Blue and Green

Blue and Green
should never be seen
except with something in between

Her body, her thorax, gashed through with ultramarine blue, luminescent as her flesh ebbed into the green oxide. Strange slight demarcation between body and space, bodies echoing in space around, odd flesh traceries, screaming into colour, light vibration, possibility, no, impossible strangeness.... Maybe only a painter can know what the pigments mean: ultramarine blue – is sapphire, transparent, light moves through it. Diluted it is air, space, perpetual light, but pure. It has to be, because the slightest touch of any other colour – except carmine perhaps – muddies it. Against yellow ochre it recedes back into darkness, deep velvety shadows that you can’t help but want to enter, to plunge your hand into, to stroke with your eye. Green oxide is getting harder to find – so is increasingly a synthetic substitute. It’s a funny colour. Based on copper oxide, its a cheap heavy mineral pigment, and sits opaque against the luminous blue but it’s not as mucky as ‘sap green’ or heavy as viridian which bores like a hole through the canvas – or diluted – sits on top, squatting like a large frog. And neither pigments are like the phthalocyanide blues or greens – heavy unwieldy big pigments – which stomp all over everything around. On her figure it reminded me of a skin, partly flayed – but not in a painful way – more as something opening up to the world around – and the blue furrows – mimicking cicatrices met my eyes like those of a lover.

Dunno why it is that My Favourite Consort Cure has this effect on me, but her company seems to evoke my own intense embodied connection with paint, with space, with flesh. After a weekend wandering with two dear friends through crazy bushland, grey rocks, that mad dark blue of midwinter sunshine, watching their eyes change from blue, to grey to green, watching them dilate with pleasure, ring with fatigue, well with tears, crinkle with laughter as we frolicked and flirted and fucked and muttered every type of madness under the sun and dredged strange things from the darkness, I was and am impossibly, delighted, ecstatic, comforted; with them, with me, with my life, with the world, with colour and sense and smell.

I was still flying high doing my last interview for THE TOME, with an eminent aussie painter™and inspired, ecstatic, delighted, stimulated by all measure. He said he'd been painting the same thing for 60 years. Trying to paint – not so much bodies but how they, and we emerge from and merge into space and light – how land and space permeate us, enter into us. How in painting we eat our world and disssolve into it. He said he’d done the work in London which he found mind blowing but impossible to paint. He had to imagine he was somewhere else than where he was at that time. London. Mind blowing. I smiled and thought of My Favourite Consort Cure and the sheer weirdness of strolling around my barrio having the same conversations we'd had strolling in blighty a few months ago. I thought of Rothgo and looked up at the red in front of me. then I wondered where the hell I was.

I didn't mention Louis Kahn. I giggled some stupid smirk about Goethe, then hated myself for banal posturing. His new works, again breathing this strange embodiment into paint, light, space and old traceries over bodies, his body, her body, an eye, a mind, a hand, a desire moving onwards through time outwards into space. I guess he must be in his ‘80’s, deep golds and luminous reds sang colour and life and energy of a young man I was going to say but I don’t want to close this down into something that looks like it could only be done by a certain type of person, a certain gender, a certain gender, a certain poise, especially when there are so many young male painters whose work has no life or joy or energy, just a stylised beige coldness…..

I cursed the narrowness of my topic, the lateness of my research, the fact that I'm meant to be in the phase of pulling all the threads together of the tome that will be, not opening up and expanding. Rounding off, packing up. Assembling THE ANSWERS into a nice linear format….. Of course I want to write about a thousand other things, than my topic. Of course I want to discuss his painting, his life history, take a quote, or an anecdote for a walk, a long, long meandering stroll into something else entirely – not assiduously tap out the interview and extract the required and received information, and turn into a nice astute observation on something really quite marginal.

Last week, nestled in the temporary bush retreat of The Estimable Colleague, (and one of the dear friends above), staring into the depths of my stupidity trying to finish a chapter – and extracting sentences one by one – I decided to grab one of her books and sit in the brief afternoon sun. Imaging her Erotics is a familiar book – a collection of writings and images by and about the performance works of Carolee Schneemann – but seeing it again brought tears to my eyes. I’m amazed that such people exist, have existed, and that I’ve met them. I’m amazed by The Estimable Colleague, the mad imaginative flights between conversation, smut, theory and imagination – her playful delight in her body, in performance, in play, in dressups. At once completely absurd and so deadly serious.

One of the astonishing things about NYC in meeting older straight (well, ostensibly hetero at least) women who have the same sense of their erotism that I thought only dykes had. For me sex isn’t just fucking, about taking and being taken. Not the stupid infantile girl need of approval and sating – but a miraculous response to the sheer impossibility of its existence – a decidedly queer contingency. Just as life is the space carved from an awareness from and a flight from death,– desire is a response to prohibition, to control, to restriction – to impossibility. It’s not just a reactive transgression against the law of the father, but a very tangible way of moving between states, conditions, memories and sensations that get compartmentalised, separated, regulated and controlled. Against the striated space of bourgeoise sexuality, queerness promises a mad line of giggling flight into absolute crazy connections – firing off each other; hand, smile, head, twig, ear, navel, banana, finger, giggle, toe, whisky, cunt, noodles, knees, hair, fist, earth, butter, nose, nipple, water, fist, vegemite, beer, armpit, cheese. Time to feed the dogs/cats/fish/birds/libido. Coffee anyone?

Schneemann’s performances have the same mad energy that embraces desire, life, connection, flesh and possibility with a distinct lack of ego, and her words make me cry. And I hate myself for having SUCH A TINY TOPIC – and that I have to slowly and painfully weave so many mad broken threads together. It’s like weaving a hair shirt at times – strand by bloody strand, and hair is such a fiddly, prickly recalcitrant thing to work with.

The tome has been and is a space for incredible, unbelievable discovery, for connection, for remaking and reviewing the world – for ASKING QUESTIONS rather than finding answers, but as a fire and brimstone anti-determinist – this phase of writing up, of proving AN ANSWER, a solution, a new party line…. Well it sucks just a bit.

My life is so amazingly happy at the moment – I’ve got so many miraculous delights occurring. TEDG showing me an astonishing essay by a student – writing ficto-crit porn deconstructions involving Deleuze. At the moment I have a delightful home, that is a real home, and a harmonious compound and a barrio where i've lived half my life and woven innumerable stories, connections and sensations between my body, other people, and the funny little sunburnt streets around. I know lots of mad brilliant women and funny sweet men, wild breathing art and great great books.

Everywhere but Here

The "new towns" of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the historical time on which they are built; their motto could be: "On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has." It is obviously because history, which must be liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the forces of historical absence begin to compose their own exclusive landscape.

From Guy Debord: the society of the spectacle, (ch7, p177)


Now I know it must seem hopeleesly posey to be citing Debord and whingeing about suburban ennui from my little dystopic patch of trendoid bliss in Newtown. And it's probably just because there's been a patch of rain lately and I'm feeling a little bit glum, huddled in front of my bar radiator, drying out various drenched bits....

It's been just over a fortnight since I landed back home. the weather was mostly sunny, warmer than europe, but not too hot, and fun happy pleasant easy etc. I'ts still fun happy pleasant easy etc. but it's also pissing down and the sky and streets are dark by 5pm. Yesterday I staggered out to paddy's - desperate for some veggies that weren't double the price of the bloody UK (fer feks sake!) and not encased in styrofoam gladwrap from a supermarket......

And laughed at the mild humid temperatures and sydney people rugged up in puffy parkas, and grimaced at the crazy SUV drivers mistaking their metal sheaths for sugar based skin compound and zipping madly along George street, and grimaced as my favrouite pearl pink brolly blew inside out and flew out of my hand whisking my scarf away with it.......

Inside the shell of paddy's I smiled at the market sellers flirting and haggling in bahasa and english in the one mouthful - and the others screaming out in thickly accented strine and others easily shifting between english and mandarin or vietnamese - and it felt so foreign, so familiar and nothing like the tampere kauppahali, and yet so strangely like it too.

Sydney - such a funny strange asian city/english colony built and rebuilding itself on black land and white lies - o so many damn lies, divine lies, endless erasure, disclosures, ruptures..... Terra nullius being the first founding words for generations of exiled honkies to write down made stories that excluded somehow the non honky identifying exiles equally living out strange dissonances....

my own dissonances meeting my ex-expat aussie friends at the local pub last night. drinking shite aussie guinness (stout for the fosters generation to swill on St. pats day in their sweaty green singlets - a disgrace but all they had on offer) and cursing at it being the double the price of a decent thick black alcholic creamy pint back in blighty, and cursing the plasma screen blaring sport, the aubergine beige renovations of the bistro, the orange peroxide renovations of the female patrons and feeling strangely at home amid the cursing of what could have been what was, what is, somewhere else but here.

In the loos - texting my friends in a non sodden melbourne - dancing and laughing at a bestiality themed dance party (where was sex pig?) and a now steamy summered finland, and a sunny new york - I have no idea what time it was there, here or anywhere else... it was text time, it's always text time, time for text to take me away from here, from now - into another space where I'm with someone else doing something different, doing something.

I wonder about my text addiction - this constant need to be removed from the present. I'm standing on the threshold of writing up a chapter.... shivering at the waters edge - sticking a toe in and desperately looking around for a reason to stay out of the water...... the chapter- appropriately enough - is an earnest attempt at a geneology of Sydney, of Sydney art education - a nice spatio temporal discursive tracking of where people have stood still and imagined they were somewhere else - and how they have done it, where and why.......

