Cinematheque Films Videos

http://vook.tumblr.com Dear Mary, Mary Scriver thinks that Bill and Melinda Gates have to know SOME gay people. You're correct. There have to be perfectly acceptable, moneyed, sophisticated, social-climbing, suits that Bill and Melinda Gates must be acquainted with. The gay men who have it all. I was living in Winter Haven, Florida once, with Adolfo Mata (AIDS activist) and the writer, TR Witomski. TR was a regular at Mach Magazine (my favorite) and was also acting as my agent. I was making more money through TR than I had ever made. Mostly writing sex. Almost all of it heterosexual. Hustler was fun. I had a slew of female porn names and received hot, and lascivious letters from straight men all over the world; hetereosexual men who thought Vivian Keysley Brown was a poetess with huge breasts. We were on our dock that went out into the lake, and we were reading the Sunday Times. TR turned to Adolfo and I, and said, "You know, we never get invited to the Winter Park Barbecues with the rum Daiquiris with the little umbrellas and all the nice gay men." Adolfo and I just rolled our eyes to the sky. "And we never will," Adolfo noted. No umbrellas for us, We usually drank Bombay Gin right from the bottle riding the bike around the lake leaning mean into the curves late at night in our speedos. Or less. TR and I sighed. We were not the nice gay men. Certainly not the kind of suits Bill and Melinda would know. Adolfo and I owned Harley Davidson Sportsters: the company called it the bike that was born on the street. Mine was black. Adolfo's was red. TR was content to be seen on the back of either one, holding on for dear life. New York City and the Mineshaft (I wrote the book, a gay classic, sold out day one) was a five hour drive. You gritted your teeth going through South Carolina -- but we could and did outrun the cops. Take one look at my bigboy, hard, hard, tough black bike. Can you imagine either Bill or Melinda riding it? Me either. Once we rode nonstop to the Stud. My daughter, Kree, on the back of my bike. Kree was in the second grade. The Stud is a bar in San Francisco. I will spare you my Mexican cantina stories in Santa Rosalina. For that matter, we weren't the nice gay men who stuck to men. Our tastes were eclectic. Men are simply easier. You meet one on the street and you know immediately sis-boom-bah that he wants to have sex with you. And so he does. Women are more work. I had souped the bike's engine up so I was only getting about fifty miles to the gallon. I would love to take Bill Gates for a ride to Hellfire. It's in Chicago. The world was our oyster. I seriously doubt that anyone has ever put Bill Gates on the back of a Harley Davidson. I don't own a suit. I have never learned how to tie a tie. At that time, I owned a pair of jeans and a ton of leather. Here's a gig. I had a kid. I sent her to private colleges and today she teaches children in Bolivia. I did not screw up. I defy anyone to say I did. Kree did, indeed, grow up in an environment that would not have been approved by the mothers of the PTA. But Kree has something the children of those mothers positively do NOT have. She has stories that are positively hair-raising. She survived. Nice gay men just want to adopt nice children. We just pulled kids in off the street -- being kids ourselves. Not nice kids. Not nice kids have the best marijuana. As far as sex was concerned, it was just another wild ride up the Pacific Coast Highway and back again. I would give my right tit to watch Melinda Gates roll a joint. I don't know the gay men they know. The gay men they know are corporate animals. I want to know people (sexuality being totally irrelevant) who are interesting. Young gay men today are way out there. Back in the olden days, junior high school boys were not coming out. Today, on Facebook, they have entire organizations. I should know. They keep asking me to join. What I am afraid of is being reduced to some grandfatherly type who has wild stories to tell of the Lone Ranger and I and Tonto and yesteryear. I am not sure I want to feel that old yet. These guys are fourteen and fifteen and they are far more defiant than we ever were. I can't take back my past. I don't want to. It was breathtaking. And then it changed radically. I work with a bunch of very young boys who have AIDS. All my older friends, the guys I used to run with, the men my age, are dead. I can't tell you how many of them I have held as they died. I have my own theories on death. One of them is that if you want someone to hold you while you die, they should crawl into bed with you and hold you and let you go. I have done this hundreds of times now. I feel like I should always be wearing black. Usually, I am wearing back. Did you know that black is all the colors in the spectrum. I see the color black as affirming life. Because it's so crammed with color. If I'm wearing leather, the reflection of it glitters in the night. Salvador Dali made me