Author: Duncan Spark

I am an artist and writer living in London

Categories
Health

Let’s Start Again Shall we?

Laying in my bed with this fever..seems like a bad time to start cleaning house but that’s what I find myself doing.

As the New Year approaches we all attempt to make changes in our lives, commit or recommit to breaking old habits and focus on what we know is good for us.

Looking back at this eventful year…wasn’t it just?  Of course I think about you-know-who but how I think about him must change.

Already I am wondering why a man I knew for so little time and spent even less real-time became so bloody important to me.

That’s a question I need answering with the help of a therapist.

I can dress it up as a huge romance..or I can tell it as it is…two addicts clinging onto one another for safety.   So few words to describe something that has bugged me all year.

My abandonment issues, separation angsiety…all makes sense.

Jake lingers in my nutty mind because in March I will be carrying the can for the both of us in court.

As irritable as I am about the court date..March 25th (I will be really pissed as the date approaches) I am in the sort of mood where if I were a King I would be pardoning all manner of prisoners.   The prisoner I am pardoning today..is me.  I deleted my Manhunt account, my Adam 4 Adam account and lastly..my Gaydar account.    I must say..it’s a tremendous relief.

All I have to recommit to is my porn problem…which is not as bad as it was but still figures in my fantasy life.

The great thing about AA or SAA or any 12 step programme is that we can always start again.  You know as well as I do how topsy-turvy everything has been these past few months..how thrown off course I have been.

Wandering up the High Street today, a light rain on my face, even though I am really sick..I felt happy.  Incredibly at ease with everything.

I am not in competition with anyone.  Not for a better time, not for a bigger house, not for more money or a better job.  I have quite enough of everything.  I always have.

You know, I am going to tell you something:  I have been praying hard for Jake to be okay.  Praying for his career, his love life, for adventure and peace of mind.

Would I want to be him?  No.  Would I have wanted his life thus far?  No.  Instead of hating him I have been getting some perspective.  Sure, I wasted a great deal of time on that young man, and it feels like not much has been learned..but I am sure that as time passes I will think differently about that.

I can see that not many people anywhere, how ever rich they are..are very happy.  On the face of it Jake had everything a young man could possibly want but just pick at the surface and there’s nothing there.   Happiness is so elusive for so many.  The folks I know here in Whitstable are especially grumpy.   They drink too much, they feel trapped, they are ignorant of so much…yet they live in harmony.

I sometimes wonder if it would have been better for Jake to stay in the closet..if you want to call it that.   They were happy together.  They were soul mates.  He just wanted a bit of cock on occasions…or did he?  For as much as he dismissed what he wanted from me as a ‘bit of fun’, I know for sure that he wants to be loved.

I never really understood what it was about his Father or Mother that made him lie to them.  Were they hideously judgemental?  Homophobic?  Unlikely as his dad is a psychiatrist.  Most probably they are as entitled as he is.  What happened to little Jake?  Precious Jake?

I chatted with someone Jake knew at University last week.  I asked if it was a particularly macho anti-gay university…as Jake had described it.  My friend laughed out loud..he said that it was like going to the Castro in San Francisco.   Ithaca is a private upstate liberal arts college.

He must have lied to me all the time.

He must have been really unhappy.  I hope he gets happier.

Hanging with Tom the other day…he’s happy…his wife and kid seem happy too.  That’s something to aspire to.  I have always wanted the mince-pie, brocade and topiary sort of comfort he has and then I look around and see that I already have it.

As you may have noticed…the blog didn’t go private because there doesn’t seem to be a way on WordPress for me to do that.  Oh well.

BTW, it’s that time of year again where I get to vote for who will win this years BAFTA for best film, director, etc.   I realized, as I was voting for the best male actor, that I knew every one of them personally and had slept with two of them.

Strange but true.

Categories
Health

Beastly Influenza

It’s quite a chore this nasty flu bug.   I couldn’t sleep a wink all night…my skin felt as if it were being burned from my flesh, my eye balls bursting out of my skull, sweat pouring from brow and pits.

