Even now, as I’m writing this, I have Netflix on and I keep going back to Café Panic on my phone to build my café empire, which is infinitely more satisfying than anything else I could be doing for some reason, which is … probably way more sad than it is funny.
In my pre-COVID world, binge viewing was the default mode. Now, pace has become my strategy for survival. In a moment when time is amorphous and frequently daunting, I use these self-contained, individual seasons to mark time and the passage of it.
A ritual on Zoom is not something you can just watch, like digital, performative experiences nowadays. The participants are gathered in an assembly of sorts, like in live theatre: the ritual cannot happen without an audience that can sense each other. And yet there’s a distance.
I have put trust in a government that carries a bad history of lying. I tell myself it’s kinda like that lover who keeps breaking your heart and you keep saying “okay it’s fine whatever” because a part of you is just waiting for the relationship to somehow end and the other part of you knows that those are the only four words this language has allowed you to learn, practice and speak.
Here’s the best part. When we can finally see each other again, we will all have a renewed love for social interactions and friendships. Having been through that once, it’s the thing that is giving me the most hope.
It’s a beautiful mess. The mad, disabled and chronically-ill life, a place of vulnerability and marginality, is inseparable from a world where merely existing can be laborious.
For a hot second I worried I had totally lost touch, but the truth is that the reason I make art at all is because I want to make our world better. I could talk your ear off about my theories on art’s relationship with society and politics, but at the end of the day, cut and dry that’s what I’m about.
It’s no secret to anyone who knows anything about me at all that I love horror movies. In the 1980s, I prayed at the altar of the local video store. For a rural, small-town boy, with only limited access to blockbuster movies at the local movie theatre, each VHS tape introduced me to new worlds and experiences.
I’m an advocate for questions. One of the foundations of my artistic practice is striving to find the right questions to ask. Questions hold power and possibility. Finding the right question to ask myself or another creator can be the key to unlocking creative discovery. A really good question keeps revealing new layers. A really good question is a reminder that life is not fixed, but in a state of constant change, and that we can keep trying new responses, new ways of answering.
there are some moments, where the feelings of grief and loneliness sit heavily in my chest. i think about how familiar these feelings can be for queers + trauma survivors. one day, I go to the park + cry as I listen to the bodyguard soundtrack. thank goodness for whitney houston. she just gets it.