misfired monologue @misfiredmonologue - Tumblr Blog

about making a film

If I ever made a film, it would have to be one that has a verbal narration of thoughts reaching throughout every scene. A constant telling of thoughts and what is going on. I have a feeling that this would be looked down upon in the film world as a failure to narrate exclusively through images and dialogue. Like choosing the easy way out. It would be the only way I could do it.

Making a film is making a monster baby that eats at you for months and then either kills you or escapes you into the world without thanking you for all the hard work you put into it. Making a film scares me because it would mean to be fully committed to an idea, to be so committed that there is no trial, no way to make it a few times until it feels right, to toss around and play with images. It appears that one has to be so committed to an idea and plan it accordingly and devote years to it or lose one's sanity. Making a film is being pregnant with your own idea.

Making a film is not for those who whirlwind around and have a hard time finishing things. I imagine. But maybe that's exactly the people for whom making a film could be best. In this gigantic task they find the perfect way to overcome their indecisiveness because they have decided to turn their next months or years into one long day. And they will finish this project in one day and they stay in the tunnel of this vision. When they come out on the other side the world will have changed a bit and moved on without them.

Maybe making a film is the ultimate form of time travel. Maybe Fassbider really only just lived for a few weeks, in his mind. Jumping from one film to the next, from one day to the next. Making the record speed at which he finished his feature films pale in comparison.

Maybe making a film is as easy as taking a phone and saying fuck it to all conventions and funding and knowing that with increments of increasing image and sound quality, sacrifices too high would have to be made. And if the film doesn't work out with the resources at hand it didn't want to be made in the first place. Maybe making a film is about not getting hung up on it and just doing it. And doing it again. I often think of this study, which I of course never researched properly and it could be an oversimplified story anyways, that a teacher of mine once cited incorrectly to encourage his students to let go of perfectionism. This study supposedly looked at two groups who both got asked to finish a specific task. One group got told to execute this task once and make sure to take all the time allotted to produce one perfect outcome. The other group got told to execute this task as often as possible and then submit the best result out of many. Supposedly the second group excelled in comparison, with having put in practice and having learned from their mistakes.

Maybe making films is impossible because you can't make films as easily and quickly until you excel. You can't make ten films in a day. You can't make one film in a day. Or maybe you can and this is how I would make a film if I ever made one. I think of Fette Sans’ La Reprise (dérive) here.

And maybe, probably, I would continue not to do this, because I get distracted by life too easily and find myself wandering off as soon as I have committed to a routine that feels right in the moment. Like how I imagine myself a writer and jump from one text to the next and derive intense joy from finding the one of ten texts that feels important to me and I shyly publish it on my blog or print a little zine and give it to some close friends and they rave about it and I feel amazing. And then life gets in the way and before I can build on this and even think about writing enough for it to morph into a book. I find myself having to earn money too many hours of the week and falling asleep when I get home and completely forgetting about the routine I was in and also forgetting to feel enough or anything at all. And when I return to it months or years later, it feels like no time has passed and I think of myself as a writer again and I know why. Because I write. It doesn't feel like time travel because it isn't.

It's spiral time. There is no linear narrative in my making, because I end up going in circles and ellipses and orbiting an ever changing core of desires and sense of self. The moments in which I curse spiral time the most are the moments in which I violently get ejected from my routine, my path, my idea and gain distance, fast, from this core that despite all its messiness at least feels like living as me. Something I do, not because, but in spite of the world that I reluctantly call 'real life', in absence of a better word.

Getting flung out so far into space that every time I worry that I have ruptured my orbit, that I have never been this far from the desire(d) path and that I will never have a meaningful idea again, that I will never make an artwork again and that I lose too much time out here flailing my arms, trying to take control of my momentum. That I lose too much time working to pay for my room where I spent too much time unable to hear my thoughts because I sit in there too close to everyone else's life, because I can't afford my own flat or studio and when I do, I work too much to afford to spend a few days at a time there in silence. This is the point in the orbit where I wish to be one of these presumably cis, presumably white, presumably male, presumably academic with weirdly well paid and less exhausting jobs brought to them by social capital and exuding competence with confidence. One who just barges on and walks in this more of less straight line and doesn't get thrown out of orbit but occasionally throws himself out on purpose to feel some suffering and make things a bit complicated for himself and complain about something that would very well be in his control to change or could be cherished because it is very much a symptom of being alive and being a human. Only when this reaches its peak in the form of a midlife crisis, complete with some balding hair, people will start to think of a certain whining as mildly annoying or ridiculous. And even then of course, he wouldn't care, and soon enough someone would make a biopic about him.

I will never make a movie walking in a straight line or write a book like this or keep up with my friends or my research in a non-chaotic way. I orbit and eventually I return to a high velocity portion of an ellipse that returns me to a previous way of doing and thinking and I dive into it starved and with speed, a huge fucking grin on my face. Internally. I grab every thought I have with both fists and walk through a crowd holding shut both my ears to shield this regained sense of self for just a few minutes, hours, days. I know that not only the flow, but my whole self will dissolve immediately when a friend asks me something out of the blue and expects an immediate answer. Actually, when anyone talks to me, when my employer writes a passive aggressive email about me having forgotten to fill out a supposedly important pdf that turns out to be not important or time sensitive at all a few weeks later when the printed out and forgotten form falls from their desk while cleaning. I will be flung into a dull space again by someone needing me for just a brief moment or someone seeing me and asking me how my day ways and what my weekend plans are and I stand there like an idiot and start reciting things, unsure what it is they want to hear because I for fucking sure don't have a desire to tell and of course what they want to do is hear another person talk to them and ask them about their day in return which they then can recount because it is important to them to recount these things because maybe otherwise it feels like they have not lived them at all, or because it feels nice to get to live it twice.

And then they leave again and do whatever it is they do without thinking twice and I stand there and what could have been a text that turns into a book that turns into a film and what would have been an idea that turns into a gesture that turns into connecting with someone in a way that radiates joy through my life for years to come, is gone and can't be taken back and instead I do laundry.

That's why I never make a film, I imagine, or if I did, I have to think of myself like Fassbinder who tells people to fuck off and who starts screaming and throwing things as soon as someone disrupts his orbit, his one day he has to make a film. Who clings with all the violence his hands and eyes and mind can muster to this trajectory and succeeds and gets away with it more or less until of course nothing about this way of living is about wanting to live. And drugs and contempt and being around people all the time, yet only living for these ideas and pictures and highs, kills you or something else that I don't entirely understand kills you because I have never been in such a manic or depressive orbit; never managed to untangle myself sufficiently from the day-to-day that puts grey numbing in between layers of intensity. Never felt everything all the time so much so that I always wanted to die and never wanted to stop.

march 2025, Berlin

The Stand-In Undertaker

A Dispatch from Finale Filiale

It's amazing that this space exists, but I am an artist, I don't think I need to talk about death.

She said, after having told me she just came from a memorial exhibition honoring her mentor and artist colleague. It was clear that it would be hard to get people to come to a place that was not pretending to be a funural home for reasons of art. But more like the real deal. Or at least not art.

