Stuff about ‘Stuff’

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“These two seemingly disparate fields become something new, more than the sum of their parts, a delicious undertaking.  Alison is adept at working with both sides of her brain and I compliment her on that achievement”.

Ah, youth.  When I went to Art College in the 1960s, I left behind a proper four-year college education halfway through and my father’s expectation that I would ever amount to anything.

A ‘simple country boy’, as I am fond of describing myself in retrospect, I went to the big city and encountered what was initially quite an overwhelming experience.  Fellow art students seemed more talented and sophisticated than me.  The other boys had locks that certainly were longer than mine.  That became my first trial then: to grow my hair.

The second challenge was to choose a ‘major’ for my studies.  I had arrived with a passion for theatre set design, but there was no major in that.  I chose ‘three-dimensional design’ because I thought that was a close second.  

It turns out it wasn’t. 

Three-D was in fact about Industrial Design: engineering and building models and stuff. I spent the majority of my time making spidery mock-ups of bridges and such out of balsa wood strips, which would somehow always get crushed in the journey from my apartment to class.  Sniffing the air-plane glue used to assemble them turned out to be the only unexpected pleasure of this new experience.  At other times, perspective drawings were required that needed to be India inked with Rapidograph pens.  Always a few steps from completion, the pen would tit squirt a huge blob of black ink all over the drawing and ruin it. 

There were other possibilities in choosing a major at Art College, of course.  Painting was one, but those students all seemed a bit too talented and determined.  Illustration was another, but those with an interest in that seemed already to have all the skills necessary (and I certainly didn’t).  There was Ceramics, but I generally made a muddy mess at the potter’s wheel at the required introductory lessons.  In fear of no future job prospects otherwise, I stuck to Industrial Design. No, I was not brave enough to take a more adventurous gamble on ‘art for art’s sake’.

There were courses in Typography, but I had little idea what Typography was.  The teacher who ran the Typography course was called “Jim”, even by his students.  This was rare at that time, because most instructors were called ‘Mr. This’ or ‘Mr. That’.  His students, who worshipfully followed him around between classes, all seemed a bit uh, …well, what we might call ‘alternative’ these days.  Word of mouth was that he was really into innovation, new music, even revolution.  His students were going to turn the world of Art on its head.  They were going to change everything. 

He (and they) were quite scary to me. 

Now I say scary, but we must remember that we are talking about a country boy in the big city who was just learning about the possibilities of other ways of doing, living, being.  An example: an ‘older’ student in our class (who had served in the Navy) invited us to his place one night to listen to some music.  It turns out that he smoked ‘weed’ and had us listening to some strange folk singer, Bob Dylan.  It was too weird for me and I left quickly. 

This is ironic because only two years later I would be listening to Buffy Saint Marie records whilst doing lines of speed purchased from a go-go dancer.  In the final analysis, Madame Bovary had nothing on me in terms of ruination in the big city!

So this brings us to talk about Typography more soberly and page design more generally.  Eventually, I did learn something about two-dimensional design from Lenore Chorney, a wonderful teacher of Fashion Illustration who became my mentor for several years.  I embraced the excitement that she brought to the page in her talks about Dada artists, Suprematism and Constructivism from Moscow, Bauhaus design from Germany, Futurism from Italy, and De Stijl from Holland.

'Self-portrait' 

I was a slow starter, but I got there in the end.  Because of or in spite of those early experiences, the visual is of central importance to everything I have done and still do. I often comment that I learn more by watching what people do than listening to what they say.

In spite of (or because of) my visual orientation, I have returned to the concept of text and the page frequently in my work in Performative Social Science (See Popularizing Research), particularly in my considerations of ‘audience’ and specifically, the primary importance of the reader when our outputs are textural.  How do we engage the reader in a dialogue? How do we encourage our readers to invest their own experiences in their interface with our text?

