Farewell

SOPHIE died in Athens last night. I didn’t even know she was still here. I never felt like the music really talked to me but this weird vocalisation, with the voice in-between genders and identities, this crossing back and forth between lives, made a clear impression on me. I was eager to see what she will become what else her troubled mind and soul will create, cause the kind of trouble she was into is very obvious to me and very familiar. I adore SOPHIE’s imagery and universe growing. I think her experimental style, blended with outrageous pop, is definitely how old-school sci-fi queers were imagining future.

Today I tried not to read many things about SOPHIE’s death. I avoided the stoic farewell posts of my circle and advised myself not to be vulnerable with her, because A) since I started wanting to live, death became a bit more scary than before, and B) because I really am processing some other heavy things right now. So I left home almost immediately when I woke up ignoring the fuss on social media and went to meet Vassilia and Alkis at Kypseli. While we were hanging out SOPHIE’s loss occurred every now and then and I realized I was fighting a very certain feeling and it was not annoyance or boredom but it was this deep melancholic sadness of depression, the one that allows hopelessness build hour by hour until your eyes are filled with tears and it’s now nighttime and you start crying with no obvious reason but because you’re feeling small and helpless and alone and SOPHIE is dead and life is excruciating and art is not about the result but about the process and this process is so fucking difficult but also so fucking magical and how the world can be so cruel and obscene and everyone is still so full of themselves and dedicated to minding their own business and never notice or say anything about that? Why the fuck SOPHIE went out to the balcony to watch the full moon at 4 a.m. and fell and why the fuck the world didn’t shut down at this exact moment and why I had to fight this immense wave of sadness about a person I didn’t even know? It’s like a part of me violently crushed and chopped and was taken away before I was able to appreciate and love it and cherish it for what it was.

Last July I got around a very dark place and had to convince myself to survive, using all the outside help I could, trying to find reasons into everything that surrounds me: people, places, events, potentials, situations, objects, aesthetics. I used them as totems, as sources of connection, as anchors to existing and as signifiers of a life and as evidence, listed solely as opposition to my hungry urges for an ending.

One of those totems were my random interaction with a couple of two stranger queers, during a climb on Parthenon, blogged here. I am quoting a part below:

We just went in for an art exhibition, showing at the bottom of the rock and then we kept going up without anyone asking us for tickets and stuff. It was nice, not so hard to climb despite of what I was imagining. But the truth is that we were really out of our comfort zone, socially wise. The good thing is that the whole time of going up, we shared the narrow dusty path with some queers, a greek hipster gay boy who was taking his guide duty very seriously, narrating stories including names and dates and places too far away from now to make sense; and then the beautiful trans girl, tall with long curls in the color of barley and blue eyes full of loving care for her grumpy techno-goth girlfriend with the skin all rushed from that vicious sun and the climbing. Yeah, paint me a hopeless romantic but I felt connected with those touristy people and at that moment I believed deep in my heart that everything in the world is going to be okay if I stay close to them; at least for a while. 

29th of July, 2020

And then I saw an IG story published by SOPHIE’s girlfriend, about the loss. First slide was a photo of them during a sunny summer afternoon, SOPHIE was posing with her long curls in the color of barley and her blue eyes full of loving care for her grumpy techno-goth girlfriend with the skin all rushed from that vicious sun and the climbing. In front of the ruins.

Right next to them, out of frame, I was taking my own photo, building connections and memorabilia in my head to keep on living.

Rest In Power stranger. I’ve missed you once when we split ways coming down the rock and I am painfully missing you more, now I know. 💔

Man From The Magazine

Paul Thomas Anderson built an enormous, focused and ultra niche career only as training so he can meet the Haim sisters and be their soulmate filmmaker for ever, change my mind. Oh wait, you can’t.

And a piece of ancient foreseeing knowledge, a power I seem to have inherited from my humble μάγισσα mother: I soon see Danielle Haim stepping behind the camera to conceive and deliver a smoky, rhythmical, angsty, existential and full of dark humor firstborn baby flick of her own; it may also include: traces of alcohol, sick drums, power pop rock riffs, walking on shiny asphalt, abandoned drive-ins, cars, food in bars and LA sunsets.

Danielle Haim in Man From The Magazine, 2020. Dir.: Paul Thomas Anderson

オーディション

Preparing an application for a cultural fund for filmmakers here in Greece. The amount of €€€ is absolutely decent but the only reason I decided to stress myself to do this, it’s because two out of the three persons in the judging committee are artists I truly admire and I want them to come across my stuff. Those people are Syllas Tzoumerkas and Eva Stefani. The third person is a producer with an impressive portfolio, I wonder how I didn’t know him in the first place.

Anyway, the thing is I must concentrate and present a body of work. I won’t go into details cause it doesn’t matter. The interesting part is that I switched to my creative mode and I had long time to do so. Quarantine kind of helps because I rested well the previous week and we are still under lockdown, so the time is limited but available and I have nothing better or worse to do. Those moments of focus and concentration are rare, so I find myself somewhat excited about all this.

