About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

5

The Ultimate: Etta Without Tears

By
Hilton Als
– January 23, 2012

The incomparable Karen Baccouche, sometimes known professionally as Karen Binns. Self-creation par excellence. Native of Brooklyn, New York, lately of London, a fashion stylist, publisher, and the fine possessor of a language one is not likely to hear from anyone else, let alone with crimson lips. I would spend the rest of my life being her Boswell if she would have me, but she’s fairly Swiftian-by-way-of-Lester-Young herself, so, why should she? She writes as she walks, in the air. She’s the strutting embodiment of what Truman Capote was trying to get at with Miss Bobbitt in his short story, “Children on Their Birthdays,” with a little of his “Miriam,” thrown in, too, but only Miriam’s white dress. But scribblers live less than Miss Binns. We grew up within moments of each other in East New York; I wish I had known her then, which is to say been the happy beneficiary of her utterly realistic and ever hopeful eye, which never shuts the truth out, along with her sideways way of talking. Had I known her as a child, I would have grown up braver that I was, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have hid my childhood notebooks filled with observations about our neighborhood in her presence because Karen would have saved me, I am always looking for her rescue, I always listen for the sound of her voice when she says, as she said to her client, Tori Amos, once: “Chile, let’s push past this moment of horror and have some mushroom polenta.” We met in the New York of the Odeon, lines on the table, lines to get into Madame Rosa’s, where Karen was the door person from time to time as she worked to establish a career as a fashion stylist. With it all, Karen has never been anything less than herself, the kind of woman who, blonde to blonde, would have mothered Etta with a sidelong glance and a “That’s dry,” or “Chile, please,” when Etta’s men started acting up, or Etta herself. The New York where we met: no one wanted to live in Tribeca, it felt like a world filled with bats, an ominous moon, a little drug hustle you’d rather forget. Cabs, and street lights that didn’t make anything brighter except the potholes, and manhole covers. In that world, Karen, a girl’s girl, and her late friend, Mercedes, an actress, rose above the steam that drifted up and out of those manholes, like gossiping ghosts, and those two New York City girls walked straight through those phantoms and didn’t take any shit because why should they? There were other things to stick to the heels of your shoes: the vibration of the music at The World, or Save the Robots, or late night dish over bistro food at Florent before embarking on the real work that lay ahead: taking off one’s make up, taking the phone off the receiver, to bed. I rarely see Karen these days, but continue to “live,” as she might say, when I have news of her. The last time I saw her was over on the lower East Side, and she was in the company of a friend who looked so much like Mercedes, I couldn’t help but comment on it, somewhat tactlessly. Karen thought about it for a moment, her freckles got darker, and she said, shaking her head and speaking for all of us: “Chile, I’m just trying to hold on.”

 

0

For Miriam “Marie” Dorothea Edwards Als

By
Hilton Als
– January 21, 2012

Two songs that apply to her maternal philosophy. From the lyrics: “Something big is going to happen, my dear. Bigger than mountains. It’s freedom.” And: “Sounds. Of life. Are heard. Everywhere. Sounds. Of life. And love. And despair….You gotta keep movin’ on. So, make your choice. You go, and do your thing. You will find your grass will turn green. Believe.” I believe it all. Thank you, Mrs. Als. Welcome—and good-bye—and thank you.

0

On Janet Malcolm

By
Hilton Als
– January 9, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

These comments were written on the occasion of Janet Malcolm’s show of collages, now on exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

