More on the horizon. Larry and i went to see a performance at the Mark Morris space next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This was the "variety show" that Lisa was helping to organize. It turned out to be fun, the most amazing act was the tap dancer Omar Edwards. There was a reception afterwards, that was also terrific.

A lot has happened this week. MoMA announced the appointment of Barry Bergdoll as the new curator of architecture, replacing Terrence Riley. I had to go to Gouverneur to see about a (very minor) attack of gout. But i needed to get some more pills, just in case there was a full-blown attack. (This has happened before, when i've had a relapse a few weeks after an attack.) But it took forever: the last time, i simply went to the emergency room and a doctor saw me and looked at my foot and looked at the chart and then gave me a prescription for Indomethacin. This time, i went to administration, and got sent to emergency, and then emergency sent me to podiatry where they do "walk-ins" and then i had to go to the cashier so i could do the co-pay, and then i went back to podiatry where they sent me to administration again to get a referral, and i got the referral and went back and sat waiting for three hours!

It was insane. However, everything is fine, but i think i need to change my service provider or whatever it's called to some place here in Brooklyn.

What's happened to the radio here in our room? It doesn't work. What i think happened.... i don't want to say, except that i found the same thing with the VCR in the basement: someone had been playing with the knobs on the things... and it wasn't me and it wasn't Larry.

Cara Mertes just got a new job, as head of the documentary section at the Sundance Institute.

I finally mailed off the books to Brett. I still have to mail off things to my niece. It's only a few months late.

Once again, got sucked into some of those damned threads on the IMDB message boards. Why does it matter? There's a thread about a movie that's now being shot in Paris, and how a number of the directors and actors originally announced (including Godard) are no longer participating. And then it just disintegrates into idiots who couldn't care less about Godard. Including one idiot who uses the tag "resdogs" or something like that. So one person surmises that the person is a fan of Tarantino, and reminds said person that he should show respect for Godard, since Tarantino does, and the person replies that he hates Goadrd and can't understand why a cool director like Tarantino would like Godard....

And at that point, you know it's hopeless. The internet has unleashed this morass where there are no critical standards, no history, nothing. Fred Camper makes the point that,w hen he teaches, he makes sure that his students must use actual research: they must look at the actual films, they must look up the material published in the 1960s and 1970s, they must not rely on the internet, where you won't be able to find material from (say) Film Culture or the East Village Eye. (There's a website devoted to Louise Brooks, for example, and her last article, "Why I Will Not Write My Autobiography", which was published in Film Culture in 1979 and has never been anthologized, is not included in the bibliography. I'll bet the person who runs that website doesn't even know the article exists. And yes, it is authentic, because Film Culture was one of the places where Louise Brooks published her articles, the rest of which were included in "Lulu in Hollywood".)

Someone (i don't know who) responded to one of my posts, by asking what Christine Vachon did to me. Well: that's nobody's business, but, in essence, she cut me dead. That is: the "queer" film business isn't so vast that there aren't overlaps. So after the release of "Poison" and "Swoon", i'm at an event and Christine Vachon also shows up... and she cuts me dead. Now, i never (usually) go over to people, because i don't expect people to remember me, but in Christine Vachon's case, since we were friends, i expected her to say hello. And she didn't. So i knew she was purposively ignoring me. And she was. And she continued to do so for years afterwards. It wasn't even saying hello, it was snubbing me, very publicly.

If we had just been business associates, or casual acquaintances, that would have been fine. But we weren't. She was a close friend, and i did nothing to her. She did something to me. (Just before the release of "Poison", Todd Haynes called me and left a message on my machine, apologizing for the "oversight"; in Todd's case, though i haven't seen him that often, when he does see me, he always comes over and says hello, and always tells people how we're good friends, yada yada yada. In Todd's case, what happened was "business" but it shouldn't interfere with "friendship".) I can get over the business betrayal, but it's the personal betrayal that hurt.

And i won't let it happen again, which is why i don't have any "art friends" anymore.

And i don't want to be alone, i do want to go to things and see things with people....

But i won't ever let anyone else get close to me the way Christine Vachon had been close.

Well, the quasi-storm last night caused a brown-out in Chelsea, where a lot of the elevators weren't working in the gallery buildings, etc. So that's what happened: there was some sort of power problem (a surge, etc.) that affected things like the radio and the VCR. But the computers and the TVs are fine.