I SAY I WANT SOME RESOLUTIONS

Here’s last year’s list, amended with variations of CHECK! in front of things I actually accomplished and with updated/new things I have yet to accomplish:

CHECK! I will turn 50 in April (that’s not the actual resolution—it’s just the preamble to the resolution) and to celebrate I will run every race within 100 miles that’s been on my bucket list—plus any other races I discover that sound fun—all summer, culminating in a back-to-back three-day Disney 5K/10K/half marathon in November. [UPDATE: I was sidelined by injuries for two races and I opted not to run the 10K at Disney, but I’m still giving myself full credit for accomplishing all of this. And I can run faster than you if you try to chase me down and explain to me why I didn’t.]

I will finally run the Bix 7 in the Quad Cities this July.

And you should come with me, whether you want to run or cheer or celebrate together at the after-party.

I will continue making the gym and distance running an integral part of my life. Because I’m not getting any younger or less single.

PARTIAL CHECK! I will stop thinking PB&J and Diet Coke are an acceptable dinner.

I will continue enjoying PB&J at all opportunities and I will continue eliminating Diet Coke completely from my diet (14 days and counting!)

MOSTLY CHECK! I will stop launching scorched-earth social-media fights with cousin-curious Trump supporters to the point that I make myself angry every time I open my social media and discover that they still don’t know how to lose and shut up and go away like normal morons.

I will stop losing hours scrolling mindlessly through Facebook and use my newfound free time to pursue something—anything—more productive.

I will keep myself constantly updated on the current slang and the new small talk. And use it only in irony. Because I’m 50. And an adult. I think.

PARTIAL CHECK! I will figure out how to use the universal remote I bought for our TV. [UPDATE: I made multiple attempts last year, and I got it to do everything but change channels via the number keys. PLEASE COME OVER AND HELP IF YOU’RE FLUENT IN TECHNOLOGY.]

I will start (or finish) reading all the books I bought (or received as gifts) in 2018 (or 2017) (or 2016) (or before that).

I will continue to cultivate the wonderful friendships—and keep my distance from drama—that I’ve been abundantly fortunate to have found since I moved home four years ago.

I will quickly learn the names of people I meet, especially when we do shows together. But no promises—I’m mired in a lifetime habit of convincing myself I suck at names and therefore not even trying.

ONGOING CHECK! I will get the hint and cut my losses the first time someone shows me we don’t have much of a friendship and it’s never going to go anywhere.

SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME PICK A COLOR BECAUSE I’M SERIOUSLY PARALYZED WITH INDECISION! I will bury my tinkle-colored bedroom walls in a deep, rich, handsome, masculine, adult color that I have yet to determine.

CHECK! I will nag and complain without shame or reservation until we replace our pinky-beige, mousy-blah, suburban-horror Formica countertops with something that doesn’t make me want to hide under the sink and slowly die of mousy-blah ennui hastened by poisoning from any store-brand Formica cleanser we have stored there.

I will continue to cull and integrate and sell and give away the two-bedroom-apartment contents of my storage unit ASAP so I can eliminate that $200+/month line item from my personal budget.

I will use my newfound storage-unit savings to pay for regular voice lessons [which I started in December!]

I will make practicing the piano a regular part of my weekly schedule to try and regain some of my long-dormant skills.

I will try to get a gig choreographing something smallish somewhere or finagling my way into playing in an orchestra pit somewhere. [YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. CALL ME. LET’S TALK.]

I will more regularly give myself private tap lessons from all the YouTube tap videos I’ve found.

I will stop wasting time winding up the vacuum cleaner cord.

I will scoop the cat box twice a week instead of once.

I will finally visit the local museums I’ve been woefully absent from seeing: The African-American Museum, The Czech and Slovak Library & Museum, The Masonic Library and Museums, and any others I discover.

I will work harder (notice that I’m not giving myself any form of schedules or deadlines here) to post more frequent #ArtThrob essays about my favorite works of art.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will reduce forgetting my bipolar meds from once a month to zeroth a month.

I will avoid the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. And all other parades. Just like always. Because parades are stupid.