An early (Jones, 2004) attempt was made at both audience engagement and alternative use of textural production in the published results of my interview with social psychologist, Mary Gergen (”Thoroughly Post-Modern Mary”), where I used a variety of typography and illustrations within a unique page design to represent that biography in an academic journal.

Four years later, Sally Berridge (2008) produced a stunning effort in a graphic design of her entire thesis, represented in the FQS article,“What Does It Take? Auto/biography as Performative PhD Thesis”.

Now we have ‘Stuff’ by Alison Barnes (2010) or ‘Typography as a language of performance’.  ‘Stuff’ is a slim, beautifully crafted volume that provides unique and personal answers to the query, ‘What makes your house a home?’ Items such as photographs, travel souvenirs and childhood toys become autobiographical objects and form a spatial representation of identity in the book.  The reader truly becomes engaged in a process of interaction. The readers’ experiences are embellished by their own personal reflections and memories, redefining yet again, the on-going social construction of the meaning of home.

‘Stuff’ is important to me and to Performative Social Science because it is a successful example of the fusion of art and social science in a single project.  The levels of both design and social science compete with each other for praise.  These two seemingly disparate fields become something new, more than the sum of their parts, a delicious undertaking.  Alison is adept at working with both sides of her brain and I compliment her on that achievement.

I never did complete Art College.  Life happened as we like to say and I moved on with it.  Several years later I did cobble together my credits from the initial college along with those from the Art College and fashion them into an undergrad degree of sorts by taking a few more academic credits at a local University. 

I fondly recall an Anthropology course at that University for which I produced a final project—a game in the shape of a three-dimensional model of a haunted house. It came with little plastic babies that were the game pieces.  You dropped them down the house’s chimney to play.  The professor was taken aback, but he did give me an ‘A’ for my efforts. 

I had been to Art College, after all.

Update on Sally Berridge's PhD Thesis

For the time-being, you can read about Alison Barnes’ journey with ‘Stuff’ (and see some examples) on her blog.

This blog is produced using Georgia typeface.  I thought that providing this information would be an ironic touch.

Rufus Stone the movie: Trivia

A compiliation of trivia from 

the making of Rufus Stone the movie. 

The 'mirroring' by the two younger characters of their older counterparts was conceived after the Exec Producer shared a pas de deux from Petit's Proust ballet with the film's director. The swimming scene in Rufus was also partly based on this ballet.

 

Stephane Bullion - Florian Magnenet - Morel - Saint-Loup ou le combat des angeswww.youtube.com 

"Morel et Saint-Loup ou le combat des anges" interprété par Stéphane Bullion et Florian Magnenet Extrait de "Proust ou les intermittences du coeur" ...

       'Abigail', the young tattle-tale in Rufus was named after another scandalmonger, 'Abigail', from 'The Crucible' by Arthur Miller.

Martha Myers-Lowe (above) who plays Abigail in Rufus Stone also played Ian Curtis' sister in the film about the band Joy Division, 'Control'.

        Flip's line, "I'm not sure if the place is ready to receive 'gentlemen callers'" is an homage to Tennessee Williams. 

  

       The name 'Rufus Stone' was chosen for the film and the character after months of ruminating. The author saw a sign for "Rufus Stone" in the New Forest and remarked: 'That sounds just like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel!'

 

      The name 'Flip' is short for 'Philippe'. In the back story, Flip's mother ,who married a farmer, was from the nearby town and put on 'airs'. She gave her boys French names, which bullying quickly shortened.

    Rufus' hands in the opening close-up are actually those of boom operator, Dan Rhodes, who stood in for the shot.

 

   

             The film was shot over five days in July with a cast and crew of more than 45 people in eight locations in rural Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire.


It was director Haneke's comment about 'The White Ribbon' that partly inspired the story behind Rufus Stone: "‘It’s very simple to get a cross section of society within a village; you get a microcosm of the social macrocosm’.

        Rufus Stone was shot entirely on the Arri Alexa digital camera. "ARRI is to filmmaking, cameras and lenses, what the Mercedes is to the automobile".