Eating well, drinking coffee with cardamon seeds and listening to good music, that’s my “working seriously now” recipe, so I can stay focus and bring home the coins. I like filling applications about me, it’s a narcissistic symptom that amazes me every time.

Here is a fan-made poster of a film I thought I didn’t like but stays in my mind like a splinter since I watched it some days ago. Don’t have any idea why, don’t ask.

AUDITION (1999, Miike Takashi) by Peter Strain Strain.

And here is one of the albums I listen while I write or edit. It’s the early work of Alexandros Voulgaris aka The Boy, with the late actress Mary Tsoni who was found dead in her apartment on May 2017.

I really can’t stand The Boy and the only way I can listen to him is through their mutual band, Mary and the Boy. Give it a chance if you feel like it gory, dark and paranoid. Personal favourites in this album (and overall to be honest) are definitely tracks 5 and 7, called Black Terror and Jesus respectively.

Mary & The Boy – Mary and the Boy (2005)

Tsoni’s voice and performance is the epitome of trouble and artistry. When the news of her death got out I was truly depressed and sad; like I lost someone I knew and love. If religions are correct and souls go somewhere, I hope at least Mary went somewhere she likes.

Captain’s log for autumntime sadness

It’s a strange season and I am passing through it strangely. Normally, I’d have some autumn blues by now but they’d be easy, cozy and familiar, I’d start smelling autumn things around and feel the need to drink tea and eat up some vitamins. But. No. This time is different somehow.

I have been crawling in my room, nesting anxiously, freaking out because the weather is still hot here. I have been eating uncontrollably and that’s partly because my stupid monthly blood delayed and messed me up, and partly because this is what I do when I am stressed and somewhat afraid. I have been having doubts for everything I named a win the past months and I need people to tell me I do good, but I also don’t at the same time because I know I only did the planning and not the actual work and now it’s time for the work and I don’t like to work. I feel alone and isolated and this moment is the moment I have to be out there and communicative. And I feel exhausted but my body is full of energy so I don’t take good care of it, secretly hoping it will fade slowly so it won’t bother me with its will to live good. Every nice habit I have built the past few months is slowly disappearing and I am almost unbothered by the fact. Disappointing. I just want to sleep all day and make imaginary conversations with famous people or with people I miss. I suddenly feel the need to travel and I suspect it’s not only because I like visiting places but it is also because right now I cannot.

I have this thing: when I feel too comfortable somewhere I bail. Having this leaving urge now. I have felt it before. Then something catastrophic begins happening.

Yesterday I wrote music for this new song, the first in english I don’t hate. It’s coming together nicely. Today I discovered this Scottish band called The Spook School. They are very nice and I like their sound but above all I like that they are friends and they do not take themselves too seriously. They are fun, they are weird, they are awkward, they are obviously queer but in an aloof way and I like that. I see myself a lot in that image. And my band. Too bad they broke up.

The Spook School announced a UK Farewell Tour that ended in September. They said they would rather go out with a fanfare than let the band drift quietly away.

Collecting

We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

― John Fowles, The Collector

We all want things, period. It is okay to want, but what happens when wanting becomes the only tool to categorize everything? I want this less than that therefore that is better, more valuable, more necessary than is this. Is this what they call the desirability capital? If wanting much creates a currency then to be wanted creates power so is this what is happening to me every time I feel wanted? I become a collectible that can be bought and is this my power over those who want me? Isn’t this cruel for everyone? I think it is but then why I like it so much?

Like little Danny Kelly in Christos Tsiolka’s Barracuda I want too to become better, stronger, faster to be more valuable, to be more expensive, to be wanted by more and more, to be admired and to be bought, to be owned and to be placed on the highest shelf of someone’s collection so I can look down at the collector in the utmost cruelty, judging them cause they wanted me. Who the fuck wants this mess that is me, is the message beneath it all. And the impostor syndrome triggers.

In The Friendship Song, Laura Jane Grace is singing, over a happy major-tone based tune:

No, I don’t have many friends
I only ever seem to fuck over them
You’re not like the rest of them
You accept me for who I am

And I don’t judge you for it, and that’s what friendship is

And I am wondering what is this sickness in my brain having me turn in circles, patterns and looking for signs of someone to save me. I don’t even know from what I need to be saved, fuck. Although, lately I simply want to be seen instead of saved and this is a step forward I guess. But this is only until someone comes closer and express a sexual or erotic or romantic desire for me. Then it’s all saving again. Madness. Maybe the trick is to be focused on friendship instead of sex and maybe Christina has hacked the way out of destructive patterns and think that I am the one who have listened to the fucking song a gazillion times crying over it and not her!

Anyway, I am only writing this here because I talked about writing this blog in therapy and me and K discussed how writing can help identifying feelings. I like to write and I want to train my brain not only to think what to write but also to write while I’m thinking. Being the visual type and all, it makes a whole another effect on my processing. Went for basketball yesterday, it was nice. Not monumental like the other time but nice.

Speaking of collections, I am starting a new one. Album cover art that looks like those below:

Vacancy by Bayside (2016)

Bought to Rot by Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers (2018)

Soothing to look at. I like the feeling and I want a room full of a bunch of such covers, in baroque frames. Like a rich idiot person.