So, reading, confused about time. not wanting to tie things down with a neat tight well told narrative - i go back to favourite theory boys for solace. Debord of course, maybe even Walter B. try to remind myself why this matters. try to remind myself why i'm here, alone, grumpy, underfucked and overfed, scowling at the weather, scowling at myself. trying not to escape into fantasies of sex, smutty texts, porn, wanking, recipes, paintings, long counselling conversations with whoever.Dear blissful distractions - but yes - only distractions......

I actually like writing and like my research and find it interesting. but the 'pressure' of writing, of working, of focussing on the tome - is about the conscious exclusion of everything else in that moment of writing. Of only doing that project, of closing things off, of only allowing myself to occupy one mental space at one time. and anticipating it - that's the worst. the space is - not here, not on my bed, wiht the rain beating agains thte window - mad cackles of a gaggle of girls strolling past in the street, flatties singing, planes screeching. it's not about my stiff neck and sore bum and pickeable nose and filthy ears - it's a strange retelling of other spaces - me taking my mortal coil into transcribing, describing, assembling, reviewing, and despite my little heideggerian dillemmas - re-presenting a set of stories and impressions and histories that people have entrusted to me.

Last week - I drew one of my interview subjects - who did a series of incredible poses - which I felt, at first, compelled to somehow represent, acccurately or elegantly or faithfully. the faith being - to somehow communicated my gratitude, awareness of engagement with and delight in the sheer generosity of what she was doing in taking off her clothes and arranging and presenting her body - for a group of us - to look at. After an hour of gnashing my teeth at my ineptitidue and lack of practice - i relaxed. Realised the act of drawing has to involve a level of faith in my own capacity and fallibility - and that drawing, as a practice can only ever involve a trusting and honest engagmeent wiht myself, in that place, in that moment with all my limitations and desires.....

so i try to think about the tome like this. that the words, ideas, experiences, offered, performed, given by subjects, don't compell me to a defninitive representation of 'them' or of the historical narratives they may cite or trace or describe - but to something else.... which I don't know how to describe yet.

shit! that was almost a perfect analogy!

hence this post.

Pressing Immanence

got this from a dear friend the other day....

Come drench your cunt in liquids divine
at the shrine
of Betty, who is Camp,
In Melbourne.
We will wash away those dusty cobwebs in an orgy of
fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun.

The prospect of AKSHUN with lusty SOuthern Babes has
got to be motivation.

And what's a few more days of coldity?
Hell - there'll be sunshine and summery goodness in
patches at least - (4 seasons, any given day...)

How can you deny the ladies/humans of Smellbourne the
joy of your flesh?

Share! Comrade! Collectivise your flesh, comrade!
Submit your pleasures to the will of any randomn
collective of comrades, comrade!

Camp Betty - is the nashnool kweer gathering held on occasion of HRH Betty's birthday - ie this long weekend.

and promises to be a week of radical sex and politics

or is it radical politics and sex?


Decided sex pig would be the best option for hiding from psycho bunny while on prowl for lady flesh in spewtown. found pig masks and copper hats in the ONE SHOP! how cool is that?

OK - so here's a pic of me, fantasizing alone, avoiding study - or anything even slightly serious - under the pretext of looking for my yoga tights - ya know I just randomly uncovered my love-police outfit (not the sunnies - hence the pig mask)

And - decided that If I wear it up to the buzz bar I can entertain Kathellism, extort money from patrons in amuzing manner and have good excuse for not going and getting maggotted at sly later - coz those fetish boots are bloody hard to dance too (note to self: leather daddies dance that way for a reason; boots are too damn heavy)

So - yeap - will head home, stay home, work at home, write the tome and be a GOOD GIRL......

ditto for this weekend. weekend of anticipated girlswot goodness will hopefully be relieved by smutty phone calls from wonder-boi

sigh

oh, and a posse venture out to Gurlesque of course. Unsure whether to go as sexpig or pig princess or evil tango master.......

Latter needs a wig now my 'natural' hair colour has become cloaked in layers of chemicals......

Even tho disguises ain't particularly anonymous - they hopefully are scary enuff to scare off straighty pink-picketters like stalkergirl - and masks are a great way to hide obvious eyeball panic/fury if I clap eyes on her.....

Immanance

Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey.
Find something wrong, chop it out. Wait.
Find something else wrong.
Try and find someone who'll chop it out.
Chop it out.
Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong.
Can't chop it out this time.
Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz.
My story has been played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
Maybe it's like mine.

Maybe there's something mysteriously toxic about life modelling for blokes.

the quote above came from my friend Pred's blog - sometime in may 2004, which was the last month he lived... and the last 6 days of it were pretty fucking sparse.

tomorrow - well 4 hours strine time is his deathversary - or at least when Abel & I got the call from Stacy - whose bike had been stolen from outside the hospital where she'd kept a vigil.

how fucked is that?

mind you - if you're being shat on by an elephant you tend to notice it less if you tread in a dog turd.....

My mum says that people only swear if they feel powerless - and maybe this explains the profusion of swearwords in my current rants about the big D.

yep - I feel powerless about the big D.

anyway - I returned to Australia and discovered that another life model, CLive Stanbridge, is dying of pancreatic cancer.

Clive is incredibly physically agile and strong with a face that reminds me Samuel Beckett. I modelled with CLive a few years ago for a winter course taught by David Fairbairn. We did a series of short poses, getting longer and longer, and then ending up in some strange durational state of extended discomfort - enmeshed in a series of furniture style props - while students did large scale charcoal drawings all around.

the drawings were bad auerbach messy things - but OK you know - with a bt more life in them than poncey academy style scratchings. I imagine all these big messy drawings rolled up under people's beds or in their garage - not fitting nicely into a framed wall piece above the sofa and it makes me smile.

for me, thinking of clive - I have a distinct physical association. not just form drawing him, and remembering his poses - but remembering his smell, his touch, his physical presence. I barely know the guy at all -and yet do know part of him intimately.

Life modelling is a bloody amazing special occupation and I feel so glad that I was able to do it. I'm also glad I could get out of it. clive was a full time model for 20 something years - and has no super, no health fund, no pension. He's fucking sick, he's dying, he's shit poor - and has had to work himself into the grave - or into his bed.

Apparently the NAS has a collection box for him to help cover some expenses, and the compound sketch club also passed around the hat last week.David Fairbairn is apparently coordinating the fundraising activity, and also apparently drawing him at his bedside.

I don't know how i feel about that.

kind of icky.

so i've chucked on a bit from a paper I wrote 3 years ago a few months after Pred died..... coz it shows my ownpainful grapplings with the horrible strangeness of touching, imagining, remembering flesh that we see, we touch, we love, and that we lose.....

As an artists model I have a social circle of friends who are models and artists, some who are models only. I have modelled with some friends, and drawn others, and others have drawn me. So I am familiar with a type of mimetic exchange and comfortable with it. The last ‘doubles” gig I did was with a friend, with whom I’d collaborated on guerilla theatre performance projects and also drawn. We’d done a series of crazy poses, standing on our heads, pretending to throttle each other, whip each other, writhe on the ground and culminated with a six hour tableux vivant from Gericault's Raft Of The Medusa. He was crouched in a slump of despair while I slid off the dais in contorted death agonies using a type of shoulder stand where I rested on his shoulders. All fun stuff and a very intimate and precious experience, because models posing together have a type of complicity.

Because we are performing “silent” models are able to speak, quietly, and implcity in the double modelling are the quite comments, gestures and squeezes where we feel each others pain thresholds and physical limits. Talking is a great distcraction from pain and discomfort of extened poses. Anyway the next time my accomplice modelled, I persuaded him to be tied to a crucifiix and pretend he was jesus dying on the cross. A few weeks alter he was diagnosed with cancer. I found at that point impossible to imagine drawing him, because I knew that all I would be seeing would be his corpse.

Earlier this year he had to go into hospital and his partner (also and artist and model) kept a vigil by his bedside and took her watercolours. Abel and I decided that spending time with him was the best way we could show out support, and as we always acarried pencils wiht us, we ended up sitting around drawing each other pretty much because that's what artists do. when Pred saw this he was horrified at the thought that we would draw him in hospital bed, and expressed it as a violation. He wasn’t presenting himself to us, he wasn’t in control of how he was presented before us, and he wasn’t in control of his body, or able to understand or articulate what was happening, at all. My last memory of him is of a type of wild eyed terror and rage, a desperate rage to cling to life.

Actually my last memory of him was the last time I read his weblog from april, and the last brushmark I put on a painting of him that I finished after his death. What art objects do (like written texts) is they change temporal order. Time doesn’t proceed in a sequence but loops backwards and forwards, in th way that memory does. The way we carry objects with us, horde, discard, exchange, destroy, create and collage them is a similar way to how we actualise our experiences and memories. I think that this looping, this disrution of the continuum off birth, life, death is a way we have to try to mediate death, to cheat it, to alternate it, even generate a simulacra of it that can be exchanged.