Then, at dawn, the temperature abated and I was left floating in a semi daze on my damp bed.  The Little Dog looking closely at my face as if I wasn’t anyone he knew.

My hosts and I all fell at the same fence so spent today in our rooms.  I made my way out of the house to buy thick pea and bacon soup from Dave’s Deli on Harbour Street.   The dog crapped outside The Oyster Co.   I broke all my rules and bought some linctus for my throat and cough.

Ed called…rather miserable that I couldn’t meet him in town.  Charlie called to discuss our trip to Sundance.   Can’t wait.  Gabe emailed to rearrange my trip to Florence.

Wondered what I would do for NYE as this flu will take a few days to shift.   No Florence until the 3rd January.    I have never had a dud NYE in sobriety..really hope this isn’t the first.   Can you imagine it?   A raging fever watching Susan Boyle on YouTube.  Happy New Year!

Got to sleep now…got to sleep.

Categories
Christmas

Wiki Christmas

I love wiki leaks for this reason:  It’s like getting to hear what everyone ever said about you behind your back…confirming exactly what you thought they might be saying.

Today…I had lunch with Tom, his wife, daughter and assorted friends.

I am now in bed with the most terrible flu so here are some pictures.  Lunch was delicious.  Conversation amusing.  Children delightful.   Discussed Scott Crolla.

Tom’s Garden
Tom’s Garden

Sir Tom and Lady Croft

me
Categories
art Auto Biography Love Rant

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

I was informed you were dangerous and to only speak to you when chaperoned.

AMANDA ELIASCH

You know who coined the phrase Mad, Bad etc?  Lady Caroline Lamb of course… about Byron!  Although my fun friend the sadly departed Matilda, Duchess of Argyll thought the same of her predecessor, the even more glorious Margaret, Duchess of Argyll whose husband found Polaroids of her sucking a huge cock… naked but for a string of pearls.  Frankly I would rather have been Margaret than Matilda.

Margaret said, “If you have to be a Duchess you may as well be the Duchess of Argyll.” I loved my Duchess adventures in Edinburgh and The Highlands playing back gammon and drinking whiskey, even though she hated paying her gambling debts.

Tell me how brilliant that is?  Amanda warned off me?  Most people are in no uncertain terms.  It certainly separates the chaf from the corn.  (The Chav from the Thorn). The people who remain in my life are up for the adventure of knowing me.   My new friend Ed, for instance, who I am spending tomorrow evening with…  what a sweetheart.  Of course there’s a long list of oafs who cannot bear the heat in the kitchen…  more fool them.

When I left Joe he told the friends who remained my friends they were ‘spineless’.  I am PERFECTLY sure that I would do EXACTLY the same. I am excited by my own life all over again.  What adventure will I have next?

Amanda and Tim are once again breaking up…  but the truth of the matter is that Amanda… poor old bird… can’t bear to be separated from Tim.  I know THAT feeling.  I hate to be separated from the man I love.  I want to punish the fuck out of him… so now she’s upon FB slagging him off like an old fish wife.

I was never so lonely as the moment I left him.

Tim’s being very discreet but really!!  These two star crossed lovers must decide what they want to do!  I can’t be the sacrificial lamb every time they fetch out their AK 47‘s.

Amanda’s beef?  Tim bought her a voucher for a ‘Garden Center‘ turns out that the ‘voucher’ is for her to buy something from the glorious Chelsea Physic Gardens a stone’s throw from her Cheyne Walk home.   Now, I would love that as a gift.  I don’t really care if Tim berates me behind my back.  It’s his prerogative but the simple fact is… I don’t care!   He’s in excellent company.

What’s been going on in FREEZING COLD Whitstable?  Had breakfast at Windy Corner Stores.   Wandered home along the  beach.  In the very short time it took me to get home something of a miracle  happened…I began to inhabit my own skin once again.  Every time I pray for something it is swiftly delivered.  The only problem is… I don’t pray enough… because I’m frightened that the magic won’t work!

Typical Boxing Day… cold meats, TV, pickles, a trip to the pub.

