Like many gay men, I understood at an early age that a fey gesture or tone of voice could put me in harm’s way
‘Is it possible to make a work of art that is not embodied in an object?’
A ponderous silence.
‘Well?’ said Delia.
‘Is it the artist’s job to answer questions, or to ask them?’
In a classroom in Manhattan on a rainy day, my perception of art was changed forever. Vito Acconci’s pedagogy …
[...] His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when she and I sat down behind them.
Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real estate agent came out to see if the adjacent area would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line a…
I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete a…
