3 days till #Hallowmeme!

One corner of the bedroom is DONE! Maybe.

1. When you coincidentally buy pieces of décor that look like they were made to go exactly together, it is pre-ordained by a mountain of cruel, angry gods that THEY WILL NEVER LINE UP.
2. If you buy something with patterned cutouts laid over mirror, get used to living with clouds of oily smudges or learn to decorate for distraction.
3. When you discover the evidence of a lifetime predilection for buying Francophile wall hangings and Eiffel Tower objets d’art, group them proudly and enjoy them over les casse-croûte of French toast and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
4. Yes, that is Prince Albert in a can.

Or I shall marry the Prince of Whales

Must ... not ... picture ... his ... droopy ... dry ... bosoms ...

When you FINALLY put away the Christmas decorations in your bedroom and bring out your regular decorations and rediscover that you’re a bit of a Francophile

Also: Covet my freshly polished, super-awesome bookshelf built from remnant wood by my homebuilder great-grandfather!

Also: My beanbag juggling cows have started yet another year (decade?) being shelf decorations instead of teaching me how to juggle.

ArtThrob: The Burghers of Calais

(Original French title: Les Bourgeois de Calais)

1889

Auguste Rodin

Impressionism (1872-1892)

The relatively short-lived period of Impressionism in art was as defined by what it wasn't -- clear lines, plausible composition, realistic depictions of figures and the space they occupied -- as by what it was: impressions of visual perception told through explorations of changing light and color and even through the rough-hewn textures created in paint using varying brush strokes. A radical departure from the longstanding -- though always evolving -- rigors of academic Realism, the fresh ideas of Impressionism on canvas quickly inspired similar reinterpretations of artistic norms in music, literature and sculpture.

Enter François-Auguste-René Rodin.

Classically trained and well-established in creating representational art, Rodin saw Impressionism's dreamy figure studies and craggy, dimensional textures as a vocabulary he could use to render bold ideas, subjective emotions, and plays of shape and light in sculpture. His raw, turbulent works brought new, profound depth to the revolutionary cacophonies that had so far been constricted to the flat canvases of Impressionistic paintings, and his most riveting use of this complex, muscular multi-dimensional language is in his mighty Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to liberate the French town of Calais during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin sculpted the figures with such a masterful mix of romantic realism and primitive rawness that you can see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and arguably unfinished in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions.

French law decrees that no more than twelve original casts may be made of any work by Rodin, which means The Burghers of Calais tells its weighty story in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands resolutely at the entrance to the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building.

I make a point to see my reproduction of the work every summer on my annual pilgrimage to visit friends in Washington, D.C. It stands with other Rodin masterpieces in a relatively austere corner of the sunken sculpture garden behind the Smithsonian's relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum. I usually stop there on my way to the airport at the end of each visit. I walk around the sculpture a few times to take note of specific details Rodin included -- like articulated toes to help propel the walking figures through space -- and specific details he didn't include -- like eyeballs to help the figures see where they're going. Then I sit in my same spot on a little concrete ledge to take in the piece in its weighty enormousness, to contemplate the explosive change Rodin and the Impressionists brought to the way we see and understand and interpret art, and to take comfort in the fact that my Burghers will most likely stand caught in their time and this place, waiting for me year after year every time I come to visit them for as long as I live.

ArtThrob: Paris Street; Rainy Day

(Original French title: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie)

1877
Gustave Caillebotte
Impressionism (1872-1892)
Art Institute of Chicago

While technically created in the heart of the Impressionist period -- which trafficked in explorations of light and color and brushstroke techniques at the expense of clear representation and plausible perspective -- Paris Street; Rainy Day reigns in Impressionism's visual indulgences with cleaner lines, realistic human figures, and vanishing-point perspective that extends almost mathematically from the rectangular cobblestones in the foreground to the ambitiously double confluences of angles at the distant ends of the forked street. To enhance the effect, Gustave Caillebotte paints the figures in gradient levels of focus, creating a photorealistic contrast between the three figures enjoying relative visual clarity in the middle distance, the three (well, two and a half) figures who are too close to stay in complete focus at the front of the painting, and the increasingly-less-defined human shapes receding into the misty distance.

While providing a convenient context for allowing distant figures to fade to gray -- along with filling the setting with shimmers of Impressionistic light and reflection -- the misty weather in the painting also allows for the curvy shapes of umbrellas and hunched people to provide visual counterpoint to the geometries of the streets and buildings ... plus it gives the figures a range of purposeful movement, whether they're casually dodging raindrops or hurrying to get somewhere dry. The overall effect is a graceful collaboration of shape, energy, atmosphere, physical presence and measured social observation.