A few years ago I made a resolution to say or text or email something nice to somebody—longtime friend or random Internet stranger—every day. The resolution has slowly evolved to also include just texting or emailing a random hello to someone I haven’t talked to in a while and to check in almost daily with people I know are struggling with mental illnesses themselves or in their families. I’m sure I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall it’s become a happy little daily habit that’s kept me in touch or even reconnected with people from every corner of my 50-year (ACK! How did that happen?) life (except for a handful of guys I’ve had longtime crushes on because I’d die inside whether they did or didn’t respond—and, sadly, at 50 years old (did I mention I’m 50?) I’m still kinda scared of guys I have high-school crushes on). Crippling insecurities aside, I’m renewing my daily-compliment/hello/check-in contract for yet another year. And I encourage all of you to consider trying something similar. Because it’s WAY cheaper than flowers. Or therapy. Happy 2019!

#ArtThrob: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. His “September” (2009) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

This sunken sculpture garden is my favorite place—which houses my favorite sculpture—in DC

It's hidden in plain sight on the Mall side of the Hirshhorn, and it provides quiet sanctuary—and welcome shade—on molten, touristy days like today. I'm not really sure what started making this sculpture—Rodin's epic "Burghers of Calais"—so particularly meaningful to me. It’s most likely the piece that finally unlocked the aesthetic, artistic and historical secrets of the broader Modernist movement for me when I took a college art-history class: its raw, muscular composition ... its marriage of Realism (which sought to represent human figures as they are instead of idealizing them) and the last dying gasps of Romanticism (the very emotion-wrought idealization that the Realists were striving to overcome) ... its accessibility from any educational and even physical perspective ... it’s just so many things on so many levels, including my newfound levels of understanding the movement. I should state that this dual Realism/Romanticism classification is solely my interpretation of the genres and the transition between them, but you cannot deny that the oversized figures in this sculpture are muscular and handsome and to a large degree idealized while still being rough-hewn, misshapen and out of proportion.

The figures are six men being led to their death to liberate the French town of Calais in the Hundred Years' War, which adds layers of fascinating historical content onto the reasons I love the work. I find it all at once intimate and epic, unfinished and uneditable, and abstract and representational, the latter of which has always been my preference in art and especially sculpture. So I make a pilgrimage to see it—I even sit in the same shady spot to contemplate it—every time I come to Rehoboth and DC. It's always a beautiful way to rest and rejuvenate and think and remember and see these decades-old friends in relative peace before my vacation ends and I head home.

Iowa stuff, yo

wearborn.com, yo

Happy 127th birthday, Grant Wood!

EMERGENCY EDIT: My bad. His birthday is actually on the 13th. I've apparently had it on my calendar wrong for years. But my hearty birthday wishes still stand.

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around my home town: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its nameless glory right here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in American Gothic.

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the first World War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware:

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting.

My framed print of Daughters of Revolution—along with one of my grandmother's teacups that I've always displayed with it—are currently not challenging me to do anything but pay for their storage in a giant and impeccably tidy storage facility at the edge of town. But they are quite literally among my favorite possessions and they will see the light of day again as soon as I finish painting my bedroom. Correction: As soon as I find them in my vast storage room first. In the mean time, I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing the works here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness.

I say I want some resolutions

I will turn 50 in April (that’s not the actual resolution — it’s just the preamble to the resolution) and to celebrate I will run every race within 100 miles that’s been on my bucket list — plus any other races I discover that sound fun — all summer, culminating in a back-to-back three-day Disney 5K/10K/half marathon in November.

I won’t let up until I get a small group of runner friends to come to Disney World with me.

Plus any of their partners or spouses who want to cheer us on between days of helping us hobble through the parks.

You’ve been warned.

I will stop thinking PB&J and Diet Coke are an acceptable dinner.

I will stop lying to myself about giving up PB&J and Diet Coke for dinner.

I will stop launching scorched-earth Twitter fights with cousin-curious Trump supporters to the point that I make myself angry every time I open my Twitter notifications and discover that they still don’t know how to lose and shut up and go away like normal morons.

I will figure out how to stop my iPhone’s autocorrect from capitalizing Random (see? do you SEE what it’s Doing?) words in the middle of sentences.

I will figure out how to use the universal remote I bought for our TV.

I will use these accomplishments as the final credits I need to finally get my engineering degree.

I will start (or finish) reading all the books I bought (or received as gifts) in 2017 (or 2016) (or before that).

I will get the hint and cut my losses the first time someone shows me we don’t have much of a friendship and it’s never going to go anywhere.

I will bury my tinkle-colored bedroom walls in a deep, rich, handsome, masculine, adult color that I have yet to determine.

