With a smug look on his face, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit is arrested by the New York Police Department for his dicey tightrope-walking performance between the roofs of the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.
Nº1 •
Flirting with Clouds
There’s not a small number of iconic New York City photographs, but few convey with greater intensity the endless possibilities the city harbours for those willing to take risks than Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers at 411 metres above the ground. The image, taken on 7 August 1974 at about 7.30 in the morning, captures the French high-wire artist suspended in the air, crossing between the towers on a wire only twenty-five millimetres in diameter, with no net under him. I can’t begin to imagine what drives some performers to put their lives at risk for the sake of their art, the kind of rush Petit experienced that day, and the addictive nature of adrenaline. Slenderly built and sheathed in a sexy black bodysuit, on his face we see the concentration and satisfaction of performing for the daily commuters and the occasional seagull gliding through the air – not quite able to understand how tremendous a feat this is. Looking at the photo, I can’t help but wonder if the spectators were fearing for his life. Or were they ultimately experiencing their own rush knowing they were also part of the act? Voyeurs to a performance that, given the police sirens, shouldn’t be happening. Petit crossed the forty metres between the towers not once or twice but eight times. As he became more comfortable with the wind pushing and pulling his bird-like body, he began dancing. At one point, he proceeded to lay down on the wire with the same ease with which one lays down in a hammock. Petit has said that the only real danger he experienced that summer day was being pushed down the stairs handcuffed by police officers. He was charged with trespassing but given the option of having the charges dropped if he performed an aerial show for children in Central Park. He abided. A small price to pay for conquering the celestial stage and realising a life’s dream that took him to the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world. The twins were his muses. New York the only city where far-reaching dreams are never too far.
Although playful and flirtatious at first, photography came to be about searching for one’s self for Alberto García-Alix, inciting him to break conventions in his portraits of himself, strangers and loved ones.
Nº2 •
A Bridge Over the Abyss
The images of Alberto García-Alix, a photographer who came to prominence for capturing ‘La Movida,’ the countercultural movement that took place in Madrid after Franco’s death, document those living in the fast lane – hookers, drug users and abusers, bikers (the Hells Angels type), and porn actors and actresses who, at the time of the shutter going off, appear to be caught reflecting on their life choices, wondering whether they will make it through. As it turns out, many didn’t.
García-Alix also shot some seminal artists of that time like Pedro Almodóvar, Camarón de la Isla and Rossy de Palma, among others, as well as taking still life photos. But his images of bad boys and girls are unlike any others. They contain the kind of sexual energy, rough and primal, that some might fantasise about while having sex with their long-time partners. His subjects don’t seem to abide by societal constraints or be emotionally available, making the idea of having sex with them all the more desirable. García-Alix has the uncanny ability to cut through to his subjects and expose their inner selves, most likely because he is one of them. Or was. He stopped taking drugs a decade ago or so after some health complications, but not before spending more than twenty-five years using heroin and cocaine and travelling the world on his Harley-Davidson looking for the shots that made him the photographer he is today. In his most remarkable portraits, García-Alix captures both the reverberations of his subjects’ most questionable actions and their need for redemption. In his images, we experience a condensed version of the hell his subjects have gone through or are about to. One of the artists that comes to mind when looking at his work is the American photographer Nan Goldin. Both chronicle a life in the darkness, an epoch and particular cities. Madrid in his case. Boston, New York and Berlin in hers. They equally document the underground world they barely survived, but, unlike Goldin’s, the images of García-Alix are charged with a viscous sensuality. His subjects stare at you with a harrowing intensity, an open invitation to join them as they jump over the abyss.
Artist David Wojnarowicz intimately writes of perilous experiences, particularly sexual encounters, in his scathing and seductive autobiography-cum-essay collection Close to the Knives (1991).
