Categories
art

Billy Childish

Me and Billy at his Lehmann Maupin opening NYC 2015

I met Wild Billy Childish (William Hamper, Stephen Hamper) in September 1977. We met in the lobby of Medway College of Art, the first day of our Foundation Course and pretty much lived in each others pockets that year up on the hill overlooking Chatham and beyond.

I commuted from Whitstable to Chatham on the train wearing my mother’s green woollen tights and various punk get-ups. Braving a torrent of abuse. Bill was in a band called the Pop Rivets and interviewed Polly Styrene for his fanzine. He knew about Kurt Schwitters and German Expressionism and wood cutting and Celine’s Death On The Instalment Plan. He was very generous with what he knew and I was hungry to learn it.

When we left Medway… after a ten year pause we were friends for pretty much two decades. We collaborated on my performance art posters and I bought art from him when I had the money and he needed it.

I think he sent me every book he ever published, every album he ever pressed… and I have every punk fanzine he produced at Medway. He was a machine. Painting, printing, writing, singing, playing the guitar.

Charismatic bad girls flocked to him.

Billy’s girlfriend whilst at Medway was a beautiful woman called Rachel Waller who, when she was done with Billy, married the Olympian Steve Ovett.

While we were at Medway, Billy and Rachel took me under their wing. He recognised another tormented soul and she wanted a gang. However, he could be unashamedly homophobic and treated women as he saw his dad treat his timid mother, June… not very well.

One night Billy and Rachel took me to dinner at the expensive Windmill Restaurant in Whitstable with some money his dad had given him. They missed the last train home to Chatham from Whitstable and my step father refused to let them crash at the house. I was mortified.

After we left Medway he went to St Martin’s School of Art and I lived in Paris and changed my name. We didn’t really speak until 1990.

I did not know Billy when he was married to Sheila although when I met Sheila recently at the RCA she showed me her Billy brand on her upper arm. The hangman tattoo. He married Sheila when he was still with Tracey Emin which devastated Tracey. He could be a real twat.

Billy’s dad was not a good man. Billy seemed all at once in awe of him and terrified. Billy was brought up in Walderslade, a genteel and affluent neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chatham. His parent’s house was well appointed, decorated with real art and art books.

Bill’s father wore velvet collared coats and his Mother, June was a potter. When I was a teenager I liked visiting Billy’s house because it was so different from mine. I thought to myself, Billy and his brother would never want for anything.

Billy is terminally nostalgic and even when we were kids Billy took teen me to old men’s outfitters in Rochester and made me buy braces and homburg hats and I willingly followed his lead. I was his clueless project and soon I was wearing ripped tweed, argyle and caps. He was without doubt (until I met Fred Hughes) my greatest style influence. He was so sure of everything he said and I believed in him. He was the surest 18 year old I had ever met. I would ever meet.

The time I knew Billy the best was when he was married to Kira and had his son Huddy. June moved to Whitstable from Chatham and I was invited to Sunday lunch every weekend for years. Sometimes it was the only proper food I had. As June roasted a chicken, boiled vegetables and made crumble I sat in her spare bedroom which doubled as Billy’s Sunday studio watching him paint. I lazily listened to him talk about painters and painting and Tracey. Always Tracey. I sat and listened to him talk about politics, his health, Peter Doig (who we both knew) but as Tracey gained traction in her career so Billy became more agitated. The Emin tent with his name appliquéd in it… her painting which he felt Tracey owed him a thank you, but rather than be grateful she described him as… stuck. So he created a movement around Tracey calling him stuck, which is what a narcissist does I suppose.

The truth is, Billy was stuck. Stuck in his ways, enslaved by routine. Intransigent.

He tolerated my theatre success. It didn’t mean anything to him but after I met Joe and bought the Peter Cushing house and started making movies he shared that he found my success deeply concerning.

“I never want to talk about your work and I won’t come and see your movies.”

It was at this time Billy became aware I was friends with Jay Jopling who I met in Edinburgh whilst I was working for Ricky DeMarco. Jay and his YBA circus. Jay often visited the cottage at 13 Island Wall in Whitstable and brought his star acts with him. Billy would ask for an introduction to Jay or a studio visit (as did all of my artist friends) but Jay who represented Tracey Emin at White Cube described Billy as ‘tricky’ and refused to meet him or see his work. I remember exactly where that conversation happened and how I dreaded telling Billy… Jay wasn’t interested.

It was his separation from Kira that showed Billy at his worst. Billy’s new American girl now wife Julie inserted herself into all of our lives and frankly, it didn’t feel very good. I liked Kira. She was firm but kind and I respected her authority.

After Kira left and Julie moved in I tried having lunch with them as usual but I couldn’t just pretend things hadn’t changed so I stopped having Sunday lunch with June, Billy and Julie. I continued buying his work. Things came to a head one Sunday afternoon when he visited the Cushing house with Julie and we got into some verbal argy bargy. I told him I thought the way he treated women was despicable. It was then, and only then, he threatened me with physical violence. Sometimes you see people exactly for who they are. Later that evening he called and apologised for his behaviour but it was too late… I had seen him.

I saw Billy recently at Frieze. He gave me a hug and said he thought he might see me. He told me to call.

I didn’t call.

Then, coincidentally I met Billy and Kira’s son’s Australian girlfriend who works in a gallery along side the RCA. Causing me to meet Huddy as an adult, an artist whose work is very similar in style to his father’s.

The last time I saw June she said,

“I’m 90.”

She died shortly after. I heard from Whitstable locals Billy didn’t visit very often.

All in all what do I feel about Billy now? We will continue to bump into each other. We are in the same orbit. I feel as if I was dumped when I saw the worst of him, but Billy never had the courage to tell me why he gaslights me.

I’m left with the paintings, the books the records and stacks of drawings. The paintings I have? Nobody really wants the old stuff. Billy now paints like he actually wants to sell his work. The early work… jarring colours and equally jarring subject matter now ditched for Doig like forests of silver birch and sunsets.

He painted me a cat. I said, “Can you paint it pink?”

I think he probably sneered… but he painted it anyway.

