11.01.09

borrowed & blue 11.01.09

PANEL 1

Picture: “Woman with bullwhip up her fanny.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, containing the text.

Text: What was happening in my life at the time that Fabulous Muscles was being made was frankly the worst time of my entire life.

PANEL 2

Picture: “A machine gun pointing into a bold Iraqi dawn.” barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, containing the text.

Text: My dad had committed suicide, I was living in a very dangerous neighborhood…

PANEL 3

Picture: “Tumescent stiffy disinterestedly pulled by some beefcake.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, containing the text.

Text: …I was working at an impoverished school where my favorite student was repeatedly molested by his brothers…

PANEL 4

Picture: “Uniformed bestetsonned grunt pushing up for a squat thrust.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, containing the text.

Text: …I was totally broke, I was drinking out of control (maybe that is why I was broke)…

PANEL 5

Picture: “Blindfolded child in vest perhaps sat on the knee of the great dictator, maybe just dimly aware of the pederast behind the viewfinder.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, containing the text.

Text: …my best friend had betrayed me twice and I was cutting my face with car keys.

PANEL 6

Picture: Profile view of a human brain (possibly slightly tilted, diagonally, not flat 2D-looking). Driving through the brain diagonally from top-right to bottom-left is a spear. The background is a flood of zeros and ones, appearing as if on an old school (think 80s films) computer green-screen.

Text: I would say that Xiu Xiu for me has the function of being a place to put feelings that would, have and do otherwise put me over the edge.

PANEL 7

Picture: Silhouetted form of a man/person, kneeling, facing the user. Their form is completely black but their eyes gleam. Inserted into their skull, on either side of their head, are two electric coils with wires trailing off. In the background-right of the panel there is a laptop (on a table?), the screen displaying scrolling zeros and ones.

Text: At the risk of sounding morosely self aggrandizing, I have a hard time dealing with about almost anything and Xiu Xiu allows me to turn manic and self destructive tendencies into something else.

PANEL 8

Picture: Same shot as above, but with a crack appearing in the head of the black-shaped person, and the two halves coming apart slightly (still all in black, with the same powerful gleam in the eyes) and garish streams of neon colours unfurling out of the crack. The background of the picture, playing on the computer green-screen motif, should now be green-screen waveforms (like a WAV file being played, possibly with a few zeroes and ones intermingling behind it?).

Text: The impetus comes from what is happening in my life. From dark, negative sexual feelings and violent impulses and actions and from relentless self hate and from shame and from horror at how I have acted.

PANEL 9

Picture: Shot from above and to the side of the cracked head, close up. Here the crack is a visible jagged crevice, the neon colours unfurl and fill the rest of the panel.

Text: Horror at what sex can be, horror at how desirable that horror can be, horror at unquantifiable mean lusts.

PANEL 10:

Picture: Bottom corner of a bed, sheets ruffled. The Elifrede Jelinek novel Women As Lovers, a white hand next to it. Maybe a white rose next to the hand and book. Everything here, in contrast to the last panel, is very serene and soft – whites or other very soft, pale pastel colours.

Text: The novel is about, or at least my reading of it, how far one will allow oneself to be destroyed by and for love.

PANEL 11

Picture: The lap of a naked male sitting on the edge of the white-sheeted bed, sitting cross legged (genitals not visible, maybe the crotch-area would be seen as slightly ‘out of focus’, with his hands and knees in focus). In one hand he holds a white rose, the stem of which is pressed against the outstretched forearm of his other arm.

Text: How socially a woman can be told to think of the idea of love in and of itself regardless of how the opposing object of said love beats them and is disgusted by them…

PANEL 12

Picture: Close up of the arm and rose. We can see here now that he is pushing the thorn of the stem into his arm, that it has caused a small, but deliberate, red scratch. Note: the physiology of the man in these pictures should denote a tense, locked-up feeling. Also still quite like the idea of this being quite soft focus, pastelly and serene, except for the strong, new deliberate line of red.

