| Otto-Hypnosis |
| Friday 14th 2008f March 2008 13:26 |
| Hi Kids: Just a little Otto news. I completed my first European tour with Otto, showing it at the Berlin International Film Festival, The Istanbul Indpendent Film Festival, and a special screening at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. On April 3rd, 2008, I will return to Europe for the second Otto tour, showing it in London, Belfast, Brussels, Linz, Donau, Turino, Rome, and maybe some other places that I forgot about. For more information, check the Otto website at www.ottothezombie.com. Also check out my new blogspot at www.brucelabruce.blogspot.com for photos and event information. Undeadly Yours, BLAB |
| Dereliction of Judy |
| Thursday 10th 2008f January 2008 13:25 |
| Hi Skids: Judy LaBruce here. So sorry I haven't been by in a while. I've been busy finishing up my movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People. That's right, there is a semi-colon in the title. A semi-colon and a comma. Get used to it. We did the sound mix here in Toronto at a really cool, high-end sound facility called Tattersal, and Lou was our amazing mixer. He totally Dolby'd it all up for us, so it sounds stellar. He had been working on The Tudors but he squeezed us in because he dug Otto so much. So to speak. Otherwise, I've just been preparing myself like Rocky for the gauntlet of festivals and screenings ahead. As you know, our world premier is at Sundance on January 19th. Here is the full list of public screenings of Otto at Sundansk: Saturday, January 19, 11:30pm Library Center Theater, Park City Sunday, January 20, 3:00pm Egyptian Theater, Park City Tuesday, January 22, 10:30pm Broadway Center Theater VI, SLC Saturday, January 26, 9:00pm Egyptian Theater, Park City Otto and I will be in attendance at the first three screenings, including the one where we rock Salt Lake City. Sundance rule of thumb: ignore Salt Lake City at your own peril. It is a big city like any other, with lots of stuff going on. It's not just full of Mitt Romneys. Anyway, to that end, I will be guest djing at Justin Strange's cool indie-electro club on Thursday, January 17th. I forget the name of the venue. Just look it up Justin's myspace page. Justin is cool and rad and has a "The Revolution is My Boyfriend" tattoo across his chest. I will be with Otto and with my friend Brian the Mormon Hustler whom I met in Berlin. And don't take it too literally - we're all hustlers, as my friend and patron and producer Bruce Bailey is wont to say. Hustlers or pirates. So I should also inform youse that after Sundance, Otto is heading for the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival. We are in the Panorama Section, alongside the directorial debut of none other than her Madgesty, Madge herself. I wonder how long Madonna will keep riding in the wake of my publicity machine? Ha ha, just kidding. I hear she has her own publicist. Actually, to tell you the truth, we don't even have a publicist going into Sundance. We have an international sales agent, Charlotte Mickie, of Maximum Films, the Robert Lantos company, but we don't have a publicist. But that's okay. I've been doing my own publicity since I was five years old. it's not that hard, and sometimes it can even be kind of fun. Almost fun. On the verge of being fun. Our exact screening dates for the Berlinale haven't been set yet, but when I hear you'll hear. Then I'm jetting off to Turkey to attend the Istanbul International Film Festival, which should be hot. I've wanted to visit Istanbul ever since I saw Brad Davis in Midnight Express. He gave me the Istanbul blues. Speaking of hustlers, did you know that Brad Davis's kid brother, Gene Davis, played the blond trannie hooker in Cruising? I just learned that by watching the dvd extras. They're stellar. There's a whole little documentary about the many ways the gays tried to disrupt the filming of Cruising in New York City. Schmucks. I remember bravely breaking through the picket lines on the very first day Cruising opened in Toronto, which made it all the more delicious. But I digress. After Istanbul I'm attending a screening of Otto in Paris with my producer Jurgen Bruning at the glamorous Palais de Tokyo on February 27th. Then it's back to Toronto for some R and R with my husband, the Santeria priest, who, incidentally, just had his Ocha birthday - fifteen years! Happy Ocha Birthday, honey bunny! So now, in parting, I will leave you with an excerpt from the shooting diaries of Otto; or, Up with Dead People that I've been serializing in my Gay Times of London column, Rushes. Just to let you know how hard I work to provide you with a little entertainment. TTFN. BLAB p.s. This website doesn't allow me to post too many photos, so I've opened up another blog at Brucelabruce.blogspot.com where I intend to post mostly photos and other visuals. If i get around to it. April 24/07 Things are supposed to get easier on the second day, but not on this shoot. The location is a remote, bucolic graveyard in the north end of the city. Transportation is in disarray, so I’m picked up late, already putting us behind schedule. As I leave the apartment I’m billeted at, a suspicious old man lurking in the shadows of the hallway comes toward me like a zombie, speaking in German. I slip into the elevator and the doors close behind me before he can take a bite out of my arm. When I arrive on set I’m informed that the gorgeous Rick Owens shoes to be worn by Medea, the female lead, have been left at production headquarters and it will take an hour and a half to get them here. I’m forced to change the shooting order, which means we have to bury Jeremy, the boy who plays Otto the zombie, in the cold morning ground. We’re planting him in a grave on his nineteenth birthday, which is cruel enough in itself, but when we start shoveling the dirt on him the pressure proves too much and he starts to have a panic attack. We have to furiously dig him up. He’s crying, and I have to spend a moment to comfort him. Poor boy. Little does he know that the torture has only just begun. When Medea’s shoes finally arrive, we shoot her big soliloquy as she stands over Otto’s grave. If I had any doubts about her casting, they are dispelled today by her bewitching performance. She really was born to play the part. After shooting a few more random scenes of Otto walking wistfully in the graveyard, night falls and things really start to fall apart. We are hopelessly behind schedule, the departments are not communicating with each other, and there seems to be an epidemic of mosquitoes and ticks even this early in the spring, apparently due to global warming. We have to be particularly wary of ticks, whose bite can cause paralysis and even death. It’s hard to direct a movie when you’re paralyzed, even harder when you’re dead. By the end of the night’s shoot, involving a trip to Nico’s grave, we are three hours over schedule, the crew is grumbling, and we’ve already had to drop scenes. To top things off, the catering has been a disaster, and there hasn’t even been a cake organized for our star’s birthday. My producer hastily arranges some champagne and cake back at headquarters, but bad catering doesn’t bode well. Mutiny is never far behind. April 25th/07 This freakish plague of sunshine in April, unheard of in Berlin, is really wrecking my party. The location is an abandoned industrial park, but I refuse to shoot one of the key final scenes between Otto and Medea in the glaring sun, particularly in High Definition, so I have to stall until twilight magic hour. I look at the weather forecast and it’s just one big yellow ball after another, day after day. So much for moody, overcast Berlin. We’re shooting the night scene, in which two of the revolutionary zombies, Fritz and Max, are assaulted by thugs with baseball bats and one of them is set on fire. I have to keep reminding my cinematographer that we’re shooting one of Medea’s arty movies-within-the-movie and not a Jackie Chan flick. Sometimes he gets carried away. Every time I look at my watch, time has evaporated. It’s 2am and I’m still missing two key scenes. I have to keep lying and stalling: just one more set-up, just one final shot. The crew wants to pack it up before I shoot the final scene of a dummy being set on fire, but I somehow convince them to stay until close to dawn. They are pissed, and Christophe Chemin, the actor who plays Max, is covered in scrapes and bruises from being beat up by the thugs in take after take. Nobody said it would be all glamour. April 26th/07 Once again that big yellow ball hangs luridly in the sky. We’re at a country intersection in the middle of nowhere, and I’m once again stalling until twilight. The art department has procured a huge dead rabbit for the scene in which Otto chows down on some road kill. I feel guilty about the rabbit, so I ask if we can at least eat it at the end of the day – road kill gourmet - but the art director informs me that it’s already been sitting out in the sun too long. Well, I tried. Believe it or not, our unit photographer, who has also been shooting a making-of video, is bitten by a tick today! Oh well, I was finding being videotaped all the time distracting anyway. The art director stuffs the gutted rabbit with cleaned pig intestines and sashimi tuna coated with strawberry sauce, which Otto has to eat. What next, water-boarding? April 27th/07 Tonight we’re shooting in a spectacular abandoned amusement park on the Spree. A decade ago the owner was caught smuggling cocaine into the country concealed in the rides, and it’s been closed ever since. It wasn’t easy to get permission to shoot here – the huge park is fenced off and guarded by vicious dogs – but we went to the gay Mayor’s office and he gave us the go-ahead. We’re even allowed to shoot porn scenes, but unfortunately the zombie extras who’ve been cast aren’t porn professionals, and the cold makes it difficult to sustain erections. Oh well. I’m sick of making pornography anyway. |
| Otto is coming!!! |
| Wednesday 17th 2007f October 2007 09:23 |
| Hey public: I am in post-production of my new melancholy gay zombie movie "Otto; or, Up with Dead People." Here is the overly academic synopsis: Bruce LaBruce “Otto; or, Up with Dead People” is a melancholy zombie movie with political overtones that seeks to extend and elaborate the emerging zombie mythology. A modern fable about the loneliness, emptiness, and alienation that results from rampant consumerism and materialism under advanced capitalism, “Otto; or, Up with Dead People” presents as its central character Otto, a young man who may or may not be a zombie, depending on your point of view. Otto is first seen walking down a deserted stretch of highway, not knowing exactly where he came from or where he’s going. He is dressed as a kind of neo-Goth dandy, but his clothes look and smell like they are rotting on his body. After hitching a ride with a clueless elderly couple that drops him off in the city, it quickly becomes apparent that there is something distinctly odd about Otto. He seems to be homeless, taking refuge in an abandoned amusement park, and he never sleeps. He also has an eating disorder: he has an aversion to consuming human flesh. He’s a zombie with an identity crisis. He does, however, seem to have to eat some sort of flesh to survive, so he resorts to road kill and small parkland creatures like squirrels and pigeons to satiate his desire to consume. Meanwhile, we are introduced to our other principal characters, Medea Yarn, an avant-garde filmmaker whose name is an anagram for Maya Deren, one of her role models, and Fritz Fritze, her main actor. Medea is a classic Goth Goddess in the vein of Diamanda Gallas who frequents graveyards and slaughterhouses with her girlfriend, Hella Bent, a silent movie Vampyra type. With the help of her brother and cameraman, Adolf, Medea is trying to complete her epic film project, “Up with Dead People”, the story of a future wave of gay zombies which rises up against a corrupt, corporatized, and soulless consumerist society. Medea and the actor Fritz Fritze, the star of “Up with Dead People”, are both devout followers of the SPK, the Socialist Patients Collective that emerged in Germany in the seventies, who believed that mental illness – schizophrenia, eating disorders, and other sicknesses of the soul – is a direct result of the cruel and deadening effects of the free market capitalist system. When they finally meet Otto, who responds to one of their casting flyers for Up with Dead People, they are both convinced that Otto is the ultimate embodiment of the SPK, the proverbial one-dimensional man. Medea immediately begins to make a movie called “Otto” specifically about this strange and endearing young man. But is Otto a real zombie, or is it merely his own mental delusion? Vulnerable to the attacks of marauding youths who would seek to bash and annihilate a poor homeless fey zombie, Otto agrees to appear in Medea’s movie, believing that it will be the perfect cover for him: people won’t think he’s a real zombie, he’ll just be playing one in the movies. As Medea shoots Otto, and after the undead boy moves in with Fritz, he starts to recover his memories of the time before he was dead. But will this save Otto, or drive him to self-annihilation? “Otto; or, Up with Dead People” is a mash-up of genres and media, a modern fable and picaresque about an alienated youth in an increasingly brutal society. The film is composed of a fractured narrative that includes films-within-the-film, illustrations and text, and even some dance choreography and movement, all coming together to form a layered and textured field of images and ideas. Parts of Medea’s films are shown in the movie, including “Duet for Somnabulists” and “Messy in the Afternoon”, an affectionate tribute to Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon.” Illustrations in the vein of Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, and Basil Wolverton, combined with stock footage and intertitles, are used to create a new zombie mythology, an allegory for our troubled times. |
