Monday, October 29, 2018

Traumboy

Daniel Hellmann's Traumboy at Counterpulse is largely personal and the personal as political.  Daniel, the happy hooker,  tells his story of becoming a sex worker to support his performance art and how that has come full circle in this production where he now performs about his sex work.   He tells the story of his sex work as a happy hard working young man,  giving pleasure to others for money.   He explains the work life of the modern gay male prostitute, the online advertisements, the negotiation of services and price and the work itself--massage, fucking, blow jobs, rimming etc.   For Hellmann the only issues are prejudices among his family and friends and society at large leading to alienation and an increasingly difficult legal landscape.

In the performance,  Hellmann employs two primary strategies.  The first and most used is that of story telling and direct conversation with the audience.  The conversation begins Hellman's ask to the audience to text him questions which he reads and answers from his phone.  As the performance continues,  Hellmann turns the conversation back to the audience asking the questions of select members of the audience.   Both sides of the conversation are questions and answers about sex, sex work and the relationship of sex and the exchange of things of value.   Hellmann tries to coax out of the audience the understanding that in all kinds of sex there is some exchange of value.

The audience is coy, resistant to acknowledging the indirect commerce of sex,  reluctant to speculate on the experience of buying sex or admit to their own direct transactions.   There are no aha moments and few real engagements with the conversation.   Under the surface is the social stigma Hellmann points to that the buying of sex is a desperate sad act performed by only the most undesirable and unfortunate people.   A group to which none of these audience members want to belong to even in a performance conversation.  This holding back constrains Hellmann' and we become complicit in the prejudice and oppression of the sex workers, of Hellmann.

Despite his charm and getting to know him and his story,  he remains other to us.  And as if to emphasize this persistent/insistent otherness, Hellmann moves from the conversation to performance.  He poses for a photoshoot for his online profile,  has the audience read aloud his online testimonials and even performs a punk cabaret song.   This is the other part of his ask for acceptance and appreciation as a performer not just of sex work but also of song and dance.

He closes with an offer of a three dollar peep at his teaser jerk off video.   An offer taking up by more people than he expects.   The short porn piece like the text questions taking him a degree removed from the realness of his sex work.   Very different than the work of other performers who put their bodies more centrally in the work.   Like the audience conversation, the graphic porn video on his laptop comes off as strangely and ironically prudish.


Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Fiction and the False Narrative of the New Narrative

New Narrative isn't exactly fiction as some would have it but it isn't memoir either.  But there is a gossipy quality that makes discussion of the text fraught both if the writer wants to be a bit coy and if  the story is in part actual and in part invented fraught when questions of authenticity comes up.  What is authenticity in this context after all?

Lifter Lehmann @ Way Bay for Gluck & Boone

Bruce Boone and Robert Gluck read together at the Berkeley Museum on May 4th.  The evening consisted of a shared reading of their "translation" of Fontaine called La Fontaine with each writer taking turns reading sections from the book.  Following the La Fontaine reading Boone then Gluck read from newer work.  Boone read from a soon to be published long poem, Valentine for Daddy Steve and Gluck from a limited edition art book collaboration with Cuban artist José Angel Toirac, Parables.

Gluck's reading including slides of the images from this limited edition, 33, artist book that explores the glorification of Fidel Castro through the creation of iconic images of Castro in the tradition of Christian iconography of Christ through the pairing of these images with Gluck's biblical style passages.   Written with the constraints of not mentioning Castro or Christ and stylistic constraint of the sincerity of religious writing,  Gluck gospels create a religion based on the Castro icons and his porous passages of insight and belief.   An ironic successor to his Margery Kempe, this test of belief has non of the duality and complexity of that text but rather builds in his language the layers created by the images of Castro as Christ.  Gluck uses the infinite loop strategy of the Gospel of the Thomas Gospel to create even more impossible loops and layers of transfiguration in his gospel of Saint Gluck.  Passages of which I wish I could quote properly but I do not posses one of 33 copes.  So I will attempt to give some color of it from my haphazard notes and snaps.



Among the many delights of this book are the titles for the images (all taken from Cuban Media) given to the images of Castro,  The Hills of the Fatherland,  In the Temple of the Learned Doctors, and this one of Elia Gonzales the boat boy who chose to return to Cuba whose title I don't recall but  may have been The Professors as Toys...below is the Hills of the Fatherland.




