Cigalit

Kofi Fosu Forson

When I was a young girl, boys rolled stockings up and around my thighs. Soon after, they joined the army. We were never the same. Roadside bombings were a common thing. We watched as tourists came to see The Holy Land.

Here on Christopher Street, I can hardly lift a pen to write the word “tit.” The smell of summer makes me sick. I usually go swimming in the Bronx. My grandparents live there. “We are good to our people,” they always say. They give me money in the thousands. I must say, we are good to our own people.

I love sleeping in the nude, especially in the summer. I lie there, feeling the beads of sweat form in some unusual places on my body. I live with a friend. We exchange similar stories about escaping gun fire.

Across the street, the buffed boys in tank tops argue through the night. The sound of it..? It’s violent. My roommate and I would start gossiping about men. I like aggressive men. Doing it is all about aggression. Once I get beyond foreplay, all I want to do is bite, scratch and hit.

So why then did I fall for a poet? They see with their hearts, think with their minds. Men don’t think with their minds. He came on wanting to light my cigarette. I usually don’t smoke. I take out a cigarette when I want attention. And of course I don’t have a light. So he was doing pretty good so far.

I had him come over. It’s funny, isn’t it? I was sitting there, thinking of a million ways to do one thing. I made a tiny move and he was on top of me. Animals get this way, like they want to strangle their victim. I didn’t give him any but he sure kissed good.

How do I say this? “Doing it…” I don’t believe in it. At least not the way most people do it. The whole thing about taking your clothes off to do it! Do what? Yeah but I love watching it. I recently saw one with Lydia Lunch.

New York girls! Don’t mess with them! They might take a knife out on you…Ditch you for another man right in the middle of sex. New York girls! They would make a dyke out of you. They did me.

Sex with that man was like going through the motion. Oh, so I’m taking my clothes off. Oh, so now I’m naked. Oh, so like I’ll fall on my back and open my legs. Oh, are you in? Oh! Oh! Oh! So like now we’re doing it. Wait; let me try it on top. I think I’ll sit here for a while. He doesn’t like it. He’s getting up. Oh, so now we’re doing it like dogs. Is that it? That was a piece of cake. I can go home now and listen to Abba.

Copyright Horatio Monologues

Artist as Gigolo
Kofi Fosu Forson

Purple rose on a magenta tailored corduroy suit: - certainly the differentiation between what is masculine and otherwise homo-persuasive.

The artist as gigolo draws from the feminine. As an exacted false truth, it can only inspire the gigolo. Peculiarly, pink stems from the female what otherwise would be suited as ultra marine blue on the male. Naturally from the painter’s brush, color isn’t definitive of either the male or female. It is however suggested that flamboyance is feminine and neutrality is male.

High fashion proves that there is no particularly significant palette for each gender. Patterns for the male showcase colors that are at the disposal of the female. This ebullient display once again can either be interpreted as a form of sexual persuasion or temperance.

If an artist, love of color can be attributed to the gigolo in his childhood: - Natural then as sex to roleplay. Artist as gigolo is imaginative. With words, he can paint a picture, translated as the pick up line. The female is then transported through a series of ego massage.

To claim the role of artist as gigolo is to first be an artist. This sets a foundation for the wherewithal to seduce. Pertaining to women in the art world, whether with an art dealer, agent or buyer, the gigolo feels comfortable in trading sex for favors. It isn’t for pleasure. Professionally, the artist as gigolo is also known as pimp, thug and hustler.

Liverpool, New York
(International Geophysical Year)

Kofi Fosu

Night Fly, a jazz/pop album by recording artist Donald Fagen features a song in which he envisions a world of leisure for artists everywhere, ninety minutes from New York to Paris.

Liverpool, New York is not a city. It’s a conscience, memorable as an intellectual state of mind. Far-reaching beyond the communicative ratio between two cities, Liverpool has been to New York, for me a society where art as language is encouraged. Interdisciplinary activities function as an everyday dialogue.

With transVoyeur, a cultural initiative co-founded by Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney, there’s a continuous sense that life as a young artist begets a future forum centered on art, philosophy and hybridism. These are the markings of a postmodernist livelihood.

Intellect and love promotes universality that which concerns the psyche. Money and sex continues to devalue the mental proportions which could be elevated into inspiring matters concerning art and politics and maintaining the prospects of a city, its people and in doing so we affect the future.

Liverpool as a conscientious truth within the everyday New York rigmarole remains a constant not just as a city with its history but as an intellectual source fueled by artists such as the aforementioned Sweeney, Jo Derbyshire, George Lund and Tony Knox.

The combined sentiment among these artists is to at times encourage the promotion of Liverpool as a predestined city of culture for the year 2008. Alongside this traditional sense of honor is the innermost sensibility that breaks tradition, all the while featuring courageous attempts at reinterpreting commerciality.

Living in New York, I’m an outsider. My independent practice in which I deal individually with women is a gradual source of graduating from the principles that define the artist and muse.

As a son and brother, I’m African. Otherwise I continue to seek the probability of meeting artists from all over the world who merit the demand for articulating and corresponding on the subject of art and culture.

Liverpool, New York is not a city. It exists in the realm of a global conscience. Conclusively, it has helped define my existence.

Photo by Jo Derbyshire

Skin
Ethnic / Postmodern
Kofi Fosu Forson

How does one debase the color of the skin? Are we not institutionalized to think that fair skin equates beauty and knowledge? How far have we come from black racism? Why then do we continue to feed from a European sense of emotional wealth?

The signifier of what is potentially skin color marks ethnicity. Henceforth the world is divided by the colors black and white. Within its commonality are the divisions between what is racially black: dark skin, half-cast… etcetera and what besets the color white as in freckles and other features which demonstrate a person’s heritage.

Skin color in the postmodern world doesn’t delineate a certain intellect. The mind is at odds with the self more than it is with polarity. Racism exists and given the differences we continue to remark at the color of the skin and other forms of disdain.

What defines the current evolution isn’t race. It’s gender. The underscore is how men and women choose to express themselves in a race justified by the illusion of power. Insofar as establishing control, the male has yet to redefine for himself what is postmodern. He has planted himself in politics and the liquidity of money. The female has incorporated what once was a defeatist proposition into an everyday probability, that of her sexuality.

Skin in a dramatized form of dementia will be hung upon the wall like drapery. In a skin-flick, the eyes are subject to total euphoria. On a black woman she is mother of the earth as is visible with Trinidadian women taking care of white children. A naked white woman is the envy of every living thing. A black man in all of his musculature is a target.

Incorporated within the masculine is the universal male in his attempt to gain control. The black male in his very own way attempts to speak the language of business and capital. His evolution is one to watch. The greatest concern is personal growth, whether through capital and or intellect. There are many reasons to believe the future looms large.

The black female commands her own destiny. She has removed herself from the constraints of the black male. Now it’s possible for her to decide what path her future takes. For her, the future is now.