Pain is that which destroys language and destroys meaning. Witnessing pain is horrible because we are witnessing someones own incapacity to articulate or contain their affective sensation, and we are taken into a space where meaning no longer operates according to the rule of simulacra (a representation of a representation of a representation. All of which function as units of exchange) but into a space of death, death being a finality that cannot be exchanged. As Foucault says dying is a pure event that can never verify anything. It cannot be exchanged, or reversed and cannot really be represented. Death is a great unnamed unbearable mysetery that is only really cognicised in the individual trauma of grief. As Lingis writes however, death is the immanent condition for living, and life is the activity which we carve out of death. Lingis also described the importance of being with those who are passing form life into death, of bearing witness to the most singular and isolating experience that exists. This is where I start to wonder about what spectatorhsip is, what is bearing witness, and what is appropriating or violating someones experiences by representing it, or what is giving it expression. If pain (and death) is characterized by its own unspeakability, it's un-representatilbity then for someone to depict or represent someone elses pain is to a certain extent to speak for them, which is problematic.

three years later - i still hold onto the mantra that the immanence of death is what propells my own movement forwards, into life, confusion, movement, exchange.

for me, grief is in every breath - but it's about breathing, letting tears flow and gasping out sobs. I'm so glad now to have my brother's photo on my desk where I write, to be able to listen to jazz and smile, and to have spent time in NYC with his ex - healthily speaking about and cursing him with tears in our eyes...

I hope I don't sound too sanctimonious tho. One of the reasons why I modelled full time for 4 years - was that i was in mourning (for my brother) and paid enforced stillness, the ritual death play of reciting, posing as a corpse gave me the space to sit and learn to endure my unendurable feelings.

In the 4 years since, of thrying to theorise the bizarre practice of posing as a statue of playing dead for a group of people who sit and draw and ostensibly seek to represent that performance..... I've managed somehow to negotiate that dillemma.

kind of. I'm less interested in the act of drawing as representation, as visualisaiton and as the capturing of a fleeting moment of life - or death - but as a way of entering and extending certain relationships.

As much as i cherish my mad paintings of pred on a crucifix with a flouro orange cock and a crown of bougainvillea - I cherish more the flesh memory of his shoulders supporting mine. where I could feel the air through both our frames as we lay and talked. talked madly about science, politics, sex, porn, catholicism, stupidity, squatting, anything to take my focus off my aching hips, my numbing legs, the increasing pressure of blood in my temples.

Walking past the yuppie dog boxes at the end of the street, takes me back to the day of posing - coz it was the same day that Pred had just opened them as a squat - OK - not the dogboxes but the balloon factory that was on their site. i remember the social centre party that weekend, the spray paint, the beer, the kids, the music, the laughter, the fucking brilliant mad life that surrounds every memory of Pred and of so many mad brilliant people around him.

so for me - life drawing is always the start of something, of a connection that moves me into life, into engaging with people, with paint, with play. Drawing is drawing breath, drawing water, drawing life. It's opening up lines, and bodies and viewing into things that are incomplete, strange, unseen, barely imagined, uncoordinated, and deliciously mad.

Bloodlines

I can still taste her when I remember

Waking up amidst a tangle of limbs and red swathes across my legs, oozing out of her, where I'd felt her, where I could smell her on my fingers, where my thighs rubbed against her, where her nocturnal frictions had left an exquisite trace over my very happy flesh.

Later, I washed myself and went wandering into the Rothgo room at the Tate Modern. I'd sauntered past Herman Nitsches hysterical red gashes on canvas, to immerse myself in the unbearable intensity of the long dead Marc. Superficially it seems almost monochrome, diachromatic stains spread across stretched canvases. I stood and stared. Raised my fingers to my nose and inhaled. Somehow in the subdued light I could see or sense the tracery of his brushes, blotting across each patch of colour and where they bleed into each other. I heard my own blood in my ears, I could smell hers again, taste mine where she'd bitten my lip and i felt myself swoon, felt tears in my eyes for this strange sad melancholic miracle - I felt like I was inside Marc's body and inside my own. I fell in love with him again, prayed silent whispers of gratitude to some imaginary deity that he'd picked up a brush and sticky pigment and done this......

I must have looked like a total wanker sitting down to send an SMS. I was texting my friend in Finland - who'd sent me a desperate message the night before, finishing off her body of work - pushing herself beyond reason - hating herself, hating her work, hating her life and loving it in equal measure. In reduced txtage I tried to remind her of the brilliance, beauty, sheer life affirming agonizing wonder of what she was doing.... doesn't it make sense? you see Rothgo, text a painter.....

So, a fortnight later, I trudged across some European mud. ice had melted and the fields were gashed with furrows, interspersed with bits of brown and patches of green. Walking through this closely worked earth of stone and moss and mud to my friend's studio. arriving and seeing the same gestures, the same marks of earth scratching swathes re-enacted across her canvases - cut by images of dipossessed - framed in their own strange aporias or aphasias or both......

We looked at her work - stepped back, paced around, stares out the window. I suggested we go for a wander outside, feel the earth under our feet, breathe some air. and then back, laughing after hugging and dancing around outside in late evening sunlight, we looked at the paintings again.

I gave some suggestions for the last 6hours of working the pieces - what she could resolve or why she mightn't. she asked how I could know so much, see so much. I said i'd had 9 years of knowing her work - seeing her move to plant gestures of paint, to scrape back, what she did with her neck and legs as she mixed up each colour.... and then walking through the landscape she'd painted, the place she'd worked through - the same place viewed and ploughed and cut and worked by 4 generations of her family - I could taste her body, her blood, her very being in the work....

The intimacy between a painting and the viewer, the intimacy between artists who know each other's work is as intense as that between two lovers. Maybe that's why i shied away from ever hitting on to anyone at art school - It seems like we're too close already. sacredly brilliantly close - but also scarily so.

Maybe that's why I think of the painter friends as family - because there's such an intense embodied connection to each other, to each others work. At art school watching the first agonized gestures as we do stupid tonal exercises- working up to something else - less important but so loaded with our dreams our ideas of who we are... until alone in our studios, texting each other, remembering each others words as we feel our selves disintegrate and all we have left is the paint, the marking, the mad trudging dance through the world.....

God how I have hated Griselda Pollocks comment about painting being the expression of a subjectivity that is masculine - or some such binarised scary shit. I hated it then and hate it now - not only because of it's violence against the female painters i know - but it's violence against paint - against the sheer joyous terror of looking at stuff that is so profoundly indeterminate - so anti-subjective - that it did and does make me want to scream....

On my first day back i went out to see the work of 2 dear very close friends. the first, a former lover, delighted me, surprised me so deeply. Strangeness of intimate gestures, bits of her body trapped in glistening coloured cream, modelling into furlicues - and then other surprises, at her finesse, her subtlety, things I'd never seen before. the strangeness of an old lovers body - remade, moving on - well beyond me and our past.

smiling, I went to another gallery and saw a large strange work of another friend. such finesse again, brought into play with a much stranger assurance of the impossibility of his existence, or stillness or something. I entered the piece, heard planes in the distance, sat staring and smiling for half an hour. what did I see? movement, play, strange strange slowness of time, mixing, feeling spinning, divine madness hushing quietly in the corner.

Still jetlagged, yesterday I sat for an old art school friend, meditating silently as he mixed up his pallette. years or portrait modelling taught me well - that someone isn't ever painting ME - and what they want from me as a sitter is to be a strange absent presence - so they can paint - the paint - so the shapes and colours and light reflecting off my face and hair and thick glasses, provide a structure so they can go into their own experience of paint, how it mixes, oozes, slides under their brush. It's not about objectification at all - but a very intimate desubjectification - a movement by both parties out of ourselves into something else.

My friend the portrait painter is my age - and his stack of CD's were a nineties grunge kid's dream. I put on one I hadn't heard for nearly a decade - the favourite CD of my first girlfriend, the one we'd made love to again and again, and listening to it, inside i went back into myself, into my memories of being inside her, feeling unbearable close. Mazzy Star's five stringed serenade, my fingers like strings playing inside, strumming, worshipping adoring, until then I had no idea how wonderfully vaginas could extend themselves and how terrifyingly strange blood that wasn't menstrual could be. The first time I drew her blood with my poorly cut nails I pannicked.....eve now long nails make me gag.

Yesterday, sitting quietly immobilised, feeling myself somewhere else and yet profoundly present - a delightful dysphasia - slipping between many presents, many states, many bodies.....

Spring Fever and the recovering catholic

I’m sitting in my friends’ flat in tampere, shaking and sweating and extruding viscous green snot from my nose.

I’ve got the bloody flu – AGAIN.

Maybe it was running around naked in the garden between sauna and bedroom. Maybe the sauna wasn’t hot enough, maybe the sauna was too hot, maybe the airport saga stressed me out, maybe sexual frustration makes me sick, maybe I’m allergic to spring, maybe my body is really confused going through spring when it should be autumn, maybe it’s time to come home.

I’ve got 10 more days before I get on the plane back to OZ ™.

So far I’ve had a tranquil and reasonably productive time in finland. My friend heli – was frantically finishing her paintings for a show next month – while I sat in a quiet little room – fleshing out my paper for next week, working out the second half of my thesis – and realising that maybe the tome is going to come together – that the time in blighty – immersing myself in learning as much as I possibly could – actually has allowed me to resolve some really big things – and maybe I’ll find the words to justify summarising 20 books and interviewing 8 people instead of redrafting the long overdue chapter from hell to my supervisor…..

My last day in London was almost perfect. (Ok the real one, Monday – not the accidental Tuesday)

I spent the morning trudging around Westminster in the rain with a bunch of queers weilding a soggy pink banner with ‘queer rage: no borders’ painted across it.

We were meant to be part of a demo demanding citizenship rights for refugees, what the frogs call ‘sans papiers’, and kind of felt a bit out of place amongst the union jacks and other national flags of marginalised migrant workers; mostly polish or brazilian.