Billy Childish oil on canvas Cat

Categories
art

Cadaver Bag

Over My Dead Body 24/25 RCA Cadaver Bag, Rope, Granite, Knitted Toys and Painted Intervention.

From the garment bags earlier used in the revolving moving image installation and referencing my grandmother’s hoarding of torn and bloodied clothes evolved the industrial cadaver bags intended for human remains.

Suspended so we might consider emotional weight, emotional baggage and also the weight of grief. The granite is immovable. I am powerless over the granite blocks. The toys: synapse.

The bag is full of old clothes I can no longer wear but too expensive to throw away.

Dressing up. Fashion. Disguise.

Categories
art

Wardrobe

Blood, Shit and Cum Mixed Media Painted Intervention 2024/25 RCA 1.5m x .5m

1964. M2 Motorway. Torrential rain.

Aunt Evelyn is emigrating to the USA. David, my Step Father, is driving us to Heathrow. The car is an adapted Citroen DS with seven seats he had borrowed from a friend. There are nine of us in the car. Evelyn, her small children Mark and Miranda, me, my two year old brother Stuart, my Mother, David, my Grandmother and Grandfather. 5 adults and 4 children.

David is 24 years old. Driving too fast in the torrential rain, he hits a a sheet of running water and aquaplanes over the central reservation into oncoming traffic. He crashes head on into a dentist travelling south who is immediately killed. I am sitting on my Mother’s lap in the front passenger seat. Upon impact I hit the windscreen, through the glass, out of the warm car, into the cold rain and onto the wet verge.

Silence. My skull smashed. Lying in the grass. Rain on my face. I remember hearing my Mother’s voice.

“I think he’s dead.”

No, I’m not. I thought. I’m not dead. I’m alive.

I remember the ambulance. Sitting opposite my aunt. Her legs were bleeding. There was a lot of blood. Over all of us. My clothes were sticky with blood. I’m wearing tartan trousers. The ambulance was just a van with broken people sitting on benches opposite each other.

We all survived the accident. There were so many of us in the car, packed like sardines. No seatbelts.

I remember telling the nurses at the hospital I didn’t sleep in a cot at home. I slept in a real bed.

I stayed in hospital for 20 weeks. I have no recollection of those months in hospital.

Four years later I am staying with my Grandmother. I am 8 years old. My Grandfather had died of an asthma attack beside her. She set the table before we went to bed. The house always smelled of apples. I liked the room I stayed in when I stayed with her. I can hear her downstairs preparing breakfast.

The wardrobe was assembled from odd elements. A deep shelf hung with a curtain made of orange linen, patterned with black bull reeds. I loved rooting through her old things in the wardrobe.

Past her summer dresses and winter coats, buried deep under the shelf I found opaque garment bags. As I unzipped them I recognised immediately what they were. My dead Grandfather’s tweed suit covered in dried blood and mud. My own tartan trousers from the accident similarly covered in dried blood and mud. In all of the garment bags hidden at the back of the wardrobe were the clothes we were wearing the day we survived the terrible accident on the M2 Motorway.

I told my mother. When I returned, the bags were gone.

The next project I set myself at the RCA was to unpack the secrets of the wardrobe.

Over my Dead Body 24/25 RCA Mixed Media

Over My Dead Body 24/25 RCA Mixed Media

Blood Shit and Cum 24/25 RCA Mixed Media

Categories
art

Dildo Dino

A few days after I arrived at the RCA I asked my rather gruff personal tutor if he was at all interested in getting Jay Jopling or Charles Saatchi to chat to the students about the beginning of the YBA movement. The tutor scoffed… these men were irrelevant dinosaurs. The RCA had ‘no interest in commercial galleries’.

Of course I took the dinosaur comment rather personally… I am older than Jay. If they are dinosaurs. I’m certainly a dinosaur. I crept away and had a little cry.

Then I stopped crying. I set about making me… my dinosaur in just about everything I could lay my hands on.

This dinosaur isn’t going extinct any time soon.

The conversation has since been contested by the tutor.

Dino Dildo sketch 24/25 RCA

Dildo Dino 24/25 RCA 274cm Black Nylon Inflatable

Over my Dead Body installation sketch 1.5m x 1m RCA Mixed Media

Dino Sketch 1m x 60cm 24/25 RCA Black Gesso on Paper

Embroidered Dinosaur Wool Blanket, Silk, Painted Interventions, Polythene, Garment Bag 24/25 RCA 65cm x 20cm

Reading Jail 274cm x 274cm 24/25 RCA Oil on Canvas

Categories
art

Erasure

Blog Redact 1. 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

The first few weeks at the RCA were simultaneously very scary and utterly thrilling. Surrounded by so many new people. Negotiating space and time in an institution when the only institutions I have ever been in long term are hospitals.

The first term was full of exciting promise. I started as I meant to continue. At a pace. I needed to set aside my expectations and start by making sense of the past few years. Firstly, I wanted to address this blog as it has played such an integral part of my creative life.

So, I took important texts from the blog and blew them up to one and half meters by one meter and began either erasing or redacting or enhancing these huge new works on paper.

This research was never really meant for anyone than me but certainly helped make sense of this late term transition from film and words and structure to unstructured mark making. As I mentioned in an earlier blog I spent the previous year working with two young producers on two original screenplays.

One of the scripts I was particularly proud. Both screenplays were a tribute to the highly structured work I had been making these past decades.

Useless Man. Self Portrait 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

Then, through this work, I started looking at my life in AA these past 27 years I had devoted to sobriety. I felt angry with AA. Had it been a monumental waste of time? Am I an alcoholic? I had predicated so many of my most important decisions on my relationship with a cult? I had moved to LA. I had chosen my agent and manager and lawyer… because of AA. Ultimately I felt as if all I had really achieved was a race toward insanity buoyed by other insane alcoholics. Who could be the maddest manman in Madland ? I was a clear winner by far. As soon as I stepped away from the AA competitive madness I was free and consequently so much happier.

I still find myself drawn to crazy addicts and alcoholics. It’s the intensity of the connection, feeding my desire for more… me and my addict.

I set about erasing the 12 steps.