Paris Street; Rainy Day greets visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago at the top of the Grand Staircase as they enter the permanent-collection Impressionism galleries. Its rainy ambiance may seem dour, but the choreography of human figures and the multi-directional spatial composition are an apt invitation to explore the museum, intermingle with the other patrons and contemplate even the things that aren't immediately in focus.

Black. On Halloween. Groundbreaking.

But I’m on Day Two of using my new SPF 30 anti-blemish French moisturizer that promises to reduce the appearance (but apparently not the existence) of fine lines and wrinkles. Do I look like a pale Millennial who knows how to pronounce Châteauneuf-du-Pape yet?

Today's moment of pure, ridiculous joy: Kristin Chenoweth sings "Veronique"

You want to know what brings me pure ridiculous joy on the stage, in my car and dans le rue? THIS does. This gorgeous, inspired, culturally literate, perfect little theatrical montage of brilliantly silly ridiculousness from Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman's brilliantly silly -- and just plain brilliant -- musical On the Twentieth Century.

From the virtuosic coloratura runs to the not-having-sexual innuendo of "she close the door/and start the Franco-Prussian War," this piece is The. Perfect. (Non. Sondheim.) Showtune.

And I may or may not have listened to it on repeat for two hours last night as I folded a towering mountain of laundry.

Watch and listen. Because it WILL be on the test.

Oh, hi! It's Jake.

You probably don't recognize me behind this body mic. I'm also wearing a false mustache (which I just tried to spell as moustache but spellcheck zapped me with the Cattle Prod of Shame, though this is all beside the point) so you may perceive an imperceptible difference in the way I look.

Anyway, I have something to announce that I've been keeping a highly disciplined secret for a couple months now: I'm in a show! And we just tonight completed our penultimate rehearsal, which means we have our final (or "ultimate" as they say in places where they use the word "ultimate") rehearsal tomorrow night ... and then we open our mere four-show run on Thursday. And here's a fun-for-the-whole-family idea: You should come see it! I'd tell you it's about an English woman pretending to be a Polish man pretending to be a French woman but you and I both know that's ridiculous. So here's the insider scoop: It's really about a gay French waiter who works on the side as a gay French choreographer and eventually works his way up the corporate ladder to don a false mustache and become a secretly gay Chicago mobster. The show is called Jake/Jake/Jake and you can find showtime and ticketing info here: Jake/Jake/Jake!

Victor/Victoria Wandelprobe!

Since this show takes place in Paris I'm pretty sure Wandelprobe is French for OHMYGODIFORGOTMYLINES! But apparently tonight it's actually just the first marriage of orchestra, singing, blocking, choreography, tech and I guess lines if we can remember them. We are freed from the earthly shackles of sets, props and costumes, though we are encouraged to wear some sort of clothing out of propriety. And since we're doing the show in a half-round arena, our pretty freaking fabulous orchestra is wired for sound and hidden in a nearby room ... behind this super-secret door. Where there is sometimes pizza. Which I'm pretty sure is also French for OHMYGODFREEPIZZA. I'm becoming quite the international man of culture in this show.

Zut alors!

If he's importing cars from France, then his rallying cry of American JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! must be a bunch of merde.

Don't you hate when you wake up on a Monday morning and you still have the crappy, embarrassing president?

I bet Freedom Fries is being misspelled on the new White House menus as we speak

Let's hear it for the Rainbow Tour!

Wow. OK, this post is gonna be long. But I was in Europe for TEN FREAKIN’ DAYS, so quit your whining and get reading I have a lot to tell you. I’ve peppered this post with links to fabulous pictures and other enriching supplemental click-throughs, so you should be entertained until the bitter end. And if you can’t wait to see all the dark, grainy pictures my cheap camera took, you can just go here and check them out all at once.

Otherwise, I humbly present you The Rainbow Tour (now in low-carb digestible chunks!):

We’ll start at the very beginning, with …

AIR FRANCE
Aside from our early problems with lost luggage (which were more than compensated for with prompt, free found-luggage delivery and a well-stocked lost luggage kit that even included a condom), I really have no complaints about Air Chance France. The food they served was pretty good, the crew was attentive, our flights arrived more or less on time—and even though our seats were a little on the cramped side, they included individual entertainment centers that offered movies, TV reruns (including old episodes of “MacGyver”), music (including “An American in Paris”—GET IT?) and that spellbinding display of GPS ingenuity that uses cartoon maps and a little cartoon plane to show you exactly where you are, how high you’re flying, what you’re about to crash into flying over and even when you should expect to arrive at your destination.