a leather vest. He sewed a white dove on the back. Even Dali is dead. Death just paves my way. We at Cinematheque are all struggling on a day to day basis to survive. Most of us are lost. But the group of us the most lost are the twelves. We call them the twelves. I struggle to be as patient as I can with them. I often have to repeat myself to them as to why they need to take their antiretrovirals and how and why those poisons work. Bill and Melinda Gates know how antivirals work. It's a shame they don't know much about a struggle called compliance/adherence -- or pill burnout -- because with twelve-year-olds it's not a struggle, it's not a challenge -- it's a war. If the kid goes off his medications he's going to die. They die under bridges every day. It's a particularly rotten form of suicide. I will hold them under a highway bridge anyway and then I am compelled to let them go. I only rarely write about the Americans among us. They're vulnerable. Their country is antediluvian. Bill and Melinda (may I call you by your first names) know the movers and the shakers. I know the guys whose houses have crashed in on them. Bill and Melinda Gates have a foundation endowed with thirty billion dollars. That is not spare change and I admire what they do. They do not know my friends down at the Polk Gulch Saloon that has wild fundraisers where $310.15 is given to Miss Twiggy Stardust (who frequently sings at the saloon) from the fishbowl filled with one dollar bills so she might eat this month because the mobile food program has ran out of money. It's harder and harder for Miss Twiggy to make it down the block to the saloon because her neuropathy has crippled her. Someone is usually assigned to go get Twiggy. The Polk Gulch Saloon is all she has. Big men dressed in leather will carry her. Can you see Bill Gates carrying Miss Twiggy Stardust down to the Polk Gulch Saloon. Or Warren Buffet. No. Me either. The day will come when we go to get Miss Twiggy to sing for us, she will be dead in bed. I hope she will not be alone. Justin has volunteered to take the cats. Those cats are going to miss Fred. Which was the name on the Twig's driver's license. I have voluntered to donate his vast collection of Japanese books too... I have no idea what I am going to do with those books. Pile them up and weep on them. Bill and Melinda don't know Denny. Although Denny's from the same neighborhood they live in in the Bill and Melinda Gates' new, sprawling House (the security alone would buy Australia). Lake Washington is too cold to swim in. The Gates' pool is heated. There is nothing wrong with this. It is not a criticism. My criticism goes to Denny's parents who are in the middle of the most volatile divorce I have ever seen. The lawyers have divided Denny up into pieces of joint custody where when with mom, she pumps him for dish on the dad (especially other woman), and dad - and dad - and dad is simply absent because he has serious job issues to deal with in management at Microsoft. I have a secret phone number and a secret phone that I throw away every Monday morning. It is for the Dennys. How they get these numbers is anyone's guess. I don't want to know. The grapevine these kids have is more solid and more secretive than anything Verizon could design. Apparently mom's new boyfriend turned out to be more interested in Denny than mom. Question: "I think he ripped my asshole and I'm bleeding. I can't go to an ER because my dad's a doctor and everyone will know." His dad is not a doctor but it sounded good. I am three thousand miles away. I call my downtown Seattle contact. I won't tell you who he is. He frequently helps kids come down from combinations of things like meth and paranoid schizophrenia. If you are a paranoid schizophrenic on meth, and you so much as assume a karate stance that you once saw on TV in a rerun of the Karate Kid 3 (you know nothing of Karate) the Seattle police have a mandate to shoot you dead and that is exactly what they will do. Calling 911 is not always an option. Playing for time (or for the meth to wear off) can be an option. Drunk tanks are designed for drunks and vomit. A paranoid schizophrenic will hang himself by his underwear. I can't and I won't tell you who a lot of people I work with are. Sometimes they are simply people who will pick you up after a bad SM scene has turned ugly. "Oh, just break down the door," is what I tell them. Grab the kid, and get into the car. Take the kid to the DavidBath Hotel and calm him. Heroin works. Check him out from top to bottom. Bruises around the kidney area are very bad and he goes to hospital right away. The kid will fight this. Tie him up and throw him in the car. You may want to leave the hospital before the police come because you're carrying. All these kids want into my program because we have a focus on art. I can only take a few. Most are European. American kids are so difficult to work with because they are so conflicted. Their educations suck and