So $640. later, I leave with faith and antibiotics.  After a week of watching my beloved boy go from his mister happy, rambunctious self  – a cat who used to wolf his food down, and eat nearly anything – now barely manage a lick here and there, I need the hope. The anti-nausea shot and subcutaneous fluids seem to help, he eats a little, and drinks, and gets a little burst of his old energy. Sick with a summer cold, I go to sleep feeling a little less worried and sad only to wake and find all our effort vomited up in small glistening heaps strewn across the floor.  I start to wonder why he’s on antibiotics as the bacteria test supposedly came out clear according to the doctor’s follow-up call. And while I know that supposedly this type of antibiotic can reduce inflammation – the central issue here, as Roman’s general diagnosis is IBD, evidenced by chronic diarrhea – I still wonder if its benefit outweigh the negatives as antibiotics increase nausea and diarrhea. And the outcome of the fancy expensive test I did consent to was, as I went in there expecting, that steroids are the next step, according to that update as well.

I call the vet’s office, and as they did a few weeks back, when my Gigi got poisoned – or so it appeared – by eating some of my geranium plant, they immediately suggest going to an emergency vet. I don’t understand this new protocol, although given how little I use their services, maybe this has been standard practice for a while. But to what end? Avoiding malpractice concerns, or for those visits that will prove less lucrative/worthy of their time.  It set me off to hear it again. No, I declared. I want to talk to my vet who just treated my animal, discuss these questions, and get him in there again for another round of fluids and anti-nauseous shot. And pick up the cortisone/steroids. HE NEEDS TO EAT, and you should be doing the follow-up.  My nerves are frayed. We make an appointment for the next day. I spend another nite entreating him every 15-20 minutes to eat.  Returning to his little bed over and over again with a new, perhaps more enticing option of cat food to no avail.  Following him around when he does move, doing more of the same, creating a veritable buffet of bowls on the kitchen floor.

I take him in the next day, apologize to the receptionist for being a bitch, we have a laugh, and another vet, his wife, co-owner of the practice, skims Roman’s file says, misses a couple of things, calls him a she, and perfunctorily tells me I really ought to do the ultrasound – the insanely expensive test  to rule out the cancer. I say, you think so? Pretending to be sincere, yet also falling prey, as I tend to, to her guilt tactics. She has that “we’re just telling you what’s best for your pet’s health” tone that nearly all vets do, and it too is both false and yet sincere. She called him “bubula”, which was pretty sweet but I also heard her get nasty with an underling. Another $175.

The good news is, at the moment, he’s stabilized, and seeing that grin as he bounced on the bed to greet me, obviously feeling much closer to his old self than he had for a while, was a heart-bursting moment. But its band-aid therapy. And I’l take it, with deep gratitude, as long as he feels well. I will not watch him waste away though, so when this fails, I will have to face the music, and get that vet over to put him down at home.

Dealing with all of this has had me thinking a lot about how we deal with aging and illness in this culture as well as my ongoing distrust for doctors of any kind in the current system.  Also, after my dad suffered a major setback recently, a fall and concussion that involved over a week of Intensive Care, and the further impediment of his mobility. Which for a man of 83 who has had Multiple Sclerosis  for 40 years, is pretty serious. The difference between his living at home, as he’s done, under my mother’s care, or going into a home. These choices, or the lack thereof, just reveals the dysfunction relationship our culture has to life, death, community, and suffering.

As my 50th birthday creeps up on me, I keep thinking I need to think hard about how I’m going to experience being a caregiver, and eventually a patient. Weighing the agency I have in that against the fear of helplessness. I wrote about my vet experience in such tedious detail in part because I simply needed to share it, but also because we tend to avoid the details, not because they’re tedious but because therein lies so much of the isolation and pain.  Several times during the course of writing this post,  I’ve been interrupted by my Roman who is clearly feeling more energetic, and every time, I stop to engage him. My instinct is to do everything I possibly can to minimize his suffering and perk up his spirits. That’s the choice I’ve made for how I’m going to deal with his demise despite what the vets might say. But the doubt, the worry, the guilt and pressure are exhausting.  Shouldn’t “medical care” seek to accommodate and alleviate stress, rather than exacerbate it? All that said, my boy is back to his old self, a little more rickety, and my vet helped make that happen. Maybe compassion attracts compassion?

