april 1 very late
kathe:
today was a whirlwind day verging on out of control, mostly because it started with filming for this documentary that a woman Gabriela is making for Channel 4 on Erotomania, which actually is not as it sounds. I at first recoiled when she approached me thinking that of course she was making the same assumption that everyone does, that I am some kind of sex fiend or egomaniac (actually she is making a film on egomania as well.) but it turns out that erotomania is love addiction, in particular the kind of stalker-esque love addiction where one is convinced they are in love with another that they may barely know (if they know at all) and that are convinced the virtual stranger is also in love with them. In any case, the whole doc is basically on addiction and obsession with love and they came in to interview Paul and I and film a couple of faux appointments: one with David who came a couple of days ago (and who Paul and I fell charismatically in love with immediately) and one with David Lillington, who I know well enough to feel that the cameras would not interfere with my love of him (and they didn't).
Gabriela and her cameraman Yoshi came early but things never really go as planned in filming with things like line noise in the microphone and shadows of the cameraman falling into the screen and it got later and later and the day got messy and it was hardly "real" but Paul and I did our best throughout it all. I thought the film seemed really smart and Gabriela really disarmed me when she questioned me about the origins of my obsession with love
I didn't feel like doing in-depth surgery on my childhood which I've talked about ad infinitum with just about anybody who would listen for most of my 20s and 30s (and also had shared extensively with Paul on many late nights). I did weirdly remember this film I saw when I was in high school THE STORY OF ADELE H by Truffaut. It supposedly was the story of Victor Hugo's beautiful youngest daughter (played by the over the edge and beautiful Isabelle Adjani when she was very young) who falls in love with this young lieutenant who will have nothing to do with her but she is convinced that she loves him and he loves her and she has this hysterical pregnancy and spends all of her parents' money trailing around after him til she ends up in someplace like Tobago walking the streets in her tattered ruby red dress out of her mind and she actually passes her "lover" on the street as she wanders aimlessly looking for him. Gabriela told me that David Letterman's stalker through herself in front of a train a year ago . . . In any case she wondered how I got to see this film when I was 16 and I told her that my English teacher had told me about it and then I kind of glazed over and she asked me about him.


I had heard around school that John A had slept with some girls at my school and I decided I was in love with him before I even met him, which tells tons about me and my early basis for love. My high school was fairly experimental and also large so we could register for a variety of English classes and I chose John's filmmaking class and systematically & strategically moved my way closer and closer to him, ending up on the street in front of his apartment on the upper West Side (I lived in the suburbs by then), casually calling him working my way upstairs (on many occasions). I guess it was fortunate for me that he realized I was a live wire and never physically touched me (although he ended up marrying a girl a few years older than me) but I think in the end he really loved me too (in some fashion) and never told me to go home but continued to engage me and really brought me forth, taught me things about art and life and I thought about love but I don't know if I was making it all up (oh god, I know it is all so cliché). I remember he gave me a beat up copy of A CHILD"S CHRISTMAS IN WALES and the inscription inside said something like "I swing from inside these yellow walls (he meant of the school) like an anchor . . ."
I used to sit by his desk in the English Lab during my free time and pass my notebook to him so that he could comment, as my English teacher, on my poems. They were about him and my obsession with him. He would read them and say something arch or provocative and then write some comment in soft pencil in the margin and pass it back to me and we would love like that for the better part of a year, til my skin was tight it hurt to breathe on it.
Black Love Song
from my journal in high school 1975 junior year
it's days like today
when I feel the pain
and it hurts like
an old war wound
days when I play
hard chords on myself
days when I
ask myself why
is it that
I feel this
wanting
to feel you in me
wanting
to feel you
wanting
to feel
days like today
when I split my side
sew you in
to me and you
wearing the same air