The past few weeks have been really interesting.
Annoyingly I’ve not been able to write about most or any of it and will not be able to in the foreseeable future.
As I have said before, as life gets really interesting the blog becomes less relevant. Real life interrupts blog life and for that I am very grateful.
Eventually, when I am allowed, I will explode all over the blog and tell all but for the time being I am keeping my BIG MOUTH SHUT.
I am having to be covert.
Presently staying with friends whose main morning preoccupation is to read really bad news out loud off of the internet. The corruption, the greed and the misery we create around the globe gleefully read out loud to their increasingly cynical children.
Frankly, there is no reason for a young child to have the worst possible news read out to them first thing in the morning as they prepare for school. Scares them. Scared me when I was a kid. All that bad news about nuclear weapons. I had a recurring nightmare about the atom bomb exploding. On my own walking home from junior school up Windmill Road, Whitstable just in sight of my family home…when the atom bomb detonates. A blinding light then a fierce, hot wind. All I could think about was that I had to get home. Of course, there was no home to get back to.
Right now my friend is telling her 8-year-old, “Brain damage is linked to cell phone use…”
Like a fairy story.
They had a lunch here on Sunday for two German friends. A well-known actress and her film industry husband. Within two minutes of arriving he announced the death of Perry Moore a man I knew in passing from New York. Perry produced the Narnia films. Years ago Toby Mott, Noreena Hertz and I had lunch with Perry and Tatum O’Neal at Freeman’s on Rivington when it was hot to have lunch there. Perry and Tatum were both very drunk and weirdly abrasive. Terry Richardson joined us for coffee.
I was not shocked to hear about Perry’s death as it was somehow gay inevitable. His father sadly telling the press that his son was on fine form the day before. Well, nobody ever expects the death of a healthy young man, no father ever expects to bury his son.
Unless, of course, their son leads a double life. We live, as gay men, lives away from our loved ones. Compartmentalized, fine one day..dead the next, slumped in the bathroom…oxycotin overdose. It is too familiar to me. So sad.
It would not surprise me if Jake ended up like Perry.
Anyway the German made some flip remark about Perry dying and gay people in general. He didn’t realize that I was gay. He didn’t realize that I was half Iranian so later made equally racist, inappropriate remarks about Iranian films winning the Berlin Film Festival.
Sometimes you just have to take the bullet so…I challenged him. Within minutes he was threatening to punch my fag lights out. His wife apologized for his behaviour.
They left.
Scratch most white Germans and a jackbooted Nazi goose steps out of the wound.
Samia Saouma my Lebanese ex-friend, gallery owner who lives in Berlin and is arguably one of the chicest women in the world was once applying her lipstick in the back of a cab when her white driver told her that she was a rag-head whore who should prepare for her next trick out of his cab.
Nice.
Recently I took down a whole heap of posts from this blog. Blogs about him. Removed until they had no internet traction. Yesterday I reinstated them without his name attached. Self censorship is not a good thing. I also reinstated the Angry Reader blog that obviously came from ‘you know who’.
It amuses and disturbs me in equal measure that he would think that every achievement, everything of which I am proud he considers worthless. This coming from a man who has achieved NOTHING before he was thirty years old (17th May) when I, in comparison, achieved so much! Much more than anyone ever predicted.
By the time I was thirty years old I had written and directed plays, opened a restaurant, renovated houses, travelled the world. Christ! I did all that as well as being mentally ill, making enemies, etc. etc.
Achievement is not to be judged by others but rather owned by oneself.
I know that he gets drunk, stoned and lonely. I know that deep down he would prefer to resolve rather than reload. Time will tell. Time, as I have often quoted, is the greatest distance between two people.
I know that the we he suggests laugh at me has always laughed. They want me imprisoned or dead. They condemn me and they condemn my friends for being my friends.
He, on the other hand, may be surrounded by friends, family and lovers but at the end of the day he has to face himself, as we all do, in the mirror. I saw him wrestle with his conscience.
At that moment when I was most proud of him I should have just walked away.
As for the film? It takes shape before my very eyes. Working with CP in quite a different way than I have before. That’s all I can say. That’s all I want to say.
I still have no interest what so ever to meet, engage or have sex with any man.
Oscar party week. I am not involving myself until Saturday. Kick off festivities with Sharon…we will do the do…the merry dance. Still, if I am honest, I can’t really be bothered.
I want to make my own film now…not celebrate the achievements of others.
P.S. Tatum O’Neal wouldn’t remember me. She and Melanie Griffith once broke down together in an AA meeting. Crying about the relationships they had failed to have with their children. Meg Ryan looks like Melanie Griffith. They must have had work by the same surgeon. Meg Ryan wouldn’t remember me either.
Related Articles
- Narnia producer Perry Moore dies at 39 (guardian.co.uk)