| Gay Times Column |
| Wednesday 17th 2007f October 2007 09:20 |
| Hi Kids: did you know a have a regular movie column called Rushes in the Gay Times of Britain? Here's my last column if you missed it: The Toronto International Film Festival has come and gone, and all the celebrities have gone back into their celebrity holes. If there’s one thing I can’t stand these days, it’s a celebrity. Fame has officially become the most overrated, repellent institution of the modern era, and entertainment television reporters, the lowest form of celebrity themselves, are the single-brain-celled organisms that perpetuate it. TIFF turns Toronto into the ass-kissing capital of the world for ten days each September, with the celebrities taking to the adoration like zombies to brains. I hate the way they invade our subconscious and colonize our dreams. Why, they even have an awards show during the fest to honour the stars who donate the most to charity. Excuse me, but isn’t charity work supposed to be humble and unostentatious? Anything for a photo op! Meanwhile they stomp around the world with their enormous carbon footprints and lord their wealth over everybody. Hypocrites. Now that I got that off my pigeon chest, rather than concentrate specifically on the gay films I saw at the festival, or films by gay directors, I’ll just provide a gay reading of some of the fifteen films I saw, only one of which was made by gays for gays. That would be the world premier of A Jihad for Love, a documentary about practicing gay Muslims, directed by Parvez Sharma and produced by Sandi DuBowski, director of Trembling Before G_d, a documentary about practicing gay Orthodox Jews. In fact, it’s pretty much the same documentary, except replacing Kosher with Halal. The same lingering question occurred to most people I talked to who saw it: why don’t they just abandon the institution that loathes them to the point of wanting to annihilate them? Besides, as we now know, according to Mr. Ahmadinejad, there are no gays in Islam. More to the point, why don’t we just abolish organized religion altogether? I’ve always preferred my religion disorganized. Speaking of religion, you could almost consider Harmony Korine one himself, judging by his rabid Toronto following. (I hosted an interview with him streamed live on the internet a couple of years ago as part of the Kodak Lecture Series at Ryerson University, and a preposterous number of people showed up. They even had to broadcast it on screen in an adjacent auditorium for the overflow crowd, like Lady Di’s funeral.) His new movie, Mister Lonely, which had little buzz after Cannes, is delightful and idiosyncratic, especially if you are a fan of skydiving nuns on bicycles and sadomasochistic celebrity impersonators (and who isn’t?). My husband and I attended the premier and partied afterward with the sober Mr. Korine and his gorgeous young wife, Rachel, who is also in the movie. Film critics will probably tell you to stay away from it, but most of them have their heads up their asses these days anyway. Highlights include James Fox as The Pope and Anita Pallenberg as The Queen of England (much more believable than Hellen Mirren). Harmony and I also took our spouses to Paranoid Park, directed by Gus Van Sant, the man who introduced the two of us at the premier of Kids at Sundance way back in 1995. Another startling meditation on modern youth, this time of the skateboarding variety in Portland, Oregon, the movie is as good if not better than Elephant, which is already saying a lot. Speaking of masters of cinema, I also saw the new films of George Romero (Diary of the Dead) and Brian DePalma (Redacted, which just won him best director in Venice). Both films are about amateur directors making and distributing movies in post-apocalyptic worlds by using what little technology is available to them – digital and surveillance cameras, laptops, video websites, etc. Shot in Toronto, where he now lives, Romero’s new Dead film is close to perfect, a hip and modern, political horror film about film-making in a zombied-out world. De Palma’s film, which uses the same techniques to portray a horror story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl by American soldiers in Iraq, is close to terrible, a vulgar and exploitative work of misguided liberalism that strains to be phat but manages only to be gross. The simulated beheading video of an American grunt by Islamic militants is totally unnecessary. While not the best movie I saw at the festival, The Walker, directed by Paul Schrader (Cat People, Affliction) was probably my favourite. A virtual remake of his American Gigolo, the film replaces Richard Gere’s high-end hustler in Hollywood with Woody Harrelson’s cultured Southern gay gentleman in Washington, D.C. who’s job it is to escort aging Senator’s wives and other upper crust viragos to diplomatic functions – until, that is, the political elite try to pin the murder of a Beltway insider on him. Harrelson and his handsome, hot-tempered experimental artist boyfriend, played by sizzling German actor Moritz Bleibtreu (Munich), do share one screen kiss, but more impressive is a movie which takes as its lead character a gay man who is not only educated and elegant, but also discrete, loyal, and morally unimpeachable. It may be a stretch, but it’s nice to see for a change, and Harrelson luxuriates in the role. I don’t even have room to talk about I’m Not There (Todd Haynes’ abstruse Bob Dylan bio-pic), Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas’ meditation on Dutch Mennonites in Mexico), or Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg’s ode to violent Russian Mafiosi in London, featuring Vigo Mortensen in a naked knife fight to the death at the Turkish baths, which is beyond orgasmic), but suffice to say cinema isn’t quite dead. Not yet. |
| Otto; or, Up with Dead People |
| Tuesday 17th 2007f July 2007 14:45 |
| Hey Kids: if this blog seems a little dead, it's probably because I've been working on a new dead movie - er, undead - called "Otto; or, Up with Dead People." It's in the can, mostly, and I'm just about to go back to Berlin to edit and do post-production. If you want to keep track of the progress of the project, just go to www.Ottothezombie.de. Be sure to check out the blog for lots of production stills and behind-the-scenes photos. You can also keep track of everything by going to my myspace page, www.myspace.com/brucelabruce, or Otto's myspace page, which is www.myspace.com/ottothezombie. And remember, zombies are people to. Dead people, okay, but still people. Sort of. |
| Just Got Back from the Promised Land |
| Tuesday 17th 2007f July 2007 13:58 |
| Just got back from the Promised Land, and, as promised, Israel is pretty spectacular. It’s no wonder that so many people are fighting over this gorgeous little piece of paradise. Of course, as a guest of the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and its wonderful director, Yair Hochner, who programmed this year a retrospective of my feature films, I mostly heard the Israeli side of things, and I encountered suspiciously few Palestinians, who undoubtedly have a different take on the land they call Occupied Palestine. One thing I did learn, however, is not to stick my nose into the complexities of a historical and political situation that goes back thousands of years, and that not even the principals involved can seem to begin to unravel. Instead, I decided to hit the beach. I was put up in a cute little boutique hotel on the waterfront in a breezy room with a Jacuzzi tub and a spectacular view of the bathtub warm Mediterranean Sea. On the beach friendly barefoot young Israelis with ankle bracelets served you food and drink as you sat in chairs under umbrellas in the white sand and nursed your hangover with a book and a bloody mary. (My summer reading material, perfect for Israel: “What Did I Do?: the Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers”, a personal history of the crazy, sexually sketchy New York Jewish jazz musician and painter, a contemporary of Andy Warhol.) Secular Tel Aviv is a 24 hour city, and its denizens party well into the wee hours, so most days began for me in the early afternoon. An occasional interview or photo shoot for the likes of Ha’Aretz (called the New York Times of Israel), on whose front cover (which is our back cover) I somehow landed, might have roused me before noon. Ignoramus that I am, I bought into the western media hype about Israel, so for the first few days I expected to witness storefronts being routinely blown out like Clive Owen did at the beginning of Children of Men. But of course, that film was set in London, and these days it almost seems more likely that a terrorist bomb will explode in Marble Arch than downtown Tel Aviv. In fact there hasn’t been a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in two years, and the general mood of the city was relaxed and convivial, although you do get the impression that even the day after a suicide bombing, the resolute Israelis would be partying on without much bother. Depending on whom you talk to, the recent lack of bombs may have something to do with a) the Israeli West Bank barrier (fun party game in Israel: refer to it as the Apartheid Wall and see how people react); b) the natural ebb and flow of the very fluid political situation, from which violence emanates in waves (this is the theory espoused to me by Gal Uchovsky, hot producer and longtime lover of the talented Israeli director Eytan Fox (Walk on Water, The Bubble), who also informs me that only right wingers believe the Wall makes Israel a safer place); or c) the Palestinians are too busy killing each other these days to bother with Israelis. I tend to favour the latter theory, what with Hamas having just taken over Gaza from the Fatah party in a bloody coup. Although Saint Genet famously sided with the Palestinians, sometimes supporting Israel doesn’t seem a hard choice for homosexuals to make. After all, one of the first edicts issued by Hamas after it was democratically elected was to forbid homosexuality and threaten its practice with prison or death. Genet always did love his rough trade. Then again, a lot of ultra-orthodox Jews aren’t too keen on the idea of homosexuality either, as I discovered when I spent a day in Jerusalem and marched alongside the three to five thousand participants in the 6th annual Gay and Lesbian march. Actually the march itself, refreshingly more of a serious, political affair – no topless trannies or bottomless circuit queens vomiting over the side of tacky floats to bad techno music – was rather uneventful and sedate. This was probably owing to the fact that there were twice as many police officers as marchers involved in securing the event, blocking off large sections of the city and not allowing the protestors, including an orthodox Jew caught with an explosive device, within miles of the march. I was almost disappointed that they weren’t allowed at least within yelling distance of each