Tag: New York City

Categories
Rant

Agave

Today I am staying at the house all day.

An Australian friend may come over but if he doesn’t it’s no big deal.

I like being here.  It’s a beautiful spring day.  The garden is blooming.  Sadly, the HUGE agave planted just as you enter the main part of the garden is beginning to send out it’s once in a life time flower spike which means that after it has bloomed it will die.  I am going to miss it.  It looks like a huge spear of asparagus.

The twins are out all day.  Robby is at an audition and darling Miles has a job interview with a production company.  I am so proud of them.  They work so hard, they are both so focused on making their Hollywood dream come true.

As much as I didn’t want the role of mother hen I actually quite enjoy nurturing them both.  Cooking, washing etc.  In turn they make me laugh and insist that I jump in the car and go with them when ever they go on an adventure.

This morning Miles and I walked to the PCH down the new road and had breakfast.  We met a couple from Carbon who had lost their dog.  My heart wept for them.

We earned our breakfast with that exhausting 5 mile walk.

Yesterday I watched Dorian Gray with Toby at his home in Hollywood.  I am thinking of recutting it.  We are going to recut it.  Parts of that film are so clever, mostly the parts Joel Plotch cut.

We ate lunch at Joan’s on Third with Miami Henri.  Roast chicken and grilled vegetables.  We ate some very unpalatable mushroom salad.

After lunch I sat with John who I had not seen for a month or so.  Not for any other reason that he has been on a long family holiday.  I have been in NYC.  We had a great deal to catch up on.  I told him about my session with Jill on Monday.  I found seeing her very rewarding.  I had forgotten just how a therapist can take the sting out of ones tail.

I told him what was going on in NYC with The Penguin, he looked very pleased with himself.  “I told you so.”  He never ever liked The Penguin.   The Penguin knew John didn’t approve.

Yet, for all of his self-congratulation he was compassionate and kind.   He doesn’t/didn’t want to see me suffer but equally he could see what was going on from the very beginning.

I talked with Jill about this next touchy subject and shared it with John.

Can I mention the touchy subject?

Nope.

Apart from the touchy subject Jill called me a ‘late bloomer’.  She said that my heart had been broken.  We talked about love addiction.  Making a person your higher power rather than God.  We talked about going into Pine Grove and getting my power back.  I talked about having no consequences…or at least any that scare me.  We talked about nihilism.

I don’t know if I can mention the touchy bit.  It is so freshly revealed.

I can’t.  All I can say is…it’s about grieving.

Dan called to tell me that the shelves I designed for his apartment look spectacular.

I was in bed by 10.30.   Up at 5.30 this morning.

Categories
art Gay

Cannes

I thought that you might enjoy this picture as much as I enjoyed creating it.  Inspired by Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.  My Hasidic Easter Bonnet.

Spent yesterday planning my trip to Cannes.   Of course, I love Cannes when everyone is there for the film festival.  I am deliberately revisiting all the places that we visited together so that I can expunge him from the memory of the locale.

As NYC becomes less emblematic of those painful days with him and more joyful as I remake this city with the other.  The streets are no longer associated with those miserable days of fruitless longing.

The sunshine is mine and mine alone.  I love the streets!

Could you imagine anything more ghastly than sitting in an office day after day for thirty years with minimal vacation?   Looking forward to retirement?   Eww.

My therapist and I are planning my escape.  An escape that will include the possibility of a return to what I used to enjoy:  peace of mind.

On Saturday morning I saw a young mother drop her baby on its face.   The baby was fine.  Mainly made of gristle they are more resilient than they look.  Sturdy little things.  The young mother, more from embarrassment, screamed out “My baby!”   The restaurant hushed, her other child started crying, her own mother with whom she was having breakfast, sat immobilized by fear.  There was, however, something about her scream that reminded me about the moment the Big Dog was hit by the truck.

The trauma associated with that ghastly moment lives with me, shapes my thinking and holds me hostage to the notion that I must never be hurt like that again.

When we were interviewing old people last month we met an old man who told us that he couldn’t own pets any longer because he fears the depth of emotional pain that comes with a beloved pets death.

I know what he means.  The pain felt around the death of anything you love, the loss of anything one cares about (as one gets older) is without parallel.

In many ways I am more numb now than I have ever been.  Less able to feel for fear of being badly hurt.  How could I have got this far without…and then I thought back.  I remembered the excruciating pain of being dropped again and again as a small baby/infant/child.   Suck it up Duncan.