The biggest thrill of the shoot for Exec Producer Kip Jones was watching the 'fire starter' at work. Jones had some problems with playing with matches as a child, he admits. 

       Discussions between Director Josh Appignanesi and Exec Producer/Writer Kip Jones began in 2006. It took more than two years to raise the funding and four years to complete the research, before the writing for the script of Rufus Stone began.

Watch the film here

Pinterest: a new potential for visual communication

I have joined Pinterest and begun to play with creating a page.  First one: 'Beauty'.  Some of my own photographs and others that inspire me.

My page on Pinterest

13 Facts About Pinterest Users [INFOGRAPHIC]

Tickled pink: the year behind, the year ahead.

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"How breakthroughs come, and the price people pay for them". 

It certainly has been a productive and eventful year for me.  After more than five years of scheming, planning, cajoling, compromising and plain hard work, our efforts to produce Rufus Stone the movie culminated with the premiere of the film at Bournemouth University in November.

Bringing this concept of a ‘performative social science’ to fruition in such a major way (£226K of funding by Research Councils UK and three years of research by a dedicated but small team supported by citizen advisors) certainly was a milestone personally.  Working on the film production with director, Josh Appignanesi and Parkville Pictures, along with what to me seemed a huge cast and crew of more than 45 talented individuals for a 30-minute film, was the icing on the cake.  The week of location shoots in rural Dorset and surrounding counties (thank you, SATNAV) in July was truly a personal learning experience I will never forget.  The response that the film received at the premiere was reassuring and heart-warming. 

I can only look to the year ahead with many more screenings of Rufus Stone, both for citizens in rural communities as well as in film festivals and at a few conferences.  It should prove reassuring to all of us for our faith in the project and all of the hard work that went into making it happen.

Something else happened late this year, however, that tickled me pink.

More than ten years ago now, when I was living in a bedsit in Leicester and had just finished my PhD, I decided to write a conference presentation about Ken Gergen and Klaus Riegel.  Both scholars played important roles in the development of my thinking for my thesis.  During this time I came across a volume (Life-span Developmental Psychology Dialectical Perspectives on Experimental Research, edited by Nancy Datan & Hayne W. Reese,published by Academic Press 1977) that was a result of the Fifth West Virginia University Life-Span Developmental Psychology Conference held at Morgantown, West Virginia in 1976. The conference centred on the work of Riegel and the book included a chapter by Gergen.  


My imagination got the best of me.  What if these two, both influences on my own work, had a conversation following that gathering? As I recently explained, reported in a Times Higher Education article, "Gergen is a giant to our generation, so it was good to look back to a time when he was insecure...I wanted to examine how breakthroughs come, and the price people pay for them". Thus, “On a train from Morgantown” was born.

It seems a short time ago now, but we must not forget that in 2001 digital production was limited, at the personal computer level at least.  I found video-cassette recorded footage of trains that would have been in service in West Virginia in 1976 then convinced a techy at my university to help me cut and edit it.  I wrote a script (much like a radio play) and found people to record it on cassette tape (one in Germany, the rest in Leicester).  I produced overhead projections for some of the visuals and created lots of sound files and edited music (again, on cassette) to fill out the imaginary train journey. 

I packed up all these production materials and caught the ferry to Hamburg and then a train to Berlin and a conference at the Free University to present my grand production … to an audience that would include Mary and Ken Gergen.  When my allotted time came, I spent it dashing about starting up a TV, co-ordinating a cassette player, an overhead projector, etc.—a bit like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

Ken Gergen responded quite emotionally following all of this.  The mostly German-speaking audience seemed a bit confused by it all. 

I recall this as a bit of madness on my part at the time, but also in many ways as the public birth of performative social science, or at least the seeds for its future development.  Being a visual person, I wanted to ‘show’ as well as ‘tell’--and this frustration became central to my efforts in developing PSS.