Actually one of the organisers came up and asked us to put aaway the banner, and we all got lost and separated and I found myself strolling amongst a bunch of Nuns. Nuns always make me nervous. It’s a strange combo of sexual fetish and deep deep subservient catholic guilt. As much as I try to focus on that nun who used to beat me and then kissed me on the mouth when I was 7; a suitable target for kinky queer detournement, I always end up thinking of those Nuns I liked and so desperately wanted to impress with my neat hair, neat knitting, neat writing, neat painting, when puberty hit. Of course I failed.

So I moved away from nuns and strolled along with union jack waving batucata playing Brazilians. It was kind of cheery in the rain. Arriving at Trafalgar square, I wandered in the rain looking for the posse and involuntarily shuddered when the MC tried to lead the crowd to sing: “all we are saying, is give us a chance’.

My shuddering provoked a 180 spiral which led me to spy the big pink banner on one of the railings. I found the posse. Drenched from marching around in the rain, and tormented by thought of missing a glimpse at GREAT ART – in exchange for standing around soggily sulking at stupid Christian racists – politely making pissweak social democratic demands for ‘naturalising’ migrants – instead of ripping bloody stupid borders down….. I excused myself from the queer posse and headed into the national gallery.

Decided to head to sainsbury wing loos – in order to cruise past the old faves…. The turner/lorraine connection. Sigh. My favourite Rubens – unfaithfully transcribed in lots of flouro pink a few years ago….. the Rembrandt room? – no, no, - I’d never leave….so I allowed myself to linger in front of the perfect alabaster buttocks of the Rokeby Venus – and contemplated that poor noble drenched suffragette who slashed them apart back in the olden days – all in the name of the beauty of womanhood – and of Emmeline Pankhurst…… As my hair slowly dried, I searched across the seamless perfection for some tiny little hint of the damage that hadn’t been concealed by the restorers. Alas. Her flesh was but a sea of alabaster seamlessness…… so I went for my piss.

Post piss – I thought I’d check out the Kossof transcriptions – and my left hand started to itch – contemplating the time Leon had spent in front of ye-olde-masters – feeling his way into pictoral space. This maybe sacrilage for an ex-NAS girl like myself to say – but I actually can’t stand the way Kossof uses paint – it’s like he’s wading through the bloody trenches – his gestures almost charicatured into constant repetitive swathes through endless beige impasto….. I really believe that drippy stuff needs to sing – and not just belt out noise like Barnesy – but float around and lilt into arabesques – and head off into high transluscent pearly colour – as well as hitting deep resonances of murk.

Hell. Not sure if the synaesthesia thing is working. I think I’d like to see some bare canvas and some carmine on Kossof – and I’d be a bit more content. Perhaps.

But the drawings of Leon – were a bit more satisfying – though I was still about edgey about his tendency to make swathe-cutting scribbles – maybe a person can take the gestural thing a bit too far?

For reassurance I decided to look at the world’s greatest cartoon – Leo da Vinci’s preparatory for the Virgin with St. Anne…… the NG has moved it from it’s shrine in the back– so hunting for it I got distracted by some titians, and some weird olde Italian paintings – including an image of the virgin mary within a vulva shaped halo… HailVaginaCunt! I think the painter of the vision of St. Gabriel was my kinda Catholic….. After I had to ask for directions…..

Entering room number 2, I turned right and then couldn’t stop smiling. Leo Da Vinci’s faces – now agedly chalked – are always quite creepy – but there’s the really nice bit where his finely modelled drapery across St. Anne’s knees open up into charcoal lines and then moving down to the toes – become clear deft strokes. No mannerism here. Just a nice intimate ease – digits doing digits with the end of a burnt stick while dreaming of the virgin mary. How deliciously catholic. I looked at those toes for quite a long time – until I got a call from a friend – who reminded me where I was meant to be… err.. shit… yeah.

Back in the blighty drizzle – the posse had dispersed and headed to some pub near Trafalgar square. Part of me wanted to head back to the NG with my sketchbook and stare and scribble for 3 hours – but then part of me couldn’t take my eyes off the nice queers filling the room. I tried to stick to a sober bubbly or two…. But it was a sodden afternoon, and I was in a warm wooden panelled pub, surrounded by sweet smiling hotties, and Guinness on tap.

Hmmm – A perfectly poured Guinness is not cold – but not tepid – and the head – forms a type of rich crème like that on a really good black expresso coffee. This was a perfect Guinness – poured by a man with teeth that could only come from England– and my epiphanous first sips were shared smiling into the eyes of the boi wunda. I spent most of the afternoon returning to this simple state of bliss. Sipping Guinness, flirting with boi-wunda and imagining the virgin mary’s toes. Soft sinking charcoal, dark notes of creamy bitter Guinness in my mouth. Sweet north English bois, with high voices and alabaster skins and clear eyes……

I wasn’t sure if it would be decently British to engage in smutty toilet sex in daylight hours – especially so close to Lord Nelson’s column – so we snogged on the stairs and eventually headed up the street laughing. We were meant to be escorting a friend to play dressups for the Diamonda galas concert that night. I was meant to be organising a posse for my last brick lane vindaloo, I was also contemplating standing outside the barbican hoping to score a ticket… what a note to end on! “give me sodomy or give me death”

So I failed to engage in any of the above – and our friend was late dressing up, and boiwunda had to get ready for work the next day – and none of us had nearly enough playthings to engage in much more than a brief foray into fabulously smutty rompings in our friend’s house... Hence the torrid texts since.

Boi wunda is not one of the hotties from the flickr pics – so friends reading this will have to imagine him for yerselves, just as I imagine and remember and wank and sigh. Back in blighty he’s not doubt seeing far more action than I am at present. I’m always amazed how in the first flush of serious lust – imagining the lust object fucking other people turns me on almost as much as imagining them fucking me – or me fucking them. At such points lust – seems to be an infinite expanding field of possibilities and connections – and now I better stop or I’ll sound like some old raver on E – but there’s a delicious side to sexual desire – a delightfully generous side to lust that does look for endless and infinite pleasure, for expansion and possibility rather than scary clingy paranoid possession.

Once the green eyed monster grips my entrails – the thought of ‘my lover’™ sprawling around with someone else makes me sick –and then I hate myself for my own jealousy – and then it’s a rapid descent into lesbian bed death. Holding, clinging, desperately grasping at someone like grains of sand in my fist – only makes them slip faster away.
So I don’t know if or when, or say it again, if, I’ll see boi-wunda ever again. I’m in that delightful state of ‘oh wow, oh no, oh well’ that I remember feeling errr… 9 fucking years ago in another European city.

Meanwhile the sheer queerness of the encounter – of being dragged around gay bars by ex-dyke pre-t bois who like playing faggot to fucked up ladies like moi – has somehow fulfilled a lot of my own kinky fantasies. I think I’ve found a happy resolution of my own queerness, and finally a place where jism-phobic str8hating cuntcraving hosebeastiness makes some sense.

Since I’ve now got cocks on the brain I’ve decided to make the symbolic order of the phallus the cornerstone of my paper for the feminist conference. I’ve going to make an analogy of Jean Baudrillard’s description of the striptease (its Chapter 4 in Symbolic Exchange and Death) and the life class. OK – that’s not that exciting – but If I construct the life class – as an enactment of the symbolic order based around a desire of all participants to embody the phallus then I’ll explore the microdynamics of how this is constantly (dis)rupted by the sheer difficulty of reducing a strange fleshy uncoordinated insecure ambiguous body into the performance of singular cyclopean mastery.

My idea – hell - my belief – my existential credo even – is that it is in these moments of the ‘almost’ – the points of inadequacy – of failure – not quite failure – but that strange special moment where impossible hopes meet with the incredibly surprising possibilities of what our bodies can actually produce or perform or do – which is never what we expect. So for me in art – its about fudging marks – funny odd akwardness – it’s about Bryson’s idea of the glance –not being an obviously subversive counter to the gaze – but a series of odd little skirting glimpses that allow us to glimpse something else in the corner – that can take us somewhere else. In sex – it’s my new friend’s absent cock – constantly teasing and expanding in increasingly smutty texts between us – that themselves form another trajectory of desire and becoming.

I hope this is worthy of Liz Grosz – whose going to be at the conference (it’s going to be a panty wetting weekend in Turku). The last time I saw her - I’d dragged along the consort –who then made a verbal comment comparing her ideas on art, vibration, chaos and becoming … to wine tasting. I nearly sunk through the floor and felt nauseous for hours afterwards. Ha-ha my life is fallibly nuts.

Last Day in London - kinda

I've already writtine this in ten emails

I am actually sitting in an internet cafe now -tapping away my last few hours in london.

Yesterday I headed off at 2pm - to make a 6pm flight - and arrived at standstead airport just after 5.30pm- when the chekc in counter had shut.

I rand around begged, pleaded - persuaded and made it through - racing through security and the shopping mall and legions of bewildered trolley wielding duty free shoppers and onto my flight - into my seat -and realised that I'd left my laptop back at security.

apnnicked, freaked - begged my way off the flight - and get my backpack off the plane - and went back - and thankfully managed to get someone to find it.... somewhere in limbo land between secuirty gate and lost property.

then wandered backwards through the terminal and out the font end - rebooked a flgiht and discovered that the airport is 45 minutes away from where I was staying in london -by train.

bugger

so I'll try again in an hour - and enjoy stnadstead airport....

I need to do a long posting about my 'real' last day in london - whihc was brilliant - and involved a sodden rally, an epiphanous drying out in the naitonal gallery, and a delightfully epiphanous guinness and flirty naughty afternoon...

hmmm

Joys of blighty

I just did a BIG ART RANT - on the art blog

and can't be bothered writing more.

