Time, mon amour.

On stealing time, seeing art, and poets refusing lesbian bed death.

In League with the Night: A Passion Like No Other-2012

8.20.22. A calm Saturday. I’ve fallen into an easy, satisfying routine during the week. I wake early, give myself the full morning to accomplish life tasks: still unpacking, putting up art, mulling what I need and want to be surrounded by in my domestic environment. I bought a flex exercise bike recently and find myself using it regularly, with a second coffee, pedaling away with a front window view to my street and neighbors passing. I’m a bit surprised at my constancy. One thing that works: to give a structure and frame to my day, meaning time. I allot bits to certain things, and then can stretch out within those allotments. It’s structure, ultimately, and I always work well with one that aligns with my priorities. I’m an OG journalist: deadlines help me.

In the afternoon, after a good walk with my dog, Scarlet, I settle down to some form of work. Writing or editing, for myself or others. I walk a lot around my neighborhood, and I try to get off my cell phone as I do, taking in whatever there is. Right now, there are a few fragrant trees and I try to match the perfume to the tree. The smell lingers over the road, and I remind myself, it’s summer, still August, when time is allowed to move more slowly, when people are headed for the beaches, grassy picnics, nature.

But about time…today’s subject. I’ve always thought about it. I’ve been hyper-conscious of it since I was younger and lost my mother to years of cancer illness and that limbo of uncertain fate, then death, and watched my older sister struggle with a mental illness that came upon her suddenly in college. My mother used to say, swore me to uphold her advice: Don’t put off your happiness. Don’t over-sacrifice, as I did. I wanted all you children and I regret nothing of that, but I ran out of time. I’ve only just started to be the artist I could be. Please, listen to me now. Live for me because my time is over. Don’t wait for time. Time is now. She urged me to cultivate joy and tend to my health, because she had one child whose joy and health had been stolen. It killed me then, hearing all that, but I took the life lesson, and try to apply it with full intent. Her point was that time was tricky: you were swimming along, living your perfect-imperfect life, and then it was over, or might be. Or it could be joyous or unhappy, but you had some choice in the matter.

Now I treat time with respect, especially as I’m older, and I also seek to expand it. Unfortunately (really, it is unfortunate 😊), but I can’t do mood-altering drugs. My body has zero tolerance for them. I was never any kind of druggie, but I did try a few things in my 30s, not really my 20s, and the main experience I retain of the pleasure is that expansion of moments, when time falls away a bit, and we laugh and laugh with our friends. Like the best of sex, too. Slowing and stealing time in the best possible way.

Fly In League with the Night….

This morning, I took a bit of time to enjoy discoveries I made last night, after midnight, which has become my default favorite hour to troll the art world, as I wrote in an earlier post. I’ve been wanting to go to London because there are people there that I need to talk to for my journalism work, but also because I love the Tate and I love thrifting in London and who doesn’t enjoy an English accent? I should say Tates, because the museum has expanded with satellite sites and events.

They have a show at the Tate Britain that caught my eye, and well, made me stop and look. A lot. I found myself happily lost in the figurative portraits of the British painter, writer and poet Lynette Yiadom-Boayke, who has roots in Ghana. She’s had the first solo exhibit by a Black British woman artist in the Tate’s history. I loved A Passion Like No Other, posted at the top this post. She’s a dreamy painter whose painting remind me of Turner seascapes, though she does faces and people, not nature or vistas. It’s something about the light and keeping the contours of land and objects softer and the brushstroke. Dreamy, softened, makes you look close at the detail, only to pull yourself back, get more perspective. Her landscape is the Black body, in repose and motion, in reflection. Her subjects aren’t real people, which also sets her apart. Some of them are derived from found objects, and critics view her as a heavyweight in the renaissance of Black portraiture.

Razorbill (2020)

Yiadom-Boayke had a show at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2010, curated by the late, visionary curator Okwui Enwezor, who championed so much Black and African and diaspora art that his legacy just keeps expanding. I’m sorry I never met him; I get a sense he was not only smart and really thoughtful about art and colonialism and race and power, but a guy who knew how to live—really live. With engagement and friends and his own mind in a constant conversation with the past and future. I did see a few shows that he curated in past years; he had a great eye.

