Apollonian...Dionysian...Ninjaliscious...

The ME that can be named is not the Eternal ME. But I’ll admit this much: I’m a helluva character. Earthy. Sublime. (Often at the same time.) Smarty. Pantsy. Not TOO terribly crazy. Employed. Neither an old man nor a kid. Single. Free of funky diseases. Patriotic, but not a flag waver. Bearish. Pygophiliastic. Mildly logorrheic. (To say the least!) I live for interesting experiences. I went to Egypt as a tourist and inspired a Revolution. Opera chokes me up. Zombie movies fill me with glee. My footrubs are legendary. I give GREAT conversation. I’ve loved and lost and I’d rather love. Yes, I can be a wicked one behind closed doors – and there are whole erotic continents I’d love to explore with the right woman – but take me home to where you grew up and your mom'll think I'm just the sweetest boy in the world. I'm not generic nor do I aspire to be. I've been compared to Rabelais and declared an honorary Jew. Give me twenty years and I'll be the Emperor of America. Or a total crank. Or dead.

Living in beauty.

Don’t know about you but I’m certainly not expecting 72 virgins in heaven. This is all we have, this Earth, and we only have a little time on it - it seems to me that we might as well see as much of what’s in the world as we can and take as much pleasure from it as possible. And by “pleasure” I don’t just mean gross carnality, although that is CERTAINLY a part of it. (“If the body were not the soul what is the soul?”) I mean despite the terrorists and the Republicans there are still good things in this world – sex, and love, and art, and sport and food and drink, and liberty, and democracy and all kinds of wonderful things. Why can’t we live for and in them? At least as an ideal? Sure, we all have our quotidian and depressed days, our days when we have to worry about money or work or some such nonsense, and not every day is the adventure it should be and, yes, we've lived through years of war, collapse, and teabaggery, but even so can’t we still aspire to beauty and grace in all their forms? Life, perhaps, can't be ALL dirty fucking and discussions of the Dhammapada but it would be shameful if it were only busywork, sitcoms, and lite beer. Maybe this is all debased existentialism, third-rate Epicureanism but the alternatives seem unspeakably bleak. Me, I might die bankrupt, possibly heartbroken, certainly horribly embarrassed, but I hope that at that last extreme I'll be comforted with the thought that while I could I lived.

Oh, and I work in a lib'ary.

Bullshitting.

People don't usually notice me first. I notice them.

BOOKS - In a very real sense books are my life. I earn my daily crust in a library after all. So I take them seriously.

I spent much of a recent year slogging through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. For pleasure. Seriously. Don't judge, yo. You should date me just for that.

True story: During the height of Pottermania, facing a long train trip into the wilds of the North, I figured I'd see what all the fuss was about. I went to Barnes and Noble to pick up the first book. Never got it, though. Nope, ended up with Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics instead. Make of this what you will. (I did end up doing all seven in one summer-long Harry orgy, the year the last book came out. Mostly so I could get with a girl, yes, but I did appreciated them. I just wish Harry had killed Voldemort and TAKEN HIS PLACE. But that's just me.)

Speaking of juvenile fantasy literature: recently, finally, at long last, I finally finished Atlas Shrugged and I feel like a great mass of tobacco infused feces was deposited in my brain. I think I need to read Marx for a year just to get the taste out of my mouth. Oh, and this followed a reading of The Fountainhead which was only good in comparison to "Atlas." I try to have few absolute dealbreakers, but Randbaggery (I just made up that word - cool, huh?) is certainly one of them. Who is John Galt? Fuck you, that's who.

A while back I found myself in Iceland reading the Völsung Saga. Life is funny that way, no? When I returned I moved on to the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson and parts of the Poetic Edda, as well as some of the sagas of the Viking arrival in the New World. I had a bit of an obsession for a while with one Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir. She was fierce. I find that when I go places I end up reading their books. So Nelson Algren in Chicago, the Satyricon of Petronius in Rome. I got a little overambitious in Egypt and brought along the entire Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz; my days were full in that amazing land and I think I got up to page six.