Have I written about the joys of my hosts flatmate - who practices opera during the day at home? she only does trouser roles... (operatic drag kings... how damn cool)

My Tribal Home

the title is meant to be a profoundly clunky detournement of christine anu.

It's clunky because honkiness is about aculturation. honkiness is a condition of continuous whitewashedout cultural aphasia. to be white is to be trash, trashed, trashy and trashing.

to reclaim words like 'tribe' is really fucking problematic. It's the same cultural expression as orientalism/primitivism/essentialism/tourism.

and they are all spinetinglingly vile. they mean that we don't face the whiteness that is ours as a colour, as a conditioned condition that is privileged but that projects it's own invisible colours onto others while it retains its own invisible silent blandness.

I don't know how to describe or name whiteness without skirting dangerously into some edgy fucking racial essentialising zone of acute badness.

so i use the term beige. just because it's a colour I hate, because my skin fades into it when I wear it, and i do become sickeningly invisible - clothes, furnishings, carpet merge and sink within my skin. bile rises in my throat and I feel viscerally revolted, nauseous, as I feel myself descending into a psychaesthenic crisis of conformity. and it feels like death.

So, that's the bad news.

the good news is that, here, under the pallid spring sun of dear old blighty, I have found something that is deeply homely, that makes me feel profoundly at home, centred and connected.

Even better - it is within structures that are really precarious / edgy / underground / shaky / flakey and even dodgy.

People use the word 'tribe' often when describing the loose connected clan that is the wonderful world of queer squatters, just like lots of queers use the word 'family' to describe our chosen networks of psychic sustenance - those really close friends who you don't always like but you do love. the people who you can call at 3am and who call you..... sometimes I do this too......

but it makes me squirm in my seat just a little.

Let me tell you where I am, while writing this right now.

Right now i'm sitting in the loungeroom of my friend's house in north london - working off the neighbour's unprotected wireless connection. the household have been squatting together last year in est London and previously in amsterdam, but have decided to try out paying for gas, housing and power while they work day jobs and sort out the stuff they'd been putting off for the past 5 years..... (like dentistry)

I squatted with one of my hosts EIGHT YEARS AGO, and have 2 degrees of separation in 50 different directions with his current partner. this household are friends with a couple of different squatting households in london but especially with one squat a few minutes 9by bus) down the road - where I was staying previously.

i heard about The Dalston Squat through a friend who I knew through the food coops/social centres in sydney and who now lives in France. we haven't seen each other for 4 years - but email quite a bit. she gave me the email of one of the Dalston crew - who invited me to stay - and turned out to know - not only expat -sydney squatters and queers in London - but also a few of the people i squatted with in Paris, SEVEN YEARS AGO. Plus other people in the squat also knew the same queeruption/queer/squatting people/zines/scenes as I did.

Meeting people here has reminded me a little bit of when I first left the country and used to run into people in Sydney who were also from the country. We'd establish redneckville of origin - and then each recite various names of people from the same hicktown and then - having established a mutual acquaintance we'd then recite their personal and/or extended family history, right up to the latest news we'd heard. the more recent news we could divulge - the more 'authentic' our claims to really being form the country actually were.

as much as I whinge and disdain my Mum's propensity to spend one hour per week filling me in on all of the minute sickness/birth/death/marriage details of all of the extended family members of every current or former resident of Hicksville - I know that for my first 7 years out, it served some purpose. I used to think of the Mandingo Griots and the way they were able to store all this lineage of info in the heads and then recite it on demand........

Essentiallly all that has happened in the 18 years since i left hicksville is that my 'hometown' has shifted into a fairly non localised network of queers/squatters/artists/rifraf that has had some connection to sydney but more to certain politico/cultural 'affinities'.

so often - when meeting Australian expats OZ - i feel like the girl that stayed home - that can bring news from home and fill people in on how everyone is doing....

but this time - i've felt a part of something much bigger - and yet far more intimate. I SHOULD be a good little Deleuzian and call it a Rhizome - but it might sounds a bit too pompous.....

But there is a difference. when i meet up wiht a Newtown expat and fill them in on the latest goss/activities etc. - i'm working within and on a narrative lineage - which includes myself, the listener and the subjects spoken of in a linear geneology of nostalgia and gossip. this is nice, but limiting.

when I go to a squat/club/action and meet squatters who squatted with or did a social centre or agitprop/playscene etc. with someone else who i've also done the above with in the past - I THINK it forms a rhizome. because the spaces and activities are usually temporary, they are fleeting little moments of utopian reimagining - that can't be localised within a suburb or town - but that spark off a trail of different connections and possibilities.

This sounds a bit airy fairy possibly, and I wish I could explain the vast deep joy that has fed my soul in the flakey precarious queer spaces i've found myself.

for the past five months I've been around really lovely warm generous people who I really trust and love and who feel like my family. however, almost all of them identify as heterosexual. Within this straight space, I go into my default position of being a single eunuch lesbian. It's not because straight people are homophobic as such. i know this, because all of these friends were deeply supportive of my last wifelife and my queer career in general. but to be a woman, in this world, involves being passive or invisible unless interpellating male attention (either lust, admiration or aggression). if you don't do that, you fade to beige spinsterhood.

I think i wrote somewhere about how joyous i felt wandering into the unity bar in Paris - and meeting sapphic stares with my own sapphic stare - and how it made me feel human. I've felt the same joy and relief wandering into queer bars in New york and finland - even though it was freezing and I didn't know anyone.

Actually hanging out, and talking, dancing, performing and flirting with not only queers, but radical activist squatting queers has been like this multiplied by a million. I always think that the condition of activism, of queerness, of a reactive critical existance and of art - comes from a basic sense that your own existence is impossible in the present world. Idealistically this produces what Sarah Ahmed describes as a type of 'motility', and agitation and excitement that causes things to happen, and new connections to form.

but living it on a daily basis, is often sheer hell. Actually, to be alive, and to sense the impossibility of your existence, your soul life, sex life, desire life and dream life is deeply deeply crushing.

when we can move, agitate and in that movement find connections with others who are just forced to move, agitate and irritate then it can be lifesaving. Literally.and when that agitation can mobilise into a project, a performance, a squat or a social centre - then it's really really magical.

I joked about the Dalston Squat feeling like a 'love camp'. "love camp' was a joke someone coined about an art school camp in the desert about 10 years ago. But the love - and I can't find a word better for what I feel about and within and between the other squatters reminds me so much of the special sacred circle of friendships I have with friends from art school. Art school is also an impossible imaginary and temporary space (at least for the students) and when it works - people do form funny sorts of connections - between imaginary spaces, impossible desires, and disappearing times. (god that last phrase is cheesy)

the problem/limitation or whatever is that, like art school, this place is almost completely white. the squatters come from different countries, but all are fairly beige - and London - and especially north London is not beige. so much so that I tended to assume every honky around Dalston must be a friend or visitor of the Squat.

so i'm back to the problem of colour. I've tried to resolve this with fake tan. trying to hysterically play with the whole anxiety of whiteness. white trash like fake tan, but stirling middle class/alternative honkies like to keep our pallour - and - scarily enough - spread it around the spaces we create between ourselves. this seemed to happen a little less in sydney - but it's still a problem.

and i'm not sure what good - beating my pallid hand against my pallid brow actually does to challenge it. i haven't been here long enough to know what the unbeige queers/suqtters/rifraf actually do and why it's separate from happyhardcorehonkyland.

Maybe Australia isn't as crap as I think.

Spring is Here!!!!

already my nose feels snotty.

On monday I turned 36. sigh and sigh again. I wandered out into the sunshine with my dear finnish friend, Heli, and we sat in some asphalt courtyard surrounded by trailers selling weird fried shit. (mainly hamburger style concoctions on rye bread with plastic cheese and gerkins). However, despite it's gritty setting, in the moderate temperature of 8 degrees and lots of sunshine, the Tampelentori took on a kind of italian plaza feel. People sat in the sun and slowly peeled off layers of heavy coats and mittens. Heli's toddler slept and my feet started to sweat under my moon boots.

It wasn't quite Turku - which if I was drunk - I'm sure could be desribed as kind of Parisian. Set around a central river whihc runs out to the sea, it's full of old bourgeouise building, and in the orange afterglow of a spring time sunset it took on quite a festive air - as all the local kiddies - bedecked in goth wear and brightly dyed hair sat on the cobblestone river banks swilling salmiaki vodka. aaah finland, finland, finland... It's the place I want to be.....

turku nightlife had been a bit of a highlight generally. My friend took me on a tour of the best cafes and pubs (hmmm a sober pub crawl, in finland, only mayhem would do it), whihc included a cafe named after finland's greatest arhcitect, Alvar Aalto, and culminated in the local Dyke bar.... which was at the back of some plaza - filled with kirrputori selling Latch Key rugs.

We walked in to the dyke bar - which was almost empty except for a table of young raver style manga goth girls and another table of 40 something butches - who all stared at us. gulp. My friend - a high femme - ordered soda and cranberry for us both. We went and sat in on the blue velvet raised corner seating and admired the decor - which kind of reminded me of hawaii, and the UNITY BAR in Paris.

I forgot to post about my adventures in the dyke-zine launch in New york. Lets just say that alison Behcdel quite possibly is some sort of freaky master of the universe. Because I can now say that I've been in various dyke mileus, in various cities, for more than 15 years, and QUITE STRANGELY - the differences between Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Lyon, Paris, New york AND turku are astonishingly few and far between. Maybe there are only 50 lesbians in the entire world and the rest are all clones or a mirage or something.

