Ack! It's Inspiration!
Jul. 21st, 2003 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseNo, no! I have no more time for new inspirations!
Shortly after I came out in 1988, I met an amazing young man with a diamond hard way of looking at the world. He was also a singer/songwriter and we made a lot of music in the next few years. He claims I taught him how to be a disciplined musician. (Note to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
barkis: we once played a gig down at the venerable Cameron House on Queen St., sharing the bill with a feisty dyke band. I was doing door for their set when Jane Siberry came in to see them.)
My friend -- oh, let's call Black Strum -- couldn't stand Toronto and moved to Vancouver where I visited him infrequently while my sister also lived there. He then moved to Tokyo where he lived for three years and where I stayed with him for three days in December of 2001. He worked as an environmental consultant, a night-school science teacher and then as an ESL teacher, the job that brought him to Japan. He moved back to Vancouver in 2002. He was one of the AIDS revolutionaries who didn't believe HIV was necessarily the sole source of AIDS and wrote many articles on the subject. But he burned out of AIDS activism and gay journalism and sharpened his dark view of the world to a cold gleam.
In e-mails and on his website, he writes angry tirades which, frankly, I can't digest. But through it all, he's written brilliant, hard, rocking songs, the recent ones peppered with Japanese expressions and soaked in angry remorse. I've been listening to low-fi MP3s of his for the last few months and really enjoying the blistering, painful, passionate music. Today he wrote me that in his quest to make his economic life viable, he may have to give up music. This broke my heart and, 40 minutes ago, inspiration hit me: I have to produce an album for him.
He has no money, so I need to make a budget, a working plan and hit up his friends in Toronto. One of them, at least, is pretty fucking rich. I wonder if they'll go for it?
I can even see the cover: Black Strum with his guitar and a scowl in a big coat that is flapping in the wind. He stands at night in an industrial wasteland while a coked-up Japanese pretty boy, dressed in very little, go-gos behind him on the rubbish-strewn concrete. In the background, the lights of Tokyo.
I've been working dilligently here at the office for the last five hours, staying mostly clear of the 'Net and now I'm obsessed again, unable to focus on anything but this idea.
Curse you, inspiration!
Shortly after I came out in 1988, I met an amazing young man with a diamond hard way of looking at the world. He was also a singer/songwriter and we made a lot of music in the next few years. He claims I taught him how to be a disciplined musician. (Note to
barkis: we once played a gig down at the venerable Cameron House on Queen St., sharing the bill with a feisty dyke band. I was doing door for their set when Jane Siberry came in to see them.)My friend -- oh, let's call Black Strum -- couldn't stand Toronto and moved to Vancouver where I visited him infrequently while my sister also lived there. He then moved to Tokyo where he lived for three years and where I stayed with him for three days in December of 2001. He worked as an environmental consultant, a night-school science teacher and then as an ESL teacher, the job that brought him to Japan. He moved back to Vancouver in 2002. He was one of the AIDS revolutionaries who didn't believe HIV was necessarily the sole source of AIDS and wrote many articles on the subject. But he burned out of AIDS activism and gay journalism and sharpened his dark view of the world to a cold gleam.
In e-mails and on his website, he writes angry tirades which, frankly, I can't digest. But through it all, he's written brilliant, hard, rocking songs, the recent ones peppered with Japanese expressions and soaked in angry remorse. I've been listening to low-fi MP3s of his for the last few months and really enjoying the blistering, painful, passionate music. Today he wrote me that in his quest to make his economic life viable, he may have to give up music. This broke my heart and, 40 minutes ago, inspiration hit me: I have to produce an album for him.
He has no money, so I need to make a budget, a working plan and hit up his friends in Toronto. One of them, at least, is pretty fucking rich. I wonder if they'll go for it?
I can even see the cover: Black Strum with his guitar and a scowl in a big coat that is flapping in the wind. He stands at night in an industrial wasteland while a coked-up Japanese pretty boy, dressed in very little, go-gos behind him on the rubbish-strewn concrete. In the background, the lights of Tokyo.
I've been working dilligently here at the office for the last five hours, staying mostly clear of the 'Net and now I'm obsessed again, unable to focus on anything but this idea.
Curse you, inspiration!
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 12:48 pm (UTC)What do you make of that particular theory? (I note that you phrased the thesis in the most generous and plausible possible terms. Is that because that is the form in which your friend held to it?)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 12:58 pm (UTC)I don't know enough about the science of AIDS to say, however I believe that the politics of the fundraising and community action is served better by a simple model like HIV=AIDS than by scientific debate. Unfortunately, this is not always the best recipe for good science.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 01:34 pm (UTC)Given the occasional cases of people who contract HIV but seemingly never develop AIDS, I think a strong case can be made that HIV is not necessarily a death sentence, and that factors like diet, exercise, environment and one's own genetic predispositions can play an important role in the development of AIDS. What gets under my skin are those who claim that environment is the sole causative factor, going so far as to claim that anti-AIDS drugs are among the environmental factors which are among the "real" causes of AIDS. The whole argument often ends up sounding like AIDS is a punishment for "unhealthy lifestyles", which from straights sounds like bigotry and from gays, self-hatred. (God I hate that word, but...) The notion that one should never take meds sounds like an overly-rationalized form of suicide.
One can certainly agree that the economic interests of pharmaceutical companies and the institutional interests of advocacy groups have combined to shape an exclusive focus on the virological aspects of the epidemiology that may well have stunted research in other directions that could have saved or improved lives. From the research I've done on it--admittedly non-scientific--I think going any further enters onto the terrain of conspiracy theory.