other, as opposed to the extremely controlled and clamped down, almost purely symbolic function I witnessed, which almost seemed like an exercise in denial. I also visited the old city of Jerusalem on the same day, and gathered some ancient earth from near the Wailing Wall for my homosexual husband, who, as a Santeria priest, holds such things sacred. It was for me, to say the least, a day packed full of staggering contradictions. Back in Tel Aviv, probably one of the gayest cities in the world, I ditched politics for parties. I had already experienced The Notorious G.A.Y., the infamous Monday night hip hop party at club Lima Lima, where I saw some of the sexiest men I’ve ever laid eyes on. There I partied with the editor of The Gay Times of London magazine, for which I now write a monthly column, and his boyfriend, who hobnobbed with Gal Uchovsky and his best friend Ivri Lider, one of Israel’s hottest pop singers. I also spent an afternoon with said editor and beau at the gay beach, which, as everyone knows, is directly in front of the Hilton Hotel, smack dab beside the Orthodox beach, which has alternate days for males and females, and which is separated from the gays by another little wall of segregation. Unfortunately we didn’t get drunk enough to swim around it, and besides, it was ladies’ day. A few nights later I attended a bad gay party at this same location, full of circuit-y, vacant party boys. A not-bad-looking gay architect grabbed me and steered me over to his friends, who had recognized me. They seemed embarrassed and politely made their excuses, leaving me with the architect, who proceeded to tell me how Israel should drop the bomb on Iran before it had the chance to develop its nuclear capabilities. That’s one of many things that Israel has in common with America: a preponderance of right wing gays. My friend Itai Valdman, a sexy former Israeli officer and a current editor of Time Out Tel Aviv, whom I first met in Berlin, took me out with his friends for a night on the town, including an adorable little Berlin style watering hole called Riff Raff, and a quick tour of the two official gay bars of the city, which are pretty much as dreary as they are in every other city in the world. Hot hint: in Tel Aviv, the weekly parties at non-gay bars are where the real action is. This included the fun Thursday night party that I guest djed at called Pag (check it at myspace.com/pagit), where a fun, smart-looking crowd indulged in illicit substances and drank on the patio or danced inside until dawn. In general, things are much more relaxed in Tel Aviv than I expected in terms of drugs and alcohol: you can smoke pot openly in clubs, and walk down the street day or night with a beer in your hand. The gay film fest was pretty standard: there’s not much you can do with the programmatic, generally uninspiring gay and lesbian movies that are being made these days. But if you’re going to see bad gay movies, you might as well do it in a glamorous setting like Tel Aviv. |
| Infinity Crisis vs. The Pig Farm Follies |
| Monday 22nd 2007f January 2007 19:58 |
| Hi Public: Here is an article I wrote many moons ago about my trip to the venal Vancouver Pig Farm. It's pretty lurid, but we can't bury our heads in the sand, especially when we're fortunate enough to still have them attached to our bodies. x BLAB Vancouver is supposed to be a lark for me, but it ends up being more like a raven. A big, black menacing raven like the stuffed one that perches ominously upon the glass cabinet full of Imperial Prussian War Helmets in the apartment where I'm billeted. Funny how a trip that is supposed to be playful and casual can turn into somebody's idea of a nightmare. I'm flown to Vancouver to participate in the second annual art happening called Red 8, organized by my fwiend Fwedewick, a multi-media event with installations, projections, and live performance that is designed to break the rules of established art practice. But the problem with shattering all the rules is that sometimes there's very little there to keep you from walking over and staring straight down into the great, yawning black abyss. I suppose it's necessary to step up to the precipice every once and a while and take a peek, but it sure ain't much fun. Things start out deceptively upbeat. There's a party in my honour at the bizarre, pre-Nazi apartment, followed by the obligatory visit to the Dufferin Tavern, the dive-y gay bar where crystal-tweaking hustlers dance their odd striptease with complete contempt for the musical beat. Afterwards Fwedewick and I venture to an after-hours club where crystal is the order of every day. There are only a few people in this huge warehouse space, which is crammed full of the flotsam and jetsam of the streets and alleyways of the city. One fellow whom I share a pipe with tells me the story of how he spent several years as the bouncer at a strip club frequented by the Yakuza in Tokyo. There seems to be a lot of Chinese and Japanese Mafia connections in Vancouver, because I've heard these stories here before. He also tells me a disturbing, implausible tale of meeting at a party an eight year old girl in high heels and a cowboy hat who just got back from Vegas, but at this point in history anything seems horribly possible. If Jon-Benet were alive today, she would probably be living in Vancouver. I make the huge, empirical mistake of smoking too much crystal, the dodgiest of drugs, which inevitably turns me into the ultimate sex pig-bottom of all time. Equally unfortunate is the decision to top off the night at the local bathhouse, where I descend into a maelstrom of blow-jobs and poppers. So tweaked am I, in fact, that I burn my nose on the horribly corrosive liquid, effectively disfiguring me for the remainder of my trip. It's one of those embarrassing homosexual moments that makes you want to seek out electro-convulsive aversion therapy. The next afternoon, I'm awakened by a strange voice. It seems to be coming from the life-size wooden figure in the turban and Arabic costume who stands across the room proffering a pair of white gloves. He's like a dime-store Indian, except in the form of some manservant of the British colonial Indian era, straight out of "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer". He's telling me that it's time to get up for the Pig Farm excursion. It turns out to be the voice of my host on the intercom, who informs me that after only about an hour of sleep, Fwedewick and our friend Sebastian are there to drag me out of bed and take me to the dreaded location. It's not accidental that my trip turns out so malevolently. Since my visit last year, Vancouver has revealed its dark side to the world in spades. Beneath the picture postcard beauty of this Pacific port snuggled serenely amidst the Rocky Mountains - a city that boasts an old growth forest - Lighthouse Park - within its limits, where you can completely lose yourself in nature - evil grows. First there was the brutal bludgeoning with baseball bats of a gay man who was found naked and bloody in the vast Stanley Park, a crime, inevitably compared to the Matthew Sheppard case, which remains unsolved. Then, a month ago, there was the revelation of the Pig Farm, a location where the bodies of several women were unearthed, leading to speculation that up to 150 prostitutes from the east side may have fallen victim to a serial killer or killers over the past ten to fifteen years. Naturally the police were lax in their investigation because the women who have been disappearing, many of them First Nations, many of them ravaged by drugs and HIV, were regarded as transient and disposable and not worth caring about. The owners of the pig farm, which is located in a suburb of Vancouver called Port Coquitlam, are a couple of brothers named Pickton who are apparently upstanding members of the community, regularly hob-nobbing with police and local politicians at various functions. The brothers used to have parties on their property, dubbed "The Piggy Palace". The evidence points to one of the brothers in particular, who had been charged with attempted murder of a prostitute in the past. Now he's been charged with two counts of homicide. But wait, it gets more bizarre. One victim claims that she was abducted by the pig farmer and witnessed him slaughtering and skinning a prostitute as if she were a pig. Horror stories are now proliferating, like the theory that the remains of the prostitutes cannot be found because they were fed to the pigs. Shades of "Hannibal.” It is also well known that the brothers were selling home-made sausages to local stores and restaurants. Shades of "Soylent Green.” Add to this that the new premier of British Columbia, Liberal Gordon Campbell, is pulling a Mike Harris (the recently dethroned premier of Ontario), cutting funds for social services and education and giving tax breaks to the wealthy while unemployment in the province soars, and you can see why Vancouver is turning into the nightmare capital of Canada. Plus, to add insult to injury, they just lost their NBA franchise. Fwedewick and Sebastian and I expect to find the pig farm well before dark, but it turns out to be more difficult than we expect. We drive around for several hours as the day dissolves into black night, stopping at a variety of gas stations and Tim Horton's donut shops to ask directions to the felonious farm. Everyone is suspicious of our motives, but I think it's important to visit the sites of human atrocities, to confront evil head-on. That's why I did the Jeffrey Dahmer tour in Milwaukee, and made the hejira to Auschwitz when I was in Poland. We're lost again, so this time we drive onto the hilly campus of Simon Fraser University and pull up to a bus stop where about fifteen people are waiting. Fwedewick rolls down the window and asks loudly, "Hey, does anybody know how to get to the Pig Farm?" Everyone starts to shuffle away slowly, looking down at his or her feet. Finally a couple of hot jocks in the parking lot who are a bit too familiar with the details of the case offer us precise directions to our destination. When we finally reach the Pig Palace, it's a cold and black, starless night, although a big orange full moon hangs just above the horizon. We expect the farm to be on an isolated dirt road, but instead it is directly adjacent to a suburban landscape that could be anywhere in North America - strip malls, a gas station, a McDonald's, a couple of roadhouse taverns, a Home Depot-type retail warehouse. We turn onto Dominion Road and inch past the Pig Farm, which seems to be comprised simply of a small house and barn, an abandoned Winebago, a couple of run-down vehicles, and big piles of dirt everywhere from recent digging. There are also ominous rows of wooden boxes piled up. As we pass the house, we see the trailer the police have set up, and a couple of cherry tops. A uniformed cop and a civilian glare at us as we inch by. We turn around and crawl past again, then pull over into the parking lot of a mall to digest what we've seen. Fwedewick, who is part Indian and HIV-positive, like many of the vicitims, is communing with the dead spirits. Sebastian and I observe his rituals, but eventually we start to get freaked out by the location so we drive off. While searching for the farm we were very light-hearted, cracking jokes to ease the tension, but afterwards we're a little spooked. I've also heard that some of the prostitutes may have been taken on freighters as sex slaves and dumped at sea. It's pretty terrifying. Nevertheless, the show must go on. We’ve sub-titled Red 8 "Infinity Crisis vs. The Pig Farm Follies", so we have a lot to live up - or down - to. Unfortunately, the models that Fwedewick has provided me with for my live porno shoot aren't quite up to snuff, absolutely no pun intended. One in particular, a hustler named Melanoma, is a bit too redolent of the whole "Deliverance" theme that seems to have been cropping up all week. The idea is to shoot him with a hard-on wearing the American Flag, and then fucking a blow up cow replete with vagina that we found in a Granville Street porn store (they didn't have any pigs). But unfortunately he can't get it up, even with Fwedewick fwuffing him and screaming, "C'mon, get it hard! Get it hard right now!". Finally I get Sebastian to pour a bucket of fake pig blood on him, "Carrie"-style, but whoever made the concoction has neglected to put in the red food colouring, so when he pours it on Melanoma he's like a seagull caught in an oil slick. It's so oily and slippery that he loses his balance and falls right on his tailbone. It's a disaster, but the kids seem to like it, including young upstart Asianpunkboy, who I’ve been corresponding with on the Internet but hadn’t yet met in person. It's that painful kind of performance art that veers unintentionally but inexorably into exploitation and offensiveness, which I suppose is appropriate for the Pig Farm Follies, but which is what I've spent my whole career as a "pornographer" trying to avoid. Oh well. Pig shit happens. At least absolutely no members of the press have shown up, owing mostly to the fact that the ad for the event that Fwedewick sent to the media consisted of a naked photograph of himself literally covered in photo-shopped come. No one would print it. The rest of the show is pretty good, particularly the performance artist Sharon Needles doing Raggedy Anne drag to "It's a Hard Knock Life" from "Annie", and Fwedewick getting an infinity symbol branded on his ass. But somehow, in the current climate of venal Vancouver, home of the Pig Palace, it's all a little too close to home. |