Sunday.  Birthday party with friends.  I ate too much cake.  I was wearing a lilac cashmere sweater that garnered some reaction.  “That’s risky.” A rather bland looking woman commentated.  I smiled and thanked her as if she had just complimented me.

The baby was fine.   A little redness on the forehead but after a few moments of crying he/she was smiling and gurgling.

Incidentally, after all my Jay Jopling bashing for not being political there is a show at Mason’s Yard called NEW ORDER that looks very promising.  This work looks very impressive though a little austere.  Where is Max Beckmann when you need him?

I am desperate to see this.  I hope it is as subversive as it looks.

I have included the gallery’s incredibly verbose description below.  Who writes this shit?  Look at the way they over use/mis-use the word polemical.

Masons Yard 8 Apr—14 May 2011

‘The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle.’
Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetics of Politics’ (2006)

The relationship between aesthetics and politics has been a polemical issue for much of the history of art. In particular, the late twentieth century saw an overt politicisation of critical discourse amidst collapsing colonial hegemonies, global wars and the emergence of civil rights movements across the world. This was coupled with artists questioning the principles of modernism opening up the debate as to what constituted a work of art. A number of key figures emerged on the international art scene, whose practice specifically dealt with issues of power structures, race, injustice, gender and dissent. The works featured in ‘New Order‘ share a focus on the transformation of social or ideological structures that shape experience, and in different ways they explore existing communal, political and physical constructs of the everyday.

The formal geometry and commonplace materials of Miroslaw Balka‘s ‘Kategorie’ (2005) lend the work a pared-down aesthetic generally connected with Minimalist and Conceptual art. A six-metre long, two-metre high tunnel is interrupted by five fine coloured threads, suspended from rotating motors on the ceiling. The work is rich in associative historical and political references, such as the traumatic memory of wartime atrocities in his native Poland which Balka has addressed throughout his practice. The colours of the strands – red, violet, green, pink and black – are the colours assigned to uniforms identifying different categories of prisoner in the concentration camps (red for political prisoners; violet for Jehovah’s Witnesses; green for criminals; pink for homosexual and bisexual men; and black for Romany people, alcoholics and individuals with learning disabilities, among others).

Part of Doris Salcedo‘s ongoing series in which found domestic furniture is used as a vehicle to explore the traumatic political history of her native Colombia, ‘Untitled’ (2008) features tables and wardrobes, conjoined and partially entombed in concrete. The re-assembled components of the hybrid form of the sculpture, each through use embedded with a material history, function as silent witnesses to implied personal and collective narratives.

Rooted in black urban experience, David Hammons‘ practice comments on the iniquities present within social, political and economic systems. Critiquing the relationship between high art and the street, his sculptures often feature found objects laden with cultural association. Hair clippings swept from the floor of a Harlem barbershop are fashioned into a cornrow hairstyle upon a smooth oval rock in ‘Rock Head’ (2000), while in ‘Which Mike Would You Like to Be Like?’ (2001), Hammons takes three vintage microphones that serve as surrogates for three prominent figures in recent popular culture – Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan – referencing the limited range of role models for young African-American men.

The densely-layered, collaged paintings of Mark Bradford also incorporate materials salvaged from an urban setting, including torn bill posters or newsprint. The abstract compositions reference alternative cartographies that burgeon within cities, such as the spread of an economic underclass, the movement of immigrant communities and race relations. In ‘Strange Fruit’ (2011), fragments of text drawn from the local ‘merchant posters’ Bradford frequently uses echo across the painting, while the title is taken from the protest song about the lynching of African-Americans in the 1930s, sung by Billie Holiday.

In Julie Mehretu’s ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ (2008), a swirling vortex of shapes and marks on a grey ground, overlaid with architectural passages, give the sense of a gathering storm. Made on the occasion of the inaugural New Orleans Biennial in 2008, the painting conveys the destructive power of uncontrollable nature within a stricken cityscape, mired in bureaucratic chaos.

In 1969, Anselm Kiefer photographed himself in a variety of imposing locations (often in settings evocative of German Romantic imagery) making the Nazi salute. The resulting series, entitled ‘Besetzungen’ (‘Occupations’), provocatively confronted the blanking out of history and questioned the collective guilt of an entire post-war generation in Germany. In the works presented in the current exhibition, ‘Heroische Sinnbilder’ (2011), Kiefer revisits the iconography of his own art history, as a means of investigating the resonance of totalitarian symbols across the passage of time.

