Lucian Daemon

http://vook.tumblr.com How can you pretend to have a well-endowed research/outreach and focus on a pandemic that has killed millions of my brothers and lovers and fathers and sons and friends and so many, so many, so many of the writers, artists, filmmakers, dancers, choreographers, photographers, and just plain of dishwashers, and let's throw a few drug dealers in there -- when in fact you do not know these men. The dead ones or the survivors. Those of us who live with this struggle every day of our fucking, screaming torn-apart lives. How can we be expected to act as anything less when we are never listened to, taken into consideration, and our daily struggles remain fundamentally unknown. Unknown Hells. Even in the struggle for a cure, we remain unknown. We have been pushed back into the shadows by the people with the money. Melinda Gates is not even approachable. She hides inside a warren of her offices. Why isn't pill burnout as suicide even anywhere on any psychosocial agenda. No, it's easier to let us die. Where are the research projects that target the lives of whores, male and female -- never there. Why is prostitution never studied outside the context of the anecdotal. Why is Melinda Gates saying another 25 years for a vaccine and when you ask her about a cure she just shakes her head. Eyes averted down. 1982-2035 -- 55 years of promises. Bill and Melinda Gates do not have a single gay friend. I will not be around in 2035. I will not know them or have ever traveled in their circles nor they in mine. But they're trying. I know they're trying. They just don't know or want to know the people they are trying for. It is a tragedy. In knowing us, in knowing what daily, mundane struggles we face, maybe part of that glimpse could add to whatever the cure might be. Maybe if you stepped outside the comfort zone you would discover landscapes you did not know existed. It's a comfort zone. Through which a gate shall appear with the you of you on either side.

I like Melinda Gates. She's not staying home and eating bonbons. The work the Gates' Foundation has done in the world of AIDS has been fundamental to our understanding of just how long it's going to be to get a vaccine (another 25 years) let alone a cure (maybe never). There's this WE CAN DO IT charge ahead... Grim as it is, they're at the top of the pyramid scheme where thusly the money flows so the people they know are going to be the people with money for access. They're not out here on the ground where what goes on could increase their understanding. How are the demographics of HIV connected to urban hunger, homelessness, prostitution, and human trafficking. It's so easy to pretend this is a medical problem that we can win as we fight the DNA structures of a virus. Come on down, Linda. I'll show you around the neighborhood. Charlie Rose hasn't posted his latest vid with her but when he does, I'll embed it here. She's still hopeful. In a very sad sort of way. -- Tim BarrusCinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

The boys of Cinematheque Films would like to thank the hundreds of boys on Facebook who have contacted us in support of The Fallen and the Flight. We hear you. We are here to tell you we know all about the sexual human trafficking taking place. You are not alone. In fact, we are hearing from hundreds of you every day. It’s daunting. But we are not here to tell you that nothing can be done. It begins with you. GET OFF THE STREET! How. How. How. We hear it all the time. Use your feet to leave the street. We don’t care if no one wants to hear it. We KNOW how hard it is because we’ve been there. Some of us are there right now. Making the change to getting off the street is not an event. It’s a process. We have learned the hard way. We used to say: IF YOU SLIP UP AND RETURN TO THE STREET, YOU CAN’T COME BACK. But we’ve had to change that. It’s a PROCESS. Not a one night stand. Leaving the only environment you know is too much to ask like some hardass urban shelter. We are not a shelter. We are a guerrilla art community. We are here to tell you that the first step toward the freedom you tell us you seek is getting off the street. They have you working the street because they’re making money. Bottom line. The difference between what we do and what everyone else does is that we won’t sell you out. We won’t use your real name and we won’t tell ANYONE — not even the cops — where you are. Or what your HIV status is. We don’t sell lists (we don’t make them) and we don’t beg suits for money. We understand that programs that beg suits for money are programs that have to dance to someone else’s tune. And that someone else is always faceless, and behind the scenes. But they call the shots. We call our own shots and that puts us way off the map. But we are here to tell you something you already know in your GUT. The street is killing you. In Pay for Play, you CANNOT tell if a trick is HIV by his appearance alone. Everyone here has made that mistake.