| Miami's Vice |
| Wednesday 13th 2006f December 2006 23:00 |
| Just got back from a weekend in Miami Beach, and believe me, forty-eight hours is enough. That is to say, Miami is not my favourite city in the world, but as my comrade Slava Mogutin and his publisher Powerhouse Books had invited me down all expenses paid to co-host a party for the launch of his new coffee table book Lost Boys, I could hardly say no, even though I’d be getting hitched four days after my return. (Powerhouse will also be publishing my book “Bruceploitation!” late next year.) If you want to know why the entire world loathes America so much, go to Miami Beach. Sure, it’s a kind of paradise, with temperate weather, gorgeous beaches, and beautiful-on-the-outsided people, but it’s also vulgar, meretricious, self-absorbed, materialistic, amoral, apolitical, and lousy with ugly-on-the-insided people. Perhaps I shouldn’t say apolitical per se. In fact, their idea of being political is precisely flaunting as much wealth as possible, shopping for the most expensive designer labels, driving around in grotesque stretch Hummers, and displaying as much of their expensively engineered plastic bodies as the decency codes permit. (It’s the same political consciousness that motivated Bush to encourage people to go shopping after 9/11.) Conspicuous consumption is their religious credo, and material success is their only measure of a man. Sorry to get all Gandhi on your ass, but in a world with so much starvation, suffering, and deprivation, it’s behaviour that can only be regarded as selfish, ignorant and grotesque. But bracketing that, I had a good time. Ok, here’s the deal with Art Basel. I guess a country gets the art it deserves. America is a country embroiled in an ugly, dangerous war with no end in site, no exit strategy, and the potential to destabilize the entire world to the point of kick-starting a nuclear war that will make the other World Wars look like a friendly game of Battleship. (I urge you to read David Rose’s article in the latest Vanity Fair about the neo-con revolt against the Bush Administration and their dire predictions for the future of Iraq, which basically boils down to the rise of a Shia theocracy and their alliance with the newly empowered Shia Mullahs in Iran; the nuclear ascendancy of the new Shia bloc pitted against a newly nuclearized Sunni Saudia Arabia facing off across the Gulf; and the manipulation by America of Israel as a nuclear proxy to fight these forces in the Middle East, to be followed by either a limited or all-out nuclear war.) The art at Art Basel was so far removed and so insulated from any of the political realities going on around the world, it was almost eerie. Whatever happened to the notion of art commenting on or critiquing or engaging even on a subconscious level the social and political realities of a culture or civilization? The increasingly aggressive policies and tactics internationally of the Bush administration and its military complex are inversely proportional to the isolationist quality of the American public consciousness, and that includes its artists. Very little of the art I saw addressed the unstable, violent, and bloody reality of the world at large even in an oblique, metaphorical or subliminal way. The art was shockingly docile and inert – either decorative or craft-based (Martha Stewart was their, sponging up the craft techniques for her capitalist exploitation machine) or so self-absorbed and self-referential in relation to art discourse that it gave the impression of being created in a vacuum. It was also surprisingly asexual, which makes sense when you realize that the only credo being ascribed to by artists and gallerists alike was that of commercial and economic viability. The ascendancy of the gallerist, in fact, has rendered artists, and to a large extent, art itself, obsolete and superfluous. De Kooning’s legendary crack about Leo Castelli’s salesmanship – that if you gave the sonuvabitch two beer cans and called them art he could sell them – has become the du rigueur modus operandi of the new breed of gallerist. But the difference now is that it’s not just the emperor who can’t see his new clothes are non-existent: it’s everybody. The gallerists, the artists, the critics, the dealers, the buyers: it’s a brand of group hysteria. Of course Jasper Johns’ response to de Kooning’s quip was to make a sculpture comprised of two cast bronze replicas of Ballantine Ale cans and sell it for vast sums of cash. (For a cautionary tale of what happens to the human soul when it gets lost in the abyss of artistic self-reference, material overkill, and isolationism, read the chilling article about Jasper Johns in the latest New Yorker, which I read, appropriately, on the plane on my way to Art Basel Miami.) To be fair, I was only in Miami for a weekend, so I didn’t get to see any of the many alternative satellite art fairs that have cropped up around Basel, but the smell of what I’m describing permeated everything. The younger artists don’t really seem to be critiquing the more established artists on any political or ideological or even moral level; they’re just trying to figure out how to usurp their elders’ position, to beat them at their own game. Everyone wants to be rich and famous these days. Ho hum. My first night in Miami, the last Saturday of Basel, my posse, largely comprised of Slava, Slava’s boyfriend the artist Brian Kenny, our Powerhouse publisher Nick Weist, and Gio from Black Peter Group, who was slated to perform at Slava’s party the following night, tried unsuccessfully to get into about four parties, including those held by Visionnaire and Jalouse magazines. Much like the new Manhattan, parties now consist of grotesque, elitist and exclusionary door scenes, evil sociopathic bouncers and door people, and rampant desperality. If you are unlucky to get into the party (we were turned away even though we actually knew the door people personally – maybe they were doing us a favour), you have to wait about an hour for a 25-dollar drink, listen to bad music, and elbow away monstrous, hard-bodied fembots and Wesley Snipes impersonators. Grotesque celebrities who will go to the opening of a Madonna H & M line generally have nothing to say because they’re out every night and have long since run out of topics of conversation. Plus they are usually too busy looking for some paparazzi to flash their privates at in order to get into the tabloids. Oh yes, so deliciously decadent, so terribly outré. As Donald Sutherland says in Klute, “all that is so pathetic.” We had fun anyway. The party held by my dear friend Dash Snow at the Standard was the exception to prove the rule. No door scene, no irritating “list” celebrities, unlimited free vodka all night, lots of space, a teepee: very civilized. By this time we had been joined by a gal named Betty of Journal magazine, co-hosts of the party, who joined us five males for a skinny-dip in the body temperature infinity pool. We spent the rest of the night in a variety of Jacuzzis and hotel rooms, topping it off with an early morning moonlight nude swim in the ocean behind my hotel, the lovely Royal Palm. I ended the night on my balcony overlooking the ocean, no longer considering jumping like I had earlier after seeing the art at Basel. The next day we had a sound check at the club that was hosting our party, The Mansion. Poo Diddy played there recently, and they host some of the biggest parties in the city – Playboy, Grammy, whatever. Our names were in gorgeous black and red on the marquee, and all seemed to be going well when we arrived with the hot dirty white neo hip hop bands Avenue D and Black Peter Group for the sound check at 6pm. Things started to go a little awry, however, when the chipper yet annoying manager and the stone-faced tech-guy who looked like Steve from the Jerry Springer show began to veto every simple request that the bands made (a platform to perform on, specific lighting requests, sound options). I was to guest DJ, so I tested the system with The Fall’s Totally Wired, which sounded amazing. The two bands did about five numbers each, including some hot choreography; the bald tech-guy told them that there would be two couches and they would perform between them and not move beyond those parameters. Anyway, long story short, apparently one of the owners caught the sound check and vetoed the bands performing, claiming that they weren’t “consistent with the image of the club.” Slava was, understandably, furious, and threatened to veto the party. Nick asked me to get him to show up because he’d spent months organizing the thing, so I suggested to Slava that we just rise above it and go and drink the free booze and make the most of a bad situation. I also called my friend Aron of aNYthing and arranged for the bands to play at his party at the Marlin Hotel instead. So we went to the Mansion party and snubbed the organizers and I refused to dj out of solidarity with the bands. And we drank the bottomless bottle of Grey Goose the club provided us with, and Slava was all happy because all these big European gallerists showed up and his book is a big success and Jack Pierson was there and it was sort of fun. But then again, we were on E. We were supposed to only stay an hour out of protest; three hours later I was still trying to get Slava to leave to go to Aron’s party. Finally Slava started getting a little aggressive while dancing with a Middle Eastern artist, and they started faux-fighting, which kind of escalated into a quasi-real fight, and then they ended up smashing through the crowds of stupid rich people who looked like extras from a Sean Paul video who stood around stupidly listening to bad mainstream hip hop music and who, as soon as their leg started moving to the beat a little bit, were subject to a thug bouncer in black coming over and shining a flashlight on the offending moving part like Lorenzo Lamas pointing a laser pen on an unappetizing appendage on Are You Hot?, and Slava and the hulking tattooed artist made a swath through the crowd and ended up crashing into a table and smashing bottles and glasses, and so they got turfed by the bouncers in full nelsons and we all left and had a good laugh about it. We ended up late at Aron’s party where, when I arrived, my man Aron handed me a full bottle of vodka all for myself. (The bartender tried to take it away from me, but Aron got it back and gave it to me again because he is so cool.) And Dash and Aaron and Dash’s lovely sister Caroline and his ex-wife Agathe and Semen and Gargantuan Dan and all these people I know from New York were there, and then we all piled in cabs and went over the bridge to a titty bar called Gold Rush, and there I pressed damp one dollar bills between the fried-egg titties of some hot skinny strippers and ended up playing Gio’s tambourine to such tunes as Grace Jones’ My Jamaican Guy while we partied with the strippers who thought we were cool because we weren’t all just dirty old men and gross, greasy professional athletes. And the music was five hundred times better than at Stupid Mansion, and even the faggots were getting turned on by the skinny bitches. And I can say that because I’ve dated hookers and lived with strippers and it’s an honorable profession and there’s nothing wrong with it per se. It’s just that a lot of gross people go to titty bars. And later I ended up back at the hotel with the posse playing tambourine in the Jacuzzi, and then swimming naked in the ocean with a German gallerist. And I forgot to mention that the night before I watched Gio give head to a straight guy who was passed out on a canopied bed beside the pool. He may not want me to mention that, but I’ve had sex with unconscious people before and I think it’s hot. After all, it’s not as if it’s against their will. Technically. And I also forgot to mention that for a refreshing critique of American foreign policy you should check out this article: http://www.energybulletin.net/12125.html It basically states that the strategy of the US is to maintain the US dollar as the standard international currency in order to use inflation and deflation as a means of external taxation, effectively promoting the maxim that nations tax their own people, while empires tax other countries to consolidate wealth and power and to promote dependency on the US economy. |