VERY WELL THEN. Let us turn our attention to the question of fiction. And how it stands, presumably, on the other side of truth. And how the waters that separate fact from fiction are muddy, and always have been. And how that muddiness is the result of truth and fantasy living in rather close proximity to one another in our respective minds. We’re built that way, to hear all words as stories, but eventually our incessant internal moralizing insists we separate truth from legend, as if such a thing can be done, but we’re built that way, too, to not leave well enough alone, to categorize and moralize, separating that which we deem correct from that which we dismiss as wrong, because we must cut the world down to our size in order to manage living in it, but what does it mean to define this or that action as wrong or right? What does it mean to live anything as impossibly fucked and chaotic as life in a “correct” way? Of course, most of us exist with the compunction to be a good citizen. And that is the only right—to love, and to protect hearth and home. But how does correctness—the good citizen angle—get perverted by the need to label, say, this or that other form of love as “wrong”? Sometimes those good citizens define certain modes of thinking as being incorrect, and threatening, too. The imagination for one. Why is fantasy often regarded with distrust? Is living in the real and the good, and living in one’s imagination, mutually exclusive? Marianne Moore longed for “literalists of the imagination,” who could create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” And yet so many of us spend our time trying to build real ponds to contain those frogs—when we’re not trying to kill them, that is. We reduce the world to a series of literal-minded propositions, the better to define or describe it, eventually coming up with what? Journalism and cant. But the waters that separate fact from fiction are filled with little fishes, and the little fishes have bits of mesmerizing glint on their tails, and sometimes in their eyes. You could call the glint lies. Or the shiny, inspiring catalysts that hook the imagination. When Daniel Defoe stood on the banks of the Orinoco in his mind, he saw the truth of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the fact that it grew out of several real lives, Alexander Selkirk’s for one. Selkirk was a Scottish castaway who ended up on a remote island in Chile and lived to tell the tale. And then there was Robert Knox, whose account of being abducted by the King of Ceylon was published in 1659. By the time Defoe, a former journalist, published his best-known novel—which is widely regarded as one of the first, “pure” fictions—the truth would not leave him alone. You may recall Robinson, and his desire, always, to leave England for the unknown—a world of waves, and loneliness, and paganism, and sand, and cannibalism, and slavery: a “sensational” tale filled with sensations. Like the best art, Robinson Crusoe is a collage, a marriage of fact and fiction, a universe of the real and the imagined that only a former journalist could have come up with, since journalists—certainly the smart ones—live with the question of veracity, always, and the question, always, of what makes a truthful account of anything. Journalism becomes an art when the writer dares him or herself to ask if reality itself is a form of fiction. Or, more specifically, how real is this or that, given that it’s being filtered through a decidedly subjective perception? Is the sky turning silver moments after seeing it, describing it, as blue mixed with white and flecks of gold as true as the blue sky one saw moments before? Are the “ums” and various hesitations that punctuate regular speech fictionalized when they’re cleaned up in a magazine? The waters that separate fact from fiction are muddy and filled with fish the color of kelp, and their gills are a brighter color than that fish’s green, particularly after one realizes that the most interesting art of the twenty-first century is based not on the truth or fiction winning out—which is to say documentaries or various forms of fabulation—but an admixture of both.

