More things I found in my storage unit yesterday

• Clear salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats that I got as a housewarming gift when I bought my first house in 1993
• A teacup from my grandmother’s Blue Willow china
• Chinese-inspired objets d’art are called chinoiserie
• You’re welcome
• An Army rubber ducky that I got from my friend Mike who's a kick-ass Army veteran
• A plaque I bought at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona with a shimmery sky-blue frame that has never gone with anything in any house I’ve ever owned
• Picasso is tacky and his stupid “art” will never catch on
• Loser
• An authentic finger bowl or flower vase or vomit bucket or who knows what the hell it’s for that I rescued when I survived the Titanic sinking
• Or maybe it’s just a reproduction that I bought at a Titanic exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
• At my age, my memory is shot so its provenance is now lost to the ages
• So shut up
• A French sign about reading on the toilet that I bought at a Euro-charming little shop in Montmartre high above Paris
• A Norwegian kitchen witch that I cross-stitched and framed at Skogfjorden language camp in 1983
• Shut up
• It’s totally not gay
• So shut up
• A stone coaster printed with a vintage Eiffel Tower print
• Though it’s neither real stone nor authentic vintage
• But I like it so shut up

Things I unearthed in this weekend’s storage-unit excavation, from left to right:

* All those random electronics cords that the world has been searching for in our collective, almost desperate random-electronics-cords drought (sorry!)
* A rubber keychain from a Chicago marathon that I will neither ever use nor apparently throw away
* A half-used container of Body Glide that—get your minds out of the gutter—distance runners use to prevent chafing on rubby body parts and that I’ve used only as a very precautious precaution because I’ve never really had chafing issues but I’d rather not discover that I do halfway through a long, sweaty run
* Art magnets for the art-magnet collection I forgot I once started and clearly never spent much time growing
* The knee brace that got me through my first marathon (can you tell I stumbled on a big box of running stuff in my excavation?)
* A crackle-finish ceramic hand that I bought during my Decorating With Fake Body Parts Phase that if I remember correctly also included a phrenology head, a skull and a fully articulated skeleton on a fake-old-timey stand (all of which no doubt await discovery in a future excavation trip to the storage unit)
* Two souvenir Disney luggage tags that currently contain business cards from four addresses ago, but that’s about to be fixed.

I also found an unopened package of razors and a slightly crumpled box of #10 envelopes that seemed a shame to just throw away, but that’s all so unimportant that I won’t even mention them here.

I! AM! GEEKING! OUT!

Grant Wood! The artist! From Cedar Rapids! At the Whitney! In New York! OHMYGOD!

This is such an amazingly comprehensive and brilliantly curated exhibit. Every one of my favorite Grant Wood paintings is here, with the words Cedar Rapids all over the wall descriptions. I talked at length with one of the docents, who knew more about Grant Wood than I do. But I know more about Marvin Cone SO THERE.

Grant Wood was gay. The Whitney says it right when you walk into the exhibit. But Grant Wood's been saying it for decades with every hunky farmer and soldier he's ever drawn or painted. LISTEN, PEOPLE!

Here's my favorite painting OF ALL FUCKING TIME! RIGHT HERE! IN FRONT OF ME! WITH A STUPID GLARE ON THE GLASS! I have written about it extensively RIGHT HERE IN THIS LINK!

Fact! Grant Wood drew vaguely tawdry and vulgar cover art for undeniably tawdry and vulgar books. To wit: Here's a direct blurb quote from Passion Spins the Plot (you may want to sit down for this): "Leaving the wild, brutal land of his childhood, Vridar Hunter enters college with little understanding of women. But there he is led down the forbidden paths of youth. He meets pick-ups and prostitutes, gets drunk, steals, and tortures his body with erotic imaginings of a soul growing from adolescence to manhood. Yet always in Vridar's heart burns the bright dream of Neloa, to whom he has pledged his love. It is not until Vridar returns home that Neloa's own soiled lips shatter his image of a passion as pure as vestal flame." VESTAL FLAMES, PEOPLE!

I probably know this woman's descendants, who no doubt prowl the streets of Cedar Rapids endlessly smirking and judging, smirking and judging:

Cherubic cheeks! Ruddy complexion! Flawless hair! BIG GEOMETRIC COW BUTT! Did I hear someone say Grant Wood was gay? Because, seriously. DOES IT REALLY NEED TO BE SAID?

Grant Wood is my homeboy and I’m so proud that this exhibition is here and people from all over the world are seeing it and talking about it and taking selfies with the paintings—but who does that? gross.—and I couldn’t stop telling complete strangers that I went to Grant Wood Elementary School and I’ve even met Nan Wood Graham who as you should know by know is one of the figures in American Gothic (the left one, I believe) and I AM SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW.