Of course, probably the best book I've read about a place is The Power Broker and I didn't even have to get on a plane. What an amazingly great book. Robert Caro is near the top of my personal list for the Nobel Prize. If you live in New York and you haven't read it, what the hell's wrong with you?

Some books that have made impressions on me in this century: A Rebours, Midnight's Children, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with Our Families, Blindness, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and Jarhead (which made me want to go out, join the Marines, fight in bars, whore it up, drink much too much, shoot high powered rifles, and just basically act like a dangerous motherfucker.)

The All-Time List has to include: the Bible, the Koran, most of Shakespeare, The Epic of Gilgamish, The Iliad, Moby-Dick, Oedipus at Colonus, The Bacchae, Up in the Old Hotel, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Soccer War, Madison's Notes on the Federal Convention of 1787, Winesburg, Ohio, and Ultimate Porno: The Making of a Sex Colossal, the true story of the making of the film Caligula and, by a long way, the funniest book in the history of language.

All this being said, I do often deprecate reading. When I'm around the young people, especially, I advise them that they should avoid books and watch TV since books just give them ideas, rots their brains, and shrinks their ovaries (those possessed of ovaries). I mentioned much the same thing to the president of a major American university. Am I serious? Who knows. But it's clear that I'm a very bad influence.

MOVIES -
Lawrence of Arabia
Olympia
The Tree of Life
My Dinner with Andre
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Last Night
A Clockwork Orange
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
The Empire Strikes Back
Bull Durham
RoboCop
High Noon
Badlands
Starship Troopers
Gimme Shelter
Destroy All Monsters!
Wings of Desire
Hannah and Her Sisters
Borat!
Prospero's Books
Unforgiven
Godzilla
2001: A Space Odyssey
Man with the Movie Camera
Seven
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Easy Rider
In the Realm of the Senses
The Blair Witch Project
The Nights of Caberia
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
Citizen Kane
Taxi Driver
Radio Days
West Side Story
Apocalypse Now
Meet the Feebles
The Seven Samurai
Annie Hall
Gone with the Wind
Pulp Fiction
Raging Bull
Showgirls
Heavenly Creatures
The Right Stuff
The Apostle
Zorba the Greek
Birth
Gabbeh
Irreversible
The Graduate
The Great Escape
Dr Strangelove
Night of the Living Dead
Nashville
The Silence of the Lambs
Singin' in the Rain
National Velvet
Blue Velvet
Casablanca
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes
All About Eve
Intolerance
Andrei Rublev
The Wizard of Oz
Night of the Hunter
Shortbus
Barry Lyndon
The Godfather
The Godfather, Part II
Vertigo
The Congress of Penguins
Angels in America
Dodes'ka-den
Airplane!
A Moment of Innocence
Behind the Green Door
The Singing Detective
Manhattan
Goodfellas
United 93
M*A*S*H
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Caligula
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Bridge on the River Kwai
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
Sanctuary of Love: The Mission of Salvatore Verdirome
A Streetcar Named Desire
Kandahar
Y Tu Mama Tambien
The Wicker Man
The French Connection
Something Wild
Salesman
The 400 Blows
Crime and Misdemeanors
A Christmas Story
I Spit on Your Grave

And that's just off the top of my head. I could easily have listed a couple of hundred more and there are plenty of omissions that gnaw at my conscience. I like movies.

I've seen my latest addition to this list, The Tree of Life ten times in the theatre. Seriously. No joke. It got to me. Even the way pretentious bits wrecked my whole face. I'm pretty sure that's more than I've ever seen anything in the theatre. And I recently got the DVD (though it really should be seen big). If you haven't seen it, wanna see it?

MUSIC - I listen to everything from shape notes to twelve tone rows, Mozart to Mingus, the Missa Solemnis to murder ballads. "Surfin' Bird" used to be my theme song, the Grateful Dead was the soundtrack of my childhood, I got punked by Throbbing Gristle and loved it (Genesis used to be a neighbor), and was thrilled to find squawky avant-garde music in my neighborhood. But it’s opera that really gets me going, especially the music dramas of the wonderful-horrible Richard Wagner, in particular Der Ring des Nibelungen, the only work of art that’s ever gotten my hairy ass on an airplane.

