Heart of Glass
Heart of Glass
Valid Until Sunset launch & November's Angels-of-the-Month
Six years earlier you had gone to the opening of the new Whitney building with your new friend Peter. He’s old and straight and you’re young and gay and you both write about art. Together you walk into a dark room with a slideshow from before you were born, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. You know it very well and recognize most of the people. They look like your friends, and they feel like it too, because the images are so intimate. Pictures of a glamorous writer you admire flash on the screen. There is one on her wedding day: she’s wearing a big white veil and wiping tears off her cheek. You know that she and her husband have AIDS. You know that three years after this picture they’ll both be dead. Actually most of the people in these pictures are dead. When you go back into the bright galleries you’re both wiping tears away. You decide to get a camera and take pictures of your friends and everything you love. The one you choose is like a plastic toy, with limited range and small enough to carry everywhere. It makes a cartoon camera sound — and credit card–size pictures roll out the top, blank white, which slowly darken with the image.
—From the introduction to Valid Until Sunset
That was back in 2015, and of course, Peter Schjeldahl died last year. Many people I love and admire died in between, and my book explores how images relate to transience and loss. As a project, without saying it outright, it is animated by the question: “How do we mourn?”
It is something I’m asking again with increased urgency, as we witness the incredible suffering in the world.
As such, it feels strange to be sending out an invitation to a party, but I also believe being together is an important dimension of mourning, and that it is necessary to find moments of joy and connection within grief.
In that spirit I want to invite you to join me tonight at the Parkside Lounge (317 E. Houston Street, New York) 7-9pm to celebrate the launch of my book Valid Until Sunset. We’ll be in the back room. You can buy copies there and I’ll be signing them with sparkly ink. Have a drink, see old friends, and make new ones.
The wonderful Ana Matronic will be DJing from 9pm-2am so we can all dance it out together.
And with that, I’m pleased to announce November’s Angel-of-the-Month:
