The women i dream of, when dreams are all there is...
KORTNEA
She works at my new favorite local restaurant (since my previous local favorite closed). With my housemate, we three always chat. I've given her two love poems. She said the first was the sweetest thing anyone's ever given her. My housemate is 90 and unabashed about lobbying on my behalf, whereas i'm quite shy. There is a lovely energy when we touch. She's christian, and i have no reason to think we have deep compatibility...yet i have lurid dreams of living with her, loving her relentlessly, and impregnating her willy nilly. I dream of serving her, cooking a meal and rubbing her feet while she eats, then asking whether she wishes me to kiss her feet. The fantasy culminates in the most mind-blowing oral pleasures she's ever imagined (and given her beliefs, her entire sex life may be hypothetical), then penetrating her and whispering that i won't cum, not now or the 1000th time, unless she whispers for me to do so. If she needed monogamy or marriage to be completely at ease, i imagine happily offering those! Perhaps part of my desire for someone wrong for me, in a situation that might be a crime against my creativity and sanity, is because i recently opened myself wide to loving the most compatible woman i've ever known...and got singularly crucified. That's on top of my growing collection of years of emotional and sexual isolation. Is there a touch of literal insanity in this? It sure feels like it. All the more frightening, in that i'm actively courting kortnea, and almost feel i'd let the fantasy play out if it kept unfolding. Loneliness drives me ever closer to being the game-playing, sexual/romantic predator this society makes of everyone.
LAKOTA
Still in the center of my dreams (see MM#4). I can't shake the image of our most intense moment, genitals engorged and sliding together...then imagining myself whispering beautiful words about whether she thinks her son should be an only child, and did she know when holding his father that he was the man to fill her womb, and then penetrating her (instead of holding back, as i did). I'm pretty sure she desired me completely that night. It's all eerily like a scene in AS GOOD AS IT GETS, when Helen Hunt has a disastrous date with a man who turns tail after repeated interruptions from her sick child. He says it's too much reality, and comes off as a shallow wanker...but is that fair, even a tiny bit? Isn't he being abnormally considerate? Lakota was a single mother with a five year-old developmentally disabled child. That's a lot of reality to heap upon attraction. Perhaps i was a little unfair to her (and this society was certainly immeasurably unfair, as it is to every single mother), but was i supposed to take her life situation out of the picture? Was i supposed to imagine that she was able to do so herself? Here i am years later, unwilling to forget one of the more beautiful moments of my life, yet almost tormented by the sensible reaction i showed. Do i love children? Far more than most. Could i have loved Lakota immensely and enduringly? Absolutely. Would being a "daddy", with all the indescribable burdens and self-abnegation that implies, have been at all right for me then...or now?
MARA
We lived in the same boarding house last year, for a couple months. She returned to her native China, and we've kept in touch. She's intelligent, and i was achingly attracted. We came tantalizingly close to romantic involvement. I dream of offering her marriage, so she might return to this country for as long as she likes. I dream of offering her the multiple babies she could never have in her own country. There's nothing rational about these thoughts...not even on the compatibility level, which we never got to explore deeply. There is an almost unrelentingly lonely desperation to living in this society, and it breaks stronger people than i.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Fallout
STAGE/SCREEN 75
-fall 2005
A short film by Andy Rath, a young filmmaker who ran his own company. He produced art pieces and corporate films. FALLOUT was initially created for use in rehab centers, showing drug users going through their lives, with all the trigger behaviors that addicts would recognize. The film would splice Andy’s segments between educational footage. Andy had already shot the other “drug users”, and hired me as his heroin addict. We filmed over three days - around the waterfront in Brooklyn, in a Greenpoint apartment, and on the streets nearby. I played a fella named Steve, and the film shows the progression of his life from occasional heroin user, to seeking it on the street, to living on the street doing crack. It was an absolute blast. Andy had great energy, very laid back and focused. His assistant Ryan was at least as much fun. My first acting partner was Miki Mosman, whom i actually met for a blind date the day of the shoot. She joined us on set, and was pressed into service in a flashback, as the girlfriend who introduces me to heroin. It was very trippily shot…and wouldn’t this be a much cooler world if all fizzled first dates were that much fun? My second acting partner was a fellow named Luis Rodriguez, who played my drug connection. Luis used his own car in the film. I fear i may have offended him by assuming that all the Puerto Rican flags and bandanas and seat covers were just for the shoot. I initially laughed at them, not realizing that that’s how the car always looked - living in America, i’m just not used to non-ironic patriotism. The shoot was often tough physically, because of the simulated drug use - regular cigarettes and crack