Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

photo © by Melissa Wells 2005
It’s been frequently said that men go to tranny bars to see the vestiges of femininity. In today’s culture of loud raunchy drunk cursing chest-baring grrls, men have only old movies and t-girl bars to relive the golden days of how women used to be. What people don’t talk about is the equally charming notion that in some of these bars, one can sometimes run into examples of how men used to be. Sweet, kind, considerate, and not always on the make. A quiet sort of masculinity if you will.

I went to Boston recently with a former bandmate drummer to go see the Hives at Cambridge’s Middle East club. (We stopped in at Paradise and had a blast too). Unfortunately, there was a night when he and I had to part ways because Dave held the last ticket to a rock concert. I, left alone, decided to stop in on the infamous Jacque’s Cabaret on 79 Broadway, off the Boston Commons.For those of you who aren’t aware the trans-friendly city of Boston is also a progressive city in transgender issues. Massachussett is home to one of the longest running transgender magazines in the country Tapestry. And the city is also home to the excellent transgender website URNOTALONE, run by Bostonian natives Jon and Vicky.

For years, I have heard about Jacque’s Cabaret. Somehow I was either with friends who wanted to go but had one too many, or at other times, with friends who had one too many, then forgot where we were supposed to go. I must say that I had the preconception that Jacque’s was going to be like New York City’s Lips, a place that is well known for loud raunchy cursing barrel-chested bachelorettes holding their last stomp about town.

Jacque’s, was actually quite civilized. Upon entering at the corner entrance tucked behind the Radisson on Stuart St., the space looks like any other bar. A quaint watering hole near the front, and a semi-circular stage towards the back.

I arrived early and sat myself at the front bar for a few quick ones. The bartender (I believe his name is Bob) was cordial and good conversation. Unfortunately, I was in transit to a dance club known as Machine to reunite with my traveling sidekick after his show finished. So I spent only an hour or so at Jacque’s, afraid to wander into the nether regions without any male protection.

Some reason or another, I always attract the wrong sort of attention at Trans bars.

Not this night. I stayed put, kept the conversation going, and eventually several men at the bar attempted to convince me that sauntering over to Machine by foot (2.1 miles) was sheer madness. I was thinking Dave Attell Insomniac, but I guess I kinda forgot I don’t look like Dave Attell.

I did ask for Jon and Vicky, and was told they usually showed their faces around on a Saturday night. By then, I started talking to a gent with a sad face and kind eyes. (I think his name was Bill).

He convinced me that I should not undertake a walk to Machine on my own. So he finally hailed a cab and deposited me inside and sent me off.

Ladies and gentleman, it is debatable that the transgirls in Boston look different from the ones here in New York City. But I can attest this much: New York City men in transbars men simply do NOT do this sort of courteous thing.

So my limited review of Jacque’s is this: It’s everything you thought a Boston club should be.

Bostonians who go to Jacque’s, if you see a lonesome fellow with the wistful storylines around his face, please let him know Pristine (from www.d332.com) said hi and thanks for his concern.

He was right. I could not have done that walk.

But it was sure nice to see men the way they used to be.

If there is a movie I’m glad I didn’t see in a cinema, it would have been Tom Tykwer’s Perfume. I would have laughed myself off the seat by the end of the story. From the director who brought us one of my favorite movies Run Lola Run (1998), which I considered a metaphor for techno music construction, Perfume begins in a literate manner, a stately call to the audience to realize and democratize the lesser understood of our five senses. However, as the director’s stylism slowly gains momentum over plausibility, the movie begins to take on a farcical tall tale.

First, there is Ben Wishaw’s Vegas magician flair, flailing bottles around and mixing up a storm as if he were an 18th century Tom Cruise whipping up a cocktail, all without a need to check the results. Imagine here, a movie about Ansel Adams wildly snapping shots without even looking at his subject matter. Then you have the perfectly crafted supermodel bodies of 18th century women? Has anybody seen a Fragonard or a Watteau? Those women should still have some leftover flab from the Ruben years. It’s hard to imagine French street urchins with gym memberships, less French urchins with cockney accents. Even the nun had a six pack! Who has time for catechism when you have to put in 90 minutes at the Marais sports club of Paris?

I know as the story takes a turn into Ibsenian theatre that we are supposed to turn our noses up at the mob mentality of the masses. But the final orgy pit scene really takes the cake. We know the character can catch a waft from 10.8 kilometers away, but does that mean the average bloke from the madding crowd can do it across a gigantic town square filled with the unwashed masses?

For me, one of the saving graces of the second half of the movie is possible if one chooses to view scent as a metaphor for physical beauty. Replace Jean Baptiste Grenouille’s acquired, unearthly “perfume” garnered from a string of dead virgins with a composite of the most attractive features of say, People Magazine’s 50 most attractive people, and you basically have an entire nation crying for the stay of execution for that hottie murderer awaiting his or her death sentence on death row. This social commentary makes the movie somewhat watchable. After all, Grenouille was in despair in the end, having experienced only the masses’s love for his perfume, but not for who he was.

A frequent plight (I have heard) the glamourously beautiful must endure.

The other redemption is the reference to the smell of death. Chandler Burr wrote in the New Yorker article “The Scent of the Nile” (March 14, 2005) that some of the best perfumes contain the smell of indoles (which decomposing bodies are full of), the smell of death. So Patrick Suskind’s novel - which I shall shortly read - is true to form when his hero distills his base scents from murdered bodies.

Finally there is the ambivalent commentary of how the different classes react to a thing of beauty. One group makes love in the faint traces of its presence, while the other, lacking a vocabulary of appreciation, requires the entire bottle to literally overkill their consumption.

The moral lesson here? Ladies, just a dab will do. Don’t drown yourself in it!

As a child, my impressions of Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo came from a Siskel and Ebert TV review. In that episode, they also reviewed Les Blanks’s Burden of Dreams. In my jumbled memory, Fitzcarraldo became a dark ominous movie about a violent Klaus Kinski threatening to punch people’s lights out if he didn’t get his ship over a fog-ridden mountain.

From this frightening impression, I procrastinated for years in getting around to see Fitzcarraldo. When I did however, the moment I saw the opening scene with grubby Kinski stumbling off a little dinghy into an opera house holding an oar in one hand and his lady in the other, all for the love of music, I knew right there and then that I have wasted many years on a wrong impression.

The closing scene with Kinski’s bright promising smile, sailing triumphantly through the muddied Amazonian rivers on a busted ship, loaded with an orchestra and compacted operatic ensemble set performing A Te O Cara, Amor Talora from Bellini’s I Puritani ranks as one of my most beloved magical movie moments. O such joy, happiness, and inspiration to be defeated, and yet stay true to the life of an aesthete, and live for beauty.

Here is my favorite New York City ensemble: Parthenia, performing at their resident space Corpus Christi Church at 529 West 121st Street, Morningside Heights this Friday evening (October 19, 2007) at 8 pm.

Preferred seating $35
General seating $25
RUSH tickets $10 (limited availability at the door)
An intimate collection of early European art songs leads you through the private chambers of Renaissance life and love. Featuring the brilliant English-born tenor Rufus Müller.

Suddenly freed from my modest duty as image editor and book designer at an academic press, I am returning to a life of leisure. What better way to move sweetly into a new beginning than to the singing viols of Parthenia?

Come and enjoy the lovely sounds of Tudorian music and help support the continuation of early music.