Whitstable, my darling home town grounded me.  Everything is going to be OK.  This is where I have lived and I will die.  The people who know me..know me.   I am so happy here..even though it is not my current home there is always, and will always be room for me.

PS You’ll need more than a chaperone to keep safe around me.

Boxing Day 2010

Categories
Christmas Dogs Love

Merry Christmas From Whitstable

A lot of what artists do seems to involve watching and waiting to see what will happen. When I’m desperate enough just to do anything, even if it seems completely stupid, it’s such a relief.

Bruce Nauman

Seems like an odd quote to start my Christmas blog but without doubt much of this years nonsense would have been resolved sooner if I had thrown myself all the more harder into some sort of work..paid or un paid.

Firstly, I want to thank you all for so loyally following my blog.  I bumped into my friend Josh last night at the Pearson’s and he told me how much he loved reading it.  Such a surprise!

Christmas in Whitstable has been a great deal of fun.  The pubs packed with revelling youths.  All the chavs are dressed in padded country jackets.  Caps and Barbour type padded jackets.  They look great.  Consequently I can no longer wear mine.

Met my mother for lunch.  I gave her a lovely etching by Wendy Croft that I found in the Caxton Gallery that my friend Tom’s cousin owns and where I am negotiating to live next summer.

Alma and I are off to Church this morning to sing Hymns.

St Alphage is a blunt, crenellated,  Anglican church on Whitstable High Street where, as a child, I sang in the choir.

I took Alma for communion and we sang hymns very heartily.  There was one very good choir boy..too good.  Amongst the ancient old ladies this tall, mop headed youth..like David Beckham playing on a local 5 a side team.

After the service we hung out in the vestry with the choristers, some of whom were in the choir when I was a little boy.   I showed Alma the picture of me back then dressed in my cassock and surplus.  I will see if I can scan it for you.

Alma teared up during the ‘peace be with you’ segment of the Anglican Christmas Service.  We all shook hands and hugged.  Everybody seemed very genuine.

I had a blog comment about my continuing, yet more occasional (indeed diminishing), mentions of Jake.  I now only mention him when I want to share how obsession/addiction/compulsion ruins my life.    I don’t really care what he, or if he knows about it.   As for how long we were together..that really doesn’t matter.  If your heart has been revealed and riven…well, I’m just telling you…it takes time.

I could write about the big dog being killed every single day.  The two incidents are sort of similar: the death of something special.  I think about both of them every single day.  I don’t care if that inflates his ego.  In some way, whenever I am inactive or having a quiet moment I will either remember the moment she was killed or the moment I understood that he would never be my boy friend.

The death of love.

When the Big Dog was killed I couldn’t stop crying.  It might have been the realest thing I ever experienced.  As a result it brought up every painful moment I ever felt but refused to cry over.  The death of my Grand Mother, my real father’s death…oh the list goes on and on.

It is TIME TO FEEL.  I am happy that I am coming out of it but it was essential to experience.

Before I left NYC I met a young man who has been emailing me and with whom I am building a connection.  He is a really special man.  An artist and an intellectual.  I am not keeping any of his emails.  They are immediately burned after reading.

Yes we did fuck the first night we met which is not ideal…and maybe that will impact on our future liaison but I am seeing where this one is heading.  Let’s hope that this next year will be productive, considerate and filled with love.

Christmas Day was okay.  I found a blond wig and clowned around for the kids.  We opened a million presents and May bought The Little Dog a reflective coat for the miserable New York nights ahead of us.

Alma, May, Me, George Christmas 2010

I forgot to mention that I met my brother’s beautiful little son who had his first birthday on the 1st December.  His name is Oscar and had a ready smile and a charming disposition.  He LOVED the Little Dog.  Perhaps I should leave everything to him when I die?

I have to leave my money to someone…maybe him.  I really liked him.  That’s an odd thought isn’t it?  I have to think about it sooner or later.

Ended up helping with the cooking of Christmas lunch.  The turkey was great..really moist and cooked through.  Cooked for 11 people.  I felt a little distant.  I wonder when I am going to sink back into my own skin?  They asked me why I was so ‘subdued’ I felt that the correct word might be contemplative.

