Death of a Strange Man

While killing time on Social Media I noticed that a strange man whose initials were JBM had died…heart attack while out for a walk. This strange man was a person with whom I had intersected many times a few decades ago. We had both participated in a media arts cabaret performance thing four decades ago and survived the catastrophe. This strange man was a writer... modeling himself after Jean Genet; but he subsequently became an arts critic for one of the city’s daily papers. He became a template for the art critic who really was a literary writer and thus was not primarily versed in the visual or temporal arts. He was also quite obviously a queer gentleman but he was or had been married to a woman who reviewed murder mysteries for the same daily newspaper. Very strange man indeed, he was from Louisiana and talked in a Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams accent. I hadn’t thought of JBM for a long time, actually. I thought he’d become rather right-wing. But I was sad to hear of his passing. He wasn’t that much older than I am, and this is too early.