#HowToTurn50 #AndOMGGRANTWOODGRANTWOODGRANTWOOD!

One day until my Big Birthday Broadway Binge Bash!

I'm rounding out my four-day overdose of big-gay-show-tunes theater and Jimmy-Fallon-VIP-seats TV tapings with a three-plus-mile run through the always-surprisingly-hilly Central Park, a visit to the Iowa-homeboy Grant Wood exhibit at the big-city-New-York Whitney Museum and a dance-with-the-pros tap class at the where-the-pros-train Broadway Dance Center.

There's still an entire Friday afternoon to fill, possibly at the Frick, possibly at the Cloisters, possibly trekking along the Highline, possibly traversing the Brooklyn Bridge, possibly visiting the brand-spanking-new Nordstrom men's store ... my Friday is full of delicious possibilities!

#HowToTurn50

Putting the meh in exhibmeht

There’s a tidy little Edward Hopper exhibit at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art featuring pieces on loan from the Whitney Museum in New York in exchange for the Grant Wood pieces lent from the CRMA for the Whitney’s current Grant Wood exhibit. 

The Hopper exhibit here is perfectly OK, but I much prefer the extant architecture from the Carnegie Library that was repurposed into the CRMA with its gloriously geometric Postmodern addition in the 1980s:

#HowToTurn50

Book your Big Birthday Broadway Blowout Billion-Bucks Bash Bonanza—and pack your tap shoes for another bucket-list class at the Broadway Dance Center!

Flashback Friday: Twinsies Edition

This painting hangs one room away from American Gothic in the Art Institute of Chicago. But with me standing next to it, it's hard to tell which painting is which. I can be quite a chameleon that way.

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.

The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art

as seen across Greene Square and through some random wedding party from the rooftop garden terrace of the Cedar Rapids Public Library

Flashback Friday: Art Isn't Easy Edition

Chicago Art Institute. 2011. We may not have been smart enough to stand in decent lighting, but at least I was mart enough to flex when I knew there was a camera pointing at me.

Flashback Friday: Giant Fiberglass Underpants Edition

The plaza outside Tribune Tower in Chicago used to (and maybe still does?) have a rotating display of massively giant sculptures of stuff. One summer it was the figures from American Gothic, which made sense since the painting hangs in the Chicago Art Institute. And in 2011 it was Marilyn Monroe coquettishly letting her white halter dress blow up over a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch, which made sense since that movie had exactly nothing to do with Chicago. The sculpture was artistically unremarkable -- as are most giant sculptures rendered in fiberglass, to be fair -- and its cantilevered billowing skirt ended up serving the unintended but more useful purpose of sheltering lost tourists and people waiting for the 147 bus during sudden rainstorms.

Plus, no matter where you stood within sight of the statue you couldn't avoid seeing Marilyn's GIANT FIBERGLASS UNDERPANTS. Which I, being a paragon of maturity, of course respectfully refrained from photographing and posting on social media or my blog.

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.

Awesomeness beyond American Gothic

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 off-puttingly 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 soon. 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.

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 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!

Who’s your Hoosier?

I am! I am!

I spent the weekend visiting my formerly-of-Chicago friend Bill in his fabulous new Indianapolis home, with its cool architecture and its multiple bathrooms and its endless supply of closet space. (Bill, knowing the depths of my storage envy, showed considerable restraint by not rubbing my face in his ample closets. So to speak.)

Our weekend was packed with the best kinds of fun, much of which involved lounging around chatting. But we also squeezed in two lovely brunches, an expert driving tour of Indianapolis’ fabulous neighborhoods and museums and historical buildings, and a lovely afternoon in the ultra-cool Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The IMA building is an authoritative structure situated in a corner of the sumptuous Oldfields-Lilly House & Gardens. Like much of the newer architecture Bill showed me in Indianapolis, the IMA building has a sense of adventure, achieving its intended purpose with creativity and humor and a little visual experimentation. And the collection inside, while not as exhaustive as the building’s epic scale would suggest, is thoughtfully displayed, with useful information and a logical flow of ideas.

The best part of our tour: The Amy Cutler exhibit in the museum’s Forefront series. Amy (I call her Amy) has defined her own post-feminist genre, commenting on the social and familial experiences of women with a visual vocabulary that’s at once amusing, resigned, earnest and at times unapologetically ridiculous. Her images walk a line between the disturbing grotesqueries of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the oddly pedestrian horrors of Edward Gorey—especially in my favorite of her works, Dinner Party (left column, middle row), which features corseted ladies in gargantuan farthingales fighting each other with antlers made of upturned chairs and strapped-on cutlery.