Janet Malcolm’s work as a journalist who writes about the fiction in real lives, and as a visual artist of the very highest sophistication, is at the center of the questions illustrated above. Indeed, her work in both mediums asked those questions much more astutely than most other writers have, or can. In our rapidly expanding world of truth in a second, no one can get away much with a lie. But it’s the human impulse to make things up. Appropriation—collage falls under that heading—is a fact-based art. Take Sherrie Levine for example. In the nineteen-eighties she re-photographed Walker Evans dust bowl era pictures, signed them, and made them her own. There was a collage of feeling in this seemingly academic exercise about originality. For starters there’s the artist who loves Walker Evans, and who aspires to “copy” him—a feeling no artist is unfamiliar with as they sit sketching a Renoir at the Met, aspiring to be Renoir. And if Sherrie Levine is not to your taste, think about Joseph Cornell, whose dreams of movie stars, of the glamour of silence, of women, inspired him to re-construct all that in his own work. One story about Cornell: In 1931, the “B” movie star, Rose Hobart, was featured in a very bad film called East of Borneo. But Cornell didn’t dislike the film, nor its narrative of adventure: Robinson Crusoe, but starring Depression-era Americans in pith helmets. Indeed, the artist found Hobart’s portrayal of a girl lost in the wiles of wild palm “exoticism” moving enough to recreate her. So, he re-edited East of Borneo, and put Hobart at the center of his imagination, a damsel not so much in distress, but more alive because of our attention. As a collagist of superior skill and feeling—indeed, could a collage not be regarded as a kind of film still, an outtake from a coming attraction on the screen of the artist’s mind?—Malcolm creates imaginary gardens but with real newsprint and letters and photographs in them. In her recent work, she also imagines other real life artists. A significant presence in these recent pieces is the German born Jewish artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970). In 1949 Lost Everything and Too Clinical, Malcolm uses copies of photographs of Hesse’s sculptures not so much to call attention to the sculptural elements in her own work—the building of layers with space as another layer—but as a visual element that recalls how Hesse’s early work came about: through appropriation. Living in the Ruhr valley in the mid 1960’s, Hesse found her voice as an artist when she started sculpting out of the materials she was literally living with in the factory she and her then husband shared: life as the event, with art as its record. Hesse—a Jew displaced by World War II, and then further emotionally displaced by her mother’s suicide—was, despite her past, an artist who was deeply engaged by, and admiring of, the art making process; her work conveys there is joy to be had in making things, and wit, too. But there is sadness shading the arched eyebrow: no artist ever feels they “got” whatever it is they mean to express, not completely. And despite the decisiveness of Malcolm’s line—one gets the sense that a piece’s various elements have only been put down after many, many drafts, and reconsiderations: time and revision as part of life’s collage—the space surrounding her images, and bits of colored paper, or yellowing paper, is filled with a quite deliberate absence, like something abandoned but not forgotten, not ever, like bodies we have loved but can love no longer. In this series, sex, one of life’s more ephemeral and intense activities, happens, but it happens through language—a doctor or patient describing what it means to his subjects, or a patient to himself. In one note a patient writes: “Shelley Winters—special charm in her face—no beasty feelings about her, just charming feelings—now for about four months.” But when does desire not bring out a “beasty” feeling, especially when it’s the performer’s job to seduce? One tries to repress one’s “beasty” feelings the better to be socialized. But into what kind of world? A world of repression with its arbitrary rules vis-à-vis what constitutes a lie, or the truth, or attraction? Malcolm’s desire to order the world is not so much the desire to re-create or control it as it’s an exploration of its various elements—those moments of being that are no more, and that were as true and fake as anything else. Grief and fiction are the central themes of her collages; the grief is real, the images are made up out of the real stuff of grief, which is to say artifacts from the past, a desire to not let go, and are the visual representations of the will to remember even as time erodes that will, and we are no more. But that’s not entirely true. The others that come after us remember us as Malcolm remembers her dead, or the not-known-at-all, their various fictions and facts intact as they swim in the muddying waters of what we erroneously describe as the real world. Read the rest of this entry »