We devoured the St John’s Christmas Pudding with lashings of clotted cream.

After lunch hung out at my friend Sasha’s cottage. Her dog Pip and her friend’s dog played with the little dog who tried fucking them both.  He was very funny.  Saw some very good British TV…however my once friend David Walliams (Clancy’s Kitchen) has a new show that isn’t at all funny.  A mocumentary about airports…terrible.

A few more days in Whitstable.

Need the results of further tests from last Wednesdays hospital visit.

I am going to Florence next week for NYE then I am in NYC apartment hunting.  So, lots to do.

Have a very happy Christmas everyone…unless you are jewish…or a muslim..or don’t give a fuck.

BOXING DAY update.  My friend Rachel Weisz is all over the news today…leaving her husband for Daniel Craig.  I could just tell that was on the cards.  She looked miserable the last time I saw her.

St Alphage Church 2010

 

Alma, May, Me, George Christmas 2010

Sasha
Categories
Love

Moving Forward

At least I know I’m still alive…that’s the one great thing about post-breakup anger.

You want him dead…well, maybe suffer some agonizing disfigurement…you can’t say his name without spitting it and you want to harangue every happy couple you see on the street. Not very nice, but it beats being numb and limp.

Rage gives me edge, keeps my blood pumping, gives me a reason to get up in the morning. In fact, we live in a culture that encourages us to express our anger; doctors and therapists agree that repressed anger hurts our psyches and bodies. We’re supposed to let it out.

But raw, primal rage has its limits.

So we smash every plate in the kitchen and rip up every last picture of him-all we’re left with is a mess. Cathartic but not constructive.

Moving forward is what we ultimately want to do.

One way to start is to acknowledge the anger and fantasize revenge, and then forgive yourself for feeling that way. You’re allowed these feelings- you’ve lost so much, and you’re so tired, disappointed, and wounded that you want someone else to hurt.

Reveling in rage can give you the will to live again…but clinging to anger only warps your own heart. You have to move beyond anger if you want to recover completely, that is, if you want to become a trusting, caring person again.

Categories
art Dogs

Bugger That

Hospital day yesterday.  It was quick and efficient.

Nicola arrived from London on Tuesday and bought delicious, French macaroons.

We ate dinner at Wheelers (4 courses 65 GBP including a dozen native oysters) and she stayed in Georgina’s B&B in the same room/bed I stayed this July.

The following morning we bought her Wellington boots from the ancient shoe shop Wooley’s on the High Street and went for a long walk on the snowy beach.  Met other very jovial dog owners and the little dog ran like a mad thing through the melting snow, his little pink paws skidding over the ice.

The woman in Wooley’s, incidentally, remembered fitting my school shoes when I was a boy.   Wooley’s has been on Whitstable High Street for a hundred years next year.  They asked if they could put my photograph in the window when they celebrate their centenary.  I was honoured!

We walked to The Battery, Marilyn’s place on the beach..I described it in my blog the other day.  On the way there, however, we peered through Janet Street-Porter‘s cottage window at her austere modern kitchen and her Gary Hume prints.   I wouldn’t want to live there.  It was so impersonal and the yellow walls were painted the wrong yellow.

The Battery looks a bit worse for wear.  I may nip up there later today and take a picture of it for you so you can see what I am talking about.

If you hadn’t noticed I feel leagues better.

I decided to let myself off the hook.  Become quite tearful when I write it down like that.  It’s time to stop beating myself up.  Give myself a break like they say in the Narcotics Anon literature.

I was chatting with a friend yesterday and I realized that I was finally out of the woods.   It’s a decision.  I have been waiting for a storm to pass rather than wash something down the drain.

My friend was telling me that he would find it hard to love again after his last failed romance, that he had been tossed aside…and I thought to myself, “Bugger that, life is far too short not to fall in love!”  I come from a long line of men who can say proudly that they love another man.  I love you is possibly the hardest thing one man can say to another.  I am doubly proud that I have said it and I meant it.