Text: …and is careless to them and to fight for love to endure for love to push forward through hell for the idea of love, blindly.

PANEL 13

Picture: Extreme close up of previous shot. The scratch is longer now. The image should look as though the man has just stopped digging the thorn into his skin, that his physiology has relaxed slightly – the rose therefore is not digging into but resting between the man’s hand and his arm, not-quite parallel (it’s head should be tilting towards) to the bloody scratch. The furthest petals of the rose overlap the fresh scratch, and its blood seeping colours a pretty spot of the petal red.

Text: …to be told to need the idea so much that health and reality do not exist.

PANEL 14

Picture: The lower legs and feet of the man, still cross-legged. The bedroom floor. The lower part of the bed. The laptop on the floor (suggest making it a white macbook) is creeping into view in the bottom left of the panel, its screen is partly visible. Note: the Word document that the laptop displays, and which various parts of the text are visible depending on the positioning of the screen in the panel reads: Loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s when someone loves you and you don’t have it in you to love them back… ‘Do you want to see my panties?’ is the last thing I will ever say to you. ‘I want to finger every teenager I see,’ is the last thing you say to me. Don’t make fun of my night out.

PANEL 15

Picture: Close up on the laptop, slightly from above, bottom corner (left?) edge of the keyboard against the floor, a different section of the screen and the text visible. A small spot of red blood on one of the letter keys, a topless, discarded bottle of Liquid Gold on the floor next to the keyboard.

PANEL 16

Picture: Extreme close up of the bottom right of the laptop screen and top-right keyboard. The last part of the text should be strongly visible here.

PANEL 17

Picture: The head and upper torso of the man, looking away from the viewer, at a blank spot on the white wall in his room. His hand should be to his mouth, perhaps picking at the corner of his mouth, as if nervously thinking. His form is in the left-hand of the frame. The wall is bare and white. Behind him in the left of the frame could be an oak dresser, with a vase of white roses on top. In the right of the frame the top of his bedhead is visible (see this as being a metal frame).

Text: As a person for whom gender dysphoria comes in and out of play it is an incredible work to read being a male and propagating some of those things upon women (in a way that I am ashamed to admit I have not as much with men I have been with) but feeling like a female inside and relating to those themes in a turned around sort of first hand way.

PANEL 18

Picture: Straight-on view of the metal-frame bedhead (drawn in black, thinking of iron) pressed against the wall. Above the bedhead is a slightly out-of-focus family portrait. Tied to/around both of the bedposts is a thick black strap. These two thick, taut straps descend forward and downwards to something out of shot on the bed. Note: the bedhead grid stretches fills from left to right of the panal, the family picture is at the top of the frame so should be slightly cut off. The black straps are the strongest, most salient and ominous element in the picture.

Text: It is about the desperate, insane, out of ones hands personally and socially downward careen that the conception of love is or can be.

PANEL 19

Picture: Back to lap of naked man, but this time with POV swivelled round slightly so we can see what is to the other side of him on the bed. His hand is laid against the naked back of a body laying face down. Note: think pretty much just the back of the person, of indeterminate gender (although it is a male), should be visible at this point.

Text: It is very confusing to be newly in love in a positive way but to have a suspicion of it and a guilt regarding it.

PANEL 20

Picture: Back to the POV showing bedhead, but this time lowered, so that we see the body who is tied facedown to the bed. The POV of the viewer therefore should be as if we were above the body’s thighs. We can see his naked bottom, his back, with the hand resting on it, a mop of black hair, face down where his head is (and arguably not totally visible, gag straps around his head – also black), and his wrists each raised slightly above his form – strapped to the bedposts.

Text: ‘I Do What I Want When I Want’ is a love song and a song about being afraid of being in love but finding a person who despite all attempts to ruin things on my part is too wonderful not dive headlong into. I think love songs that are truthful are amazing, any song that is truthful is. It is less about trying to avoid writing a love song and more about trying to avoid being in love but finally being unable to deny that it is staring me in the face.