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Clearly, true capitalists know better than to alienate or judge consumers, and keep morals out of the transaction. Its the ideologues who’ve got an agenda, and usually a righteous mission to justify it, one with an absolutist vision – insert bible thumpers here – that bring morality into the equation – insert corporate right-wingers, religious zealots, and all the other wealthy nutjobs whose strings are being played by a cold-calculating capitalist here. So believe me, I’m very cynical and kind of ick-ed out by how mainstream so many gay and straight folks I know have become, in large part as they chose to participate in that get married, buy a house/apartment, bear offspring, bourgeois nuclear family thing.

BUT there’s a spectrum of POVs, and its always taken those working from within and without the system to change it, I think. Ever heard of the Trojan Horse? Celebrating the supreme court’s ruling – a victory for civil rights!!!! – that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, and on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, is a beautiful thing!!! Its one damn weekend, and we can still continue to advocate for #blacklivesmatter, #abortionrights, etc. because in no way should what happened in Charleston, SC, be forgotten, nor should the protests, of which i’ve been part of, stop.

And maybe there’s an unexamined bias in some of these anti-pride critiques that stems from an Amerocentric (not a word, but should be) perspective that forecloses what Pride parades and rainbow flags mean to the rest of the world? Its easy to forget the utter bravery, the warrior-like resolve, required to carry that flag in places where homosexuality is still a crime.  Punishable by death. Places where people boldly and heroically risk their LIVES to be out and proud. As those at Stonewall once did. I was so touched, for example,  to see a friend, a longterm survivor of AIDS march today with veterans of the latter, though it was a pic of a Ugandan man striding down a dirt road, wrapped in a long rainbow cloth tied at his waist, that brought me to tears. Don’t forget Uganda just passed the most draconian anti-gay legislation, and despite the state sanctioned violence this man’s action could provoke, he marched anyway. So its important to remember rainbow flags aren’t just co-opted signs of capitalist-assimilation for everyone on the planet. For some, it represents solidarity with an identity so radical its met with murderous hatred. In Istanbul, parade goers were attacked by police with rubber bullets for fuck’s sake.

None of this is to suggest everyone who is gay, queer-identified, or allied with civil rights, should wave a rainbow flag around, but to say there’s no need to piss all over someone else’s celebration. Pride 2015, especially here in NYC, was momentous, and while I was not able to partake ( I’ve been hosting Turner-Prize nominated artists, Jane and Louise Wilson all weekend, in conjunction with a screening/talk they did for my show, From the Ruins…), I was there in spirit! Luckily, it seems the negative attitude didn’t register out in the streets.  But on Facebook I saw a LOT of it, and just felt the need to comment. As one friend counter-posted to all the ‘tude, and the implication that one can’t be Pro-Pride AND anti-assimilationist, “YES AND NO. We can feel both at once”, with the two following pics attached:

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SO, I decided to watch Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a film I’ve wanted to watch again.  I love Lynch’s work, and watching, I was reminded how much his aesthetic evokes David Cronenberg. And Viola! I’m not the only one!. Makes me wonder if there’s a female counterpart director – so insanely wrong that women directors are still so goddamn rare these days…But back to the film (for me, that is), which I highly recommend! Here’s a pic of the ever-fab Ann Miller channeling perfect 60s SoCal grooviness as Mrs. Coco Lenoix! I want to recreate that hair look somehow…

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I’ve always avoided the sadistic pleasure of gang-ups because of natural compassion for anyone under attack, not  to mention the issue of context, which is essential. and easily missed, I might add, esp. on social media.