I will nag and complain without shame or reservation until we replace our pinky-beige, mousy-blah, suburban-horror Formica countertops with something that doesn’t make me want to hide under the sink and slowly die of mousy-blah ennui hastened by poisoning from any store-brand Formica cleanser we have stored there.

I will continue to cull and integrate and sell and give away the two-bedroom-apartment contents of my storage unit at least to the point that I can downsize to a smaller (cheaper!) storage unit.

I will not use my newfound storage-unit savings to binge on shoes.

Although one man’s “bingeing” is another man’s “stocking up.”

I will stop wasting time winding up the vacuum cleaner cord.

I will work harder (notice that I’m not giving myself any form of schedules or deadlines here) to post more frequent #ArtThrob essays about my favorite works of art.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will finally join a gym. And maybe post some gym selfies once in a while to prove I’m going there.

I will avoid the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. And all other parades. Just like always. Because parades are stupid.

A few years ago I made a resolution to say or at the very least email or text something nice to somebody — longtime friend or random Internet stranger — every day. The resolution has slowly evolved to also include just texting or emailing a random hello to someone I haven’t talked to in a while. I’m sure I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall it’s become a happy little daily habit that’s kept me in touch or even reconnected with people from every corner of my almost 50-year (ACK! How did that happen?) life (except for a handful of guys I’ve had longtime crushes on because I’d die inside whether they did or didn’t respond — and, sadly, at almost 50 years old (did I mention I’m almost 50?) I’m still kinda scared of guys I have high-school crushes on). Crippling insecurities aside, I’m renewing my daily-compliment-hello contract for yet another year. And I encourage all of you to consider trying something similar. Because it’s WAY cheaper than flowers. Or therapy. Happy 2018! :-)

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.

Day 6 of 7

Seven days of black and white photos about me. No people. No explanations.

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.

Grant Wood's Veterans Memorial stained-glass window, Veterans Memorial Building. 11:20 pm.

My summers with Rodin

Washington, D.C., is so overflowing with American history that there's a monument to something or someone on practically every corner. The Smithsonian museums are so overflowing with history and culture and gift shops and art that some of it literally spills outside into the sunshine. And part of my annual summer pilgrimage to visit some D.C. friends and road-trip to their Rehoboth beach house is my visit to the sunken sculpture garden behind the relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum, which houses what most people probably see as the oddest examples of Modern art. 

The sculpture garden sits more than a story below street level so it masks all the ambient street noise, but it positively hums with beauty and magic and some of the most delightful -- and delightfully odd -- art that waits there resolutely to nourish any soul. If you're in D.C. and want to visit my little sanctuary, enter from the Mall side and go immediately to your left -- the corner there is populated with the rough-hewn glories of August Rodin, including what is perhaps my favorite sculpture of all time: his mighty Burghers of Calais, which depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to save their city during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin has sculpted their figures so masterfully that you see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and almost primitive 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. It's everyone's sculpture -- casts of it stand in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands at the entrance of the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building -- and it's my sculpture to admire and fear and share and visit summer after summer, year after year.

Grant Wood, Regionalism and my kitchen wall

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around my home town: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with promoting the leftist politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color.

Fun fact: The model for the central figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in American Gothic.

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the first World War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O off a blue plate? NOT so appetizing.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting.

But I've accepted that challenge. Gladly. And my very own Daughters of Revolution print today occupies the place of honor over my collection of Norwegian family artifacts in my kitchen.

September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb.

His September (2009) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

My weekend in pictures and song

Well, actually there is no song. So I just lied to you. And that's not my only lie. It looks like I'm running with my training group in the picture below. But that's a lie too! You can't trust me! The reality is my car wouldn't start Saturday morning so I had to run a mile and a half to our meeting place and then my shin splints started acting up so I was pre-tired and in pain and I ended up lagging behind my whole group for the whole six miles we ran together, except for this little part of our run where everyone stopped for water in mile 4 and I actually caught up with them long enough to have our picture taken as though I'd been running with them all along. But I hadn't. And they quickly left me in their dust after this photo was taken. So I'm not only a dirty liar, but I'm a dirty slow liar. The worst kind!

But they waited for me at our finish line so I got to pose with everyone as though I weren't a giant mussy. Which could also be a lie, but I did run our full six miles (plus my bonus one and a half miles) so I still get full credit for Saturday's run.