According to Gluck a reconstruction of a revolutionary moment to tell a story for the Castro regime.  What I heard in listening to the text was the reducing and reproducing of phrase and linguistic image that both evolved and broke them down.  In the beginning was the shadow and the bug.  Batwings bear her soul...Corpse I...Nettles and for the rhyme of Death and Breath. I revise in the cementary the form of Flesh Shirts.

Gluck's reading was follow by Bruce Boone ready A Valentine for Daddy Steve.


[Daddy Steve notes go here]

Following the reading Minnette and I slipped back to Way Bay to catch what we might have missed.  a curious show we both found ourselves searching for friends or people of interest.  During our backwards and sideways meander we crossed Larry Rinder giving a guided tour to some no doubt import people.  Got a gentle recognizing wave which we returned glad to be able to slice and dice this show our way.  In the end we decided we liked the gossip and the gathering.  Found little good work.  And wanted a something to map it physically.  So as she is want Minnette lifted the gallery guide.  See her fleeing with Malka like determination past the guard below.  


And of course she was as she if a successful lifter.

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Deep Diving into Mishima

Forbidden Colors - seems the right reading before another Japan trip.  Trying to wrap myself up in all things Japanese if you please.

A funny day walking about in search of a perch to land on.  A place to do a little writing like this outside of notebooks.  Fewer hooks and crooks to fall in and out of.   Not much writing done after all.  A good bit of walking and talking to the self.

Considering the loneliness of the age.    Life apart.   Breaks the heart.

And of course all the forgotten projects.    Project forgetting and regretting themselves.   The burden of the promised to do.

A delightful Dog Eared Castro reading with Minnette.  Friends and celebrations of solidarity in queerness. 

A Twin Peaks Tito Martini and after an Orphan Andy burger for dinner.  The perfect Castro evening.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Writing on Performance/Riding the Performance

Describe the actions/actors.  The scene.  The mood.

Dissect the scenes.  Pull out the themes.  Break and un-break the things by writing within the thing.

How much of the experience is the aftermath?  The after after all is the future past perfected.

These queer Irish performers.   This queer Irish performance.  So much of the experience unknowable without context/history/language.

The performance still unfolds in the after.

A schema of crema.  Fraiche ideas for beutiful boys.

They tell me white on white colonialism is even more fun.   Absent a racial component the oppression/suppression is unobscured.   Pure in its architecture.  The personal prefecture of power.

She asks if it is possible to be both pure and sullied all at once.  I answer taint the saint and she'll still save ya.

Oh mary mary quite contrary do you love me so?

A small pattern of pain marks the border between past and present.

Her nails curled up and peeled back from her fingers revealing nascient claws growing from her bloody finger tips.  She shook her hands violently tossing the molted nails and blood aside.

A museum of cunts.  The cunts in the basement.  The base of the museum.  A foundation of cunts. Cunts under the mews.  Cunts the muse.  Guardians of the partriach's gates.  Through the cunt they all must pass.  Man and woman to enter the corrupted temple to Rome.

A collection of cunts clamoring at the gate.

Welsh sex workers unite the miners in the land of love.  Emerald smiles.  Desperate whites.  All pats in play.  They kill the Leprechaun.  Take back the Zombies.  An ontological Gaelic.    The colonial experience all in white.  Gwelga.  Walk the imaginary line. 

Undo the erasure of the body from the language.  Unmake the church and state.  Property and borders become extremes of dark and light.  Saint Patrick, a Welsh sex worker, came back and fucked the island into submission. 


Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Composition Marks, Methods, the Notebook Problem and a little on Performance

Neeli Cherkovsky talks about the magic of composing poetry on the computer.   He writes ideas and sketches in notebooks but never poems.  Poems he writes only on the computer.

I wrote through the nineties and all the way through the oughts on a computer.  Sometimes even on something called a Palm Pilot which was about the size of an iPhone but had this amazing fold out keyboard.   Then something changed.  I became more and more interested in writing on paper, in notebooks and increasingly very specific types of notebooks.   Japanese notebooks for a long time were my go to place to write.  Then Belgian Atomo notebooks with their solid spirals and special binding letting the pages be taken out and new blank pages put in.  I am again back to Japanese notebooks (or at least those from Japanese stores as some are actually made in Vietnam).

