A review by twistingsnake
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz

5.0

There was an air of desperation and possible violence around him like a rank perfume. And that was what suddenly became sexy to me. I tried to understand this sensation, why the remote edge of violence attracts me to a guy. I associate with certain gestures or body language or scars or other physical characteristics an entire flood of memories and fictions and mythologies. It’s something in the blue-ink tattoos or coal-scratched rubbings made in prison cells or in delinquent basement parties. Maybe it’s the sense that he could easily and dispassionately murder someone or rob a liquor store or a small roadside gas station or bang some salesman in the head at a highway rest stop and steal his automobile; it’s something about the sense of violence carried as a distancing tool to break down the organized world. It’s the weird freedom in his failure to recognize the manufactured code of rules. The violence that floats like static electricity that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security; I’m attracted to living like that, moment to moment, with very little piling up of information, breaking the windows of cause and response.