Nº3 •
Close to the Knives
‘In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins,’ my favour-ite autobiographical essay in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) by David Wojnarowicz, describes in an oneiric, kaleidoscopic voice, at times making it hard to understand what is imagined from what is lived, the intoxicating rush and addictive nature of cruising. Wojnarowicz, a multifaceted artist who used a wide array of media including painting, collages, graffiti, photography and writing, among others, provides an account of sexual encounters both realised and frustrated, against the backdrop of what it meant to be queer in America during the AIDS crisis. Growing up in an abusive home in New Jersey, the artist moved to New York City in his early teens, where he became a street hustler who frequented a sordid and underworldly Times Square – not the Disneyland version we know today. Sex became both a way to subsist in the city and a way to explore his identity. Part of the East Village art scene of the 1980s, Wojnarowicz cruised the abandoned warehouses and piers of the Hudson River and helped claim the ruined waterfront as a queer space. Today, long after the ramshackle edifices have been completely erased, the West side piers remain crucial spaces for LBGTQ+ people, especially for queer youth.
In the essay, we find the artist cruising far away from New York, in a ‘machine of speed,’ travelling through the open roads of the West and Southern states with their seedy rest stops, rusty gas stations, and the thrill of being caught in the sexual act amplified by the State Police troopers’ constant surveillance. In one extraordinary passage, he enters a bathroom at a rest stop somewhere in Arizona and cruises a massive man of unusual dimensions through a peephole in the bathroom stall. They soon get in their respective cars and follow each other through the desert on a service road. The man stops near a bridge, Wojnarowicz parking behind him, only to walk up to the stranger’s car and sit next to him. They unzip and start jerking off, both alert, one of them looking through the rearview mirror, and the other looking ahead through the windshield. Two bodies full of desire and urgency in the dangerous and extreme landscape of Arizona, full of scorpions and rattlers, and cops and troopers, the fear of being caught more thrilling than the sex itself.
An emotionally raw, sizzling romance, Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together (1997) follows two men who, despite their destructive and turbulent connection, continue to take a chance on each other.
Nº4 •
Happy Together
Happy Together (1997), the Hong Kong drama film nominated for the Palme d’Or, for which Wong Kar-Wai won the Best Director award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is a heartbreaking, beautifully elliptical cinematic story of two lovers, Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai, a gay couple from Hong Kong who travel to Argentina, their relationship beginning to crumble. Their love might have been healthy at some point, but by the time the viewer is brought into their lives it has degraded into the kind of toxic love that becomes an emotional labyrinth impossible to escape. The movie opens with the protagonists stranded on a road on their way to the Iguazú Falls, as they get into what seems like yet another fight. The men decide to part ways, and this rupture, we will learn later, is one of many, their accumulation becoming the main narrative device of the film. The breathtaking opening images of the Iguazú Falls, one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, shot by cult cinematographer Christopher Doyle, capture the turbulence of the relationship with great intensity as it begins to unfold in all its toxicity, seemingly reaching a point of no return. Is there a better metaphor for a passionate love story than being on the verge of a mesmerising waterfall, 2,700 metres wide? The images manage to portray both the immense beauty and tremendous danger of the 82-metre-high fall. Edited to a beautiful tango, the sounds of the bandoneon, an instrument in the accordion family, rhythmic and nostalgic, make the possibility of jumping into the abyss all the more romantic.
Throughout the film, as if caught in the centrifugal motion of the waterfall itself, Ho and Lai fight and make amends over and over, their desires seemingly orchestrated by a force of nature rather than by personal choice. Their lack of money to return home, radically different values and a tacit codependency are the surface issues that keep them in this loop. But there’s more to it: the irrational and inexplicable undercurrent that exists in every fraught relationship, which Doyle’s handheld camera with its voyeuristic style and overexposed film, along with Kar-Wai’s use of music and editing, so masterfully convey. Moments of complete bliss become more heightened as the characters dive into the dark-ness towards a constellation of pain.