I was meant to go out to the local Tampere gay bar for a women's dance last night - but I misread the programme (not hard given it was in finnish) and so came home instead. I did catch a performance art event by local megastar MonaRay, but not after walking into some scary bar full of men wathcing soccer.

i've even seen clones of ABEL. And frightening numbers of mini-me's.

I left NYC with a duller plum shade through my hair - so I now look like a standard middle aged bookish finn. Obviously i don't talk like one.The food - largely consisting of Pirrakas (rice or potato filled vulva shaped pastries) and porridge has
bulked up my weight again - and I can't wait to get to old blighty to find some fresh vegetables. (who'd have thought it).

anyway - at least we finally have sunshine - and the sun doesn't set until after 8pm. So I'm off for an evening stroll along the now melting lake to watch the sun set over water and ice.

this wekeend I'm heading off to england feeling a tad anxious because my accommodation is looking really shaky. I'm meant to arrive in central london at about 2am on sunday morning. (shudder). One accommodation offer is undergoing home renovations and is squatting in a corner of their kitchen. another one hasn't replied to my emails, and a third is weighed down with early parentitis. PLUS most of the inner city youf hostels have a strict under 35's policy - and are already booked out!

Strangely enough, acute anxiety seems easier to deal with than depression. I could just hang out in stanstead airport until something turns up...... they have coffee after all
anyway

Wintereisse - farewell to 35

Last night I felt as if my chest had broken open. The silent and continuous flow of tears of the past month came pouring out as large wailing sobs. Slightly muffled by my pillow but consumed more but the icy darkness around me. So much fucking sadness. Grief sitting on my chest like some evil demon, sinking it’s claws inside, sucking out my will for life and making me earnestly wishing I was dead.

After lying and sobbing silently for about an hour, I decided that my preferred mode of suicide would be to drop a hairdryer into the bath. Since I don’t own a hairdryer and currently have no access to a bathtub this seemed reasonably remote to indulge in as an anaesthetic fantasy of self obliteration. I’ve got a few ethical objections to suicide, mainly involving anticipating the pain of other’s around me. I don’t feel I have the right to cause anyone the terrible pain of grief. So, Hellish as it is, I acquiesce to continue living.

This heart, this broken aching heart is hell. I’m sick of tears stinging my eyes, and I can’t believe that I’m in this much pain. I’m curious about how emotional pain gets psychosomatically located in this strange lump in my chest. I wish I could freeze out this pain. Grow up, get over it and move on. Focus on my work, be a good serious, self contained proto-doctor, not this pathetic undershit, weeping over someone who simply isn’t worth it.

So today I happily acquiesced to Heli’s suggestion that we go and plunge ourselves into a hole cut into the ice of a frozen lake. It is less extreme than it sounds. The hole is right next to a sauna, and today the weather was well above zero (ok mainly only 5 or 6 degrees by 5pm, but she’s gone there in minus 20). I fantasized about the cold waters cauterising my heartbreak, providing some sort of shock to jolt me out of the miasma of grief. And I’d never say no to a sauna.

The first time I happily screamed and laughed aloud at the icy shock on my feet, my legs, my torso as I descended in, and quickly emerged (they have a stairwell into the hole). And, back in the sauna, I enjoyed the round of applause from the stoic elderly ladies, politely impressed at my feat of tourist bravado. The second time, I tried to allow myself to sense what it felt like. The terror as my feet and legs went numb, combined with the sheer thrill of the cold as I resisted the urge to leap off the stairwell and swim around in the hole. Then the strange rush of my blood thickening. Blood thickening – is something I’ve always associated with the cold rush of a dead sweaty panic. Icy emotional stabs from small instances of heartbreak, disappointment, shock. So often I’ve felt my blood runs cold when I sit and numbly grunt at some nasty little shock revelation of betrayal or hurt or absence, but it was nothing like this. I could feel my capillaries contract, felt a really funny internal rush that almost made me swoon. But I didn’t swoon, and remained upright, sensing the weirdness of the cold, the liquid on my skin. Then I raced up the stairs, and stood around – in a strange hysterical high. Such happy numbness, no, not numbness, something else.

My heart is no where near healed, but I’m less of a mess than last night. And my old emotional reflexes seem to be kicking in at last. I hate the consort. Maybe I should hate Abel too, but the consort is an easy target. Because I wanted out, but didn’t think I’d feel this way, because I thought it was desire and not love, because it was seven months and not seven years, because he confused me every step of the way, because he’s a man and I never thought a man would ever hurt me this much (again).

Maybe the latter is the more important point. I always associate heartbreak with women – which certainly sounds more romantic than weeping over a man, but there’s something deeper. When I think back over a lifetime’s habit of coldly describing injuries done to me by men; emotional abuse, betrayal, sexual abuse, coldness, coerced sex, general nastiness, drunken date rape and sexual rejection, I wonder why I haven’t been able to articulate this as a personal injury, but I’ve either theorised it or turned it into some tidy little narrative, where I seem to vanish. I think vanishing is part of the point, and probably explains why such incidences are so annihilating, and why all I want to do afterwards is annihilate myself. To vanish, disappear, feel nothing, say nothing, do nothing, to sink into a hole an never emerge. To be mired, silent in my own deathly misery.

Part of my loves the bullshit in break-ups. The eternal line “oh, yes, we’ll still be friends, of course we’ll be friends, I still love you and always will”. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to know what a total crock of shit that is. Despite many attempts and experiments at this particular project, I am not good friends with any of my exes. We’re civil, and some of us can even socialise – but the end of a relationship is exactly that. It’s a defeat, a failure, a termination. The memories remain, but the future trajectory is over. And I don’t think it is really possible to remain good friends with someone who has caused or does cause you a lot of pain, unless you’re a masochist, which I’m more reluctant to be lately.

This trajectory of musings came from another silent little bout of tears tonight. I was musing on the feminine grace of the consort, which is what attracted me in the first place. He’s one of the faggiest men I’ve ever met, and a big part of me was convinced he was gay, but repressed – but given my own circumstances, I’m assuming there was a fair amount of self projection involved. But he was and is, incredibly, beautifully and exquisitely feminine, and yet strangely masculine as well. I know I was intensely attracted to the sheer queerness of someone so camp, prissy and girly being able to nail me to the floor with his phallus. But there was something deeper than the thrill of being fucked by a femme, because I’ve been fucked by dildo wielding femme dykes, and enjoyed the odd brief foray into flipping butches too. And I think it was the last deep gasp of my own masochism.

There’s nothing queer about heterosexuality – particularly when the roles within the relationship are so fixed. And between mayhem and consort, the roles were fixed. He, and older man, definitely wore the pants, sex only happened when he wanted it too, and it happened on his terms, where he was the active partner and me the passive. I hadn’t been that passive (not even with a man) since nineteen eighty something, and intensely enjoyed the experience. But for me, what was a fleeting intimate opening into softness, passivity and trust, was and is something entirely different within heteronormativity. I think all of the consort’s exes have been upwardly mobile, middle class, intelligent women. Professional socialised butches of the straight world to his own faffing femininity. But whatever the social roles, the sexual union maintains his own subjective position as a man, even reinforcing it. I had a strong sense that the consort gets off on ‘flipping’ dominant women, and this is one of the reasons why he isn’t gay. His femininity is a ruse, a disarming seduction, a play, and a delightfully queer one at that. Kind of.

What cannot be queer in such an encounter – is that he, socially, ostensibly is a heterosexual man, and the bearer of both subjectivities. Kristeva’s argument that men can bear the symbolic values of the feminine and the masculine, but women can only ever transvestise ourselves is a timely reminder of this paradox. Men are imbued with an internal subjectivity, that of masculinity, at their core. Women aren’t, at least not when we start messing with the phallus. My own exquisite delight at being fucked, being filled with a penis – was a delight at being filled with the phallus, at collapsing myself into a skin, a layer, a shallow carapace for this cultural figment. I wasn’t even ‘feminine’ in this, merely a part-object, an embellishment of another object. The play of seduction, he was feminine, insisting on pursuing and seducing me, and expressing disdain or aversion if I tried the same trick in return. This hurt a lot, but also contributed to my feelings of ‘victory’ when I could finally feel him inside me. For him – I guess the victory was in seducing a top, in having a profoundly articulate dyke begging for his cock, in taking my arm and walking down king street, remapping my very queer cruising grounds as a coupled heterosexist space. I’ve got no doubt about his investment in heterosexuality as a social institution. I have written and workshopped bisexuality for over a decade, but that doesn’t help my feelings of internal betrayal in allowing this to happen. Part of me was intrigued by this remapping, this strolling, this remarking of the territories crossed and recrossed by Abel and I, in the arms of another, entirely different body. Part of me delighted in the sheer queerness of it, and It felt very queer to me, but not in the right way. Becoming the human condom, was a delight, a vertiginous delight of descent, away from myself, from my own subjectivity, and my own confusion. But I feel hollow, hellish and bereft as a result.

I wish I was tougher. I wish I was immune to men, and wanting to be desired and loved by them. I wish I didn’t long for a rapprochement and healing of my own ancient wounds of love and betrayal and loss for the deadmen in my biofamily. I wish, that by cutting my hair and swaggering around grinning at girls and occasionally fucking them, that I could immunise myself against this hurt. This immense stupidity of my own vulnerability, as a woman, as something inscribed as ‘lacking’ in relation to men, that makes any meaningful relationship with them, literally impossible.

