Gay marriage is not simply about “love” and “commitment” between sweet and adoring couples who “just” want to get married. It is a multi-million dollar campaign waged and controlled by some of the most powerful non-profits and richest gay neoliberals, and it is about a systemic disregard for…
Outfit.
Career Timeline: 1985 - Starwatcher I
Moebius began a series of illustrations called Starwatcher, which he said “lives in the Moebius universe”, and is something he’d frequently return to over the years. They were originally made to be printed as silk-screen serigraphs by French art publisher Aedena.
Kinkade struck his jaw square, as the muscles in his arms and legs tightened to steel knots and his hands clenched so hard the skin around the knuckles began to break. His eyes, which in his powerful middle-age had shone from behind with the slim light he called god, now ran stark gray, bricked up solid.
In a sudden jolt, he swung himself out from the blankets tied round his gray, speckled skin, and toward the floor. His arms trailing behind, he landed with his face down, to let glasses and nose bear the fall on their own.
They broke, both of them, the glasses along the frames, cutting deep grooves along the high nose and forehead, splaying and letting blood over his face, onto the floor, the nose, forced right, solidly breaking along the cartilage line.
A thick, toad-eyed relative in her forties, with a gray swooping helmet overdyed fuchsia, fell on Kinkade, squealing concern. She rolled him over in his nudity, and shrunk away, his face still wrenched in a powerful, empty jug. His long thin cock was a blaring obscenity.
Shuddering broke in over the twisted body, and the spots seemed to grow and shrink, before smoothing over his whole body with a thin, rubbery film. A sigh was breathed by the gathered crowd. “He’s gone, they said, his light has left us, for that far shore.”
Behind the eyes, gray fell to black, fell to null. The wicking of a fluorescent bulb hung to the room.
With J.E. Manier gone, it felt to E.P. Williams sometimes like he was the only person left alive. “I take down the scrapbook night after night,” he confided to his mother, “and I feel like everyone has fallen away, or they might as well have. I just look upon his face, the wild strike in his ragged hair, remember, before he got to be such an old man. I told him, you know, I was a joke, but I told him that I wouldn’t ever want him to get old like my father did, before he passed. But when he did, I wasn’t sad to see it. He said his hip hurt, I said to myself, least you know, maybe if you were dead in a box your hip would be all out of whack and you wouldn’t do nothing. When he smoked cigarettes, he coughed too much to be a healthy man, but I always said to him that a dead man don’t smoke cigarettes so much as become one and he’d laugh his ass off at that.” E.P. laughed once or twice, intentionally. “I found a picture of him, Ma,” he said, “where his shirt buttons up all the way to the collar and he hasn’t got a tie on, that I can tell, and the collar is tight on his neck like a line, his turkey wobbler is hanging on for dear life, I see this picture, Ma, and I’m being honest with you, I just want to die myself. I want to fall down in that well and drown, just on that chance that we might have another cigarette left to split and another clip of whiskey to bite.”
What is the word, she said, to be bad, but not exactly bad. 못되다. she said.
I’m not sure, I said, there are a lot of particular kinds of bad. What would be an example of someone being this kind of bad, I said.
Well, imagine you have a fight, she said, and you say “I’m sorry,” and they say they…
This summer, The Harley-Davidson Museum will open an exhibit dedicated to an iconic piece of motorcycle culture: the black leather jacket.
The “Worn to be Wild: The Black Leather Jacket“ exhibit will showcase over 100 artifacts including jackets designed by fashion houses such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Gianni Versace, as well as jackets worn by celebrities such as Elvis Presley.
The picture shows a motorcycle woman with leather jacket, circa year 1949.
Haunt
I am underneath the floorboards, crawling.
It is the best way from one room to the next.
The secret way.
The way of cats and ghosts.
I keep a duvet under the floor,
under your feet.
I listen to your weight shift above me.
I listen when you call for me, or ghosts, or cats.
None of us will answer.
We aren’t the answering types.
We do what we do, we do what we like.
We haunt you, we like that, we do that.
I am touching the sole of your shoe through a pine knot.
You feel me, but you don’t know me.
That is a power of ghosts, and cats,
and mine.
I slide up near the cradle, and I steal milk
from your baby’s mouth.
So quiet, you don’t hear. So soft, baby won’t feel.
I lick my fingers.
I nestle below your bathroom sink
amidst the terry towels.
I rise up through the sink pipes
and I try your wife’s perfume.
She smells like a garden in decay.
Now I do too.
When I am under you,
You will smell our flowers rotting.
Under the floorboards, I am your secret child.
I am hidden for my defects,
but remembered to balance team games
on family night.
You are calling me now, and I am laughing in my way.
My mouth opens, my mouth closes,
there is no sound but a hiss of breath.
You mistake me for a pipe.
I try new sounds, sounds that cannot be pipe sounds.
Sounds like scratching. You call me a squirrel.
Sounds like tapping, you call me wind.
Sounds like moaning, you call a priest.
In 1920, Robert Frost had a poem published in Harper’s Magazine.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction…
This is the culture I grew up in.
This man could have something on those shelves that my childhood hands touched. Or things my father or my uncle or my grandfather held for a time that went into another junker’s hands and on and on through that tangled network of junque and junque dealers, before it found its beautiful home.
My junque heart though, it has junque blood, and it wants the contract for that man’s estate sale when he, you know.
The hours I have spent, in the narrow aisles, squeezed between old magazines and doll parts and stopwatches and jewelry. The hours I have spent sorting through cardboard boxes, watching auctions, being proud when my father “said the numbers” better than anyone else.
How I never understood, until I was older, why we didn’t use a gavel, why we shouted our spells and cantor. Why they were all transfixed.
Gavels are for Sutheby’s. We were magicians in a court. We had ritual and skill. Silent auctions are for frauds and chumps. We give you numbers. Rolling, endless, trackless numbers. We cast spells. We are spell people.
Black magic money, junque magic numbers.
This is our spell.
The Cupboards
The cupboards were full of ghosts. Remember pasta, they moaned. Remember chips and salsa, they whispered. I will, I promised. I will.
In the corner of the cupboard, I found the dried bones of forgotten food. Three grains of rice, disgraced. A broken spaghetti noodle.
There was a lid too, of a lost jar. It wailed to fit. I rummaged.
I gave it two turns on an old peanut butter jar, but the jar had been made a cup, and it had no more interest in lids.
I laid out contact paper on the cupboard shelves, to bury the ghosts. I meant to honor them. They shouted at me, raising up bubbles of air.
I tried to smooth and soothe them. They didn’t care for it. They haunted me all night and made my stomach rumble. I dreamt of sandwich slices.
