“Look, tonight is the future, and I am planning for it! There’s this shirt I gotta buy, a beautiful shirt.” – Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever
“Uh, I’m not very hungry; just gimme a double Polar Burger wit’ everything and a cherry soda wit’ chocolate ice cream.” – Danny Zuko in Grease
“And now after all this time I finally figured out how to trap him… I will become him” – John Travolta about John Travolta
In years to come, people will talk about John Travolta as a famous old movie star.
“Now he feels like some ageing pin-up finding a pimply kid masturbating over photos of him as a boy, and peeping lecherously in on those carnal couplings of his youth.” – Separate Rooms – Pier Vittorio Tondelli – Italy – 1989
“I don’t like labels. I simply feel like a boy who needs to express himself in the ways and times he feels. Sometimes with a song, sometimes with a book. The label limits you, forces you into a defined space. I want to stay free. Maybe, if I really have to, I would call myself an artist. Period.” – GionnyScandal
*****
“When Gionata opens his eyes, he sees only a bright white tube hanging from the ceiling. He needs a few seconds to focus on everything else – the hospital room, the IV in his arm – to understand why he is there and to realise that he is still alive. Gionata’s story, aka GionnyScandal, starts from here, from the decision to put an end to his pain once and for all, from the extreme and dramatic gesture made when everything seems to have lost meaning and direction. But it also starts from the rush of a friend to save him, from the affection of those around him, from the desire to live that returns to inhabit his thoughts after the drama; from the need to deal with one’s past to move forward and face the future. And so, once out of the hospital, he decides to go through the darkness to understand the origin of his suffering. To do so, he will have to face the ghosts of the past – the death of his adoptive parents, the disappearance of his beloved grandmother – and track down his biological parents who he never knew anything about. And in this journey he will learn to really know himself, perhaps to make peace with his story. To once again put hope and beauty at the centre of his world and his music.”
Photographer Arthur Elgort talking with his daughter, Sarah Elgort, for Interview Magazine, April 18, 2025.
“Every life – and every tragic death is full of ‘what -ifs.’ I’ve been over Jeff’s death thousands of times in my mind, wondering if we could have – should have – done anything differently. Of course we could have, but none of us could have predicted the one last risky, no-parachute move Jeff made that day, walking backward into forever, his mind full of music as if he were in the long grass in front of his new house. Jeff swam farther toward Mud Island, singing along to Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, his voice reflecting off the monorail bridge as he swam under it.”
– Words from Dave Lory, former manager of the late singer Jeff Buckley (1966 – 1997)
“The cruel reality is that maybe improving my physical appearance is just as fundamental to my success as developing my art practice itself. It’s also frustrating to feel myself internalising this idea that I have to get sexier and show ass online if I want to play the game.” – Dylan, painter, New York
“I only glanced fleetingly at him as I passed, I did not really see him. But that uncertain glimpse was sufficient to stir my imagination, and I received and took away with me a vision of beauty… ah, of what beauty.”
Extracted and adapted from Tristan, a 1903 novella by German writer Thomas Mann.
“Won’t King Sausage cut your head off if you dip it in another pig?”
– Mary and George / Sky Studios / 2024
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 