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Friday, December 31, 2010

2 0 1 1

Enjoy. Work hard. Be creative. Always.


It's up to you and me.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

H A P P Y - H O L I D A Y S




Little did he know, this shabby but sincere Father Christmas, beacon of hope in our darkest days, when pestilence and depravity prowled the streets of New York, and discarded syringes pricked under the threadbare soles of our shoes, while rats in London scuttled in a filthy torrent over the stinking mound of accumulated trash, and gangsters quietly tortured their victims under a naked lightbulb in dank cellars, punks snarling at passers-by and spitting out a song with no future. Little did Father Christmas know, the thoughts this boy was powerless to resist, as he sat perched on the man's broad thigh.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Virgilio Teixeira 1917-2010

He travelled the world when Portugal was locked and alone. He tried marijuana at a party in Hollywood, and never returned. He stared Julie Christie long in the eye, and she fell a little bit in love. The Spanish adored him, and he gifted them with many films. He was a wrestler, and a tennis player in his youth. Maybe I met him in 1948, in a smoky Lisbon café, when he had acted with Amália Rodrigues and he called me little bifinho. HE CRIED. He wished he could have acted in COCTEAU movies and feared the dark when the projector was switched off and the film unspooled.
When it did, he went to a place where desire is always silverscreen


Friday, December 10, 2010

C E N S O R E D


A Fire in My Belly from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

David Wojnarowicz died of Aids-related illnesses in 1992, at the age of 37. Once he was no more than a firebrand element of the cabal of East Village artists that sprung up around the downtown scene of 80s New York (revolving around such places as the Pyramid club and art spaces/abandoned cars/converted toilets such as Civilian Warfare and Fun Gallery, and through figures such as Gracie Mansions.

Keith Haring passed thru here. So did Kenny Scharf and Kiki Smith. Ru Paul started at the Pyramid Club, which is still there on Avenue A (last time I looked), though it is no longer much to write home about.

Wojnarowicz was catapulted into the public eye when his works provoked the wrath of careerist senator Jesse Helms, and the American Family Association. He keenly felt how people like him were being marginalised, victimised by the false moral prophets of the American right, left to die in hospitals and neglected by the corridors of power. These people didn't like his work, because, for once, it pointed an accusing finger at THEM, not the other way round. He became an impromptu spokesperson for the right to free expression in the face of enormous prejudice, and in the courts he won that particular battle.

Last week, the Smithsonian capitulated to pressure and removed the above video by Wojnarowicz, due to pressure by the Catholic League and Republican John Boehner, in the first (believe it or not) institutional retrospective of homosexual-themed art in America. Galleries across America and beyond are showing this work to the public, in angry response. Post it, share it, wherever you can.

http://warholfoundation.org/foundation
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120905885.html?hpid=topnews
www.hideseek.org

Saturday, December 4, 2010

What Would Virginia Woolf Think?



The Calamity of Masculinity 2008 by Colin Ginks, private collection

In 1928 Woolf imagined a young English man called Orlando born during the reign of Elizabeth I, who refused to grow old and thus engaged in various derring-do adventures across the centuries. Orlando toyed with sex and gender. He had an affair with a Russian princess, while still a man, and finally, as a woman, married a sea captain.

Buck was an American woman born in 1972. The future seemed glittery, and made of styrofoam. Men like this walked the future earth.

Buck Rogers in the 25th century liked taking off his shirt for the older man in leather.

Our Buck for many years was unhappy. She was a model, and a bleach blonde, but she drowned her sorrows in substance abuse.
Then it dawned on Buck that she should turn herself inside out. She wanted to be the bionic man. She could rebuild herself. And then she could have a job for life, as an adult fimmaker. She could own her own company, and be the dominatrix of her own destiny.

But Buck kept her femaleness, down there, for inside there is the soul, and a little golden key to the next life.

One day in 2008, Buck, now striding the streets of the earth and winning awards at the AVN awards like a colossus, bumps into Virginia Woolf on 5th Avenue in New York. HE compliments Woolf, and asks if that is her porn name. Woolf doesn't like this brave new world, and even throws up a little bit in her mouth at the sight of him.


Schwarzwald, The Movie You Can Dance To, a production of the Saint At Large,
My dayjob, NYC,  2005-2009.





Monday, November 29, 2010

N E W Y O R K #1

Last Address from Ira Sachs on Vimeo.