pipe. Because of the intimacy of film, i couldn’t get away with my stage trick of “appearing” to inhale, so i gutted it out and sucked it in, take after take. Interestingly, the following year i did another short, one that required chain smoking, and after thirty straight minutes i began to feel debilitatingly sick. That film was abandoned in production, and had also included footage of me being drowned naked in a bathtub. Back in FALLOUT, i was crack-smoking a combination of aspirin, tobacco, and steel wool (take that, you weenie asbestos inhalers!). Ryan had a wonderful dog who almost made it into the film. We nicknamed him Cracky the wonder dog, and joked that the sequel should be about him. The producers were so happy with the final product that they commissioned a separate art film, using just the footage involving me. There were real life elements that made it into the film…a huge rat on the waterfront, a bicyclist i suddenly jumped up after and chased…it was such a cool creative process. We used a borrowed forklift for an overhead “zoom away” shot. To make the heroin injection realistic, a setup was concocted using a sealed tube of fake blood, and superglue on the syringe tip so it would “stick” in my skin. The effect was disturbingly realistic. One of the funniest things to come out of the film was the shirt i wore for the apartment shots - a T-shirt from the children’s camp where my brother’s brother and his girlfriend taught. The shirt had a happy cartoon sun, and that smiling sun was all that was visible behind many of the heroin shots. Were our film a bigger production, might the camp have sued? As it was, it was just hysterically funny (to John, Brian, and Janice, especially). The film was submitted to festivals, but rejected because it lacked narrative structure. It’s wild to think about the thousands upon thousands of rehab vets across the country who might recognize me on the street. The most unlikely fanbase to ever approach an artist publicly?
-fall 2005
A short film by Andy Rath, a young filmmaker who ran his own company. He produced art pieces and corporate films. FALLOUT was initially created for use in rehab centers, showing drug users going through their lives, with all the trigger behaviors that addicts would recognize. The film would splice Andy’s segments between educational footage. Andy had already shot the other “drug users”, and hired me as his heroin addict. We filmed over three days - around the waterfront in Brooklyn, in a Greenpoint apartment, and on the streets nearby. I played a fella named Steve, and the film shows the progression of his life from occasional heroin user, to seeking it on the street, to living on the street doing crack. It was an absolute blast. Andy had great energy, very laid back and focused. His assistant Ryan was at least as much fun. My first acting partner was Miki Mosman, whom i actually met for a blind date the day of the shoot. She joined us on set, and was pressed into service in a flashback, as the girlfriend who introduces me to heroin. It was very trippily shot…and wouldn’t this be a much cooler world if all fizzled first dates were that much fun? My second acting partner was a fellow named Luis Rodriguez, who played my drug connection. Luis used his own car in the film. I fear i may have offended him by assuming that all the Puerto Rican flags and bandanas and seat covers were just for the shoot. I initially laughed at them, not realizing that that’s how the car always looked - living in America, i’m just not used to non-ironic patriotism. The shoot was often tough physically, because of the simulated drug use - regular cigarettes and crack pipe. Because of the intimacy of film, i couldn’t get away with my stage trick of “appearing” to inhale, so i gutted it out and sucked it in, take after take. Interestingly, the following year i did another short, one that required chain smoking, and after thirty straight minutes i began to feel debilitatingly sick. That film was abandoned in production, and had also included footage of me being drowned naked in a bathtub. Back in FALLOUT, i was crack-smoking a combination of aspirin, tobacco, and steel wool (take that, you weenie asbestos inhalers!). Ryan had a wonderful dog who almost made it into the film. We nicknamed him Cracky the wonder dog, and joked that the sequel should be about him. The producers were so happy with the final product that they commissioned a separate art film, using just the footage involving me. There were real life elements that made it into the film…a huge rat on the waterfront, a bicyclist i suddenly jumped up after and chased…it was such a cool creative process. We used a borrowed forklift for an overhead “zoom away” shot. To make the heroin injection realistic, a setup was concocted using a sealed tube of fake blood, and superglue on the syringe tip so it would “stick” in my skin. The effect was disturbingly realistic. One of the funniest things to come out of the film was the shirt i wore for the apartment shots - a T-shirt from the children’s camp where my brother’s brother and his girlfriend taught. The shirt had a happy cartoon sun, and that smiling sun was all that was visible behind many of the heroin shots. Were our film a bigger production, might the camp have sued? As it was, it was just hysterically funny (to John, Brian, and Janice, especially). The film was submitted to festivals, but rejected because it lacked narrative structure. It’s wild to think about the thousands upon thousands of rehab vets across the country who might recognize me on the street. The most unlikely fanbase to ever approach an artist publicly?
