Frankenstein vs. the World

I have the inclination and the need to connect to all the ages of my life, past or future. From my childhood until today, I don’t see those sections, those famous stages, that all normal men go through, each time denying and forgetting the age that came before. I slip inside myself as if along a river that you can travel up- or downstream; I rediscover and am in harmony with myself wherever I am. As for old age, I was very unhappy at the beginning of adolescence because two-thirds of life seemed to be spent in withering and dying (real death was nothing but an insignificant corporal formality at the end of another interminable death). I’d send feelers, images, in the direction of these future years. And it is only when I was able to live, to feel, for example, like an old queer sucking off brats (and had foreseen, worked out what I would be in that situation, as well as an infinite number of others) that I finally began to live what was left of my youth without too much apprehension. Such fancies certainly have little to do with what I’ll experience; but they take in hand the difficulties of the future, sketch out the tactics I’ll use to survive there as I do elsewhere.

– Tony Duvert, Diary of an Innocent, trans. Bruce Benderson

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Here’s a cool watercolor collaboration between Kevin Kopelson and painter Bob Mendoza, which Jennifer Doyle recently recommended to me. It was posted to the blog Urban Molecule last year.

I like the eerie way Bob talks about his nudes:

I started using pornography as subject matter for painting around the late 80s during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City. I’d go to this shop called Gay Treasures. It was like a gay porn archive for me. With catalogued magazines, reference books, and someone who functioned like a librarian. I’d go through stacks and stacks of old porn magazine from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s not to get off, but to behold the truth of these men from a time past. I was moved to paint them. I once read how Claude Monet when viewing the body of his dead wife was moved to paint the various tones and hues of her decaying flesh. I understood the disgust he felt from his reaction but also his need to represent what he saw.

In the 90s, sex was like death to me. The men in these magazines fucking repulsed me. What moved me to paint them was how light in each photograph was captured by 50s Kodachrome, 70s Ektachrome, and other dated chemistries. Capturing the light on his wife’s dead body disturbed Monet because he thought it intruded upon his grief for her. He had to capture that light and get it right on the canvas. Yet, when I see the painting that resulted, Monet’s grief is clear to me. The old porn in gay treasures had traces of light that illuminated the sex of these men who were to die of AIDS. Like Monet, I had to capture that light on what seemed like dead bodies to me.

Here’s the text/art, and here’s the interview.

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Here is a video of my current favorite song:

Tags: love.

Tags: love.

Hedi El Kholti’s long-awaited sex zine finally arrived in the mail this week, and it’s beautiful.  Very proud to have helped out a little on this.  Here’s the copy I wrote for it some time back:

Remember when desire could be revolutionary? Arriving in the banal wake of the artificial sex liberations lampooned by Tony Duvert and others, Hedi El Kholti’s new magazine looks back to the small-press sex culture of the 1970s to offer up visions of real freedom for the present. Somewhere between a literary fanzine, a noise-pop scrapbook, and an open diary, ANIMAL SHELTER reminds us that disclosure itself can be radical — a nonconfessional act of *sharing* that subverts our cultural coding and creates new opportunities for pleasure. This is writing that “invades its own privacy” (Dodie Bellamy), and, in doing so, activates actual possibilities for the nonprivatized life.

Stories in here by Hedi, Chris Kraus, Ariana Reines, Jennifer Doyle, & Bruce Benderson especially are dear to my heart.  Honestly one of the most exciting, genuine books I’ve read in a long time. 

Tags: (in)hibition, caginess, haven, ill-fit, love, neglect, protection, rescue.