Because publication is/was the end-all of an academic’s life, I began to think about how to possibly publish ‘Morgantown’.  Because of my visual inclinations, I thought that a film script with all of its optical instructions might do the trick.  So I wrote ‘Morgantown’ up as a screenplay, looking at many scripts in order to get a sense of how to present a visual story as text.  A bit of a Pollyanna at publication, I actually submitted the script to a few publications which I naively thought might be adventurous enough to publish it.  They were not and it was rejected.

I put ‘Morgantown’ in a drawer somewhere and so it languished for almost a decade.  About a year ago, the editor of a special issue on the work of Ken Gergen for Springer’s Psychological Studies contacted me and asked if I would be interested in submitting a paper for the issue.  I responded that, yes, I do have something that may be fit for purpose.  Go ahead, I told myself: ‘I dare you.’  I submitted the script for 'Morgantown'.

To my great surprise, the submission was accepted with little change and now is published as a film script in the special issue on Ken Gergen in Psychological Studies.  In my estimation, this represents a great breakthrough for Performative Social Science, or the use of tools from the arts in dissemination of social science research.  It gives others a reference in support of their own work in moving academic publishers to being more open, even inviting, to alternative presentation formats.

Two major events, one year.  Rufus Stone is so important to me personally and a concerted effort of which I am very proud. I am grateful to all involved in making this happen.  The initial resistance of some to its subject matter in fact played a major part in driving me forward and insuring that I did not give up. 

‘Morgantown’ and its eventual acceptance holds a special place for me, however.  In so many ways it represents ‘working in the dark’ against unknown forces and circumstances, but still being driven by our muses to create and invent. 

Morgantown represents what I like to call  ‘kitchen sink’ work—work produced because creativity compels us to find the means, the ways, the materials and then the outlets.  I never want to forget that it is in these personal efforts the potential to make a difference lies.

Some of the responses to the publication of ‘Morgantown’ are repeated below.  They convince me that efforts to open up channels previously closed to innovation and experimentation are not unfounded and offer support and encouragement to others:

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·       Congratulations. This is really amazing. Thank you for your courage. And for the work that you are doing for all of us.

·       It’s just wonderful to see the glimpse of barriers breaking down between interdisciplinary research and innovative work. Well done!! It is happening a step at a time and we just need to keep on pushing those boundaries.

·       breaks the waves for academics like me
dreaming of more than the written words
to portray researched life

·       I got very inspired, though, when reading about your publication as I share PSS' engagement and ambition to intensify publications moving in between arts/social sciences/performance …I say/shout "GREAT!!!" from Copenhagen! Thank you for sharing!!

·       I continue to watch your career with great interest and derive much hope for my own work from your example.

·       fantastique!!! gives me hope

·       Think it is really important to share this kind of news as it gives all of us who research in creative ways hope!

·       A massive achievement in the current climate!

·       This is fantastic … and I received this just perfect for our course in qualitative research methodologies where I am teaching narrative and performative approaches. Will use your article as a brand new example and hope to encourage some of our students to be more daring!

Rufus Stone

From the programme for Rufus Stone the movie which premièred on 16 November in Bournemouth after more than five years of preparation:

Kip Jones (Executive Producer and Project Lead). Kip Jones was born in a trunk in the Princess Theatre in Pocatella, Idaho. Not really, but that old Judy Garland tune has had its effect on him. As a child, Jones loved finding large cardboard cartons, cutting a hole in them, crawling inside and putting on a show for neighbours and family members. In spite of recent academic achievement and success, he still insists on putting the razzle-dazzle back into scholarly outputs. Theatrical haze is his favourite device.

Harry Kershaw, Josh Appignanesi, Martha Myers-Lowe, Tom Kane at the world premiere of Rufus Stone in Bournemouth, Nov 2011.

 Watch the film here:  https://vimeo.com/109360805

“No horses were frightened in the making of this motion picture”

Actor Tom Kane, who plays the role of young “Flip” in Rufus Stone, relaxing between takes.