I feel weird writing this - and putting it up for the world - and the consort to read. for every paragraph of what seems like impossible bile here - i have 10 tear sodden ink pages scratched out ink bic biro at desperate hours of the night - or the day. sometimes living is total total hell, and I write because to not write means that I suffocate. Maybe one day I'll feel less hurt, less scared, less sad, less fucking bitter. At the moment my hatred, my fury, my frustration is the only thing getting me out of bed each day. that tiny little fire in my belly, stopping me from freezing completely.

It’s not all bad. Reading velvet park, I came across an article about the confusing challenges to health care provision in san fran – generated by the proliferation of transgenderism. Lots of FTM’s are fucking gayboys, or straight girls, or MTF’s, or queer girls, and vice versa. Reading this I imagined a utopia where gender binaries cannot exist – and have been queered out of existence. I image a utopia where gender doesn’t matter – and can be changed like a set of underwear or drag outfits, and where genitalia are freed from the constraints of gender, or sociality, of subjectivity and can salaciously stroll across open fields of lusty willing flesh. Then I regret sending my wonderwand home.

Winterreisse

wintereisse

It's meant to be the end of winter. today was to hot for thermals - and we had to move our clocks forward at midnight - so I think it's one am now?

It's certainly still winter.

I got delayed in the big apple by a nasty flue - which kept me bedbound for a week - and I spent last week wiht evil menstruation from HELL.

(Only a man could come up with the theory of intelligent design - coz anyone who'se experienced fucking lady biology would know - that the only intelligence that could come up with the bluddykunt form of gonad management would be that of some freaky mysoginist evil genius....)

today - was my last satterdy in the big apple - and I had a migraine from hell. It's just starting to grip my neck as I type so i'm typing faster to hopefully ward it off.

so this will probably be the last posting on this blog - unless I get reandomly inspired by fond reminiscences.

I had a plan of posting a daily inventory of nutty new york moments (which occur daily - god this place is great) - and then I thought it'd be good to write some observer participant account of all the skethc clubs i been going to - but given ehtics limitations and impending tome completion - I better hold off for a few months.

And I felt so down that I posted my misery bits on the bodies art and stuff blog.

I dunno whether to keep up with the amateur cultural anthropolgy stuff and save the acute emotional angst for bodies art and stuff - and keep art and mayhem as a long distance publicity board for stuff in sinney town....

wahtc this space...

i'm trifurcated.

As I left the L-train the other night - I felt like i'd entered some weird tweeny sci fi movie where all the adults get zapped off. I was walking through the subway corridor FULL of twenty something funky white kids. This off a train full of mixed aged, mixed race individuals was WEIRD.

the funky squad of Bedford Street have moved south and now lorimer street and surrounds is gradually getting 'hipper' and whiter and inevitably blander. L casa del ramon is still surrounded by spanish speakers but some nice honkeys just moved into the flat downstairs - and i haven't seen the crack dealers across the road lately.

My own comfort zone,; nice 'alternative', pale skinned, bespectacled, earnest reading thinking people - are always a slightly uncomfortable sort of zone - coz we're so precarious - always on the way somewhere else. - we seem to so rarely make communities but be at the forefront of the breaking of other ocmmunities.

but as I age into the late 30's I'm feeling less comfortable aournd the ghetto of cool around me. I DID make it out to the dyke mag launch last week - and found myself in a room of clones of girls I could have seen anywhere in the past 15 years: sydney, melbourne, brisbane, Lyon, Paris... fuck o bloody fuck - alison bechdel really is the dyke version of moses. the tribes dON'T CHANGE.... acutally they do - coz now with T and surgery - there are a lot more t-girls/bois/t-bois/FTM's - pick your word.

Meeting eyes with 'new men' - I feel kinda weird - coz in a dyke bar, I'm in a space where i don't usually look at men as sexual so I don't really know how to respond....

anyway - i danced for a tiny little bit - but now many people were dancing and I was feeling socially phobic (of wandering up and chatting to random strangers) and then I remembered how I felt when I was the same age as most of the crowd - needing 5 drinks before i'd dance, 10 before I'd make a pass at anyone - and I sighed, and decided that maybe 2 hours was enough time there and I'd rather be at home.
sigh

at least I didn't have a hangover

sorry this post is so boring! - check out my other blogs instead!

Feeling Down 2

Fancy That!

sometimes the universe is INCREDIBLE - in the way it just responds to your inner psyche.

the previous posting was a cut and paste job from some email that just arrived in my inbox: with "Feeling down" as the subject heading.

I love the NON-english of spam - it's the last pure form of automatic writing... and I think there's a message in there somewhere for me - past the buttons for cialis, viagra and xanax......

At the moment I need all three - I'm so flat I can't even get my dildo to stay erect.

I'm debating whether or not to venture out to the launch of "Velvet Park" - which is meant to be the alternative version of "Go" which is the big apple's version of Lobotomies On The Loose. the cute girl-on-t at Babeland said it wasn't really quite "on our backs" - but seeing as I missed the SLIT launch last week in Sydney I thought it might go some way towards alleviating my feelings of vaginita cobwebitis.

On the other hand the theme is "roller derby" - and I'm about as natural arround roller skates as the average pussy cat, and I find sporty dykes totally unsexy - sport, sweat, netball, uniforms, running shoes, EUGH.

AND the website has WAYYY too many references to the L-WORD - which I think is like STARBUCKS of sapphodom - ie non coffee drinkers think Starbucks must be a good idea - and I.... am proud to say that I've been in the USA for 3 months and not stepped foot in a single one!

and I was feeling too depressed even to brave Dr. Sketchies, (actually i've decided that I never want to draw another titty tassle as long as I live....) and so I'm still thinking that maybe I should take advantage of another late night in solitude wiht my skethcobook at the MET.

Yesterday i fought back tears and entertained myself for at least an hour underneath Carpeaux's version of "Ugolino and his son's" - looking up and imagining a mayhem version of Monty Python skit - done ocker style.....


"i'm sorry lads, but there's just too many of you, and we're all starving to death, so i'm afraid I'm going to have to chop one of you up and feed you to the others..."
"ohhh SHIT dad, that really sucks, can't it be Jason?"
"No, craig, Jason's too small, he'd barely feed a cat, I'm afraid we'll have to go with Brian"
"Fucking No Way!"
"Listen, son, I know you're the favourite, and i'll try and let that console me and the other's while we're savouring your barbecued, flesh; you're a big strapping lad, and maybe, just maybe with your help, we'll all pull through"


Actually Just add that to the pile of reasons not to go - I love art and the met is open till 9pm again tonight....

OK, reasons to go:
I should see some Lesbians for I leave New York
the magazine is the nearest thing NYC has, to SLIT
the launch is a 10 minute walk away from where I'm staying
I could check out some of the openings that are in the area
I could even score dutch courage at openings before hand
I'm wearing all black
I might get laid and this might improve my mood
I might get laid by some homocidal freak and this would eliminate my mood
My mood ain't good


Again more reasons not to go:
I'm trying not to drink. this limits my gregariousness
I feel about as sexual as an armadillo in the fucking 4 layers I have to wear everywhere so I don't freeze my tits off
I was feeling too withdrawn to cope with Dr. Sketchies then I don't know how I'll cope with A) willliamsburg art scene B) Williamsburg dyke Scene
I feel about as sexual as a wombat generally. I think this is a sign of depression.

I think i'm depressed

Reasons for depression are all noteworthy and logical

I'm probably premenstrual (no sign of the menopause yet)
I'm been bedbound nearly all week with a nasty headcold
I haven't been dancing, or exercising or having much fun at all
I haven't had sex for nearly 3 months, and that was with the consort
I'm a bit broken hearted about the consort
It's the anniversary of the end of the lesbian marriage

Inspired by ZOO - I signed onto the ANU MoodGym (where KPI's meet cognitive therapy)
so I went through and they reckon I'm not very depressed but I am very anxious. Of course I'm anxious! i've got a year to submit my PhD! And then i'm cast off into the cold world of unfunded doctoral purgatory......

"your thoughts determine your mood"

A wise proposition, but I reckon the ones from the SPAM email are far more interesting....

maybe I need to go and update the list they have, of shit things, OK things, good things that happpened this week, and my responses......

or maybe I just write them here:

1.I lost my flashdrive. totally Crapolla. thoughts were "fuck, fuck, oh fucking fuck, fucking hell. I'd better go buy another one and try to track down/back up info."
2. I had evil sinus headcold for 5 days. Thoughts were "ohhhhh, fuck, this sucks. Have I got enough codeine? I don't want to take sudafed, PLEASE don't get bronchitis, I'd better start taking my athsma medication again, I don't want to get out of bed. Have I got enough food? fuck this suuuuuckszzzzzz zzzzzz blow nose, cough, sleep etc.
3. consequently didn't present conference paper in finland, had to contact organisers and hosts, and hotels and change plane tickets. Feel a bit of a dill
4. felt like shit and couldn't do any more research and lost a week on my 4 week travelpass....
3. My mobile phone stopped working - and the phone company ate the $10USD credit remaining. It took me a few days to notice and a few more days to work out why. fucking nothing I can do. can't be fucked giving more money just to send 3 sms...

good things
1. We managed to work out some sort of a semi-reliable local wireless internet connection - this was good coz the landline has been down and I had to change/arrange a lot of crap
2. today was sunny and 55 degrees in the morning
3. I had some decent books and got to wallow in bourdieu's distinctions.... argh such a canny marxist he was! I love it when the world can look straightforward and clean and critical - and we can wipe all traces of identificatory enjoyment with dismissive sneers at the bourgeoisie.....
4. Blueberries were only $3.00 a punnet instead of $5.00

anyway - before crashing and collapsing I was trying to ward off impending feelings of doom by keeping myself busy - running between sketch clubs and the library and doing dinner wiht people - and getting out of the house and away from myself....

but then I crashed and collapsed - so now i'm a little scared of pushing myself into avoidance.

so here I am, debating what to do with myself.
did I write that my libido has VANISHED. (yes, a surprise) and a sign that I'm meant to keep myself under wraps - and that I haven't got a lot of energy for others, maybe.... or a sign that I'm completely shutting down and avoiding human contact and the world because right now i'm ACHING like hell, and don't know what the FUCK to do about it!!!

i'm not really a total emotional escapee - hell i'm wallowed on this blog all last year, and the year before, and i did A LOT OF CRYING last year. and I saw a therapist, and had regular shiatsu and did a lot of yoga and even had a full immersion rebound affair..... which has now, in it's inevitable and timely and sensible denoument left me feeling hollow and horrible and heartbroken and very hurt and alone and sad.

which are all just feelings. I didn't want the lover, didn't want the relationship, just wanted the sensation of being held and fucked, and cooed at.

but it was rather attaching, all the same.

as for the trouble and strife, well.

