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The savage, beautiful, and unforgettable memoirs of an extraordinary artist, activist, and iconoclast who lit up the New York art scene in the late twentieth centuryDavid Wojnarowicz's brief but eventful life was not easy. From a suburban adolescence marked by neglect, drugs, prostitution, and abuse to a squalid life on the streets of New York City, to fame--and infamy--as an activist and controversial visual artist whose work was lambasted in the halls of Congress, all before his early death from AIDS at age thirty-seven, Wojnarowicz seemed to be at war with a homophobic "establishment" and the world itself. Yet what emerged from the darkness was a truly extraordinary artist and human being--an angry young man of remarkable poetic sensibilities who was inordinately sympathetic to those who, like him, lived and struggled outside society's boundaries."Close to the Knives" is his searing yet strangely beautiful account told in a collection of powerful essays. An author whom reviewers have compared to Kerouac and Genet, David Wojnarowicz mesmerizes, horrifies, and delights in equal measure with his unabashed honesty. At once savage and funny, poignant and sexy, compassionate and unforgiving, his words and stories cut like knives, leaving indelible marks on all who read them.… (more)
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His world was peopled with damaged friends. He said everyone he knew came from a family of abusive parents, not least his own. His friends were all on the edge, leading fringe lives in which they all psychoanalyzed each other and the country at large from painful perspectives. They lived bizarrely. There was a lot of violence, a lot suicide, and a lot of AIDS. There is constant sex, sometimes romantic, usually brutal, often filthy, always craved.
He was never truly happy, but he was happiest outside his nonexistent comfort zone. “Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to be forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.” That’s the best definition he could admit to, and it’s more than most could own up to.
His thoughts and dreams were populated with hallways, often long, often dark. I’ve never seen the word hallway so many times in a book. Uncertainty played an outsized role in his short life.
The second half of the book is less enthralling, because it is transcripts of interviews he taped of his friends. It is their words, not his. The interviews serve to bring them closer, before they die off in rapid succession. The hunger for more of Wajnarowicz’s own writing has to wait to the end, where he intersperses the description of a bullfight in Mexico with thoughts and reminiscences it inspires. And almost every paragraph admonishes us to smell the flowers while we can. He did not.
Unfortunately for all of us, the last years of his life were consumed with caring for friends with AIDS, followed by his own case. His fury at the hypocrisy of the dominating government agencies and officials, and especially at the self contradictory and insufferable Church, enraged and changed him. We can’t even imagine what kind of writer he might have become without that ugly diversion. That is possibly an even greater tragedy.
This will have to be eloquent enough.