Just to be clear: I’m not a wigs and whistles kind of guy.  That is, I have never fancied a day out at a gay pride parade.  All right for some, but for me the idea of being gay, even celebrating it, is not about being ‘outrageous’ in public for an afternoon and then thinking I have won over some disbelievers or bigots.

With my serious mortarboard on: How does such activity open up dialogue, located in human interactions and their social contexts? How does it promote inter-subjectivity, being-together, the encounter and the social construction of meaning? 

Frankly, simply writing about that sort of approach does not seem to me to have changed some attitudes either.

Perhaps making a film with the intent of beginning to change hearts and minds is, ironically, a middle ground: an activity somewhere between ‘Shout it loud; I’m gay and proud!’ and tedious intellectual rhetoric published in unread journal articles. 

Five years ago, I thought I would give it a try, anyway. This is when the scheming for the film, Rufus Stone, began.  Could we, through the use of film, both set to one side typical critical response to academic research and, instead use the outputs of that research to create a place for shared dialogue amongst the very citizens that the research is about?  By sharing stories, could we all warm up a bit around the communal campfire?

The personal irony of taking this ‘road less travelled’ has been that the process has made me somewhat more militant.  Much of my newfound exasperation with ignorance has been ignited by some of the responses to our proposed film, its story and (importantly academically) the findings from the in-depth research in which our script is grounded.

A tendency towards denial continues to astound me. Included in the storyline of Rufus Stone is a prevalence of suicide amongst older gay men, frequently reported in both our biographic interviews and a focus group as well as in the press.  When this is mentioned, a typical response is, “Well, that may be so for their generation, you know, older gays”.  I ask, “Why then is there an international campaign to raise awareness of the increase of suicides amongst gay youth?”  This fact is typically met with silence. (For example: 'Gay Buffalo Teen Commits Suicide ...')

The British do not like to seem to be complaining. Brits often will silently endure a poorly served restaurant meal rather than object to bad service.  Bring up a subject like gay rights, prejudice against gay and lesbian citizens often leading to isolation, even despair and harm amongst many older community members and the British penchant for avoiding awkward conversations goes into overdrive.  The dialogue typically goes something like this:

“I doubt that there are any in our village, anyway.  We hold traditional values in our community”. 

“Well, we don’t care what these folks get up to exactly as long as they don’t do it around here”.

“We have grandchildren.  We need to protect our values for their sake”.

A phrase that is well over one hundred years old now is often repeated in these conversations as a response to calls for understanding and compassion towards gay and lesbian citizens. When a Victorian actor showed too much affection for the leading man, actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, replied: ‘My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses’.  The fact that a Victorian attitude frozen in time is today seen as an ‘amusing’ response to an ‘uncomfortable’ conversation simply boggles the mind. ‘Traditional values’ such as tolerance and fair play seem to have no place in this version of community standards. The lark ascending, indeed.

That line, ‘We don’t care what you do as long as you don’t do it in the road and frighten the horses’ is included in the script of Rufus Stone. It is delivered in a speech excusing village attitudes, even making light of a plea for compassion.  In the next scene, the lead character discovers that his boyhood friend has just hung himself.  The point of this juxtapositioning in the storyline is to emphasise that what we say often does have consequences, often, serious ones.

Now for some good news. Between takes of the scene described above, I was waiting with some of the young crew, sheltering ourselves from a sudden shower behind a van packed with leads and sundry cinematic equipment.  The boom operator, Dan, fresh from film school with an unbridled enthusiasm for his role, factiously quizzed me.  “So Kip.  Are horses afraid of gay people?” 

We all laughed. 

“It is less painful to learn in youth than to be ignorant in age”.

 —Proverb

Watch the trailer for RUFUS STONE here,
and catch the filming of the final 'fire scene' here.
Background to the research and film production on RUFUS STONE blog.

 Watch the film here

A summer holiday, three books and a story

I left New York for Philadelphia on an early morning train and never heard from Jason again.