We were sitting on the voluminously plush crimson velvet couch, in front of us a round wooden couch table where she had put her plastic bag with a white primrose, which was given to her as a token of grief at work. The room overlooks the small and quiet Platz in front of Naunynstraße 53 and the brightly lit window broadcasted its vinyl lettering outside into the Berlin winter dark. It reads Finale Filiale and in smaller letters Tod und Trauer Infozentrum.

I had come here after a long day giving workshops to pay rent and determined to make the most of the last hours of the day by somehow finding the focus to be an artist and do artist things in a room that was quiet and for which I had the keys.

Not long after I sat down at the massive desk made out of a dark wood, placed in a way that was most exposed to the outside, I saw her face appearing outside, looking in. At me. I had barely set up my laptop, much less gathered an intelligent thought and yet felt the need to snap back into the reality of being watched while doing a job. When I got up to open the door her friendly face greeted me and she introduced herself as a neighbour. She had wondered what this project was, since, as an artist herself, she was a fan of the curatorial work at Kreuzberg Pavillon.

Technically it’s not Kreuzberg Pavillon the art space currently, I explained. It’s a space to talk about death and grief now. I hesitated. You could also call it a funeral home pop-up, if you will. Işikali Karayel, who is an undertaker, will be here at selected times and have open conversations about death and or share information about international funerals and muslim burials in Berlin.

So that’s what it is, she said and remarked that she thought it was such a coincidence that this space would appear here during the same time as she was hosting this memorial show for her former professor, who died recently. Now, every time she came home from her work there, she saw this: Info-Zentrum für Tod und Trauer. It almost didn’t feel like a coincidence to her.

As she had come inside and we sat down I jumped on the chance to do what I had been instructed to do by Fette and offered her to come to an open evening with Işi. That if she felt like this was coincidentally or not the space that she needed in her life right now, that it was very open to her, which led us to the beginning of this story. While very excited about Kreuzberg Pavillon, the art space, now looking like a funeral home, she was a little shy about the possibility of it actually being one. Sort of. With the only similarity being that it was open to the public and that, apart from the official opening, people rarely came inside.

I had almost forgotten that people had this hesitation about grief and death. That most felt like this was not something they were allowed to talk about unless... it was about to happen? Or someone they loved just died? But even then, most people I had talked to seemed apprehensive.

Yet I got to hear a lot of stories. Every I don't really have a need to talk about this in my life right now followed by a so and so JUST died and here are my very personal recollection of it and my feelings around death. For a week I felt like I had, by being a stand-in for the undertaker, slipped into his role in the space through projection and, apparently, necessity. As if people unsure about making an appointment to talk about grief with someone who was not in the room, decided to test the waters by talking to me about grief. Me, who had not given a single hint towards the fact if I am in any way qualified to be trusted with their feelings like that. Turns out, talking with a stranger about their grief involves very little talking on one's part and a sincere commitment to listening.

What I did not tell her was how I recently started having these heavy intrusive thoughts about my partner dying unexpectedly.

The fear of a relationship so full of warmth and trust and beauty that the only imaginable force to rip it apart would be loss of life altogether. Like having to physically tear open the universe and ripping the sun from its fabric for light to end.

Usually I am pretty good at striking overbearing worry about things I have zero control over from my mind. This one persists though. I have not told R. about it yet, so he will probably find out about it by reading this text. But I imagine he has spent enough times with the pictures and videos of bombs striking residential neighborhoods in Gaza and Lebanon on his devices, for him to possibly connect this suddenly increased fear of rupture of life and love and hope to the sudden increase of time spent watching a genocide online.

It’s almost ironic how a subconscious not-being-there does not seem to be an option (unless one actively denies the existence of this organized, state-perpetrated violence, this ripping up of the sky and burying it in blood, as factual reality) and yet I sit in safety in Germany, a state very much so complicit with this act of horror. Unable not to witness and unable to transpose the ensuing anxiety into my immediate life in any other plausible way than transforming it into an imaginative personal tragedy.

The neighbor was right when she said that the Filiale Finale almost felt too-perfectly timed to be a coincidence in terms of personal stories of grief. A few days prior R.’s grandma had passed away and it was the first death of a close family member of his.

During the following week grief spilled through his fingers into our texts on screen. He writes these beautifully heartfelt words that he cannot say out loud to his mother, who wants to organize the things-not-feelings that were left behind. I watched R. send pictures of old photographs that he had never seen before and uncover small details about her life. Like the motorcycle she drove when she was young and the sad look in her eyes on her wedding pictures and a poem she had kept about shitting on life, which his mother hated and he loved because of this fact and because he cherished this piece of evidence of her small rebellion against a life that did not grant very much space to rebel against it.

His texts read like poems to me, his pain about not being the only one who knows of her death but seemingly being the only one to see her (as in: recognizing) and needing to talk about her and his witnessing.

That week I spent my mornings teaching 11 year olds basic bookbinding techniques and about making Zines and the evenings handing out flyers in the neighborhood for an open door type of evening with Isi at the Filiale.

Eventually I found myself calmly binding a little book amidst the chaos of children crafting. I glued printed out screenshots of the texts and pictures R. had sent me into pages wrapped in a soft and fragile looking mint green paper. One after the other. Something about wanting to make him be able to feel the importance of his words by giving them back to him and about the stories told being given the ability to stay close on pages to be touched. Something about handing the person you love a token of grief.

Would you like to come to an open meeting on death and grief? Here is a flyer. We'll have Turkish tea and baklava! It's open to anyone who wants to speak about death in any shape or form... or if you know someone who…

Who what? Who will die one day? Who will experience loved ones die? Colleagues? Anyone they knew personally? Or not? Everyone is invited, literally.

Nobody wants to be invited, literally.

Originaly published in @fettesans Zine for Filiale Finale at Kreuzberg Pavillion Berlin, February 2025

Who do the dead haunt if they are still alive on paper?

03.04.23

The thing about the ghost was that it sometimes made him avoid making a call just to buy themselves some time. To strategize the inevitable explanation of why he was not there. Or why there were either too many or too little of him on paper. Administrators hated this more than they hated him. After all they were sympathetic and recalled having heard of this trans thing before but never had met ‚a real one‘. Sometimes not being there on paper felt like not being there at all. In these moments it was as if he had tricked the whole world simply by staying alive and continuing on without letting a government know about it – as if every breath was somehow illegal. But no offices could tell him for a fact that it was. All they did was express how very uncomfortable they were with the ghost and him (which one was which?) forcing them to deviate from protocol. He licked his fingers like a person that existed. Would he ever be able to shake off this lingering thought, of being a little less real and thus, a little less protected? On days like this it was hard to tell if it was his ghost-self that was left behind, or if he was the one running still, trying to catch up to the undead. What if he had stood behind the curtain of standard operations for too long and no matter how fully legal and real he had become in everyone else‘s eyes the damage was done and walking the stage confidently would forever feel like betrayal.