| The World of Henry Orient |
| Saturday 02nd 2006f September 2006 19:31 |
November 16/05. I arrive in Hong Kong a little groggy, having taken a gorgeous sleeping pill during the 12-hour flight from Heathrow. I popped it right after watching Batman Begins, but I should have done so beforehand: it’s a real stinker. Why do all these hotshot young directors go to Hollywood and proceed to make the most banal claptrap? I don’t get it. Denise, a sweet, studious lesbian with glasses who is the new director of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, now in its fifth year, picks me up at the airport. She’s so adorable with her modest little Bruce LaBruce sign. She takes me on the subway to my hotel, the Eaton, in Kowloon, a four star affair full of ferreners, and then treats me to dinner at a nearby restaurant where I try a local delicacy, crispy fish skin, which we wash down with ginger and hibiscus flower tea to combat any potential bird flu. Denise is smart as a whip – she’s a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong, working on a dissertation about Hong Kong lesbian culture. (Her girlfriend, who attends the University of Shanghai, is doing her dissertation on Shanghai lesbian culture, so they’re a real dyke power couple.) It’s nice to be invited to a more lesbo-centric gay film fest for a change, not to mention one run by people who actually have an education. ‘Cause I got mine. November 17/05. Raymond Yeung, the former director of the HKLGFF, and currently a feature filmmaker, graciously volunteers to take me on an absolute beginners tour of Hong Kong. We start at a decidedly old school dim sum restaurant and then head straight for the famous escalator that Faye Wong rides so hauntingly in Chunking Express. After that we go to the peak to enjoy the panoramic view of the city, followed by a Starline Ferry ride across to the island, the very ferry that Nancy Kwan terrorizes Bill Holden on at the beginning of The World of Suzie Wong, one of the movies I watched as preparation for my trip here. (I saw this famous Richard Quine movie – he also directed the great Bell, Book and Candle – as a kid and vowed to visit Hong Kong some day. Both movies, for some reason, have brilliant first halves but fall apart in the second act.) In the evening I have my first screening of my latest movie, The Raspberry Reich, which is at the theatre in the IFC, the tallest building in HK, the one that looks like a giant electric shaver for men. It’s very daring of the festival to be showing my explicit homosexual fare at such a high profile location in a country that isn’t exactly known for its magnanimous view of homosexuality. In fact, the festival organizers seem to think that the thoughtful and detailed article about me and my work that appeared today in the South China Morning Post constitutes somewhat of a breakthrough. The opening movie, before mine, is called Saving Face, a rather grim lesbian romantic comedy starring the beautiful Joan Chen, who plays the mother of a dyke. As a 48-year-old divorcee who gets pregnant, she’s the sexiest thing in the movie. The after party, held at a bar called Jewel, is a bit wack, although the lesbians are for the most part stylish and hip – neither butch nor femme, but more androgyne on the girlie side. The call it “pure.” One of my hosts has rounded me up a Happy 5, a kind of strong mood enhancer that is also known as Hong Kong Ecstasy, but owing to my jet lag and the late nights in Madrid, it hits me like a ton of bricks, my legs go queer, and I can hardly stand up. I suffer through bad cocktail banter from a couple of English party girls who apparently pay the rent by sexually dominating diminutive Chinese men. They both strike me as a couple of Holly GoHeavilys, trying a bit too hard to do the Fraulein Sally Bowles routine in a foreign land. In fact, most of the expat British and Australians I will encounter here are rather off-putting, to put it mildly. November 1  05. Raymond takes me to lunch in Kowloon, the more working class part of Hong Kong, at a restaurant that hustles and bustles for an hour, then empties out completely at 2pm as if someone has yelled fire. This city is fast and runs like clockwork. In the evening, after another of my screenings, Bryan, the promoter who is organizing my party later tonight at Propaganda, takes me out on the town. He drags me to a tacky area in the Central district called Lan Kwai Fong, a street on a steep hill that’s packed full of drunken expats and white western tourists with large lardy asses that swallow up tiny designer barstools; these cretins get fallen-down drunk by the end of the night and roll down the hill in their own vomit. Bryan, a new queen of the old school, has come here for some sketchy drag show audition, so he leaves me to my own devices with the owner of the bar, who is very gay standard and proceeds to buy me tee many martoonis. The bar is called Post 97, a cheesy reference to the year that the Brits were forced to relinquish control of Hong Kong, and not a moment too soon. It’s gay happy hour on Friday nights at this bar from seven to nine - pretty tragic, with only a couple of cute Chinese guys and an overabundance of rancid British rice queens. I can’t stand it any more so I pop the E that one of my hosts arranged for me to buy from a cute gay drug dealer earlier in the day. We leave the bar before the E kicks in, and soon Hong Kong will turn into a magic pinwheel. I want to see the city lit up, so we rush to catch the last ferry to Kowloon and jump on the last one back to the island. Then I make poor Bryan rush us to the last tram up the hill so that I can see the panoramic view of the city at night. My poor host is a little terrorized by me, but generally he’s a good sport. Besides sharing the same first name, spelled the same way (you didn’t think my mother named me Bruce LaBruce, did you?), I discover, during confessionals on the empty fairy, that we have much in common, including both having been raised on farms and both having tragic dog stories. His: a dog that he had become attach to as a kid was one day designated as dinner, but the poor pooch instinctively sensed his impending fate and tried to run away - unsuccessfully, because he ended up on a platter, but out of loyalty Bryan refused to eat him. Mine: when I was two or three I had a pet dog named Tippy who became jealous of me and started to get nippy, so one day my father took him out behind the barn and shot him. My parents didn’t tell me what happened to him until I was eighteen. In their defense, we didn’t eat him. These stories explain why the two Bryans are fagalas. Bryan is kind of standard poodle superficial queenie gay, but he’s a nice guy underneath – if there is an underneath. We get a text message from Wouter, the Dutch founder of the fag festival, who informs us that everyone is waiting for us at Propaganda, but Bryan is stalling: he wants me to arrive at precisely the right moment. So it’s not my fault that we’re going to be fashionably late, but later Wouter seems to attribute it all to my diva tendencies, and perceive it as some sort of slight. Or am I being paranoid? For some reason people always choose to believe the worst of me. We finally arrive like a couple of demimondaines, but just as we’re about to enter the club, three fat Australian louts pass by and I hear one of them say, “That’s a fucking gay bar, mate. Don’t go in there or you’ll get AIDS.” Maybe it’s the E, but somehow I find it heartwarming - the genius of the timing of it. Bryan ushers me into the atrium of the bar, a circular space that has been transformed into a gallery of my photographs, including the pornographic ones, lovingly blown up and artfully arranged on the curved walls. He had led me to believe that the high-res images that I had mailed to them on disc had been impossible to print in time for the event owing to their size, but he only told me that to add to the surprise. So sweet. I’m suitably happy, and surprised also to find Weiland Speck, an old friend who is now one of the directors of the Berlin Film Festival, sitting at the bar. He’s dropped in to see me, just passing through town on his way from Tokyo to Soeul. So I have a nice chat with Weiland, but Wouter seems to have vanished. From then on it’s party time. The owner of the bar, a Chinese guy named Lawrence, squires me grandly to the VIP bankette replete with champagne in a bucket and finger food. I’m pretty much penned up there like a caged animal for the rest of the night, along with Bryan and the editors of Dim Sum, Hong Kong’s only gay magazine, a mixed race couple, Chinese and British. The cute Chinese DJ joins us every now and then, who’s supposed to be straight but flirts with me outrageously, especially after I tell him, when he asks, that I am, for the most part, sexually passive. He tries to seduce me by playing some of my requests, like Michael Jackson’s P.Y.T. and Rock With You, albeit speeded up to conform to his fascistic house beat. I do manage to escape from the bankette long enough to talk to some of the plebeians, like the very smart and very cute American Chinese girl from NYC who asked me a lot of astute questions earlier during my Q and A, and the tall, handsome French guy who tells me my movies were a huge influence on him when he was growing up, which makes me feel good and old. At one point Bryan stops the music and makes me go on stage to give away some prize packages based on trivia questions about my movies. It’s very corny, but kind of charming. I’m pretty out of it, though, what with the E and the champagne and cocktails and the jetlag and all, so at 5 a.m. I go back to my hotel room and take an Ativan and pass out. November 19/06. Hong Kong is more Blade Runner than Tokyo; the neon signs and giant video screens linger on my retinas in the morning. It’s also all about electronic technology – for example, you buy an Octopus card, put it in your wallet, and then simply run your wallet over a sensor to gain access to all forms or transport, or even to pay for small items at the convenience stores. Everything, including the subway, is evenly air-conditioned (I’m here at the perfect time of year – apparently the summers can be unbearably hot and muggy), and even the cute red cabs have gizmos, like in Tokyo, that allow the driver to open and close the door for you. It’s the automated future. I’m a little homesick today because it’s my boyfriend Tony’s birthday. He’s a Scorpio, as is his mother and my mother –a trio of deadly stingers. I’m a little burnt out from last night, but I soldier on, wandering around the outdoor markets of Kowloon in the afternoon, and hooking up with Denise in the evening for dinner and a Q and A after a screening of my movie Super 8 1/2. It’s strange watching the movie after all this time. I actually love the way it looks, and love the fact that it’s so morose and melancholy in a romantic way, a posture that’s more challenging to maintain as the years groan on. Denise has been playing phone tag with a girl whom I’ll call Mimsy, a friend of a friend in the fashion industry here who is also known as Hong Kong’s party girl and penultimate fag hag. My friend has arranged an introduction, and after a dozen or so fuzzy calls, Denise apprehensively arranges to hand me over to the Chinese adventuress. Mimsy has invited me to a party at a private residence – a rare privilege for foreign guests – so Denise insists on taking me in a cab to the assigned address and enacts the extraordinary rendition in person. It’s an ultra posh neighbourhood halfway up the hill on the central island - row upon row of expensive hi-rise apartments. After another