OUR HOTELS
Our Madrid hotel was filled with fabulous basement catacombs (and free access to the Internets!), Barbie Dream Showers and curious, inescapable peek-a-boo displays of roommate toilet activities. Our Paris hotel was waaaaay less high-tech (and waaaaay less fastidiously clean), but it provided plenty of room for all my fabulous new shoes, and it could not have been more conveniently located for gay tourists who like easy access to shopping, pastries, charming little out-of-the-way restaurants, gay people, museums, walks along the Siene, piña coladas and walks in the rain.

AND SPEAKING OF PINA COLADAS …
You know how I never drink? Well, that kind of … um … changed in Madrid. You see, my friends ordered a pitcher of sangría at our first dinner … and I’d never had sangria … and I’m never opposed to just tasting alcohol (you know, just to see what I’m missing out on) … and it was kind of tasty … and before you could say Jake’s dancing around with his underwear on his head! I’d had a full glass of sangria every night with dinner—along with a shot of some syrupy apricot-and-cinnamon schnapps thing my last night (which I sipped like the dainty little princess I am)—for three nights in a row.

Go on. You know you want to. Just let it out. Let that giant YAWN out over my sangria story. “Woo-hoo,” I can hear you say. “Jake had a glass of alcohol with dinner. Alert the media!”

Well, I AM the media—at least as far as your eyeballs are concerned at the moment—and it IS news. I had more to drink during my three nights in Madrid than I’ve had collectively in the almost 37 years I’ve minced walked this earth. And while I’m not about to do anything crazy like order a beer or something the next time I walk into a bar (crazy!), I actually kind of liked my sangría. I didn’t feel like the alcohol did anything to make me slur my speech or tell my friends how much I loved—LOVED!—them, but it did apparently make my face quite red.

Some people drink and get laid. I drink and turn into an Oompa-Loompa. Sexy!

THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
The TVs in our hotel rooms—when they weren’t bringing us dubbed reruns of “Charlie’s Angels” and “CSI” (which in France is called “Les Experts”)—kept our brains fed with a steady diet of CNN and BBC world news. (Note to Not My President Bush: The international media report every word you say and everything you claim to think as though you know what you’re talking about. Please make sure that you do.) And to our horror, these otherwise rational, relatively reasonable news sources that brought us political and economic information from around the world focused their American coverage on … the Michael Jackson trial. In all seriousness.

I am SO embarrassed that we have a kid-diddling circus freak as the sole noseless face of America in the international media. Seriously. I could just die. (See the reference to red-faceness above.)

FRENCH MEN
Before I move on to touristy things, let me just get this out in the open: I have a new fetish. Move over, muscular blonds with meaty butts and thick, rubbery lips—I’m now in love with wiry little Frenchmen with their tiny waists and angular faces and dark complexions and deep brown eyes. But damn do French men jam my expertly calibrated gaydar. Every single man in that country looks queer, from his manicure to his fastidiously trendy wardrobe to his impossible-to-resist-grabbing ass.

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, it’s on to the touristy stuff:

THE EIFFEL TOWER
What magic! What charm! The Eiffel Tower is just as fabulous as I’d imagined—though I’d actually pictured it being a little taller. We went up once during the day on Wednesday (apparently missing Rod Stewart’s third marriage proposal by mere hours) and then again on Thursday night, where we were treated to hookers! hookers! hookers! tacky kitten souvenirs gorgeous views of the city and the on-the-hour sparkling light effects that literally make everyone in the city gasp and applaud and reach for their cameras.

VERSAILLES
For some reason I’ve never been that interested in Versailles—though I’m a huge sucker for over-the-top architecture and vulgar displays of grandeur. Versailles delivers all of that and more—even managing to fuse my twin fascinations with rococo excess and wig-wearing human heads in a fabulous way I’d never even imagined. I was surprised to discover that large parts of Versailles (and, actually, there really are no small parts of Versailles) are in a state of formidable disrepair, though there is a lot of repair work underway. The famed Hall of Mirrors is currently undergoing a thorough rehab; we could see only about a third of it through the construction.

