Tag: Joni Mitchell

Categories
art

Royal College of Art REVIEW 24/25 PART THREE

Chamonix July/August 2025

Gaza Body Bag RCA 24/25 Cancelled art work. Granite, paint, rope wool, cadaver bag.

‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.’ Pablo Picasso

Sitting at my desk in view of these great mountains.  I feel calm and relaxed but aware of an impending tempest creeping toward me.  I’m ordering canvases and pigment paid for by my host. I wonder how these nascent feelings will make themselves known.

I can’t help mulling over my time at the RCA.  If I hadn’t been on anti depressants these past five years I would have reacted very badly to the way I was infantilised by the tutors at the RCA.

I might have laid on the floor and screamed like the baby they thought they were poking.  

Sitting in the office like a naughty boy because… I didn’t say ‘they’ rather than she.  Because… I took up wall space.  Because… I chose a 9 by 9 canvas to paint.  Because I had frank conversations about sex. Their beady eyes, condescending eyes… enjoying their opportunity to admonish the confident, award winning, accomplished film maker and performance artist.  I felt like I was in a petting zoo with these curious animals nipping at me to see what I was made of. 

Goading me. Will he strike back?

Ok, I made a deep dive into the fetid world of academia. I escaped… and am happy to breath fresh, mountain air. In all my days I had never been in such a toxic, competitive environment.

‘Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.’ Andy Warhol

I started taking anti depressants after I contracted covid in 2020.  I stopped taking anti depressants the month before last.   The veil lifted.  The brain shocks took a while to fade. I want to fuck again… I began having deeper, less controlled emotions.  I am far less patient and very snappy.  Regardless of all this… I am pleased to be back in the world of full fat feelings… with a solid desire to express myself.  Somehow I was less motivated to write and make art when I was under the chemical cosh.

Ross and others shared they were on anti depressants.  I wonder what their art would be without the mind altering drugs?

I have been in and out of hospitals for decades… as and when my mental health gets the better of me.   The longest time I spent in hospital was a whole year.  The mentally ill are far better understood now, than we used to be.  However, I never really felt my mental health was taken seriously in the RCA petting zoo.  Did they expect me to be rational?  

The angry Chinese guy who challenged me after my first RCA blog raised an interesting point.  He suggested… I didn’t want to learn anything at the RCA and just applied to the school for ‘validation’.  The first part is easily debunked.  The second part of his comment is more interesting.  Do I crave validation? 

Well, yes… I do.  I write to be read. I paint to be appreciated. I crave applause from the audience. I desire film reviews. The tears and laugher from those who watch me tell my story (flay myself) at an AA meeting.  I love when people comment on my blog. I love the attention… good and bad. 

That boy threatened to ‘drag’ me and I came in my pants. I love it when you tell me I’m a great cook. I love it when you praise my garden and the way I decorate my house, the art I have chosen.

I am unashamedly a validation junkie… I faint with pleasure when you hate me as vigorously as you love me.

I am the jouster and a jester… a validation junkie.

‘Art isn’t about the creator, what they think, or how they interpret their own work whether it’s poetry, music, or paintings. It’s about the spectator and how they interpret it.‘ Oscar Wilde

As the RCA recedes and the people I met… who I didn’t know a year ago, I will not remember a year from now.  I can scarcely remember men I have had months long relationships with.

I am a stone skimming over the surface of life.  I have little interest in knowing people for long.  To meet them once is enough.  Or to boast… I was there.

10 convivial moments.

  1. I saw Joni Mitchell play Fez under Time Cafe on Lafayette in NYC. 1995
  2. I saw Ivan Lendl play Boris Becker, Wimbledon. 1986
  3. I stomped divots with the H.M. The Queen on Smiths Lawn. 1984
  4. I had dinner with Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams and Ian Drew after a private Prince concert at The Roosevelt Hotel. 2007
  5. Fred Hughes introduces me to Andy Warhol at The Factory. 1985
  6. Rufus Sewell calls as I am driving my F150 up the PCH from Malibu to Topanga. Our friend and massage therapist DL discovered our friend Heath Ledger dead in his bed. DL doesn’t alert 911, DL calls Ashley Olsen. 2008
  7. Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard with Ricky DeMarco. 1988
  8. Dinner with Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, his wife and daughter at The Mercer describing the moment Timothy Geitner calls, the banks are failing, asking what to save: The people or the banks? 2015
  9. New Years Eve, Mercer Kitchen dinner with Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Sporty Spice, Fran Leibowitz, Alan Cumming, Calvin Klein, Martine McCutcheon and Matt Goss. 1999
  10. Province Town, my birthday party thrown by Michael Cunningham. Guests include Jennie Livingstone, Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Friedman, John Derian, Ken Fulk. 2015

I don’t currently have communication with any of the people mentioned above. I don’t need to. I knew them as much I needed to know them, at the precise moment I met them. I didn’t need to go to Wimbledon again, I didn’t need to know Sporty Spice… and she didn’t need to know me.

