I’m a fucking mess. I produce art and writing out of a condition of profound self-promotional cluelessness. I’ve got no coherent profile. I can’t seem to pick up the right lingo. It’s embarrassing. Or perhaps a different way of being. At any rate, my art inhabits the tension between the two. Between fucking up and alternative ways of inhabiting the life to which I’ve been consigned.

I started out as a musician. A classical viola player. But I lost my nerve and betrayed music to be with my friends, because I thought that would be as good as music. For a while it was. Until my friends started splintering off into getting married, and having kids, and buying houses, and generally ruining the magnificent sense that we all belonged together in one raucous pack. They are still my friends, but I will never forgive them for this. I love them, but they betrayed something. Art is what I did with the resulting isolation.

I wrote poetry in the wake of my partner dying of AIDS in 2003. I moved to the desolation that was then Buffalo, NY and started doing performance art amidst the ruins of it all. There were composers around—there and then elsewhere. I wrote librettos for them. They believed in me. I remain achingly grateful to them for this. I became convinced that my eye was better than my ear. That I was a visual artist rather than a musician. That maybe this, at last, was who I was. That maybe it would stop me feeling like a fucking mess. I made installation art, started drawing, and got dumped by my long-term boyfriend during the COVID pandemic. And then I wrote a book called Doing Nothing, which is about failing to cure myself of being a fucking mess. About the need to be incurable. Which is probably what most of my art is about too. About not getting better. About trying to fall in love with being ill.

From a different angle, I’m not so embarrassing. I collect a paycheck for teaching music history in a university. But this is a bit of a scam. Because the whole academic venture was always just a ruse so that I could do something artistic instead. The academy thinks it’s open to this. It isn’t. It just wants people with coherent profiles so it can exploit them by putting them in the shop window of its university websites. And as you know, I don’t have a coherent profile. But I do love teaching. Because I love performing. And I love my students. Because most of them are still honest enough to be a fucking mess too. And so, for the past thirty years, two or so times a week, a fragile little utopia has blushed into being in my classroom. And then faded without a trace.