Tag: Oscar Wilde

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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
Health Immigration Rant

Fuck You Paul Ryan

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“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”

—Oscar Wilde

Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are dark side muppets.

They inhabit a world where only the mercenary survive.

They have no interest in the beautiful world around you unless it can be used to make more money.

They think conservation is for losers.

They will mine every last piece of coal, sell every last drop of oil, catch every fish, chop every tree without consideration for you or your children.

They have scant regard for other humans unless they have achieved what they define as success: huge amounts of money and power.

They believe in slavery.

In their dark world you will be enslaved with huge personal debt as soon as it is reasonable to impose it upon you.

So obese you’ll be unable to defend yourself, or run fast enough from crazed, gun-toting children high on prescription meds.

You will have no option but to eat cheap gmo food that causes rampant obesity in you and your family.

Your local school will be stripped of funds so your children remain uneducated and unable to intelligently question their plan.

They will teach your kids, when they can get away with it, the debunking of a thousand years of empirical scientific evidence in favor of ridged adherence to the bible.

You will fear being sick and die long before you are expected because of the appalling health care system that they proudly tell the world is the very best.

Finally, you will live in toxic shame inspired by Christian‘morality’.

If you ‘fail’ the system by becoming unemployed they will demonize you, your peers will accuse you of laziness. You will be encouraged to blame brown people for your misfortune.

Ryan and Romney will achieve their aim by frightening the oppressed proletariat with dishonest bogey men: the deficit, the end of the traditional family and foreign terrorism.

They will succeed as other tyrants have before them.

The people are simply too fatigued to fight their lies and mythology.

Complicated and realistic solutions have been long abandoned in favor of easy and inchoate sound bites.

I had a dream last night that I was fucking Paul Ryan.  After I ejaculated I pulled my cock out of his ass… but it was no longer a penis…. It was a crucifix… Covered in blood shit and cum.

Finally, I rather like the new, gamine Miley Cyrus. A world apart from the generic valley girl she once was. What the hell is all the fuss? Proof (if you needed it) that people don’t really like celebrating individuality. Preferring the homogenous mass.

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art Fashion Film Gay Hollywood Money

The Picture of Dorian Gray

So, here it is.  Up and running.

My controversial, contemporary retelling of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Lippincott version of  The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I really hope you enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq13aF5EQMA

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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

Oscar Wilde

Duncan Roy and Wendy Asher

Oscar Wilde enjoyed the extravagant promises of the Victorian Age, capturing the imagination of London’s aesthetic elite. However, beyond the enlightened few, everything about the man provoked consternation to the prudish, hypocritical Victorians—from the green carnation in his buttonhole to his sensational novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Like his suits, Wilde, a tireless self-promoter and purveyor of the unforgettable bon mot, was exquisitely tailored. While young, he was best dressed in bold plaid, plus fours, starched shirts with high, tight collars or gabardine suits cut short above the hip. Wilde traded his own slender, youthful visage (French
pleated hair and Cupid lips) for a bloated middle age rife with extravagant capes and voluminous fur-lined coats.

In his revisionist biography of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?, Neil Bartlett describes how Wilde became a huge man with a penchant for young, willowy boys. He was an intriguing mass of contradictions: The love letters he sent to his wife, Constance, are as beautiful as the letters he sent to the dark-hearted “Bosie,” his lover. The innocent stories he wrote for his beloved children were a counterpoint to the pornographic tales he created from his forays into London’s dank underworld.

The pornography attributed to Wilde in the British Library, under the pseudonym “Teleny,” reveals his sado-pedophilic fantasies. Young boys figure highly in these violent, disturbing texts. The virginal youths are deflowered by older, cruel men, their innocence torn from them.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is the reworking of these same themes that lead Wilde to his pessimistic and wholly modern conclusions about our shared horror of the loss of youth and how we might reclaim it.

When casting for a perfect Dorian, I was not interested in hiring a great beauty, but rather, a young boy. After all, beauty is subjective, youth indisputable.

For the movie’s Dorian Gray, it was imperative that our actor, David Gallagher, look effortlessly chic. David is very much the stick-thin look of right now and Dior Homme (as reinvented by our costume designer, Hedi Slimane). Dressing the literary youth icon of our age was a perfect solution for us and Dior: Slimane set his homoerotic boy-man aesthetic against the new Puritanism of American mainstream culture.

It is Lord Henry Wotton who appeals to the youthful Dorian Gray and speaks for the moisturized 40-plus generation, when he says to Dorian: “I wish that I could change places with you. To get back my youth; I’d do anything in the world. You are the type that the age is searching for and is afraid that it has already found. The world has always worshipped you—and it always will.”

If Wilde’s sensational sodomy trial had happened today, would the acclaimed wit have ended up in prison? Given that we find it hard to throw celebrities in jail, perhaps not. But Wilde’s predilection for sex with underage boys? I am sure that his hard drive would have been littered with unsavory images of children.

Once in prison, Wilde was given a thin gray cotton shirt and pants. Issey Miyake—or Kim Jong Il—might have gotten a kick out of this minimal Bauhaus look, but Wilde loathed it and woefully described his prison uniform in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A couple of years later, he was dead. (“It’s either me or the wallpaper.”) But as hard as I look, I cannot discover what he was buried in. Except, of course, shame.

