7/21/08

Don't Touch Me Unless Your Mean It

I don't feel like describing the past week. Reading at the gallery and performing at the art space and going out to bars and having parties. I don't care. I don't want to talk about distances between the dance floor and the stage. It's only three feet. Half my entire height. I had a productive few weeks. I hope I can continue, somehow.

I sort of want to describe having (another) Black Sunday yesterday, in which every thing is unsuccessful. The heat, and the feeling of being suffocated. My horoscope said that yesterday I would feel isolated and alone. That I would use the day for a radical reappraisal of my relationships, and how equivocal they are. And as usual I tend to agree with Mr. Cainer's Horoscopes. Yesterday was awful.

The only things making it bearable: drugs, air conditioning, Liz Fraser's voice, frozen drinks, and La JohnJoseph. Who, really, has entered the inner circle of my friends. The Seventh Layer: The Soul Sisters Who Get To See How Ugly I Act When I'm In A Bad Mood.

Susan Sontag, from her journals: Poor little ego, how did you feel today? Not very well, I fear — rather bruised, sore, traumatized. Hot waves of shame, and all that. Pretty much sums it up. Suzie wrote that after getting dumped, but it still feels right. I haven't had occasion to be dumped in a while. I've been doing the dumping, the quitting, the severing. Mostly I just break up with myself.

Really, though, the thing that made yesterday bearable was falling asleep at 10pm, only to be woken up by fireworks going off outside of my window. I decided to watch Gregg Araki's Totally F***ed Up in bed, at midnight. I sort of expected to hate it. It's the first in his "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy", and I felt like I didn't really need any more pessimism. I've had a rough few days (in my head, at least, I mean). Here's the thing, even though it's "Another Homo Movie By Gregg Araki" I totally loved it. It's about a group of disaffected gay teenagers in LA in the early 1990s, chain smoking and listening to industrial records. The lesbian couple is particularly great. Even though the movie is set in (ever "post-apocalyptic") Los Angeles, where everyone complains about the heat. Duval's Andy is constantly in a leather jacket. The goth boy date scenes really ripped me up, for some reason. Reminded me of being a gay punker in high school, minus the sex, I guess. We still sneaked into places though.

Of course, this is Araki's first movie with James Duval, it reads like a love-letter. That the movie is at all compelling is due entirely to Duval's hair in his face. The dialogue is totally corny ("Don't touch me unless you mean it"), but it still works. I felt particularly alienated yesterday, so it was some relief to watch other bored queer teenagers sitting around, smoking cigarettes and listening to Ministry, talking about how scary fucking is. And how love doesn't exist. It has every trope of disaffected homo youth: hating the "scene", doing drugs, befriending resourceful lesbos, "processing". Abandoned buildings. It did make me feel a bit better, I guess.

The magic:

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