call, Denise, who seems to fear I may end up in the white slave trade, nervously hands me off to Mimsy, a petite, pretty Chinese girl who already looks half zonked by 10pm. She grabs my hand and leads my to the elevator. We emerge in at an apartment in front of which several women sit on the floor smoking. They greet me as I remove my shoes and put on a pair of white slippers, and then enter the apartment. Inside, instead of the raucous western style cocktail gathering in full swing I’m expecting, I find myself in the midst of a small group of intimate friends - awkward! Mimsy introduces me to everybody and they’re all very friendly, but it still feels a bit like I’m intruding. There’s a great deal of leftover food on the long dining room table being cleared by an industrious maid; the only person left eating is an extremely good looking young man at head table picking at some sort of crab. In an adjacent space, a gang of four people is sitting around a small table playing what appears to be mah jong, but which I later find out is actually gin rummy played with tiles instead of cards. Mimsy, whose English is minimal, keeps asking me if I want to eat. I keep begging off, but finally she insists that I try a Shanghai hairy crab, a delicacy that is currently in season. I acquiesce, and the fellow who seems to own the apartment orders the maid to cook two more of the crabs, which will take about 25 minutes. In the meantime I learn that the hot boy that I’m now sitting with at the table is Song, Mimsy’s new boyfriend from South Korea whom she met at a gay party in Tapei. He seems very simpatico, so I begin to communicate with him, although his English is extremely rudimentary. As we speak, Mimsy comes over to me, pulls out a Special K bumper and inserts it into one of my nostrils. Not wanting to be an ungrateful guest, I accept the bump. Fortunately I’ve done my fair share of ketamine in my day, so I’m able to negotiate the impending high. The hairy crab arrives and is set in front of me, looking, as the vitamin K starts to take effect, like some organic Chinese box. The maid lays out a small arsenal of utensils, but I have no idea where to begin until one of the guests generously offers to navigate me through the process. It’s a precise litany of procedures, beginning with tearing off the legs and claws and removing various undesirable entrails and organs. Thankfully, mine is a female, so I don’t have to worry about what to do with the sperm, which Mimsy, who is eating one simultaneously, explains is the best part as she greedily sucks it up. After unfolding various crusty plates and layers, like reverse origami, I finally get to the delicate meat, which doesn’t taste like chicken, but which has the consistency of chicken liver, which I love, so I eat it gladly. Then it’s a matter of cracking and cutting the legs and claws with crackers and scissors and sucking the meat out of them. Mimsy ostentatiously presents me with the large male claw. By this time I am flying, so the whole experience starts to become highly bizarre to me and seems about as complicated, as I tell my hosts, as learning to land an airplane. They all seem to nod appreciatively. What follows is a series of more bumps from the Special K Pez dispenser as we proceed to get ridiculously high, so much so that when I excuse myself to use the washroom I have to walk like a retarded zombie, shuffling my feet in the ill-fitting slippers with my arms extended in front of me for balance. The apartment is relatively small, but slick and commercial looking, with obviously expert feng shui: a flat, square sunken pool on the floor with goldfish; opaque, pearl/green panels on the walls, some of which push open to lead to other obscure rooms that I never see; white and off-white and glass furniture and white fuzzy carpeting. I’m not sure which panel to push to find the bathroom, but somehow I manage, although it feels a little bit too much like Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions. I could easily begin to feel freaked out, so high and out of my element with virtual strangers, but instead I just relax and have fun. Back in the living room, Mimsy is making international phone calls and passing me her cell every once in a while, telling me to talk to this person in Shanghai or that person in New York, until finally she’s too high even to pass me the phone. Her hot Korean boyfriend, who isn’t doing as much K, comes over and puts his arm around me and chats with me in his charming, minimalist English. He doesn’t have much of a vocabulary, but what he says is economical and direct. He admires my tattoos and shows me his – his name in Korean across his lower back. Eventually I discover that the owner of the apartment is the chap who designs the lighting for all of Hong Kong, not to mention Shanghai and Beijing. And Chinese cities are all about lighting. I pull him into focus and tell him I like his apartment because it reminds me of American Gigolo. He informs me it’s one of his favourite movies, and shows me his coffee table book. I tell him the only place in America with good lighting is Palm Springs. I discover that another fellow, who has been sitting quietly by himself on the couch, is a very famous Chinese cartoonist. He starts to draw cartoons of people at the party before he starts going into a K hole, which Mimsy spends a long time coaxing him out of. The whole evening starts to feel like a dream, so I snap a few pictures as evidence, but when I get them developed they just look like they’re of normal people at a normal gathering. At about 1am Mimsy and Song decide they want to take me to a club. We take a cab to a place that is called Dining Harbour by day, a restaurant that occasionally transforms into a nightclub called Darling Harbour, a deep basement in an obscure location on a deserted stretch of road. Finding the club is much like Jimmy Stewart and Janice Rule trying to find the Zodiac Club at the beginning of Bell, Book and Candle. Everyone knows Mimsy at the door, so we’re ushered into the back of the club, which has an opium den motif, sailing past a throng of hot Chinese boys with incredible bodies and exotic faces (well, exotic to me, anyway. Is that racist?). The music is deep house/jungle, and there are psychedelic projections on the wall. Way too much dry ice. We continue to do bumps and drink, and Mimsy gives me a half an E, so I’m really high now, starting to feel a little like Brenda Vaccaro in the Midnight Cowboy party sequence. The Chinese boys with their shirts off on an elevated platform with psychedelic patterns on their bodies start to become two-dimensional and I begin to hallucinate; it’s very Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Chinese-style. Gradually everyone in the joint has his shirt off – even the fat middle-aged Englishman with the black eye patch is topless – except for me and Song. I refuse to take off my Karen Black t-shirt. Even when I was young I didn’t take my shirt off in clubs. I’m trying to avoid the white people on the dance floor, who all seem like tired colonial sexual predators. Finally, after much cajoling and the encouragement of half the bar, Song takes off his t-shirt, and several guys, including myself, almost faint. He’s that hot. By this time we’re all passing around energy drinks and getting lost in the music and lights. I think the hot owner of the club with the body of death and shaved head is kind of flirting with me, but I’m too far-gone to sort it out. It’s fun, but Mimsy seems pretty out of it, and slightly sad. Like all party girls, she has a melancholy edge. I should know. Mimsy and Song put me in a cab at about 5 a.m. November 20th, 2006. Oddly, I feel like I have more energy today than yesterday, but that’s probably because I’m still high. In the evening I’m taken to dinner by a fellow named Travis who teaches sociology at the University of Macau. His specialty is rent boys, strictly from an anthropological perspective. He takes me to a great dim sum restaurant where a mainland friend of his from Xinjiang who speaks Mandarin joins us. (Since the handover, more people in Hong Kong are speaking Mandarin, and it’s included in the subway announcements.) Travis treats me – I haven’t paid for a drink or meal since I’ve arrived owing to Chinese etiquette – and treats me to more drinks afterwards at the only other real gay bar in Hong Kong, called Rice, a cute, smallish and upscale establishment with dim lighting and cute boys. Or is that cute lighting and dim boys? Travis travels the world attending conferences and apparently does a lot of fieldwork on the subject of hustlers; I share my expertise, such that it is. Well, I did direct a movie called Hustler White. November 21/06. I’m pretty burnt out today, fighting a cold, and I still think I may have the clap. I join Travis again for dinner at a restaurant that serves Xinjiang-style food. A Hong Kong filmmaker named Julian Lee who directed a movie called Dark Corridor with Daniel Wu, the Chinese heartthrob who seems to take a lot of showers in his movies, joins us. He also stars in the Yonfan movie Bishonen, in which he plays a cop who falls in love with a pop idol. I met Yonfan in Turin earlier this year when I was on the jury of the Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Julian is thin and high-strung, wears glasses and talks a mile a minute. He’s frustrated because he wants to make his third feature but he’s having trouble raising the money, so he’s teaching film at a university in the meantime. He grills me rather aggressively about my career and the film festivals I’ve been to. I find him almost sweet at first, and I can certainly relate to his funding problems, but after a while his non-stop monologue starts to become a bit much, especially when we end up at a semi-private, communal café called Bittersweet in the Causeway Bay district. We sit in a group with a couple of Travis’ girlfriends, including a lesbian who runs an organic farm in the New Territories, but Julian is on a roll and no one can get a word in. I tell my story of recently being sued for a million dollars by the estate of the photographer of the famous Che Guevera photograph, which upstages him for a moment. November 22/06. Raymond takes me to lunch again in Kowloon, a strange restaurant that is packed solid with customers who are all eating either macaroni with beef or white toast, fried eggs, and ham. We’re there for their famous egg and milk custard, which tastes kind of like cream of wheat but with a more jelly-like consistency. Raymond shows me Chunking Gardens, the exotic mall/hotel full of African and East Indian merchants where Brigitte Lin runs around in a blond wig and sunglasses in Chunking Express. Then he takes me to the ferry so that I can go to see the Giant Buddha that everyone keeps talking about. It’s a long trip by fairy to an island and then by bus to the top of a mountain - much more treacherous than I expected. Maybe that’s because I’ve left so late in the afternoon and therefore I’m the only person on the bus, which the driver seems to see as an opportunity to drive like a bat out of hell around hairpin curves. When I finally get to the Giant Buddha, on the site of a former monastery, it’s much more touristy than I expected, which kind of demolishes the spiritual vibe. I hate tourists, especially when I am one. November 23/05. I go to the cinema near my hotel to see B420, the new Sam Lee movie, which is kind of an updated Jules and Jim for the teenage Chinese set. It has a lot of style and verve, and I like the way that suicide, murder, teen pregnancy, and rape are all treated in a somewhat off-hand, whimsical way. Sam Lee plays a suicidal former motocross champ who watches porn all day because he’s depressed. After the movie I go to my favourite food stand for deep fried squid, and then it’s off to Macau. I want to go primarily because of the campy old Hollywood movie called Macoa that was set, although certainly not shot, there, starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, and directed by Josef Von Sternberg, which contains the famous line by Mitchum, “You remind me of an old Egyptian girlfriend of mine. The Sphinx.” I’m feeling a little harried today, so when I jump on the metro I go in the wrong direction and end up way out in the New Territories, some J.G. Ballard-y part of the city that I know nothing about. By the time I make my way back from the outer limits, it’s already 4pm, and when I get to the Macau ferry I realize that I’ve left my passport in the hotel, which one needs