1

Butt

By
Hilton Als
– December 31, 2011

Is Butt Magazine the greatest publication in the world? After a nearly two year hiatus, the magazine has returned to the stands, and its importance–it’s beauty and uniqueness–are more evident than ever: absence makes the eyes grow fonder. In part fiscally supported by small ads from merchants ranging from American Apparel to Marc Jacobs, Butt couldn’t make it on quarterly guest spots alone, and more or less suspended publication in 2010. While this dismayed various fans–“Where’s my ‘Butt’?–I for one was admiring of the co-publishers and co-editors, Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom’s, unwillingness to compromise. If they couldn’t publish their “magazine for homosexuals,” as they bill it, in the way they wanted, why put out anything at all? Finances must have improved, because now we’re the happy owner of Butt No 29, with a cover by the largely London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans–a portrait of a beautiful young boy named Karl, the sides of his thin head beautifully shaven. Working out of Amsterdam, Butt is as much about dick and ass as it is about language. Printed on pink paper that always seems to have an inky smell, l love the literalness of the story titles: “Normal Bodies,” “Embarrassing Interview With A One Night Stand,” “Boring Interview with a Random Gay Stranger.” What you read in Butt is what you get. The Q and A format is the magazine’s standard, but the contents aren’t. Whether a spread, so to speak, is devoted to gingery drummers, ears, or guys with a plush fetish, Butt details aspects of sexuality, of play, that wouldn’t necessarily occur to one, like the guy who gets off on covering his body with sports socks. Fetishes are interesting to read about, but repetition is boring to deal with in conversation. What I tolerate in Butt, I couldn’t take over the phone. Looking at Butt, I fall down the rabbit hole of sexuality. The simple headlines and questions help get me there; my mind works overtime to fill that flat language up. Do I like butt? I am falling down the hairy rabbit hole of indiscriminate slightly shitty smelling ass looking at myself, my needs, my “issues.” My mother didn’t have much of a butt; she was teased for having a body like a twelve year old boy, albeit one with large breasts. Did I like my mother’s butt? Do I have my mother’s butt? My mother’s butt–why does Mia Farrow’s body, not to say butt, in “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in particular make me remember how much my mother must have dreamt because her children became dreamers–one of them even dreams for a living. He’s doing it right now. In “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Mia Farrow plays a woman who’s abused by the exigencies of the so called real world; her kindness is a burden that others want to abuse her for. She has no butt to speak of, but what little she has finds itself sitting, as often in possible, in movie theatres, where she falls in love with worlds not her own. As she watches a movie set in a black and white atmosphere, Mia Farrow can dream the abuse heaped on her almost non-existent butt away. She can be loved, but in the dark, and at a distance. Sometimes men look at one another’s butts this way–in the dark, and at a distance. Does the dark make a butt more alluring? Can you feel a butt without seeing it? If a butt falls in the forest, can you still hear it? Would you still want it? Butt magazine features personality profiles, too. John Waters. Rufus Wainwright, etc. But it’s the unexplored that piques my interest–and the documentation by people like Tillmans and Marcelo Krasilcic, who act as the magazine’s house photographers. (They’re Annie Leibovitz at “Rolling Stone,” in the seventies, but only if she knew she was gay, and Jann Wenner, too.) Their pictures aren’t a la Deborah Turberville atmospheric, but more obviously documentary-like, albeit framed by kink and unusual beauty. In this issue, for instance, a handsome Brazilian drummer named Adriano who works with a lesbian band does nude yoga for the benefit of the camera, but you don’t see his junk–and very little of his butt. It’s his beautiful eyes and not his butt that take up much of the portrait (in my eyes at least) and spell a kind of trouble. He will love me, but only for a night. Truth to tell, I will only let him love me for a night. He will love my butt because I have high, proud, Negro buttocks, unlike my mother, who had something else in addition to her movie logic. If Adriano touched my buttocks with those thoughts in mind–here is my Negro, here are his buttocks–would I flinch? Would my butt collapse? Would I be put off by his fetishization of my butt? We meet for coffee the afternoon following the night Adriano feels my butt for the first time. He wants to know what’s wrong with me, why didn’t I call him back? How to tell him that my butt felt what he didn’t say? I want to show him other butts, not at all Negro, but high and proud just the same, butts he might fancy just as well as mine, butts that are free of the knotty race issue, which is to say, free of me. Would white butts, say, mean as much to Adriano, my butt lover, the drummer who can’t see the forests for the Negroes falling in trees, as my butt? Adriano sips his coffee as I try to fuck with his butt perspective. I begin by showing him white butts that are prominent, like a Negro’s. He is quiet. I take in Adriano’s eyes, his bare butt in his underwearless jeans. I want to break up with him but I can’t: separation insults me. I don’t want to separate from anyone, I don’t want to lose one memory. The quiet loveliness and light in Adriano’s eyes reminds me of other eyes, other butts, and one set of eyes and buttocks in particular, both belonging to the beautiful former dancer Joseph Lennon. Youtube reacquainted me with what I shall never forget: Joe’s swift and slow poeticism on the dance floor. The first clip features Joe partnering a woman he worked with a number of times over the years, the dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage. Karole sports a sleeveless sweater, and Joe, a brown leotard. I met them after Karole had split from Merce, where she was, along with Valda Setterfield and Carolyn Brown, one of Cunningham’s five or six peerless female dancers. One of the things I loved about watching Cunningham, always, was how nearly PHYSICALLY impossible his work was for men. No matter how “skinny,” men simply have bigger thigh and ass muscles bless them then women, not as long a reach, or as high an arch (in the foot, often not in the eyebrow, either). If you’re a boy, you’re just weightier which, on stage, particularly in dance, translates as slower, certainly in terms of the speed with which Cunningham saw movement in space. For men to perform Cunningham, they have to accept and deal with the limitations of the male body, and what their ass can and cannot do. This can result in audience sympathy or ridicule. I think Cunningham must have felt the former because he relied on dancers like Joe to push past what they were born with while supporting extraordinary physical creatures like Armitage, who cut through space for their male partners, allowing them in to rebuild it as they passed through on something like pointe. Watch how Karole leans on Joe, and how he moves past her as he moves with her. Free your mind and your ass will follow. Part of Cunningham’s great genius, of course, was in knowing how to partner his dancers up. Not to mention finding those artists who could make cinema stars of them, too. “Channels/Inserts,” was directed by Charles Atlas, who was not only one of the first videographers, but the artist responsible for Cunningham’s costuming, and lighting, for nearly two decades. (At the tine this film was made he was also Joe’s partner.) I first saw Joe and Karole perform together at the Dance Theatre Workshop in a piece that Karole choreographed, and that Charlie dressed, lit, and more or less directed. In that piece, Karole wore black stilletos, and Joe wore a “Saturday Night Fever”-like white suit and black shirt, thus capitalizing on his innate glamour, a presence that said everything through being; he didn’t need to say much; he had himself, and an audience of eyes that rested on his butt, then his eyes, then his beautiful black curls, as I do now. And tomorrow the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as formed by the late master performs its final gig in time for the New Year. Butt Magazine costs 9.90 cents in the U.S., and is available at St. Mark’s Books. Just buy it.