they have no notion of what the HIV drugs they are either taking or will be taking soon enough DO. Sustiva is a real problem because it's so neurological and it's a poison that goes after the virus deep within the brain. It's one of the few drugs that can cross the brain barrier which means it's extremely potent. It gives kids LSD trips more profound than LSD. We have found that certain drugs like Lorazipam can smooth out the screaming nightmares into a more quiet set of visions. This can be tweaked carefully with 2mg Dilaudid. But Sustiva is a drug the kid will be taking every night for the rest of his life. Denny sells his Sustiva on the street. It can be snorted. It's a killer of a rush. Denny's CD4 counts are hovering between two to three. A count of 100 is fullblown AIDS, "Microsoft executives (I would have no way of knowing if these are the suits Bill and Melinda might know) will pick him up so he can blow them in their car. A blowjob is twenty bucks. Two blowjobs is a night at the DavidBaths Hotel. Denny rationalizes someone at the age of thirteen sucking of men in play for pay by contending there is no exchange of blood. I call it. APITTD. A Perfectly Insane Thing To Do -- and it can get you locked up. People who know that they are infected and then go whoring are people they put away. The neighborhood I would love to give Bill and Melinda a tour through is nowhere near Seattle. It's the Pigalle in Paris. Meth is cheap and common in the States but in Paris it's heroin. I give gallon jugs of bleach to twelve-year-olds. I will take a Parisian kid from the Pigalle before I will take an American. The issue is mainly medical. No one in Paris turns on the moral meters in the taxi cab. If a kid assumes a karate stance in front of anyone, he is quietly talked down and lead (frequently by me) into an intensive care unit versus being shot in the head. I love these kids. And it's not because I'm fucking them. My body stopped making testosterone a long time ago. I'm impotent. I want to see the kid make it from the night into the next day and not with my cock stuffed up his asshole. It's way, way too limp to make it in there. You scream at me for truth. You don't want the truth. You want conformation of what you already think the truth is. If I had to make a list of the insanities that concern me the most, at the top of my list would be an effort to get the twelve-year-olds to stop selling their AIDS drugs to other junkies, and to get the twelve-year-olds to understand how these drugs work to keep them alive. My other concern would be to keep the kids with full-blown AIDS to find an alternative to prostitution. Tricking in my world means addiction. Tricking in my world is the kid I'm sitting beside at the Polk Gulch Saloon on

http://vook.tumblr.com Most people think of Tim Barrus as a writer involved in literary scandal. Even at publications as radical as Drummer and Mach magazines, both gay leather/sm publications, Barrus was their most controversial editor. Then, he went mainstream in disguise. Esquire (nominated for a national Magazine Award). Houghton Mifflin. Time. Random House. PEN. The New York Times. Tim Barrus was denounced by the Wall Street Journal. Yet Barrus does not even see himself as a writer; certainly not one who belongs to a community or a genre. Tim Barrus is a whore, and says so. He is banished from the United States. The issue is identity. Barrus does not allow the superficiality of a literary scandal slow him down. He moves to France and creates Cinematheque Films. Cinematheque Films, based in Paris, is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. Prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Traditional education has failed them. They are from the street. Tim Barrus connects with the writer, Mary Scriver -- or Prairie Mary -- through Arts Journal. She intrigues the boys of Cinematheque with the publication of her book, Bronze: Inside and Out. The boys of Cinematheque are connected at the hip to computer technology. It is how they communicate. Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus begin a dialogue that delves deeply into the ideas of censorship, the Internet, journalism, writing and publishing fiction, black lists, and how these things have a direct bearing on the lives of young boys struggling to create art, and struggling to survive. As creatures of the street, the boys have left "the life" of the Pigalle, the Parisian red light district. They are not strangers to how organized crime functions, how the drug culture still flourishes, and they are all too familiar with human trafficking. How the boys of Cinematheque Films become involved in extricating other adolescents just like them from the legacy of human trafficking is the story behind The Fallen and the Flight. A VOOK. Whose fictional narrative employs both text and video. This is the VOOK query for The Fallen and the Flight by Tim Barrus -- aka Nasdij -- and Mary Scriver -- aka Prairie Mary. Videos