I lived 5 years in NYC, and continued to work there a couple more while living in Norfolk, Virginia.
This short film by director Ira Sachs resonates with me like a keepsake. It shows a muffled, pensive city, a place of absence and lost life. I don't think, creatively, New York ever recovered fully, but all of us who pass thru the city are indelibly affected by its space and light and dark and intimacy, and inspired to become someone else, someone more alive than they've ever been.
Many of the artists and performers mentioned here are hotwired to my brain, part of a downtown scene that has been washed away on the tide.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Portugal, 1991

Almodovar - not the movie director - is a town in the south known for little except one dubious statistic: at the time of my visit it enjoyed the highest suicide rate in the land. It sits and shudders on an Alentejo plain, a haphazard blur of stucco, grey in the winter, infernal in the blistering summer.
My first boyfriend here came from Almodovar,though I met him New Year's Eve in a hole-in-the-wall bar in Lisbon. His name was Vitor and at the time I thought the world had to be a puzzle, so he fit magnificently.
Since he still lived with his mother and beady-eyed grandmother, when I visited his home town Vitor put me in a hostel. There he could visit me in the dead of night, climbing out the bedroom window and creeping along the deserted streets. Then, to avoid suspicion, he would return home before sunrise.
The last morning, a Sunday, I am beginning to stir, once again alone in my room. I hear a key click and turn in the lock. I know it is the owner. One thing you develop early on is your sixth sense, an intuitive, cannibalistic understanding of what men want from you. He bundles inside, and he is ashen, nervy. He comes over to the bed and starts to paw me. I softly push him away. He pulls off his clothes, in a fever, revealing his lumpen, pallid body beneath. He moves to the end of the bed, and masturbates himself. I watch, anchored there, till he comes. His expression is one of unresolved desires. When he's done, he dresses again, and leaves, barely a word spoken.
Years pass and Vitor is long-gone from my life, when one day we bump into each other again in Lisbon. "Oh," he says, "The owner of the hostel where you stayed passed away. it was last year." He dropped dead, all of a sudden. Natural causes. I nod. I remember, but I was a different person then, just a boy still. I had grown, whereas in Almodovar they distill. I was happy at least, to hear that one fat, gay man in Almodovar didn't commit suicide, like so many of them.

Abridged from my forthcoming selection of short stories and memoir. Comments welcome.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

FEEDBACK



Kim Gordon
supple-legged rock vixen
Dayglo bangle sex spangle
Gay me slay me
Can you? With your guitar knife carve me a new sex machine
Kool thing

Sunday, November 14, 2010

H I D D E N


Did you hear the one about the man of god?

Since gaining my ordination as a priest with the Universal Life Church, this old faggot will gladly officiate your wedding.

Thanks to photographer Paulo Madeira for his collaboration.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Welcome to the Dollhouse

LATONYA
Latonya is part Cherokee.
She is 6'2", so she is always asked if she is a model.
She is an executive for Black & Sassy Hair.
She is learning Chinese, for business.

KAYLIE
Kaylie hasn't talked to her parents for five years.
She doesn't like Sushi.
When she was out of work for a year, she turned tricks to pay the rent. She advertised in the Village Voice.
She now works in an animal hospice upstate and doesn't talk about her past to anyone.
She doesn't believe she will ever get married.

GABLE

Gable's father is a closeted business man, who sees his male lover on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Gable's mother dislikes the Mexicans that hang around downtown waiting for fruit-picking work.
Gable has s slight speech impediment.
The rest is a great unknown. She can already taste its dark.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

H O M A G E




The photographs of Arthur Tress reveal pasts lost to memory. Family, youth, occupied spaces since abandoned, and gay male lives long gone. Trying to capture and channel his singular eye, his sense of isolation and symbolic mystery, proved elusive. Must. Try. Again.
Thank you to Paulo Madeira. He took these images in an abandoned factory in Alcobaca, two hours outside Lisbon.


'Cut'


'Egg'


'Sexghost'

Paulo Madeira
http://www.arthurtress.com/

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

WORD.

Thought for the day:

"We might be poor, but we still have desire."

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Paradise


When a cinema dies, does it become a silent movie?
Lisboa has lost most of its movie palaces to the wrecking ball and the shopping mall. Even the porn cinema in Rossio has gone the same way. Is nothing sacred?




And.
Is there an artist moonlighting at the porn cinema, Cine-Paraiso, Rua Loreto, Lisboa?
I also saw Francois Ozon's
8 Femmes here...

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

C O M I N G S O O N


Para os mal ajustados, os tesudos, os bonitos por dentro, os do underground, os lovers, os fighters, os alfacinhas, os curiosos.