Now we move on to verse two of our not-song about the weekend—the verse where I whore myself down to my underpants for money. But the money isn't for me, so I'm totally somebody else's whore. Or something like that. The whoring happened at an event called The Big Package, which raised money for the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus in a live auction for some pretty impressive packages of goods, services and travel opportunities. Our hostesses for the evening were a glamorous but sturdy trio of ladies with surprisingly resonant voices:

As a whore, I represented one of the packages: the GQ makeover package, which included a Tiffany watch, which I am photographed modeling here with Bill, who is holding a not-untoiletlike porcelain receptacle for lottery tickets:

The idea was that I was a nerd plucked from the audience and stripped one article of clothing at a time while the bids for my impressive package climbed higher and higher. The trouble is, I'm naturally such a fashionplate that the premise was laughably unbelievable. So here I am using my superior acting skills to come off as a nerd while our sturdy hostesses and our auctioneer struggle to contain their awe:

As the bids climbed, the nerd clothes fell to the floor. And the stomach got sucked in tighter than an aging diva's forehead.

And by the time I was down to my noticeably red underpants, my package had grown to epic proportions. It netted $1,300 for the chorus. Woot!

In a side story that I mention here solely for journalistic balance, a straight personal trainer did the same thing to sell his training services for the chorus. But they let him keep his pants on:

We close our non-song with verse three: Sunday Funday with Matthew, Todd and Brad. We started with a lovely (albeit long, as in our-waitress-disappeared-for-a-good-half-an-hour long) brunch at Pierrot Gourmet, the deliciously foo-foo French-ish restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel. Then we sauntered down Michigan Avenue toward the so-new-it's-FREE-this-weekend Modern Wing of the Art Institute, stopping long enough to let the paparazzi photograph us artfully re-creating the freakishly huge American Gothic statue in the Tribune Tower plaza. Note the way Matthew is holding his imaginary pitchfork in the wrong hand. Also note the napping homeless person.

We entered the Modern Wing via the shiny (as in blindingly shiny, as in so blindingly shiny it's actually a shockingly unfortunate design flaw) pedestrian bridge (officially called the Nichols Bridgeway) that connects Millennium Park with the Modern Wing's top-floor restaurant (officially called Terzo Piano) and glass-enclosed terrace (officially called the Bluhm Family Terrace).

Renzo Piano's architecture for the Modern Wing is striking in its combined intricacy and simplicity. The spaces are open and airy, and they neatly strike a balance between defining spaces and accommodating vast quantities of people. Here's the pergola-like roof over the stately, possibly-ideal-for-Jake-and-Justin's-wedding courtyard (officially called Griffin Court) that bisects the two Modern Wing buildings:

I have a new favorite Matisse painting: his 1920 Interior at Nice, which captures a breezy patrician noblesse (the casual chic dècor! the studied ennui! the rich silvery palette!) with a strikingly vertical perspective. And it lives here, in my favorite new Modern Wing of my favorite local Art Institute!

Here I am contemplating a large Joan Miró painting of Terrence with a horse. Or maybe it's Phillip. I always get those two confused.

I didn't realize this dress was between me and the camera when Matthew took my picture. But it sure gives me a nice bust. And broad shoulders. And a freakishly tiny head.

Motif! After we left the Modern Wing, we ventured into the Art Institute proper to visit some of our favorite paintings, including my old friends from American Gothic. We weren't sure if we were allowed to take pictures of the painting, so we snapped this one without spending a lot of time finessing our balance or composition. But we were able to crop the napping homeless person out of the picture. And Matthew got his imaginary pitchfork in the correct hand.

We finished our day with some disappointingly greasy and expectedly overpriced food at Terzo Piano (the restaurant at the top of the Nichols Bridgeway, for those of you who aren't keeping track). But we figured we were paying for the atmosphere. And the view. And the beautiful Chicago afternoon with friends.

Actually, we finished our day at Angels & Demons, which I freaking LOVED. So I just lied to you again. But we took no pictures, so there is no real proof we were there, lusting after select members of the Swiss Guard. So you'll have to take my word for it. Unless I've given you any reason to think I'm a liar.

How to turn 40: Step 3

Wake up in a fabulous New York hotel all snuggled up next to your fabulous fiancé and realize that, while the fiancé is still pretty fabulous, the hotel is just nicer than OK. First of all, the pillows on the bed barely qualify as usable. You get a choice between a microwave-sized throw pillow with all the squishiness and comfort you'd find in a blister pack of store-brand lunch meat or an actual pillow that feels like little more than a threadbare pillowcase stuffed with balled-up socks. Then you get in the shower and discover the shower head is one of those water-saving aeration thingies that give you all the water pressure of a mouse sneeze.