to visit Macau. I vow to figure out how to get back to my hotel and back in time to catch the 5pm ferry, which I do manage. When I finally arrive at Macau I’m surprised to see that it’s more like Vegas than the fishing village I was expecting; it’s where Hong Kong natives go for leisure and gambling, a former Portuguese colony known for it’s international intrigue and corruption. Travis, who teaches at the university here, meets me at the ferry and proceeds to give me a whirlwind tour of the port city: an out-of-the way Chinese-run Portuguese restaurant; the famous church wall left standing after attacks by the Japanese during WW11; a walk through the narrow cobblestone streets, where we have a rare sighting of some pan Asian transsexual hookers. Travis has me back in time for the 11:00 pm ferry so I can catch the last metro at 12:15, but my four hour tour of Macau was so rushed that it seemed like an episode of the Amazing Race, the most depressing reality TV show ever because it’s almost all about the mundane mechanics of travel. November 25/05. Will I get laid in Hong Kong? It’s beginning to seem doubtful, particularly since I haven’t had sex with an Asian since that Chinese guy in a Berlin bathhouse last year. (Well, Far East Asian, that is; my last boyfriend was from a Southwest Asian lineage.) I think I’m supposed to be monogamous with my new Cuban boyfriend now anyway, although I did sort of have sex with that Portuguese guy last week in Madrid. Maybe I should try celibacy for a while. Now that seems exotic. Today I finally meet Yonfan, the famous gay Hong Kong filmmaker who has directed many of the major Chinese stars, including Maggie Cheung and Yun-Fat Chow in Meigui de gushi (1985), their first big film. He treats me to breakfast at the world famous Peninsula Hotel, which was once on the waterfront, but owing to landfill and development, is no longer. Not to mention they built the dome of the space museum right in front of it, which scandalously ruined its feng shui. Yon Fan, an elegant man of sixty who looks forty, sits across from me and tells me about hanging out with Yves Saint-Laurent in Paris in the seventies. When I mention that I met Julian Lee the other day, he bristles. Apparently Julian was his former protégé, and, I suspect, his lover. Now they act more like rivals. He tells me the story of how when he took Julian to his apartment once, Julian couldn’t believe that he didn’t have any beauty products in his bathroom, and later on he caught Julian looking under his bed for them. Sounds like something I would do. It’s nice to know that fags are the same all over the world. Yonfan takes me to the teahouse and the café he owns in the Central District, and generously gives me a box set of his movies and a book on Hong Kong cinema art direction. In the evening I meet up with Raymond again, and we join two of his friends for dinner. One of them is named Colette, a Chinese woman with a posh English accent who owns a restaurant called FINDS (an acronym formed by the first letters of the five Scandinavian countries) and a bar called Drop, which is near Propaganda. Her half Chinese half Australian boyfriend is a hot former Kung Fu stuntman for Hong Kong kung fu movies who has more recently directed an animated feature. Mimsy joins us for dinner, and its good to see her in a more sober environment. She dotes on and orders for me, including a strange noodle that you eat with sugar and vinegar sprinkled on top. I end up drinking for free until the wee hours with Colette and her beau at her upscale establishments. November 25/05. It’s my last day in Hong Kong, but I’m not leaving until after midnight so I have some time to murder. I decide I have to pay homage to the late, great Leslie Cheung, who committed suicide on April 1, 2003 by jumping off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the Central District. I go to the hotel, which is beyond posh, and ride the elevator up to the 24th floor. I go to the door of the health spa, which is apparently where he jumped from. I say a little prayer. He was 46. Next Denise takes me via cab to a live interview in Kowloon at Hong Kong’s only English language radio station. Two snarky Brits grill me on a variety of hot button issues like art and porn, gay activism, and Madonna. (Denise, who sits in on the interview, is wearing the cute little red “Madonna is Counterrevolutionary” t-shirt that I gave her.) They seemed quite baffled by my pseudo-Marxist cultural critique of Madge, not to mention my arcane philosophy of homosexuality. Denise, of course, gets it, because she’s smart as a whip. Then it’s back to Soho for some clothes shopping at a great store called G.O.D. (Goods Of Desire), and then to the movie theatre in Kowloon for some last minute interviews. The best one is for a magazine called Friday, the Hong Kong equivalent of Sassy, conducted by an adorable young Japanese girl who is petite, stylish, and shy to the point of breaking my heart. She says she was initially afraid to interview me because of my bad reputation, but by the end of the interview we’re posing for photographs together like girlfriends. Then it’s back to my hotel after a tearful goodbye with Denise (tearful on my part, at least) and a quick nap before heading for the airport. On the plane back to Madrid I watch Mad Hot Ballroom and cry about fifteen times. I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife. I pop a sleeping pill and pass out for the duration. Bruce LaBruce |
| If it's Tuesday... |
| Saturday 27th 2006f May 2006 13:16 <a href="http://technorati.com/claim/yx5ic9eztj" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a> |
| Hey public: Here's a think piece I recently wrote about Tuesday Weld for Nerve.com. Before Drew Barrymore, there was Tuesday Weld. You may recall that by the time the blond grandspawn of the Barrymore acting dynasty was 14, she had already been addicted to drugs and alcohol, attempted suicide, and written a book, Little Girl Lost, about her recovery. Unfortunately, her subsequent career as America’s kick-ass sweetheart with a heart of gold, goofy and innocuous and somehow inert, belies a certain pop culture amnesia in which the transgressions of stars, particularly the female ones, are forgiven and forgotten as long as they become domesticated, perfectly socialized cash-cows. Tuesday Weld began her career on a similar trajectory, but this ravishing blond with coal black eyes, this pixie bombshell instead chose a far more difficult and challenging path, refusing cooption by the mainstream at every turn in favour of a more personal, interior vision. Having famously turned down leads in such blockbusters as Lolita, Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, True Grit, and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (when asked why she turned down Lolita, she responded, “I don’t have to play Lolita; I am Lolita.”), her very persona is a rebuke to all the greedy blonds (whether blond or not) who will now take any role as long as it reeks of money or bequeaths awards. By her own admission, Weld, who started supporting her mother and two siblings (all later estranged) as a model at the age of three after her father died in 1946, had a nervous breakdown at nine and became an alcoholic at ten, regularly blowing off correspondence school to get drunk in the West Village. In full Judy Garland mode at twelve (is it her life or Garland’s that Natalie Wood embodies in 1965’s Inside Daisy Clover?), she fell in love with a homosexual and attempted suicide by washing down sleeping pills with gin, causing her to lose temporarily, after emerging from a coma, her hearing and sight. By the time she made her Hollywood film debut at 13 in 1956, she had lived life harder than most actresses four times her age, inspiring Danny Kaye to quip, when she starred as his polio-stricken daughter in The Five Pennies (1959), “Tuesday is 15 going on 27.” Perversely, in spite of her premature maturity, she would end up playing sweet sixteen characters until she was 27, although as the idealism of the postwar fifties turned into something much more bleak and complex by the time America began its slide into the late sixties, so too did Weld’s persona progressively take on a more self-consciously sinister and foreboding edge. That the spectacle of America’s sweetheart suddenly becoming the spooky little girl next door led to rumoured, if tenuous, connections with the likes of Kenneth Anger and Anton LaVey, Aleister Crowley acolytes both well versed in the Black Arts, should come as no surprise; it’s significant that she’s been cast in this dark company - an honorary witch. It’s also interesting to note that LaVey, who dedicated The Satanic Bible to Tuesday Weld and Marilyn Monroe, spoke of Weld as a more intelligent and emotionally stable living approximation of Monroe and Jayne Mansfield (the latter a well known member of the Church of Satan) who has managed to avoid the masochistic fate of her predecessors by eschewing stardom and the public eye. If the phases of Weld’s acting career mirror the tumultuous shift in women’s roles from the fifties to the nineties, it has to be said that it’s been a bumpy, and sometimes backwards, ride. Thrust into the role of career woman as a child, she became in the movies as a young teen the innocent little girl she was never given the chance to be in real life. She parlayed her infamous turn as Thalia Menninger, the hip teenage aristocrat and nubile material girl, in the 1959-60 season of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, into sex kitten roles in questionable movies like Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), Wild in the Country (1961) (her obligatory Elvis movie), and Bachelor Flat (l962). Although she had already managed to squeeze in one controversial turn, as Selena Cross, the girl who is raped by her stepfather and has an abortion, in Return To Peyton Place (1961), it was in her numerous television roles, mostly between 1962 and 64, that she started to articulate the disturbed, sociopathic and decidedly feral persona that would soon become her trademark. The two most integral are her Route 66 episode (Love is a Skinny Kid, 1962), in which she gets off a bus in a small Texas town wearing a Japanese mask and mysteriously burns a doll at the stake, and her The Fugitive episode (Dark Corner, 1964), in which she plays a seemingly sweet and innocent sculptress suffering from hysterical blindness who is revealed to be a jealous and manipulative murderess. From that point on in her career, all evening gloves, and cashmere sweaters, were off. Often cast as the innocent, if eventually corrupted, country girl (moonshiner’s daughters pursued by Elvis in Wild in the Country and Gregory Peck in I Walk the Line (1970); Steve McQueen’s unspoiled farmer’s daughter girlfriend in The Cincinnati Kid (1965)), it was her twin roles as social-climbing, small town girls in two of her best films, Lord Love A Duck (1966) and Pretty Poison (1968), that allowed her to lampoon her own vixenish image and thereby fully realize her dark potential. The two movies are remarkably similar variations on the same theme: a high school girl from a fractured, single-mother family comes under the spell of an older ‘boyfriend’ who harbours elaborate delusions (and who is also heavily coded as homosexual - they are played, after all, by Roddy McDowell and Anthony Perkins, respectively, both gay, if closeted, in real life) and proceeds to reek havoc on the town. (Remember it was Weld’s first boyfriend, a homosexual, who caused her debut nervous breakdown.) In both movies, the mothers are promiscuous and tarty - frustrated women in their early forties stifling the freedom and ambitions of their daughter - and in both cases the highly unsocialized boyfriends, after obligatory, if unorthodox, drives to lovers’ lane, are enlisted in some crazy homicidal scheme to extract the girl from her repressed position. (“The old hag even took my car keys,” complains Tuesday in Pretty Poison.) Although the girl is undeniably complicit in the murders (in Pretty Poison, she actually commits matricide), it’s the boyfriend in both movies who ends up in jail for the crime, so entranced by the young, anarchic beauty that he gladly takes the rap. It’s these two enormously clever black comedies that get to the black heart of Tuesday Weld. Pretty Poison is way ahead of its time in its depiction of homegrown terror: it’s not the obviously unhinged, sociopathic arsonist outsider (Perkins) who becomes the multiple murderer, but the