Although… quite unexpectedly, I was taken to the home of Joni Mitchell by her ex husband on Laurel Canyon the night we thought we saw Elizabeth Taylor dining at the Chateau. It wasn’t Elizabeth.

Jennie Livingstone Provincetown MA 2015

The friends I have are on borrowed time.  I will know them… until I tire of them.  I suppose that’s why gay life suited me, the transitory nature of gay life, one night stands… casual sex… anonymity.   The social mobility of my gay life, one day a Duke another a dustman.  Listening to their stories then passing on… cum in my beard.  

This is why AA suited me… the constant flow of desperate people with desperate stories flushing through the rooms of AA.  Never settling, skimming… like me, over the surface of life. 

This is why Hollywood suited me, meeting people but never engaging with them for anything than the duration of the ‘meeting’.  I am at Leo’s house showing my movie in his very own cinema… I will never see him again.  I am on Malibu Pier with Jen and Brad having breakfast… I will never see them again.  I am walking with Channing on the beech… I will never see him again.  All I am left with is the story of a fleeting moment and that’s all I want to be left with.

I was at the RCA with Xavier, I’m bound to say… when he is a huge star. ‘We drank hot chocolate made with oat milk at Parker’s as he fretted over which major gallery to sign with.’

Gaza After Guernica 2024/25 RCA Paper Graphite Oil Stick

2.

Every day I see the most atrocious, sickening and heartbreaking images from the killing fields of Gaza.  The mass murder curently happening in my name to the people of Palestine.  Kids murdered.  Kids starving.  Kids full of hope over a bag of lentils then shot in the head.  A five year old child shot in the head holding a bag of lentils.

The UK government is fully complicit in these murders.  Starmer, our sinister Zionist leader, makes dreary, unemotional speeches promising action but does nothing.  He and other European leaders like Macron, are making Israel’s genocidal dream come true.   I tried to address this in my work at the RCA but it was removed by Harold Offeh, like the work of another anti Israel artist Zina Karaman… controversial elements of her work removed by the staff.

Art.  Making art.  I just donated 40 years of diaries to a national diary archive.  The rest of my archive and all of my finished movies are held at the UCLA Library Film & Television Archive.  

I have never stopped making work.  Perhaps my most audacious artistic endeavour is this blog. First a diary… now a blog.  There are huge gaps I am trying to fill, playing catch up writing the missing years by hand.  

My friend has an atelier I will use as my studio.  Tomorrow I’ll clear it out.  I want to finish the series of black paintings.  Paintings to remember the burned Malibu garden.

Cactus Tree

by Joni Mitchell

‘There’s a man who sends me medals
He is bleeding from the war
There’s a jouster and a jester
And a man who owns a store
There’s a drummer and a dreamer
And you know there may be more
I will love them if I see them
They will lose me if they follow
And I only mean to please them
My heart is full and hollow
Like a cactus tree…’

© April 1, 1968; Siquomb Publishing Corp

Categories
Malibu Rant

Down to You

I am sitting at home with my foot in the air swaddled in ice, listening to Joni Mitchell.   Well, singing along to her less pessimistic songs.  Relieved of the bondage of self.

The dog had his stitches out yesterday.

Henry has been very kindly driving me around.  We popped into Gjelina for a late lunch with Anna and bumped into Louisa Spring and the fabulous Chrissy Illey.  Chrissy, as you know, is a wonderful writer and journalist from London.

Read her stuff here.

I will see them again this weekend.

I had to buy new towels.  All of mine are old and miserable.  Nothing worse than getting out of the shower and searing your skin with an old towel.

Meant to be having dinner with a friend in H’wood last night but my ankle blew up like a big pink balloon so I hobbled home and lay in bed.  Iced.