 

3

Soulkiss: The House Band at Valda’s Restaurant and Cafe

By
Hilton Als
– December 2, 2011

Below, Soulkiss covering the Nona Hendryx penned “Going Down Makes Me Shiver,” which appeared on LaBelle’s 1976 album, “Chameleon.” But can a song appear? Patti and the girls do it no better. But it is not a competition. These boys are LaBelle’s progeny, and Laura Nyro’s as well. A dream of unity realized. What would have moved Mrs. Vreeland as I called Valda in particular: the black man in the kilt and baseball cap, retreating halfway through the set, overwhelmed by the lead singer’s understanding and grace, not to mention the boy in the green shirt who resembles our departed friend, Carlos Arevalo, himself a singer. And what can one say about the lead singer that he does not say himself out of his own deep feeling and understanding for Nona’s writing, “Shiver,” being a (barely disguised, for gays at least) pean to lesbian love, now, in Soukiss’ collective voice, a kind of anthem to queer love in all its manifestations. And then there are their bodies: not standard show business shapes housing/protecting each member of Soulkiss from their monumental sensitivity. Squinting the eye of one’s mind, one can imagine each of the singers as little boys standing in the middle of their respective bedrooms, holding a hairbrush, as they sang, hoping their homo dreams did not get out and would out as Patti-love and their own emotions coursed through their difference. Scrolling through Youtube further (which is how I found this truly exceptional group) I found them singing another bit of Nona’s reporting about women’s bodies in love: “You Turn Me On,” from LaBelle’s 1974 “Nightbirds.” What the boys will learn, and are learning from Patti, Nona, and Sarah: to treat the songs as monologues, to act, and let the voice breathe meaning in between the lyrics. Soulkiss: I will be certain to have Mrs. Vreeland follow their music anywhere. And I hope she asks me to go along. As Gertrude Stein once said: “You can leave, but only if you take me with you.”

LaBelle “You Turn Me On”

