Paul Attinello

Author: paulattinello

  • Flirt (Sitges IX)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    This last night of the trip, I have determinedly done what I didn’t really do at all this time – go to the major gay bars and clubs. Bear Bar – I’d forgotten what it was like, and five minutes are enough (I escape, I’m afraid, especially after the one interesting French guy walks out…

  • The last day at the beach (Sitges VIII)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    Well, the last full day, anyway – tomorrow morning will be fairly brief before I have to leave. This is also the title of a favorite track from William Ackerman’s Conferring with the Moon – a beautifully melancholic string ensemble leading into acoustic guitar; one of the finer examples of why I think Ackerman was,…

  • Desafinado (Sitges VII)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    There are always points in any trip or vacation when one feels out of tune with the whole idea of vacations – they can come because of overdoing it (bars, restaurants, credit cards) or contrarily from underdoing it (as though you aren’t taking advantage of whatever supposed delights were available). The conjunction of insulted annoyance…

  • Xiguerit-pocquerit (Sitges VI)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    Tonight was the final night of the Festa Major de Sant Barthomeu, which involved a lot of people in large circles doing the Catalan national dance… which is actually quite peculiar. It’s sort of ametrical (are there about nine, or twelve, steps in irregular groupings?) and extremely restrained, to say the least – frankly it’s…

  • Out to lunch (Sitges V)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    Today Susan and I went in to Barcelona on the train, to wander around and indulge ourselves. I wanted to do something unusual for lunch – in Sitges we have been a bit too conservative, too pedestrian, landing repeatedly at a popular Argentine steak house (pleasant but a tiny bit boring). So we were thinking…

  • Getting Out (Sitges IV)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    After the previous two posts, sleepless and, as always, aware that one should employ every minute of vacation time rather than waste it, I went out at 3 am to Trailer, my favorite of the dance clubs here. It turns out that 3 is too early for Trailer, and it was virtually empty – I…

  • The abbot’s story

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    Have I ever told you the story of the Japanese abbot? – no, of course I haven’t. It was a tale that caught my imagination, or perhaps arose into my memory, some time in the late 1980s; on my computer is an aborted text where I tried to tell it, embedded in an imagined story…

  • Temporal (Sitges III)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    After midnight, difficult to sleep, hearing David Lang’s shimmering, wispily endless Orpheus Over and Under pieces. There is something bothering me about Neville’s illness and impending death (aside from the obvious), plus its effect on his partner Chris, plus our mutual friend Dennis’ moving away up the coast, and the possible knock-on effects of these…

  • Gloriana

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    Listening to a favorite work, perhaps not one of the monuments of Western music, but, well – Britten’s Choral Dances from Gloriana, a suite of all-too-short dances that represent a miniature masque held in the Elizabethan court. I love the whole opera, too, although the best recording doesn’t seem to be available any more; of…

  • Imperturbable (Sitges II)

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    Even after a demented pair of nights spent trying to keep up with Nick, a handsome, sexy younger guy – one whose approach to everything is aggressively, even competitively, sensual, and who complains in one breath about the “bubble” of Sitges (by which he means the strangely unreal effect of the desire-oriented population – and…