Informem-se!
muchomachony@gmail.com

Monday, August 16, 2010

"A happy place, in a sunny fairy land." (Killer's Kiss Part II)


(Notorious gnome cruising ground)

And King Ghob, His Majesty King of the Gnomes, speaking from his Portuguese fairy castle, on YouTube did say, "I am ready for the end of the world, and I tell ye, it shall happen on December 21st of the year 2012, and the world shall be filled with pestilence and genital herpes, and to all those boy lovers, fickle and with treachery in their bewitching gaze, who dare to leave us for the fairer sex, they, well they shall be first to suffer with eternal bad hair and slingbacks that chafe but till then, OMG, Fashion Clinic has a sale with the most gorgeous Prada bags going for a STEAL I bought FOUR and they look FABULOUS at Urban Beach and did you see Luis Figo totally waxed his chest duh! Fashion DON'T, gurl! Whatever! Um... where was I?"

(Reputed final broadcast on YouTube from murderer and self-titled Gnome King, Francisco Leitao, which never quite made it on air)

This reclusive Portuguese 'serial killer', self-proclaimed King Ghob, King of the Gnomes, and owner of a scrap metal merchants, was arrested for the murder of one teenage boy lover and his new girlfriend, and the girlfriend of yet another lover who did the same. Leitao regularly videod himself on You Tube performing magic rites and often proclaimed the end of the world was nigh, but that may just have been because he owed over one million euros in unpaid back taxes.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Lisboa could be this right now

(if it wanted)

Grace Jones' and Divine's birthday at Studio 54

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Killer's Kiss (Part 1)


She stumbled upon them, in the stable, locked in a torrid embrace. Their mouths exchanged torrid seas of saliva. Their eyes, wild, savage, bore into each other, the flesh as one. Her husband's neckerchief had unravelled, revealing a heaving chest of dark hair. The other, the other clasped her husband's buttocks as though they were rocks on a cliff face, holding him aloft. And there it was, the word of damnation - HIM. Her husband, exchanging bodily fluids with another man, their groins treetrunks, heaving at the zippers of their corduroys, desperate to spring free and sing the song of passion, the song of the ciganos! Maria Serrano Pinheiro's hand grasped her own throat, as if she wished to strangle herself, as if she wished to die!
There would be death tonight, but no, it would not be hers. Tonight was a night for revenge. Torrid revenge.

(15/07/10 - 20 or 30 shots were fired in a fued between gypsy families of the Lisbon bairro of Carlos Botelho, injuring a number of people, after Maria Serrano Pinheiro found her husband kissing another man. Torridly.)

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Sunday, July 4, 2010

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner


Any night, you go to a gay bar and there the older men sit, all jutting, sharp elbows and legs crossed, perched on bar stools, alone.
His name is Vasco, late fifties, sauve as a cocktail no one knows. "Talk to me," he begs. "I am so lonely, empty."
You try and reassure him with platitudes that he won't understand. He blames the Church, in all (Catholic) seriousness and he talks, on and on about his mother, as if we don't have one and will never understand. "I am rich," he says, like it helps. He's more drunk than anything else, a filthy, decaying inebriation.
We duck and weave, but it's true NO ONE talks to him and perhaps we are the first in a long while. He clings to us. It's embarrassing. At some point, a banality I dug up from the self-help recesses of my mind inspires him to rage. He spits in drunken fury, profanities like tar, and then just as fast, he is sobbing on Lennie's shoulder, great wracking convulsions of loneliness and incomprehension of how gay became apparently so... nice for those younger than he.
We eventually shake him off, and before I leave the bar, I see Vasco again, swaying on a drunken ship of sorts. He has an impish smile, as if he's enjoying himself there - just for a moment.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

All lesbo Brides of Saint Anthony for 2011!


In a shocking move by the Lisbon municipality, next year the long-standing (well, since 1958, and excluding some years when they forgot to do it) tradition of the Saint Anthony brides, namely of marrying dirtpoor and ignorant citizens for free according to repressive Catholic hocus-pocus - will be totally LESBIONIC!!!
Mayor António Costa announced his decision in a media whirlwind, saying: "Frankly, these deluded idiots may be poor, but I for one am growing tired of these heifers being so goddamn ugly! Jesus Christ! Now girl on girl action - that's hot, right?"
When further pressed, Mayor Costa denied he would extend the invition to male couples. Appearing unusually piqued at the non-plussed journalist of football newspaper A Bola, he exited the room, screaming: "Are you calling me a faggot? Dare say that again and I'll make you my bitch till Portugal actually win the World Cup!"
Viva as (muitas) Noivas de Santo António!

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

B R U T A L I S T




Architecture as expression of male id. Architecture as imposition of masculine form on a female landscape. Architecture as penis envy. FuckMEtecture!

Thursday, May 27, 2010

You Give Love, A Bad Name?