FOOD - I like food, sure, but I'm not really a foodie and anything prepared with skill and love and without raisins is good by me. Which doesn't mean that I'm not adventurous: I've eaten wasps, puffin, reindeer, stuffed pigeon, and putrified shark. One year my Thanksgiving dinner consisted of whale and horse (yes, I'm going to hell) followed by numerous shots of very strong, very green liquor.

You know, I spent two weeks in the driest country in the world and I couldn't drink the local water. Or touch it. Probably shouldn't even have looked at it. I can't tell you how grateful I was, when I got home, to be able to take a long drink at a public fountain. Makes you think about privilege.

Anyway, the material world is an illusion.

That said, I currently have roughly 1900 items on my Amazon Wish List. Feel free to ply me with commodities. Here are some other things I adore (and if I go over six you can chastise me later): Schvitzing at the Russian and Turkish Baths, sneaking into movies, theatre, museums, galleries, (the whole cultural package, really - 'cept ballet), the first 274 words of the Declaration of Independence, callipygian women, baseball in general, my beloved Red Sox in particular (with the Mets on the side), long, happy, languid, barely clothed Sunday mornings with that special someone, and, especially, this magnificent, doomed, prepocalyptic cosmopolis of ours, the New Rome, the New Jerusalem - I ♥ NEW YORK.

I'm all over the place.

BASEBALL - Although perhaps I should say I “contemplate” it, the way a mystic might contemplate the depths of Kabbalah or some other form of profoundly esoteric arcana. Three strikes, three outs, nine innings, ninety feet to first, four balls, four bases, boundaries which are a little portion of infinity, constant grinding failure, sudden exhilarating success, utter timelessness – it’s a satisfyingly mysterious game, a subtle and sublime game, a beautiful game (you can keep your “soccer”), a game of both cursing and poetry. Oh, and it also happens to be a lot of fun, listening to the game on the radio or heading out to the ballpark, drinking overpriced premium beer, and cheering on your favorite Nine. It’s one of America's great contributions to world culture – right up there with jazz, abstract expressionism, constitutionalism, film, and.... whatever other good stuff we've done. Life is a metaphor for baseball.

RELIGION - That rat bastard Jehovah left his only begotten son nailed up on a cross back in the day and has been doing the same damn thing to the rest of us for 2000 years. If he's not dead yet it's our duty to kill him. Let's be honest, he's a problem: from keeping our gay friends from getting hitched (in many of the less glorious states of our glorious Union, anyway) to telling fanatics to fly airplanes into our buildings, he's scary and dangerous and creates monsters as often as he does saints. (And I've known at least one saint and if I were a praying man I'd be asking him for favors in heaven.) His followers just might end up killing me; there's plenty of precident. And, since I'm not inclined to play a part in some idiot theist's eschatological drama, frankly, that pisses me off. Or to put it another way and to quote my friend the Iraqi expatriate Communist artist professor security guard: "I do not believe in God. And if he exists, I am AGAINST him. And I will tell him so. To his FACE." (That said, there's a lot of truth in what the Buddha and Jesus said. If I were to be a monotheist I'd be a Muslim.)

SEX - I mean, is there REALLY a more interesting subject in the whole world? Is there a time when we're more vulnerable, more defenseless, more human, more ourselves? A friend of mine once described her experiences at a sex club to me thus: 'It's such a primal scene, like being born or dying, and it's usually so private; it was a real privilege to witness.' Is it any wonder that it's my every third thought?

THE MIGHTY, MIGHTY UNION- I've been active in mine for a while and helped negotiate our most recent collective bargaining agreement. Which was like being beaten with rubber hoses for weeks on end. But it's a fairly good contract, all things considered. Workplace justice, yo. That's where it's at.

