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Enjoy. Work hard. Be creative. Always.

It's up to you and me.

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

THIS BOY

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.

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

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

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.