I even got in a bit of trouble at Versailles. See, there was this huge statue of Napoleon (who I’ve always thought was kind of hot) so I jumped in front of him and asked Matt to take my picture. But then I noticed that from where I was standing, you could pretend to look up his robe as though you were admiring his massive marble member. So I reached up and did just that. And just as Matt snapped a picture, The Angry French Lady of Death appeared in a cloud of smoke and started chewing me a new delicious chocolatey profiterole asshole. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble for touching the statue, disrespecting the patron saint of French military might history or actually using soap in a European country, but I was definitely embarrassed for being caught doing tacky American tourist things.

NOTRE DAME
Again, not as big as I’d expected—but just oozing (literally!) with soaring Gothic charm. We climbed the claustrophobic little winding stone staircase to the top (I had to climb carefully because if I turn around and around too fast I might accidentally turn into Wonder Woman), where we were treated to spectacular views of the city and up-close-and-personal encounters with the church’s famed gargoyles. But since it was gray and overcast and COLD (it was pretty much like that the entire time we were in Europe) our rapidly shriveling nuts didn’t let us stay too long.

THE LOUVRE
I know this is sacrilege—and maybe it’s just because I was well beyond the stage of cultural overwhelmitude by the time I got there—but I found the Louvre to be kinda boring. (And this is coming from a man who habitually spends entire days in art museums in every major city he visits.) The building itself is GORGEOUS, but the sheer volume of art it contains is so overwhelming it’s almost nauseating. (Kinda like that time in fifth grade when I chewed five whole packs of grape Bubblicious in one afternoon—to this day I can’t even stand the smell of the stuff.)

I’m also not a huge fan of the genres that dominate the permanent collection. There’s an awful lot of dark Dutch paintings (Rembrandts are like Eros lube—a little bit goes a long way) and waaaaaay too much rah-rah Northern European stuff (there are acres of canvas dedicated to long-dead French royalty—who are similarly enshrined in virtually every other museum you visit in Paris—while there isn’t a single work by an American painter … at least not that I saw, and I traversed the entire museum last Friday). I do, however, have a fascination with heroic statuary and virtually anything Medieval, both of which are available by the ton (literally!) at the Louvre. Which was also part of the problem: While I stood in silent reverence in front of the first 400 marble statues that I saw of Greek gods clad in delicately veined muscles and draping robes, I found myself all but sprinting past the next 400 of them, trying desperately to spare them the fate of the doomed grape Bubblicious.

I also wasn’t a fan of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid the first time I saw it—and I’m usually the first to jump on the grand-old-architecture-meets-funky-new-architecture juxtaposition bandwagon (wasn’t that a Beatles album?). But it grew on me immensely about the fourth time I walked through the courtyard. And once I entered the pyramid and discovered its role in making the museum so accessible I became a huge fan.

One of the reasons I was in the courtyard (and not in the building itself) so many times was because of …

THE STRIKE
I’m already not a fan of unions, and on Thursday when all the collective museum staffs of Paris staged a massive strike, my carefully planned vacation was torn asunder. I am the almighty tourist! You must bow to my whims and show me your national treasures and sell me overpriced trinkets on MY schedule, you selfish museum staffery! Actually, when we found out later that one of the reasons for the strike was to oppose a proposition to extend the grueling French workweek from 35 hours to 40, we did become arrogant, unsympathetic American tourists. But since there was nothing we could do, we turned to Plan B. And my personal Plan B was …

MONTMARTRE
There’s this obscure little tavern in the Monmartre district in northern Paris called the Lapin Agile where poets and writers and artists have met and exchanged ideas for over a century. There’s even a brilliant little play by Steve Martin about a hypothetical meeting between Picasso and Einstein at the Lapin Agile right before they burst into the worldwide consciousness. I’ve always wanted to visit this tavern, but it was pretty low on my priority list—until the museum strike moved it instantly to the top on Thursday.

The Lapin Agile kind of hard to find, and my wandering journey accidentally took me through Montmartre’s pretty revolting sex district, where trannie hookers—who had a preternatural ability to sniff out my Americanness as I walked by—literally HOUNDED me on the sidewalk. I quickly learned that if I pretended like I spoke only Spanish, they were pretty powerless to bug me with their pidgin English and their manly features and their tarty little outfits. Lo siento, Guapa. No te entiendo.

THE OLYMPICS
Both Madrid and Paris are vying to host the 2012 Olympics, but Paris wins by a kilomegamelometer mile in the self-promotion event. There’s a massive Parisian campaign on subway walls, candy wrappers and even entire sides of beautiful old buildings to create buzz and influence location judges. The logo in this picture adorns the magnificent Hotel de Ville, which was just a few blocks from our hotel. It also appears on a couple other buildings we couldn’t identify and even the Eiffel Tower itself. And it’s totally freakin’ cool—Eurocool, even!