12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 1 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 2 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 3 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

I made a series of works addressing the horrors of the Gaza Genocide inspired by Picasso’s Guernica. Drawn over a blog description of my own decent into hell. The micro and the macro.

Gaza Erased 1. 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

Gaza Erased 2 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

Gaza Erased 3 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m

Categories
art

Mental Health Crisis

Psoriasis? Or something more sinister?

Easter 2025

Easter 2024 I discovered an itchy, scaly rash on my buttocks and on the back of my legs. A routine trip to both the doctor and the STD clinic (was it Money Pox?) posited I had either Psoriasis or Eczema. Both conditions apparent in my immediate family. It didn’t really occur to me these diagnosis were not consistent and I should really have sought a third opinion.

By late January of this year and quite suddenly the painful and desperately itchy rash had spread all over my body and I woke up to specs of dried blood all over the sheets and pillowcases. I tried a little on-line diagnosis of my own and bought some scabies cream just in case. After two weeks the situation had become dire.

A trip to the dermatologist in Canterbury and a helpful doctor friend seemed to point in an altogether more sinister direction. The consultant immediately put me on a very heavy dose of steroids which, may have helped with my skin but my mood plummeted. The pills make me jittery and thirsty, I became snappy and impatient. The steroids catastrophically compromised my already shaky emotional and mental foundation.

I knew I had to get out of the RCA as soon as possible. I had to get out of the studio… as in this highly charged environment I was likely to say the wrong thing or react incorrectly to a bunch of much younger people who understandably could not easily empathise with an old man with a bad diagnosis.

The problem with Steroids (Alex my studio cohort and Anthropologist turned Artist told me) steroids have three emotional outcomes: Glad, Mad or Bad. Mine was decidedly bad and mad. I felt terrible.

After two biopsies things became a little clearer. Still not crystal clear… but much clearer. Although sinister there are two flavours of the same sinister. I will know the (bad or less bad) outcome on Tuesday 22nd April.

I fled to Portugal to be on my own. I’ve been sleeping until Midday every day since I arrived in the Algarve. My skin is healing for the most part, the pustules held back by the steroids.

I am less grumpy because I am totally isolated from other humans.

The spector of my insanity in retreat.

When I was happier I wanted to do a PhD: Artists and Insanity.

An article in the New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope uses the work of Martin Ramirez, an artist with schizophrenia, to ponder the well-worn perception that artistic creativity and mental illness are somehow inevitably linked.

Emotional disorders are not afflictions that sometimes come with built-in creativity. It’s time to kill this stereotype and the stigmatising statements that often come along with it.

We with mental health issues are still not understood when we present for the most part as normal. Like a trans person I seek to pass without being noticed until I am caught chatting to myself or saying things I wonder why… why did I say that?

It became obvious, very quickly… even though I had made my life-long mental health struggles very clear to the RCA administration before I arrived, my concerns were not being passed onto the correct department.

This may have had something to do with a messy transfer of power from the brilliant and enigmatic CAP head of department (now Dean) Chantal Faust to firstly Jordan Baseman then to Dr Harold Offeh.

Crucial information was not communicated. Two long term hospitalisations in psychiatric hospitals, ongoing mental health care, a massive head injury when I was a child. There really wasn’t any kind of support or help from the College.

I suppose, because for the greater part of my life, I manage my condition.

I am used to going as far as I can before the wheels come off but after a couple of incidents (I will write about these at a later date) I begged the student union for help. Help came in the form of a very level headed guy who talked me through what was happening.

When I discussed my health I found the staff in my department prone to infantilisation. They looked at me with fixed, wide eyed grins as if they were placating a baby.

I mean… they are just artists. They are not doctors, they are not therapists. I understand they were just trying their best.

So I wrote to Harold Offeh the head of CAP and told him I desperately needed to get away because I knew I was holding back a dam of emotions that could not afford to break at the college.

If I were epileptic and had a seizure… how would they react? A seizure is very scary for other people. It is confusing. It can be triggering.

That’s what mental illness looks like. It is something I have struggled with all my life. Periodically I can hold my head above the water and get things done then I am dragged deep beneath the waves.

When I fight my way up again gasping for air… things were not as they were.

I’ll write more tomorrow.

Categories
art

Royal College of Art

Malibu Fires RCA 2024/25 Acrylic and chalk on Canvas 2m x 2m

After a few years away from this diary I have decided, with so much going on… to make my thoughts and feelings public once again. I have a great deal to process, most notably the death of my darling Little Dog. The death of my brother Stuart, the destruction of everything in Malibu, the gruelling politics of fear now so widespread and the institution of The Royal College of Art.

So… let’s fire this baby up. See how she rolls.

In September 2024 I began the process of leaving Whitstable for the last time. On so many occasions I had resisted going back. I was living happily in Portugal in a lovely home and mostly enjoying my life post Covid, post near death experience.

The Little Dog was still alive but ailing. 

I had visited Whitstable and made arrangements to stay with my dear friend who I found to be in deep trouble. Her late stage Parkinson’s Disease was limiting what she could do and despite her valiant attempts her life was shrinking. I returned to Portugal but she begged me to come help her. Yet again, I couldn’t say no. My alanonic codependency, my desire to fix… to interfere (masquerading as help) got the better of me.

So, I moved back to Whitstable where I took up the relentless task of caring for my friend with Parkinson’s Disease. It was a gruelling and thankless task. As much as I cared about and loved her, I hated the disease. I tried to create a safe and beautiful environment for her but by doing so made my own life very dangerous.

I cooked every meal. I sat beside her. I dabbed at her brow. I drove her, did the gardening, the laundry and unpacked the shopping. I really hoped God was looking down approvingly at this living amends.

However, I knew (apart from a container of possessions) I had no business being in Whitstable. Those I knew, had known all my life, would finish up their days in much the same way they had for half a century.

Return of the Native I am not.

In the past two decades I had lived in so many different towns of varying sizes before I returned to my ailing friend. I had lived In Hollywood, Malibu, Tivoli, NYC, Carmona, Tavira and bought land in Walford, Herefordshire… and each of those places with a varying range of money to play with I met the same kind of people. I met billionaires and paupers. I made 500k. I made nothing.