PANEL 21

Picture: The head of the bound person. His lover’s hand on his head, as if lovingly tousling his hair. The straps of the gag going down across his face should be visible here, if not the gag itself.

PANEL 22

Picture: Profile of the above shot. POV is as if the viewer were kneeling next to the bed, very close to the man’s face. His face is facing downwards, but here the gag and some facial detail is visible, as is the man’s eye – open. The bottom half of his lover’s face is visible as he bends down to whisper into his ear, his lips are parted. From his lips, instead of words, comes one single musical notation (a quaver?)

PANEL 23

Picture: Extreme close up of the singing man’s lips, profile as before, no longer singing – closed (as if to kiss?).

Text: The person who the song is about is someone with whom I had and have a B&D relationship with and 2 years after becoming involved in that way we have since proclaimed for each other.

PANEL 24

Picture: Directly from above, looking down from the ceiling at the scene – bed, laptop, singing man now sitting up again, the hand again on the bound man’s back.

Text: I think that any sex, any physicality can be knife to the throat. Gayness, in our case has nothing to do with it.

PANEL 25

Picture: As above, but with the singing man now looking directly up, at the viewer. This is the first time we have seen his face.

Text: People's perceptions of gay sex can be what you are saying and we have used that imagery but we have used description of submission and domination in relation to hetero sex as well.

PANEL 26

Picture: As above, but with the man looking straight down, as if staring intently at the bed sheet. His hand is now raised above his lover’s back, curled tightly into a fist.

Text: I think there is too much of a knee jerk equivocation to the cock as terrible spear.

PANEL 27

Picture: from POV of other side of the bed, close, as if the viewer is kneeling again. The frame should encompass probably the upper part of the bound man’s bottom at the edge of frame left, his head should be partly cut off from frame right – just a bit of black hair visible, no facial details. In the centre of the frame, his lover’s fist has violently smashed through and into his back, up to the wrist (as if attempting to punch through and clutch his heart, from the back). Red blood splashes high from the wound. The first should be right inside the body (think DL in Heroes), the blood should be vivid and colourful.

PANEL 28

Picture: Same as before but close up on the fist, still in the back. The blood has settled on the man’s back now, and out of the wound and into the air is seeping twirling strands of the same neon colour used in the early panels.

Text: I think that the heart as grenade is more spot on.

PANEL 29

Picture: same POV as frame 25, this time twirling neon colour beginning to flow upwards from the wound, filling the room. The punching man’s head is once again turned towards the viewer, his lips once again slightly parted, his eyes gleaming as in panel 7.

Text: Any genders heart.

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(not sure about this frame)

PANEL

Picture: Reprise of panel 6, except with the zeros and ones replaced by the flooded, twirling colours, perhaps more pastelly and subdued now. No spear. Overlaid on the brain is perhaps the outline of two male faces kissing softly.

Note: Had an idea that this reprise of images would be smaller than the introduction, just all five frames in a horizontal line in one panel.

PANEL 30

Picture: “Blindfolded child in vest perhaps sat on the knee of the great dictator, maybe just dimly aware of the pederast behind the viewfinder.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, coloured neon pink, no text.

PANEL 31

Picture: “Uniformed bestetsonned grunt pushing up for a squat thrust.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, coloured neon pink, no text.

PANEL 32

Picture: “Tumescent stiffy disinterestedly pulled by some beefcake.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, coloured neon pink, no text.

PANEL 33

Picture: “A machine gun pointing into a bold Iraqi dawn.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, coloured neon pink, no text.

PANEL 34

Picture: “Woman with bullwhip up her fanny.” A barcode-shaped dash in the dead centre of the image, coloured neon pink, no text.

ACTION

• 2007
• 2000
• 2006
• 1978
• 1977
• 2001
• 2004
• 1991