Lately, virtual bullying seems all the rage as schoolyard trolls go meta.  I’m thinking of the year-old case of Justine Sacco, the gift that keeps on giving. If you recall, she’s  the woman who tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” to her 120  followers, and in the 11-hour plane trip home during which she had no cell service, received 20,000 tweets shaming her for it. That someone in Cape Town, South Africa, would take up a Twitter challenge by a stranger thousands of miles away to go wait at the airport to meet and tweet Sacco’s shocked reaction when she learned of her infamy shows just how far people are willing to go. Sure, the tweet had become what her BFF called “the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now”, but still, really?!

If you don’t know what I talking about, I recommend reading  this excellent Times Magazine piece by Jon Ronson, a guy who acknowledges his own impulse to chastize in it. He shares how he began to control said impulse once he saw the wake of trauma it caused, having interviewed several victims of the virtual mob. Many, who like Sacco, were traumatized long after that elusive, all-important context came to light, and in some cases vindicated them. Ironically, one such case was a young woman from Michigan who dressed as a Boston marathon victim for Halloween, which I’ll admit was as tasteless as Sacco’s sick joke.  I’ll also admit that it made laugh out loud. Why I don’t know. Maybe the slapstick ghastliness of the costume seems perfect for Halloween?

I mean, OF COURSE its wroooooong, the idea of family members and loved ones enduring the joke makes it so. But as we all know, social media is all about getting attention, and such displays have become as pedestrian as bad tattoos and duckface selfies. That’s why its no surprise someone tried to up the Ante with a better costume – a kind of FUCK YOU to the morality police, I suppose, as well as  a way to capitalize on the reaction.

 All of this puts me in two minds on the issue. My unwavering commitment to defend free speech (always balanced by the equal conviction that people have a right to protest what they feel they must) undermined by a nagging “what did they expect would happen?” disbelief. The kind I typically reserve for the dangerously naive. Is that an invitation to jump on the Blame & Shame wagon (haters all aboooard, toot toot – I mean, tweet, tweet)? NO.  I’m just acknowledging the growing lack of responsibility/concern for one’s public behavior never mind the consequences of one’s actions when the stakes are so obviously high.

Clearly, social media exploits and encourages these outre outbursts. Twitter, which breeds sensationalism like Facebook on steroids, seems the worst. Another reason – in addition to just not having the time –  that I don’t tweet. The instant sharing of instant thoughts in a forum designed to make us want to be “liked”, “shared”, and “followed” has turned into a kind of virtual Russian roulette. I chose not to play. (And believe me, there’ve been many a social media scandal vis a vis the art world in which  I could’ve assumed a beef, or added my two cents, but abstained. Because I felt sorry for the person being attacked – the stuff of nightmares! – and/or was appalled by the hypocrisy of those joining the fray – their own bases ambitions for doing so being no better than those they sought to virtually lynch.) So where does that leave me? Disturbed.

APRIL 5, 2015/ UPDATE: This Atlanta piece offers a critical view on Jon Ronson’s new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, 2015, claiming it “vividly warns about the power of angry mobs online but ultimately misdiagnoses what drives the modern cycles of indignation.” This pretty much gives you the gist, in a way, reflecting my own perspective, which is strangely reassuring: Stone didn’t mean for the image of her disrespecting a national monument to be seen by many people, but is it any great surprise that what’s literally the most anti-patriotic symbolic gesture a person can make might get out onto the wider Internet once it’s on Facebook? Sacco tossed into the world a joke about racism that actually came off, to many, as racist; is the takeaway that people are too sensitive, or that it’s a good idea to carefully consider matters before sending out a joke about AIDS in Africa, of all topics?

We are living in very tricky times when it comes to what is “appropriate” behavior in the public sphere, and to the backlash against all things PC, which intrigues me.