The same kind of people made themselves apparent in every town, in every city.

There was the return of the native on the hunt for answers, there is always a bent lawyer, a miserable divorcee… In every town there is a heartbreak. The same story. The same closeted sailor. The same rancid coke addict stinking of cheap, over cut drugs on their breath and skin. 

In every town.

Every town has a respected few who have no damned reason to be respected, and a few who should be respected but never are. There’s always the blowsy blond who marries the local business man and drives a fancy car. There is the drug dealer and the dreamer and the goody housewife and those who live out their days crippled with debilitating illnesses.

There is a local girl with a head injury who just wants the best for everyone whose coworkers laugh at behind her back.

In every town there are a gang of thugs who get together on a Friday afternoon and eat sea food, drink too much and lie about the value of their jewelry.

The feminist art collective who draw each other badly.

There is always the lacklustre husband who returns to the barren ex wife he abandoned (cap in hand) from another who takes all his money but delivers three sons.

There is the 50 year old woman who writes to her boyfriend in prison for five long years but when he gets out he sleeps with her best friend and breaks her heart and her bank.

These dramas, unchanged since Dylan alluded to them from his sleepy Welsh village.

Whitstable. Wealthy married couples (gay and straight) buy terraced houses, hire fancy architects who strip out all non load-bearing walls revealing ‘volumes’ and when they are done… install thick, white plastic plantation blinds, blinding the house from the street.

As Whitstable prospered (because of Oysters not yachting) so the local football team Whitstable Town became the toast of the local league. I had many a moment in those Belmont bleachers, under the rusty gasometer, when I was a kid.  Every Saturday.  

David Roy my step father played for the town, respected for his scissor tackles and party antics in the bar afterwards.

He always has a bottle of wine in the boot of his car for the ‘ladies’.

After nearly 3 years of devoted service to my friend something in me broke.  I was gasping for air.  Whitstable became a desert with nothing to drink. I was thirsty for change. Tied to the antics of my sick friend and her sicker family.

I applied to the RCA after my brother Stuart, died.  My younger half brother.  His death inspired me to get on with things.

A lifeline from heaven… the RCA accepted me and in September 2024 I started an MA in Contemporary Art Practice. 

The first thing I did when I arrived and given the opportunity, I cut myself off from David’s name. I took the name I was born with… before David Roy adopted me or even knew my mother or me.

Duncan Paul Spark.

It hasn’t been easy owning that name… Spark. Even though I hate the name Roy and all it means, I am used to it. I am used to that name. My Mother applauded me for changing it.

Then, unexpectedly, my mother had a massive heart attack whilst looking after her grandson.  He saved her life.  Called the ambulance.

My Mother couldn’t believe her heart had given in. She berated the universe from her hospital bed. 

“I’m not fat!  Why did it happen to me?”

My Mother, with her boyfriend Martin, watch right wing news channel GB News.  They wind themselves up fearing ‘the immigrants’. They have a particular fear of Turkish Barbers and Taxi Drivers who they believe are gifted their barber shops and taxis by the British government.

Then, in January 2024 my younger brother Stuart died. His heart gave up. He was two years younger than me.

Did you know he was jumped in Joy Lane? People… stopped their car, leapt out and the men punched him and the women hit him with their shoes.

Stuart was never the same. Unsurprisingly, he too struggled with his mental health. He was fearful and paranoid but refused to get help. He was sure they were out to get him. Run him down. Ever vigilent he told my mother they followed him, they were waiting for him to make a mistake so they could get him.

Stuart and his family left Whitstable and moved to a semi-rural part of Kent and kept goats.

Stuart didn’t want the doctor or the ambulance to come the night he got sick because he was sure they would come, hiding in the ambulance. It sounds terribly sad. His wife had begged him to call an ambulance but he refused.

A few weeks before Stuart died my Mother was staying with him (unable to be alone in her flat after her first heart attack) watching TV with Stuart’s wife and daughter.

My mother told me this story with the same crumpled face and indignant tone she had when she reminded me in the hospital she wasn’t fat and didn’t deserve a heart attack… she, is as it turns out, is perpetually indignant.

Anyway, they are watching TV and TV Chef Ainsley Harriet is preparing some mince meat. He is kneading the meat and breadcrumbs with his bare hands. My Mother says,

“Look at that, that’s disgusting, his black hands in the meat.”

The family were aghast. They told her she couldn’t say things like that.  Even Stuart told her off.  What? My Mother could not believe her son wasn’t defending her.  He understood what she meant?  Didn’t he?  Had the world gone mad?

My mother was outraged they had challenged her racism.

Then Stuart died a couple of weeks later. And she said, rather coldly,

“Well, his paranoia got him in the end.”

Twenty or so years ago… and it might have been more. I was in a car with Stuart and he said,

“You know what David did to us. He should have gone to prison.”

“What did he do to you Stuart?” I should have asked. But I did not.

I froze. I stayed silent.  It was a terrible betrayal. I betrayed him to keep my own position in the family as the only abused son, the only victim. I was not prepared to share! In fact, Stuart was giving me the opportunity to reach across decades of hurt and share some kind of support… or something. I did not. I stayed silent and we never spoke of it again.

I regret this terribly. I might have been the only person he could have spoken to.

On the order of service for his funeral there was a picture of him on a bench in his garden with his goats.

Goats on his lap. It made me cry but only when I couldn’t be seen.

I wrote two commisioned movies in 2024.  One about a nuisence gangster and the other about an estranged brother and sister.  I think one of them is getting made.  We will see about the other one.

Oh, he’s a late bloomer they say.

In September 2024 at 64 years old I made the last, greatest bloom.

I went to the Royal College of Art to make conceptual art. From September 2024 to March 2025 I was perhaps the happiest person I have ever been. And, save for a few moments with occasional personalities, I kept on top of my resentments and anger and shame. I worked diligently in the school Herzog and De Muron designed and embraced every second of any chance presented to me.

I cast in bronze, I painted, I made sculptures out of body bags. I emroidered and knitted and painted some more.

