Categories
art Gay Hollywood

Brice Dellsperger

After an uneventful day, excepting a visit from a 28-year-old, sober, HIV positive, gay mafia moll with a remarkable story…I braved the cold and walked from the East Village to an art opening in Soho.

Team Gallery on Grand Street is owned by a grumpy, reptilian gay guy called Jose Freire.  I was introduced to him yonks ago by Max Wigram when I tried unsuccessfully to buy a piece by Ryan McGinley at Frieze.

As miserable as Jose may be…he has great taste and last nights show was no exception.

An extraordinary video installation by French artist Brice Dellsperger.

I met my sweet and excruciatingly handsome friend Leonard the young buff Buffalo boy who seemed a little overwhelmed by both the crowd and the show.  We ate dinner at Prune.  I had the monkfish liver and a very poorly executed lamb steak.  He had prawns and veal.  We did not stick around for desert or coffee.

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The Team gallery show was called:  Refreshing Fassbinder…and others.

The show continues Dellsperger’s longtime fascination with the psychosexual in contemporary cinema.

Body Double 22, after Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was perfectly delicious to watch.  A mesmerizing, non-linear partial restaging of Stanley Kubrick’s thriller Eyes Wide Shut

Body double refers to Dellspergers’s performers (he and long time collaborator Jean-Luc Verna) standing in for and lip-synching to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

The films examine issues of authenticity using digital slippage, irregular lip-synching, and crudely constructed sets and costumes…channelling Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman.   Gay art cinema.

I loved Jean-Luc Verna’s performance which is tinged with menacing humor..as only a tranny can.

Body Double 27, 2010 is a three-channel video installation which, of course reminded me of my own film AKA.  The same scene repeated, side-by-side, with several different actors playing the same role.

This piece was particularly beautiful and more than adequately fills the main part of the gallery.

In Fassbinder’s film a man lusts after his co-worker Anton, who says, “Too bad you are not a woman”, to which the man responds by becoming a transvestite.

Dellsperger’s film is a repetition of a scene where a transvestite furtively approaches an anonymous man.  The man is always unresponsive.  The transvestite cries on his own.  Dellsperger’s powerful looping fragments form an unrelenting examination of unrequited love.

Dellsperger revisits themes of gender, destabilized identity and homosexuality in the Hollywood mainstream.

If you can, go see this show.

Categories
Death Rehab

Wake Up!

Kristian’s death has affected me more than I might admit.   Rather foolishly I had a picture of him on my phone that lit up every time somebody called.  I deleted it today-I was making myself sadder than I needed to be.

Found myself looking at pornography last night-late-trying to soothe myself-trying to throw a warm blanket over my feelings.   It didn’t work.  I still woke up this morning overwhelmed with fear.  I wrote to John:

5am.  Waking up in huge amounts of fear.  Crushing, overwhelming fear. Think I may have come to the end of the line. Cannot go on.  Making bad decisions.  Can’t face anything.  Financial ruin facing me.  Nowhere to run to.   Don’t trust anyone. Obsessed.  Looked at porn this morning to try to sooth me-did not work.  Nothing works.  Do not see any more life ahead of me.

As dawn broke over the mountain I expected those particular ghouls to vanish, yet, those pesky demons lingered all day-like they were waiting patiently to claim me.

My father died when he was 53.

Found myself looking at pornography..

Now, that sounds like it happened to me rather than me searching around for that perfect porn moment.  Porn is like research, it’s scholarly, frustrating, intense.

Feeling desperately sad.  Not sobbing like when the Darling Big Dog was killed.

Cannot listen to Kate Bush or Soft Cell (remember listening with him) but rather strangely listening to the Spice Girls, which softens the edges-like having a wank.

Throwing the towel in.  “Goodbye my friend.”  Remember when we were best friends with Matt Rowe who wrote all those huge number one hits?    “Goodbye my friend.”   Remember New Years Eve at The Mercer Hotel in NYC with Melanie Sporty Spice and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?  Odd mixture that night?  What a night.

So I’m chatting with a friend about his childhood and he tells me that his father was sent to prison when he was 11 years old.  The only way he knew how to deal with the shame was to lie to his classmates.  He knew where his father was but told his friends that his father was on a business trip-he told lies because the truth was far too complicated.  Gosh, I related to that.  Lying to make life easier:  My father is on a business trip.  Telling palatable childish lies leading to a life of fantasy, pornography, disconnection.

It took me so long to let the truth set me free.  Now I try so hard to tell the truth.  Lyle brought word from England that I had a terrible temper.  Oh yes, I remember that.  My temper was a daily occurrence for so long.  Before I went to Sex Rehab I really had no idea why I was so angry-after sex rehab I fully understood why I was angry and the mechanism that controlled it.  So, to all that I shouted at and screamed at and made cry-I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong.

Sorry to repeat myself but..

When Kristian died suddenly a door opened into a world I considered closed to me.   I had considered suicide for as long as I can remember but never seriously.  Death, after all, is a very long time.  Suddenly there are enough fun people in the after life that I might have a good time.  Giggle with.   I am not scared of death-I was just scared of being bored when I got there-now with Kristian dead-death seems like a realistic option.  Holding the door open for me.

I am looking for clues for what might keep me alive?  What can I believe in?

This morning I heard John talking about being asleep and how much of the time I have been asleep.  I fall asleep when I first meet some one-a deep sleep.  I always thought that it was because I felt comfortable but now I see that it was to escape intimacy or worse that something might happen to me.

Moths in my clothes, little dog pawing at me…home sick for Whitstable, for Battersea Park..can we walk there together you and I?

Selling art-legitimate source of misery?  My friends didn’t want to buy my art.  They want to buy art from a legitimate source.  Funny.

Lying.  It’s a choice.  To tell the truth or lie?  It seems obvious doesn’t it?   Well, these muddled days, as Michael Moore reminded us when he picked up his Oscar, are ‘Lying times’.  Within a relationship there are all kinds of lies but I don’t want to tell HIM lies.  I just want him to know the truth.

The silence in the Malibu Mountains, the thudding base from the music playing in the apartment above my Hollywood apartment.   Both the silence and the interminable base making my head ache.   My head aches.

The questions that haunt me:  How could he have taken such a risk?   How can he be calling me to join him there and why am I listening?

One day I will write about FULL DISCLOSURE-a most unsavory practice.

I love you MR DARLING NYC-you are keeping me alive,  your love and your perfect smile are keeping the worst of these terrible demons from driving me to the gates of hell.

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