Well, the worst of Christmas is behind us, and everyone is scooping up twenty-five cent leftover poinsettias and the like, and getting down to the true meaning of Christmas at the malls, with that Bethlehem thing safely out of the way.  One hopes one need not hear Jingle Bell Rock or Rocking Around the Christmas Tree  or I'll Be Home for Christmas ever again, but one will settle for 11 months without them.  I'm not being a grouch - I like the old reliables - especially O Holy Night, and amongst the modern stuff, Drummer Boy, and even (kind of ) Silver Bells.  Christmas was nice; I spent the day with those ragged remains of family left in the area at the new home of my niece, Gary's daughter Megan, in a small village an hour east of Reedville.  They just purchased a lovely home on Main Street there, built in 1896, which the original builder never lived in because his wife, who must have belonged to one of the drearier Protestant cults, thought it was "too fancy".  To my eye, it is no more fancy than is typical of a middle class home of that era, when it seemed nothing could be built that wasn't beautifully done.  Each room of the downstairs has an oak floor with an inlay of different design  around the edge - no two alike, and there is a beautiful, though not extravagant staircase, with a closet beneath it in case Harry Potter needs a place to stay.  A previous owner had painstakingly removed all paint and restored all the woodwork to natural oak, and it has a wonderful homey feel - just the place for a Christmas.  Best of all, the place is as snug as can be - when we lit the fireplace (which has a gas insert), they had to reduce the thermostat which was already set at 62 to a lower temperature because it made things too warm.  My house, which was built in 1968, and probably is roughly the same size in square footage, immediately offers to the gods of outdoors any amount of heat I can stir up; a thermostat setting below 73 leaves me scrambling for a sweater. 

Yesterday, which was Boxing Day in Britain, and What-Were-They-Thinking Day in the USA which likes its Christmases long, commercial, and finely tuned to the our material wants, I spent with my nephew Sebastian.  We went to see Milk, for which we had very great hopes, since both of us are among Harvey's People and both lived in San Francisco for long periods of our lives.   One huge treat for me was right at the beginning, where they were using vintage footage of Castro Street and for a moment focussed on the exterior of a hair salon place yclept The March Hair that once existed just off Market Street right by the Castro Theater.   This shop was co-owned by a very good friend of mine named Steve, and was where I used to get my hair cut and catch up on what was in and what was out.  Steve knew everyone and everything that was afoot, and even had his 15 minutes of fame in an odd sort of way.   Steve's room mate when I met him (it was never clear to me whether they had been, or were, lovers) was a fellow named Fred, who was an artist that actually made his living at art.  This was astonishing to me, for I had gone to high school in the Age of Sputnik, when the schools I knew had made it plain that art and music and theater and the like were hobbies, and that those of us who would make it to college would be engineers, scientists or other practical types.   Some of Fred's methods of making a living at art would not pass muster with nuns of the sort Meryl Streep so accurately portrays in Doubt, but they were effective.  Fred frequently seduced buyers into making purchases, one might say, in a manner that had little to do with the art itself.  Steve loved art of all kinds, and even collected a few drawings I did, since, yes (he said humbly) I can draw a pretty nifty likeness of folks when I try- or I could; I haven't tried it for years.   If I may digress a moment here:  One of my proudest - or most gleeful - moments was when an artist friend of Tumwell's who had been living in Ecuador for quite a spell, - and who loathed me, a feeling that was mutual - came to visit and spotted a portrait of Tum on our wall, and asked with evident admiration, "Who did that?" and had the grinding humiliation of finding that it was I who had so drawn his attention, and that he had betrayed approval.  Oddly I can only draw people I like - then it seems like my hand can feel the shape of their faces when I work.

I think Fred's work, at least some of it, did have merit (although likely not as much as he believed), and once he got a showing at - if I remember correctly - the University of California in San Francisco, although it may have been somewhere else like that.  Unfortunately, two of Fred's frequent motives (that's the real plural of motif,  folks) were religious icons and naked people, especially men to whom he tended to append extremely, nay, impossibly, large - um - equipment at full salute.   It was the early '70s and everyone (it seemed), was totally open to, and totally adult about, art of a Mappelthorpian nature, at least in San Francisco.  Three of Fred's displayed paintings were of a naked/religious nature, and there was equipment a-plenty pointing in all directions.   Some woman, twenty years ahead of her time in her militant religiosity, took spraycan in hand and defaced the three paintings.  Jesus, she felt, would have wished her to do so.  To the poignant question, abbreviated in these texting days to "WWJD?" her answer was "Graffiti, and lots of it!". 

Fred had used as a model for Adam in a near-life-size painting his friend and roomie, Steve.  Steve had the perfect look of the 70's - think of any of the hair band guys - thin to the point of gauntness, long silky blond hair and an angular face with the bones visibly shaping interesting planes of light and shadow.  Although Fred stylized his human figures extensively, this was recognizably a portrait of Steve (and if I do say so, a really fine specimen of Fred's work).   Fred was not slapdash; his work was meticulously wrought, with great detail and enormous amounts of time and craftsmanship put into it.   Anyway, this defacing was a tale of human interest that piqued the interest of the enormously popular San Francisco columnist of the day, Herb Caen; it had all his favorite elements: currency, naughtiness, and an element of in-the-know; and he tracked down Steve and asked the question that was foremost in the minds of all of that portion of San Francisco which lay south of Market and was bounded by Dolores and Twenty-Fourth Streets and Twin Peaks: "Was the depiction accurate?"  

Of course this question was by way of a joke and a leer; for not only John C. Holmes, but Man O' War and Seabiscuit would have blushed for shame if forced to compete in the area to which ol' Herb was clearly referring.  Steve was quoted as replying,  "Oh, Fred tends to exaggerate sometimes" 

The story ended happily for Fred, as things tended to do before he was swept away in the tsunami that was AIDS.  The University, or whoever, had either insured the showing or was deemed liable - I forget which, and Fred got top dollar as well as that publicity which in these parlous times equals talent in the public mind (if one may use 'public' and 'mind' in the same sentence with a straight face).  

So for those of you who are brave enough souls to see Milk, if you look slippily right at the beginning when the shopfront of the March Hair is briefly shown, you can see a non-priapic example of Fred's artistry, since Fred did all the stained glass and decorative work for the shop.   Being somewhat documentary in format, the film was not to me exactly gripping in the way that some films are, but the performance of Sean Penn is breath-taking - there is not an iota of that thuggish machismo he so often displays, and yet he nuances the 'gay' behavior of Harvey Milk so finely, there is at no point the element of caricature that usually attends a straight guy 'acting gay'.  It is a tour de force without any question.   And, man, by all the evidence provided therein, he must be a great kisser!

I lost track of Steve, which I regret, because he was a good friend.  It was another case of supposing that I would run into him again and then not doing so, which is what happened to most of my friends.  I know he outlived Fred (they had long since ceased to be room mates), but I would not be surprised if he, too, fell victim to the plague - indeed, I would be mildly surprised if he didn't.  Not because he was particularly promiscuous - I don't know, really, if he was or not - but because if one does run into someone one knew from Castro Street in those days and asks the whereabouts of a mutual friend, the format of the question is always, "Is so-and-so still alive?"   This is a question it would never occur to me to ask of someone in my generation from any other venue.  So it looks like the spraycan lady not only was ahead of her time in her iconoclasm, but that, in fact, she wins.