In 2024 Palestine overwhelmed me. I had to stop looking at dead children in Gaza. I revisited Picasso’s Guernica to make a series of works in response to the horrors of Gaza.

Then, out of the deep dark ocean, two things happened in January 2025 which shook at my foundations.

The Palisades Fire began burning in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles County on January 7, 2025, and grew monstrous enough to destroy the Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu.

The fire was fully contained on January 31, after 24 days.

A series of wildfires in Southern California driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, burned 23,448 acres, killed 12 people, and destroyed 6,837 structures, making it the tenth-deadliest and third-most destructive California wildfire on record and the most destructive to occur in the history of the city of Los Angeles.

One of the 6,837 structures burned was the beautiful house on Hume Road, Malibu… along with all of my neighbours homes, burned to ash in the Palisades fire.

As of today I have not really processed this.

I have seen pictures and videos.

I have pictures of the house, the garden, the view and the dog. Everything in those pictures is gone. The view, the furniture and the beautiful garden I spent years and years tending and brush clearing and landscaping and loving and loving and loving.

Do you remember before I bought it? I would drive from Hollywood up Sunset the long way through Bel Air to Malibu and sit in the garden of a house I didn’t even own and look at the Ocean? It was so magical. Watching the hummingbirds dart into the fleshy white cactus flowers.

Malibu Cactus Flower Erased 2024/25 Mixed Media 1.5m x 1m

I could have bought the house in Silver Lake but I didn’t. That house is still standing. Hume Road looks like an atom bomb hit it.

Everything has gone.

That’s enough for now. There’s loads to write about. I’m here for another two weeks. I’ll try and write every day.

I’ve touched on some of the themes I’ll be exploring in more depth these coming weeks. Notably, my time at the RCA, looking after my friend, the death of The Little Dog and my health which seems, at long last, to be defeating me.

Categories
Queer

Ana Corbero Redux…

Ana Corbero

During one of the last text conversations I had with Ana she asked me to write a blog update. A redux. Here it is.

You might be wondering why I’m roasting this old chestnut. Ana Corbero? Didn’t you wave goodbye to that old bint in 2017? Didn’t she leave you gasping for air like a freshly caught fish? Well… that’s what should have happened. I should have left well alone but life never turns out the way one thought it should. Sometimes, so it seems, I just can’t help myself from another thrashing.

At present Ana Corbero is living in Espluges, Barcelona. She lives in the palace of arches created by her tricky, tax dodging father Xavier Corbero. On instagram she belches how she is surrounded by love and light. She’s opening a gallery, she offers her close artist friends exhibitions in the space… only four years ago she called her fathers house, ‘that vile mausoleum I want nothing to do with’.

Things were not so good for Ana in February 2019.

On March 1st 2019 Ana Corbero emailed me. Desperate and alone… her husband and children, she cried, had abandoned her. Penniless, addicted to drugs, trapped inside her lavish Andalucian jail… like a Saudi princess.

It’s time to revisit Ana Corbero, describe the creature she really is. How Ana Corbero deserved to be abandoned and humiliated by her husband and her children. I shall continue telling the truth about Ana Corbero… her lies, her manipulation, the manipulation of her story, the story of her ‘trauma’. Her trauma, allegedly inherited from grandparents, from dolls, from Miro, from the Virgin Mary. Trauma, always her excuse for behaving exactly however she wants when she wants and anyone who has the audacity to contradict her is a hyena, a heretic, a narcissist.

But how did this happen? How did you fall back into her poisonous web, Duncan? Why didn’t you listen to those you trusted? Why couldn’t you stay away?

March the first 2019. Ana Corbero asked for help. She could have asked any number of people. She could have asked her rich Turkish friend Mr Koc. Her rich French friend Mr. V. She could have asked Elsa Peretti who bank rolled her father’s excesses. She could have asked the poisonous Celia Lyttleton. The poisonous Celia Lyttleton who once arrived on my doorstep in desperate need of help, babe in arms, until she was ready to move on. Ana Corbero could have asked any number of these rich friends but in her time of greatest need she asked me. And that, my friends is how a fool and his money are easily parted.

Some might say, oh just let it go. You can just imagine who might say that. People… rich enough not to notice the absence of several hundred thousand euros.

Begrudgingly, I answered her call. “What do you want?” I was irritable and uncommunicative. How did she know I was in Seville? She persisted and after some persuading I met with her. If only to tidy up past resentments. Because, as we all know, resentments are the number one killer of people pleasers.

At her house in Carmona she sat on a wide, yellow, gingham sofa. Tiny and thin as you could not imagine. Smoking one cigarette after another. Her eyes sunk into her head. The house was cold and damp. The smell of nicotine lingering. She began sobbing.

I asked what had happened.

“Nobody knows how to help me,” she wailed.

The staff had lined up in front of her unable to help. The nurses and housekeeper and gardeners. Everyone was exhausted by her. A year later, she would do the same to me, take everything I had… emotionally, physically and spiritually.

She sat on the sofa and told her sorry tale of a one page divorce she signed because she loved her husband and she said she would do anything he wanted. She had given him everything, now she had nothing. The children refused to see her. Like most desperate fools she was incapable of owning her part in a disaster of her own making. She was the victim, the wretched victim who had only others to blame.

However self piteous, it was hard not to feel compassion for her. However she’d behaved, surely she didn’t deserve this?

As I was preparing to leave the house that damp Spanish afternoon she grabbed hold of me and begged me to help. I thought for a moment and wondered how many times I had been desperate for help but unable to ask. Desperate and alone, this catastrophe was of her own making. So I said this,

“I will help you, I will do anything it takes to help you. But you must let me help you the way I see fit. I will be paid for my time if and when you are liberated from your shoddy divorce agreement and your father’s inheritance bares fruit. This help does not come for free.”

I asked her to consider signing an agreement and I left.

I stayed in my hotel in Carmona and flew back to London the following day.

Ana met me in London.

During the hours we spent together I attempted to unravel her various problems. Her problems were complex but not unsurmountable. The divorce she had consented to was a mess and obviously signed when she was high or drunk (no excuse). What little leverage she had I knew I was going to have to exploit to force her husband into a negotiation.

