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"Grindr Sells Stake to Chinese Company " by MIKE ISAAC via NYT t.co/0ea2D1VUdE (via Twitter twitter.com/felipemassone/status/686716376371851266)
Quietly edibaubling away...discreetly doing what it does.
I am looking at a christening photo of Ray. Ray being the Baby Jesus figure is dead centre, dangling from his doppelganger father’s right arm, his dashing daddy’s right hand disappearing into Ray’s left oxter. Ray is half-smiling, looking content, and plump, Mona Lisa-ish. He must be at least 3 or 4 months old in the photograph, taken outside a ‘home-county’ church. Ray senior is flanked on both sides by two attractive, respectable, women, obviously the mother to the right, in a Chanel-type woolen suit with a timeless white ‘Halo hat’. She is holding a little girl’s hand. This older sister looks somewhat shy, partially hiding between her parents, cautious of the stranger with the soul-stealing camera. The other woman, to the left, is dressed in all-white, well at least it appears to be white in this black and white photo. She was possibly the Godmother for the font-ducking, that act of saving Ray from perdition. Her hat is more Dr. Seuss, oddly perching. Whether the child, Ray, has been saved or not at this point, is impossible to say, after all this photo could have been recording their arrival or their departure from the church.
For my work of fiction, he looks saved. I can usually tell.
Ruin: Well, there you are saved. We got christened within a week of being born, a Catholic thing, in case you died suddenly. If you weren't christened, and died, you would go straight to Limbo, no get-out-of-jail card. Limbo was an eternity thing, and you would never get to sit with the baby Jesu, and his mater, the BVM, or hear God’s divine voice. It was hell, without the fire and brimstone, for unchristened babies. So, it was splash splash, mumbo jumbo, ASAP for us lot.
I have no baby photos really, all lost in the running away from the ‘sheep's head’ (coming soon to a cineplex near you), or thrown out by my parents after/before/during their falling apart (the photos and the parents).
Ray: I had a conversation with Wim at about 02.00 this morning. He’s still in Australia. Both his parents are deceased.
Ruin: Blimey! And he said? Tell all, no, I am joking. I really hope he is happy.
Ray: He seems fine. Busy working so not really free to chat. He is in a relationship he is happy with.
Ruin: I think being somewhere else, other than here, will change him for the better. One can develop a myopic vision of the world, when you don't leave your place of birth. It stultifies.
Ray: He asked about you: “Have you heard from Ruin lately?” I told him you are fulfilled and busy writing.
Ruin: I am pleased he enquired. If you are in contact with him again, let him know I am happy for him.
Ray: That’s what I wish for my Marketta, my pearl of the frozen occident, that leaving of one’s tundra. It knocks off the chauvinism.
Ruin: and for ‘Him Indoors’ too, of course, he never left the Netherlands. It's too late now, at 80, but that's ok too.
Did Wim just pop up on Whatsapp, or Facebook?
Anyway, I am more or less universally available on Flickr, he can see what I am up to there, but I can understand him not looking there. It is a bit of a glorious backwater. I remain faithful, in a 'Once a Flickerite' sort of way, another catholic leftover, a perverted constancy.
Ray: Marketta is in Fribourg CH now. Her first day she phoned to say how awful her accommodation is. Basically, it’s different from Finland, and Finland is, of course, superior. The Swiss know only about cuckoo clocks, Toblerone and Rolex, etc. I laughed with her about her culture shock: she is like this wherever she goes. However, after 48 hours she pulls herself together and acclimatises. But I think she should spend a few years out of Finland, a few weeks or months is not enough.
Ruin: Ye, I agree, a few years even, shock is wonderful for the system.
Ray: Wim is in my WhatsApp list.
Imagine going to Thailand in the ‘80s. Major culture shock there. Language. Everything.
Ruin: Yes, it must have been intense, even moving to London from Clondalkin had me floundering. Just copy the natives, talk posh and wear plus-fours was my modus operandi, as you know. It all worked out very well.
Ray: I was young and resilient, but I found it a huge challenge. The heat and humidity too. Fuck me. I was full of whoremoans too.
Ruin: those bloody whoremoans! You should copyright that! Whoremoans (©Ray). There I did it for you. Expect that to pay dividends shortly, the spendooly should pour in.
Take you clothes off and moan like the natives, you took to that like a wild goose to water.
