Davey Davis's Blog, page 12

David Davis: Members Only

It was Sunday morning, and I wanted something gentle. When A, a wholesome, easygoing guy I had been talking to for a few months, messaged me, I invited him to my place after his jiu jitsu practice.

I found A waiting in the vestibule downstairs, sports duffle hanging from his shoulder. 6’1” and lanky, as his bio promised and photos attested. Buzzed head, strong nose, boyish seriousness. As he followed me up to my apartment, I tried to make small talk, but he responded in monosyllables, almost grunts. A dummy, I thought. I knew he was watching my ass as we ascended, the silver lining of a broken buzzer in a fourth-floor walkup.

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David Davis

When I got a job at a dungeon, the dirtbag who owned the place organized the girls based on when they joined. According to her, you were in a litter with everyone hired around the same time as you. Litter. The girls I trained with were creatures of the same parturition; one of our rotating chores was picking up sidewalk trash in order to ingratiate ourselves with the neighbors, who knew everything.

As I began medical transition in my late twenties, a trans friend on a similar timeline referred to us as littermates. Though biologically speaking she had a few years on me, we were in our transsexual infancy together. And who had whelped us? I wondered. But I liked the idea. I still feel a cozy, familial intimacy when I learn another trans person started HRT in the spring of 2019, or got one of their surgeries in autumn of that year.

At Doll Invasion a few months ago, I met a butch who also began testosterone in the last year before the pandemic, a tidy half-century since Stonewall. We were in the pool together. They were theoretically my type, but I felt warmly platonic toward them—always a nice surprise. We’re the same age! I said, though their birthday was closer to my mom’s than to mine.

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Trans anniversaries, like before/afters, are played out, but I still noticed this week that it’s almost been four years since my (second) top surgery. This means that it’s almost been four years since I met Jade.

The appropriate gift for this milestone, according to Brides magazine, is fruit or flowers. There are pink raspberries in the fridge and scarlet amaranth hung to dry—but those are for me. I’ve already picked out Jade’s anniversary gift, which is more on theme for a third anniversary. I don’t think she’ll mind.

Jade is cis, but since she came out when we met, her queerness is about the same age as my medical transition. The first time I visited her apartment, I still had tape on my chest. I discovered that she wanted to touch me. I couldn’t remember a woman ever touching me that way before (or a man, for that matter). What is a whelp’s earliest sensation: the crush of the birth canal, or the warmth of its littermates down in the grass? Her acrylics felt natural, if not normal.

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David Davis 44, part 2

Read Part 1 of my new series on Method acting—what it is, and what it isn’t.

Last time, I wrote about the public misconceptions around the Method in the case of actor Jonathan Majors, who claimed through his lawyers that his “immersive Method acting style” was to blame for his alleged abuse of his coworkers on set. While the controversy surrounding these allegations is certainly an extreme example of how misconceptions of the Method can be leveraged to aid and abet violence1, I’m fascinated by their implications. Who is served by these misconceptions? Why and how do they proliferate?

To be sure, falsely claiming to be Method actor isn’t usually done with cynical ill intent. Still, if we want to be discerning about the Method and who’s doing it2, it’s clear that we can’t always rely on an actor’s (or their legal team’s) self-identification with it.

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So, how do we know if someone is really a Method actor? To start, it’s best not to take the headlines for granted. As I wrote about last time, the “immersive” acting style mentioned to by Majors’ lawyers is not the same thing as the Method; nor is any approach to acting just because it is difficult, idiosyncratic, physically demanding, or “perfected” with highly-managed access to stuff like vocal training or bodybuilding. The Method is—or was—a system of rehearsal techniques that was developed by Konstantin Stanislavski and, in America, iterated on by a handful of twentieth-century theatre practitioners3, so why are do many of its contemporary invocations tend to be based on vibes, not facts?

When I read a headline like, “Timothée Chalamet Respects the Austin Butler School of Method Acting,” I go vibe-hunting with such facts as are at my disposal. What, I ask the internet, is Austin Butler’s training or educational history? What is Chalamet’s? Is any identification (whether by Butler himself, or someone else) with the Method based on anything other than, “Getting into character was weird, hard work?” As far as Butler goes, an admittedly perfunctory search doesn’t indicate any deeper engagement with the Method4 than the clickbait that invokes it.

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Let’s do this exercise with someone who actually is a Method actor. Take Tom Cruise5, whose charismatic intensity, secretive relationship with the Church of Scientology, and commitment to extreme stunts—for cinema!—make him an easy mark for the vibes-based school of Method acting. But as I outlined above, none of these qualities are enough to earn Cruise the label of Method, or even Method-adjacent, actor. Here’s what does: Cruise, like Joan Fontaine, Anthony Hopkins, and many other big names you’d probably recognize, trained with Sanford Meisner, who like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler developed his own acting technique from Stanislavski’s globally influential system.

Now, we can confirm Cruise’s Method pedigree from scanning Wiki pages, reading articles, and listening to interviews. But the proof is in the pudding, too. The way that Cruise talks about his training as an actor screams Method, even if he never mentions Meisner, Stanislavski, or the M-word itself. Here Cruise is at a presser or film festival (not sure) talking about getting into character for Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004)6.

We spent five months preparing the character in the film. I did training so that I became very competent with the weapon. Trained with live ammo, so that that’s something that I just knew and I could just…I just knew that. And the kind of work that Michael and I did together and the way he works with his actor is working on knowing the history of the character so that we could find those moments and be specific with those moments and discover them when we were shooting.

Cruise’s approach to getting into character for Collateral is certainly immersive—becoming “very competent” with a gun and absorbing the backstory of silver-maned hitman Vincent are both solid techniques to begin “living the part,” as Stanislavski refers to it. But why does “living the part” matter? As Cruise says, “[S]o that we could find those moments…when we were shooting.”

Which is to say: according to the Method, character immersion in service of mimicry is only a point of entry. Truth is not memorized, but discovered. “Plan your role consciously at first, then play it truthfully,” advises Stanislavski’s pedagogical stand-in, Tortsov, in An Actor Prepares. The “assimilation of the model” (the model being, in Cruise’s case, the character Vincent) goes deeper than “sheer imitation, which has nothing to do with creativeness.”

While a sometimes quite impressive skill, imitation is not the goal of good acting; in fact, all of that preparation—the intensive study of the character’s life, background, interests, even their way of moving and speaking—serves a purpose, not of making for better representation, but of creating the right circumstances for inspiration, and therefore creation. “All of this work on your material will help you to permeate it with your own feelings,” explains Tortsov to his acting students. “Without all this you will have no art.”

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It bears repeating that Cruise was not a student of Stanislavski, but of Meisner, whose innovation on Stanislavski’s system included a greater focus on the other actors around them (as opposed to one’s own internal thoughts or feelings associated with the character that one is playing). Still, this insistence on the actor being present through the strength of their instincts and imagination, as well of as their preparation—rather than disappearing inside, or beneath, a static character—originates with the master. Cruise speaks to this in a segment from his 2004 visit to the Actor’s Studio:

“You know, I create a character, and it’s all about the story of that character. Creating an umbilical chord from myself to that piece of material…I am who I am, I am constantly looking at life, every day at people. It is my point of view, but from that character. I’m discovering this character and how he feels about things. It’s my instincts, but I don’t personally re-stimulate painful experiences. I’ve found, personally, that it’s made it difficult for me to not be there in the moment for myself. That the availability of emotion is greater for me when I’ve created it. I am the character, and I’m there in the moment, and whatever happens, happens. That’s what works for me: the power of my own imagination.”

Interestingly, this emphasis on presence and imagination aligns with the Stella Adler school of Method acting, which discourages the reliance on affective memor7. But the emphasis on authenticity, whether from Stanislavski or one of his disciples—and “[t]o be an interesting actor, you must be authentic,” claimed Meisner—flies in the face of this phenomenon of the vibes-based Method, a technique colloquially understood to mean the total disappearance of an artist into a role8.

Which brings me, I think, to the heart of this series: if the vibes-based Method can be used to disappear an actor’s agency to the extent that it can be used to disappear literal violence on their part—as is happening with Majors’ abuse allegations—how much can we trust it, or the art it’s said to produce?

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1

Not in the least because Majors is a black man, and regardless of whether the allegations against him are true, he will see scrutiny and reprisals that a white man in a parallel situation would not.

2

Because we’re curious, and nosy, and nerdy.

3

Sorry, this is starting to feel very, “Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster!”

4

I could be wrong tho, idk.

5

I’m a genuine fan of the Last Movie Star, if not an apologist for him. Plus, as is the case for a lot of Millennial children, Cruise’s infamously campy early-aughts behavior with Matt Lauer and Oprah affected me in way that can only be compared with Angelina and Billy Bob, or the release of Cher’s Believe (the single from which I think actually think turned me gay).

6

One of the rare Mann films I don’t enjoy. I wrote about my favorite here.

7

Adler famously said, “Drawing on the emotions I experienced—for example, when my mother died—to create a role is sick and schizophrenic. If that is acting, I don’t want to do it.”

8

It’s not lost on me that, Method or not, rumors, suspicions, and accusations of violence, particularly connected to the cult of which Cruise is, or once was, a high-ranking member, have dogged the actor for years.

David Davis: Members Only

Below the cut are images of big needles going into my skin, plus some blood.

Most of the time, the needles go in my back, where I can’t see them. I tell people it’s because I’m squeamish, which is true. Last night, when Daemonumx was suturing and piercing me amidst others doing similar—pussies were sewn shut; hand-sketched designs came to florid life under painstaking scalpels—I kept my eyes averted. I’m already prone to fainting as it is.

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David Davis

According to a novel I recently finished1, Rembrandt said that artists shouldn't travel. Is this true? I have no idea, and a cursory online search reveals nothing. My discovery of this possible apocrypha happened to coincide with my first trip to Amsterdam, where I took in, as they used to say, the Dutch painter’s The Night Watch (1642), although I missed my opportunity to spend the night with it, as did the Rijksmuseum’s 10 millionth visitor back in 2017.

For the Dutch teacher who received said opportunity, it was, according to the BBC, the chance of a lifetime—as if sleeping on a hotel cot in a massive hall that’s either ticking with institutional static or silent as the grave is something the public has long been clamoring for. The urge to slumber beside a Yevonde Middleton or a Jonathan Lyndon Chase has never once occurred to me in my years of museum wandering (and in the case of artists, like, say, the eerily wonderful Ralph Eugene Meatyard, any urge I may uncover would certainly be headed in the other direction). What marketer came up with this scheme, and was its origin a session of Mad Men-style brainstorming, or was it actually something akin to organic—a pitch from a discreet, and possibly perverted, art-lover, the kind who’s barely able to suppress the instinct to lick the glass and fondle the clay?

Perhaps artists shouldn’t travel, but sometimes we do anyway. I’ve enjoyed what little I’ve seen of Europe, as I’ve enjoyed spending time with European artists, who look upon America’s art infrastructure with a refreshing kind of horror. It’s bitterly validating to spend time with people who have enough distance to see how bleak it is here in the States, where even our most lauded artists are referred to as “content creators” and obliged to work four or five day jobs2. If you’re really good, they’ll feed your book to the AI machine, maker of our supernumerary doppels, that’s gunning for everyone’s job.

But that’s what travel’s for, isn’t it? The contrast? The juxtaposition? The uniting of the unalike to produce new knowledge and unfamiliar sensation, like meandering walks along canals of dull green water, or timeless fucking in the wet gilt of a weltering sauna, or a starry night at the museum, humbly and narrowly bedded, perhaps in one’s real-life jammies, at the feet of one of the masters, trying to recall if Painter of Light belongs to him or to America’s very own Thomas Kinkade3?

The more I think about that Dutch teacher, the more I (grudgingly) grow to appreciate his moment in the spotlight. As someone for whom sleeping around is integral to how I socialize, particularly among other gay people, sleep around is almost always metaphorical. Although I often say that my relationship with Jade fixed me—domesticated me, even—sharing unconsciousness with another person remains something I rarely do, especially if we’re fucking. For years I only did it with her, acclimating myself, sometimes painfully, to another pulse and all its potential4. Recently, as I’ve slowly begun to sleep, really sleep, with someone new, I’ve been reminded of how patient Jade was, and remains; not long ago, she pointed out that I sleep best and longest when I’m with her, and as usual, she’s right. With her beside me, my body descends to depths I never thought possible, to places of cellular repair and spiritual revitalization that I don’t know how I survived without. She smells warm and fits well, her feet pointed like a Barbie doll, with shoes to match under the bed.

To sleep together is an intimacy without witness, let alone memory. The Rijkmuseum’s remunerative cringe aside, one begins to understand the impulse behind the PR stunt.

I’m in your debt. I owe you the next installment of the Method series. I owe you a Member’s Only post that shows a little skin, maybe even a little blood. I owe you a newsletter that comes out every Monday morning at 9 am on the dot, one with an editorial calendar and crisp audio and perfectly cropped photos. Stay tuned, I suppose.

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Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.

1

Alan Hollinghurst’s resplendent The Folding Star.

2

I won’t complain too much. I’m not among the most-lauded, but I’m grateful to have a day job, which affords me the stability to moonlight as a novelist.

3

Neither. Apparently, that was J. M. W. Turner’s moniker until Kinkade TRADEMARKED it. Turns out Kinkade was from Placerville, CA, which really does explain a lot about his whole deal.

4

In my early twenties, I had a boyfriend that I slept with almost every night, but sometimes I had to wear all my clothes—a sweatshirt and jeans, even my shoes—or spend the night on the floor, because the proximity was occasionally unbearable, and because what if I had to run away?

David Davis

Last year, shortly after publishing my second book, X, I was invited to speak on a panel about gender and literature. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to me very often, but as a trans artist writing about trans people, I was happy to be included, especially because the cis woman organizing the panel seemed to have a genuine interest in my book. It was clear from her thoughtful emails that she had read X as closely as anyone else I had spoken to about it, perhaps even more so.

And then there was the social significance. The panel was important, the cis woman told me, because it was going to be attended by so many cis people, who would arrive unfamiliar not just with my book but transsexuals as authors. This population desperately needed exposure to trans people, the way that children need exposure to wild animals at the zoo—for their enrichment, which, it was implied, would eventually trickle down to the rest of us.

You may be able to guess how it went. The day of the panel, the cis woman began by misgendering X’s protagonist, Lee. Not just once or twice, but repeatedly. When I overcame my embarrassment to correct her, her apology was more than deferential. She actually seemed shaken by her error (and in front of an audience, too!), but nevertheless, she persisted in her misgendering, though she didn’t appear to be choosing her words maliciously. In fact, it was as if she was physically incapable of doing otherwise. I considered cuntiness, but instead I was gracious, which I still regret, and finished the panel without further comment.

Afterward, when I emailed the cis woman to tell her I couldn’t in good conscience promote her panel on my social media, her written reply was as effusively penitent as her verbal one had been, although this time she wondered if perhaps Lee had different pronouns and I had just forgotten1?

The misgendering of an imaginary person that I made up for a story feels nothing like being called a tranny on the street or getting kicked out of the doctor’s office. This here was your garden variety micro-aggression, one from a lifetime of similar. You don’t have to be trans to find yourself someone’s empty vessel; of being not even an idea, but a void where an idea should be. Still, the whole thing bothered me, and if I think about it now, it still does. That cis woman had dehumanized Lee before she could encounter X as a whole—meaning I, as its author, had been disappeared before I could even be dismissed.

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By the time I had begun writing my third novel, that panel had come to represent a nascent desire to make art about these experiences without having to metabolize them with my own body; this desire dovetailed with the ambient pressures of conducting myself as a TRANS writer of TRANS fiction—someone whose genre is necessarily informed by my genitalia, which I find to be so very unchic—in a political environment of genocidal transphobia. Why was it that I had to bear that burden alone?

Well, what if gave it to someone else? How would the normal version of me—a white genderqueer person—encounter the kind of entitlement, emptiness, and two-faced contempt that that cis woman has already probably forgiven herself for? What would it look like? What would it write like? How could I create a character to share this with me, and then take it for me? What would it be like to meet the world on its own terms: what is the, or at least a, trans experience without trans people? I realized that one way to replicate what the world presents to gender nonconforming people as our best case scenario for a trans public life—that is, a permanent, rigid, and violent sexualization, objectification, and infantilization—was to curse my protagonist, a straight-identifying white cis man, with an extreme and unrelenting beauty.

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The first draft of Casanova 20: or, Hot World, my attempt at a trans book without trans people, is more or less finished2. Below, you’ll find a short, unedited, and paywalled selection, which I read last week at San Serriffe in Amsterdam with my lovely friend Huw Lemmey.

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David Davis

For some likely algorithmic reason, the same week that Jade and I saw, enjoyed, and discussed Passages—the newly released sex drama starring the incandescent Franz Rogowski as a crop-topped chaos bottom compelled to emotional escalation—Twitter surfaced a clip of the legendary scene in Y tu mamá también (2001) when the frankly perfect Maribel Verdú teases teen puppies Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal around her body to the dovelike yodel of Marco Antonio Solís, his ballad of tragedy pulling the hair-trigger on the trio’s horniness—the perfect soundtrack for a drunken beach threesome doomed to nostalgia before it’s even come to pass.

Troubled MMF love triangles never go out of style, at least not for me. From the traditional to the transgressive1, this artifact of compulsory heteromonogamy seems almost perfectly designed to generate the urgency required to scale unmapped desire. Unlike the more stable couple form, whose secrets are more easily satisfied, the troubled MMF love triangle, wherein gendered punishment (emasculation for the male counterparts; neutering for the female) looms for all parties, has 50% more membership to feint, dissemble, prevaricate, and occlude. With power both obscured and decentralized, the trouble MMF love triangle is in a constant battle for balance—like a helicopter, it functions precisely because it must fight against upending itself.

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Any of my subscribers located in Amsterdam? If so, join me and the brilliant Huw Lemmey for a reading at San Serriffe on Thursday, Sept. 14.

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

Would that include Passages, with the established, rather than subtextual, queerness of its MM?

David Davis: Members Only

Will you wait for me here? he asked.

Yes, I said.

He laughed and said goodbye. The front door closed and clicked. For the next hour (though I didn’t know, at the moment, how long my friend would be gone), I tried not to move. If I did, I would be confronted with the limits of my ability, and if so confronted, I would struggle. I didn’t want to struggle, because it’s humiliating, and because I wanted to pretend that I was there of my own volition. Which, I reminded myself, I was.

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David Davis

At Riis this weekend, I ran into an old friend, another writer.

Hello, how’ve you been, what are you up to these days? At our feet, a sea of gay people reclined on towels and blankets, their patchwork forded by leering gulls and nutcracker merchants. Speakers blasted house, latin trap, pop. A hundred yards off, an American flag decorated with headshots of the angelic Ice Spice rippled in the breeze. This summer’s beach reads—Big Swiss, Mrs. S—were out in force. Hello, I’m good, just finished the new book.

My friend had a friend, to whom I was introduced. I asked my friend’s friend if they were a writer, too. From the look on their face, I knew what their answer would be before they said a word.

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I often ask people if they’re writers because the answer is often Yes. Actually, the answer is very rarely Yes, but it it’s nevertheless usually in the affirmative. When you ask someone Are you a writer?, and they don’t immediately reply No, you can rest assured that they desperately wish to say Yes, and perhaps may even eventually do so, but not without your help (and a lot of litigation, while they’re at it).

Well, the accused will begin, I mean, I have been working on something…

Or they’ll say: I know I can’t actually call myself a writer because…

Or: I had this [insert project], but there’s my job and laundry and everything. I don’t know how you find the time…

Long-winded and self-deprecating, their answers telegraph a heady blend of relief and anxiety. They’ve been caught red-handed at something (laziness? fakeness? delusions of grandeur?), but there’s defiance in this saga of inadequacy, too, as well as the blissful surrender of disclosure. This, I think, is what a priest must feel like when he’s listening in from behind his alveolate screen: sympathetic, but ruthless.

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Only gradually have I realized that my favorite question—Are you a writer?—is a somewhat sadistic one. Curious about people but for the most part too nervous for most normal socializing, I’ve learned, in a sort of instinctual way, that putting someone on their guard is a great way to control the conversation. Any good interviewer knows that simply giving their subject enough rope is likely to be more successful than even the most incisive line of inquiry. Gently prompt someone to account for something they feel even a little conflicted about and nine times out of ten you can sit back, relax, and let their neuroses carry you away.

What does this sadistic tendency reveal about me and my sense of myself as a writer? Nothing flattering, I suppose, but then again, perhaps it starts to get at the problem at hand. I think that those who struggle so mightily with whether or not they’re a real writer are missing the point, a mistake they can only afford less as the advantages of being a writer continue to shrivel up and blow away. As the ability to exchange the labor of writing for money or career prospects, let alone something even flashier, continues to diminish, the question of why we write becomes even more pressing, at least for me.

If after the collapsing media industry, economy, and climate all that’s left for an artist is their own satisfaction, or the pursuit of it, then why not just call yourself a writer? What reason is there not to?

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David Davis

Early on in Alan Hollinghurst’s 1994 novel, The Folding Star, Englishman Edward Manners picks up Moroccan Cherif—“but born in Paris and uncircumcised,” Edward notes—and brings him back to the Flemish boardinghouse where he’s staying. Their first sexual encounter begins with some shyness. With Cherif seated on his lap, Edward is glad his lover can’t see him “gaping and heavy-hearted with praise” for the young man so newly cruised. But when Edward looks around Cherif’s shoulder, both men appear in the full-length mirror against the wall.

Our eyes met there, but [Cherif] was a little bothered by that intimacy. Then, as I was climbing to the end, he got right off me and stood on the floor. I scrambled up too, confused for a moment by my own reflection in the glass, as if without my specs the image needed to be blinked back into focus, or as if a sixth sense revealed a face within my face, ghostly features caught in the very silvering of the mirror. Cherif took a half-step forward, and fell against the glass with flattened palms. A sequence of sounds emerged from it, or from a distance beyond it; and then for a couple of seconds we saw ourselves dematerialise and a perspective open up within — a shuttered room with stacks of chairs, lit from the side by an opening and closing door. Cherif was sighing and laughing quietly, and sat down again on the bed while I pulled on my trousers, hopping and treading on the legs.

I’m taken with this scene, with the way Hollinghurst vacillates between sex and real life, discomfort and pleasure, the uncanny and the evident; between one man and another, strangers who call each other “friend.” Feeling both romanced and creeped out, I read this final graf several times over, certain I’d overlooked the turn of phrase or crucial conjunction that would unlock the specific sensation that Hollinghurst intended for me to experience. But no matter how many times I returned, that sensation evaded me. Why couldn’t I land it? What was I missing?

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I’ve never liked mirror sex. Like Cherif, I’m put off by the looking glass’s capacity to double (quadruple?) intimacy. I don’t find my own face and body erotic, either, though I’m charmed by those who do. But willing as I am to indulge them, I see something sinister in this mirror sex business: it induces not just familiarity, but performativity, too, in the sense of reinscription, self-discipline, and doing as being. Now me, I get my rocks off different. To each their own, I suppose.

Unlike the ambiguous scene between Edward and Cherif, cinema’s mirror sex correlates so strongly with dirty, kinky, non-domicile fucking that this very short list of movies featuring it (taken from an informal Twitter poll I ran this morning) is uniformly horny and violent: Black Swan, American Psycho, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Eyes Wide Shut, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Show Girls, Basic Instinct1. In this context, the mirror, particularly when located in an unusual place (anchored to the ceiling, amplifying a hotel or VIP room, walling a carnival funhouse), communicates cheapness, degradation, and transactionality. With its medieval trick of the light, it creates space surrounding and beyond the marriage bed, putting those inside at risk of contamination, infiltration, corruption. Even if you’re able to otherwise maintain the normalness of your sex in the presence of the mirror, its false multiplication perverts your pleasures. If there’s just two of you, you’ve created a group; if you’re alone, you become Narcissus.

It occurs to me that perhaps I’ve superimposed my distrust of mirror sex onto Hollinghurst’s novel, thwarting his intentions, if he had any when he wrote the above scene, with my own bias. Does this make me a bad reader? I don’t think so. But maybe it does suggest that I could stand to be a little more open-minded.

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1

Isn’t there one in In the Realm of the Senses? I can neither remember nor confirm.