I am not sure exactly what drove me back to paper and away from the computer.   It may have been a shrinking down of the scope of my writing.  A return to more poetry less fiction and performance pulling me closer to the page.   It could have been the intense digitization of my life (along with everyone else's).  But the notebooks are a pleasure and a problem.  The writing stays in the notebooks for a long long time.  A problem I have talked about briefly before.

I've been asking myself recently what it is I am interested in.  Obsessed with.  And by extension how to engage with that interest/obsession.   Ironically what I am most interested in is Performance.  Something that I gave up formally a long long time ago but something that inhabits my every day and very being quite intensely.

I perform constantly.  Usually short improvised pieces riffing off a phrase or bit of language that infect the place, situation or my mind.  These small performances are impossible for me to stop.  The happen almost out of control and with some risk or danger.   I have no idea what is coming next until they are done.


Sunday, April 08, 2018

Airports Argue the Colonial Questions Persist-A Stain of History



Engage and enrage.  Foreign laughter sounds like an argument of rolling roiling Rs.

A chuckle, the knuckle he’ll buckle under.  Thundersome drums of beaten hands, bruised bodies begetting Bambi dreams and screams—Oh No!  Don’t glow—irradiation sweeps the nation in a fallout of signification.  

Gendering the probable pronoun of the unblinking from forming the inversion of the smile seen around the world—And yes that is a sexual term without and within hetro normative discussion/digressions on the homosexual experience.  

Sodomy is a such a quaint term—hard to believe its mention could cause a lady or the impacted lad to faint—a feint of no consequence for the sense of a crushed nipple—a sticky ripple the small of stipple—an adulation sweeping the nation.  

Go on then…tell me some more magic tricks or better yet of magical tricks—horny hicks, raging pricks and pretty dicks—Detectives one and all.

Boarding/hoarding.   The flush handle matches catches the decorator’s eye.  Emboldens the designers desperation, sweeps the nation like a broom—open up the tomb—bury it like a womb man—cross the span as another Iran—so far away only a seagull can say hey hey we’re the flunky—a they of delicate identity and an impermanence  of binary.

Cobal is a t short of colour—sing the true blues of bludgeoning, then bring the right red to bare the knuckles under which he buckles.

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Skylines of clouds—the louds of ice dreams in silky fluffs of snowy down.   An imagining of inter dimensionality—the collapse of the narrative into a single story structure.  A Flat running through with possibilities—an impossible assertion of one dimensionality—if only a line could be as fine as wine—age gracefully—unapologetically with wonder—dreams of thunder—cracks in the façade—hard as a placard.  Drive a vintage Packard.  Pretend to a characteristic heuristics—the math is difficult to parse with the promise of a/the missing integer. 

Her digits designed to beguile all the while—something pretty to defile—a characteristic blemish—A story told in Flemish.  A Dutch treat.  The little Dutch Boy—Taller than all the rest.

The Colonized Indonesians, kept for their pleasure after the loss of their treasure.   The locus of the pleasure, the focus of the pleasure all in terms of the colonial Cock—a doodle doodle do—An al dente noodle pent up the rent—over he goes stopping as no one knows how or when or when.  

Any incidental pleasure the Indonesian experiences is considered accidental and unforeseen.

The accommodation of the Colonial Cock is not easy for the Indonesian.  The Colonial Cock is insistent/persistent in its penetrating way.   The Indonesian must give over to the Colonial Cock all it asks and more. Give over the power and pleasure as it were nothing and every thing.

The Indonesian’s pleasure is profound.   Unexpected, the pleasure reclaims and tames the Colonial Cock.   The pleasure is a power, a potion, a notion of magic making—no faking—the Indonesian’s orgasm rocks the Colonial Cock to its roots, shoots its evidence everywhere sticky and stuck the Indonesian holds the Colonial Cock hostage to its desire,  a captive cock begging for release.  Just a little more grease.

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Mineral and metal resources extracted as part of the occupation paid for the costs of the occupation.  One nation under godless corporation, the peninsula prevaricates over its own fate.  Asks of itself existential questions.   Wonders of its wonders slipping from its soils.   Coils in repulsion over the occupiers compulsion to comport themselves in Colonial costumes while buggering all the boys.

Surely native attire is more appropriate for local fornication—regardless of the nation state or fate of the buggers and the buggered.

Assumption is a kind of consumption of beliefs belying the boy bottoms turned top notch buggers, butts bouncing happily in the air as their Colonized Cocks claim the frame of the Colonizer’s ass as their own. 