I had a Facebook squabble with a well known writer who damned me for appearing on the ‘A’ List.   Why the hell shouldn’t I?  Low and High culture are there to be experienced.  I have certainly had my fill of High Culture.  Performance Art, Art Films…even my book (nearly finished btw) feels like it was written for the exclusive few.

Sorry publishers…I know you don’t want to hear that.

When I got home I tried sleeping but ended up not sleeping.  Instead I sat at the desk tidying my prose.

Perhaps I am perplexed by seeing you know who next week?  Perhaps I am worried by the future.  At around 4am I finally fell asleep.  Exhausted.

Malibu Chile Cookout today.

Categories
Gay

Neil Sedaka

7am 4th July. Yesterday I must have walked between The Pines and Cherry Grove a dozen times.

I woke up in The Pines and fell asleep exhausted in Cherry Grove.

Benoit and I went to a ‘media’ party in some huge house on the bay. What differentiated it from any other party was not immediately apparent.

The half naked men and boys looked identical to all the other men and boys at similar parties elsewhere.  I was introduced to the new editor of the Advocate. He too was half naked. He looked at me suspiciously and so he should. I have no interest in him.

By 2 in the afternoon everyone was trashed and the toxicity began to get to me. I kept thinking to myself how much fun Jake would have here. How he would fit right in.

Later that day I met Stephen Macias my ex manager. He is a truly vile individual who fully took advantage of my Hollywood initiation. I will write more about that at a later date.

He looked good for someone with ‘issues’. He told me proudly that he attends Barry’s Boot Camp in LA.

I saw Mark Beard the muralist. He paints all of those Homoerotic murals in Abercrombie and Fitch. He looks like a scull on a stick. My ex Joe helped him buy his huge studio in Hells Kitchen.

Mark’s boyfriend Jim still looks great.

I hung out with Zelcho, Caroline and Todd. We ate lunch at Cherry’s. I kissed a beautiful man who I met waiting for the water taxi.

I thought more about Jake every time I felt uncomfortable. I damned myself because I had inadvertently let one of these people into my life. One of these party boys. Even though when I met him he was merely a party boy in waiting.

Later that night Caroline cooked a delicious dinner and then we met Benoit and his friends at The Top of the Bay ostensibly to listen to Neil Sedaka sing but when we got there Neil looked frail and left with his friends.

He was being bullied by an Easter European woman. He asked her, “Do you like me for me or because I’m a famous singer?”

We chatted for a while about his children and grand children and West Hollywood where he still lives with his wife of fifty years.

Benoit’s politician friend told me his coming out story. Outed at 30, left his wife. Lost his important job in politics. I asked why he hadn’t come out sooner (read get honest) and he said that he didn’t want to lose his family.

Earlier in the day I went to the AA meeting at the Fire House (6pm) where I listened to group therapy and not one word of recovery. The good looking men only listened to the other good looking men and chatted amongst themselves if the speaker was fat, old or ugly.

On several occasions I wanted to get back to NYC. Every man on the boardwalk held a cup brimming with a lethal amount of alcohol. By mid afternoon many men were staggering or slumped or glazed.

The little dog chased a young buck with velvet antlers.

As I sit writing this Neil Sedaka sat with me and told his life story. He is such a delightful man.

I applauded him for not performing last night.

He told me how Elton had given him a second chance. He told me how he had filled the Albert Hall two years ago and he asked if I had ever been in love so I told him about Jake.

He said, “It’s rich material.”

We talked about Carol King, Sinatra, Elvis and Joni Mitchell. It was compelling stuff for 9am on a balmy Fire Island morning.

20110704-092403.jpg

Categories
Love

Send Me Somebody Who is Strong and Somewhat Sincere

I am not going to write about the other any more but I am going to write about what it feels to not have that delicious daily contact with a man who wants to hear your voice or get your emails.

Even though it just ended I am unusually happy.  It takes a great deal of energy maintaining a long distance relationship.    A great deal of wasted time wondering and planning.   If I asked once I asked a million times when he was going to come visit me.  It was that sort of anxiety I am happy to jettison.

Alone does not mean lonely.  I am not just going to let anyone in simply because I can’t face the idea of being on my own.

I am not lonely, I have so many extraordinary people who catch me as I begin to fall. Everyone at breakfast told me how happy I looked.  I am happy.  I made the right decision.  I did it right.

