Tag Archives: blog

Stolen Words / The Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision

Klein Youth – Charlie Marseilles

“We speak of the body of the young man at his fullest development, just on the brink of maturity, a young man who has retained some of his original innocence. The model for the classic Greek was the young athlete, from an aristocratic family, who competed in the nude in the original Olympic Games. It is not until later that the natural male form was used as a medium for the expression of godliness, an idea that later became the basis for a popular religious sect. A look back through the twentieth century will demonstrate just how long the Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision. Examine the popular male images of the past 60 years. How many of them have been both young and beautiful?”

Helen Ziou – Valley Advocate Amherst – April 1984

Back off – I’m not that person now

The soul of a good time. But something changed. I’m not a social person anymore, but everybody wants me to be. They talk shit all night. I want to say, “Please go away, I prefer my own company now.”

Seven cool things that I heard this week


“ I heard Earth, Wind and Fire singing ‘Ba-dee-ya’ on the radio, and I thought, oh no, this is another step towards autumn.” – a woman on the bus referring to the song September.

“There in the shade, like a cool drink waiting, he sat with slow fire in his eyes, just waiting.”  – Johnny Hartman singing A Slow Hot Wind. 

He comes from an old Dorset family that made grandfather clocks and had a swan’s head as their emblem.” – a posh woman boasting about the man who her daughter is marrying.

“Hey, is there anywhere to play pickleball around here?” – a student in Starbucks.

“I can hear monks chanting.” – Charlie laid in bed in the middle of the night.

“The drawback is that you always get corn dust up your bum.” – a farmer on the radio.

“Come and look at this rock, it’s shaped like your willy!” – a young girl shouting to her older brother.

Stolen Words / Commander in Camp


“The  president is a camp icon. He’s like a drag queen. He’s outrageous, he’s transgressive, he’s catty, he’s a narcissist the likes of which we haven’t seen since Alexander the Great.” – James Kirchick, journalist and author of ‘Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington’, as quoted in in The New York Times.

You want them to be yours, but they’re not, and never will be

Image: Alex Avgud

If someone asked me who the love of my life was, it would be the one that I’ve been waiting 15 years for. That’s how long my infatuation has lasted. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for him to realise that I am the one. But he knows all this, and isn’t in the slightest bit interested. It’s emotionally painful and challenging, and my resolve never weakens, but I know that it was never meant to be. I console myself with the things that are wrong about him. He is tall, blonde and lanky and everybody says that he has a tiny dick. He can be quite nasty. He spends money he probably doesn’t have. He is disorganised and incredibly untidy. And there’s the annoyance that everything is handed to him on a plate. A relationship would never have worked, and this one-sided love is best left unfulfilled. But despite all these flaws, love can be irrational, broken but still loved.

Keep a notebook. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain… but it never happens


What is it with buying new notebooks? I see one that I like and end up putting it on the growing pile of unused ones, and I tell myself that one day I will put down all my thoughts and ideas until it is full, and resist the urge to start a new one. But it will never happen because there is something therapeutic about starting a new notebook. Those seductive pages that urge you to write something brilliant, but never actually get around to it.

When does a secret stop being a secret?


I swear that I didn’t tell anyone, Colvey. I know that you won’t believe me, but I didn’t write this. It was supposed to be a secret between us. But if I’m honest, I kinda like the fact that you like twiddling. 

That Moment / Once you ignored me, and now I am special

I saw you several times and you ignored me. Why do I remember that? It was because I thought you were handsome. But ignorance turned into friendship, and I hadn’t realised how generous you were. And that generosity came from Robin Hood. Steal from the wealthy, and give it to others. I met you tonight, fresh faced and smart, a tap on the shoulder, a cheeky wink, and you gave me a bottle of beer. I doubted that you had ever ignored me. 

He understood that a work of art, or an effort to create beauty, was regarded by some people as a personal attack

They said he was a prodigy, and I didn’t doubt it. Pour le piano. He played notes that were delicate and haunting. But those gentle sounds had meaning and showed that he recognised beauty but didn’t know what to do with it, and this was the cause of his torment.

He peered from underneath a baseball cap, sad frightened eyes, that looked at the door behind.

“When Debussy died on March 25, 1918, in Paris, it was being bombarded by the Germans….” He stopped playing, “ … “and it was raining.” I’d heard this line before but couldn’t remember where.

He walked towards the bookshelf and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that were hidden behind Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. The holy egoism of genius. He blew smoke into the air. “I am repaired, reconstructed, remodelled, remixed, rethought, reimagined, reinterpreted, rekindled, reactivated, but not rebooted!”

***

Almost everything here is inspired by Art of Noise

That Moment / I felt nothing because I was happy

A girl who was supposed to be Ian Van Dahl mimed Castles in the Sky on stage. We wandered along the dark balcony and thought that it was incredibly good. Balloons rained down and the crowd shrieked. She reached the chorus line – Oh tell me why. Are the castles way up high. Please tell me why. Do we build castles in the sky? – and it all went wrong. I tripped over a hidden step and fell twenty feet below. I felt nothing because I was happy. I lay there and heard a guy say, “That was a fucking big balloon!”