B e l l i a l   D a r s h a n

 

 

Introduction (by Larry Mitchell)

 

          “Let’s drink to the old faggots who were there and helped make this happen just by being there.  It’s been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free… We gotta keep each other alive any way we can ‘cause nobody else is goin’ to do it.  The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions.  The first is that we will get our asses kicked.  The second is that we will win.  The faggots knew the first.  Faggot ass-kicking is a time honored sport of the men.  But the faggots did not know about the second.  They had never thought of winning before.  They did not even know what winning meant.  So they asked the strong women and the strong women said winning was like surviving, only better.  As the strong women explained winning, the faggots were surprised and then excited.  The faggots knew about surviving for they always had and this was going to just be plain better.  That made ass-kicking different.  Getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution.

 

          There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wear a suit for a lifetime.  Pinetree dreams of a glorious, non-violent revolution.”

 

          -Larry Mitchell, 1977

 

 

 

With Every Fiber of My Being (an excerpt)

 

                I suppose it all started when I was a child. My art teacher asked me why I chose the color purple as my favorite color.  I didn’t know anything about the musician Prince, books or movies, not even the general palate an artist uses while putting together a masterpiece.  But I did know when my mother first took me to see the film “The Poseidon Adventure.”  It was the first time I ever saw people dying and I couldn’t distinguish the difference between what was being projected on the big screen and what was ‘real,’ what life was.  By the time a group of people started crashing through glass, were drowning in the water and continued dying, I thought that that was really happening in front of me.  As people fell, screamed and bled, I was traumatized.  I started screaming, couldn’t control my emotions, didn’t know I had such emotions and was shouting “NO, NO, MAKE IT STOP!”

 

                My mother took me out of the building right away.  Standing in front of the Wintergarden theater in Jamestown, New York, she began to explain that what I just saw wasn’t real.  This was very hard for me to understand.  It was, after all, happening, in front of my eyes.  I suppose I chose the color purple because it didn’t look like blood.  It didn’t look like the sky.  It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen before, until I saw it in the form of a crayon.  What was being projected and what was ‘real’ was everything I wanted to disassociate myself from.  I suppose that might be the reason why purple appealed to me.  Later in life I would discover purple was the color of royalty, wealth and the highest shade of enlightenment.  To me, purple was simply a reflection of the kind of boy I was, am, different and indifferent.

 

                It all comes down to one thing.  I’m an artist.  My art is my life.  It’s what I see.  Life is art.  I am afraid of meaning.  I got my bachelor’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and having been in the military for three years, watching a few people die, having a bomb thrown at me and my girlfriend.  Artists are pretty weird.  Soldiers are pretty weird.  Life is pretty weird.  People like us, who are willing to go to whatever extremes are necessary to ‘get us there’ will ‘GO THERE.’  We don’t care what you think is “weird.”  We don’t look at life the same way others do.  True artists and true soldiers stand apart from society so they can evaluate it, manipulate it, congregate it.  Make it mean something.  We show others how hideous and amazing  and most importantly, how beautiful it all is.  We do this by fighting, with ourselves, with others but more so, with ourselves.  It’s like one girl telling another girl what life should be like in a book or a film called “The Color Purple.”

 

                When I first met Jaron Lanier, the man that invented virtual reality, I remember him putting it to me this way… “Information is isolated experience.”  All films and reality aside, I’ll never forget that.  At that time, I was the new faggot in San Francisco, an apprentice to a man that built 16^th and 17^th century harpsichords and clavichords, my boyfriend was in a band.  I moved to California after living in Panama, Central America for three years.  I lived not far from the Panama canal.  Everything American, Democratic and homosexual was completely foreign to me.  I was and still am an artist whether I am creating art or not.  It’s all in your head.  You can’t trust me but I guarantee that you can trust that I will always be myself.  This would often complex people around me.  Most people do not want to go through painful experiences; they scratch the surface lightly to avoid figuring out exactly who and what they are.  After seeing death in a film experience and then through my own eyes, I wanted all the painful experiences I could possibly find.

 

                After a number of girlfriends and boyfriends said to me “maybe you should go see a doctor or something,” I began to wonder if I was so complex to the point where I was simply born to make everyone around me uncomfortable.  So, to figure out what was so complex about me and how I viewed the world, a psychologist finally came into my life and said I “suffer” from bi-polar disorder and manic depression.  He wasn’t interested at all in how artistic I was, what I achieved, how I viewed the world.  I figured he must have known something being a “professional” and all.  I was prescribed anti-depressants and to this day, have struggled through a variety of drugs to keep me alive and confused about who I inherently am.

 

                Now, having been in the military, college and losing countless friends to homelessness, drug addiction and AIDS, I decided that with this news about my irrational behavior, I wasn’t doing so bad if I was still alive to talk about it.  That is I suppose, how I have become what I am today besides a ‘confused artist.’  When life is stripping everything away from you, you can either go with it or try to hold onto it, all pretty white knuckled.  When your fingers grip more so, to the point where they feel they’re going to fall off, you can feel yourself falling… falling… falling deeper into desperation.  You learn to let go.  You have to.  And so, with this American flow, I try to keep myself free of struggle anymore.  The memories still come back, hitting me from somewhere in the back of my head, like a boomerang.  I’m hit.  I’m hit again.  I’m hit a third, fourth, fifth and countless times as the years go forward.  I end up trying not to hate anyone in the process.  The bottom line is… you should never give a sixteen year old artist a gun.

 

                “This is my court.”  She continues in a moment.  “Be careful what you tell me, sir,” she says.  “I’ve been around a lot longer and am a lot smarter than you are.”  “The man hunt is over,” says the guy that interrupts Judge Judy.  It looks like something like breaking news.  I flip the channel on the remote and there’s an important message for people that have taken… anti-depressants.  It sounded like he said “airplane something or other” and I realize that’s how our brains work, being bi-polar, ADHD;   we have this remote in our heads and someone keeps switching the channel.  We’re looking for stability.  We’re fooled into thinking drugs can help.  I used to take drugs to kill myself slowly.  Now I take drugs to keep me “stable,” like everybody else.  I’m not like everybody else.  I need to remember that.  I need to feel good about that.  This is my life.  No one else’s.