Ray: I did.
Ruin: the clogs don't really fit here for me, but they do have euthanasia, so it's not all bad.
Ray: I had heard that commercial sex was a thing in Thailand, and I needed to carry out research 🔬
Ruin: All my whoremoans (© Ray) have fucked off, including testosterone and estrogen not to mention those still left undiscovered. This is my favourite thing about aging. Blessed deadening!
You always had that Attenborough, investigatory, leaning, intrepid even.
Ray: I applied it rigorously.
Ruin: I noticed that at my orgies, intrepid, whilst not partaking at all you managed to perform investigative field studies of the greater-freckled, and rutting, ginger shirt-lifter.
Dickie would have been proud of you. Someday I must plumb your brain to mine those objective nuggets garnered in your passive observing.
We were mad. I suspect that we still might be. It is incurable, and will, at least, kill me.
But you know what, bring it on. I must say I would rather die of too much sex than too much accountancy, or farming. I can honestly say that I left no balls unturned.
Ray: There was madness in our methods ….
Ruin: though mine were mostly up in the air, my liathróidí (Gaelic for balls) that is.
I think so, yes, there might have been some method there, as you say.
We generated some ‘tales of ordinary madness’, perhaps, borrowed from Mr. Bukowski, rather well done, in an extreme and low-rent sort of way.
I seemed to be always talking through them too, I mean talking through those 8-hour orgies, like an orgy running commentator, a narrator of sorts. I was perhaps already planning on writing them up. The BBC could have made me 'Head of Orgies', a bit like their chief political commentator, a specialist of sorts.
Anyway, I am hugely glad that is all over.
Gone Gonads Gone.
Virginity restored and ass slammed shut. Except for egress of course, in emergencies.
Ray: Your tiny Anne Frank attic studio drug den was glorious peak madness.
Ruin: Gloryhole and ketamine central (a go-go). I was intrepid too.
Ray: The life and times…
Ruin: of Tristram Randy, off his buggering head, hilarious really. And then it stopped, almost suddenly, even. Whoremoans (©Ray) withdrew, and hey presto a new dawn.
But I know there is still some residual madness there.
Ruin was a silly sausage for having been in love with a straight man, Ray, for more than thirty years. It really was one of his würst ideas. But he was a bit of a hot dog, in his time, or any time come to think of it.
Luckily, an older Chinese-art dealer put him Str8, and Ray was his best-man with his wife, Marketta, by his side.
07:54 am, 08/11/2022
Ruin: How is it going with Bono? I am half intrigued, that memoir thing.
Rack: Still enjoying. He's a little coy about making a shit load of money, at least thus far. In my memory he got very rich very fast. However, he also gives a shit load of it away. It's interesting to examine one's resistance to belief, faith, God. He really does have the faith and it is one of the reasons I wrote him and the band off when I was younger. But surely you should be allowed to believe what you want. Anyway, I'm softening on belief. Less allergic to it.
Ruin: I would read it more because it is supposedly a well written memoir, and from our land of origin, even, our own fertile midden. I don't know their music at all except one song. I believe he drops names well. I am a name-dropper too, so I thought I might take notes. Perhaps that's not enough reason to read it.
Rack: I have been insanely horny all day long. Maybe I think it’s spring. 77F! Just when you thought it’s all over.
Ruin: I remember those days, almost impossible to walk down the street days, though I could never cruise the boulevards, never pick people up 'in passing'. I would have to go to a dark place, like a sex-cinema or a sauna, or get on the internet, go 'Gaydaring', those days pre-Grindr (I am a Grindr virgin, by the way). It was almost like being ravenous, like Lestat must have felt.
Out of bloody control.
I don't miss it at all. Sometimes I now wake up with a chubby, and think, well that's just happening to stop me peeing the bed. I love this new state, with that driver now in the back seat whingeing, relentlessly, “are we there yet?”, that “there” being the Nirvana of not being. But I still don't think I am depressed, I delude myself into thinking I have somehow maturated, and am heading towards bliss and oneness with the universe…
I have just taken pill number one, and I am writing immediately, keeping my diary, my homage to you and our Annie. I see I am coming over all Annie-get-yer-gunge (©Ruin) this morning. I do be loving a bit of gunge. Perhaps I will add more as the morning unhinges.
