Special Report - New York is Baaaaaack!

Special Assignment: New York is Baaaaaack!
March 1, 2002
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, March 1 (UPI) -- I've identified the precise moment when New York returned to normalcy.

It was January 9, 2002, the day Michael Musto devoted half his column in the Village Voice to the splendors of drag queens and go-go boys in Washington, D.C., which is, he assured us, "one of the gayest places on earth." He had just returned from a vacation in the other terror-stricken city, only to pronounce it fully returned to hedonistic abandon.

"At a pre-Stonewallish gay steak house named Annie's," he wrote, "the gay steak is tasty and the flamboyant waiter will gladly tell you the history of his jewelry. . . . Crawl through Secrets' men's room--it's basically a small town--and you get to something called Ziegfeld's, where the trannies put on a cabaret show with retro material (Liza Minnelli's 'Cabaret') and banter ('Everybody say, "Hey, bitch!"'), though the spirits sometimes get as high as the hair. As a special treat, a Secrets go-go boy doubles as a spiritual singer, gravely massacring 'O Holy Night' with clothes on."

Obviously Michael Musto dwells in "terra incognita" as far as official Washington is concerned. John Ashcroft is not likely to start joining in group choruses of "Hey, bitch!" anytime soon. But the spirit of the column--hey, we're trolling the bars because that's what we do--was so pre-9/11 that it almost made you think that any day now New York would start tearing down the tourist traps around Times Square and reopening the porno theaters and sex shops again. (Well, we can dream.)

At almost the same time, Penny Arcade, the flamboyant downtown performance artist, announced her first new show in three or four years, promising bawdy humor, free-form social commentary, exhibitionism, and the background gyrations of her new troupe, the Jon-Benet Ramsey Memorial Dancers. Called "New York Values," she bills the show as a celebration of the end of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's rule, because the man who was good for crime was considered BAD for parties, what with his unrelenting moral crusades to "clean up" bad old New York City.

In other words, New York is getting kooky again, celebrating the underground, the weird, the offbeat and the downright bizarre micro-cultures that seemed to slowly disappear in the late nineties as "Rudyism" turned bohemian New York into a haven for upwardly mobile burghers who wanted to spruce up--or tear down, depending on how you look at it--all the neighborhoods where naughtiness once flourished.

"It's turned into a mall," Penny Arcade told the New York Observer, echoing a familiar New York complaint. "Children can roam the streets at any hour of the day or night. They are free to walk to the West Side Highway without prostitutes, Greenwich Village without homosexuals and Fulton Fish Market without fish. Which is dull, which is not New York. My show is about the New York you miss, or the New York you missed. . . . The problem is that New York is now populated by the ten most popular kids from every high school in the world. Most of us who moved to New York came here to get away from those people. We were losers and deviants."

But losers and deviants don't go quietly, and over the last couple of months there's been a return to the club world, the Off-Off-Broadway theater, the silly cocktail parties used to promote even sillier books and movies, and even the beleaguered "gentlemen's entertainment" venues. Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw (which he would be the first to tell you is the sickest newspaper in America), was back in the news, fighting a harassment rap in Brooklyn and flopping face-first onto the floor in a fit of stress-induced low blood sugar. The tabloids renewed their scandal-mongering and lurid crime coverage. It's been like . . . well, like the pre-Giuliani nineties.

And the barometer of that change is Musto's column, "La Dolce Musto," which is so much a part of New York that people who don't even particularly like the Voice will pick it up just to find out where the little rascal has been the past week.

I've been a Musto fan for years, mainly because he's one of the wittiest stylists in the English language. Each column is like a skillfully structured stand-up comedy routine, starting with an often outrageous premise and then working his way through the various parties, premieres, openings and p.r. hustles of the week, expanding on the theme, returning to it, hooking together disparate events with Oscar Wildesque segues, riffing on the delightful strangeness of it all while peppering his little urban travelogue with "I can't believe he said that" pull quotes. (During a conversation with Mira Nair, the director of "Monsoon Wedding," she tells Musto "The film is not about the anthropology of ritual." To which he says, "Please--what is these days?")

He's the master of the wry one-liner:

"'Moulin Rouge' is as subtle as Khmer Rouge, but it saved viewers a lot of drug money."

"I can understand Winona Ryder's pain, having just seen her in a trailer for an Adam Sandler movie."

"'Black Hawk Down' is 'Saving Ryan's Privates.'"

"One more close-up of someone holding the damned ring [in 'The Lord of the Rings'] and this thing would be ready for the Home Shopping Club."

"Cher's upcoming 'Living Proof' CD is lots of fun but has so much of that 'Believe' voice-machine stuff that if her ex-hubby suddenly came back from the dead, they'd be Sonny and Vocoder."

But the column is so intricate and baroque that quoting it doesn't really do it justice. Here, for example, is his riff on the December movie lineup:

"It's Oscar-movie time, when disabilities are trotted out and sugarcoated, so you're not terribly upset as various performers cutely spazz up a storm in order to go for the gold. Coming up, we have Sean Penn as a lovable, mentally retarded Starbucks employee (and no, that's not the only kind they have); Russell Crowe as a paranoid-schizophrenic Nobel Prize winner; Dame Judi Dench as a famous novelist with Alzheimer's; and Jim Carrey as a suspected Commie who'll spend three hours of your life trying to get his memory back. Cheer on their impairments! Admire their brilliance! Wish you could go unconscious!"

But Musto is at his best when he's on the move, club- hopping, schmoozing, serving as a judge at open auditions for a stage show called "The Puppetry of the Penis." (Yes, that's what I said.)