We needed lawyers. The best I could find. The best I could pay for.

Her father had left her (and her step mother Midu) his €150 million estate which was held in a complicated trust in the British Virgin Islands.

I introduced Ana to my lawyer Arthur Bing Nelson in London who specialises in trusts. I explained whilst I was helping as a friend, I expected to be paid for my time. The meeting was just one of many where Ana seemed incapable of grasping the bigger picture. Distracted, not looking like the beneficiary of a large estate but a resentful fool, too preoccupied with herself to help herself.

She had a plan to be closer to her children. She had been on-line house hunting for a place near her children’s boarding school. I drove her to see the apartment overlooking her children’s school unaware, until she mentioned in passing… the children were not just refusing to see her they had demanded to be protected from her, they were not allowed to see or communicate with their mother due to her abusive behaviour. The school had been instructed to safeguard them. As it turned out the children were mere trading chips in her ghastly game of cat and mouse with the cause of her primary resentment… Nabil, her ex husband. Nabil the ‘narcissist’, ‘the viper’, ‘the liar’. I was unaware that day, as we drove into the verdant english countryside the depth of deception and self deception Ana was capable.

I agreed to return to Seville for a longer visit to see what we could do to spring her from her gorgeous jail. When I returned to Seville I affirmed I was willing to do whatever it took to help her get back onto her feet and she signed the agreement to pay me an hourly rate, disbursements and expenses.

I hired Miguel and Patricia, two incisive and brilliant lawyers from the international law firm Garrigues. At our first meeting, I explained what we needed. 1. Ana needed her ex husband to renegotiate the terms of her divorce. 2. We needed to onshore her father’s offshore assets. 3. We needed to deal with a highly complicated tax liability. It was complicated but I understood clearly what needed to be done whilst Ana, yet again, sat in the meetings like a troubled child asking about plates she had left in her London apartment Nabil refused to return.

Nabil Gholam had done a brilliant job of wrestling everything from her. Kept on a short financial leash at the house in Carmona, refused entry to their apartment in London. The property she owned with her husband in Carmona was in a company over which she had no control. The other property they owned world wide had been signed over by herself to her husband. Even her father’s estate was supposedly left to Nabil. What little room he had left her to wriggle was enough for me to get her out of the agreement or at least make his life uncomfortable. He was breaking corporate rules, he was not following even the basic rules of running a Spanish company therefore opening himself to legal scrutiny.

Everyday I research property laws, company laws, I gain an encyclopedic knowledge of offshore trusts, the British Virgin Islands and onshoring. I am searching for loopholes Ana could step through to avoid the problems she had created. I coordinate the various lawyers, accountants and advisors.

As Ana saw a way out of her prison she became wilful and surly, rather than take the opportunity to change anything in herself, she set about using my money and time righting historical wrongs. As she became stronger she became more arrogant.

Every day as I sorted one problem she would set about creating another.

The control she now felt confident to exert on others she attempted on me. She told me how to breath, how to stand, how to eat and insisted I gave her urine and stool samples so she could test how my insides were doing. I refused.

Desperate for cash she took her watches to a dealer in Seville and sold them. She asked me to contact Jay Jopling and offer him a bronze by Pablo Gargallo of Kiki de Montparnass. After I offered it to him (by text) Ana admitted it was a copy of the original by her father Xavier Corbero. Thankfully Jopling declined the sculpture.

Kiki de Montparnass copy

A burly man from Seville arrives at the house. He has a bag of tools and a toxic body odor. Convinced the safe in her bedroom is packed with her husband’s collection of tax avoiding watches, Ana hired a safe breaker who worked all day to cut into the safe. He failed, filling the house with acrid smoke and foul, grey dust. The staff and I looked on helplessly as the safe breaker cut through the steel and concrete. Of course, she refuses to pay him.

High on the thought of freedom she demands furniture moved from wing of the house to another. Huge wardrobes dismantled. Beds and sculpture hauled needlessly from one side of the house to another. No longer the sickly sparrow she became a fucking monster.

At night we would work through the research I continued to compile but Ana was incapable of listening, berating me with stories from her past and the ‘inherited trauma’ of her great grandparents. She would sob and claw at her face keeping me awake until dawn.

Weeks of hard work passed. Her friend Mr V turned up from Mexico City and commended the work I was doing for Ana.

“We all need a Duncan in our lives.”

The chaos at the house intensified, Ana found her daughter’s diary who had written pubescent fantasies about the gardener. Whether they were true or not was a different matter. Seizing on this opportunity to cause more problems Ana calls the police, lawyers and social workers. We have the most gut wrenching chat with the gardener who casually denied the accusations looking at his boss with total disregard. Both me and Mr V (gay men) had seen the daughter use highly sexualised maneuvers. I extricated myself from the moment and informed her father.

Unexpectedly, Ana’s lawyers, the expensive ones from Seville… Miguel and Patricia turn up at the estate. We sit in the garden because Ana is paranoid her husband Nabil is eavesdropping from Beirut. We discuss everything in English, we discuss the divorce.

“Well, she signed it.” Patricia shrugged.

They were tiring of her antics. Why are they here? We discuss the property in Carmona held in the Spanish company she owned equally with Nabil. We discuss her father’s estate. We discuss the children and Nabil’s access to the house. Then Ana starts speaking Spanish. It isn’t unusual. But Patricia turns to me and says,

“We are discussing Anna stealing money from her daughter’s trust account.”

“How much money?”

“Enough for the authorities to be alerted.”

My heart sank lower than an ocean. I immediately tried to rationalise.

“I’m sure Ana is very embarrassed.”

I spluttered, but at that moment I knew what was happening, I felt so foolish… and I knew I couldn’t trust this greedy, common thief ever again. Stealing from her severely disabled daughter so she could attend a fancy party in Istanbul made a fool of me and my help.

Laughing how her husband would hide shaking in the pantry whenever they had a fight, she scoffed how a big man was shaking with fear, in fear of tiny Ana. But I knew Nabil wasn’t frightened of her… he was frightened of what he might do to her.