Don't get me wrong, I don't pee the bed, yet, thank you little Chubby, all praise your diminishing tumesence. I do have to get up 4 or 5 times each night to pee, a lovely inconvenience gifted by my expansively burgeoning prostate. I don't mind getting up, it's like sleep-peeing, but into a pot, so I fall back to sleep again easily. We still get up every morning at 07:30, as regular as a good old, daily, number two. All is well in that eating, drinking, and sloughing off department. Thank you for not asking. You know me, I'll share anyway. Is Bono still regular?
Actually, I think if he doesn't describe, at least once, his daily bowel movements, and his 'out there' (thinking perversely kinky here, any sort of kink will do) sexual needs, well then his memoir is probably not for me. I need those juices to bind me.
Call me old fashioned.
I am heading in your ‘statin’ direction in my refusal to take medications for that expanding prostate, the side effects are terrible. You can live with it a long time, apparently, until it completely chokes off 'Percy'. Then you just stick a tube down to your bladder and Bob's (or James) is your invasive uncle, if you get my drift.
I must say that if Mother Teresa was to write a 4-volume memoir that I would read it, but only if she included two descriptions of her frustrated sex-life, ideally one near the beginning, and another towards the end. I think I feel somewhat the same about Bono.
Just those two teasing morsels would do, cavern rumblings, nothing hot and heavy, just an admittance or acknowledgement of those fetid, oozing, depths.
I may be a dried out old crone, but I still love us geezers that slip on our own juices, and crack our pates falling, victims of those old secretions. Miss Havisham type kindling does not appeal at all.
Horny is good, in my book, as you well know. Long may it reign, or drip, or whatever.
Rack: Oh yes, good morning!
Ruin: Taking of juices, I have been reading our Edna on Joyce's 'Exiles'. Who needs a lubricant with those two old drippers around?
Rack: I don’t think Bono is going to write about sex. He references his small penis and I think that’s his way of circumnavigating the real thing. He does write about love convincingly having enjoyed a very long marriage to a woman who might be an Angel and whom I’ve had the privilege to spend a little time with. There’s me dropping names.
I’ve become an early riser myself after completely resisting it for all of my life. I like it but will admit that sometimes the day feels long. Time can feel as if it’s moving slowly, which is a good thing as one is running out of time. Maybe it only feels this way because it is relatively new. Maybe my strategy is genius in that switching my rhythm late in life I feel as if I’ve gifted myself a huge hoard of time. Inadvertent genius.
Who is that with catheterized dick in the photo? Peter had one for the last year of his life (kidney cancer) and readily admitted it was fair punishment.
Ruin: The glorious, and beastly dead, Mark America. He is in the book, recently written-up.
An English illegal alien in a private room in Sloan Kettering, talking of grifting genius.
Rack: OK, I’m off to carpe the diem on a full blood-moon eclipse and a very fraught midterm Election Day. The only good thing about all this Trumpydom is that it has finally politicized Americans, however extremely. They are starting to vote in decent numbers.
Ruin: Mark was the happiest ‘die-er’ I have ever sat with.
Rack: I remember your friendship with him.
Ruin: He was quite a chap, I nearly hopped into bed with him, but the wires got in the way.
Rack: I had a very vivid dream of my final grift last night. I think.
Ruin: I want all the details.
Rack: He is still handsome in the photo.
Ruin: and I wish you God speed with same, with whatever grift you might have the energy for. The photo was 3 weeks before he died. Mornings are best, great for writing, best for everything, even. I 'die' after 2pm for 3 hours
Rack: Foggy was dead, in the dream. I had found myself a toad-like but very dear art dealer on the Upper East Side. He seemed quite smitten in the dream (narcissistic dreaming!) and solved all my money problems.
Ruin: I am wishing him, this dream-man, all over you and up you too.
Rack: Woke up and got Wordle in 3 goes. Yes, morning is best and I have it to myself. Men folk snoring.
👋
Bono writes extremely well about The Troubles.
Ruin: So, he is there now, in our ‘self-titled’ book, in answer to you.
I might even look at Bono, now that I know he talks about having a small cock. That's enough for me.
I ordered Edna's new play today, another favourite lush. If change is happening in Ireland, it's happening because of its luscious women drippingly demanding it, and its wonderfully whorish gay sons.
Men would never change anything, why would they, they have controlled the whole kit and caboodle for so long, why would they want to give it up?