If you do go to the museum—and you should—take care not to gesture too closely as you point out the carved penises on the wooden chair in the African exhibit. Because you’ll set off an alarm. And a suspicious-looking guard will follow you around and treat you like the penis-obsessed threat to moral decency you are.

One more word to the wise: Don’t go see The Hills Have Eyes just because your friend Bill’s hunky friend Eric wants to see it. Eric will still be attractive if you elect to do something more useful with your time, like organizing your celebrity crushes in the order of who has the prettiest feet.

My bad-movie-dar started beeping the moment Eric suggested it to us, but I was being polite—and for a man who saw all of three movies that got any Oscar nominations this year, I was in no position to pretend I was any kind of cinema authority.

But oh, the pain! With all the production qualities of an early episode of Land of the Lost and the kind of snappy, smart dialogue you’d find in the rough draft of a junior-high book report, The Hills Have Eyes was most definitely NOT alive with the sound of music. In fact, its best feature was its tagline: The lucky ones die first. And it wasn’t even true! Bill and I left soon after the first sleestack mutant desert creature appeared munching on a very unrealistic severed limb, and we learned that the lucky ones leave after losing only an hour of their lives—and get a refund without even a hint of resistance! We figured the road had already been paved for us by armies of equally insulted movie-goers who opted instead to get their money back and head home to watch Dynasty reruns on the Soap Opera Channel. Just like we did. (Maxwell Caulfield … mmm …)

Butt-stupid movies notwithstanding, the vacation was a delight from start to finish, and it ended way too soon. But I did get to enjoy a sunny drive home in the land of 70-mph speed limits. And there were no laughable mutant desert creatures hiding in my tiny closets when I got home.

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.

New York! New York!

First of all, New Yorkers are CUNTS who will steal your taxicabs and then glare at you for not pelting them with offal in retaliation. Cunts, I tell you! Cunts!

Whew! I feel better! Sort of. (Stupid cunts.)

Anyway, I cunt can’t let another moment go by without telling you all about my fabulous New York weekend!

FRIDAY
First of all (oops—I guess I'm already at second of all), our client presentation Friday morning (the whole reason I was in New York) went so well, I just may be promoted to President of the Nick Lachey Fan Club World. Our clients were so thrilled with our work, in fact, that the meeting ended a whole hour early—giving me a whole extra hour to start the vacation part of my vacation.

First stop: my ultra-expensive, ultra-foo-foo hotel, which turned out to be quite lovely indeed—and conveniently located within walking distance of almost everything I had on my itinerary. (Special props go to the bed, which was so amazingly comfortable I had to forcibly remove myself from its heavenly folds when it came time to do things like attend $100+ Broadway shows and poop. It even came with a “pillow menu” (I shit you not) that asked me to choose among pillow options like organic-hull-stuffed, hypo-allergenic and Swedish-space-technology. I opted to go with whatever the default pillow was, because after one test head-lay, I didn’t see any need to mess with perfection.)

My first order of actual tourist business was the Guggenheim, which, quite frankly, sucked. First of all, I walked three miles (in dress shoes designed to make my feet look large-penis huge for fashion, not comfort!) up Madison Avenue trying to hail a cab to take me there, and the only three cabs that were unoccupied were brazenly stolen from me by cunts common New York street cunts. I thought things were turning in my favor, though, when my bloody stump-feet and I finally dragged ourselves across the museum’s swirly toilet-bowl-shaped threshold—having just saved a ton of cab fare—and we learned that there was a surprise 20% discount on admission due to construction in “some” of the display areas. Well, that “some” was more like 90% of the whole frickin’ museum—which seems like a pretty self-serving “discount” to me. (Why do I have no problem using cunt here (eight times so far!) but I find fucking to be somehow vulgar and inappropriate?) Granted, my real interest in this visit was to experience Frank Lloyd Wright’s magnificent spiraling architecture, with the not-very-celebrated Guggenheim art collection coming in a distant second. But part of my interest in the architecture was seeing how it was used to display the art—which was pretty hard to do when every display alcove in the spiral was completely empty. And the art that actually was on display in the three tiny display closets? Yawn.

Fortunately, the disappointment portion of my vacation ended permanently the moment I got flushed out of the giant Guggenheim toilet bowl exited the building. First of all, I immediately found a southbound bus heading almost directly to my next destination. And second of all, New York buses don’t take cash (how stupid is that?), so the driver just motioned me to sit down and quietly enjoy my free ride. (Total transportation tally so far: free walk uptown, free fallen arches, free bus ride downtown!)

