The day was not exactly productive. It's good that I have no work to do, because I have no desire for work. I suppose I have no desire because I have no work. Anyway, much of the day was passed shopping and fantasizing. The first, and really only, accomplishment of the day was to buy shoe strings for my sneakers. The current strings won't last another week. (I've been saying that for weeks now.) I then bought a book on Windows security—a book I have no desire to read and a subject in which I have even less interest. Nevertheless, there is good reason to invest a few bucks in the book, if only for a long shot. Never mind this cryptic reference. I also bought another volume of the Rorem diary (the last volume, dating through 1999), and some CDs. I spent part of the day researching how one can buy an apartment in Paris. There are services which find apartments for foreigners (mostly English-speaking people), manage the renting of them, etc. It's an option, one I'll likely not seriously pursue, but an option which will occupy far too much of my inner fantasy life.

Somewhere today I read a blurb that mentioned something being "out of sink." No. "Out of synch," people. Please.

Tonight I saw the premier of a short movie made in Rochester. A few friends had roles in the movie, and it was fun just to see them act and sing on screen. The quality of the movie was remarkably good, that is, the camera work, lighting, music, editing, etc. The performances were also good. It could hold its own with nearly any short film I've seen at the gay and lesbian film festival here. Its shortcoming was really its faulty "scaffolding," as Rorem likes to speak of structure in a composition. Well, actually the problem was not so much its structure as it was something equally fundamental—the basic story line was convoluted, and more importantly, dull. The story was hung upon silly Greek mythological references, in, I suppose, a bit of needless pretension. Mixed in was a good dose of clichéd gender-bending farce and several musical numbers, in an inevitably failed attempt to be all gay things to all gays... in 45 minutes. A romping gay time, it was not. It was not bad. It's just that I watched how much effort and talent were brought to bear on what was a fundamentally flawed idea, and it seemed a waste. If the story had been good, perhaps a simple little meaningless story, without attempts at more, the excellent directing, music, editing, etc. could have made this a wonderful little film. It made me wonder how the same thing happens on a much larger scale in Hollywood. So often millions of dollars are spent making a movie when the basic story and script are crap. How does that happen? In this case the script was not bad, or rather the spoken words weren't bad—the story was. Too bad. Keep it simple. It's so hard to do.

Add to my to-do list: Take 5 minutes to write a synopsis of a story that might make a good short film. Don't think about it; just write it.

After the movie I went out for coffee with Gerry and Brian. We had a good time. I always have lots of fun talking with them at coffee shops, talking about people, meeting the people Gerry knows. I could sit talking with them for hours. So much fun.

I haven't any ideas worthy of the time I might spend writing them out, nor of the time spent reading them. So I'll invoke the thoughts of others.

This was funny, I thought. Rorem gives his estimates of "homoerotics in the male sex." Among composers in the '40s, 75% he believes are gay (and three of the top four). Surely he counts himself among the top four. Composers of the '60s: 50%. Pianists, about 50%. Organists: 90% (due to their "sissified Protestant background, though in France it's otherwise"). Harpsichordists: 95%. Violinists, no more than 10%. (This is surely grossly underestimated.) Orchestra players, 99% heterosexual. Also underestimated. Harpists—fewer than you think. Abstract expressionists of yesterday: almost none. Pop artists of today: almost all. (Here he surely means Warhol, spoken of several times throughout this section of the diary. Rorem seems to think more of him than I do.) Rorem speaks of having a wet dream in September of 1966. It seems unusual. I can't remember when I last had a wet dream. Decades ago. I think to have a wet dream as a mature (and aging) man, you have to have no ejaculations for weeks and weeks. By then the semen has a lumpy yellow consistency suggestive of tapioca pudding. It's not the sort of thing to celebrate, in my mind.

I read this passage of Proust yesterday. I thought it notable simply because he rarely casts his characters as so categorically unlikable. It's funny.
Prince d'Agrigente's name "had always appeared to me like a transparent sheet of coloured glass through which I beheld, struck by the slanting rays of a golden sun, on the shore of the violet sea, the pink marble cubes of an ancient city of which I had not the least doubt that the Prince—who happened by some brief miracle to be passing through Paris—was himself, as luminously Sicilian and as gloriously weathered, the absolute sovereign. Alas, the vulgar drone to whom I was introduced, and who wheeled round to bid me good evening with a ponderous nonchalance which he considered elegant, was as independent of his name as of a work of art that he owned without betraying in his person any reflexion of it, without, perhaps, ever having looked at it. The Prince d'Agrigente was so entirely devoid of anything princely, anything remotely reminiscent of Agrigente, that one was led to suppose that his name, entirely distinct from himself, bound by no ties to his person, had had the power of attracting to itself every iota of vague poetry that there might have been in this man, as in any other, and enclosed it, after this operation, in the enchanted syllables. If any such operation had been performed, it had certainly been done most efficiently, for there remained not an atom of charm to be drawn from this kinsman of the Guermantes."

As I was sitting outside yesterday on the sidewalk of a café in mid-afternoon, I watched a group of four men, clearly gay men, hop into a Honda Element as if at the start of a grand day shopping and strutting up and down the crowded streets of P-town. A few were young; a few were graying. All were thin. Each wore the self-consciously fashionable casual summer wear that signifies hipster gaydom, their dark wrap-around sun glasses covering their wandering eyes (and their crows' feet). I loathed them. I still loathe them. What explains my antagonism?