Lonely Gym Boys, Lonely Boys in Drag, Lonely Boys Watch Film

The lonely muscle boys were at the gym this morning. I shouldn't be surprised: they are always there. At night, when the gym shuts down, they press a button near the mirrors surrounding the bicycles and mattresses fall from the ceiling. They shower in the locker room, making sure they never make eye contact. They pop coins into the isotonic drinks machine for a late night apperitif (if they have run out of protein powder for their shakes). They have much to talk about: are you using the 20kg dumbell? Can I use the bench press after you? Do you want to spot me? Your arms are looking awesome today...

I leave the lonely muscle boys around noon, buy some food at Budgens (which is not a supermarket name meant to imply "budget"), come home to my boy then realize that the b.o. stink hovering in the gym originated from my armpits. After throwing my clothes in the incinerator, taking a shower and eating, we rendez-vous at Brick Lane with a couple of Finnish friends.

London's dreary rain destroys our umbrellas. Everybody looks young and messy to perfection in Brick Lane. Vintage clothes carry pricier tags than downtown fashion labels. Cappuccinos in hand, we find Anu and Osmo in the Up Market. At a deserted nearby bar, we talk about The Science of Sleep, jobs and moving to Canada while Anu flicks through a Tuscan cookbook she bought at Borders. Next to our table, a girl crawls all over empty sofas and licks her hand as if she's a cat.

They no longer make films like The French Connection (which is what we just watched). The director, I learned in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (an exposé of Hollywood in the 70s) went on to direct The Exorcist, then crash & burn like most people that decade. New York City looked terrible in the early 70s. Brooklyn was practically a bomb site. During the film, I imagine the New York Dolls wandering just beyond the cameras, in the same freezing cold, degenerate megalopolis where the film is set; boys in drag, in their late teens, performing for the first time at the homeless shelter Endicott Hotel that Christmas, while Gene Hackman, blocks away, races against a french sniper or beats up drug dealers in leather coats and bell-bottoms.

I look out for the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, but it doesn't feature in any of the film's scenes. Gene Hackman's character mentions a visit to the Empire State Building, but nada on the Twin Towers. It's as if the Twin Towers were too remote and monolithic to feature in such a gritty and grimy film.

Kundera & the Novel

"A man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a great surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athletes, artists.

Artists' fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one's death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional - thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious - is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."

From Milan Kundera's Behind the Curtain.