The ones that sometimes get overlooked.Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

When Eavan comes back from Boston, he's going to show us the vids he made of his Asian trip. Tristan makes the popcorn. Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

http://timmy-tommy-brothers.blogspot.com/ Tommy McGurrin has constructed a very sweet blog. I am --- duuuhhhh -- in it. A bit. I thought those photographs had been destroyed. Tom has agreed that as soon as he's through with this blast through the past, he'll take it down. The past is over, Tom. Time to get on with right here right now, Dude.Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

cut that meat off that baby's cock/ cock with a rock chipped sharp as quartz will chip/ pain is largely an illusion/ run mad like ravens/ wound's habitation/ barbed/ prevents genital warts in boys age nine/ angularity/ serrated edges/ my edges/ your edges/ razor's edges/ misshapen edges/ your misshapen/ my misshapen/ malformed/ gnarled/ loophole/ orifice/ hole/ cut/ grave closes over/ vitality/ soundless coffin/ gratuitous/ we are all gratuitous/ followers of cerberus/ gardasil vaccination/ yes but your son

Tim Barrus: This is how I visualize the idea of obscurity. I do not know why. Papercuts: The New York Times I doubt that the moderator at Paper Cuts will allow this. They rarely let me in. They're not receptive to real reciprocity. They want one or two words. They love lists. Not ideas. I submit there anyway. So allow us to briefly explore the definition of and the dynamics related to the word: OBSCURE. Wouldn't that be more productive than simply listing the names of a couple of books printed in 1902. Or is real discussion frowned upon. I don't understand what the word obscure means. The New York Times and book publishing are driven by numbers and lists. It is a pretense to insist that any other attribute (such as the word literary) could possibly be relevant. I note that book publishing itself is becoming much more honest, truthful, unimpeachable, authentic, and precise about everything from numbers of books sold to the unvarnished, unexaggerated, unerring, and unaffected stories it tells as all who toil and sweat in this scrupulous business strive as best we can to maintain the veracious sheen-of-sham and hocus pocus so inherently attached like Superglue to our equivocated reputations for flimflam and fiddle-dee-dee. If certain books are obscure whose fault is it, and how can we change that. Blame... The publishers in their comfortable New York offices and Manolo Blahniks. The editors in their comfortable New York offices and Manolo Blahniks. Or the agents in their comfortable New York offices and Manolo Blahniks. Perhaps what we really need is a list of books that deserve to be obscure. Obviously, my books would be at the top of that distinguished computer print out. It is always enough to rattle off the names of a couple of books we read in 1925 on blogs that aren't really invested in any reciprocity between blog and reader. Why is it we never want to look underneath that literary skin too deeply. What makes a book obscure. I would s

Madly Anointed Kissed Bowed Down BeforeTim Barrus: Response to Ridley Scott What I hear is a question being posed: Can a film clip or an entire scene contain repeated iconic images throughout the entirety of the clip, or scene, that would have the same narrative effect (visually) that poetic refrain does at an auditory level. Gospel music does the same thing. Yes, you identify Genocide as the place where I am employing that trick the most. But I do NOT see it as a trick. It's only a trick when the writer wants to provoke but does not really know how or why -- even if he might know with what. Example: In this clip we have added in a visceral set of images and repeated them throughout the clip as if to suggest that the visual action in the clip has multiple consequences. To that end, we've added the suggestion of a foreign language (Spanish voices whispering) in the background, and only have sound effects juxtaposed around that so as not to subtract any of the power of the visual narration where repetition is employed almost as a hypnotic. You are interested in knowing if I think the technique (it is more than just a trick) could work as well in the paradigm of the VOOK as it does in fiction, poetry, and film. My response is that it's about what's in the writer's head -- if he uses repetition to soothe, make a point, or say look here, look over here. It's about analogy. It's about focus. With images, it's also about time because if you are repeating an image, the audience is always being pulled back to that one central point in time as the story unfolds. I would say that the technique is applicable to any way you want to dramatize the story. The Greek chorus was always repeating itself. As I break up The Fallen and the Flight into three categories (a beginning, middle and end), I see where the end has to reflect that slice of life the boys know as being very dark. It's 3am in the Pigalle. It's raining. You are cold. In fact, you are shivering. A car pulls over that

Tim Barrus: Nine of Wands Amsterdam: They will come into my room at night, and we will smoke marijuana, and throw around the names. Someone could be a new name. Adolescent boys are many things. Permanently rooted to one solid place is not one of those things. Change is the least of it. Transition is forever. None of you would know our real names. You know our public names. You would not necessarily know the names we use with one another. Nino knows the names. Nino names the names. Because Nino knows the cards. Nino is the Hanged Man. Nino Fabriano: Having an emotional release. Accepting what is. Surrendering to experience. Ending the struggle. Being vulnerable and open. Giving up control. Turning the world around. Changing your mind. Overturning old priorities. Seeing from a new angle. Upending an old order. Pausing to reflect. Feeling just outside of time. Putting others first. I am Nine of Wands: Defensiveness. Perseverance. Stamina. Defending yourself. Assuming ill will. Expecting the worst. Taking extra precautions. Being paranoid. Feeling wary and guarded. Protecting others. Remembering past attacks. Persisting despite all setbacks. Refusing to take no for an answer. Seeing something through to the end. Getting knocked down, then standing up. Keeping one's resolve. Trying repeatedly. Showing stamina. Continuing despite fatique. Holding fast. Drawing on hidden reserves. Holding together through force of will. Demonstrating physical strength. Keeping up the pace. But where do any of us really live. Far too often in what past the past is dead. Just dead. You could more easily eat an old leather shoe. Oh, you mean the past when sex was The World. As a card, he's creating synthesis, joining together, working in unison. That never did sound like me. Seeing dreams come true. I stopped doing threesome sex scenes when I married my second wife. I was fifty. Fifty is not forty. Fifty is not thirty. Twenty is patently absurd any way you look at it. I do all