Categories
Rant

The Penguin


Torrential rain.  Lightening.  Veselka.  East Village.  NYC.

Every day in NYC is unusual.  Most every day in LA is usual.  NYC, Paris and London are cities where one is forced to expect the unexpected.

So it was that yesterday, after I walked the dog, I made my way to China Town to find sulphur soap.  I popped into the Family Court to get a feel of what to expect next month.  Another tawdry location.   It takes a long time to file a petition.  It can take all day.  The Penguin must have sat in there for a long time.  It would have given him ample time to reflect on his shortcomings.

Again I had to walk up Varick St risking bumping into him.  The Subway at the back of my building must surely disgorge him every single working day.  I had a late breakfast with Pierre.  I met with my lawyer who was on sparkling form.    This evening we discuss strategy with the very expensive litigator.   The expensive, mean litigator.

The Penguin is forefront in my thoughts.  I spoke to Jill and Drew the day before yesterday when I was feeling less stable.  Thankfully I feel good again.  Apparently it often happens that TV people are ensnared by crazed fans.   Drew was so helpful.

I sat in the steam room for an hour.  On my own.  I lay naked on the black marble, sweating and groaning in pain from the searing heat then, enduring a different agony, under the icy cold shower.  My heart pumping.  I lay resting under thick, white towels.

I had lunch with handsome Philippe and at 6.30 I met Ross at cafe Gitane fresh from his weekend in Barcelona.  He is such a funny little dude.  We ate their ‘signature’ avocado on toast and I drank hot chocolate.  A drunk, homeless man started talking to us.  He must have been 70 years old.  He shook my hand.  He told me that he respected those who could care for a dog.  My patience for humans is worn quite thin.  My compassion for any dog is evident.

I had my head shaved at the barbers on 9th Street.  Boris trimmed my beard a little too extremely.  I look like a Spanish conquistador.  I wanted to look good for my trip up town.

UP TOWN!

I have not been north of 30th Street for many years.  Remember when I first lived in NYC I found myself on Columbus and 86th.   The day I arrived was the only time I ever saw a man raise a firearm in anger.   That was years ago.

I took a cab.  That part of town looks less salubrious than it did when I lived there.  A bit broken.  Dinner with an Armenian friend of my lawyers at a greek restaurant on Columbus.  Lamb shank.  It was passable but nothing special.  We had a nice time.  After dinner he showed me his apartment: a few rooms carved out of a giant mansion that was once very beautiful.  Thick architrave,  cornices,  creaking stairways.

I fell asleep on his bed whilst he collated his resume.  Woke up at 1am.

On a whim I decided to walk home.  I walked via the Ace Hotel.  Thumping music.  Pretty boys.   Pretty girls.

82 blocks to contemplate.   An 82 block contemplation.

I thought a great deal about what The Penguin and I will say in court.  I was torn between two stalls:  pity for the boy and derision.   The more one finds out, the more one realizes that he mixed a catastrophic cocktail of deception/desire and would not stop until he got what he wanted.

He chose the wrong man to fuck with.  His timid, delicate, winsome, coquettish facade masking the hard assed sociopath that lay within.  He compartmentalized his life: home, family, perversions/drugs/drinking.

If only I had been like the others and just seen things his way.  Poor boy, trapped in a heterosexual relationship that he didn’t know how to escape from.   That girl paid half his rent so he could live an East Village life, cheat on her with endless men.

My heart bleeds for him.

I kind of blame his hapless parents.  No…I do blame his parents.  They are not idiots.

Then, when I am done being angry, I imagine how embarrassed he must be that the whole world knows that he chose me of all people to come out to, to tell that he loved.  To be involved with.   What an idiot!

He doesn’t want you to see the picture I have of him sucking my cock.  My fat white cock in his mouth.

At least with most/all of my ex’s they were equally abnormal.

He wants to re-write the past so I am no longer in it.  The Penguin will even attempt to censor this blog, challenge my first amendment rights.  Tricky, if you work for a publishing house that must surely enshrine the values of FREE SPEECH.  Nice press angle…for me.

Dinner conversation inevitably turned to him.

Almost every gay will ask if his ex gf suspected that he was cheating on her, then congratulate him for an excellent piece of deception.

The view that all women are essentially worthless to gay men, indeed maybe even a threat…is a view commonly held but very rarely articulated.  The Penguin’s relationship with his ex ‘best friend’ (how do you treat your ‘best friend so?) was an excellent example of how gay men abuse women.