On the other hand, you get a lobby dominated by these rather spectacular paintings:


On Day Two of our spectacular Broadway birthday blowout, we brunched at the gay-fabulous 44xX with my high-school friend Chris and his delightful husband Ricky, who, as a gay Asian male of a certain age, is of course taking hip-hop classes at the Broadway Dance Center. After brunch, he took us on a tour of the center, and I've already made plans to bring my tap shoes on our next Broadway blowout trip so I can say I've taken a tap class at a real Broadway studio.

But our day was just starting! Unfortunately our Day Three is just starting too, and I have to get some pants on (yes, I blog in my underwear) so we can meet David and Joe for brunch. And when I get back, I have much more to report about our fabulous Broadway birthday blowout!

How to turn 40: Step 2

Actually, let's go back to Step 1 for a second. Before you do anything, make sure you clarify to anyone who stumbles on your blog that your birthday is a whole week away. MAKE SURE THEY UNDERSTAND YOU ARE STILL 39. FOR A VERY LONG TIME. You're just celebrating a week early in NYC with your fiancé.

That said, it's safe to move on to Step 2, where you get on your plane to find out you've been bumped from the aisle exit row seats you'd booked and relocated to the back corner window seats near the bathroom. Which is a problem because you're more than six feet tall and YOU'RE ALMOST 40 SO YOU HAVE TO PEE MORE OFTEN.

Other than that, make your way to New York City with no issues and get checked into the fabulous Millennium Hotel and head to the Museum of Modern Art for Target Free Friday Night. We got there pretty early, so this the extent of the line we had to stand in:
The line soon quadrupled in length behind us, so we were in a good spot. But once we were in the museum, we resolved to never do a free night at a museum again. Because poor people come on free nights and they just get in your way. Dear poor people who are too cheap to cough up twelve lousy bucks to get into a museum: Get a job, you hippie bums! We're trying to look at art, not the backs of your heads!

The crowds got to us pretty fast, but we did manage to stop and ogle the naked ladies in one of my favorite modern paintings, Picasso's vibrant Les Demoiselles d'Avignon:
(Take note: The only boobs you'll probably ever see on my blog are the kind that only barely look like boobs. So enjoy these while you can.) After we elbowed our way through the crowds and the art, we sat down at a little sculpture garden-facing table in the MoMA cafe and enjoyed a fabulous prix fixe dinner. Then we trotted our gay little selves a few blocks over for the first of our five birthday (NEXT WEEK! NOT THIS WEEK! NOTHING TO SEE HERE, FOLKS!) Broadway shows: Young Frankenstein! Our verdict: It's pretty stupid, but lots of fun. The sets and costumes are spectacular, the jokes are predictable, most of the songs are great, Sutton Foster is grossly underutilized in a dippy role, Megan Mullally is fabulous (though she's still playing Karen Walker, just with better wigs), Andrea Martin and Christopher Fitzgerald should win every award they're eligible for—and be knighted!—as Frau Blucher and Igor, and Roger Bart's understudy looks like he's been playing Frederick Frankenstein all his life. So far, you can call us happy, satisfied theatregoers.

Now I'm off to bed. Because I'm old. BUT NOT 40! YET! And my little fake heart attack still makes me really tired at night. And tomorrow's a big day: brunch with my friend Chris from high school, August: Osage County (a sorbet to cleanse our palates between musicals), dinner with Hugo (who it's safe to say has probably abandoned his blog altogether), Xanadu, post-show drinks with my friend Sonelius, and then who knows where the night will take us. (Probably bed. See the previous sentence about being old and tired.) Night!

Snapshots from Iowa

Getting Wood
My folks and I spent a glorious couple hours exploring Grant Wood at 5 Turner Alley at the always impressive Cedar Rapids Museum of Art on Thursday. This retrospective of works by American Gothic painter and Cedar Rapids native son Grant Wood is (I believe) the first ever collection of so much of his oeuvre in one place at one time. A Cedar Rapids native son myself, I grew up steeped in knowledge and lore about Grant Wood, I attended the grade school named after him and the junior high school where he taught art, I met his sister (who is immortalized in American Gothic (she's the one on the left)) before she died, and I've even been collecting prints of my favorite Grant Wood paintings over the years. And I added to my collection this weekend -- to the tune of almost $200 (including SWEET custom framing).