A New York Times Editorial claims "at-risk youth" need mentors. It's idealistic. Reality is another animal. As someone who mentors "at-risk" youth, I can tell you for a fact that not too many men want to put themselves in a vulnerable position where their sexuality will be questioned, their sense of morality will be questioned, their manhood will be questioned, and their humanity will become stretched tight as a motorcycle tie-down day one. You will be pushed up against a wall a dozen times a day and called a faggot every time you turn around, and you will ask yourself: why am I here. You will note that the other mentors around you -- your peers -- are there because they were one of these "at-risk youth" one time, too. Chances are, you are in the same tenuous boat. No man stays in any of these jobs too long. Not if you want to feed your family, and not if your own sons are in any way tempted to experiment with being the kind of kid Daddy spends most of his time with. Your motives will be questioned by every single person who looks at you juxtaposed against the scene the "at-risk youth" lives in; particularly if that "at-risk" mentor is male. Gender is an explosive issue. I would have to be out of my mind to be alone in a room engaged in any kind of communication with a female where simply keeping a door open is not enough. You want a reliable witness who was there who can verify nothing exploitive happened. Any male who works in a situation with "at-risk youth" where they find themselves in a locker room or any other setting involving nudity has to have his head examined. The New York Times editorial goes, as it should go, to funding issues. But funding issues are ephemeral. You won't find too many programs where mentors are offered retirement because no one stays that long. Two years is considered an eternity. One is more the norm. If you are mentoring a kid who is fourteen, and you leave him when he's fifteen, you simply become part of the problem especially whe

Tim Barrus: Guns and Pain I am interested in pain. I had never put my cock inside a woman's mouth before. I was sixteen. And in a Lansing General Hospital bed where I mainy spent my time staring at the holes in the ceiling, and wishing I had done a better job of killing myself. As it was, things had gone from bad to worse. My guts were pretty much a major mess. A good portion of my intestines had been blown away. My shit and blood and bone all over the wall. Nurses arrived with Jesus sweet Demerol whose syringes floated Hong Kong scows drifting through a harbor of my filth and decimation. I hated those women with every cell in what was left of my body. I hated them touching me, cleaning up the stinking infection, and the shit that poured from a dozen holes in my abdomen into the bandages that wrapped all the way around the torn obscenity that had been my waist. They thought for sure I was going to die. Speaking hush, hush, the boy might hear. But death was like the holes in the tiles of the ceiling -- only there and looking down at me and nothing I could either touch or embrace. I wanted them to let me die. Not suck me off. "I guess not today," she'd giggle. She was about ten years older than I was. I was just a piece of meat to her not unlike the piece of meat I was to the men who paid me to suck me off. Demerol is not a drug that makes your cock go hard. You would have thought that being a nurse, she would have known that. No, I guess I'm not going to cum in your mouth today. "We'll try again tomorrow," and she'd smile and leave. When she gave me an enema, she'd fuck my hole with her finger. Not that I could feel much of it. Some. But not much. The wound had torn away much of my nervous system, and what I was was half-numb about everything. Oh, but I was alive; yeah for me. The adolescents were all put on the same ward. The kid in the bed beside me had leukemia. It was fatal. I was fatal. We were all the walking dead. What point was there to li

He wanted us to help bury him in the sand and leave him in the desert. Bubu is an Egyptian name that means he gives light.
Bubu was on his last days.
He had given light to Haji for what I understood had been a long time. I try not to pry. I am an outsider here. I do not necessarily know what a long time means. A long time. It was a long time for them. Even if Haji was seventeen.
A boy working the streets anywhere in urban Northern Africa can be ten, twelve. It is not all that unusual that an older man would

Tim Barrus: All the Voices of His Black Dreams

Kostya is from Russia. He is not old enough to remember the Soviet Union although, certainly, he knows some of that history.

I don't know -- I don't want to know so please don't send them to me -- anything about suicide statistics. My suspicion is that Russia and adolescent boys from Russia could be a real four lane highway across a bridge to suicidal depression.