Saying I love you is much harder than saying I want to fuck you.

All I have to do is find a man who can hear those words and value them.

So, today I tried not to engage with bad thoughts and old resentments.   I thought out loud, come on LOVE you can show this old man that life is worth loving again.  So, I’ve been feisty all day but not angry.  I have been creative all day and not asleep.

I pulled out a couple of scripts.  I made a couple of calls.  I thought about finding a producer.  I had a meeting with a woman I might do a property deal with.

It was good day.  It is good to be home.

Categories
Gay

Crazy Christian/Muslim/Jewish Monsters

Just a quick note about the repeal of DADT:

This gay male ain’t impressed. Like everything Obama does the goodwill gets lost in the detail.

I am not holding my breath for better treatment for gays in the military.

Of course DADT was absurd but repealing it does nothing when you get to thinking about the real and immediate problem for gay men and women in the USA:   The Christian Right hates us (along with the devout Muslim and the Orthodox Jew)  and would like us to self destruct in a cloud of holy vapor.

With the advent of fascist Palin and her ilk…who intellectuals love to laugh at as the German intellectuals did at Hitler…laws like this can be very easily repealed.  For Goodness sake, they are already discussing separate dorms for gays!

Now, let’s start talking about the real issue: legal parity, matrimonial parity and stop gawping over the death of a ridiculous law that affected a tiny number of men and women compared to DOMA which affects us all.

There’s something else, something I always forget to write:

The gays and the lesbians ain’t going anywhere.

We ain’t asking and you ain’t telling.

You murderous, repellent christian/muslim/jewish folks can kill every black man, every white man, every asian, every jew, every muslim, every christian, every aboriginal…but as long as there are humans on the earth we will be there too.

Get used to it!  Get fucking used to it!

We are your children and your grand children.  You can hunt us down and kill every one of us but tomorrow another gay will be born.

It is God’s Will you crazy Christian/Muslim/Jewish Cunts..it’s God’s fucking will.

As for the gays…

Parity, unity and now.

Get off your fat, lazy, complacent asses gay America and start breaking windows until you achieve equality.   Stop relying on bloated lawyers to fight unwinnable cases.  Do SOMETHING!!!  Do it NOW!!!

I know you won’t.  There’s a boy you’ve seen on Manhunt..a martini waiting for you at the bar…weights to lift at the gym.

I live in the USA. I am appalled by the lack of political initiative that gay people take or are engaged in.

Frankly this DADT repeal is small cheese.   American gay and lesbian equality is leagues behind the rest of the developed world because they refuse to engage in direct action.   They refuse to seen to have an opinion…refuse to fight in any meaningful way and, just as Obama attempted to engage with the Christian right with his ill fated consensus politics..reaching out to his adversary, the gays have their agenda prescribed by their homophobic enemies rather than doing what government hates most: insurrection.

Governments hate their own people on the street demanding to be heard.

Gay men especially still live in a great deal of  fear.

Look at the way radical British gay human rights activist Peter Tatchell fought hard and visibly for all to see, worked in tandem with Stonewall lobby type groups and allowed the oppressed a voice in the streets.

In America we are regularly stoned, beaten, insulted and killed.  It is time to fight back, it is time to be heard and a smidgeon of compassion is simply not good enough.

Categories
Rant

Migration Me

We must be the first generation ever where the option to freely migrate has become almost impossible.

Humans have always fought for their freedom; whether religious, political, racial.  Finding themselves and their ideas in conflict with the majority, no longer able to live with their fellow man or persecuted and driven from their homes.

In recent times the minority were able to emigrate, find sympathetic others or start their own like-minded group in fresh pasture or foreign lands.

Sadly this is no longer achievable…singularly maybe as a political refugee but no like-minded group can move as one and find virgin territory to freely express their differences.

Migration has always been key to human success and innovation.  Stifling this primal desire to up sticks and move is patently detrimental to the human race.

We are tribal by nature and proudly so.  Most are happy with the tribe they were born into.

By fixing communities in one place the negative effects are plain to see.  Dissatisfaction reigns.

