Nikki Giovanni 1943-2024; Michael Cole 1940-2024
December 23, 2024
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission
Category
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission
Attend this tale. I regret that I never ran into her at a cocktail party, nor was I privileged to have shared the stage or screen with her. Except for a brief moment, my story is the story of millions. I was an audience member, a fan who was the happy beneficiary of the talent…
Continue readingOn this day a million years ago the two men in this photo packed up their dreams in a UHaul and moved to New York (helped by our lovely, talented classmate Stephen Hope). It was a leap of faith for us Ohio boys to pack up and move to a place where we could live…
Continue reading
When I was a 10 year-old boy soprano, a choirmaster proclaimed, “Music is a picture painted on a background of silence.” It was an abstraction that stuck, as first lessons of craft tend to do. Others I’ve heard: Show, don’t tellA cliché is a cliché because it’s trueAlways hold something backAvoid passivity in your attackThe music…
Continue reading
A few nights ago at dinner out with new friends, our getting-to-know-each-other small talk circled around to coming out to our families. Our stories all had variants, but one thing seemed universal: how the presence of AIDS smoked the edges of each instance. Mine came at the end of a most challenging year, one spent…
Continue reading
I was finishing a late-aborning BA when a professor introduced me to the works of David Wojnarowicz. No doubt she fathomed that he could be a model for the writing I was attempting—autobiography of a frank, sexual nature that also had very much to do with loss and the times in which I came of…
Continue reading
For an art model, time bends, saunters, crawls, or stealthily expands, but it rarely flies. Twenty minutes can feel like infinity if the pose is difficult—and each is difficult in its own way. Tonight is my first full-figure gig, which means I’m struggling to maintain the position of various body parts as my mind manages…
Continue reading
The sea air is a drug that addles reason. How else to explain the amnesia that comes over me every summer on the first bike ride back to the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island? I forget that its approach involves two short steep hills—the first brings you up to Little Ram’s Head Island, a…
Continue readingThe sound of the wind was strong. It was that, and what felt like sudden warmth that made Christina sit up, then shield her eyes from the sharp light. She’d fallen asleep in the field. How long had it been—an hour? Minutes? She yawned. The inhalation rephrased the moment, reminded her why she’d come back…
Continue reading
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Roger Waters, Wish You Were Here By the time we made it to Washington Square Park, 1993 was already half a…
Continue reading