I can't say that Kostya is schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is a neurological disease. But I do not

http://vook.tumblr.com His balls smell like yesterday's socks. He stares at the sad walls. As the baby down the hall screams. The sun warms his rooms. His skies always have an edge. Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

http://vook.tumblr.com

 For immediate Release: Cinematheque Films will be announcing dates for Building the Vook Workshops where the paradigm of the vook will be debated by a panel of Cinematheque students who are making them.Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

The Fallen and the Flight is not unlike a narrative that is, in fact, a dance that unfolds in front of a thousand computers where the playing of the images is its own not entirely disconnected choreography.Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.

Tim Barrus: Make a Deal With Your Gods http://vook.tumblr.com The Fallen and the Flight ends with my joining the effort on the part of the boys to extricate a young man from his prison. The extraction route is prepared and planned. Everyone assigned a role. I pose as someone who might buy the boy but first I have to meet him. This is arranged. The boy is brought to me. We make a run for it. In the process, I kill the administrator of the prison. We escape. This book could only end one way. This is it. Mary Scriver: I don’t make deals with God. There is no God. God doesn’t exist. Yes, I was a minister with a Masters of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Religious Studies. That doesn’t change the argument, but it does change the terms of the argument. The boys of Cinematheque exist. I trust that. It is a decision. I do not know individuals, neither their stories nor their faces nor their nationalities nor their HIV status. I am not there. I do not deal with them. I do not let them talk to me via email. I do not want them to separate from the group. My deal is with Tim Barrus. I trust that. It is a decision. I know he exaggerates, I know he says things happen that didn’t, I know he never spoils a good story with the truth. But I trust him to get to the heart of things. Our deal (he has his side, as well) is not based on anything but reading. We’ve had one brief phone conversation when he same out of surgery. Not much to say except, “sure glad that’s over and you’ve survived.” We trust that. It is a decision. This writing is not the kind you learn when you get an MFA or go to a conference. It’s not “pretty” and “polished” and “linear” and structured. It’s a cry, a testimony, reportage from the battle field. We are sometimes in sync and other times not. Tim doesn’t know how much I can see even though I’m not there. I don’t know how much Tim is manipulating me, making he see what he wants me to see. We

Definitions ARE important. This is not a cryptic problem limited to economic graphs of ups and downs.I'm intrigued. Not with the story. I know the story all too well. I was one of those kids. \"The Life\" is anything but unfamiliar. The so-called story is compelling enough. But so are the responses to it.Run. Away.The kids are right. Typically, the mainstream response is simply more twisting in the wind. It's so easy to say: it's terrible. Duhh. Sure, it's terrible. So is the superficial level of awareness. It's not so easy to confront the dynamics of the problem. The kids are right who tell me that no one wants to really dig too far down. It's dangerous.For one thing, males are stereotyped in most reporting as the perpetual criminal element. Illuminating. I would argue they are often enough also young boys -- who are not criminal in any way but are victims -- who are trafficked but trafficked cloaked in far more secrecy than the girls. I would also argue that culture will never make any real dents in the quid pro quo of child-sexual slavery until it can confront the reality that this sort of sickening prostitution is not characterized by a black and white concept limited to race or gender. Girls are trafficked with impunity. So are boys. We just don't want to look too closely.To slot this as a problem of social services alone is the forest for the trees. Sure, these are runaways up against the wall of prostitution. But this is also the heart and soul of human trafficking in Western society; it is most definitely not limited to those \"advanced\" places. Institutions are involved.The \"problem\" certainly has social service angles. But it's never perceived as related in any way to culture and religion.Oh, no, not religion. Yes, religion. How do you think the problem is so easily able to slip back and forth between political and geographic boundaries. As long as we continue to see this as a problem for social workers, we can conveniently avoid the real tentacles whic

Tim Barrus: At Cinematheque we talk a lot about forbidden images. And we know that getting them is way, way easier said than done. I am in awe of Taryn Simon. The woman has some seriously assertive balls. And that focus you begin to recognize in people who are just going to do what they are going to do, and they're not even all that much aware of the naysayers, the haters, the people eaten up by jealousy; the voices who are always there to say You Can't Do That. For people who want very much to Do That, I think it's important that we study the people are Doing It, and that we stop and listen to what they have to say.

Cinematheque Films is guerrilla education for a collective of at-risk adolescent HIV+/AIDS boys studying art in radical, self-directed ways. We've been prostitutes, junkies, thieves, and potential suicides. Most of us are from the street. Art is all we really have. Traditional education has failed us. We have rejected the educational status quo. We seek to interject our subversive ideas into the dialogue that defines what art is today.