Io vivrò senza te
Io vivrò senza te
Angelic Transmissions #003! & The Angel Steven Arnold!
The next episode of my talk show — Angelic Transmissions #003 — will broadcast live today (!) 12-2pm EST via East Village Radio. As always, all you have to do is click on the picture of an ear in the upper-left corner of the website that says “listen” (the upper-right corner is a live video feed from inside the booth!)
This week I’m joined by two of my absolute favorites. First is painter Gaby Collins-Fernandez discussing her upcoming exhibition “Art in Love” which opens at Rachel Uffner gallery on September 6th. Second is writer Zachary Pace to talk about their book I Sing To Use The Waiting: A Collection of Essays on the Women Singers Who’ve Made me Who I Am (Two Dollar Radio, 2024). Additionally, “Essential Cinema Correspondent” Leigha Mason will be back to discuss the long-lost Holly Woodlawn vehicle Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) currently playing at Anthology Film Archives.
Last Christmas in San Francisco I picked up a copy of Steven Arnold’s photobook Epiphanies (1987) at my favorite vintage gay porn shop AutoErotica SF:
Back at Beck’s Motor Lodge on Market street I looked through the book, page by page: bright whites and velvety blacks, a phantasmagoria of people and puppets blurring into each other within elaborate sets and costumes, often made of cut paper, veils and feathers. Bodies were painted, used as a material just like the paper. Posed as sexy saints, as celestial sirens, the photos synthesized iconography from mystic Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, as well as fairy tales and science fiction—a psychedelic rendition of Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. Bodies and gender combined and changed kaleidoscopically, merging with the patterns of striped or leopard printed spaces around them. Holy men, painted like skeletons, with big hard dicks—twins no less! (I later learned he devised an intricate process of masques and multiple exposures within the camera so that a single model could occupy many figures across the pictorial field simultaneously.) These are images in which no self is singular, no gender is binary, where life itself is just silly with sacredness.
I’m so grateful that I got to write about about my ensuing obsession with an artist who has become one of my most beloveds in the current issue of BORDERCROSSINGS Magazine. The issue is themed on photography and there are some incredible pieces—I cannot recommend it too highly. Subscribe! And, New Yorkers are in luck, you can start picking up physical copies of this jewel that comes all the way from Winnipeg at our very own Iconic Magazines.