Rack: I’m enjoying Bono. FYI, I have just added a screen time limit to my phone and laptop in an effort to be more productive, so forgive me my forthcoming absences and brevity. It is in the name of you know what. Edna?
Ruin: O'Brien
Rack: Of course. 😱 She’s so wonderful.
Ruin: 'Joyce’s Women'. Now, go fuck off and write!
Rack: It’s my weakness that I am trying to reign in. Wasted hours on Instagram and word games, not our deeply valued correspondence. Xox
That is, in a way, writing time, but I also need more time to get more formal and disciplined about it. I don’t have your capacity to produce. It’s like digging out cysts from old flesh.
Cheers! Thanks.
Ruin: Yes, it is writing time, and yes to discipline too. I might have the first hundred pages to send to you shortly, in a few weeks. This puts the fear of Raysus into me, but ho-hum.
Laters.
Rack: ♥️🎈
One video still from each "Life is Drag" video portrait (performance documentation).
lifeisdrag.com
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I create bodies of work that explore subjects such as gender, artifice, and spectacle. Utilizing processes ranging from directorial to curatorial to anthropological, I showcase exuberantly irrepressible personalities who revel in challenging clichés associated with constructs such "masculinity" and "femininity". A sampling of subjects include Girls Girls Girls (the world's first and only all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band), Tazzie Colomb (the world's longest competing female bodybuilder), and LACTIC Incorporated (an avant-garde clothing brand that takes the detritus of corporate life and reinterprets it into one-of-a-kind structural garments that challenge the polarization of gender).
With this current and ongoing project "Life is Drag", I am documenting the most innovative and singular performers of the currently exploding international alt-drag and neo-burlesque scenes. I am 3 years into this project, and so far have created 250+ portraits. These are created in my studio as well as during residencies - in New York City (The Cell Theater, Bushwig), Pittsburgh (The Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Blue Moon Bar, Bloomfield Garden Club), and New England (3S Artspace).
This project began in early 2019 in my studio in Brooklyn, when I collaborated with a local visual artist by the name of Untitled Queen - a deeply beloved, highly respected, and uniquely visionary performer and conduit within the NYC drag scene who uses drag as a part and extension of her artistic process. I then worked with selected performers from Ohio and Kentucky in conjunction with a mid-career retrospective in my hometown of Cincinnati in the spring of 2019, and in January and February of 2020, I worked with 20+ New England-based drag artists as part of a residency and exhibition at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
From the autumn of 2020 until the summer of 2021, I was an artist in residence at The Cell Theatre in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC, where I expanded the project in the midst of the pandemic to also include neo-burlesque performers and performance artists whose work deals specifically with gender performativity. Most recently was a residency in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio - which included creating video portraits of performers from the drag haus ODD Presents, members of the neo-burlesque troop Smoke & Queers, and other alt-drag and burlesque artists from the tri-state area. This residency also included an exhibition featuring this ever-growing archive, as well as multiple live performance events.
My long-term goal is to continue to do a series of such residencies nationally and internationally, which will allow me to create a comprehensive archive of video portraits of drag, burlesque and performance artists from a wide range of locations, backgrounds, cultures, and ages. Each portrait includes video of the artist performing (lip-synching, singing, telling stories, reciting monologues, dancing, etc.) in addition to interview documentation, and will live online as well as in galleries and unexpected places in between. "Life is Drag" has so far been exhibited at such venues as the the Carnegie Museum of Art and Bunker Projects (PA), Satellite Art Club, Bushwig and The Cell (NYC), 3S Artspace (NH), and the Weston Art Gallery (OH).
I believe this project is innovative and important in that it is treating and respecting "drag" (defined as broadly and inclusively as possible) as a proper art form – recognizing it as an extremely vital and valid style of performance art, and every bit as deserving of the deference reserved for more traditional classical art forms like painting and sculpture. Drag is painting and sculpture and performance all at once - and quite often also activism, education, protest, therapy, resistance, catharsis, comedy, tragedy, enlightenment, inspiration - or some combination of the above - to those who practice it, and also to those who experience it as an observer. This project is about celebrating this experimental and expansive form of art and its wide range of practitioners and manifestations. It is about creating a record - an archive - of these brilliant but ephemeral performances, from dive bars to art galleries, city streets to grand theater stages. It is about trying to properly document and share these wildly diverse acts and profound stories that will surely open minds and capture hearts.