And my next destination was totally and completely kick-ass: I hit the new Museum of Modern Art just in time for Target Free Friday Night! (I’m not sure whether or not that means it’s sponsored by Target, but I do know it means anyone can see the whole museum completely free on Friday nights from 4 to 8 pm.) And after touring the new building and the exhibits and the collection, I would have gladly paid even $30 for the experience. Since it was a free night, the place was PACKED—but the new building is designed to accommodate big crowds (except around the wee tiny escalators) and everyone there was in a good mood (because Hey! Free museum!) so the three hours I spent there were thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating. And the art! The collection ranges from rock-star stalwarts like Van Gogh’s The Starry Night to the thoroughly avant-garde (like a row of empty silver buckets labeled “spit,” “urine,” “sweat,” etc.) to things you wouldn’t always think you’d see in an “art” museum—like thoughtful displays of architecture and design and foldable paper chairs and even a helicopter. But the crown jewel of the whole collection (to me, at least) is Picasso’s stunningly large, turn-the-art-world-on-its-ear Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a breathtaking display of shape and form and color and perspective that gave abstraction a radically multifaceted new identity at the dawn of the 20th century. Art rarely gives me literal goosebumps, but Pablo’s (I call him Pablo) slutty, fabulous demoiselles almost took my breath away when I spotted them leering at me (at least I think they were looking in my direction—with Picasso it’s sometimes hard to tell) from their place of honor on the top floor. And after they’d had their way with me, I retired to a charming balcony café overlooking MoMA’s modest sculpture garden, where I capped off my visit with an exceptionally delicious Mediterranean chicken salad and a hypersweet triple-chocolate sorbet concoction. And I was in a very happy place.

But apparently the gods weren’t done doling out the good stuff, for soon afterward I found myself (sitting next to a San Diego college student named Jake, no less) at my first Broadway show of the visit: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which was, in a word, spectacular. I loved the Steve Martin/Michael Caine movie in the ’80s, and this musical retelling of the story only makes it funnier and more spectacular. The leads (John Lithgow! Joanna Gleason! All of them, actually!) were in dazzling form Friday night, and David Yazbek’s music and lyrics are even more cerebral and clever and imagery-laden and pan-genre-ic (I just made that word up!) than they were in The Full Monty. (You have to respect a lyricist who can logically squeeze akimbo into a show before the word count even reaches the double digits.) Best of all, they gave everyone in the audience a FREE cast album on Friday night! Woo-hoo! (Oh, and paging Mr. Sondheim: I have been a loyal fan of your work—particularly Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music—for most of my life. But Mr. Yazbek is giving you a run for your money. A big, promising, equally-devoted-fan-base-career-trajectory run. I’m just sayin’.)

Unfortunately, the visual excitement of my day had started to work its sinister magic on me, and by intermission I started feeling the delightful early warning signs of a migraine: sharp pain over my left eye, slight nausea, the unsettling feeling that I kinda have to poop but maybe not. And I still had one more adventure on my itinerary: drinks with Jere at a nearby establishment purported to be a hot spot for Broadway royalty. Caffeine sometimes helps my migraines, so I chugged a Coke while Jere entertained me with fascinating theater stories and we both kept our eyes peeled for potential celebrity drop-ins. At one point he thought he’d seen Stockard Channing walk by us, but we decided upon further gawking and staring subtle observation that it probably wasn’t she. Then I decided you people following along at home wouldn’t be any wiser if I just pretended the man sitting next to us was Bea Arthur, so I’m proud to report that Bea, Jere and I shared a round of drinks and a couple rousing choruses of “Bosom Buddies” and now Bea and I are Best Friends Forever. But by the time Bea and I had worked our way through the Johnny Mercer songbook, the migraine had sunk its claws deep into my eye sockets, stomach and lower rectum terminal alimentary canal, and I couldn’t pretend any longer that I wasn’t in pain. So I bid Jere goodbye and headed home (in a cab that nobody stole from me!) to bury my head between my default pillows (to block out light and sound), focus on my breathing (to stave off the urge to hurl) and eventually find a way to drift away from the terror.

WHEW! I think that’s enough of my babbling for one post. Stay tuned for Saturday’s adventures, where I discover that my housekeeper has thrown away (or maybe stolen!) my toothbrush holder (a toothbrush holder is not a cab, you cunt!), I attend a Broadway musical that (gasp!) actually kinda bores me and then I regrettably have a total missed connection with Joe.

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!