I had a full weekend, for me.  Took the ferry to Salem with The Greek Saturday to see the hair-raising "Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes" exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, and then in keeping with that theme, met my Merchant Marine on Sunday.  The second of these events was slightly more momentous than usual: we finally went for that sushi we've been talking about for the year-and-a-half since he first dropped anchor in my little port of call.

Sushi's funny.  Ordering is almost always a collaborative effort — and always should be.  You know:  they give you one slip of paper with everything on it and a pencil.  It's like one of those awful team-building exercises you do on your corporate retreat.  And it's as revealing as a Myers-Briggs test.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that sushi on a first date will tell you everything you need to know about someone.  Yes, including penis size (which should actually be part of your pre-screening).

I mean, do they grab that little slip and tick off what they want and then bark at you to add what you want, like a little Russian tank I recently went to Blue Fin with?  And then the dinner conversation, which he also insisted to his own detriment on leading, centered on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, if you can imagine — and every time I tried to change the subject from objectivism, he came back with "but you're changing the subject."

To which I replied: "Yes.  Would you like for me to concretize that for you?" 

"But you haven't told me what you think of Roark's relationship with Dominique Francon?" he demanded.

"frankly," I parried, "I don't."  And then thrusted: "Have you ever seen The Incredibles?"

"You're changing the subject again!"

But if he had seen The Incredibles he'd have known I wasn't, at least not all that much.  It's basically an animated Atlas Shrugged.

The Russian had a spry sense of humor and nimble intellect (not to mention he was built like a brick shit house), but his sushi diplomacy was seriously lacking.  When our order came I actually had to ask if we were sharing.  Even without adding Ayn Rand (who I'm sure ate sushi alone), it was off-putting. 

My Marine and I, on the other hand, worked through the sushi list in perfect concert.  He convinced me to try the Boston lobster roll and I convinced him to have a little seaweed salad.  But then, he and I have a very established, very deep rapport.  Plus this was a post-coital meal, so we were both relaxed.  And while I sometimes joked that meeting outside the boudoir could end up a Last Tango scenario, I really had no reason to expect that the sushi would be any different in certain respects than the sex.

It's always better to screw first.  I learned that from the ex.  If we went to dinner before fucking we always fought.  But if we ate afterward, it was smooth sailing.  

My Marine and I went to Snappy Sushi on the square, and had my favorite waiter: a scruffy little redhead with the most adorable minor speech impediment.  Probably all of nineteen years old.  He had been so sweetly attentive — almost affectionate — the last time I was there I was tempted to just grab him and tickle him into complete submission. 

This time was the same.  And for those of you thinking, "well, he's a waiter — he's that way with everyone," first of all: I am aware of that, and secondly, that doesn't mean he's not hitting on me.  He's the one who struck up a non-menu-related conversation, mentioning that he had seen me the other day on the T.  I had seen him too, actually, beaming at me in scruffy sweetness from afar, knew I knew him from somewhere, but had been unable to place him.

We chatted a bit more on our way out.  I had seen him earlier locking his bike up in front of the restaurant.  He was very proud of it – it was vintage and he said it was basically his baby. This might have sounded a little pretentious somehow – given the hipstery neighborhood – but not with that adorable little speech impediment.

"Well, have a nice day," our boy said as we were leaving, headed for our post-prandial nap.  "Maybe we'll meet up in the neighborhood!"

Neighborhood, or... gayborhood?

Of course, that sparked a debate on the way home about what had just transpired, and my first mate could see where I was going with it. 

"You're gonna place a Missed Connections, aren't you?" he said.

"Already did," I answered.  And it's true, I'd popped one out the first time.  You just never know.  Better safe than sorry, I always say.

It's a fact that the trip to Salem with The Greek would never have happened without Missed Connections.  He was a teller at the bank my Foundation uses.  I used to see him a couple times a week, and we would chat and sort of flirt, but I had been hesitant to ask him out for a drink with the other tellers eavesdropping on us, and I'm a little leary of slipping notes under the window at banks.  My penmanship is not the greatest and a minor misunderstanding could lead to federal charges.  So when he switched jobs all the sudden, and disappeared, I saw my chance.

And now we were on a ferry to Salem on our way to see "Trash Menagerie" and turbulent Dutch seascapes from the 1600s together.  Like I said, you just never know.

I try to make a yearly pilgrimage to the Peabody Essex Museum ( I skipped '08, but was there in '06 and '07). I like the museum itself...


....the interactive exhibitions, and, of course, the maritime art.  My love of the dramatic landscape is well-documented, and seascapes take this to a whole nother level.  As the catalog for the Golden Age show says (and I'm paraphrasing here): scenes of carnage on the high seas seem a splendid metaphor for life... 


