Henry Geldzahler Cut Me From the Herd
I'm starting a thread for all my brethren who were cut from the herd by Henry Geldzahler. If this is not you, please move on and let us reminisce in peace.
If this is you, please share your stories.
I usually take a pilgrimage to Assouline to have my photo taken beneath this one of Henry Geldzahler and Andy Warhol, two guys who meant so much to my early life in NYC. They opened lots of doors for me into the inner rarefied rooms of the city until they nudged me from the nest to make room for other youngsters they cut from the herd to add to their folds. Henry would have cringed at that mixed metaphor; Andy might have noticed but would not have allowed himself to cringe and mar the mask of himself. They knew when I was ready to make my own way once I'd learned more fully and cleverly the charms of palaver and poise and a kind of performative southernness, some would even say it was - it is - a perversion of southernness because of my politics. But labeling it so just signals their own perverse contextualization of southernness to exclude my hero Fannie Lou Hamer to make way for hoop skirts and "how y'all?"s and honeyed accents that hide the sting of history. Henry and Andy helped me find a sense of home within my southern self when for so long what was within myself back home was what sent me into exile. Henry and Andy - exiled themselves to lives in NY - taught me that to have stayed back where we were raised would have been sentencing ourselves instead to an exile from ourselves. "Sometimes," Henry once said to me. "We are born in Elba. It's getting off that island to this one that saves our lives." He paused and put a Grether's Pastille into his mouth and stared at his half a cigar. He straightened his porcelain bowtie. I heard, as usual, the clink of the ring against it, a ring his jeweler cousin Johnny gave him, a hollowed out gold one inside of which were two small diamonds that could be emptied into one's hand from a tiny secret compartment. Henry emptied them into his soft small palm, they glistened in its pinkness. "Do you know what the name of the ship on which Napoleon was sent to his exile on Elba?" he asked. "The Undaunted. The HMS Undaunted."
| by Anonymous | reply 8 | May 8, 2024 4:14 PM
|
Kevin Sessums is an asshole, but he is a human asshole who isn't famous enough to be incessantly stalked here, have accidents and ill health wished on him, and to have his health problems mocked.
| by Anonymous | reply 3 | May 3, 2024 5:54 AM
|
I could not do it. My career went nowhere
| by Anonymous | reply 4 | May 3, 2024 5:59 AM
|
R3 Quit making things up to be mad at you preachy piss pot.
| by Anonymous | reply 5 | May 3, 2024 6:03 PM
|
R3 This is one paragraph. Defend that, you screeching, sorry ass bitch:
"Lenny and Hilda had been silent as he carefully removed the David Bowie astral sphere from her forehead with some cold cream and rubbing alcohol and was now softly scrubbing what remained with warm water and soap. This was what passed as a mother/son ritual for a former fashion magazine editor and her gay still-jobless-but-Bard-graduate 21-year-old son who had together just come from a “Not So Sweet Sixteen” come-as-your-favorite-rock-star party downstairs in the art gallery in their townhouse where they now lived in this small river town in upstate New York, that first part of this run-on sentence what Hilda was thinking about writing in her journal later, the writing-it-all-down in such a context both a foreshadowing and forestalling of the memoir several publishing houses were trying to convince her to write. But Hilda had always lived in the present - hummed about in it, humming about and insistently present the only place she’d actually ever felt at home until she settled here along the Hudson - so much so that even “focusing on the future is just a way to memorize my past in order to recite it back to myself with more concern in my voice,” she had written last week in the journal and when she read that out loud to Rosemary, who was a better writer than she, was told to keep the cryptic quality of it. “Sometimes,” said Rosemary, “we don’t have to understand what we write because a reader will.” Hilda liked that. It let her off the hook, and the only thing she liked better than being let off one was escaping one herself, slipping from it and humming about in the current, a double-entendre she would concentratedly try to remember later as she instead tried now to concentrate on getting her son to look into her concerned eyes instead of focusing so intently on cleaning her forehead. Hilda’s concentration in this moment was finally more maternal - finally - than Lenny’s even though he was being performative in his tenderness in the way she had always expressed such a thing toward him when she found herself trying to act like a mother instead of being one. Lenny’s concentration, in fact, had the odd incongruous depth of the makeup artists Hilda had too often noticed when a photo shoot had lost the light and it was time for a model to be scrubbed of scrutiny. Yes. In the morning, she’ll suggest yet again just short of insisting - an old editorial tone of hers she too often employed with him - that he apprentice with a makeup artist, a female one she was quite fond of, who was always looking for an artistic type to tag along and make her feel both young yet old at the same time, that vibratory axis on which the fashion world spun, that neither/nor netherworld - more incongruity - where allure timelessly lay though alas agelessly did not."
| by Anonymous | reply 6 | May 4, 2024 8:06 AM
|
MMMUUURRRRIIEEEELLLLLLLLL
| by Anonymous | reply 7 | May 4, 2024 1:56 PM
|
We need to find ways to navigate culturally and politically this new landscape in which we are all living now and stop falling back too safely into the old paradigm that does nothing to thwart the political dangers in which we are living by denying they are here by insisting on being ensconced in an old paradigm of our parents and grandparents' time.
| by Anonymous | reply 8 | May 8, 2024 4:14 PM
|
