Complicity Sounds LIke A Woman's Name

...yet compliance sounds like the name of a machine that washes, erases, destroys.


"Whenever someone makes a 'breakthrough' into honesty, it means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can't see. To be honest in a real, absolute way, is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart."

"Because after all, the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible means and social commitments that are useless and probably shouldn't even be honored."

"It's futile, pointless conversations and gestures until finally there is nothing left but to die abandoned,..."

"...treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats, name tags, and lapel pins who are no more civilized than sanitation workers ... that's what the applecart means to me."

This was contained in the interview made just three days before they collapsed on Avenue A with a massive and inoperable brain tumor.

"...and instantly I felt like I'd understood something powerful that had up until then eluded me. "Fassbinder was such an ugly man," I said.

"That's the real subject of his films: an ugly man who was wanting, looking, longing to be loved."


This was so elementary, yet unspoken because of course I was ugly too. And the way you took this in, understanding it without any explication, made me realize how everything that's passed between us came back to desire and ugliness; longing and identity.