Look, as time passes the prospect of meeting anyone appropriate diminishes. I knew what I was getting myself into when I met him.  The intrigue was a powerful part of the attraction-until it wasn’t.  The prospect of being a boyfriend was quickly replaced with the role I am often cast in, that of rescuer, therapist and problem solver.

I had a wonderful morning with Jennie and Guinevere who is as funny as all hell.   I can’t possibly tell you what we spent today giggling about. It wasn’t, shall we say, politically correct.  That’s what you get when you drive around LA with a scriptwriter, an ex-porn star and two dogs in a beaten up F150.

Who do I turn to when things get really sad?  Joni Mitchell of course!

But here I am jigglin’ like a cabbage patch doll at my desk-not in my bed desperate for answers.   How did that happen?  Why am I not sad?  Is it because the sun is shining or because I am relived to be away from the emotional catastrophe?

Of course I miss him but when things end they end.  It’s not like we can’t see each other as friends.   In some future place when time has passed.    I wonder if that is possible?  If you compare him to my other friends is he up to par?  I hope so but I don’t know yet.  Love blinds one to the hard facts.    I remember when I used to stay with Celia in Yorkshire with some admirer and she would scowl at me because what I saw in my beau my more critical friends, like Celia, failed to see.

At the end of the day I don’t depend on another to make me happy, clinging to a man for validation.    When I sleep in an empty bed at night I sleep soundly, neither hankering for a man beside me or a warm body simply for the sake of it.

I spent the morning with my friends, firstly at breakfast then driving home.  Now I am sitting on my own, writing this and listening to Joni.  Jennie is coming by later to take me up Runyon. The little dog can’t wait!

What is the cure?  No, not love.  I loved him.  I loved them all.  The death of love has taught me that I am very dangerous.  But that is why I wake up every morning like a boy!  Even now.  Let me tell you once again, let me take to the roof of my apartment building in Hollywood California and shout out loud that I am not afraid.

Categories
Love

Happy Today

I am happy today.  You know there are so many good things happening to me and more importantly to those around me.

It’s so easy to write about being miserable.  It’s easy to indulge our fears.  It’s easy to blame the world for all of the bad things but I ALWAYS forget to tell you when I am happy.  Perhaps I am not sitting at my desk when the happiness comes?  I think that may be the truth because I am out in the world experiencing my joy.

I am with friends, climbing the canyon, writing and reading.

My joy is NOT dependant on any one person.  My joy comes from listening to Joni Mitchell, sitting in the sunlight of the spirit and reveling in the triumph of watching my friend Jennie celebrate her one year of continuous sobriety.  Oh, and before you say it, I am sure I am not meant to be discussing her ONE-YEAR publicly but I am.  After all she has worked so hard to get to this place of authenticity.

Most of you witnessed how she changed on TV.  How we all began this remarkable rescue mission-rescuing ourselves from oblivion, self-hatred and isolation.

Change comes in great gobs never in dribs and drabs.    So this change is all about not wanting to be at the mercy of others, understanding that I can never trust my perception.  It is always wrong.   This change comes from giving into not wanting to change the way I feel.   I have put a lifetimes of effort into separating myself from everyone.  Emotional Boom and Bust.

By watching Jennie flourish I can hitch my wagon to her well planned recovery.  I learn from everyone who comes into my life.  Everyone.

If I have to be on my own then so be it.  But I needn’t punish the world by keeping those around me at arms length.  It’s time to let you in.  Let you be my friend, my colleague, my lover, my mother and my brother.

Being happy does not mean that I ignore suffering, ignore inequity, ignore insensitivity but I don’t have to make it mine.  I needn’t own the suffering of the world and use that as a reason to ruin my own chances.

There are hurdles, great ravines and deep chasms that hinder the direct path that any man needs to take in the great journey of life.    But rather than dwell on what may or may not get in my way I can enjoy the wind in my hair and the sun on my face as I get to where I am going.

I would rather wear a compass than a watch-after all it is best to know where I am going than what time I get there.

When I am scary I am most probably scared.

I don’t want to be that scary man I can be.  I want to be free and if I only get a glimpse of freedom today and just for a few hours then as least I have experienced the feeling and have something to work toward, something I am capable of.

Have a great day everyone.  Remember that there is a solution-so start living in it.

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