He had no regard for her.

One might say that all men who cheat are the same…but I am not interested in what heterosexuals get up to.  I am interested in the way gay men treat women.  Since interviewing so many of them for our film I understand better that gay men still have little or no respect for women.  They treat them like brood mares when going through the surrogacy procedure.  They are expunged from the surrogacy story.

They might have fag hag friends who dote on them but to me that is the most lethal symbiosis.  A no win situation.  Like marrying Jesus.

By the time I got home it was late, late, late.  I took the dog to the park.  I cadged a cigarette and smoked it.

The Penguin was bullied as a child for his short stature and beak-like nose.  His fingers are fused together, resulting in flipper-like hands.  He waddles like a penguin when he walks.  He was forced as a child to always carry an umbrella by his over-protective mother.   In keeping with his pretensions of being a refined gentleman, he prefers to wear formal wear.

Categories
Fashion

High Line

A dreamily beautiful day in NYC.  Mother’s Day at home in England.  My Mother’s sweet bf texted me so that I didn’t forget.

Met Ian for lunch.  Discussed press strategy for next month.   After lunch we walked the High Line which was such a treat.  We continued our afternoon in the West Village window shopping.  Marc Jacobs Men has moved which I found oddly disconcerting.

To tell you the truth I was less than great company.  Ian left me to my massage.   90$.   I sat in the steam room on my own sweating out the poison.  Maybe the Scientologists are right about the emotionally therapeutic effects of sweating.  I certainly felt less toxic after my stint in the steam.

I am being IRONIC about Scientology.

I had organized to meet Sean at 6pm but he was late so, thinking he had flaked, I started walking east.  He finally called as I was passing the O’Toole Building on 12th St near to where Joe and I lived when we lived in New York.

I have always liked that building.  It was designed by Albert C. Ledner in 1963.  Even though it now looks, from afar, terribly grubby…and from the street like something impregnable..it is a charismatic building up for demolition, that some are seeking to preserve.  Is it worth preserving?

In as much as it was one of the first buildings in the city to break with the Modernist mainstream it maybe deserves a second chance.  It is a significant work of architecture.

It was built to house the National Maritime Union, as the era of longshoremen and merchant sailors was nearing an end. Its glistening white facade and scalloped overhangs, boldly cantilevered over the lower floors, were meant to conjure an ocean voyage and a bright new face for the union.   Its glass brick base, once the site of union halls, suggests an urban aquarium.

Perhaps, as else where, the recession may end up saving this building if the West Village historical society doesn’t.

I digress.   I found myself standing on that corner at 7pm on a Sunday night.  After a few minutes everything around me just melted away.  The people, the cars…I found myself enjoying a rare moment of city silence.  Peace.

Sean arrived and we walked.

Dinner with Woodrow and Dan at Takihachi on Ave A.  I made a paper man out of the wrapper a straw comes in.   See above.

A cranberry and soda at that gay bar opposite.   I forgot the name.  Apparently Anderson Cooper’s boy friend owns it.  Or, is that an urban myth?  Anyhow, the experience was decidedly lackluster.  I looked at the vintage gay porn on the TV monitors and wondered why we play gay porn in gay bars.  Do we just want to remind ourselves why we are there, or…why we should be there?  The images of great gobs of cum shooting out of glistening penises seared into my brain all the way home.

Date night tonight.

Do you want to see something funny?

Don’t they look terrible on me?  Those severe glasses?

Categories
Gay

Pies and Thighs

Yesterday was fun.  Lunch with friends.  Met with my lawyer.  Drank far too much coffee.  I feel excited, a bit apprehensive, occasionally sad.   Compared to this time last year…who would have guessed?

Aaron dropped by at 8pm and we headed into Brooklyn for dinner.  I had underestimated the time so,  as we were ultimately headed for a gay bar thingy called The Metropolitan,  it turned out that we were in Brooklyn far too early.

So, we explored and ended up  in a sweet coffee shop further up Lorimer called the Second Stop cafe which served delicious coffee and good-looking baked goods.  It was nice to be out of Manhattan.  The scale and detail of Brooklyn somehow makes it feel as if it is a lot further from the city than it is.

We found a bar full of trendy straight people and Aaron ordered a whiskey and raspberry cocktail that smelt ok.  I found myself wondering what it would taste like.   I found myself congratulating myself that throughout this debacle I didn’t drink or take drugs.   I found myself hankering after a time when my head was less clouded.   I found solace in my continuing sobriety.