3am. I am bitten by a mosquito. So exhausted my immune system compromised, a thick red line of angry infection runs from the bite up my arm. I know it’s serious. We go immediately to the hospital in Seville. In the hospital she tells anyone who will listen that I am her husband. Unable to move she strokes my brow and calls me darling. The doctors confirm the worst: Lymphangitis.

Recuperating from the nasty infection I retreat to Ana’s house in Tavira, Portugal. At her suggestion I move my things out of storage and into the empty house. Ana sends video updates from Carmona. Videos of her husband wheeling her daughter’s wheelchair around the estate with the nurse. Whilst in Tavira we were contacted by middle man Enric Badia who acts for developer wanting her father’s estate. I construct a deal. If not for him for other potential buyers. The deal takes care of the offshore element/instrument, the tax… leaving Ana with a life changing amount of money.

It took weeks to recover from the infection and fight off sepsis. Emboldened by her inevitable jailbreak Ana took the reigns. As it turned out this meant more underhand shenanigans. She used her housekeeper, Ani to pass notes to Nabil bypassing the lawyers. Trying to make deals. Nabil’s lawyers tell Patricia and Miguel. When Garrigues discovered what she was doing they fired her. Speechless. Spent. It was over. She had burned her last bridge. I was so weak fell into the hall shelves and smashed her precious painted teapot, smashed into a thousand pieces.

I wished it had been her head.

tea pot

The following week she turned up in Tavira and told me to leave immediately.

Persuaded to read my previous blog the only critique she had?

“I don’t have black eyes!” Of all the terrible revelations? That was it.

Of course, a nasty legal fight unfolded. She held onto the money she owed me. She still owes me. Of the approximately €400,000 she owes me she paid me £15,000. Now it’s with lawyers. We are waiting for the court to give us a date.

It seems she has moved into her father’s house. Who wouldn’t want to live there? Why didn’t she move into it sooner? As we began the process of suing her I knew I couldn’t take this situation personally. Ana treated many people like she treated me and she will continue to treat people the same way. It is what a narcissist does.

If you spot it you got it. Everything she accuses others she suffers herself. She has paid a huge price for her inability to address her character defects. Expecting everyone else to clear up her mess. Whether that mess is dog shit in the sitting room or refusing to deal with her father’s inheritance… her unrealistic expectations of others are huge and can never be fulfilled. It makes me sad to think a 65 year old woman can be so far from peace of mind. As for me? I suggest you read my previous blog. I think it explains everything. I couldn’t save you Ana. I shouldn’t have tried.

Categories
Death Gay Hollywood Los Angeles Queer

Fear and Faith

Easter 2022 Portugal

Last night I made Indian food at home for friends. A convivial evening. The weather has been spectacular this week. The religious parades a little lacklustre, they don’t compare with the magisterial opulence of the spanish equivalent. Yet, even though I don’t believe in christianity, I bow my head before those who do.

This morning the apartment is scented with cassia, cardamom, coriander…

Last week the rains were gratefully upon us.

The sky is dove gray, the cloud ombréd into anthracite onto the horizon. Spring storms are coming. Gulls wheeling over the Rio Gilao. The swifts are no longer screaming, they are hiding in their mud and saliva nests under the eves. The deluge comes, polishing the cobbles. Parasols flap and drip onto miserable tourists. An inescapable torrent. I may have left the window open.

I am unpacking my unhealthy, enmeshed relationship with women. I am the one… I have consistently had unhealthy relationships with women. I am the one. Ending in dismay, disloyalty, disappointment. I could make a million excuses but I am the one. Whether it is George or Samia, rich or poor, bright or not… they open the door to their misery and like a fool, I rush in.

I wanted to save my mother. I couldn’t. I was powerless. I wasn’t enough. I lay in bed listening to the screams. I couldn’t save her. I was just a boy! What could I do? In my teens I ended up resenting her because she couldn’t save herself. Nor us. I know my brothers were terribly wounded. They sabotaged their father’s funeral.

Truth never picks a side.

A famous friend is crying hard about the pressure of fame, success. She is crying because she hates talk shows, she hates the publicity grind. She is bleating and moaning, the hard rain is falling. It is difficult to listen, knowing just how they reaped the rewards of the entertainment industry. I am full of judgement until I admit I’ve been there myself, equally indulgent. I’ve written about it, the loneliness of success.

If I believe my creative gifts are god given, yet… when the universe delivers I wonder: am I deserving? ‘No, you are not.‘ I hear the voice in my head so clearly, speaking to me using my voice. ‘You are an imposter, you’ll always be an imposter.’

Remember that night? The night in question, that night, that great night… leaving the theatre deafened by applause, even though I had many who would have congratulated me I had no one to call. I was completely alone, enduring the discomfort of the moment, so fearful, I wanted to call my mother but that door was closed to me. I felt so fragile, it was impossible to enjoy my success. The intensity of the moment was nothing I had experienced before. It was so overwhelming I ran away, I fought it off. I am only deserving of punishment. I have stripped myself of every opportunity presented me. I have sabotaged each and every gift. I have behaved like a lunatic.

Ana, Samia, Donna, Eleanor, Georgina, Hilary. A longer list exists… I am sure. Women I wanted to save, save from husbands, boredom, grief, family, loneliness. When will I ever learn? Maybe this is the moment? I am the one? It always ends up the same way, even when I have set the boundaries, considered my motives, written the contract. The outcome is always the same: RESENTMENT.

Ana calls me her husband, George wants to marry me, Donna is furious when I tell her friends I am gay. Samia meets me in Paris for what? She woefully reminds me how old she is. What became of them?

Drawn to their helplessness, tiny Ana lost on her huge sofa, penniless. Donna consumed by her hoard, piss and shit saved in plastic bags, Samia shamed by her menopause. Georgina’s body wrecked by Parkinson’s, her bank accounts raped by her daughter. I have learned, just now. This day. Unless those who have becomes victims to circumstance take hold of their own lives no one can help them. What could I do? I was just a boy! I can momentarily drag her out of poverty, over the shingle to the restaurant in the wheelchair… but I cannot will them to live, to stop making the same mistakes.