Nº5 •
The Risk of Leaving Home
Leaving your childhood home usually marks the beginning of adult life, a moment as exhilarating as it is scary. When you also leave the town you grew up in and the country you were born in, the opportunity to forge a new identity becomes exponential. The Moon and the Bonfires (1949), the novel by Cesare Pavese, one of the best Italian novelists and thinkers of all time, captures the complexities of homecoming with great depth. Here’s a quote from the opening pages: ‘We need a country, if only for the sake of getting away. A country means not being alone, knowing that in the people, in the plants, in the land there is something of yours, which even when you are not there remains waiting for you.’ Written in exquisitely spare prose, the novel follows a narrator whom we only know by his nickname, Eel, as he returns to Italy after having spent most of his life in California. The story does not try to answer the question posed in most immigrant novels: what is home? But, rather, a more complex one: what does home mean and how does it manifest for those who leave it?
Of course, those questions can’t be answered in a vacuum. As Eel returns to his homeland, we experience his melancholy for a place drastically changed by World War II, a constant yearning for a past that no longer exists. The difficult decision to leave home with its consequent risks made, in retrospect, when he was too young a man, constantly filtering in. What would have happened had I stayed? One of the most remarkable things I find about the novel is how Pavese elucidates that the idea of nationality is not connected to national identity and borders, but to the innate relationship we develop as kids with the landscape and its topography. And to people, known and unknown, like distant reverberations that help us understand who we thought we were and who we might be now.
French poet Charles d’Orléans not only ventured into writing in a language different from his native tongue but was also one of the first poets to write in the courtly tradition, making him an avid risk-taker.
Nº6 •
Language as Reinvention
From Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov to Yoko Tawada and Dinaw Mengestu, authors have been choosing a literary language other than their mother tongue since at least the 15th century. One of the very first writers to do this was Charles d’Orléans, a French medieval poet who wrote hundreds of poems in English during his captivity as a war prisoner. If we look at the literary canon, some remarkable works like Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) and Heart of Darkness (1899), to name some of my favourites, have been written by these ‘post-national’ writers who brought a non-Anglo-Saxon aesthetic into English and American literature.
Literary writing is already an arduous enterprise. Why, then, make it harder by doing it in a language that is not your native language? Some of the reasons derive from geopolitical circumstances. Migrants flee their countries of birth because of civil wars, dictatorships, extreme poverty, or because of the risk of prosecution for their sexual orientation or gender identity. In these cases, the need to write in a new language due to geographic displacement is imposed on them. But there are many others, luckier ones no doubt, for which writing in a non-native language is a voluntary act. By writing in a second language, these authors acquire a greater detachment from the tool itself. Language goes from being an intuitive and, oftentimes, subconscious process to a more deliberate one. This new way of constructing sentences and choosing words draws the writer closer to the idea of an artist with brushes and a set of colours – the tools being separate from the body. The effects of this process are potentially not just aesthetic. As one chooses words that are new and shiny, and in some cases detached from shame, the author unearths truths that otherwise might never surface.
Nº7 •
The Blank Page is a Naked Self
If there is one similitude between the consummate and inexperienced writer, it is that, when faced with the blank page, both feel like meeting their naked selves. It could be thrilling if you are feeling good or sexy about yourself, or scary if you are going through a somewhat vulnerable phase. In either case, every insecurity manages to find its way onto the page, the risk of failure prominent and looming until the page is no longer blank. One of the most daunting aspects of every beginning is the overwhelming number of possibilities, for the experience of having done it once is nothing but a flickering light that cannot be trusted.
It is by choosing one word versus another that the writer slowly begins to create an inroad that will take them in a specific direction. Writing becomes the promise of a place but also the leaving of other places.
Said in the simplest way, writing is putting one word after another word after another word, 80,000 times in the case of an average-length novel. But writing could also be defined as the process of making something that is not working work; the majority of the effort is spent finding the right word and discarding all the wrong ones, because there is a word, and one word only, that is right for the sentence. And though the idea of ‘right and wrong’ might seem simplistic, even judgemental, I can’t find a better way to illustrate the process. This doesn’t mean that in order to go forward some words are ‘right’ for the time being but ‘wrong’ in the long run. They are, like a scaffolding, necessary to keep building the piece. It is when the text has finally taken its final shape that one needs to go back and replace the ‘temporary right words’ for ‘permanent right words,’ as there is nothing more upsetting, once the text has been printed, than spotting a temporary word made permanent.