Group portrait taken at Andy Warhol's Factory (Warhol is fourth left, in the bottom row) New York, New York, March 6, 1968. Pictured are, left to right, bottom row: Johnathan Lieberson, Andreas Brown, Penelope Tree, Andy Warhol, Catherine Milinaire, and Jason Fishbein; second row: Lil Picard, Frances Steloff, Lita Hornick, Al Hansen, Viva, Charles Henri Ford, Kenneth King, and Ruth Ford; third row: Bruce Miller, Buddy Wurthshafter, Ultra Violet, Taylor Mead, Jack Smith, Sally Chamberlain, Wynn Chamberlain, Ron Zimardi, Ken Jacobs, Florence Jacobs, and Maurice Hogenbaum; back row: Bob Cowan, Fred Hughes, Paul Morrissey, Donna Kerness, John Wilcock, and Willoughby Sharp. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

I treasure my solitude but choose a table for ten on my holidays. It encourages me to interact. Even on vacations, I am quite content with my own company. My dining arrangement is always, therefore, full of surprises—for me and certainly for my tablemates.

Getting away from Rufus Stone the movie for a few weeks provided a good percolator for what is next for the film. I also wanted to think about my future, where I would like to be a year from now and what I might be doing then.

Three books helped with this process.

I began with Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a book recommended to me by Mary Gergen. I was soon turned off, however, by Smith’s approach to her own story and her conviction that she was the only child to ever grow up feeling slightly different or alienated. I thought that was what childhood was about. When she referenced Proust in the midst of her tales of preteen angst in New Jersey, I put the book aside and turned to Michael Kimball’s slim volume, Us.

I am a great fan of Kimball’s writing (I refer to his and the work of some of the other writers whom he has interviewed as ‘the new writing’). I often recommend his books to fellow academics as a kind of intellectual colonic irrigation for the scholar’s literary outpourings.

This will not be a review of Kimball’s book, but just to say that it is the first book I have read in a long, long time that, when it ended, I wished it hadn’t. His ability to describe minutia precisely in a conversational tone is astonishing. Kimball is someone at whom Proust would have smiled. He constructs, through simple sentences, complex situations and ideas. He is particularly skilful at describing innermost thoughts and feelings and the meniscus that both separates and joins those two intertwining elements in our lives. I love his writing.

I then turned to a quite silly book about Truman Capote entitled, Party of the Century (that would be the last Century) by Deborah Davis. Perhaps I should explain why I was reading this book before I loose all credibility here. There are definite reasons for my reading it, which can only be explained in my usual tangential style and detail. Please indulge me.

Firstly, I am giving a party next month for the cast and crew of Rufus Stone the movie. I was so impressed by how hard they all worked for little or no money the week of the film shoot that I wanted to thank them personally. As Mildred Pierce said, ‘Let’s get stinko’ and I thought that we should gather again to celebrate.

In 1966 Capote, when not comparing his own talents to Proust’s, was spending months and months planning and plotting his black and white masquerade ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The event was to be a celebration for nearly 400 of his ‘closest’ friends to mark the huge success of his book, In Cold Blood, supposedly. It turns out that creating the guest list was just as much of a production of preparation as the party itself. One detail that particularly fascinated me is that he would not permit anyone invited to bring a husband, wife or partner if both parties were not on his guest list. Instead, Capote invited a ‘hundred extra men’ to ‘partner’ lone women guests.

This is where Jason Fishbein comes in.

My story here relates to our story of Rufus Stone in that this simple country boy (me) went to the big city (Philadelphia) way back when (then) and enrolled in art studies (Philadelphia College of Art). Philadelphia has more art students per capita than any other place on the planet.

