LONGTIME NO SEE

I remember when I first saw 'Longtime Companion' at the movies. I hated it. I was in my very early twenties, idealistic and opinionated. I was living in Lisbon, in Europe, and I and my arty friends had tongues making nests in our cheeks. My friend hated the movie even more. I had never been to New York City, and this was not how I wanted to see it - this gilded ghetto cage of fading white moneyed faces, (so telling, the Fire Island scenes of the Pines house floating above the foliage, the real world blotted out and invisible below). This ain't no hip hop. This ain't no No Wave or even new wave. It was operatic dinner parties and hi energy fizzling out. Blacks and hispanics and rice queens were not invited to the last days of disco, even if they soundtracked it. "The Saint Disease" it was first called, and that is a history I came to understand through work and personal experience.

The fact it was about people dying, a tide of accumulating rot, swelling and gaining strength, rolling over the darkening sky on the beach was the most distasteful part. I failed to have a heart for this peculiar, more monied-than-thou ghetto, even as they died faster and more painfully than the rest of us outside of it.

The ghetto never died in New York. It did become more inclusive, these days all can rest there and go to high tea. The Pines, if anything, is more monied than ever. Aids never went away either - it took on different shapes, it became the perfect cross-dresser. I watched 'Longtime Companion' again last night and I forgave it, because there was nothing to forgive. These people did die, and it had to have been horrible. This is New York, and all the movie wanted to do was show them and honour them. They deserved to flicker across the silver screen, because now they are gone, all gone.

i am this also

LINK TO ARTICLE IN dezanove.pt (PORTUGUESE)

I am an artist, a reality I still often find difficult to believe. The fact that I sit there, slumped dejectedly over a blank canvas (or whatever my chosen media might be that moment), and try and sell these doodles for monetary value still bewilders me to this day.

I won't deny it's fun though. And in some ways, I find getting to my public as interesting as the work itself. Selling a potentially explosive idea to as many people I can seems so positively audacious and powerful! That's why, for me, the parties and arty, wily shenanigans I have been involved with over the years, CUE VIDEO, initially in New York City, via Virginia, lately in Lisbon, where there is a tangible whiff of creative excitement in the air, seem as legitimate as any pretty picture I may paint.

Curating an entire exhibition of (wince) queer art seems like the ultimate confidence trick to me. I imagined no one would want it, least of all the artists I approached. Well, there are 17 of us, just in the first go round, some pretty damn well-known, so at the very least a lot of alcohol will get consumed the opening night.

I hope to begin commenting on the individuals' work as we go along here.

CRONENBERG CREAM PIE (New York Stories)

As bugs do, we do.
In order to survive, we tear apart; our stomach juices dissolve resistant flesh. We cause unimaginable pain to live.
Our amuse-bouches, the food on our table, all its custard yellows and foamy oxygenated whites, once bitten or broached become a casualty of our body horror, like everything else we brush against in the city. Food, don't touch me. You disgust me. But still, we desire it, ingest and absorb it willingly, unlike bugs (apparently in our sleep we inadvertently eat up to eight a year) and sperm (ditto).
It only seems repulsive if it dangles from our chin in plain view. We flinch, if it lands on our bare legs in summer. No surprise then, if some people get off on food.
He always had a can or two of whipped spray cream in his refrigerator, and not much else, so naturally I was curious. There were tentative dating questions. Guys tend to get straight to the point. Not for us the agonised do-I-tell-or-don't-I? of heterosexual couples. For us, sex should be like test-driving a Ferrari. Sometimes, you want to go real fast.
So, on a couple of occasions, the whipped spray cream came into play, standing proud and erect on the bedside table. I soon found out that in the real, sexualised world of food, it's not dainty dollops of strawberries and cream on your nipples, till you squeal with delight. It's slathering you with honey, and letting the ants come get you. You're sushi, raw. It's filling your mouth with so much of that fucking cream you choke. Panic. Now that's hot.
Still, it wasn't enough, apparently. We had to go faster, faster still.
One morning, I realised this was to be a special occasion. Not that it was anyone's birthday, or some Jewish holiday, but in his mind he had slow-cooked me to the point of perfection, my flesh spry to the prick of the fork.
My hands were tied behind my back. Now that had happened before. He once shackled me to an office chair and proceeded to wheel me out his apartment into the corridor, locking me out. It wasn't for long, and neither did I complain, because boy, wasn't it funny?!
Jesus, sometimes I am such a cypher for the desires of others. I guess that's what makes me a writer. Are we all choking, tied up naked somewhere, at least us good ones?
Then he blindfolded me.
I was led - oh, I forgot to mention, we were both naked - to the bathroom the size of a small New York closet. A stool had been placed centrestage in the tub, and I was instructed to sit on it. I did as I was told. Yes, of course I was a little nervous. I didn't think he was a psycho, no. His hands around my throat, his taste for creative breath deprivation were mere parlour games to stave off the ennui, I believed. But I was... on edge this time, I'll admit. The spray cream, from a vertical position, was not really working. He couldn't attain the volume he desired, the all-important discomfort, the weight I would sink under. Telling me not to go away - that sense of humour again! - I heard him slip off into the kitchen the size of a small New York closet, from where the sound of clanking pots and pans, hubble and bubble reached my ears. Whatever this was, this was big. I was left there for ten minutes, alone with my thoughts. It was a chilly Sunday morning, I pondered. Must wrap up. He had an old, cantankerous cat I remembered, and it was probably darting around his feet, expecting titbits. My mum and dad far away, over the ocean. I pictured them. This, they probably wouldn't understand.
He came back and promptly emptied a bucketful of cream over my head. Vanilla, I think. I was invisible beneath it suddenly, the colour of yellow mud, my eyes, my mouth popping like a fish, all gone. His hands all over this saccharine deluge, investigating me as it dripped down my cracks and crevices. Even blindfolded, I knew how interesting I must have been. I was no longer form, but food, a cakehole, a perfect sugarstorm. I might have said "Ohmygod" but really there was nothing to say. For I was nothing. I was all surface. He was besotted. He was hard, I knew, because he was jabbing me with it. And I thought, so this is it, this is being objectified, this is being a woman, this is being a child under a pedophile's leer, and I like it, except how can this end, I can't go around like this forever, can I? And then he ripped the blindfold off and I saw the one hand clamp back onto his big sex, and in the other was a cream pie, an expensive one to boot, perfect and perfectly round, a colour feast, a 20 dollar delight, and he threw it in my face, the moment foodies have all been waiting for, and then, of course, he came.