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
"cunt"
(a declaration of independence)
-by inga muscio
1998
Do i love this human because she de-capitalizes her own name, like certain other unnamed (ahem) anti-narcissist crusaders of our time? Heck no, i fell in love long before i became consciously aware of that distinction on the book's uncapitalized cover. It may even be just an accident of publishing aesthetics.
But the towering devotion this book inspires is achieved within the first chapter. Inga is one pissed-off feminist, yet at no point do her points stray from absolute rectitude. She's perhaps the only woman who's ever made me say, "If i'd been born female, THAT's who i'd be." The fact that she might never read this, for no other reason than my penis, is neither here nor there - if i were a woman, i might not read me either. I might also be a lesbian who wears teddy bear ears, too. If i had a cunt, would virtually every favorite movie of mine involve women killing men? I hope not. Is EVERYTHING in life about the politics of gender? I hope not. But again, i have the luxury of that aforementioned penis.
Nor is CUNT a simple tale of woe. It be a manifesto, filled with life-changing ideas, starting with taking back a powerful word from the cleft of negativity into which it's plunged. It's time to celebrate cunt, she exhorts!
No more menstruation shame. Tampon alternatives like sea sponge or diva cup. Holistic, self-induced abortion instead of the depersonalized horrors the male medical establishment offers (a subject on which she speaks from most profound experience). No more stigma for whoredom. And more Pippi Longstocking, goddamit!
She also talks about the communication gap that exists between muslim women and outraged westerners, who often have a patronizing attitude toward the horrors of muslim female life. What western women fail to perceive is the sense of isolation and mutual mistrust they feel among themselves, which is absent in the muslim world, where women KNOW the deck is blatantly stacked against them - and so respond with a sense of female community and caring which we western cunts can't even begin to grasp. Awakening this sense of community is essential to western women fully using the freedoms at their command.
Muscio also writes of how women are horribly disconnected from their bodies, most apparent in the disconnect from the moon and its effects on them. Inga has filled me with eager anticipation of the next woman who might let me be part of her carnal passions - i look forward to confirming that it's possible to anticipate ovulation or menstruation through the subtle cunt taste differences that pertain to each phase of a woman's cycle.
Who's up for being licked every day for a few months?
If you want to read while i'm conducting the experiment, i'll understand.
-by inga muscio
1998
Do i love this human because she de-capitalizes her own name, like certain other unnamed (ahem) anti-narcissist crusaders of our time? Heck no, i fell in love long before i became consciously aware of that distinction on the book's uncapitalized cover. It may even be just an accident of publishing aesthetics.
But the towering devotion this book inspires is achieved within the first chapter. Inga is one pissed-off feminist, yet at no point do her points stray from absolute rectitude. She's perhaps the only woman who's ever made me say, "If i'd been born female, THAT's who i'd be." The fact that she might never read this, for no other reason than my penis, is neither here nor there - if i were a woman, i might not read me either. I might also be a lesbian who wears teddy bear ears, too. If i had a cunt, would virtually every favorite movie of mine involve women killing men? I hope not. Is EVERYTHING in life about the politics of gender? I hope not. But again, i have the luxury of that aforementioned penis.
Nor is CUNT a simple tale of woe. It be a manifesto, filled with life-changing ideas, starting with taking back a powerful word from the cleft of negativity into which it's plunged. It's time to celebrate cunt, she exhorts!
No more menstruation shame. Tampon alternatives like sea sponge or diva cup. Holistic, self-induced abortion instead of the depersonalized horrors the male medical establishment offers (a subject on which she speaks from most profound experience). No more stigma for whoredom. And more Pippi Longstocking, goddamit!
She also talks about the communication gap that exists between muslim women and outraged westerners, who often have a patronizing attitude toward the horrors of muslim female life. What western women fail to perceive is the sense of isolation and mutual mistrust they feel among themselves, which is absent in the muslim world, where women KNOW the deck is blatantly stacked against them - and so respond with a sense of female community and caring which we western cunts can't even begin to grasp. Awakening this sense of community is essential to western women fully using the freedoms at their command.
Muscio also writes of how women are horribly disconnected from their bodies, most apparent in the disconnect from the moon and its effects on them. Inga has filled me with eager anticipation of the next woman who might let me be part of her carnal passions - i look forward to confirming that it's possible to anticipate ovulation or menstruation through the subtle cunt taste differences that pertain to each phase of a woman's cycle.
Who's up for being licked every day for a few months?
If you want to read while i'm conducting the experiment, i'll understand.
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