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Someone on Facebook recently posted this image of the Hindu goddess Kalaratri, the fiercest version or aspect of Kali-Durga, consort of Shiva, I believe (Hindu mythology makes me dizzy), and I became very intrigued. According to asianart.org, “Durga appeared when the gods were unable to subdue a demon who was threatening the entire world. Individually, the gods were unable to defeat the demon. They summoned Durga and gave her all their weapons. The battle went on and on, prolonged by the fact that Mahisha [demons] continually changed shapes.” And of course, she triumphs. Durga apparently has eight other manifestations as well:

Kalaratri is typically represented by cascades of black hair lit by the stars, dark/blue skin, and four hands: two in the mudras of giving, the others clutching a cleaver and torch, respectively. She’s also usually on a horse. She’s celebrated on the seventh day of the festival Navaratri, as the image above relates, and sometimes bears Kali’s bloody tongue:

For me, she embodies the necessity of a mother-warrior archetype for which there are few western parallels. Some in Greco-Roman and Euro-pagan traditions, but none in the Judeo-Christian. The idea of a fearsome female deity who could be both destroyer and savior, capable of subduing evil while sustaining life, is obviously just too complicated and threatening for patriachs;).  Polytheistic belief systems are always more egalitarian that-a-ways as there’s room for variety and permutation built in.  Anyway, I’ve always found Durga inspiring, and this version of her, Kalaratri, was new for me, so I thought I’d share. BTW, I could find no other representation of her similar to the first one I posted, which a friend suggested may be part of a deck of cards (there is no information online).

For more info on Kalartri, go here. And if you have time, and want to explore more, I highly recommend checking out my friend Liz Insogna’s amazing project, Goddess, Speak; a series of invocations, writing, art and audio interviews.  Through cross-cultural studies of the goddess, she creates vivid and introspective portraits that are truly divine.

Liz Insogna,The Chinnamasta, ink on paper, 2014

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The photos were instantly compelling. I’d spend hours obsessively going through them, getting very drawn into the narratives they suggested, selecting those I liked based on various criteria, subjective, aesthetic, social, etc. They were so cheap, I couldn’t help myself, and sometimes I wanted to preserve the integrity of what could be 3 generations of family snapshots, so I got a lot. Over the years I found other junk shops with photos, but some were priced as precious. Luckily I found another place with a similar penchant (more like a willingness, I’d suspect) for taking in entire estates, The Thing, which opened in my neighborhood right about the time Sid’s closed. At first, I began collecting old stationary and greeting cards from the later, until I realized they had flat files in the back stuffed with old pics. The Thing then became my haunt, and I’d sit in a corner of the dirty store on the floor, slavishly going through drawer after drawer, flipping through thousands of images. I got many gems from both places, photos dating back to the early 20th century, polaroids of every format, pics printed on scalloped paper or in stereo formats, taken on all kinds of cameras: the variety was endless and enthralling!

Obvious categories emerged – birthdays, vacations, holidays, pets and kids, etc. – but I learned things too like it was weirdly common for guys in the 1920s-1940s to form pyramids or other formal shapes for group portraits (mimicking sports, I guess?). And people love posing with their cars. I’ve got photos from the 1950s of an old pet cemetery, images of WWII soldiers (including Nazis), amateur porn, representations across class and race as well as subjects and formats.

Anyway, a while back an intern of mine scanned some of the pics from my collection, a mere fraction of what I have, and I just came across the file, so thought I’d share here. The resolution is low, but they’re still great to look at. Of course, “vernacular photography” has now become a mega market with serious collectors (including famous photographers and museums) such that I don’t even bother to look anymore. I have so many as it is, and really need to spend time archiving rather than adding to the collection. Last summer a dealer rather greedily offered to buy them off me when he realized what I had, and I visibly recoiled at the suggestion. I’ve always felt rather protective of these images, which I think of as my orphans. I’ve shared them with very few people, so this is a big deal. Remember these photographs represent real people’s lives, and represent a time when personal photos were just that, PERSONAL. Yes, they also represent a history of technology, shifts in cultural and social mores, and a relationship to photos that you couldn’t entirely control. There are many “mistakes” and unintentionally interesting images in my collection, for example, that in today’s digital world would’ve been deleted, gone. Anyway, ENJOY respectfully, and please don’t disseminate without permission of acknowledgement, thank you!