#excerpt #ongoingresearch

sex shop dispatch #2

a short story

catty #2 (2023); drawn in MS Paint on a cash reigister desktop pc in a gay sex shop in berlin

Plane crashes. Snow on the side of the runway. I look out of the window and smile, while everyone is screaming, hurling off the inflatable slide off the side. I do not stay, I let myself be carried by the crowd, but it feels almost like I am gliding over them, like some kind of unbothered ghost. The plane is not on fire and the wind outside is really cold, yet smells of burnt rubber. We make our way to the rescue personnel among the fire trucks and I look back to see a slender, human-feline body open the side window of the cockpit and jump out unharmed. Their grey fur is ruffled by the wind like tall grass, as they push the captains hat over their catty ears. They walk off into the opposite direction, onto the runway we had just veered off from, that's barely a different shade of white now, with taxiways, snow and more taxiways layering themselves before the grey terminal building, that hovers in the background. For a brief moment an orange winter sun breaks out behind a dense layer of clouds and fog and illuminates their path, as if to say they made the right choice not heading into the commotion. From their confident calmness I can feel that this cat just saved our lives and somehow only the two of us get to feel this supernatural mood shift and zen wash over us. "First time?", the cathuman mouths from quite far away. I smile again and look at the crowds, to which I am still closer, frantically pulling out their phones to film or call loved ones, pushing into busses that were arriving and being tucked into silver and gold thermal blankets. I nod and watch them dance over the snow like speckles of light. "It's been ongoing though. Relentless.... anyways, what made you slip off the runway?" My whispering carried all the way over to the runway. The cat shrugged. "Today I knew this was the right way. I knew it even before the tire burst. You could say I was prepared." The set of footprints was all that was left after a while. My following eyes deduced they had walked all the way back to the gates and with much effort snuck their way all back into the pilots rooms to a warm cup of black coffee.

It would be two more month until I would meet the pilot again, via a more of less blind date on grindr. He hadn't put any photos on his profile I could have identified him with, but the view of the soft chest laying on a sun flooded mahogany bed under a skylight with soft sheets of fabric draped around it pulled me in. I wanted to meet the person who could afford to have such impeccable taste in their comfort and hornyness and seemed to live in a space where not a single thing was grey, except chest hairs fluffing up against pillows. I found out his name was Marshall when I got there and I mostly remembered it because he looked like a Marshall. I lied and told him I worked in a Sex Shop, when the truth was I had quit soon after our accident flight, when my floating state didn't wear off quick enough and my calmness scared the customers and staff alike. The attraction between us produced some kind of static in the air, that he charmingly brushed away. Even with the hairs on his head standing up he didn't look undignified or funny to me. It was like he was happening to the world, not the other way around. It was as if we had met now again specifically because of that day on the tarmac and not because we both had texted back horny messages and forth for an afternoon last weekend. "Would you like some tea?" I accepted and intuitively moved across the heavy wooden floorboards towards the bed, where I curled up into a little bun. Naked and soft to the touch. The green tea cup leaned again my exposed skin soon after and the floating that had taken a soft slumber in me awoke again and I saw Marshall and me from above, while I could feel his teeth sinking into the soft dough I had become. I was the perfect afternoon tea snack and he devoured me whole, taking sips out of his cup, leaving mine spilled between the bed sheets. To my surprise I realized I was not hovering over the bed unsupported, when he had taken the last bite, but was leaning down from a rather large bookshelf, overlooking the bed nook. Maybe I had just watched him eat a soft cake with his tea and I was in fact still here. I wanted to say something, like "do you still fly?", to break the ice, but he had sensed the question and waved it away. He invited me down and we fucked for a night and once again when the morning sun struck the other side of the apartment, the kitchen, which hadn't lay illuminated yesterday evening. He sat down there again after a while, and with him leaving it replayed that he was gone again this time, from feeding on me to walking away. And once again he was happening to the world and there was nothing it could do about it. It was the first time I met a person that became present the more by themselves they appeared. I took that imagine into my mind for quite a while, watching his spread legs and still slightly hard clit and his absent yet content gaze across the kitchen table. This was the day the floating stopped, but it was clear that the flight had changed something in me. I shook off some breadcrumbs from my shoulders and hurried out onto the balcony barefooted, jumping out over silver and grey roofs into Berlin.

...and the wind would blow me over

on failure, uncertainty & life after academia

22.01.24

I remember talking about The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam in a podcast over a year ago and how this undertaking felt like a failure in itself, because it spoke to me deeply, it sounded like it was about me, yet I could not voice this back to somebody who did not seem to feel it was about them as much as it was about me... And even though the person I had borrowed it from does no longer waves into my days, the book remains, waiting to be re-read. I can't wait for when enough time has passed since the start of me owning books again (my first collection drowned in a Weimar flat) for me to be able to read them again with a different eye, like one of the many forms of diaries I keep; photos and sketchbooks and notes and drawings and microscopic images... I am excited for the things I will find in them then, that I fail to see now. Is making art just making a diary? I think it is for me.

To turn it all into something that is also for being seen by others is really hard though. Like making a work, an installation, an exhibition. I am beginning to know that I only do it to make sure I find others who are nerds in similar ways to me, so the making of my own diaries can continue and so can theirs. To be less alone in this. It's not a must to not be alone, which is good, since it's a tedious process so far to find the others, with only a handful connections made out of hundreds of people I have shown thoughts and images to. The ones I find are usually life changing though.

Is art making a form of gambling only for the biggest Jackpots? That of connection outside of a very vast, surrounding greyness? Oh boy then do I love winning.

Sometimes I wonder if making a book could be the catalyst for this process of finding the others, for it's reproducibility and ability to put things very clearly and at length. I like the long version of things. To sculpt the point I am making, while leaving all the sprouting tangents I come across intact. Flower bulb with roots on all ends, eh? In 2014 made a list of all goals my teenage mind could think of that would be “awesome” to achieve. Among lesbian kisses I also wrote down the goal of writing a book someday. Sitting on my parent's couch with Covid (again), sorting through this oldest part of the diary like archive, I wrote a reply to this list now 10 years later. Writing a book was the only one that remained unchanged on this list.

R. talking about selling artwork, even (especially) as a joke seems so far from that all. A little sprout doesn't know right now how and when to grow into jokes about running a studio with assistants, collectors knocking o the door and art dealerships going into frenzy. But mostly to fantasize about having found all the keys to this illusive gatekept hierarchy without having to explain how one got there and just to dream of well funded means of making. That's too big of a flower pot for now.

If one were to would put me out into the wind in a big pot now, I would blow over. Out in the sun, I would shrivel up. Don't put me out on display fully, I wouldn't know what to do with an abundance of possibilities. I wouldn't know where to grow yet. I am like one of these houseplants one has grown themselves from a sapling that was given by a friend, for which instructions were lacking and now it grew too fast at times and not wide enough at others, leaving it with a long, thin, trunk that cannot fully support its fast growing leaves yet. I promise I won't leave the growing only to capitalism. I have done it before beautifully and I am doing it now, even if with less grace. The first years out of art school are the hardest I heard once and I cling to it, whatever that even means. It's probably a place in which it is hard to admit to still needing to be vulnerable more than ever, to not having reached a mythical kind of kickstart that leads to ongoing peaks of ultimate recognition. If anything the supposed end of a time and its structures did nothing but make me run up a hill that wasn't there, a bit faster and a bit more securely than I usually would, being so sure of myself and all the things I could do. There was a goal to reach, after all. I would lie if I said I wasn't proud that I did.