One year ago yesterday, or the day before (because time differences are rather odd). I was on a bus from Tampere to Helsinki with my dear friend heli, and for some reason, I couldn't stop crying. Tears streamed out of my eyes, and I had this horrible feeling that Abel didn't love me anymore. Now most people would assume that NO SMS's - infrequent emails and initiating sex with someone else while i was in the same room (and NOT with me btw) - could have been pretty clear warning signs that something was up, but intercontinental intuition in a snowy landscape sound so much more poetic.....

I thought I'd die. And I didn't. but every now and then unconscious oblivion doesn't seem like such a bad idea. It'd be NICE not to have what feels like a hole in my chest, inadequately compensated by a lump in my throat. In would be NICE not to be fighting back tears half the day. It'd be nice to stop whingeing. and to laugh.

I know things are bad inside when my sense of humour goes nutty - my inner clown trying to cheer up the rest of me. so I wandered through the Frick and nearly burst out laughing at Reynold's portraits of Lady so and so - coz they looked EXACTLY like the crazy trannies on Little Britain... or I start rescripting the gory tales behind 'neoclassical' sculptures (even thought I'd class Carpeaux as a stock romantic myself.... love the work....)

and reading another email from Abel full of earnest assurances of her sobriety "apart from one disastrous occasion" and remembering the past eight and half fucking years of the same fucking script- and involuntarily reciting details of "oh, apart from that time where I got a bit tiddly and fucked the dog and crashed the car, or crashed the dog and fucked the car, or maybe the dog fucked me in the car ... but err... No, I don't remember. No. I felt very bad the next day. No I don't remember it at all. I was just a bit tiddly. No I don't know why. I've been moderate apart from that."

there are a surprising number of homocidal maniacs who while not in the throes of an axe wielding frenzy have been regarded by many people as "moderate". this doesn't stop them from being homocidal maniacs.

this isn't meant to be an Abel bashing post - maybe it's just an easy fallback when i'm feeling scared, and sad and desperately insecure. Hell! The last time I walked into an unknown dyke bar, alone, in a foreign city was.... July 31st 1998... and then look what happened. If I was going to meet someone more fantastically amazing, brilliantly intelligent, creative,really wild and yet so tender so caring - it would be here in New York...... but I'd have to let go of her first, my stupid sad little dream that the ideal Abel would somehow emerge and we'd both rip each other's clothes off, that I wouldn't feel this level of sadness and terror around anyone and not around myself.... I'm letting this old scarred love form like a chrysalis around me, because it's secure, safe structure....

hang on, why am I saying this shit? I totally opened up to the consort, and just got crushed and confused as a result. I tried to console myself that he's way more confused than I am, but that was just delusional. I'm the one in hell here. today I went drawing and the model had the same facial structure as him. I thought I was hallucinating. I kept drawing the room around the model - everything to avoid looking into those eyes that looked so familiar and yet were so unfamiliar. Thank God the model gave me some back views so I could remember how to draw - again - and thank god his body was nothing like the consort's.... But it was freaky, in a way. another little push from the cosmos, telling myself to grit my teeth and get over it.

My latest epitaph to the consort: his phallus was like his library; magnificent yet woefully underused.

and I call myself a bookish lesbian

Feeling Down

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Bookish

I'm still slowly coming out of a very intense space where i'm obsessed with words but barely able to string a verbal sentence together.

after hibernating at Debbie's for 3 days - i've spent a frantic 3 hours catching up on email. Barely moving, typing frantically in front of a computer screen - very like the way I've been since saturday.

I've realised that it takes me at least a day to arrive into the zone where I can write - and let the words flow. I'm realising that i can't be fordist about my writing - that I spend stupid amounts of time sitting and staring and then stupid amounts of time at stupid times just typing tapping frantically.

Over the last few days I've remembered to eat a coherent breakfast of porridge and fruit - but after that I get a bit vague - tending to wnader into the kithcen at odd hours wolfing down whatever I coud find - or munching vaguely on chocolate coated coffee beans.

It's an insane way to work - but it gets the job done - strange strange space of creativity.

Sometimes - actually most of the time, the tome feels like the hardest thing i've ever done. I feel my brain and body at their absolute limits - pushing, pushing pushing shit uphill. trying to synthesize so much infomration, anecdotes whatever.

I've found with the interviews - that I have to listen and relisten and let them enter into my own thoughts before I cna include them in my writing. It's a painfully slow process. I'm still working on some of the stuff i transcribed 12 months ago.

i'm still working on a lot of the stuff I read 12 months ago. Last year was a fucking cataclysm.

i'm been moderately gloomy - coming up to the aniversary of the end of my marriage. I spent Valentines day with diarrhooeah (charming detail!) and feeling sad.

the surprise present from the consort added more confusion to the layers - especially as he admitted that he'd started seeing someone -a euphemism for sleeping with them I guess.

Part of me is desperately miserable. I sobbed myself to sleep and spent a day sobbing silently striding through snow and sunlight in central park. I found it strangely life affirming - and remembered my siilar snow bound stides across white streets of Tampere last year....

as I felt
her love
slipping
away

sometimes the present is so ghastly all I can do is try to keep moving - like a mad mouse on a treadmill - hoping that the force of my momentum will move time forwards and move me away from the present.

but this is not how writing gets done.

writing involves slow, unbearable stillness. Solid stoic fixity. an immersion in my body and a very strange detachment from it. I sense my body so much, I can smell my sebum, feel the grease ooze from ever pore. every fart, every muscle, every splash of piss - it's an intensely visceral experience.

Lautreamant obviously did a lot of writing. His crazy bit in the chant du maldoror (regular readers of my bodies art and stuff blog - will know the reference) evokes so much the intese abjection of the writing body.
still
surpassing
time

but hell! this blog is meant to be about my fun filled whirl of an exciting life in the big apple eh!

so what bits from the big apple can I offer you this week?

the bum destroying Davis's version of Caravan on a battered trumpet in the subway?

the simulated autumnal perfection of the R train at 49th Street? the R-train carriage is pure '70's uber brown - formica wood-swirled panels, orange and yellow seats, and 49th street is all red tiles.....

Or last weeks madness - an 8 hour 'theatrical' drawing marathon in some theatre in NOHO. It was the only place in New york without central heating and there were naked models, standing around for half an hour at a time. I lent my puffy parka to one to use as a robe.
that was the bad bit. the good bits included lots of fake blood, gorilla outfits and furry caveman outfits, homocidal housewives and lots of silliness. I was glad i borught my colours.

I aquired a crumpler bag for my laptop (it just fits) by agreeing to join the cave-people for a 15 minute pose. All i had to do was weild a baseball bat - pretending to belt one of them in the arse.

It was stange how my body autmatically wnet into a contraposto rotating pose: feet in one direction, legs twisting so my torso headed to another direction and me head turned in another. Strange how In a freezing basement theatre in new york, i counted the same breathes as for a 15 minute pose as a freezing classroom in sydney. Even after 3 years. two hundred and ten breaths.

I took it as an opportunity to d some research - find out about the posers and the organisers - i guess it could be participant observation - but I'm not sure if any uni ethics committee would accept it.

speaking of uni'ss I was mired in my slavish insecurity on saturday, which was no day to be swanning around in the Hilton Hotel. I didn't have any scerrick of pastel pink and thought of Paris and felt regretful.

I went to the Feminist Art Project seminar for the College Art Association conference. Initially I'd had vague dreams of swanning around with little business cards, networking and sussing out a post-doc. But - I have days where everything is too much. i can barely meet people in the eye - let alone run my own marketting campaign. sometimes I wish I was doing a PhD in mathematics so I'd have an excuse to act like I had aspergers......

some of the talks were OK, some were good, some were tedious, a couple were brilliant. surrounded by affluent successful earnest bookish women - I felt not unlike Jean Louise Barrault in Les Enfants Du Paradise - the bit at the end when he's running around a sea of clowns - and it was a bit scary... is this what I am? what I want to be?

Of course I wear less black and less designer clothing that feminist art historians. I wear bright colours and take my clothes off with people dressed in gorilla suits. I felt extremely uncomfortable in the Hilton hotel and tend to feel awkward and yuckky wherever I see the dead animal brigade (those freaky perfumed women clad in carcase skins - I'm not an animal libber - but I find fur coats... ABJECT). I feel more in common wiht the strethced out stithced up pelts than the freaky beings wihtin them.

maybe i've been working too hard