My how big you’ve grown.  If only I’d known.  I couldn’t possibly…

Oh.  Oh.  Yes.  Yes.  I…I… am.  Oh god.  Yes take me …Oh… Oh, yes.  I’m yours.

Those white men are just whores whose snores disturb the sleep of the keep.  A reckless lot they’re not got a lot to offer save the proffer of a position perhaps far from home.

The relations between Colony and Colonizer is complex.  As relations shift and evolve the interdependency blurs the lines of power and prestige.   The raw materials are transformed.  Values added.  Ideals attached to entanglements.  House boys become house holders.   Property turned to property holder, of property.  With property.  As though with child.  Without expectation.  Against and for expiation.   An explication—explicitly implicit in the arrangements for sleeping and keeping.

Affectionately called bed warmers by their keepers, the local boys expectations are greater than their keepers imagined possibilities for them.


A Continuous State of Failure

This blog and even the idea of this blog is an imagined conversation that barely happens...

My propositions of things to think about and write about linger for days...weeks...years.    Waiting for the time that never comes.

And so here again as I say I will write of Colonialism and Stains I take a piece of writing from a notebook and publish it here as an answer to that promise and bid to break the continuous state of a failure to engage.

Monday, March 05, 2018

The Notebook Problem

I writing mostly pen and paper in notebooks.   Different types of notebooks often foreign and fetishized in some way.   For a long time I wrote in Belgian refillable notebooks made by Atoma.  Buying more and the refills on every trip to Brussels.  Now I am using a refillable notebook from Japan for which I have only a few refills so that will likely end soon as I write almost everyday and a lot of pages get filled up.

The problem is the extraction of the writing to somewhere else.   Because of the effort to retype and the need to have a computer on which to do that handy by the time I retype the writhing the topic is out of date.  The story no longer interesting.

Somehow I need to adjust this practice to continue to write with pen and paper--simply too sensuous to give up--while keeping more or less current on the digitization of these words

Melancholic Birthday Blog

Time markers everywhere.  Sign signifying the passing of the past.   At Oak Street Cafe.  An old standard in a so gentrified neighborhood.  Not busy like Vinyl.  Disordered unlike the sleek cool Siteglass.

So many generations of coffee.  So many next waves it is impossible to navigate degrees of hipness with any certainty.  But I am certain the Oak Street Cafe is not hip and this Americano is old school expresso with unattributed origins. 

I came here with the idea of organizing BentBoyBooks projects especially some involving my writing and am now already distracted.   First the coffee shop browsing and now the ever present anxiety that pairs with melancholy to make my mood these days. 

I feel the anxiety like a panic waiting to take over everything and reveal me as the failed fraud I am certain I have become. Time up on the lies to the self.  The stories told to comfort my aging self with reassurances of creativity kept and possibilities still out there.  Time up on the manic distracting of the self from the self.

Time to tell a different story one built of truth and possibility.  Time to stop fearing and being afraid.  Nothing is the worst thing that can happen.   Unfinished stories and untold tales are for telling.  Publication is an act of putting the work into the world.   Not doing that is making nothing happen.

Today on this melancholic birthday I will make something happen and begin putting out the work starting with a list of project to publish.   In no particular order:

VassarBoy
The Boy Brothel
Voluntary Queers
The Market
To Sex A Story
Poet's Theatre Texts:  Hamlet Variations, The Vitrines
Bell Book and Scandal

And lots of poetry and some of my more essay like writing on Sophie Calle and collecting.   Maybe those will just go here...For sure the considering of The Colonial will start here.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Rebecca Bollinger’s Book of Stains*


A project and a catalog of ideas all at once, the book of stains is an album of images of objects blemished with unwanted color, stains. 

The antithesis of purity, these stains represent the failings of the ideals of the clean and pristine.   Gentler than a scar or amputation these stains are no less disfiguring and permanent.  Or is it refiguring and an assertion of impermenance?  

Does intention make the violation of the stain different than the violence of creation? 

The violet ink soaks the white linen fabric in an expression of a failure to hold, the breaking of a seal, the compact between pen and ink undone. 

The fabric forever altered/changed to something other than its prior pure white. 

The change is unexpected, unintended and unwelcome.  The stain ruins the shirt and in its runination the shirt becomes other.