To return to the beginning of my thoughts I want to metion that I was reading Jesse Meadows' Sluggish this morning and relished in their words. They are a constant inhabitant in my list of routines, the least I should give them credit for. (I wonder if they will ever read this.) They quoted Jack Halberstam a few sentences into their newest dispatch from a slug-timed land and it triggered, combined with a cup of coffee, this new misfired monologue. In daydreams of joyful productivity I add a bunch of new crip/critical disability theory to my reading list. Only that I don't know where to look yet beyond Jack Halberstam, (whose work I don't even know well enough to say it fits this category (although here I loop back to the enjoyment of tangents (triple parentheses ftw))) and to comb the footnotes of my favourite substacks, possibly some instagram posts of Autogynophiles Anonymous and the Drunk Church podcast by cosima bee concordia and Aurora Laybourn.

The things I feed on feel more secrets these days than they did before, becaus, just like me, they seem fragile in their ability to withhold critical questioning from an audience. Especially the imagined audience of former student colleagues, who are primed academically on a particular way of defense of ones work and criticality of others. This blog is only public place I don't worry too much about writing about things I do not want to explain further.

One is that I can't stop reading about Autism and ADHD and J.'s comment that "everyone blames their problems on it nowadays even though they haven't even tried sobriety" and the excessive eye-roll accompanying it, is amongst the reasons I stay vague in describing my work (e.g. The Questionnaire, solo show SOX 2023), even though vagueness is of course also home to the strength of letting multiple things be true at the same time, that I wouldn't want to miss. Like being fascinated by the possibility of researching traits and struggles that were wrongfully and forcefully grouped under psychiatric labels, while at the same time those labels are still perpetrating the violence of the structures that enforce them. Why the artist in proximity to academia have such an aversion to the word autistic describing anyone but people whose disability they constructed to have no possibly way of relating to them, is another question for my list of ongoing inquiries. 'Everyone does that and it's not a problem' is such a daring statement to be carried on a flag by a overall relatively small group of people who are violently running as far away from what they were brought into, despite all odds, often into precarity, because of a difference in perception of the world they cannot fully explain. In a true fashion of reverse-pathologisation one could of course also ask: Why does not everyone in this violent greyness seem to agree that it is in fact a hellscape to try and run from? Is not (!) being ill and horryfied by so called normality a diagnosable problem? And why are yet so many artist in love with psychoanalysis? And then there is my obsession with plane crash analysis videos that grew into Air Traffic Communitcation recording videos. It is the even more satisfying cousin of my obsession with documentation series about ambulances and ERs. For air traffic protocols there seems to be an actual community of aviation nerds who only cater to themselves and their own language of routines and checklists. Contrary to content of the medical, which seems to be produced with the idea in mind, that emotional and exaggerated drama is more compatible with a broader audience than a systematic explanation of all procedures, examinations and rescue protocols. I hope I don't have to make myself clear about not getting enjoyment from seeing planes crash or humans suffer life-altering (or -ending) injuries. It is precisely the examination of the systems put into place to prevent them, that calm my anxious mind. It seems to be an unfortunate reality that protocols of rescue and safety would not exist without accidents they were built upon. Failure is inevitable.

sex shop dispatch #1

catty #1 (2023); drawn in MS Paint on a cash reigister desktop pc in a gay sex shop in berlin

"Wouldn't it be nice if I got Aids at work?" "You would need to contract HIV first I guess...", I said, leaning against the cash register to relive some tension in my back from standing for five hours. My coworker nodded and didn't look away from the posters he was pinning to the wall behind us. "Just imagine I stood here and someone customer came up and jizzed onto my leg, were I had a little open wound. Oops! It would be classified as a work accident, obviously. So convenient!" His gaze wandered to the front door, from where the sunlight didn't reach the belly of the sex shop. "And you'd leave it untreated?" I asked He laughed and slapped another adhesive strip onto the poster loudly. "Of course, I wouldn't do anything! I would want to get AIDS as fast as possible and try to contract COVID. Well and then...", he smiled, almost candidly, "...bye bye! I'd be 10ft under so fast."

I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t need to, as the Ibiza party vibes vol 5 playlist relentlessly kept droning on in the background.

(…)

Sitting hunched over outside in the shadow of a small shroud in the backyard of my apartment complex I was waiting for the adhd pill I had borrowed from Z to kick in. But this time I found it harder to determine if it did. Maybe I finally got the dose right, since I had carefully scooped about half of the white powder from the gelatin capsule. Compared to Cookie Mueller’s collected stories, which I was currently reading, everything I did seemed boring and my anxieties about life paled in comparison to her detailed accounts of careless travels, near death experiences and childbirth. I closed the book and carried my cat on a leash, on whose sitting-outside-in-a-bush-session I had patiently waited on, back inside. Having worked in the sex shop for three days in a row before this meant nothing memorable had happened, except that I had found enjoyment in drawing semi-nude bodies with cat heads in paint on the cash registers windows pc, trying not to get caught. R asks me if I would exhibit them and I protest, no. I had asked a collector of very mediocre gay art who came in to buy some jockstraps on sale if he could see a market for digital drawings of anthropomorphized cats. He quickly shrugged it off, laughing while putting as much distance between himself and me in a polite British manner. So if there was any further use for them, that didn’t involve extracting income from the affluent cis gay bubble with questionable taste, it was to become cover art for these dispatches I was determined to write. Something to revive my blog with (hi there!). But I wasn’t ready to get fired over making as much of them as possible on company time. After all, I’m not a painter nor particularly passionate about the outcomes of my capitalism-coping-method.

The most exciting thing that happened day was probably selling butt plugs to a very anxious looking guy in his thirties who was planning to get pegged by his girlfriend and seemed quite stressed by the prospect of it. I wish him all the best and hope he remembers to not use silicon based lube.

drugs? and fuck the disorder/nobody is young and healthy

I propose to you: Jesus’ side wound depicted while penetrated by two fingers of the disembodied hand of doubting saint Thomas but overlay it with ultrasound imagery featuring rib shadows. “"Most artifacts in radiology refer to something seen on an image that are not present in reality but appear due to a quirk of the modality itself. Artifact is also used to describe findings that are due to things outside the patient that may obscure or distort the image, e.g. clothing, external cardiac monitor leads, body parts of carer, etc.”

(entry on Radiology Image Artifact on radiopedia.org)

(…)

The color red is unexpectedly growing on me, like this particular shade of blue and purple did before. But red?! DM me pictures of your wounds and tell me if it is too much to ask to want to hide in somebody’s hair, early in the morning, while they read, not yet ready to start the day. But I keep waking up alone so let’s call the moment face meets pillow and it feels like a full-body kiss ‘nap synesthesia’.

(…)

My recent appendix surgery and other events have seen me wrestling with stinging feelings seated deep inside various of my organs (heartbreak! fun! (irony! (is the tool of the shy, says F (quadruple parenthesis, what an unhinged way to start this!))) I’m not in the process of coming out of ‘it’, but this is a disclaimer to the following text I wrote, so something must have changed that makes me feel capable of picking up the undefined ends of the project that is this blog again. The last time I tried this, I wrote a text I titled ‘I’m turning into the upstairs neighbor everyone hates’ that I never ended up finishing or posting. And while this is not that text or even close to a re-write of it, the two are for sure connected. I would like you to imagine me pacing relentlessly back and forth, shaking limbs, in between every few sentences, if you are like me and enjoy making up a picture of the person writing a text, speaking into the void, while you read it. (Yes we are all voyeurs then, no? The meta/serving suggestion of reading might then just be about getting caught staring. Or, as Kathryn Bond Stockton theorizes erotically in ‘Making Out’, getting caught in the pursuit of “kissing a text”.) I will start with a highly personal, diary-like entry into the text, just to make sure that this cannot be confused with anything less than chaotic and embarrassing. If I don’t keep embarrassing myself here just because of the prospect of people I care about reading it, I might run out of places to do it purposefully, entirely, and that would be no fun either.

