what to make of Rome, this time

It was so different. Last time I went as a bright-eyed student of the classics, never having seen Antiquities in situ, and this time I'm past archaeology, though I went to dig at Aidone for a blissful day- after the archaeological novice's sleepless night on a mattress laid on the floor on Via Roma in Aidone. I could and did awake in a sweatbath, where sweat was one of the fluids marking the whole trip, at 5:50am with the rest of them and filed into the room late to meet the reputed harpy who directs the thing at this point. Macchi Bell- "con Macchi Bell, tutto bell'" has retired since I took his class in the spring of 2005 and stays at home building the study from which his studies kept him.

This time it was the experience of space, running up and rushing against a final day when Byron took his class and I went with him to Esposizionale Universale Roma, where the Expo of 1942 was to be held and wasn't. Now in this moment we have that it's a cruising park, and so under the shadow of colossal statues, youths holding back their horses under what we took to calling the Square Colosseum. He took us through the spaces where L'eclisse was filmed. Through this peregrination we saw that Antonioni followed these chases through neighborhoods, around real corners and down real hills, following a real neighborhood in what we take today, we who don't keep a film neighborhood together so well past walls (but inside walls we do: see The Human Centipede) as an impossibility or an invention. Here: this shot, from lying on one's back. I have yet, but will watch these. Grazie mille for the DVD shops of Shanghai.

I had more colorful adventures worthy of a Svidrigailov or a Perez Hilton, but I won't tell you about them here. In Sicily I painted a mural. I have figured that I figure a life or a portion thereof by the stories I can tell of it, but only in private, after-dinner company.

再回去罗马

and the rest of Italy, just when I'm getting started writing about China. I need a break; yesterday was strolling down Bai Se Lu with my hands in the air (as a triumphal arch) shouting, "I'm leaving China!" I guess it's been long enough.

Preface: 一時

Since last I raised the pink lantern I've moved to Shanghai, loafing around this city more and more in line with (I wanted to say Whitman but must resign myself to) H.D. Thoreau, who decried fripperies of all types when a simple shirt, holes or no holes, will do you, and measuring myself in detached contrast. All these are others and I've banked enough waves of changed mood about Shanghai to know better than to make generalizations. I can't speak about the China that Shanghai tries to beat away with hukou regulations and a sweet, humid cuisine. Even this is a polite generalization, but you and I are having a conversation and my condition- being a foreigner in China- gives any two foreigners something to talk about. If my words stab at truth, I feel I've missed the vein; there's been talk about relaxing hukou regulations for some time and off in dreamy Pudong, on one of the seventy-story billboards viewed from across the river while strolling on the Bund, between drifting shots of Expo pavilions I saw a dictum from Premier Uncle Wen exhorting us to cherish the peasantry- and for us, too, if that's what it means that it came translated to English.

今天晚上，在地铁3号线从中山公园到上海南站. I'm still wearing rags, a very old t-shirt light enough for swimming through this air, and shorts I pulled from the end of my armoire and pulled on, smelling like a year of moths. Shanghainese youths come and go, talking of Michelangelo; or, at least, we have the yellow fog rubbing against and licking the windowpanes on elevated Line 3, pushing so cinematically past 上海南站, passing away from South Station alighted on the rail lines and then banking a turn around the southern lip of Xujiahui, past the Lipstick Towers at 港汇广场 and on north to Zhongshan Park. These first clothe themselves in laughter and purple shirts, black pants, mostly black for the guys, but if the girls are on the metro they're not wearing their summer dresses- these will take taxis, and in the next post I intend to return to taxis. They'll laugh and curl around poles like cats flirting for his or her attention whose hand he or she will be holding striding through the door. I don't mean this sexist; the boys curl too. 女士 over there used to be one of them and holds her form as Pearl Cream holds the skin tight. I thought of an easy dichotomy and chucked it. 先生 stands staid; my Chinese friends tell me Shanghainese men are pussywhipped, and 先生 opens the gates for me to scrutinize all the inconspicuous individuals on this train, and stands there pleased in his pressed shirt and suit pants. The other night I ate in a little restaurant on Changle Lu and along with me, prowls of salarymen. Peasants sit upright in the seats they've seized in Baoshan or Songjiang or somewhere else at the telomeres of 上海地铁3号线, and already I've said too much.

Hitotoki is a moment and I can't stick to it. I tried at the last HAL Groupthink to justify it as "people-time," 人時, but Japan won't countenance such an interpretation and authenticity was pulled from under my feet, leaving me cold on the table. It's 一時, the twelfth part of a day, or else a simple moment whose explication is the only way I can see of explaining this city. But Shanghai rolls like a bitch in heat to show you its signs, and you do with them what you will.

All up ons / swansong time

I guess that assumes I'm a swan, but swans are nasty birds. When I was a gardener in Upperville for a summer or two, when at least I remember things being greener and requiring less paperwork, we had a mated pair of male swans who would, as avocation and exercise both, chase us and the geese and the children. One or the other of these fags would pivot its big stupid wings up into Delorean mode, wrap itself in its lilywhite feather boa and power down upon your person. The swans' dubious sexuality's all on hearsay, since I never attempted to sex them nor do I know how you go about doing that. A bird has a cloaca, I think, which is a word that means sewer in Latin. I think their names were Gary and Gary and they had matching haircuts (a jheri curl each)


LAST DAY OF WORK is May 11 for me, and a few days after that I pack up and leave Charlottesville and Reichstag and so forth behind for good, so far as I know. In a rather corporate vein, I'm thinking of tics and habits better left here; Baton Rouge is a daunting catholic concept since I feel pretty finely-tuned to Charlottesville by now, and Charlottesville will shake your hand with cold-fish Protestant apprehension, that of a world-weary burgher