The artist wears her paint spattered clothes as a badge of honor.   Fabric bearing the stains of her craft as a soldier’s uniform bears the medals of his.

The shirt pinned to a board or crumpled in a vitrine is remade again in a reframing/naming of the object.

“White with Purple Pierce”

History re-written to reclaim the shirt and the stain as an expression and act of making meaning.    The stain no longer a violation but a violet medal of meaning informs the white purity of the possibilities of purple.

The stain ascends to art.  Becomes an accidental artifact.  A marker of meaning.

Stains are evidentiary.   Blood stains especially so.

We prefer to curate our evidence to frame the narrative to our advantage.   Unfiltered evidence clouds the story.   Creates confusion and conflict.   The unintended and unexpected stain is unwelcome.   The intended stain is a lie.    Are these statement both true and the inverse too?


 *Rebecca Bollinger’s Book of Stains refers to the artists notebooks of images relating to stains which she generously shared during one of Dodie Bellamy's writing workshops.   This is an initial meditation on the concepts of stains as expressed in this book(books actually).   Stains will be part of an ongoing project in parallel to my consideration of the Colonial.

Hotel Theory Continued

OK.  About half way through the Hotel Theory part of the book(s).   Built of small meditations/mediations on hotels based on hotel literature, hotel movies, hotel/space theory, hotel art all mixed in with Chopin, Hotel Theory is starting to coalesce for me. 

I have come to accept the concepts of hotel-ness proposed as simultaneously true and false--especially as they contradict each other.   When I am finished reading I will propose my own Hotel Theory.

Monday, February 26, 2018

Hotel Theory

Reading Hotel Theory by Wayne Kostenbaum.  Not sure what I think.  I like the idea of Hotel Theory and some of the posits he makes along the way but I am also disappointed by the surface skimming and dancing around the topic he does.  Of course I might just be reading it wrong.

There are two books or texts set side by side.  The one of the left is Hotel Theory and more or less that is what it pretends to be with weaving in and our of Heidegger, popular culture, history and any and all things 'hotel.'  The one on the right is Hotel Women a self described pulp or dime store novel employing a not articles device to tell a story of Liberace and Lana Turner staying in the Hotel Women.

Two texts relate thematically and physically by the structure of the publication but do not read across as a unified text or overlapping dialogue might in a play.  So like a book full of marginalia one text competes with the other.   How is it meant to be read?   One book and then the other?  Together alternating lines, paragraphs or chapters?  I tried various versions of merging and/or overlapping the texts but then gave up on that and read first the Hotel Women story and now am reading the Hotel Theory as way to re-read Hotel Women.

I may have made a mistake.   I am even more impatient with the discursiveness of Hotel Theory after scene filled Hotel Women with a sufficient hint of plot and tension as to pretend to story. 

But then the problem may largely be my own unmet desire to read a theory of hotels that would posit something I might apply to my experiences of travel and place.  A Hotel Theory that would unpack the complex hierarchy of the Hotel.  The class system with the staff and the divide between guest and staff.   The modeling of power structures mirror the cities and societies these hotels occupy while dislocating these structures inside and outside of history and place. 

I want to be reading how the Hotel is homunculus more magical and mysterious than any alchemy can imagine.  And how this little fully formed being is itself representative of and actual.  I want to assign terms and systems to the Hotel that attempt to account for being both place and idea, human and a profane representative of humanity.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

The Post Compositional Space Or How Writing Precedes Typing

Today I am writing it out or down or otherwise committing pages and pages of writing in notebooks to documents.  In this post compositional activity I am urgently driven to compose.   To fill the remaining pages of these notebooks (mostly Japanese or Korean these days) with new writing.  I won't resist for long.  That writing, the writing that happens in carefully selected notebooks with particular pens (currently black ballpoints of various thicknesses collected from five star hotels in San Francisco, Moscow, Seoul, Bangalore and Tokyo) is the real writing.  The typing and incidental editing is for me the lesser work and so accordingly I resit doing it for months sometimes years.

The Colonial State Or the State of the Colony

It's all still about colonialism.   Occupation.  Segregation.  Control of people and resources.

This is a theme I am thinking a lot about, especially as it relates to our experiences of place and power dynamics.

I will start to share here some of my observations and musings on the colonial based on my last year plus traveling to and working in places still very much shaped and being shape by being colonies of the old and new imperial powers.