I've decided to start blogging again. I've spent the last two weeks weeping every morning and every night. Not only a form of therapy, blogging gives me a bit of a voice. And I've felt pretty silenced of late.
The undercurrent that will probably run through this blog is my love life, and lack of it. Interspersed, I'll probably reblog interesting things (on the side) and talk generally about my life. Who knows, maybe I'll even be moved to blog about art.
On that note, last night I was at an artist talk by Daniel Barrow, a Winnipeg-based performance artist (he prefers to think of himself as a comic book artist, or a film-maker!). He does overhead projector animations, a little like an old-fashioned "magic lantern" show. He gave a spectacular, atmospheric talk. I had the honour of being his technician. I don't think I did too badly, considering we didn't rehearse. My biggest gaffe was on his first cue, I couldn't get the VCR to start. I retried all the inputs, turned it on and off, hit play a dozen times, and nothing. I looked inside the flag to see if maybe the tape was jammed and -- aha! I forgot to put the tape in. It was somehow fitting.
Barrow narrates stories about the disenfranchised. His slide series called The Face of Everything featured little-known, or D-list celebrities, often queer -- like Wayland Flowers, Rip Tayor, Kristy MacNicoll -- and gave little capsule biographies, concentrating on the pathetic but still fascinating moments of their lives.
This series won me over, but he closed with a portion of his performance entitled Winnipeg Babysitter. Taking clips from cable-access shows on Winnipeg Cable, and then animating contextual narrations and captions, he tells little known stories about this little known phenomenon that's an important part of Winnipeg cultural history. The portion he performed was about The Cosmopolitans, a music show hosted by two women, German immigrants to Winnipeg (and later revealed to be lesbian lovers), who played standards like You Are My Sunshine and Tennessee Waltz on drums and organ. It was the last performance clip of the night, and as soon as it ended -- describing the death of on Cosmopolitan (Louise?) and the deterioration of the other (Marion) -- he thanked everyone abruptly, and turned on the lights. Sitting at the tech table, raised slightly above the crowd, I was a bit on display, and when the lights came on, I had to quickly wipe the tears from my eyes that this moving and sad vignette caused.
It made me wistful and deeply sad. Here were these two women who were outcasts in their home in Germany. They came to Canada looking for freedom, and still encountered hardship and discrimination because of their sexual preferences. In the end though, their lives were full and happy, and they had lifelong love and joy together.
It made me deeply sad that I will likely never experience that kind of love.
No comments:
Post a Comment