Calmness or focus have just escaped me in their entirety since my endocrinologist ordered me to increase my testosterone intake. It’s funny how all these traits of what is commonly described by people who diagnose others as having a so-called attention deficit (yes I would like to have one standard amount of attention please, what do you mean it is related to our surroundings and not a reliably measurable and portionable fluid of sorts?) and behave in ways that are comparatively (to whom?) hyperactive (ADHD) suddenly apply to me in their most stereotyped form (all diagnosis is stereotyping of course and if I ever had any scientific ambitions it would be disproving the diagnostic process with its own means, making it eat itself from the inside out just to see what would happen). My day thoughts start to take the rhythm of dreams. This is not about their contents but rather the strange intervals in which they are happening and me then forgetting them. Dreams feel like they last the whole night, days years, only to have been actual minutes of ones sleeping time. I, of course, haven’t googled this to back it up (has anyone ever met a dream scientist and can tell me if they talk like an artist or the opposite or both?), but the way one can wake up from a dream, fall asleep again for only a few minutes and wake up with a whole new epic chapter of moods added to it, makes me suspect this strongly.

Everything that feels near eternal and incredibly expansive in the moment I think it, in the next it is completely gone. My nervous walking has started up again, in an desperate embodied attempt to retain all concentration slipping from me regardless, fireworks going off all around me and not much I can do about it except throwing words over explosions like nets to catch butterflies and turning whatever I catch into ..?

(...)

If the idea of a drug becomes so powerful, the idea of a substance that can ease or make pain disappear, being in the proximity of that thought, even or especially if one is highly skeptical of it, opposes it, might do something. And I wonder if it could be an experience similarly to what these respective substances might trigger when ingested.

At least the moods that came up while being on morphine didn’t feel so strange that it remains indescribable, to me, despite having never taken any drug like it. Sure, the intensity of it was conveniently placed at a time my body would have otherwise not been ready to experience emotional elation and physical relaxation, but whatever the state I was in is called... I think the symptom of making art has its origin in a similar intensity, that cannot be chased and pops up unannounced. To call it inspiration feels bland.

Z tells me she started taking stimulants only recently, well into her 30s, having recently found “one of the good” psychiatrists (lol) who diagnosed her yet doesn’t insist on her taking those meds daily. Her talking about it cheerfully, as if it might something easy - a tool that seems to be not more or lass than that - planted a new train of thought into me. The very simple mirror of ‘our struggles are similar’ and ‘the intensity with which they impact us are not’ leading to ‘is taking meds a viable possibility to explore that I have disregarded? And through seeing someone I like and can see myself in thrive it has entered the real of possibility again?’ or simply ‘hey, I could do that.’ And it keeps popping up again and again, despite all the reading I’ve been doing, being different nuances of critical towards the pathology of neurodivergence and the category of neurodivergence as constructed itself. I don’t know where I am going with this, but to think of processes as more complex than diagnosis and prescription, problem and solution, is like remembering to inhale after accidentally holding your breath for too long. This view on things, this breathing, isn’t a fixed set of rules though, it doesn’t allow or disallow anything. So taking stimulants could indeed, become a tool in this order of things, that works with and not in opposition to the idea that distress and pain experienced in a system designed to keep functioning by causing indiscriminately distress and pain in whatever amounts necessary to achieve uniformity is indeed a perfectly logical response to that system and not a magically isolated occurrence of disorder.

What the fuck does ‘being medicated’ even mean. Or ‘being sick’. As if being ‘young’ or being ‘healthy’ was something that people could actually be and then, even more mind boggling, sustain forever. As if these ideas were not something which’s sole definition is based on being temporary and impossible to fully achieve. How could they be truths or possible states of being when they feel like highly constructed ideals bordering on infinity plus one, there is always more to ‘health’ and ‘youth’ and how would we (who is we, lol) ever get there? Hamsterwheels are much more tolerable when one is not sitting in a wheelchair, I think, while critical of the fact that ‘wheelchair’ is one of the first image that pops into my head along with the word disability. Yet advertising (one of the symptoms of capitalism, if staying with pathological metaphors?) claims obnoxiously loud that losing ‘health’ or ‘youth’ should be seen as an isolated disordered experience, a tragic occurrence which can only be altered in its severity by medical or consumerist intervention and not something that literally constitutes being a human, or really any form of life. (You have reached the part in the text that is me, dramatically exclaiming ‘We are all going to die!’. Again, existential teenage embarrassment.)

I try to picture a person that is fully ‘young and healthy’ yet always find something that could be ‘improved’ upon, and as this hypothetical construct of a person takes their next breath, they have already progressed in time and aged and with it, failed so to say. Did you also picture a man when you thought of someone advertising ‘young and healthy’ to you? Well, fuck.

And while we are at it, let’s look at Jesse Meadows most recent email-sized essays from their substack newsletter ‘Sluggish’ that touches on the idea of the typical vs divergent binary in a way that stuck with me throughout the week: “Mainstream understandings of disability have fallen into a similar binary that don’t square with the critical disability studies work I’m familiar with.”

They then go on to quote feminist scholar Susan Wendell, who wrote in 1989 that everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, because we all get sick and grow old and need support: “Recognizing this helps us to see that disabled people are not “other,” that they are really “us.” Unless we die suddenly, we are all disabled eventually. Most of us will live part of our lives with bodies that hurt, that move with difficulty or not at all, that deprive us of activities we once took for granted or that others take for granted, bodies that make daily life a physical struggle. We need an understanding of disability that does not support a paradigm of humanity as young and healthy. Encouraging everyone to acknowledge, accommodate and identify with a wide range of physical conditions is ultimately the road to self-acceptance as well as the road to liberating those who are disabled now.”

So maybe I can take a knife to all the ropes that have unconsciously tied the idea of being ‘young and healthy’ to me on all levels that are not language (yet) and find myself suddenly standing (or sitting, sleeping, taking 3-hour naps out of nowhere and missing classes and meetings because recovery is not linear) in a body looking at itself? When all supposedly ‘young and healthy’ bodies shout ‘my body is capable of being in pain and sick and injured at any moment, it has happened before and it will happen again, it is ongoing’ and ‘accommodate me and the possibility that I am in pain and failing to be productive because/regardless of it!’ alongside all bodies that are not in the process of being constructed as ‘young and healthy’... that would just be about everyone screaming. And, of course, fuck productivity, now and always.

fragments (hospital)

may 2, 2022

Aufräumen und spazieren gehen sind zu den einzigen Stützpunkten meines nervösen Kopfs geworden. Und Notizen. Und zeichnen. Ich merke es jetzt genau.

Im Krankenhaus. Ich laufe gierig durch den halb leeren Raum nachdem mein roommate entlassen wurde. Ich räume auf. Es gibt nicht viel aufzuräumen. Ein Kaugummi. Eine Serviette mit der ich mir die Nase geputzt habe.