represented here are Cinematheque class assignments, mash-ups, photographic assignments, and poetry projects created by the boys of Cinematheque. They are represented here simply as creative examples of work that could correspond to the text and narration of the VOOK. The synopsis of the Fallen and the Flight is represented here as well in the linear order the VOOK adheres to. Most VOOKS contract out the video content to Hollywood-based production companies. The premise of The Fallen and the Flight is that the video would be created by the same people who created the text. Cinematheque Films: Arts Education: Students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation in photographic, video and film production. Representations and facsimiles posted here are presented as teaching tools and instruments employed to instruct students in the techniques and application of mixed media art and collage. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows art-teaching entities the fair use of such materials in classroom and teaching-research applications. Clicking the NEXT button at the bottom of each page will take you into the linear outline of the book. Again, as such, this is the QUERY. Each video and each chapter is accompanied with observations by Scriver and Barrus. THE FALLEN AND THE FLIGHT: MEMORY'S PROFANE PERSISTENCE

http://vook.tumblr.com Tim Barrus: Response to Ridley Scott What I hear is a question being posed: Can a film clip or an entire scene contain repeated iconic images throughout the entirety of the clip, or scene, that would have the same narrative effect (visually) that poetic refrain does at an auditory level. Gospel music does the same thing. Yes, you identify Genocide as the place where I am employing that trick the most. But I do NOT see it as a trick. It's only a trick when the writer wants to provoke but does not really know how or why -- even if he might know with what. Example: In this clip we have added in a visceral set of images and repeated them throughout the clip as if to suggest that the visual action in the clip has multiple consequences. To that end, we've added a the suggestion of a foreign language (Spanish voices whispering) in the background, and only have sound effects juxtaposed around that so as not to subtract any of the power of the visual narration where repetition is employed almost as a hypnotic. You are interested in knowing if I think the technique (it is more than just a trick) could work as well in the paradigm of the VOOK as it does in fiction, poetry, and film. My response is that it's about what's in the writer's head -- if he uses repetition to soothe, make a point, or say look here, look over here. It's about analogy. It's about focus. With images, it's also about time because if you are repeating an image, the audience is always being pulled back to that one central point in time as the story unfolds. I would say that the technique is applicable to any way you want to dramatize the story. The Greek chorus was always repeating itself.

http://vook.tumblr.com Tim Barrus: Nine of Wands Amsterdam: They will come into my room at night, and we will smoke marijuana, and throw around the names. Someone could be a new name. Adolescent boys are many things. Permanently rooted to one solid place is not one of those things. Change is the least of it. Transition is forever. None of you would know our real names. You know our public names. You would not necessarily know the names we use with one another. Nino knows the names. Nino names the names. Because Nino knows the cards. Nino is the Hanged Man. Nino: Having an emotional release. Accepting what is. Surrendering to experience. Ending the struggle. Being vulnerable and open. Giving up control. Turning the world around. Changing your mind. Overturning old priorities. Seeing from a new angle. Upending an old order. Pausing to reflect. Feeling just outside of time. Putting others first. I am Nine of Wands: Defensiveness. Perseverance. Stamina. Defending yourself. Assuming ill will. Expecting the worst. Taking extra precautions. Being paranoid. Feeling wary and guarded. Protecting others. Remembering past attacks. Persisting despite all setbacks. Refusing to take no for an answer. Seeing something through to the end. Getting knocked down, then standing up. Keeping one's resolve. Trying repeatedly. Showing stamina. Continuing despite fatique. Holding fast. Drawing on hidden reserves. Holding together through force of will. Demonstrating physical strength. Keeping up the pace. But where do any of us really live. Far too often in what past the past is dead. Just dead. You could more easily eat an old leather shoe. Oh, you mean the past when sex was The World. As a card, he's creating synthesis, joining together, working in unison. That never did sound like me. Seeing dreams come true. I stopped doing threesome sex scenes when I married my second wife. I was fifty. Fifty is not forty. Fifty is not even thirty.