We ate a late dinner at Pies and Thighs.  It was OK.  Does it deserve its cult status?  I don’t think that the fried chicken is better that the 101 Thursday Fried Chicken Special in Hollywood.  Nor is it any better than Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles also in Hollywood.   It was just ok.  The deep fried pickles were inedible.  The home-made cherry pie was again..just ok.  Not a great deal on the plate and a bit mashed up.  I think our server was stoned or had spent the day surfing.  Tousled blond hair and vacant expression.

After dinner we walked back up Riggs to The Metropolitan.  We met some friends and their friends and had a fun night out.

This morning Aaron left and I walked the dog.   Jenny called and I called Hilary, Jess, Manu and John.

‘Just for Today’ is the mantra we repeat in AA.  Today and only today I am going to stay sober.   It can be applied to anything.

I am writing and in between writing I am trying to stay present.   I was looking forward to going into rehab next week.  I am not allowed my lap top or my phone.  I am not allowed anything that will distract me from the work I have to do.  Never mind.  I will check in after the 19th.

Categories
Malibu

Spring

We picked lemons and grapefruits and cleaned out the plunge pool.  We cooked dinner.  We walked on the beach.  I wrote more of my film.  I met another DOP.  I wrote more of my novel.  I am presently writing a thousand words a day.  More if I count this and the film.  We planted a tree and swept the paths.  The days are full up with life and laughter.

The twins are incredibly funny and kind.  Their Mother called me yesterday and thanked me for looking after them.  It’s a treat to do so.  They are honest.  They give more than they take.

I don’t want to go back to NYC so perhaps I won’t.  There’s nothing there for me other than sadness.   Disaster.   Therapist Jill gets back this week and hopefully I can get myself into some sort of rehab by the beginning of May.   It’s the only way I can imagine dealing with everything that has happened.   The pain and the resentment.

I can start again.

He was wearing the jacket that I picked out for him in the most recent picture I have.  Staring at a near empty pint of beer.  I hope he chokes on that fucking beer.  I hope that every time he pulls on his jacket he thinks of me and London and APC and how much I tried to help him.  What lengths I was prepared to go to make his new gay life better.

You see?  When you let a liar into your life what havoc they cause?  What pain and suffering they inflict?  Oh get over it I hear you say…but I am not like that.  I can carry around a resentment for years.   Some relationships take years to get over.  Especially when you know in your heart that you will never love like you loved, feel what you feel, be what you were with the man who you loved…ever again.  Even if he was a liar, even if he is impossible to forgive.  Even if I want so badly to put things right and be at peace with the world.

The twins are off out to Santa Monica.  They are leaving me here to write and ponder.

Life cheats us with shadows.   We ask it for pleasure and it gives it to us with bitterness and disappointments in it’s train.  Oscar Wilde.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w_szN3uuIY&feature=related]

Categories
Gay

Willie Visits

It is raining with torrential force today.  See below.

The Little Dog and me are wrapped up warm on the sofa.  Frank just left.  He brought  Willie to see us.   Willie and I still love each other but he lives with Frank now.  That’s that.  I posted a little video of us on Facebook.

Yesterday was not a great day.  I hung out with Jen and Jason, helping them with their delivery business.  Anything to take my mind off of the anonymous note I received.   Of course I thought about it all day.

I called Dan.  When is this ever going to end?

Usually when I get notes that are JB related I just ignore them…but this was different.  It was designed to hurt both of us.

In a way it was good to know where he is because I can avoid those parts of NYC where he will be.   I know that it sounds improbable but I really don’t want anything more to do with him personally.  I just WISH he had never ever contacted me.

Resentful about that.  Totally ruined the past few months.  It probably gives him immense pleasure to know that I have been so badly hurt and continue to be so.  He lied his way into my life, stripped me bare and like a wilful child slammed the door in my face.  So damned selfish.

I feel cheated out of the investment I made in him.  The time he demanded.  The love I lost.  Only now, after so much damage…like a natural calamity that leaves one in the pause of powerless amazement.

When CP left last week I felt very alone.  He, very sweetly, worried that I get depressed when he is away and (annoyingly) there is some truth to that.  I feel focused and connected when he is around.

We have been working hard to make our film happen.  It looks more likely every day.  Spent last night looking at DOP reels.