Some images from my Art Pavilion, Allove Festival May 2010

On the Allove Festival Facebook page, a fag slammed the freaks for giving homosexuals 'a bad image'.
An African statesman who shares a political platform with Kofi Annan, Tony Blair and Bob Geldof has condemned homosexuality as an "abomination", dismissing individuals' right to privacy with the riposte: "You want to make love to a horse?"
In Malawi, Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga were sentenced to 14 years in separate jails for conducting an openly gay relationship.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"We are showroom dummies, Christopher"


Seville, Spain,
May 8 2010










- Did you see that? He totally checked me out, a five full minutes. He mentally undressed me, before he went away back to his girlfriend. Hot.
- Shut up Christopher. You're getting on my nerves.
- I was the best thing that ever happened to you.
- Oh yeah? You don't even touch me no more.
- I can't, dummy.
- You crack me up. You used to, when no one was looking.
- Things change.
- Now you only feel alive, if some stranger looks at you.
- Their eyes on me make me burn inside.
- I remember the time you crossed the window to kiss me. And almost got caught.
- I feel trapped in this relationship. I think we should spend some time apart.


- I saw this coming. Don't you know, we're not real? If we burn, we melt.
- I'm willing to take that risk. I spoke to someone in Window Dressing. I'm sorry. You're being moved to the Children's Department. You're going to be Elizabeth's husband. Remember her? At 9 o'clock, they switch off the lights in there. You know what happens after dark...
- No Christopher, you can't do that to me!
- I just did.
- N o o o o o o o o o ooooooo...!

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell"


dispatches from 2009, Norfolk VA, USA: navy town

Bill, a handsome black Texan navy officer standing well over six feet tall, taps his lapel which is striated with two rows of colorful stripes. It reminds me of a barcode, his price point to the nation, but of course I don’t say that. He wants me to understand and carefully explains all they signify. “This one here is for my third term of service in Iraq.” It was to be his last and he was grateful. There was a time when soldiers would only get two tours of duty, but that was then. He was just 27. “And this…” he points to the last strip, a little red rectangle with a metal pin beneath shaped in an ‘S’, “stands for ‘sharpshooter’. Hitting a target at least 130 times out of 140. Not here,” he motions to my outer body, “but right here.” The heart. “I could hit you at least 130 times, no, 140 times, in the heart. Every time. Pow, pow, pow. I wouldn’t miss the once.”

Bill is a sweet-natured, frivolous guy with a gap between his two front teeth that is endearingly goofy. I imagine he has Stories too, but I am awkward and don’t pry; they would be too fresh, still weeping blood. They are Scars. I am an enabler, because I don’t have to think about the war; I avoid it mostly in the news, at the movies, and don’t particularly want my military friends to tell me about it. It’s far away in a foreign land. I’m not dodging sniper fire or watching enemy planes glide over my head. Obviously I prefer it that way.

Bill also is a gay man. I once saw pictures of his family back in Texas. To my jaundiced eye, the faded Polaroids are a bit strange; the Texan suburban landscape is a sun-bleached husk, and they all look at the camera as if it’s about to steal their souls. Yet the moment is touching, discernible in their awkwardness. He isn’t out to them, and believes it would break his father’s heart, I think. His ‘day job’, forget it, though they find a way for them to express themselves, even in that rotten egg of a war, frying on booby-trapped asphalt. He relishes telling me about fucking a firefighter on base. Bill was in Iraq eight full months this time, so maybe it’s not such a big deal getting laid the once, but the sheer resourcefulness of male sexuality never ceases to amaze me at least, I have to say. Maybe I’ll tell you my stories, some time.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Big Volcano of Burning Love!


We are marooned.
Stuck at airports.
As the earth arround us shifts, breaks, we seem to grow ever smaller. A fina layer of dust accumulates in our bodies. Sometimes it's so difficult to breathe.
All we have taken fror granted slips away. Xtina Aguilera's new song is a raging disappointment.
Now is the time, boys.
THINK WITH YOUR DICK.
There are the legions of unemployed. The jaded. The nouveaux pauvres. Hold them. Grab their asses. Show me yours, I'll show you mine. Bend over, and feel their pain.

Go out into the street. Show them what you got. Rub two sticks together and create fire!

David Wojnarovicz

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Crisis? What crisis?


Jonny McGovern & various waifs and strays, East Village, NYC, 2003

Ever tried making the beautiful out of the damned?

Ain't no money to mention? Use your head. Give head if you have to: Sex it up!

Ain't no sunshine? Spraypaint a big sun on a wall and put up a lemonade stand.

Here in the bottom left corner of Europe am putting up one helluva lemonade stand: an Art Pavilion with painting and film and fun and performers and if someone decides to get frisky in the middle of it all, well I'll just put a price tag on it and call it Art!

The place: Allove Festival
May 14, 15 2010 Algarve Portugal

http://www.allovefestival.com

Photograph courtesy of J.Rupp. With thanks.