Tag: Memory

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Enveloped: Covers, Openings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority

“Dark Horse,” indeed

Down memory lane.  Sounds rather cozy, when you put it like that.  The kind of trip an afternoon with an old photo album on your lap can afford.  But that is not the lap I have been taking, the road I just went down and took back.  Not even a road, really, and certainly no one-way street.

I am talking real, physical travel by plane, train and automobile to meet with real people that, over the years, have become almost imaginary to me, so distant is the past I spent in their presence and so unreliable my recall of them by way of ephemera—a smattering of snapshots rather too random, selective and pixellated to seem true-to-life.  You know, recollections turned into collectibles, keepsakes of what is lost—an ersatz of essence that leaves you with a sketchy, shifting narrative and a suspicion that the storytelling is being botched by an unreliable curator remiss in handling the responsibility of keeping and making sense of a life encoded in delicate objects that are imbued with an arcane knowledge lodged in the personal reminiscences of more than one person.

Quite a spaghetti junction, that fabled memory lane.  Prosaically speaking, although that has never been my chosen mode of articulation, I recently returned from a visit to my native Germany—or the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, to be precise.  As on my previous trip the year before, I caught up with family and friends, some of whom I had not seen in over forty years.

So as not to overshadow the momentousness of that rare occasion, I did not get to witness the once-in-what’s-left-of-my-lifetime solar eclipse, the spectacle of which we let pass us by while the three of us were ensconced indoors engaged in an exchange of memories.  No ill-fitting goggles or colanders required.

Just as fittingly, the coincidence of that celestial event occurring on the eve of our remarkable reunion has been commemorated as a new beginning by one of my friends, who set up a WhatsApp group titled “Sonnenfinsternis 26,” “Sonnenfinsternis” being German for solar eclipse.  We did not miss a thing—just each other and the opportunity to make new memories, until now.

I even spent a night—the first in thirty-nine years—in my former bedroom at my mother’s house, a 1970s bungalow I first revisited, albeit briefly, in 2022.  During that reencounter, I set foot once more in the shared bathroom, virtually unchanged, where, for about a year, from May 1985 to June 1986, I photographed myself—or my body, at any rate—to image and imagine my queer identity.

A time capsule of 1970s interior design, demolished not long after my 2022 reencounter with it, the bathroom, and the poignancy of my experience of which, led me to conceive The Return of/to the Boy in the Avocado Bathtub, a narrative art project of which my current project, Enveloped, is a prequel of sorts.

Continue reading “Enveloped: Covers, Openings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority”

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Ephemerabiliaphilia: The (Unreturned) Love of Re-Collecting the Largely Neglected

My memory is poor, generally, and getting worse.  My desire to remember the forgotten – the ostensibly unmemorable – remains strong.  It is a love rooted in the need to champion the unloved, or, rather, the dis-loved, and to abandon myself to the abandoned.  It is a queer thing, to my thinking, which is queer always and could not be otherwise.  To love, perversely, what has been discarded or deemed unworthy of consideration, means disregarding what is widely held to matter and instead be drawn – draw on and draw out – what is devalued as immaterial.  It involves questioning systems of valuation and creating oppositional values.

Commenced in 2005, this journal was dedicated to what I termed “unpopular culture,” the uncollected leftovers that linger on a trash heap beyond our mythical collective memory.  To this day, down to my current project, Asphalt Expressionism – a curated collection of images engaging with the visual culture of New York City sidewalks – I carry on caring about the uncared-for and neglected, the everyday past which others tend to walk without taking notice.

There is no such thing as trivial matter.  Nothing is negligible in itself.  What makes something worthless is not a particular quality or lack thereof.  Rather, it is an attitude, an approach, a judgment – itself often a product of a cultural conditioning.  Nothing is intrinsically trivial, but anything may be trivialized.  As I put it, years ago, when I curated (Im)memorabilia, an exhibition largely of mass-produced prints entirely from my collection – “Trivia is knowledge we refuse the potential to matter,” whereas “Memorabilia is matter we grant the capacity to mean differently.”

Low as a Kyte? A 1934 Wills’s Cigarette card featuring Sydney Kyte, a bandleader to whom no Wikipedia page is dedicated. The card sells online for under £1.

A 1930s cigarette card, for instance, may have once served the purpose of boosting sales by prompting smokers to collect cheaply mass-produced images of film stars or flowers or tropical fish.  Collecting them nearly a century later – long after the advertising campaign has folded and the image has become removed from the product it was designed to promote – means to extend the lives of such devalued objects by moving them into the sphere of our own temporary existence of which they in turn become extensions.  

Whether or not we take measures to preserve their afterlife, we instill collectibles with new meaning, give them value by investing them with our longings.  I, for one, never regard my belongings as financial investments; I do not collect calculatedly, anticipating that what I gather might be the worth something to someone else some day.

I also refuse to intellectualize my desires; I am wary of turning passion into an academic exercise.  That is, I do not rescue the marginalized for the purpose of demarginalizing my own existence by convincing others of the cultural value or historical significance of devalued objects – and of the case I make for their value.  Still, there is that longing to be loved, to feel validated, for all the reasons that many, I suspect, would regard as wrong.  

Why waste time on what is waste? Why dig up – and dig – what has become infra-dig through the process of devaluing, a hostile attitude toward the multiple, the unoriginal and commercially tainted to which we appear to be conditioned in a capitalist system that makes us feel lesser for consuming the mass-produced within our means so that we aim to live beyond those means, always abandoning one product for another supposedly superior?  There can be no upgrading without degradation, no aspiration without a looking down at what has been relegated to refuse.

I remember a gay friend telling me, decades ago, that when he was a child, drawing in kindergarten or elementary with other children, he would pick the color that was least liked by his fellow creatives.  I did the same thing when toys were being shared.  This unwanted thing could be me – this is me – is what must have gone through my mind when I took temporary ownership of the object of just about nobody’s affection.  And this, I believe, is at the heart of my impulse to make keepsakes of the largely forsaken.

I started writing this on the one-hundredth anniversary of the first radio broadcast in Britain – 14 November 1922 – by what was then not yet the BBC.  Sound, after all, is the ultimate ephemera, fleeting if uncollected, lost if not cared for.  The BBC used to erase recordings of its broadcasts, turning the potentially memorable into the immemorabilia beyond my grasp, and, in turn, turning my determination to lift them into my presence into futile longing, a nostalgia for the unrecoverable past.