Ich will gar nicht aufhören im Kreis zu laufen, obwohl mir langsam alles weh tut.

Ich bin wieder da!

Aber mein Körper nicht.

Ich tippe so schnell, hallo ich bin hier! Meine Gedanken auch! Wo dürfen sie hin?

Wenn ich nicht so schnell laufen kann wie meine Gedanken, wo laufen sie ohne mich hin?

Hospitals are erotic. Always have been for me.

Ich überlege ob ich grindr aufmachen soll, aber das hat nichts damit zu tun. Ich bin neugierig, ob andere Patentinnen auch online sind. Ob Pfleger online sind. Ob ich mit der App die 21 Stockwerke durchleuchten kann. Zumindest ein bisschen.

Ich weiß jetzt aber schon, dass ich keinen von ihnen will.

Hospitals are erotic because one is being taken care of.

Ausgeliefern sein. Aber auch der Wunsch nach Fürsorge.

Und dann war da immer das Gefühl, das irgendwas an mir anders ist, ohne das ich Worte dafür hatte, aber wusste, dass in Krankenhäusern geholfen wird. Strange, als Kind habe ich viel mehr in das transmedizinische Leidensbild gepasst. Und habe mir das natürlich auch herbeigewünscht, weil ich eine sehr verklärte und romantisierte Version davon hatte, was es bedeutet Patient zu sein.

I take nudes on the first morning in my bed that I send to no one. I like them intensely.

I can't wait to meet my scars, I think.

Three of them. (This is not top surgery! This is me-not-dying-surgery!)

And then: Am I too generous with words?

I know they are always aproximations to *something*, but approaching means there is a measurable distance. Am I too sloppy with my words, is my distance too large?

I don't have the energy to get closer sometimes. Most of them time.

Generous with words and distance makes me think of dogs on a leash, of an other being that is being kept (by you), directed. Some keep a closer leash and find a path, others get completely lost.

There is no one right way to walk.

But maybe in language one can jump further than any path could, one can rupture any room and any street that would keep ...

Art and walking are all over the place. For me.

There are no pictures on the wall in my room. There is a diffrently colored rectangle of paint though and in its corners two silver bolts. I love this absence. (I'm sure a picture would have driven me insan by now)

This has not been written while on Morphium. Or any other kind of pain meds actually. I haven't eaten much though.

I did write a letter when on Morphium.

I think it was the most beautiful letter I have ever written.

I had just woken up and mumbled it into the dark room, that was just my bed, blinking monitors and a nurse somewhere, maybe.

All the rush of it was already gone when I returned to my room, but I remember thinking how clear it all had felt. And how I wish I would be in a better condition to be able to write it down.

It was a letter and i wrote it to someone, but keeping it in my mind seemed to fleeting, so I said it out loud.

It was liberating.

While I was saying these things, I knew I had needed to say them for a long time. I felt it.

And I know that before and after would be about me being sick and me getting better mostly, but that moment, when I was speaking to you, was entirely about something else.

I wonder if the nurse overheard it, even when she walked away.

I told her that I miss someone.

I cannot tell any of it in its intensity now. Out of the moment. It is gone. I cannot go back to the place in my mind I was in, then.

Only approximate it from a far distance.

It was a unique place.

One that is too dangerous for any other waking moment, that doesn't deliver me completele helplessness.

And of course, the Morphium helped. Oh, it for sure helped.

The next day, when I was given some again, nothing of it came close, despite you appearing on my screen.

I approximate you.

Fragmented viewership and queer longing for better endings (Soldier’s Girl)

march 31, 2022

we’re both in it only for the longing,

but I enjoy being the delusional one about it.

(…)

There is a spam bot on grindr manifesting itself as an unknown user with a blank profile, that shows up in my messages the minute I go online, inviting me to visit NSAcock dot com. Therefore, the amount of people that message me on days I open the app can be reliably measured by the distance between each notification advertising National Security Agency dick. If you ever happen to visit the site I urge you to let me know what it says and what viruses are on offer (physically/digitally). I’m curious.

Heute

(...) hat dir eine Nachricht gesendet.

Diese Person ist nicht mehr verfügbar.

It’s trans day of whatever the fuck is going on and the tiredness and resignation about the endless streams of pastel infographic sharepics has long become its own pastel infographic sharepic (did you know that trans visibility without protection is a trap? yes. yes, we know). And while genuine queer rage and anger tends to make all meals of the great digital feed taste less bland, ignorance is bliss is my weapon of choice here. I gladly accept that excessive social media scrolling will be banned from my life today and probably this day for some more years to come. Am I doing this right? Therefore, holier than though, all who are consuming the dish of the day? For fucking sure not, but today I will not see captions on reposts of screenshots of tweets about other tweets that tell me why.

In 2014, Jared Leto received an Oscar for best supporting actor, portraying the trans woman Rayon in Dallas Buyer’s Club. That this was an incredibly mismatched casting choice and cis men routinely portraying trans women in film is, of course, nothing new.

I didn’t watch the movie then and my feelings for it when viewing it years later randomly at a friend’s movie night were as trivial as the event itself; not leaving the same impact as other filmic portrayals of queer struggle and subsequent death, like Soldier’s Girl, have had on me years earlier. What the two films do share though is one of the two lead roles - in Soldier’s Girl’s case that of the trans woman Calpernia - not being portrayed by a trans actress, but instead by a famous Hollywood actor and cis man, Lee Pace.

Having rewatched it only recently I thought I could give a more excited synopsis, with it recounting the different stages of the two protagonist’s - that being the performer and entertainer Clapernia Addams and US Army Airborne Infantry soldier Barry Winchell - radically different yet intertwining lives. But honestly, I don’t think it matters for the point I’m hoping to make here. All there is to know for now, is that the story is based on real events that took place in the US in 1999 ending in the murder of the young soldier by two of his military comrads. The actual story is probably best told by Calpernia herself on her blog. Everything more feels too intense to get into right now.

Maybe it is also important to note, that what I think drew me to the movie, was seeing a cis man, involved in the hypermasculine and toxic cult that is the US military, unapologetically fall in love with a trans woman. While his colleagues also meet her and other performers at a queer bar, where they admit being attracted to them, they later violently reject their womanhoods and label them as freaks, something that in their drunken, screaming discussions translates quite obviously to ‘something less than human, less than us’. Barry is given plenty of opportunity to copy this behaviour and with it escape becoming the target of increased bullying from other soldiers. But instead he reacts to his growing attraction to Calpernia with gentlemen-like gestures of affection and genuine care, not once questioning her womanhood. So basically, he is doing the bare minimum (we love to see it, don’t we?) and is not persuaded into violent rejection to ensure that his masculinity (and with it his job) remain unquestioned.

Him not doing the killing, in the end, is what gets him killed. It’s depicted in a chilling, graphic scene, that spares no detail of how his roommate and supposed friend and another soldiers conspire to and then execute his murder, by cracking open his skull with a baseball bat in his sleep. The camera doesn’t shy away from framing exessive amount of blood splattered over walls and bodies and remnants of faces.