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It was quite interesting as my mom has always been a devout Catholic out of duty to her mother and grandmother and their faith. She believes that religions aren’t bad, people are. Clearly power corrupts and this is a fundamental issue with all religions as they are ideologies, political, and usually hierarchical. I told her I didn’t believe in reincarnation as Buddhists do, so couldn’t identify as such other than to acknowledge the significance of basic tenets and meditation. I never believed Jesus was the son of God but was just a holy man, a social rebel who modeled compassion, and communal living without caste systems, etc. To my utter surprise, she agreed!

Of course, my mother has always been openly critical of the Church and has spoken out against its history of corruption (the Crusades, which we discussed, being as she describes as evil, and a particularly sadistic form of terrorism, which torture is). She relayed a story about her trip to Isreal about 15 years ago, where on a tour that included a pagan temple, an Isreali guide told her some provocative things.

(As a German who lived through WWII as a small child, btw, she’s also been openly critical of how Palestinians have been treated, long before it was acceptable in polite society, if it even is.)

Apparently the guide told her that there some Jewish scholars acknowledged that Abraham was merely a biblical figure, ie, not someone who actually lived. And when my mother asked him, “Well, if that’s true, what’s that say about the existence of Christianity?” he replied, “I’m just a guide, ma’am, you’ll have to think that through, and draw your own conclusions.” My mom has been a major factor in my being a spiritual person because she intuitively understood and delineated religion from spirituality, underlying philosophies and their institutionalized bastards. I now know that there’s no dogma or guru I can submit to in an totality. I cannot believe in reincarnation or that deities are more than metaphors and repositories of certain kinds of energy (ala the Haitian Voudou tradition which, having taught and read a lot on it, is truly a beautiful system).

As I was telling my mom how much meditation and the practice of “letting be” had helped me, impossible as it was, haha, I mentioned that I’d thought about going on a silent retreat but the idea freaked me out too much. Esp. as I’ve not yet done a workshop retreat and after telling me I should do a workshop retreat first, she went on to say that my great-grandmother used to regularly go on silent retreats. As a Catholic!

I’d completely forgotten they existed in Catholicism. The retreat I went on in high school was so lame and felt like being in school, but just somewhere else where we listened to lectures focused on “religion”. She said, contrary to what they are now, then it was total silence, for days on end. That it was meant to put oneself in touch with their deeper beings, and to be healing for body and soul. I never knew this!!! I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been asked to be silent and just contemplate/meditate. We discussed how fundamental this was to most spiritual traditions, silence, that is. And this made me think of the Quakers who are Christian Buddhists, really. I find aspects of that kind of communal meditation quite moving, actually. I’d love to visit the Quaker church James Turrell designed.

When I got off the phone, I realized that there I was talking about being with “what is”, not trying to change, avoid, or hang on to it, and I’d been telling her what to do in relation to my dad and his various baby ways:) In fact, it was also very moving to hear her talk about what a good natured loving man he is (which he is, a total doll) if also not the most responsible husband/father who ever lived. In that moment I saw I was him and all I’d said was largely me talking to myself.

I remembered its not my job to try to change things for the better or worse, just to help when called for, and to relieve suffering when I can. My parents will play out their stories and story-lines just as everyone does. Like me not practicing what I preach, a trait that comes straight from dear old Dad.

My mom also told me how she asked my father if he’d thought about what would happen should she “go” first, and its too personal to relay here, but it was all equally revelatory. Once again, I saw myself in him. In that I’d also chosen not to think about it, and hadn’t considered it might have worried him.

Anyway, I don’t typically share personal moments like this on my blog, but I am really beginning to change my view of my mother, and it is profound. When we change our view of someone, they change, not the other way around, or at least not often enough, haha. Thanks, Mom.

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Since I’ve worn “vintage” clothing since the early, mid-1980s, from high school on (mostly late 1960s to early-mid 1970s), I’ve got things that old I’ve hung on to. I’ve also always decorated/outfitted my apartments with period furniture, linens, dish ware, etc. first with Deco, then mid-century, then space-age Panton era stuff, too, so this stuff will find its way into the shop too. Hopefully, the recent passion for all things “vintage” – Gap adverts acknowledge its lure, promoting their “technologically advanced” fabrics as a way to counter the competition – has created enough of a competitive market for it that I’ll make some money:)            

People are certainly willing to pay a lot more than I ever did or do. Time will tell, and romanlovesgigi is still in its infancy, the process being quite tedious (I will never look at an online auction/individually owned business the same again), so vintage lovers check back often as I’ll be uploading new items every day.        