OUR FINAL NIGHT IN PARIS
The four of us had enjoyed dinners all week at a range of charming little restaurants within blocks of our hotel (including one called Pain Vin Fromage, which served a lot of bread, wine and cheese in a spectacular catacomb-like basement), and we decided to mourn celebrate our last night together with warm cups of chocolat at a neighborhood pub. And when the bill came and we were forced to spend vast sums of Euros for tiny little cups of melted chocolate, we knew it was time to head home.

The next morning, I arrived at the airport with exactly 11 Euros in my pocket. And I was able to cobble together a meal in one of the snack shops for exactly 10.95 Euros. Best of all, after I finished my snack, I found a Unicef donation bin to throw my last .05 Euro in. And, after curing the hunger in my tummy AND in the world at large, I boarded the plane satisfied that I’d used my powers only for good on this trip. Except for that little Napoleon incident. And all the trashy souvenirs I bought.

Anyway, I’m home. And this post is more than FIVE freakin’ pages in Microsoft Word. So I’ll stop typing and let you get back to work.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other vastly important stuff I wanted to include here. So stay tuned for the next chapter, which will NOT be this long. Promise.

I´m purring like a kitian

´cause I saw me some Titian!

(God, that was bad. But I´m caught in a weird mix of cultural overstimulation and jet lag, so I refuse to apologize.)

This morning we toured the unparalleled Museo Nacional del Prado, where I also saw me some amazing Reubens, Raphael, Cranach, Velásquez, El Greco, Bosch (bless the earthly delights of his twisted little imagination) and -- best of all -- my boy Goya. It´s hard to describe how much I love Goya´s work -- especially in person. His Saturn Devouring his Son is as disturbing as I´d hoped, though it´s a lot smaller than I´d pictured it -- and it´s displayed kind of absent-mindedly in a corner of a room filled with larger, less stirring works.

(Note to self: Get the Prado curatorial staff replaced with people who display paintings MY way.) I also love his starkly honest portraits of what must have been the down-the-line ugly Spanish royal family. The next time I´m feeling like I´m having a bad nose day, I´ll just remember the Ichabod Cranes that populate Goya´s royal portraits and I´ll give myself an instant, massive jolt of self-esteem. (Of course, the ugly royal family could overcompensate for its shortcomings with wealth and power and a specatular palace. All I have going for me is a closet full of shoes and a couple lipo scars. But the shoes are FABULOUS, and I´m currently not dead, so I guess I win. At least for now.)

The second item on our tourist agenda today was supposed to be a train ride to the Medieval fortress town of Toledo, but after we´d walked all the way to the train station, we discovered that the Sunday trains to Toledo are rather scarce -- and that we´d already missed the last one. ¡Que lástima!

So we thought we´d do a little shopping instead, but the whole city shuts down on the Sabbath (I think I might have even seen a Catholic church somewhere when we were exploring the city yesterday), so instead we had ourselves a late lunch, and now my traveling companions are enjoying a brief siesta while I blog a bit and then head up to join them.

I have to say, there´s something profoundly satisfying about visiting another country, immersing yourself in its culture and having enough command of its language to find yourself able function there independently. My Spanish has taken me effortlessly through stores and restaurants and maps and street signs and advertising -- and it´s even gotten me a few compliments from the natives! -- though the explanatory documents posted next to the works in the Prado were definitely out of my league. In any case, I feel such a sense of belonging here, and I just know I´ll be back often.

On a more alarming note: The mullet is back in full force here in Europe. The fashionistas are covered in mullet, and it even adorns hoi polloi heads here more often than one would care to acknowledge. And though it´s never really left America -- at least not in the populations that don´t appreciate irony -- it´s doomed to return with a vengeance on more educated heads in the near future. You heard it here first. So don´t say you haven´t been warned.

We leave for Paris tomorrow (Monday) around noon, so we´re enjoying our last few hours in our kick-ass Madrid hotel. Here´s a link to it if you want to check out its high-tech-meets-old-world-charm glory. The brick-arched basement catacombs are perhaps my favorite part of the building (after the orgasmically glorious showers, of course), and I´ve been writing my posts from a free computer down here all week. It´s SUCH a cool space.

Off to my siesta. ¡Hasta luego!