I have all this time to fill. I’m often filled with a restless energy and yet I’m too lazy to do anything with it. That seems paradoxical, but it’s true. Well, not lazy; it’s just that sometimes I don’t see the worth in doing anything with that energy, because I know whatever I do won’t leave me satisfied. Sometimes, envisioning something is less of a hassle than actually going out and doing it, but just as satisfying.

The thing is that I want to do something BIG, and so all the small things seem worthless. I could do the small things if they were just steps toward the bigger thing, but if the small things are ends in themselves, they sometimes don’t seem worthwhile.

But life is a succession of small things. Look at my best friend — he’s drawn, he’s learned to play the guitar, he’s written stories and songs, he’s going off to Antarctica next month. Big things? Maybe not. But still his life seems to satisfy him.

And yet I want to do big things. I want to challenge myself. I want to make something big.

Lately I’ve been attracted by the idea of getting involved in city planning somehow. Maybe it’s this Robert Moses book. But I was also very intrigued by this article about the redesign of Lincoln Center.

Maybe I should become an architect. Or an urban planner. I don’t know.

Or maybe I’ll join a choral group and start singing again. Or do some volunteering. Or work on a short story. Or all of that.

Oh, that reminds me: my novel! Hahahahaha. I was supposed to write 50,000 words in the month of November. I wrote 8,712. So much for that. But at least I tried.

Argh, all these little things. I want to do big things. Several big things.

I want my obituary to be fascinating.

A Night at the Rainbow Room

Wednesday night at the Rainbow Room was pretty great. Around 6:30 at night, I emerged from the subway at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street to see throngs of people packed behind barricades on the other side of the street. I managed to find my mom and my brother on a nearby corner, and we made our way over to the entrance of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. (My dad’s been in Florida for a few days, so he couldn’t make it.) My mom took out her invitation, a guard looked for her name on a list, we all showed our IDs, and we walked through the lobby to the elevator, which whisked us up to the 65th floor at the top of the building.

Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, people I’d never met. My brother and I basically hung out together and made joking remarks about unfamiliar people. That’s always fun. He and I have similar senses of humor. I’ve never written here about how much I love the guy, but I really do.

But the best part of being up there was the view.

The Rainbow Room is divided into a couple of rooms, and unfortunately we weren’t on the side of the building facing Rockefeller Plaza and the Christmas tree, but that was okay.

To the north I could see Central Park. It seemed somehow truncated from this high up. I could even see the big reservoir in the middle of the park. To the north of the park I could see the continuation of Sixth Avenue, brightly lit — it was Lenox Avenue, Harlem’s wide boulevard, another world, a place I’ve never been. Far in the distance was the Triborough Bridge.

To the left of Central Park I could see clusters of tall buildings — the luxury buildings on Central Park West and the apartment towers of the Upper West Side. To the right of the park, the Upper East Side.

I wakled over to the windows facing west. We were on Sixth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, and I could see all the office skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, and then the Hudson River, and then New Jersey beyond that.

But the most impressive view of all — that was to the south. The Empire State Building was 15 blocks directly south of us, huge, soaring into the sky, the top lit up in red, white and blue, as it has been for the last two and a half months. It dominates everything around it.

And then — to the right of it, but far, far away, all the way down in lower Manhattan — an eerie, pale white glow in the distance. No more tall, shiny twin towers piercing the sky; instead, something earthbound and dead and powerless. The crews have been working there around the clock for 11 weeks now, night and day, removing rubble. From parts of downtown Jersey City you can usually see the glow of the fluorescent lights. From lower Manhattan you can see it too, a ghost of what used to be. From this high up, though — especially after having seen this view so many times on the Ric Burns documentary about New York last week — it was sad and strange.

Here we were, all the way at the top of 30 Rock, in the Rainbow Room, enjoying a nice cocktail party. Down below, crowds of people were in the Christmas spirit, watching celebrities perform on a national TV broadcast, and Rudy Giuliani and Laura Bush were probably smiling along with them. New York City was full of manic energy again, people living out their dreams, having a blast, laughing in restaurants and bars, Times Square flashing electrically, Broadway casts performing their shows, taxis zooming across the city.

And far down the island, a sad, pale glow, the men continuing to do their duty, removing huge pieces of hot, twisted metal from an enormous grave, the fire of bodies, computers and cars continuing slowly to burn. It seemed like the quiet, depressed man who sits in the corner of the room as a raucous party goes on, tainting everything around him with his solemnity.

After my mom and the others received their certificates for completing the first part of her program, and after the party ended, my mom decided to take her two sons out to dinner. We got back on the elevator and took it back down to the lobby. It was around 9:15 and the tree-lighting ceremony had just ended.

In the lobby we saw a group of black boys wearing purple blazers — members of the Harlem Boys’ Choir. Their leader was trying to keep them together and get them out of the building and into the crowd without too much chaos.

And as we walked out the main doors ourselves, we noticed two familiar-looking people right behind us — Ana Gasteyer and Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live. They were looking out at the throng with very concerned looks on their faces. We did what you always do when you see a celebrity in New York — you whisper quietly to the people you’re with and you try to glance at the famous people and be all cool about it without them noticing so you won’t bother them. Anyway, right now they didn’t look like they wanted to be bothered.

Sixth Avenue was closed to traffic, but a few seconds later a cop was escorting them across the street. Membership has its privileges.

The three of us made our way up along Sixth Avenue, walking with the crowd, and then everything stopped. A motorcade appeared from the south, speeding north along the avenue. Police motorcycles, a police car, another police car, a black limo, another black limo, two more police cars, a pause. Another police car, a black SUV, another black SUV, another police car, and a couple more motorcycles. I don’t know whether it was the Mayor or the First Lady, but whoever it was, it was pretty cool.

After that was over, we walked over to Gallagher’s, where none of us had ever been, and had a steak dinner. Checkered tablecloths, big men sitting at tables with cigars, black and white photographs on the walls, paintings of horses. Straight out of the 1920s.

We had a nice meal with good conversation. An hour later we walked out onto the street again, and it was time for the three of us to part. It had been ages since my mom had hung out with her two sons alone, and she’d really enjoyed it. She gave me a hug, then she gave my brother a hug, then she gave me another hug, then she gave my brother another hug, and that was that. We all went our separate ways again, off in our different directions.

Just another magical night in New York.