BIKING - I've done quite a bit of it the last few years, at least during the warmer months. I had an okay bike but I recently got a really nice one, a jump on it and ride around the world kind of deal. Urban biking, mostly, though last summer I did a fairly epic one day ride of almost 140 miles out to the south fork of Long Island) and I think next summer I'm going to try to do RAGBRAI. But mostly I'm a five borough dude and I go all over, even Staten freakin' Island (*BLETCH*). If there's a better way of getting to know the city I love than riding around it, taking a few pictures, sometimes crashing into it at moderate speed (I'm astonished I'm still alive), then I don't know it.

PROJECTS - Taking pictures. Putting up silly little videos on YouTube. Working on a podcast about opera but with lots of cuss words. Trying to be creative.

RICHARD WAGNER - God help me, I'm addicted. It would probably be cheaper, certainly less pretentious, to just develop a nice little drug dependency instead. Hey, true story: I've become slightly acquainted with a world famous Wagner soprano who's hugged and kissed me at the Met stage door a couple of times. Because I'm damn charming at 140 characters or less.

POLITICS - Alas, it's necessary to think about in these teabagging times. I had thought, like so many of us did, that we had made a moral break with the past when we elected Obama. But bad ideas and general assholery die hard, I guess. Christ, it's not even necessary to love one another; simple decency would be enough. As I mentioned before, I kind of was responsible for the Arab Spring. We need a little of that here, dontchya think?

MY DECADENT LIFESTYLE - Going to the opera, going to ballgames, going to the movies, riding my bike, taking pictures, having sex occasionally, getting on an airplane every now and then to see some other part of the world; isn't it all so very overconsumptive and self indulgent and 1%ish when there's war, poverty, and starvation in the world? Isn't that why they hate us? Shouldn't I be up against the wall when the Revolution comes? And how am I going to keep on paying for all this shit?

THE REVOLUTION - Soon may it come.

Smiting evil. Or eating pizza and drinking wine. Or trying to find a date to a kinky sex orgy. (Are there VANILLA sex orgies?)

What am I NOT willing to admit? I am something of an exhibitionist after all.

Okay, how 'bout this: I'm terrified that I'll be forgotten ten minutes after I die.

You're a cuddly Valkyrie? Or the Eternal Feminine which draws us up On High? A saint in the bedroom and a whore in the kitchen? Callipygian? Kinky? Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttiresque? An Isolde to my Tristan (minus the deathwish)? A Salome to my Jochanaan (minus the fanaticism and murder)? A Heloise to my Abelard (minus the religion and castration)? A sensual and voluptuous Hypatia of the Oystershells (minus the oyster shells)?

I don’t know who you are, exactly, but I have a few ideas about what you’re like: the world isn’t lost on you, you’re engaged with it, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. You're sweet. You're someone with whom I can share the things that I love and who shares the things that you love. You're willing to take a solemn vow to never leave me to wake up naked in a tub of icewater, minus my liver. (That's very important.) It’s entirely possible that you’re possessed of some yummy Calatrava curves in the right places. It’s also quite likely that you’re not entirely vanilla. You’re probably obsessed with something odd and unlikely – maybe you sing shaped notes, or are a metrophile, or are well versed in Kabbalah or Sabrmetrics. I doubt very much that you’re a Republican. Now, I used to joke that all I wanted in a woman was a willingness to sit through the entire Ring des Nibelungen – 17 hours (over four days) of beautiful but admittedly proto-fascistic music – and then go skinnydipping with me afterwards. But then I realized that it wasn't REALLY a joke. So if that's you, you ought to write to me right away. And if you're completely wonderful in some way I haven't even thought of you should write to me right away. Whoever you are, ideally, I want you all: your brain, your heart, your ass. Is that too much to ask for? Well, call me greedy. Because if we connect, really connect, there's lots of love here for you to bask in. And I’ll sing to you in languages I don't even know.

(Hey, I know this is a long profile. If you made it all the way down here the magic word is SHAZAM. Mention it and I'll be really impressed.)