It's a Wild Combination
‘He’d known Terry Riley and Robert Wilson and Yvonne Rainer and all those people I had never even actually heard of, whereas I was from Hicksville – literally, that’s the town I was born in. That was all right because I was still better looking than he was –or so I thought then, and maybe that delusion saved me from an utter ignominy. But delusion is what is was’
-from Triangles in the Sand by Kevin Killian.
I’m slow to approach things I know that I’m going to love. I like to think that it’s because I believe there are a finite number of things in the world that will have an effect on me and I want to take my time to savour each of them. In reality it’s more likely that I’m just a latecomer with sloppy reading habits and a TV addiction. For this reason it wasn’t until after his death from cancer in June last year that I finally turned my attention to Kevin Killian. I wasn’t a stranger to his work, which had existed on the peripheries of everything else I read for a while. For me at least he mostly appeared as a New Narrative collaborator and domestic backbone in Dodie Bellamy’s work. The pair married in 1986 and remained together until his death. I started by reading his generously detailed Amazon product reviews, compiled over years and earning him an esteemed place in the Amazon customer review ‘Hall of Fame’. After learning that we shared the same taste in lowbrow movies and canned food, I moved onto his more conventionally published works.
Fascination, published by Semiotext(e) in 2018, is a collection of three short memoirs the last of which, Triangles in the Sand details Kevin’s brief affair with the musician Arthur Russell. The catalyst for their subdued romance is Kevin’s failure to get fucked by Allen Ginsberg during his visit to Stony Brook University in 1978 where Kevin was a PhD student. As a young queer man, Kevin figures that he has higher value on the sexual marketplace than the once deified but now ‘older, shorter, schlubbier’ Ginsberg and seizes the rare opportunity to offer himself up as a groupie for the touring poet. Kevin is all but ignored by Ginsberg and in a final simpering bid for his attention unintentionally agrees to give his accompanying cellist Arthur Russell a ride back to Manhattan.
Kevin’s attention snags on Arthur’s unusual and diverting presence during his performance with Ginsberg just long enough to acknowledge him as more than just a shy ‘hired-hand’ for Ginsberg’s latest poetic expression. He writes: ‘something registered in another part of itself, an impression of withheld energy that seemed very urban and refined’. In spite of this, he is so distracted by Arthur’s prominent acne scarring that his constant references back to it become a refrain in their short time together; ‘he’d be good looking except for that complexion’. Unlike Ginsberg and despite his talent, Arthur lacks the cultural cache required to yank Kevin from his dull suburban bubble.
Arthur’s affiliation with the New York avant-garde leaves Kevin with his rudimentary knowledge of David Bowie feeling ‘dowdy and square’. Over the course of their tentative and closeted meet-ups during which they both claim a half-phony bisexuality, they find a shared love of ABBA that goes some way to bridging the gap between the high and low culture that Kevin perceives their respective personal tastes to represent. They indulge in the saccharine Swedish pop as though marvelling at some esoteric choir: ‘If you could figure out the turns of phrase you might be on to a different mentality, as might one who would know the sex of angels’. Later, Kevin reflects on a likeness between the ‘parody of emotion’ present in the lyrics of both ABBA and Arthur, referring to them as ‘written on the very edge of English’.
In archive footage of his live performances, Kevin’s description of Russell’s lyrics makes sense. The words themselves provide few hooks or artifice, and instead of manufacturing emotion they flatten into the mix. Arthur’s mouth moves as part of a body that appears more instrument than flesh, delivering seraphic utterances that build meaning through repetition. I’ve started to listen to Arthur Russell when I run, which feels like a loaded statement, like I’m signalling something about my own taste. Perhaps this is because like a young Kevin Killian I am not immune to cultural intimidation and suburban paranoia. Am I trying to give the impression that I am not someone who chooses algorithm-made Spotify playlists just to make one less daily decision? That I don’t grunt like an oversexed hog when I run? If I had never turned my attention to Arthur’s work before reading Fascination it’s because I misinterpreted the few descriptions I had of his work and guessed that the kind of music he made would be too complex for my tastes. But I was wrong. I run to escape the weight of a world that is suffocating, and listening to Arthur Russell’s repetitive, building cacophony I find that all sensation flattens into a wall of pure and abstracted feeling.
Kevin never details an end point in his relationship with Arthur. Still hung up on Ginsberg’s rejection, their affections for each other never really take on any great depth. On hearing the news of the musician Arthur Russell’s death from AIDS in 1992, Kevin only makes a connection between the person in the obituary and the young, acne scarred man with whom he’d had an affair on learning that he had once played cello for Allen Ginsberg.
The narrow confines of Kevin’s internalized suburbia leaves him susceptible to a kind of cultural intimidation that only serves to further entrench him in the shallow and narcissistic culture that he longs to escape. As an insecure young queer, Kevin is so floored by Arthur’s vast knowledge, connections and fluency around arts of high and low culture alike that the only way he can soothe his own shame is by fixating on his self-ascribed higher sexual currency. He writes: ‘If he had no acne he would have been too good-looking for me, out of my league. But that seemed to shallow me the price he paid for being so brilliant, that equitable God had not let him out of heaven before scarring his face like he was one of the tribe of Cain.’ In the unchartered depths of self-deprecation, Kevin blinds himself to the slow unfurling of a cultural icon.
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