"Eleven game contestants lined up naked onstage, ready to flip their ding-dongs around into stunts from the Windsurfer to the Loch Ness Monster (which are eerily similar, actually). The Hamburger--a bulbous schlong sandwich--is particularly hard to look at . . ."

I've always had an image of Musto doing a lot of lurking at these various soirees. He seems to be able to sidle up into conversations just when people are revealing their worst secrets or dumbest fears. At the premiere party for "The Affair of the Necklace," he was chatting up Hilary Swank. "The costumes were beautiful," she said. "Milena Canonero is a complete . . ."

"'Bitch?' I said, smirking, and director Charles Shyer, thinking I was being serious, said, 'Well, she's a perfectionist and that can be interpreted as . . .' (I love trapping these people into uncorking truthlets.)"

Of course, New York is the capital of gossip--and gossip columnists--but most of the daily columns read like they've been put together over the phone. Musto's has a "you are there" immediacy that catches his prey in their native habitat, turning their own words back on them, for good or ill. (He's not always catty. At a recent party he sauntered up to Benjamin Bratt, intending to ask him about Julia Roberts, when "the actor disarmed me by smiling and saying, 'Are you gonna start any trouble?' Suddenly I was subservient, well behaved, and totally enslaved to those cheekbones.")

The relentless gay subtext of the column is a tradition at the Voice. When I caught Musto one Friday morning at his Voice "cubicle" (he's still technically a freelancer after 17 years), he had nothing but wonderful things to say about Arthur Bell, the pioneer of "openly gay and political" gossip whose column "Bell Tells" paved the way for "Le Dolce Musto" when Musto landed his dream job in 1985. Musto had grown up in New York ("Born in Manhattan, raised in Brooklyn, I can't drive and I'm allergic to the sun"), had worked for the defunct Soho Weekly News, and at one time had aspirations as a singer. His group, The Must, was "a Motown cover band" that played a club date with Madonna "ten years before she was famous." (The budding diva demanded her own separate dressing room, then "tested the mike so long we had no chance to try the stage"--a story Musto has repeated gleefully over the years.)

Remarkably, the man known for his wicked stiletto wit turns out to be generous to a fault when it comes to his blander colleagues in the gossip world--Cindy Adams, Liz Smith and the army of pros who churn out bold face names in the ancient tradition of Louella Parsons and Ed Sullivan. "I have sympathy for the other gossip columnists," he told me. "They have to do those things daily. I really feel for them. I have a weekly column so I have the luxury of doing everything myself. The whole column is just seeing everything that week in New York through my eyes."

"And do people cooperate with you?" I ask him, thinking specifically of his frequent allusions to the sexual preferences of various celebrities. "I would say that half the people approach me when I go into a club," he said, "and the other half run away from me. What they don't do is try to plant items with me, because they can't be certain of the tone I'm going to take with it. They'd much rather be in 'Page Six' or Liz Smith's column, where they know what they're going to get."

For years Musto has been known for his jibes at Rosie O'Donnell for her "ambiguous single-mom act." When she finally did come out of the closet, on national TV, he praised her for the gesture, but for "La Dolce Musto" readers it was a five-year- old story. Musto doesn't exactly "out" people, and some of his "is he or isn't he?" pieces fall into the category of wishful gay thinking (he's currently entranced by the Dell Computer kid), but scarcely a week passes without someone getting the Musto Gender Preference Test, including people you would never even suspect:

". . . Justin Timberlake's fascinating foofy career choices have me wondering if the cutie has a memoir coming out. Justin-- here comes another list--played a swishy hairdresser in the NSync movie (a part he'll reprise on 'Friends'), wanted to do the film version of the AIDS musical 'Rent,' portrays young poofter Elton John in Elton's new video, posed for a homoerotic photo spread in Arena Hommes Plus, went to Beige and Asseteria with girlfriend Britney Spears, and reportedly might don drag in Brit's next video. Ain't no lie. Bi bi bi?"

Living as he does in the most ephemeral branch of journalism, you would expect him to be the most devastated of all by the "death of irony" mood after the terrorist attacks. (If you had picked up his column on 9/11, you would have read his encomium for the final Wigstock, the annual drag-queen convention, as well as lavish praise for the re-release of "Funny Girl" and a Gary Condit closer.) But he was actually back into the frou-frou swing of the city before anyone else, regarding it as something of a sacred duty. He penned the occasional Ground Zero item that touched on the entertainment world--mourning the loss of Windows on the World and recounting the miraculous escape of his high school friend, Windows executive chief Michael Lomonaco--but he refused to indulge in the sort of public breast- beating that other entertainers were hawking.

"Gripped by contagious dread," he wrote of the anthrax scare, "I started wondering if it's really worth dying just to open some crappy press release for a celebrity photo op. (Answer: Yes. This is what I do, and I'll keep doing it, Taliban masters. Besides, when a paycheck arrives, you'd be amazed at how brave a person can become.)"

When I asked him if he agrees with my premise--that his sojourn into the Washington go-go bars represented the return of vitality to downtown New York party life--he said, "Well, I'm flattered by that. I was the first one advocating that we should be going to parties and night clubs. We should continue to do what we do in order to cement our democracy. And it wasn't just a rationalization, it's something I really believe in. It's what we needed to do. We need a sense of joy and festivity or else the terrorists have won."

If such a quote appeared in a Musto column, this would be the place for the witty riposte. But I know better than to duel with a master.

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