Black Lamb

Fur release

December 1st, 2004

BY CLINTON WILSON

Tipi Khan is behind the wheel of the taxi cab as we’re stalled in mid-morning traffic at the entrance to the Midtown tunnel en route to LaGuardia, where I’ll board a Northwest flight destined for Boise. If it had been a shorter distance safely within the boundaries of Manhattan during a later, inebriated ride, I might have engaged him in a conversation about the dark stain his namesake left on European history, but now I am tensely quiet as I think about my impending familial visitat. It’s a prodigal-son return without the chastened spirit, one I’ve been dreading for almost three years. I don’t know what I fear more, fulfilling a promise I made to my mother to sit through a Mary Kay demonstration, knowing she wants to use me to capture the New York cosmetic market, or helping her sift through four recently unearthed boxes of papers, journals, and memorabilia from my youth.

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Category: Wilson, All Christmas Issue | Link to this Entry

How I became an artist

September 1st, 2003

BY CLINTON WILSON

Living in Prague a few years ago having only a rudimentary grasp of the Czech language, I was faced with the constant challenge of finding a film that didn’t require the reading of daunting Czech subtitles. This often left me with the dismal choice of mainstream American films that monopolized the cinemas of Prague. When the blockbuster Titanic opened during an usually severe famine of engaging film, I grudgingly paid to see it, but not before reconsidering and retreating from the box office queue three times. So when a festival of Peter Greenaway opened in the city, I coerced my German boyfriend to see an early work, one of the few films on the program alien to me.

I had become a fervent Peter Greenaway fan upon my initial introduction in college to his commercially successful cult favorite, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. After seeing many of the auteur’s ambitious projects — Prospero’s Books, Zed and Two Naughts, and his numerological masterpiece Drowning By Numbers — I marveled at his power to elevate the bizarre and the grotesque. But these films barely prepared me for his modest 1976 effort, Vertical Features Remake.

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Kafka becomes me

June 1st, 2003

BY CLINTON WILSON

A verbatim transcription of an online “conversation”:

VillageBoy: I like your Manhunt profile, and you have a pretty intriguing handle, Waxkafka. How’d you come up with that?

Waxkafka: Well, I thought it had a better ring to it than Waxheidegger.

VillageBoy: I see. Seems like you have an affinity for German literature.

Waxkafka: Das ist wahr. Actually, this is from a series of mantras I created in college after reading Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis for a compulsory freshman comp class. They were esoteric expressions of an inner struggle between the forces of Classicism and Romanticism, self-deception and self-realization, stultification and transcendence.

VillageBoy: All of this from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, huh? There’s nothing in your profile that suggests you’ve undergone an insectile transformation.

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Author profile

December 1st, 2002

Clinton Wilson, a writer and drama fanatic, lives in Manhattan. His Black Lamb column is called Cosmopolitango.

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Category: Wilson | Link to this Entry