Hallucination Downtown. This is a compilation that was assembled in the early ’90s: first there’s a montage of too-gay-to-function snippets of me flitting through the Times Square area at dusk, through subway cars and passageways, and standing at the centre of that crazy intersection of Avenues and Streets and Broadway, filmed by my good friend Wayne; then there’s footage filmed by Mal and Kim as part of their generous hospitality in their Warhol’s-Factory-like apartment on Perry Street and on the surrounding streets of Greenwich Village; and then there’s footage of my reading or performing passages from my novella The Platinum Raven, lit by projections of my paintings, which was also filmed by Mal and Kim.

Professionally edited by Oliver Wicki on then-prevalent three-quarter-inch U-matic analogue tape, this compilation was made as a segment of Wayne’s project Metaculture, which explored various urban subcultures in NYC.

R.I.P., the lurid neon we can see here in the Times Square sequence. This was just before that neighbourhood started being forced into a lamentably sanitised version of the dark and characterful luridity that had flowered there so richly for more than a century until then. (16’15”)
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Performance 1. Apologies for this performance of mine; but I can offer something of an excuse, which is that it’s the only one of these pieces where I was playing a role within something larger, rather than just reading or performing a text as myself. This role was as a figure delivering some version of seduction. I’m not sure whom I could have seduced with this in reality, but that was the specific instruction given to me and to a few others too, by a talented artist named Jean-Luc Vilmouth, who filmed us all. He then used our various depictions of seduction to make an interesting and successful video installation art piece called Bar Séduire at the Guggenheim Museum Soho. My text from “Venus” in the published collection Hallucinations; shot by Jean-Luc Vilmouth. (3’41”)
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Performance 2. Here’s a souped-up little vol-au-vent of not-so-understated performance by me. The video projections are by Artpig; the text later became part of chapter 2 of my novella Hallucination in Hong Kong; and the combination of the two was produced and recorded, with his customary generosity towards other artists, by the multi-talented musician Caeser Pink at his creative hub in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for his The Imperial Orgy TV Show.

The full episode of Caeser’s show is here. More about him is here and the Imperial Orgy’s Wikipedia page is here. (1’18”)
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Performance 3. My text from “Action” in the published collection Hallucinations, with: projections of video by Artpig, shot by Caeser Pink for his Imperial Orgy online show; and projections of my paintings Sick Beauty and Conflux, shot by Mal Torrance. (7’45”)
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Performance 4. My text from “Pluto” in the published collection Hallucinations, with a projection of my painting Fried Eggs by Moonlight, shot by Mal. (1’35”)
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Performance 5. My text from “Enter” in the published collection Hallucinations, with a projection of my painting Corn in Flames, shot by Mal. (3’00”)
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