Not getting wood
My sister and her husband still don't have a headboard on their bed, so we all stopped by a furniture shop this afternoon to browse through some options. My sister found a nice wooden one she really liked, but my brother-in-law told her he "did not want to get wood in (our) bedroom."

Finishing my Christmas shopping
(At least for my parents.) I bought my mom a Grant Wood print and paid to have it framed this weekend. I was still behind on what to get my dad for his October birthday -- much less Christmas -- when their 20+-year-old garbage disposal crashed last night. So I bought them a new one and helped install it today. Which earned me tons of cash back on my credit card, tons of macho points on my gay card and a bad case of frightfully slimy dishpan hands.

The Princess Party
Hot on the heels of being más macho que su mama, I attended my niece's princess party at a local gymnastics emporium. (You know: because princesses use balance beams. And stuff.) The best part: Lots of cake and ice cream. The worst part: LOTS of pink. And screaming children (albeit screaming-because-of-exuberant-happiness children, but screaming children nonetheless).

Pretty, Pretty Princess
This is the name of a game. A game my niece got for her birthday. A game we all played when we got home from the princess party. A game that involves moving a little jewel-toned game piece around a board and slowly donning a matching necklace, bracelet, earrings, ring and even a tiara. A game my niece miraculously won! On her birthday! Leaving her hapless uncle wearing only one earring and his necklace.

What a pretty, pretty loser.

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!

My favorite painting

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around my home town: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists’ Weltanschauung was less concerned with promoting the leftist politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created was a masterpiece of technique, form and color, but it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the first World War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O off a blue plate? NOT so appetizing.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting.

But I accepted that challenge. Gladly. And my very own Daughters of Revolution print occupies the place of honor over my great-grandfather’s hand-built bookshelf in my dining room.

(HA! I see your Weltanschauung and raise you one oeuvre AND one hegemony.)

Culture Vulture

FRIDAY NIGHT
Bob and I saw a bizarre little play at a bizarre little theatre. Bertolt Brecht's Puntila and his Man Matti is—and I'm just guessing here—an absurdist look at class divisions and the plight of laborers in 1930s Finland. Or it's an absurdist look at the fluidity of social stratifications in the presence of alcohol in 1930s Finland. Or it's an absurdist story about a wealthy alcoholic landowner, his wily but long-suffering chauffeur and the impending marriage of his never-satisfied daughter in 1930s Finland. Or it's just absurd. In any case, after getting over my initial discomfort at the prospect of watching a loud actor play a loud drunk for two hours, I enjoyed the play—at least to the extent I was able to understand it. My favorite part was the ending—and not just because it was the ending, but because the entire cast came out with half-filled beer bottles, began blowing over the openings and created a gorgeous calliope accompaniment to the closing song.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON
Bob and I continued our weekend of culture at the Art Institute with a viewing of Unbuilt Chicago, an exhibit of architectural models and drawings of Chicago buildings that never made it from the page to the real world. Some of the proposed buildings were spectacular—many of them disappointingly so in comparison to photos of the buildings that currently stand in their place today. The exhibit isn't very big, though, so while we were there we also visited some of our favorite pieces from the museum's permanent collection:
• A Sunday on la Grande Jatte, a favorite of mine if not for the brilliant Sondheim musical it inspired then for its simple defiance against artistic conventions that sent modern art even further down the path of exploration.
• Paris Street; Rainy Day, a sumptuous visual feast of energy, mathematics, perspective, atmosphere and social observation.
• American Gothic, Grant Wood's wryly humorous, oft-parodied homage to enduring Midwestern virtues. I'm especially drawn to Grant Wood's paintings because he lived and worked most of his life in and around my home town. He even taught art at the high school that eventually became my junior high school. I also have a print of his brilliantly satirical Daughters of Revolution hanging in my dining room.

SATURDAY NIGHT
I sang with about 20 chorus members live on WGN radio to promote our holiday show. WGN broadcasts from a sidewalk-level booth (scroll down to see it) in the magnificent Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. Passers-by often stand at the windows and gawk in at the broadcasts—and since we were clearly and repeatedly identified as the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus, we were essentially specimens of homosexuality in a glass display box. So we spent most of our time in the studio demonstrating various group-sex configurations.

SUNDAY
I'm choreographing the abovementioned show, and I'm pleased to report that as of today's rehearsal, all the choreography is taught. It's far from audience-ready, but at least it's all taught. WHEW.