I have never been a proponent of integration.   I am a loner but my adopted tribe, the gay tribe, has enthusiastically created comfortable ghettos where they feel safe and valued.  The same can be said of Asian communities in Northern England, Hasidic communities in Brooklyn, Posh people in Gloucestershire etc.

Where we are trapped together in unhealthy union fights between opposing tribes become not only more frequent but also more relevant.  Forced to share increasingly limited space, integration and multiculturalism become the buzz words for panicked community leaders and governments all over the developed world.

Remember the Rwanda genocide?  It is no coincidence that before the genocide Rwanda had more humans per square meter than any other place on the planet.

There was no more room.  Nowhere to run.

One tribe hacked the other tribe to death.   It is what we do.

In Thomas Hardy‘s desperate last novel Jude the Obscure, there is a small boy nick named by his Father, ‘Young Father Time’ an anxious little thing who murders his siblings then commits suicide upon hearing that his Mother is worried at how they might all be fed.

He hangs himself with this tragic note pinned to his vest:  “Because we are too many.”

Genocide may be a valuable part of the human story.  It maybe a very healthy part of our story, as unpalatable as that may sound.

If we are unable to migrate we are unable to evolve.  Our ideas become increasingly inward looking,  we become prone to mysticism, religion and superstition.

At this moment in the history of man we are all, unfortunately, Native Americans forced into reservations, like Inuits and aboriginals obliged to accept the limitations of an over crowded and over regulated world.

Bedouins, gypsies, nomads no more.

I have always felt separate from everyone.  Separated by class and circumstance, by wit and intelligence, by impatience and sobriety.

My tribe of one has found his place in acres of rolling scrub overlooking the Pacific.   The tribe of Me walks safely in my own home town.


Categories
Malibu Travel

Whitstable Life

Whitstable life.

Actress Fay Ripley has moved into the house opposite my old place.   Saw her today in the most elegant shearling coat and big glasses.   Celebrities stalk my home town…jabbering away loudly on mobile phones.

Even the little houses beyond the High Street that I never thought would be interesting to London people are now 300k and never on the market for longer than a few weeks.

Recession?  Where is it?

I am still really pleased I sold both my houses.

I never really liked the Peter Cushing house (number 3 Seaway Cottages) it was large and draughty and I think I must have been to the beach maybe twice in 13 years.  The beach was the front garden..but I am not a beach man.

I really loved the other house (number 2 Seaway Cottages), the house next door that I renovated from scratch.  It looked superb by the time I finished with it.

I poked my nose through the door yesterday and the Anthony Gormley coat pegs are still in place.  The rather beautiful kitchen lamps have been replaced by ugly, modern, cheap looking, brushed aluminum sconces.   Everything else is just as I left it.  The fig tree in the garden has been severely pruned as it should be.

I had an unfortunate incident on Sunday night.  Went to see my friend Cathy for dinner but she was so drunk I turned on my heels and left the house.

Last night, through a genuine blizzard, walked to an NA meeting.  I looked like a snow man when I got there.  Expecting the worst (crack addicts) but instead met with a group of sober people with surprisingly good, modern recovery.

It was great.

Sometimes I think that NA has more to do with SAA than AA.  The Step work and traditions of NA as written in the Green and Gold Book have really appropriate text for addicts of any kind sex/drugs/drink.

I had lots to write about the past couple of days but…the memories escape me right now.

Long walks with the little dog around the golf course.   Tea with Georgina and family.   Sunday lunch time went to the Monument Pub and ate roast pork with crackling.  Entertained myself with the Monument Football Team who are all, every single one..to a man…GORGEOUS.

Ate home-made pate today for lunch with Carol before she crawled into her workshop…you know she’s a potter?  A ceramicist?

Back in LA Ashley tells me that the waterfall that thunders under the Malibu house drive is thundering nicely.    By the time I get back the garden will be a jungle.  I was worried that the new road would be washed away.  I bloody hope not.

The sun’s gone dim,

The moon’s turned black,

For I loved him,

He didn’t love back.

21/12/09 – 21/12/10  Adieu my darling.

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