This article was edited by Black Book for whom the piece was originally written.  It has been pointed out to me that Hedi lent us the clothes for Dorian rather than designing them for the film.   I have also been asked what happened to the film.  How did it do?  Well, in my own estimation it did OK.  It closed the London Lesbian and Gay film Festival, opened the Miami G&L film festival and opened the New York G&L film festival amongst others.   It had a small life and then vanished.

Categories
Gay Hollywood Love Rant

Pornography: A Spectacle

It was an early morning yesterday.  I was up before the dawn.  And I really have enjoyed my stay. But I must be moving on.

Sexual anorexia is a term used to describe a loss of “appetite” for romantic-sexual interaction but can be better defined as a fear of intimacy to the point that the person has severe anxiety surrounding sex with emotional content.

4am, Saturday morning.  It is almost impossible to sleep.  My lover is in town.  My sleep schedule rearranged as I learn all over again to share my bed.

We have been in and out of bed all weekend and whilst it is reassuring to have this oversexed lil monkey crawling all over me I end up thinking far too much-both good and bad.  The bad thoughts: wanting to escape, trying to remember old conquests, those perfect pornographic moments that always get me off.  The good thoughts: fully engaging with newly learned sexual behaviors/insights.   It is delightful to be mainly present during the sex.  Now, when I say sex what are you thinking?   The sex I have is, I am sure, nothing like most people.

When Bill Maher condemns sex addicts I doubt that he understands that most men who consider themselves sex addicts are not having the sort of sex that he is having.  They are not meeting, fucking, cumming and leaving.  Many men identify as sex addicts but the men I identify most with are actually porn addicts who seldom leave their apartments or Internet addicts on hook up sites with multiple on-line personalities.  These men exist apart from the Tiger Woods variety of sex addicts: men who hook up with women or other men whilst wives and children sleep oblivious at home.

Bill Maher’s limited understanding of sex addiction and general scoffing negates those of us who work daily in order not to retraumatize ourselves.  Bill Maher is certainly not recreating moments of childhood fear; he is not replicating perfect porno moments nor dealing with erectile dysfunction.

Tiger Woods may be a serial cheater but his story is the exception rather than the rule.  Those of us who compulsively masturbate seldom get to meet anyone at all regardless of our engaging personalities.  Addicted to the soothing effect of ejaculation, the calming thoughtless moments just after we shoot our dwindling load.

1983.   I answered an ad in Time Out for gay performers who wanted to make a play with Neil Bartlett for the Institute of Contemporary Art about pornography.  Drawing on historical texts, Diaries of a Marianne  (attributed to Oscar Wilde) for instance, we all at once celebrated and condemned the production, consumption and effects of pornography.  In one scene we compared the fantasy of pornography with the reality of our own sex lives.

After our 10 city tour in the UK and Canada I went home and never gave the polemic we were positing another thought, yet had I… my life would have turned out very differently.

How has gay pornography influenced my thinking, my relationships, my life?

Pornography has ruined my sexual expectations.   Pornography: where men together do not tenderly hold each other, look into each other’s eyes, do not cry gently, do not laugh out loud, and do not ‘fail’ with half hard cocks.    The perfect bodies, sexual performance and youth of most gay porn stars are impossible acts to follow.

Yet, the moment I get into bed with a man I try to emulate what I see in pornography.   My stance is both dominant and aggressive, my voice lowers, I am uncharacteristically clumsy, and my kisses are full lipped.  I have no idea what the end point of any sexual encounter is because I have so rarely ejaculated with another human being.  I am rarely even in the same room because I am off in fantasy.  I am rarely hard.

My lover is sexually submissive so what good am I to him if I am so full of fear that my cock does not get hard?  That at the back of my mind I know my darling pornography waits to own me the moment he is gone?  How many men cheat on their wives/boyfriends with pornography?

The past few days of sexual activity have been perhaps the best of my life because I am at least in the same room as the man I have elected to sleep with.  I am authentic, present, calm and honest.  I tell him the truth.  Perhaps too much talking but frankly I would rather talk than be absent.    There has been a great deal of consolation since he arrived.  There has been a remarkable kindness.  I no longer objectify him nor resent him simply because he sees who and what I am.

With the truth comes vulnerability, certainly never evident in pornography unless it’s a ‘mans first time’ with another man.  Then the gay for pay virgin simply looks confused or humbled by desire.   I have wasted so many years to pornography, so many wasted opportunities, so much lost love.

Men have humiliated me.  I have, in turn, humiliated men.   I have defined myself by my inability rather than my gifts.  I have invested in my defects rather than my talent.

I am trying to have a few wonderful moments before my lover leaves LA and God knows if I will ever see him again.   Of this I am sure: we got to know each other before we lay together.  This meant that I had no shame when he finally held me in his arms.  That I felt comfortable enough to let him know what was going on with me when I could not perform as perhaps he wanted me to perform.   That we continue to laugh and cry and feel comfortable doing so.

I only have until Friday and I am going to make the most of it-before he returns to his own war zone and I to mine.

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