On a totally different note, I just finished reading John Edgar Wideman’s 1990 novel, Philadelphia Fire, a poetic, meta-narrative about the infamous MOVE organization, whose West Philly headquarters were infamously fire-bombed by the city in 1985, killing 10 people, and decimating many houses around them.

Its a rather elliptical rendering, with very minimal attention to the facts told through tertiary narratives that take the form of the narrator’s recollections of growing up in Philadelphia as an African-American, working-class kid who became a creative-class/academic. These quasi-biographical discursions nonetheless evoke the guts and heart of the people moving in and out of the shadows of this historic catastrophe, and Wideman writes them right after it happens, so it’s both very vivid and yet removed from linear time (not enough facts/reflection to draw from so soon?).

If you want to better understand the tensions leading up to the fire-bombing (imagine your city block suddenly attacked like that as a means of routing out the inhabitants of one house), and the cult nature of MOVE, they are very compellingly conveyed in this great 2013 documentary, Let the Fire Burn, which you can watch for free! Its comprised mostly of found footage, and is just as entrancing as Wideman’s book, which is its poetic corollary.
You really get a sense of how much John Africa, the very intelligent founder of MOVE, was able to marshall this rag-tag army of followers, and turn their refusal to live by social norms into a revolution of sorts. And the way the state responds. It got me thinking about Jim Baker, another guru/leader whose philosophy over time became distorted by power, evolving into its own incendiary form of anarchy, if not literally. There’s a 2013 doc on his cult (I use that word, btw, in its most neutral sense) , The Source Family, also free online.     Along with the renewed interest in vintage stuff, it seems the fascination for all things cult has also re-emerged, perhaps in relation to the populist trend for going off the grid, and forming self-sufficient communities anathema to corporate-consumer existence.

The whole 1970s cult phenomena, a time when there were over 3,000 such self-identified orgs, its link to spiritual, civil rights, and sexual revolutions of the time, is of course, perpetually fascinating to me. I did, after all, in a moment of naive embrace, consider joining the Hari Krishnas in college when they came recruiting on campus, and joined a coven for a brief time after grad school with a boyfriend.

Of course, I could never submit to an individual’s authority, esp. a man (I got enough of that growing up Catholic), but the desire for spiritual growth has and will always appeal, and not just to me. Thinking, as atheists do, that any such pursuit is simply fantasy-inducing escapism, a willing of your power away to some non-existent force, is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater imho. Though the dangers of leaders gone awry, of the inevitable corruption that comes with power, etc. are of course, inescapably real.

Probably why when I participated in a summer solstice ritual this weekend, which brought me back to my “new age” moment of the 1980s, I experienced pleasure/nostalgia with a smidgen of cynical doubt, the same irony from which this blog’s name derived. How to be authentic without the foundation and legacy of tradition, historical, cultural, and biographical? Does donning the clothes of another era beg the same question? Certainly when I watch 20-somethings parade around in their long hair and beards, shirtless in their birkenstocks, I do wonder. Food for thought….

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It reminded me of the power images still have (sometimes we all feel inured), though I would’ve thought the two photographs at the end of the interview were more “disturbing”. You decide (I find the second one pretty gross). I’ve placed them side by side. Both the images and Bruce’s work in general make me think of a great quote by Donna Hathaway from her iconic early work, A CYBORG MANIFESTO, 1983, part of which you can read here: “blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community.” I should’ve used it, but it didn’t occur to me, oh well, too late:)

(above) Bruce LaBruce, Rasberry Reich, 2004 (censored)

(below) Bruce LaBruce, photographs from exhibition, Obscenity, 2012, LaFresh Gallery, Madrid (not censored)

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