I Found It... On the INTERNET!!!

DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is still available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and via your local bookshop at Bookshop.org. By the way: If you do happen to buy it from an Internet behemoth, leaving a review makes it more discoverable to other readers.

Be Not Afraid #4 is still at comic stores and on Comixology. Issue #5 is coming in January, with an FOC of December 22, just in time for the birth of the Baby Jesus.

At a certain point, in a man’s life, he turns away from the callow desires of his youth — fame, amorous conquest, eating 100 chicken nuggets in a single sitting, etc. — and begins to dream of real estate. Literally, in my case: I had recurring dreams about being given vast, empty houses. Every door would open onto another door, with the rooms getting bigger and bigger, until I realized that my new house had  movie theaters and abandoned elementary schools and art galleries and (at one point) the entire Chelsea High Line hidden inside of it. 

In real life, of course, my house is barely big enough to have an actual house inside it, and conditions seem unlikely to improve. But the dream persists, and I have learned to sate it with an acceptable substitute: Celebrity house tours from Architectural Digest.

Famous people will just show you their whole house! Right there on the Internet! They will also show you who they are, in vivid and often unflattering detail. The David Harbour and Lily Allen tour, for example, is excruciating — he’s trying so hard to be funny, and she’s trying so hard to pretend that she finds him funny, and they are so obviously uncomfortable in each other’s presence that, if you had to have dinner with them, you would get up and run away screaming before the wine was poured. They do have a lovely second-floor bathroom with a fireplace and a couch in it. I’m glad, because I would lock myself in there and not come out. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal and her second-tier Skarsgaard (Peter? Perry? Phil? Is there a Phil Skarsgaard?) are also, I regret to inform you, insufferable.

It’s a different variety of insufferability with them: These are two self-consciously “cool” white people, from moneyed families, who know it’s gauche to be as rich as they are, but have no intention of giving away the money. So they’re stuck doing this pathetic, supposedly self-effacing Gen-Xer routine of giving their entire tour through eye-rolls and air quotes, like oh, uh, “welcome” to our “historic brownstone,” or whatever. 

Can it, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Whichever-One-You-Are Skarsgaard! You’re rich! You chose to be rich! If you didn’t want the money, you could have given it to me, or to any number of other charitable causes! The least you can do is own how rich you are, instead of eye-rolling and mumbling your way through it like a high school sophomore at his grandparents’ wedding anniversary dinner. You are not cool, you are not humble, you are not down-to-earth, you’re the reason ordinary families can’t afford to live in those brownstones any more, so shut up and show me your reclaimed wood floors. 

It takes panache to give an Architectural Digest Open Door (TM) house tour, is what I’m saying. It takes pure, unironic, Celebrity-Brand celebrity — the strength to stand up and say: “Here is my enormous house. It is the size of the town you grew up in, and I live here, in a depth of luxury and ease you cannot comprehend. You are welcome.”

Which brings us to the master of the form: 1990s rock star, Catwoman dad, and proud homeowner Leonard Albert Kravitz.

Now: The fact that Lenny Kravitz has a palatial estate in Paris may not surprise you. The zebra-print ottomans, the chairs shaped like hands, the custom-designed Steinway pianos with leopard-print stools and copious wood etching; the grand salons in which Lenny Kravitz – shirt unzipped to his navel, sunglasses firmly affixed to his face in even the dimmest rooms, glowing with a peace known only to the truly and beatifically shoeless – sits, in various attitudes of leonine repose; if you truly think about it, you cannot imagine Lenny Kravitz living any other way.

Now: It may slightly surprise you to learn that Lenny Kravitz also has an entire home museum filled with the costumes and memorabilia of trailblazing Black musicians. The custom-built club in the basement, pre-filled with partying hot people, so that Lenny Kravitz can come down and sway rhythmically at them whenever he pleases – "the heart and soul of the house," as per Lenny Kravitz – may come as sort of a shock.

But again: This is Lenny Kravitz we're talking about. It would be surprising if he didn't have an entire basement filled with Parisian crisis actors. Lenny Kravitz requires a home as luxurious and theatrical as the giant crystal-rimmed sunglasses that he presumably wears in the shower; this, he has, and it would be churlish to deny him.

Here’s the part that might actually surprise you: That is his smaller house. 

Now: Did you know that Lenny Kravitz owned a Brazilian mountain covered in herds of snow-white cattle? Not necessarily. But some part of you has always known it, just as, in your heart, you already know how Lenny Kravitz looks when riding a horse across his Brazilian compound (majestic).

You and I will never ride that horse; we will never own that mountain; we will never awaken to the pounding hoofbeats of as vacas brancas before heading to the shared kitchen for a breakfast of beautiful organic produce farmed on the premises. But now, thanks to Lenny Kravitz, we can know who does live that way: Lenny Kravitz. He'll see you in your dreams.