By consorting with a woman and her shame, I can only fail. Those who saw me wrecked by grief must never lay eyes on me ever again. When ‘saved’ what do we need with our saviour? If incapable of saving, we slip into the oily, cold water of failure. Like Jack from Rose.

Men I know sharing how they drank and used drugs like heroes: they drank like Travis Bickle, snorted like Scarface, loved like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Their cinematic memories, their euphoric recall is so often vulgar and self-aggrandising. If I drank like a character in a movie? I am Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Baby Jane Hudson. King baby. Writing a letter to daddy. Knocking back the bourbon, controlling the outcome, taking hostages.

Looking in the mirror. Crying. Drowning in self pity.

Thank God I cast myself in another movie. The movie I am living right now. Am I happy because of the therapy or the anti depressants? I am luxuriating in the moment. I love my things. The temperature is perfect. I do not wish to shut the door on my past but, thank god, I am not my story. My story, the story of casual violence and hopelessness merely gave me excuses to behave badly. ‘If you had my story you too would be a monster’, that is the lie we tell ourselves. Without my story I have no excuse. I am the one.

My mother ended up saving herself. She has the life she wants. I respect and accept that. It has taken decades of reflection to own my part. It was a process aided by the voices of so many willing to share their truth. Faith overcomes fear. I know, no matter what, I will be ok.

For that, this Easter day, I am very thankful.

Categories
Queer Whitstable

Sir Tom Croft Architect

If ever there were I time I needed this blog… then now would be that time. Writing has always afforded me the opportunity of untangling the scribble of thoughts and furies in my head. When I was a boy I made sense of complications (secrets and lies) by writing. Setting out the problems and finding solutions. My first attempt at creative writing, a series of short stories about mice… written when I was no more than 11 years old. Reading them now they are a fascinating and heart wrenching attempt to unravel the unrelenting brutality I suffered at the hands of my step-father, at school and the casual racism of Whitstable people.

Now I am kept awake at night by other furies, no less brutal. The continuing and evolving cruelty of Brexit. The take down of an elected leader by those who sought to discredit with lies and false allegations of anti-semitism. Watching a good and honest man hooked by his enemies, made to squirm for no good reason other than he sought to challenge the vile status quo and support the arab people of Palestine, confronting apartheid Israel.

Many, many people feel hopeless after the recent UK election. A rigged electoral system, a billionaire owned press spouting lies about a good man then amplified by state media. The obvious similarities to all those soviet style broadcasts we smirked at thirty years ago becoming apparently ours. This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. Ha! Riven from the ice by global warming. Climate change another of the challenges facing humanity denied by the same charlatans who sought to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.

There are two distinct types of people at home in the UK. Those who are invested in the truth and those who believe anything they are told. It is clear to people like me they dare not challenge the dominant voice. The others do not dare to take on the establishment. They cower before the lie.

You know I’ve never held my tongue. Restraint is alien to me. I’d rather lose a friend than stay quiet. This happened just before Christmas three years ago at an old friend’s house. Tom Croft and his wife Max. Sir Tom Croft. I’d know Tom since my teens and was very fond of his parents and his spinster aunt. I had spent years of Christmas at Tom’s beautiful converted barn. They had very kindly included me in many of their social events. Lunches, beach parties and garden parties, their garden is magnificent! However, their pretentious gardener, the vile Posy Gentles is not. I’d not always enjoyed these excursions. Their posh white friends were gruelling company. Trapped in a tight spot, forced to find any conversation with Amicia De Moubray, married to Kent’s Lord Lieutenant is a special kind of hell. However, I played the game and respecting Tom’s feelings ignored their right wing banta and kept my end of the conversation non controversial.

Christmas Day, three years ago at an intimate supper with Tom and Max I was forced to endure a local carpenter’s offensive opinion of gay men. I complained. Tom kept quiet as his wife, a Guardian editor, sought to protect the idiot carpenter and silence my experience as a gay man. She sought like most right wing women, at the highly polished, mahogany dinner table, to defend the dominant article: a white heterosexual male who didn’t want to understand his privilege. Who couldn’t bare… not for one moment to walk in another man’s shoes. I couldn’t shake the resentment and wrote her the following day:

‘Privilege has nothing to do with money.  You may very well have come from a worst family situation than me (tho I doubt it) even if that was the case my journey as a gay man these past 60 years has not been easy and when I share my story I do not expect you to diminish my experience. 

I do not expect you to be gay holocaust denier.  I do not expect you to do anything other than respectfully listen to those who suffered because they were/are out gay men fighting for equality, visibility and anti vilification.

Here is what you refused that night to acknowledge for me and millions of other men my age:

1. Born a criminal.  Know what that means?  Ask other gay men in their sixties.  It means when I was born a gay man could still be sent to jail for being gay.  In fact, men were still being sent to jail for consensual sex acts as recently as 1988.

2.  Facing violent prejudice in the street if you were an out gay man.  Swearing, spitting hitting and worse. And as I found recently still evident on the less enlightened streets of some European countries.

3.  The aids crisis deliberately ignored by government because it was perceived as a gay plague.   Watching over 100 young men dying gruesome deaths.

4.  Section 28, Margaret Thatcher’s draconian discriminatory anti gay law.

5. Marriage and other institutions lgbt people were excluded from.  

6.  Fear of openly expressing affection to ones we/I loved.  This is perhaps the most egregious.’ 

She replied she did not recognise herself from my description and we were no longer friends. She wrote this from a holiday in Istanbul she and her husband shared with Anne McElvoy and Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, who have located to my home town of Whitstable. One can imagine how they soothed her ruffled feathers and told her to ignore the uppity faggot.

The Guardian is now under the thumb of MI5. Forced to destroy their hard drives by a man from the ministry, the editor removed after printing ghastly truths provided by Julian Assange. How can anyone have any respect for Max Croft?

Arriving from London last Tuesday Sir Tom and his dog were waiting at the station. He said hello. I shook my head. His absurd wife, Lady Max Croft greeted him with a shrill. I do not need their garden parties, their equally dreary friends or their condescension. I do not need them to protect their friends from uncomfortable truths.

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