circle of trannies and drug connections described by Lou Reed's Transformer) or thousands (the post-hippie women who understood Joni Mitchell's
Blue on the deepest frequencies). Poses achieves this for the life of the Chelsea Boy: the young, gay, narcissistic achiever in New York. But the Chelsea Boy is only a magnified version of practically every kid new to a big city who's got a job and an apartment and worries about weekend plans: The Chelsea Boy just has sharper clothes, higher standards of beauty and a better tradition of mordant humor to console himself with.
Let's not overstate: Wainwright is not the second coming of Cole Porter. The consistency isn't there, and he's good enough to make you wish he wouldn't mangle grammar. ("There's never been such grave a matter/As comparing our new brand-name black sunglasses" is a great couplet, except that such is crying out to be so.) But the best of Poses transmits the impatient, careening, manic life of a pleasure-seeking New Yorker and still keeps a carefully calibrated lightweight focus, the way those old, literate pop songs did.
With its Broadway-ready melody, "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" enlarges little problems of indulgence, stanza by stanza, into a much sadder picture of a young striver whose unanswerable needs become the focus of the whole work. As this figure goes to California and to Europe (Wainwright is the kind of guy who'll sing snatches of French and reference Thomas Mann's Death in Venice), he confronts his own loneliness in all his lovers' faces and throws off some memorable lines: "I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue"; "Ain't it a shame that at the top/Still those soft-skin boys can bruise you/Yes, I fell for a streaker"; "Life is the longest death in California." As well a lot of lines that aren't really meant to be understood, like "All the pearls in China/Fade astride a Volta."
Wainwright uses a greater singing range now; his maundering voice has become infinitely easier to listen to. Despite Poses' multiple producers, there are more clean, clever ideas of arrangement here than on Wainwright's cluttered debut. "Shadows," co-written with Alex Gifford of Propellerheads, keeps a dry funk drumbeat, a dab of piano chords, some low clar