Here is link to the Tate show and artist: https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-lynette-yiadom-boakye

I googled the artist and was happy to find an article by an old 90s pal I haven’t seen for years, Hilton Als, the talented cultural critic and writer. Hilton selected Yiadom-Boayke as the subject for a curatorial series he did at Yale. I like this that he wrote about her work for the Yale show:

“…For the most part, she wanted to create a universe where Black people could live as human beings subject to the exigencies of life without being considered symbols of pain, suffering or triumph. To that end, Yiadom-Boayke stripped her work of complicated narratives in favor of what the body expresses in stillness, or in action, while simultaneously conveying the artist’s deep interest and commitment to color and form as it makes up the world of a canvas.’  

Ever the Women Watchful (2017)

I’ve rolled that phrase around in my head, ‘…the exigencies of life…’, thinking about it in relationship to my sense of time.

Here is a link to Hilton’s show: https://britishart.yale.edu/sites/default/files/inline/190912_LYB_booklet_FINAL.pdf

Dinner parties, past and future…

From there, I made a few more leaps, to read about parties that others have had with their time, meaning their life. I read a piece by another younger Black critic, Antwaun Sargent, who’s following in the footsteps of Enwezor. He’s an art critic, author and a fashion plate who modeled leather skirts long before Brad Pitt made the jump. He wrote a 2019 book I’ll have to look for now, The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion. He’s been prolific as a critic and cultural rapporteur.

I read one of his articles about another bright younger creative, the artist and chef Devonn Francis. The article was entitled Reinventing the Dinner Party and it caught my attention because that’s a form of stealing time I favor. Great dinner parties are the best and they often reflect creativity, both in the kitchen and in the company. He has Jamaican roots, and pioneered Yardy, a series of dinner parties that I bet Hilton and Sargent have joined. One where Enwezor would have found his art people, and Yiadom-Boakye’s work is discussed with enthusiasm. It made—it makes—me happy to know that people are throwing great dinner parties like this. I’ve been talking to a few friends who are foodies and creatives about organizing some fall dinner parties to discuss the decline of our Republic –okay, rage at Magaland—and also what we are taking present delight in, related to books, films, etc. Maybe we’ll call it Stealing Time, ha.

Lesbian Bed Death Be Gone…

There’s one more little gem for this morning. A recently released book, Dust, by LA Warman, billed as an ‘anti-sequel to her smutty, award-winning debut novella, Whore Foods.’ I feel like I should know her work, but I don’t. She’s a younger lezzie writer and there are a lot of terrific ones out there. There’s a rather charming Q&A in a recent Interview mag piece by her lover Yulan Grant. I was drawn to read the whole thing by the title of the piece, which made me smile: LA Warman Doesn’t Believe in Lesbian Bed Death (Interview, Aug. 4, 2022). When a lover pens such a title, you’re inclined to believe them.

I like this bit of the piece, in which Grant quotes another person, Caitlan Lent, who said Dust is about a

‘pair of unnamed women on a sexual odyssey through a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, where they fuck like the world is ending while surviving off of vapors from shadowy, extraterrestrial “Visitors” until they get tired of living….’

Okay, I thought. Bring it. There’s a party, alright.

The two lovers have been living together for four years, and champion each other’s work. LA is clearly still superhot for her girlfriend and, she tells readers, it’s distracting to try to write together for this reason. They sound adorable. And look, such cuties, too.

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/la-warman-doesnt-believe-in-lesbian-bed-death

A final share: I’ve been writing my post this morning to a background Spotify soundtrack called Samba Café. Right now, I’ve got Serge Gainsbourg crooning in my ear, La chanson de Prevert. Such a sexy voice. I had it on low, like a musical hum. Perfect to read about sapphic mad poets pining for each other as they dream word portals to some apocalyptic future.

Happy Saturday. Go steal some time.