1

The Flow

By
Hilton Als
– November 28, 2011

[nggallery id=14]
For me, the Fluxus art movement of the nineteen-sixties, stands next to the American surrealist cause–Joseph Cornell, Marcel on 14th Street, etc–as one of the more continually compelling moments in contemporary art. As the subject of the beautiful show at MOMA, an institution not ignorant of the fact that, at its heart, Fluxus wasn’t interested in institutions at all, one also feels a certain sadness looking at the work, given that Fluxus was about shared impermanence–the art work that disappeared after it was produced, or as it was being produced–and museums are about things being fixed, identified, the vitrine. But I do not mean to be unkind about this show, which not only saddened me but inspired me to think of my being a viewer as a kind of performance, a concept that was first introduced to me by the artist and musician Kim Gordon, who once asked how an onstage interview I’d done had gone; she called it an interview-performance. And she was right to identify it as that because after you get up there in a nice suit or whatever, clutching prepared questions–the so-called script–with lights and what not on you and the subject, it is a performance, and I remember how, after Kim asked me about the conversation, I started thinking how any number of activities could be identified as a performance, you know? Laying in bed in Northampton one snowy night, I started to conceptualize what I called paper performances–that is, little words and maybe just scratches on pieces of paper that would amount to a writing performance, I don’t even know if this would include a dream or whatever, but I liked thinking of writing as a kind of pirouette, the pencil as an instrument. Or a beautifully worn pink toe show. Fluxus took it’s name from the Latin, and means “to flow.” Inspired by John Cage’s “chance” compositions of the nineteen-sixties, the Lithuanian-born artist, George Maciunas, organized what is arguably the first Fluxus exhibition at a gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that basically challenged artists to come up with stuff that was as indeterminate and far reaching as Cage’s sound/non-sound. Macuinas’ manifesto was a gorgeous poem of defiance: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, he wrote. He went on. “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE in art, PROMOTE living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dillettantes [sic] and professionals.” Here, here! I wondered if Macinuas would be my performance boyfriend and walk me through the show, so taken was I by his ideas, even though our love would be otherworldly: my performance boyfriend died in 1978. Still, I have been known to fall for this kind of crankiness–it offsets my charm and likability and prevents people from exploiting either: the audience gets excited and scared when you have a “mean” boyfriend. I know in my heart George would have no problem being that for me: he was a Scorpio, born on November 8th. But let’s leave astrology aside for the moment; it is too fixed. When you walk into the show, there’s a hilarious Macinuas film that consists of famous names–Warhol, Ono (Yoko was one of the very first Fluxus artists and is represented in the MOMA show with a lovely meditative film of her eye opening and closing but mostly closing) and other artists. I don’t know if my performance boyfriend meant the film as a kind of put on, but I was amused by it, as was my companion for the afternoon, the author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, appropriately fetching as always, this time in a red dress. And I wondered after I found the little Jonas Mekas movie seen below what Sharifa might have looked like cooking dumplings with George in the movie–my performance girlfriend with my performance boyfriend, both in an activity or performance that pre-dates Rirkrit Tiravanija’s noodles by some thirty years–since she is, after all, a movie star, if the definition of a movie star is someone you want to look at all the time, that is, a person who is capable of generating feelings all around not necessarily through speech but through gestures, and companionable silence. We broke that silence when we laughed at several of the pieces in the show, which are difficult to describe because that is the nature of Fluxus; description is too bourgeois in the face of so much spirit; it would block the flow. In any case, I remembered, while looking at various pieces–I was intensely admiring of a set of photographs of an audience flying paper airplanes–of an art work I had seen long ago, when I was a boy. It was created by the British-based artists Gilbert and George in 1971 and they called it a postcard sculpture. On it was a drawing of the artists looking out a window at the falling snow, and it said, in part: “As we began to look we felt ourselves being taken into a sculpture of overwhelming purity life and peace a rare and new art piece…Thank you for sharing this moment with us.” The Fluxus show was like being taken into a sculpture not so much of overwhelming purity–you can’t have that feeling in a museum–but an atmosphere of a rare and new art piece of my own creation, and it had to do with words as a limiting element. As I’ve said, Sharifa and I didn’t speak much at all while we looked at the significant ephemera, and it occurred to me that that moment in time, of not speaking and with emotions flowing, was exactly where I wanted to be, and was the threshold of where I am now: of sharing moments no one should pay for. Not with words. Not with avoidance. Not with recrimination. Not with regret. Not with anything short of presence. This evening, walking home after a performance, I stopped into the St. Marks Bookstore; I was not weighed down by my silence; only words can do that to me these days. Silence permeates my thinking because its a way of not obscuring my internal mise en scene. I was looking at magazines when the young man behind the information counter asked how I was, they hadn’t seen me in a while, where was I, in Massachusetts, oh, I was teaching? His mother had dropped out of Wellesley where I was teaching, they had a little money for me, the book I had produced had sold a few copies, could they have more copies, ten or fifteen to sell, wait, they had a check to pay me for what they’d sold. And on the walk to the register I saw people I’ve known for years even though they’re old because I didn’t want that boy’s enthusiasm to be minimized by the breath of pleasantries I didn’t want to exchange if exchange is the word when somewhere deep down you know the people you’ve known for years don’t actually like you. And at the cash register the lady asked if the store had ever given me a discount, another gift, and I thought of my performance ghost of a boyfriend, George, and how this exchange about something I’d published and let out into the world with a minimum of control–you can’t call me a distributor, you can’t call me a museum–was such a proud moment for me because the experience of publishing that book resulted in these thoughts and exchanges, that boy behind the counter who’d always looked as if I’d upset his day, suddenly becoming, with a smile, my new mean performance boyfriend with a heart of gold in his mind let alone body, and how his attention gave me the strength to avoid those people who never liked me anyway but I would feel obliged to talk to and be polite to anyway because it’s in my mother’s DNA, which is to say mine, and the anger about that social falsehood is all mine, but in any case how Fluxus were these moments, how “Thank you for sharing this moment,” was it to remember and almost forget and then memorialize and walk away from this flow of feelings?

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »