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Great Online Couples of the Arts

Since I am today very mufukkin certain that I will never be able to write about myself in this capacity, it may be therapeutic for me to write about other people living the dream. My title of this dream is Great Online Couples of the Arts and my picks are two couples: (i) Mari and Kento; (ii) Tananarive and Steve.

Mari and Kento

ZASHIKI-WARASHI by Kent Williams Kento is Kent Williams. He is the love of Mari Inukai’s life. No doubt about it. Mari met me in person before I knew about Kento—so let me tell you: No doubt about it. My other reckless statements include the following flippant remark: Mari Inukai values technical supremacy in a life partner. You know, back when an actress friend of mine was pulling down US $20,000 a week, she said to me, “I need a man to look up to.” She said that to me to stop me from approaching her in ‘a certain way’ so that we can be “just friends.” I just knew she meant that stacks of money are included in what she looks up to because I was certain (very certain) that I had everything else a talented artist like her was looking for… Now, when money is the only measure of a man, then the man Mari Inukai has to “look up to” must make one trillion billion dollars a week! Now we should get some fiscal idea about how she feels about Kento. That’s a whole lot of koku, baby! So clearly Mari is a fine artist not preoccupied with the material things. Here is Mari back in 2006 just brimming with Kento:

Hooray! check out kento’s website! There are two new paintings of Meeeee!!! and here is the one of them..I was looking at this painting since he started, and made me cry when I saw the writing on the painting says” don’t forget your dream, mari”..(T_T) makes me still cry and remind of me that I should keep working on MYOWNSTUFF to realize my dream!!

To this day, Mari and Kento are still in the zone. It would be a mistake to discover that Kento does not write about Mari online. What do you think his paintings of her are? Has your monkey ass ever sat down and painted someone? Do you know how much time, mediation and inner effort that shit takes to do it excellently like Kento does? Mari and Kento are experiencing the bliss of artistic communication. Communication is the dominant, most frequent activity of healthy couples so when the couple gets old and physically frail they still have a strong bond through diverse forms of supernatural exchange. My other flippant remark is that these two intertwine on metaphysical levels that go beyond the trivial mess we see in Hollywood-style love stories with all that public hugging, awkward face collisions and shit.

When I was a freshman in college, I spent 12 hours in bed in the girl’s arts dormitory with the future mother of my first son, a ballet dancer (she actually married me later). We could not have been boinking like crazed weasels all of that time! Something else must have been going on! So I know what I am talking about when I say, ‘the zone.’ It is a blessed life to share the zone with another person (especially when both of you are out of the college dormitory and are thriving in the so-called “real world”). It is a nightmare of oppression to discover that only one person in the “happy couple” can zone out while the other sits jealously and disrespectfully in the “real world” too scared, blind, self-sabotaging and “normal” to really know what this zone is… Do I sound old and bitter? Bah!

Buy this DVD at Amazon.com! Tananarive and Steve

As I suggested in my failure entitled, “What I did to Leslie Nia Lewis in my early twenties…,” two writers may not make a great couple. My preference is for a writer and a reader—and I know full well that writers (that actually love language) can be excellent readers as well. Well, who cares about my preferences? When I see the open, candid passion between Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due, two accomplished writers, maybe I need to check myself.

Steven Barnes actually took the time to explicitly write about his successful situation (which is exactly what I would do after being convinced for a number of years that my thang is actually real) and I appreciate his openness. Here he is in the summer of 2008 just letting you know what he’s putting down:

We had such a narrow window of opportunity to find each other. I was living in Washington state, and she, in Miami. We’d each gone through a massive amount of internal work preparing ourselves to find a partner. Such work involved, variously, therapy, meditation, self-discovery, journaling, and more… Somehow, we recognized each other, and within 48 hours after meeting realized that we had to take a chance to be together, that the potential was simply too wonderful. …what I wanted, more than anything in the world, was a friend and partner, someone I could just be myself with. And I was willing to be celibate until I found her.

Buy this Book at Amazon.com! Steven Barnes makes it crystal—mufukkin—clear that he chose to be celibate in order to be with Tananarive —in the same manner that a monk makes devotion to a discipline in order to be of Nirvana. In my twenties, strategic celibacy simply was conceptually impossible for raw physical reasons that wreaked incredible impoverished pleasure and lasting child-support misery. In my thirties, celibacy for true companionship was actually possible had I known a few secrets about my family that I know now. Now that I am forty—and I have inherited my excellent children from my family secrets—the Steven Barnes story is an inspirational possibility. But remember: his window of opportunity was narrow—and this is what it really means to be a Black man dabbling in the so-called “arts” while W2-labor-camping in this North American shit.

We gotta put shit in perspective: ever since Jackson Pollock crushed his artist wife, Lee Krasner, under the weight of the new fangled fame—and also alienated the entire abstract expressionist movement, causing them to share less with each other for concerns about new fangled fame—, many artists assume “making it big” is a solo, predatory process. You see, before Bob Dylan blew up by leapfrogging over his famous girlfriend, Joan Baez, the arts scene in the Village was open and generous. Now that fame (and maybe money) is involved the artists habitually and often non-consciously fight amongst themselves for sole credit and share little with each other. This American tradition has been going on for so long that young artists who try earnestly to share can’t even do it effectively.

Buy this DVD at Amazon.com!Some female artists (especially the ones that I have been tragically attracted to) are very, very concerned about being thought of as “helped” or “influenced” by some man—especially some Black man (that does not make one trillion billion dollars a week). It is so pleasing to see here two examples in two couples where this identity-policing is not happening. In fact, Tananarive and Steve shared the marquee on not one but two writing projects, The Darker Mask (edited by my homeboy’s homeboy, Gary Phillips) and In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel.

And just one more thang for the young cats out there: being celibate (as horrible as this is) saves you from lying to and stealing from human beings. Leaving someone jaded and cynical for the rest of her existence only to make others miserable does not seem worth a few ejaculations from the genitals (easy for me to write at age 40). For me, getting a little physical contact with a twenty-something girl could end up with a few childish mistakes and youthful tears shed over resilient cheeks. But, when you are *f’*ing around with a grown-ass woman (which is what I like to do), you can be *f’*ing around with her entire life. Hey, kids, I need a living, creative woman to look up to—not some used up corpse to drag around to drinks parties. At a certain age, some women (and I guess the dudes too) can no longer recover from ‘mistakes’ related to non-celibacy (did I mention that celibacy is horrible?). Remember that scene in Blue Velvet when Isabella Rossellini comes walking across the lawn completely naked like some Ghost of Pussy Past? That shit is only funny when it is not happening to you—or someone you love.

Update: Tananarive and Steve are also sharing the pages in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. I should have known this yesterday since the book is sitting on my desk! No doubt there are probably more Tananarive and Steve collaborations out there in print…

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