When I first came across Soldier’s Girl in 2014 I watched it and then rewatched it excessively, just like the gay cowboy drama romance Brokeback Mountain - not nessecarily for the story arc but because parts of it fulfilled my simple desire to see romance, sex and affection, that has been labelled as queer, on screen. I had soon devised a distinct viewing routine that divided both movies into two parts. On some days I would watch it in full, but on days I was feeling sad and alone in my queerness I watched only the first hour, cutting the narrative short to miss out on the always violent, always deadly end that follows the protagonist’s short-lived glimpses into a world of possible tender romances. Having watched the first hour I already felt satiated in my longing. Repeatedly sitting through what was left, stopped feeling intensely heart-wrenching after a while and started to become more of a chore, that could be skipped whenever my conscience would allow it. Ignoring the last hour, the parts where a hopeful, romantic plot was overturned by violence, always left me feeling guilty of not been brave enough to be a viewer that would honor the original path of the story and with it, in the case of Soldier’s Girl, the memory Barry Winchell. Lack of exposure to other narratives stopped me from even questioning, why this was the end I felt like I should subject myself to over and over again, when I was actually there hoping to imagine how things could be different. Maybe in a way, where, just like in any other cheesy romantic comedy movie, the only challenge presented would be the ups and down of falling in love itsself. Where Calpernia and Barry evaluate their relationship and realize, that repeatedly being called freaks by other soldiers who are displaying concerning signs of toxic masculinity in their close proximity and with it the willingness to punish any dissent from the norm with violence, just like the military in general, is endangering their livelyhoods. And then find paths to live a life far from it, being supported and loved by Calpernia’s friends and neighbours and nothing truly bad ever happens to them and we see even more passionate fucking alternated with softly spoken affirmations on each other’s bodies and presence. Or something like that, you know?

In hindsight, I think this “short version” of Soldier’s Girl would have been the better movie for me, at that time, had there been someone to envision it apart from me. Someone who would have allowed for another narrative route based on real events, that we didn’t get to witness in media, because them not ending with court hearings and murder charges made them less visible to the public and less interesting to the curious cis gaze.

If undocumented storylines of joyful existence can only persist safely when staying invisible in their trans and queerness, why demand visibility? Is it so impossible to envision more of these already quietly existing narratives - to tell without recounting? If visibility without protection is a trap, then so is exclusively basing things ‘on a true story’. As if the things we make up were not real, just like gender is all made up and still very real!

The short and loud media outrage about Jared Leto’s Oscar nomination, that took place during a similar time as my obsession with Soldier’s Girl, sparked for me, above all, a weird, curious joy. Since I had just found out that trans women existed, even the mention of anything queer or trans in a mainstream online discourse felt intensely exhilarating. It was like I had stumbled upon a well-kept secret by accident, that I now carried around with me everywhere, of course contemplating subconsciously the consequences this might have for my life. Seeing this then shortly after being exposed to a wide, differently clueless public was exciting and invoking the opposite reaction of what the heightened attention frenzy on trans day of visibility feels like, today. I realize that this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I can only suspect that I had become temporarily desensitized to the stress of seeing trans people’s lives and demands to be afforded basic human decency, discussed, picked apart and questioned. Just like I had become desensitized to transphobia leading to murder leading to depiction in media, in order to maintain my access to something I felt I needed to know more about, desperately.

It would take another year or two, until I heard of the existence of trans men and transmasc folk in general.This was a much less joyful discovery. I had been deeply invested in all the trans narratives I could get my hands on and that allowed me to contemplate gender from a safe distance, which was then completely obliterated and turned itself against me in all its emotional intensity, when I realized that hey, this could be about me, too.

Badly lit, pre T trans masc YouTube vlogs of anxious boys explaining how they know to have always been a man, believing that only those who can back up their suffering with the one and only holy gender dysphoria diagnosis are allowed to call themselves trans, while frantically swiping away the fringes of an emo haircut that keeps getting in the way, must have been the mood of these discoveries. Me watching for a few minutes and then crying, thinking ‘I don’t want to be that’ might have been what happened next. But I am really not sure, the only source backing this up is the favorite unreliable narrator, my memory.

“What if I had known all that stuff when I was growing up, you know?” Leslie Feinberg asks in a video interview on transgender history. I wonder the same thing now, regarding Feinberg’s book Trans Gender Warriors, that I stumbled upon last year, but which had actually been published first in 1996. It is all and more of what I wish had come up, instead of Soldier’s Girl and video diaries of insecure trans medicalists, when teenage me frantically skimmed the internet for trans representation. What if stories of well researched trans history, collected and told by trans writers, had been my starting point for further digital exploration, leading me then to more niche discoveries like Shu Lea Cheangs interactive digital memorial archive BRANDON that was programmed between 1997 and 1999? I could have viewed and explored the original website before its Java plugins stopped being supported and it underwent digital restauration in 2017. But instead I find it now, despite all these things having existed for almost as long as I have. Why was I being stuck with scripts written by cis people about trans people, casting cis men to play women for so long and narrations that aim to convince, instead of dare to dream? And I wonder why am I still looking for joyful stories when I have collected plenty of evidence, that it is easier write them into my own life instead of finding them being told elsewhere?

“There is a reason why I didn’t know all this stuff. It’s not just that they didn’t tell me, they didn’t want me to know it. And I needed to know it.”

Feinberg scrunches up their eyebrows and looks directly into the camera, as if anxious and angry at who they might see looking back at them through the screen.

“But I found it anyways.”

Hello, M and the nightmare of being Robert Smith’s wife

march 23, 2022

I’ve sent this blog to hardly anyone so far (hi, E, I and T!) but that doesn’t mean I intend on keeping its contents a secret. It’s searchable and readily available to those who followed the link I’ve scattered unannounced in my instagram bio, estimating it might only be found by those who know very little of me; those who search, because they are curious about a stranger. Whatever thoughts will be published from here on out though will be heavily colored by the possibility of those closest to me reading this, too.

This meta introduction doesn’t feel too sexy though, does it? Pragmatically speaking, this is an exercise in talking closer to cringe than to self-doubt and its consequence – abandoning projects before they can be seen.

(Can cringe be sexy? Yes.)

As Fabian and I were walking to Prater he didn’t ask me directly what I thought of his and M’s performance that he had just invited me to see, but it was implied in our conversation. All I said was that I would maybe write about what I thought, which at that moment was entirely true.

Then he got strapped into a seat on the ‘Black Mamba’ ride and was catapulted and twirled high above our heads with a maximum speed of 80km/h. Despite having known him for years I hadn’t fashioned him a person who spontaneously agreed to jump into an amusement park ride at night, still wearing goth boots and remnants of red lipstick. M was sitting next to him, screaming high pitched and loudly for more.

An hour before their limbs had been interlaced and tied to each other with tiny silver jewelry chains, attempting to restrain themselves from moving away from the other as much as possible. We were sitting in a neon lit white cube in an art academy building, where the breath of cliché and cringe is fixated into the walls by periodically applied coats of fresh white paint. I had suggested we move inside the space to watch the performance. Whatever the ‘bodies in space’ phrase repeated in every other artist statement grasps at, it was definitely more exiting to watch two lovers embrace and tie each other up, sitting beneath them on a cold floor, instead of the distanced approach of staring in through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that faced the dark school corridor.