But even if your life is not quite The Wreck of the Amsterdam, I think there's enough drama here to compel a gander.  Personally, I had been thinking in metaphors all morning.  I'd brought Octavio Paz's Conjunctions and Disjunctions along for the ride, and The Greek and I were trying to make sense of "the ass and the phallus—the volcano and the monsoon" over General Tso's chicken at lunch in Salem center. 

The ass as volcano, The Greek could accept.  "But a monsoon is a storm," he scowled.

More precisely, it's a seasonal prevailing wind that lasts for several months.  And if that sounds like an accurate metaphor for your phallus, you should probably consult a doctor, like those Cialis ads say.

At the PEM the first thing we saw was "Trash Menagerie" — art made from cast-off materials.  Like Ann Smith's Red Squid (2008), made of broken electronics and machine parts, and my personal favorite, for its sheer directness and simplicity, Tom Deininger's Shell (2000), made entirely of discarded fag ends...


The Dutch seascapes were as full of tumult and terror, serpents and storms, the drowned and the saved, as any life, I suppose.  It certainly made the trip back to Boston by Ferry more interesting.

Despite the obvious promise, the Surfland exhibition, consisting of tintype portraits of surfers from San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Montauk, New York, which I'd also been looking forward to, was surprisingly blah.  It's strange.  I'm a big fan of those old anonymous portraits these contemporary tintypes allude to, but the faces here seemed too familiar.  It's probably me.  What's so fascinating for me when I look at an old tintype is how odd ordinary people from another era often look.  Presumably, they possess the same spectrum of emotions we do, and yet the expressions on the faces are just slightly inscrutable.

Which is why two men holding hands in a Victorian tintype intrigues...


...and a contemporary image of essentially the same thing, while appealing for other reasons, doesn't.


Granted, not everyone is as intrigued by the banally inscrutable and the inscrutably banal as I am.  But historians are similarly flummoxed by the meaning of, say, Abraham Lincoln sharing his bed with Joshua Speed for four years.  To some it seems obvious, but if you've studied a little history you can't help but agree that the past is another country.  And while we can't go back in time, you can actually get the same sense of the vast spectrum of meanings in the smallest of gestures simply by traveling abroad. 

Body language changes in subtle ways as significant as language itself.  If we were to go back in time to Elizabethan England, we might be surprised how like a foreign language Elizabethan English sounds to the modern ear, but no less foreign would be the repertoire of postures, gesticulations and facial expressions that complete the meaning.  They would be just familiar enough to us to make their foreignness especially uncanny.

What's deceptive about photographs is, of course, that they seem so straightforward, that we believe them even when we know they lie.  Or rather, don't tell the whole truth, or feel no obligation to explain what obviously needed no explaining at the time. Reading a picture is like reading a poem.  We may understand the words in another context, another form and composition, but here, like this, they make a different kind of sense.  A photograph is, after all is said and done, a metaphor for a moment, and not the moment itself.  

I can't say whether at some point in the distant future when these faces and forms in the tintypes on display at the PEM have fermented a bit,  they will become a little less grape juice, a little more wine.  Only time will tell.

But I found a fantastic collection of tiny 18th-19th century Japanese netsuke in an adjacent gallery that totally made up for any disappointment I may have felt among the surfers...


Netsuke are basically little toggles used to fasten your man-purse to the sash of your pocketless kimono.  "Why not just add pockets to the kimono?" you ask.  Because then it's a bathrobe.  Please.  So obvious.

But seriously, the issue to some extent here is: what makes a thing a thing and when does that thing become another thing entirely? Whatever your answer, if they had just added pockets, we would not have netsuke, and there may not have been anything quite so wonderful in the next gallery over at the PEM to make up for the slightly disappointing surfer show.  

Although I imagine the PEM would have come up with something.  That's what I love about museums — they are full of exquisite curiosities.  What is intriguing is thinking of a world in which these objects — arts and crafts, furnishings and costumes — fit, and into whose everyday life, exactly?  And how did these things complete the language in which they communicated subtler meanings to each other?

So much of who we are gets lost in translation anyway.  And little if any of it will survive us.  Much, much more than we can ever admit without succumbing to despair at our own eventual utter disappearance.  "Men are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious," as Heraclitus said. W.S. Merwin alludes to the Heraclitean riddle in the epigraph to The Lice.  Even Homer himself, the wisest man in Greece, was deceived by boys killing lice.

They said to him, "what we have caught and what we have killed we have left behind, but what has escaped us we bring with us."

It's said that Homer died of grief at not being able to guess the answer to this riddle, which seems a little — oh, I dunno, OCD? — to me.  But it certainly kept me occupied on the ferry back to Boston.  Better than puzzling over the monsoon phallus, or letting all those Dutch shipwrecks get to me, that's for sure.