CVL DANCE SUNDAY

Somewhere during the run of the last three or so jumpy years the Kids all congressed and decided that dancing was ideal and more fundamentally, fun; in light of sarcasm's dramatic loss of value- so great a loss that bitter people everywhere were to be found panhandling in the street, and spitting- the Kids decided that earnestness would best secure their cred and not-quite-deo-gratia keep them riding high and dirty atop a (frankly) feudal hierarchy. Also smiling is nice, said They;

ok 'feudal' is a little much and a little bitter. I've got a month left and that's a little bitter too, and there's nothing to lose in these little narratives to explain the mysterious explosion in public unrestrained revolutionary bouts of hoooooooo LARGE LOVE. Dance parties cost a lot. Perhaps it's philanthropy, in the same strained way as I can only justify spending my days as a florist by casting it as an exercise in sculpture.

evening in

should consider it more often & I'd claim it kept me sane, that Lord ordained a day of rest too and however abstractly I find that most suspect him/her/it to have a greater share of the answers on lockdown than most or all individuals-but I have a suspicion if anything I'm too sane for my own good. Today for once I feel a little too big for my britches; to cycle on through further frames of the metaphor kaleidoscope, maybe I feel like a proud whitehead, really proud and about to lose it. This is frankly odd for the climate of the past months. So tomorrow I'm off and resting; perfect; things fall into place;

this is new to me that the urge to write comes from happiness. Before I think I filled seven or eight Moleskines mostly with two things, both forgettable, that I was sad and here's why, or that I was smitten and here's how. Often I'm smitten but now it's better to speak about it, and I'm hardly ever sad. Here's to it; that's all I can say I guess, and why the yellow press doesn't thrive on public-interest material; happiness has me delving into further and ever more delightful absurdities and comparisons and suspensions of logic; like for instance, hasn't this all fallen into place by means of something like a transfigured and infernal game of Tetris, playing in a giant cybernetic frame on some fell hill?

this one came up earlier: GENERALLY SPEAKING, moustaches were de rigueur among homos in the late 70's and early 80's, a decade of salad days, plump with Arcadian barebacking (Starbucking), hopeful hitchhiking and other made-to-order porn scenarios. Then HIV begins slaying my people in the 1980's. Maybe it takes until 1992 for the full-feathered mustache- which is in itself a preposterous suspension of the natural rules to facial hair- to fade from porn and likewise from favor; now your average individual in the mainstream gaybar strives to convince you he's seventeen. No time for reasons; what I wanted to say: clearly, AIDS rendered the moustache a joke


A life lived considering these fallacies is a life well-spent, you could probably convince me otherwise but don't

HALFTIME

The only casualty of the party was the kitchen table (a rickety piece of shit) and when we were all through we ferried it out the door and pitched it down behind the stairs into the bamboo patch where the train gang would cook and pass out when it was warmer out. That's not entirely true, other things were broken and mangled, but

For a few hours everyone danced in my room, have it here with light and then properly dim as a den of sin, or of common elation. In any case they fogged up the windows; the police came by and shined a mag-lite at me by way of ordering persons off the porch roof

I mean,

NOBODY IS READING THIS and why would you if I haven't even said anything in a month and a half,

let alone the idea of it being worth reading

(while we're on this subject: I was getting pretty into wearing that eyeliner the other night)

but, to answer a seriously inconsequential remorse, many things were going wrong & it was all we could do to field all those questions. I should say for Tristan and Sam to field all those questions and fuck around with wires and couplings. I got no truck with that,

but also, think about it next time before you go barging in (for instance) to bear-hug the unassuming DJ from behind. If only next time I could set it up in a glass box suspended above the whole jam. And thank everyone for dancing like that. You know if you were there. Here's my set, if you're interested:

1. Mavenalli Project : 4Tune5
2. Edwin Starr : War (King Britt Extended mix)
3. Chicks on Speed feat. Peaches : We Don't Play Guitars (Chicken Lips Play Dub version)
4. Summerland : Soulmate (Restless Soul Peaktime Vocal mix)
5. CSS : Let's Make Love and Listen To Death From Above (album version)
6. Hot Chip : Over and Over (Solid Groove remix)
7. Armand van Helden : Hear My Name (Serge Santiago remix)
8. Fort Knox : The Big Score (Dropped Mix: Ursula 1000 vs. Dr. Luke)
9. Cassius feat. Ghostface Killah : Thrilla (A Bass Day remix)
10. Mario Piu : Communication (More mix)
11. Lil' Louis : New Dance Beat (D'extended edit)
12. P'taah : The Oldest Story (Swag Version dub)
13. The Valentinos : Kafka! (Bag Raiders How'd Ya Like It At Five remix)
14. Master H : Thirteen
15. Groove Armada : If Everybody Looked The Same (DJ Icey's Arctic mix)
16. Cassius : The Sound of Violence (Reggae Rock mix)
17. The Whip : Trash
18. Andrea Doria : Bucci Bag (Peter Rauhofer Reconstruction mix)
19. Martin Solveig : Heartbeat
20. Jahkey B feat. Satta : Heartattack (Peter Rauhofer's Particular remix)
21. Michael Jackson : Wanna Be Starting Something
22. PCP Project : Two Time Boy (JD Harris mix)
23. Greg Gaultier & Tony L : Alright (Cheers Dub mix)

mostly oldies (I'm drawing on an inherited cache of records) but goodies. Thanks and good morning