I am excited by this project.  Excited by its potential and our ability to reach out to our community and explore difficult ideas.  We spent hours with old gay folk.   Let me tell you something:  for the rich or the poor old age is a the great leveler.   We don’t do nearly enough for our aged population…not in England or America.

Therapy last night.

I love solitude too much.

[wpvideo XaMn5t6C]

Categories
art

Preparation X

I should have called this post: Pre-Existing Condition.

I have always been embarrassed by my piles.  Hemorrhoids.  I have always had them.  Ever since I can remember.  Thank God I was never a bottom.

Whilst the rest of the world looks on in horror at the inevitable nuclear meltdown in northern Japan, the brutal attacks on protestors by the Bahrainian police force, the Libyan civil war I spent this evening with a complete stranger from the internet who arrived at my home with a bag of groceries and cooked me dinner.

Whilst he did that:  I fainted.  Very, very Jayne Eyre of me.

The upshot being that I badly bruised my back on the fucking chair Michael Temple made for me.  The chair looks nice but it’s a FUCKING DEATH TRAP.

That’s what we do in LA.  Strangers come to our mountain top mansions and prepare Penne Carbonara.   I served coffee in delicate Sevres coffee cups.   The dog was FREAKED OUT when I fell over.  He ran away from me when I tried to placate him.

This morning Charles left in his neat black suit and freshly pressed shirt and tie.   He looked so sweet.  I had film stuff to do after he left.  After a few film related conversations on the telephone I walked to the PCH.  All the way there and all the way back.   He chased many ground squirrels.

I sold some art.

This afternoon I watched Sophia Coppola‘s film Somewhere.  I really enjoyed it.  The language and locations of our Hollywood lives.  Too many afternoons floating on the pool, too many hasty hook ups.  Too many facile conversations.  Too many text messages from people who either want to fuck you or fuck you over.  Not enough substance.  Set against a back drop of elegant hotels with fancy toys to play with.

I once lived in the Chateau Marmont for a month.   I moved there when the mountain burned.  I have spent many hours there making new friends.

I remain isolated.

Most of us are isolated here.  However successful we are or we are not.  However many parties we are/are not attending, however ‘connected’ we are.

Sitting around.

Waiting for a great idea.

So now the next great idea has come upon me and I have convinced others to work with to make a dream come true.  Suddenly this town makes sense.

Los Angeles, oh you strange and terrible place.

The christian twins are coming to stay.  The beautiful, twenty-year-old twins are coming to live with me at the house, live at the house whilst I am in NYC.   When they return from Utah.   My born again beauties.

I ate the pasta/caprese salad/garlic bread and he left soon after we finished our coffee to my strange, secluded mountain top life.

He was perfectly nice.

The bruise on my back is worth photographing.

just part of the bruise
Categories
Hollywood

Research

The past ten days we have immersed ourselves in the ‘project’.  I am learning to be collaborative which is unusually hard for a man like me who largely expects to get things his own way.  The more we explore the clearer the picture becomes.  Have you heard of a film called Cathy Come Home?  I am drawn to it.

I like my life right now.  Doing what I feel I was put here to do.

We are running all over town.  Dane drives me.  His sweet face lightening the mood of the day. Last night Charles stopped by and the twins arrived.  Miles has been in Australia filming Whale Wars on a boat for three months.

Youth and enthusiasm.

Meeting writers, first ad’s, lawyers and the like.   Hanging out in obscure offices and community rooms.  Have to be discreet here.  Agreed not to write about any of it but I wanted you to know darling that I am safe and well and we are working hard to make things better for you.

The garden is desperate to be planted with vegetables.  On Saturday we were in Santa Barbra and met a lively old lady with great looking baby tomato plants.

The goats need to be bought.

I dreamt about Jake again.  Again, it was conciliatory.  There are times that I wish I could share what is going on with him because I know he would love it.  Isn’t that odd?  Perhaps I am close to totally forgiving him?  The last time we spoke was in July which means that we have not spoken for longer than we actually knew each other.

My NYC bf understands my predicament.  It seems that we have all experienced mad love, crushing obsession and the like.

Do, if you want to, look at the DEATH AND LOVE IN PATMOS blog because, at your request, I have transcribed the diary entries.

Also, my current ARTIST TO BUY pick of the week is:

Carla Busuttil

who opens tonight at the Josh Lilley Gallery in London.



Categories
Death Gay

Catastrophe!

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.

Toby Mott, Noreena Hertz and? NYC

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.

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