I met Jason who had graduated from another of the city’s art schools that year, having just completed a year’s sojourn in Europe on a fellowship. He was a star of the student art world and the son of the owners of Philadelphia’s very exclusive (and oldest) jewellery store. He was living at the time in a townhouse with the owner of the city’s trendiest and most popular gay bar where he conveniently had a studio in the atelier. In fact, the first time I ever nervously entered a gay establishment was in the daytime when the bars were closed to help Jason remove some paintings from his studio above the building’s three uninterrupted étages of gaiety.

He was handsome, talented, so sophisticated, slightly older than me and about to embark on a career move to a New York City West Side loft. Oh, and he listened to show music. I was overcome with glee! At that time I was not so sure of my own sexuality, but certain that Jason was attractive. He made overtures to me, but I shyly fended them off, nonetheless continuing to fawn over him at every chance I got. I was dazed and confused, but certainly smitten.

I offered to help him make the move to his New York loft. We packed up a rental van and left for NYC and a real West Side loft situated in an old industrial building with worn wooden floors, lots of windows and little else. The grimness and decay of this particular West Side neighbourhood was never reflected in West Side Story that was for sure. Jason had crammed the van with paintings, a chandelier, bags of clothes, a small refrigerator full of booze (from the bar I assumed) and some mattresses. After the unpacking, drinking and merriment, we (Jason, a young woman who always seemed to be hanging around him, and a male friend of Jason’s from New York who met us at the loft to help) settled down to sleep on mattresses on the loft floor that night. Jason bedded me with this other guy and put himself on the mattress next to the girl because she was feigning fright at her first night in the “big city”. I knew little of the subtleties of social manipulation back then but quickly learned that night.

Without going into detail, I spent the long night on the floor of that loft pushing this stranger off of me. I was very upset that Jason had put me to bed with this unfamiliar person as some sort of loft house-warming gift for his friend instead choosing me for himself. As a reluctant, shy country boy, I reminisce that I would have finally been ready to ‘give in’ to Jason that night, if he had shared his bed with me instead.

With little sleep and cast off in such a cavalier way, I left New York for Philadelphia on an early morning train and never heard from Jason again. I returned to my girlfriend in Philadelphia, turning my back on the complexities of a world that I was yet to understand. My relationship with a woman seemed a simpler solution, except for the ever-increasing awareness of the painful dishonesty of our situation, of which I was becoming more and more conscious. (Who’s invoking Proust now?)

A few months later I opened the newspaper to see a photo of Jason on the front page with the inscription, “Jason Fishbein, artist, whose mask was a sensation at the Capote ball at the Plaza last night”. Jason had “arrived” in New York.

Recently by chance, I came across another photo from 1968 of Andy Warhol and his entourage, taken by top photographer of the 60’s counter-culture, Fred McDarrah. Jason Fishbein is dead centre in this shot. I guess he did okay after his success at the ball as well.

I was really curious about what had happened to him since then and that is why I wanted to read Party of the Century. Jason isn’t mentioned in the book by name, unfortunately, but his having been one of Capote’s “single escorts” now seems conceivable. I assume that in Capote’s Upper East Side world of New York high society, inviting gay males to such an upscale party needed some sort of plausible ‘social justification’ and Capote had come up with this rather bizarre solution.

What is the purpose of this story? Well, I suppose it is to say once more that being gay and stories about being gay are never straight forward (no pun intended) or simple. Our life stories are played out in an entrenched heterosexual culture and society, which often produces not only our angst, insecurities and complexes, but also the variety and richness of alternative lives and lifestyles as solutions for many of us.

No Patti, being a Tomboy is not life’s only young struggle.

Rufus Stone: Reports from locations, Part 2

Rufus Stone: Reports from location, Part 2


Video by Trevor Hearing

About this video:
"A second location report about the set of the film Rufus Stone, directed by Josh Appignanesi. Rufus Stone is a film about love, sexual awakening and treachery, set in the bucolic countryside of south west England, and viewed through the lens of growing older. It is based on knowledge gathered as part of the research project "Gay and Pleasant Land? - a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales." The project has been funded by the UK Research Councils. The research has been led by the film's Executive Producer, Dr Kip Jones."