Robert Smith, the man Fabian would at least consider selling a kidney for, if that meant he could meet him, wrote ‘M’ in 1980 for the second Album of The Cure titled ‘seventeen seconds’. M, of course, references the Name of the singer’s wife, Mary Poole. When googling her name, what pops up are very few and grainy 80s photos and the same televised picture of her in the audience during an award ceremony for her husband, every one of which is a slightly different shade of blue and slightly different number of pixels, countable with the bare eye. She wears the same makeup as her husband, lips red, eyes dark, yet slightly less messy and smudged, both sporting long, black, frizzled hair in most of their photos together.

A video uploaded to YouTube titled ‘Mary Poole (Robert Smith's wife) introducing The Cure's song Push on the radio in 1989’ seems to be one of the few, if not the only recording of her voice. She introduces herself as what sounds like ‘Robert’s wife’ with male radio host laughter in the background, announces the song and shakily adds ‘Robert is going to kill me, I shouldn’t be here’.

I, of course, know all this because Fabian showed me. We rarely spent time together without The Cure being at least mentioned once.

It’s not any different with M, I can only estimate how many Cure concerts Fabian has made him sit through. When I entered our living room on a Sunday morning last week though, it wasn’t Fabian who I found myself making Robert-related conversations with, but M. He was reading Camus und sighing heavily at the blatant displays of sexism in ‘A Happy Death’ by the protagonist Mersault. “One of the horny French guys?” is all I have to offer here, in terms of literature knowledge.

M sighted again, in approval, and read me a brief excerpt.

“After making love, at that moment when the heart drowses in the released body, filled only with the tender affection he might have felt for a winsome puppy, Mersault would smile at her and say, "Hello, image."”

The translation might be misguiding enough to attempt a reading, that puts a softer light on Mersault’s comment, but the french original text, "Bonjour, apparence", makes this literal image a clear one. As if the disappointment of all erotic and longing gazes and touch leaving a lover’s body right after only he cums wasn’t enough, this specimen manages to dehumanize, infantilize and then reduce his partner to her mere appearance uttering these two simple words.

Hello, image

Is also the very first line of the song ‘M’, which Robert clearly uses to address Mary. This charming man… An odd choice, and frankly, not a good look for the soft goth idol of horny teenage dreams (and not only of the 80s, as can be attested by the still very active and very young fan community!).

You'll fall in love with somebody else tonight

Soon follows Robert’s anxious address, that leaves the object of his singing tied up in his accusations and predictions. The tone here is dominated by distorted echo-y guitar sounds and an over boarding, stinging jealousy that Robert for sure wasn’t the first person to experience. But maybe one of the few to purposefully expose and repeat his teenage musings to fully packed commercial concert halls, even decades later.

A week earlier Fabian made me sit down with him and showed me various lyrics, genuinely curious what my amateurish interpretation of them might be. It’s the first time I purposefully listen to what is being said. I scrunch up my face and say bluntly ‘it must be a nightmare to be Robert Smith’s wife’.

‘M’ is playing again at Fabian’s and M’s (that being the german artist’s boyfriend, not the british singer’s wife) performance, but agency here seems differently distributed. First of all, both lovers are present and taking part in whatever is about unfold. They start off their encounter in different parts of them room. Fabian looking in from the outside, or not really looking actually and instead concentrating on writing ‘ROBERT RULES’ on the glass panel door, which makes me chuckle. Opposite is M, standing in front of meters of interlinked silver jewelry chains hanging on the wall, adorned with small handmade plastic clay and epoxy figurines, shimmering in a fleshy pink.

Between them is a symmetrical web of black latex, stretched from wall to wall, coming close to floor and ceiling. This kind of installation is a key visual and material of Fabian’s work, having embodied linguistical models and tree-like arches of academic accuracy, plucking the components of a sentence out of its context and structuring them according to analytical rhythms. I failed to ask if this specific room filling web is somehow encrypting a Cure song or, and I wouldn’t be mad at this possibility, simply exists to enhance the hot goth aesthetic and provide two bodies with a porous yet restrictive room to come closer to each other.

The tempo picks up as the next song plays. Sitting in the audience for artsy performances usually induces this very passive, docile, almost daydreaming state in me and here I also find myself following their dance-like movements for a while, that don’t read more into than the fact that two friends are deeply engaged in something they set out to do together. Feet brush up against Latex as the two begin chasing each other through - come on, let’s just call it that for the sake of pathos - their spiderweb.

Sure, one of them is M and the other one has watched every Robert Smith Interview out there and I sometimes wonder if he adopted the singer’s boyish, shy, smile in the process, but this doesn’t seem like a reenactment of any kind. All similarities of this narrative have become a dramatic and aesthetic starting point and stage for something more personal.

Fabians kneels over M and gently but assertively wraps shiny chains around their bodies, not even flinching when some of them start to rip and break.

Help yourself But tell me the words before you fade away You reveal all the secrets to remember the end And escape someday

Standing up against the wall, after having chased, caught, and tied each other up, silence follows and the room suddenly seems very bright and filled with the inevitable post-performance awkwardness. Fabian’s expression doesn’t drop when he says that it’s over now (looking at us and not at M). There was no act, the lipstick, the wild hair, the negotiating gazes and touch stay, as he instructs M where to put the remnants of his restraints; none of it was a play, only played with.

In best straight edge fashion, Cherry Soda is served to everyone, and we laugh as Fabian says that really, he only did this to make everyone sit through and listen to four The Cure songs.

Jup, that checks out, I think, pin one of the silver broken chains to my coat and follow the group into the night, to the nearby colorful blinking lights of Vienna’s Prater.

#fabianreetz #maximiliansilchmüller

working title (females)

march 21, 2022

[...]

I feel like a woman sometimes now and the thought doesn’t scare me. It seems benign and the word partial pops up along with it. Words don’t work well in this territory (do they ever work?).

I’ve learned this years ago, grappling to describe how I felt about my gender, conclusively defining it as ‘not a girl ‘and later ‘a boy if you want to call me that‘. But it’s not even an approximation of myself, it’s a working title. If no one ever saw me as anything else as ‘a boy, probably’ or even ‘a man’ I’d be genuinely content with that, because it’s not a lie. Reaching for something else would be plunging my fist into my throat and tearing something from inside out, lay it on my tongue and beg everyone to look at it. I don’t long to become an exhibitionist of my gendered flesh when it translates only to a bloody and confusing spectacle. “Gender and art are failed translations”, says Naya’s instagram bio. I agree.

I enjoy saying that gender does not exist. This of course, is as much of a ‘wrong’ statement as the ones Andrea Long Chu makes in ‘females’ (2019), firmly stating with it, that she doesn’t know if her essay is a feminist text, or if she wants it to be. Same girl, same. I like Andrea Long Chu’s play on the word female for the same reason. She twists and contorts and breaks all associated meaning with what it means to be female, while still letting the heavy weight of all these connotations, all the things that the word approximates when it’s put to work in contexts of feminism, linger on its back. Her ‘female’ is a moebius strip or even one of those impossible geometrical figures. The sooner I stopped trying to trace it’s ends and connections, making sense of it in traditional categories and just accepted that this is how things will be now, the smoother I was gliding through her writing, nodding in agreement, and laughing. She states that “everyone is female and everyone hates it” and I cannot find one wrong thing about it, really.

The fact that I stood in front of the bathroom mirror shaving my face today and thought ‘I’m probably a bit of a woman’ has nothing to do with that, by the way.

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