Fat cannibal

Back in May, I read Cynthia Carr's Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012) while I was in California visiting my sister. I read the whole 600+ page book in like 4 days. It was so good. I picked up Wojnarowicz's own book Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) right away, but I put it aside until a week ago. One of the blurbs on the back says, "This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately," and I could not agree more. Being given this book as a teen would have probably made the difference between sitting in my car listening to sports radio in the school parking lot and burning down Darrell Issa's office.

Wojnarowicz's prose is often simple and incisive, and the strongest passages are the long sentences describing what would become his political funeral after his death in 1992. I saw two films about ACT UP, United in Anger and How to Survive a Plague (both 2012), with powerful footage of AIDS activism during this time period. The footage of the ashes actions at the White House will haunt me forever, I think. Both movies recommended. Complementary and worthwhile.

The best part of Close to the Knives is the last 100 pages, where Wojnarowicz weaves together diary excerpts, dreams, descriptions of attending a bullfight in Mexico, and recordings of him interviewing his friends Joe and Johnny about their dead friend Dakota (a suicide, in exile in Texas and unable to cope with his loneliness and addictions). There's an ultimate resignation to Dakota's suicide, where Joe and Johnny know that in part their sexual rejection of Dakota led to his isolation and death. There's also an almost hilariously macabre description of Dakota killing a drug dealer, and another moment where they're describing either the Ricky Kasso case or some proto-Kasso satanic murder in New York, which really struck me. Was AIDS and sexual politics ultimately responsible for politicizing that historical moment so intensely? The quotidian concerns and fears of the junkie and the urban underclass are so present in this part of the text (not that addiction and poverty aren't political, because duh), and all of Dakota's art (as described) would be like a sub-nu metal teen murder fantasy if not for the government enabled epidemic of AIDS and violence against queer people. I don't know. It's passages like that that really drive home the "give this to every teen now." Like it's the difference between Flipper and the Feederz ya know? 

On a different but most important note, I went to a hc show in 2013 and had an incredible time and felt like a part of something. Awesome right? TC punks ain't so bad, and just wait for 'kato... Part of the project of this blog is to become more outspoken about things that matter to me aesthetically and politically so I can happily project these ideas to my immediate social world instead of shitting on everyone's vanity craft cottage industry (happy to still do that, of course). I feel pretty good about this in punk world lately, but we'll see... I plan to read a few books tomorrow (for real) and write about some tunes I like in depth soon.

TOP TUNEZ
FRAU demo (bummer about that weird digital clicking noise at the end of the tape)
1st Offence - The Night the Punks Turned Ugly 7" (gimme)
The Lewd - Discography 2xlp (need American Wino please)
Hounds of Hate lp (sick, like the 1st SOIA LP but a little more punk production so you must be like "why does this exist in 2013?" but it's great and I'm glad it does. Is "Brotherhood of Night" a secret track? I'm moshing regardless)