freckle-faced majorette next door who giggles and innocently sips a Pepsi after killing her own mother. The scene in which Weld in a short skirt sits on the face of the dying security guard she’s bludgeoned and tossed into the river in order to drown him, as Perkins watches with horrified fascination, seems oddly contemporary, a precursor to the natural born killer duo cycle of movies that continued with Badlands (1973) straight on up through Kalifornia (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994). It’s not that teenagers hadn’t been depicted as violently disaffected before Pretty Poison, but Weld’s sangfroid and frank sexuality took it to a chilling new level. Lord Love a Duck, an existential bikini beach movie, goes even further in its capricious ararchy. “What’s your major?” asks McDowell as Alan, the couch-surfing drifter who becomes the Svengali of Weld (Barbara Jean). “Adolescent ethics and commercial relationships,” she replies, blithely nailing the essence of her own screen persona. Of course Barbara Ann wants to be a movie star, and Alan will do anything, including murdering the young husband she begins to tire of, to help her achieve her goal. Barbara Ann ends up in Hollywood starring in a movie called Bikini Widow (her director’s previous movies include Bikini Vampire and Cold War Bikini), blowing kisses in her white mink stole to the crowd that menacingly engulfs her at the premier. It’s a pure indictment of the phony and corrupt Hollywood system, and it foreshadows Tuesday’s own disenchantment and withdrawal from that lurid scene. After turning down films that would have undoubtedly made her a major star, Tuesday Weld became known in the seventies for being very good in thankless roles, often playing second fiddle to some over-hyped male star. One exception is the amazing Play It As It Lays (1972), based on Joan Didion’s takedown of Hollywood, in which she plays a former model and actress in full nervous breakdown mode who has a traumatic abortion. Her first child is schizophrenic; her husband is a philandering cult director whose gay producer, played by Anthony Perkins, is her only friend. Perkins ends up committing suicide in her pretty, poisonous arms. It’s almost a pity that Weld chose not to star in Rosemary’s Baby (she claims she turned it down because, ironically, she was nursing at the time), because it would have so neatly reinforced all the cruel ambiguities of her persona. Children don’t fare well in Tuesday Weld movies - she is usually either forced to abandon them or to abandon their fathers with them (Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978; Thief (1981)), or they’re mad or she aborts them before they have a chance to be born (Play It As It Lays; Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977)). (One might conjecture that it wasn’t always easy for her real life children either; when Weld sifted through the ashes of her Hollywood Hills home that burned to the ground in the early seventies, she later confessed to thinking at the time, “Am I walking through my daughter?”) Even as she continued, after rejecting Hollywood film stardom, to make Movies of the Week for television, her roles betrayed the same diabolical genius: a murderous mistress in Reflections of Murder (1974), a chilling remake of Diabolique; a tarty woman falsely accused of murdering her own daughter in A Question of Guilt (1978); and a divorcee with a heroin-addicted son (played by River Phoenix!) who abuses her own mother (in one scene punching her in the face!) in Circle of Violence (1986). The recurring motif in Weld’s movies of violence between mothers and daughters transgresses a particularly strong taboo, but it never seems exploitative or sensational, largely thanks to her straightforward and unpretentious style of acting. A modern day Elektra, only Tuesday Weld could negotiate so successfully this Oedipal inversion by formulating it not as some petty rivalry between women for the sexual attentions of men, but rather as a profound acting out against the control of a variety of patriarchies, from the traditional family to the Hollywood system to America itself. Considering her uncompromising and subversive persona, and considering how elusive and aloof she remained throughout her career (when once asked in Interview magazine what drove her from such a public early career to relative obscurity, she replied, “I think it was a Buick”), it’s amazing how thoroughly Tuesday Weld has seeped into the pop culture consciousness. From her cameo on the first season of The Flintstones in 1960 as a kittenish Hollywood star named Wednesday Tuesday (the only other female movie star so honoured was Ann Margrock), to her appearance on the cover of Mathew Sweet’s Girlfriend album in 1991, to the emergence lately of a British band called The Real Tuesday Weld, the legend lives on. And despite her hardscrabble, knock-about life, the woman behind the persona has, against all odds, survived. One only has to look at the troubled lives and careers of the likes of Winona Ryder and Courtney Love to appreciate how intolerant and unforgiving Hollywood is of its rowdy, unsanitized rebel female stars; that Tuesday Weld has managed to play through that resistance for each of her six decades in the entertainment battlefield is a testament to the toughest cookie on the block. So much more than a blond on a bum trip, Tuesday Weld was married three times in real life (once, improbably, to comedy star Dudley Moore) and had two children, and she continues to play supporting roles in small movies (Feeling Minnesota (1996); Chelsea Walls 2001). But it’s her screen persona as the wild and unmanageable female, by turns calm and volcanic, that has left the lasting impression of a purely independent, indomitable force of nature, and a fiercely feminist one at that. Easily more glamorous than Naomi Watts, and with far more substance than Reese Witherspoon, Weld’s deceptively pretty face and great mane of blond hair, her gap-toothed smile and black, burning eyes, encompass all of the contradictions of the modern woman. The film critic Arthur Knight, who had a cameo in Play It As It Lays, once said of Tuesday, “She depressed me so much, I went from her hotel to Bloomingdale’s and shoplifted, and I’ve never done that before or since.” Temptress, feminist, enemy combatant, earth mother, and blond bombshell all rolled into one, there will never be another Tuesday Weld. Bruce LaBruce |
| All Apologies |
| Thursday 20th 2006f April 2006 00:36 |
| Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Living takes up all my time. I don't have any now either. Time, that is. In case you're interested, I currently have a think piece on Tuesday Weld, one of my all-time favourite actresses, on Nerve.com. Also, in the current issue of Black Book, I have an article about the million dollar lawsuit that my movie The Raspberry Reich was hit with, launched by the estate of Korda, the photographer of the famous Che Guevera image. An account of my recent trip to Hong Kong will be coming out in a new magazine edited by Amy Kellner and Jesse Pearson that will be distributed in all of the hotels of Andre Balazs. And then there's the manifesto I wrote on behalf of the Purple Resistance Army (PRA) that will soon be published in the upcoming Manifestos issue of C Magazine. Photography-wise, I recently published another spread in the Dutch fashion magazine Blend, and I have some fashion photographs coming out in the next issue of Toronto's The Look. It is my sad duty to report that the photographs that I took on a lark for Teen Vogue will not be published. It isn't my fault, the photographs were great. It was a styling issue. I'm trying to get them to have me photograph Coco Gordon-Moore (daughter of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore) and Bean Cobain (daughter ot Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, peace and blessings be upon him), only so that I can make them title it "Coco Bean." Don't hold your breath. It looks like I may be having a photography show at the new Vice art gallery in Berlin in July, so I'll keep you posted on that. I also have three of my fashion photographs currently on display at the Drake Hotel as part of a group show called Self Absorption and Theatricality in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and some of my fashion photography will also be on display at Peter Gatien's new Toronto club Circa when it opens in June. Otherwise, check out my MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/brucelabruce) and blog (http://blog.myspace.com/brucelabruce) for some fun stuff. I will also soon be revamping this site and making the blog more reader friendly and using a program that will allow me to post more photographs. Ok, sayonara. See you at Moustache tomorrow night. x Blab p.s. oh, i almost forgot, I'm also having another party at The Drake Hotel in Toronto on Thursday, May 4th, called Apocalypse So What, featuring DJs Rory Them Finest and Will Munro. It will also double as the one year anniversary party for me and my boyfriend, Antonio Eulogio Ramirez-Ortega. Come celebrate Iran going nuclear. Start by admitting from cradle to tomb it isn't that long a stay. And all that jazz. |
| Don Knotts RIP |
| Monday 27th 2006f February 2006 12:41 |
| Here's an article I wrote a while back for some academic publication, I can't recall which one, acknowledging the late Don Knotts as one of my role models. Enjoy. Bruce LaBruce: The Love God?; or, How to Succeed in Pornography Without Really Trying In “The Love God?”, a rather unjustly maligned Don Knotts vehicle from 1969, Abner Peacock, a nerdy, nebishy ornithologist, played by Knotts himself, is hoodwinked by various lawyers and generic Mafioso types into transforming his modest bird-watching magazine into an international “Playboy”-like porno publication called “Peacock”, with Abner himself reluctantly transformed into the pajama-wearing, sex God figurehead a la Hugh Hefner. This is the apotheosis of the Knotts persona, who had his first big success in the early sixties as Barney Fife, the bug-eyed, nervous deputy on “The Andy Griffith Show”, but who, by the end of the decade, had become an unlikely sex symbol. A series of starring vehicles for Don Knotts, with his goldfish face and an Adam’s apple the size of a small fist, posited him as the 98 lb. weakling constantly thrown into circumstances under which he had to prove his manhood. In “The Reluctant Astronaut” (a title I borrowed from for my premature memoirs, “The Reluctant Pornographer”), he plays a child-like carnival ride operator terrified of heights who becomes an unwilling astronaut. In “The Shakiest Gun in the West”, he is a meek dentist propped up as a macho gunslinger by a sexy, conniving woman with whom he is involved in a sham marriage, his “shaky gun” cleverly signifying a limp dick. (To add to the ambiguity, his dentist character has moved to the wild west “to fight oral ignorance”, which may provide a clue to the impotent Knott’s hidden sexual allure.) But it’s in “The Love God?” that all of the sexual ambivalence and homosexual panic that is at the heart of the Knotts image is deliriously articulated. While the skinny, innocent Abner sits in court for an obscenity trial, the public defender rails that it’s his duty to protect the public from “...the smut and moral corruption spewed forth like garbage from the lecherous, vile, lewd and licentious mind of this filthy little degenerate.” As Abner squirms, he continues: “Look at his face - it’s the face of a smut-monger. Look at his body - thin, wasted away by the dissipation and debauchery of a life of unspeakable orgies and depravity.” (A pre-AIDS reference, Knotts nevertheless was always coded as frail, sickly, and thus, homosexual.) “The Marquis de Sade would have considered him a peer in his search for lechery,” he finishes triumphantly. With such a build-up, the women in the courtroom and all over America become aroused by Peacock, including Liza LaMonica, the cynical, ambitious magazine editor who transforms him into a sexual icon. Despite, or perhaps owing to, his sexual shortcomings, Don Knotts always ended up attracting a sexy girl. Enter LaBruce. Like Knotts, whose characters invariably came from a working class, rural or small town environment, I was a fey, freckled farmboy who came to Toronto in the early eighties to attend film school. Although I started out in film production, movie-making was too expensive and too technical for me (technophobia was yet another of my unmasculine traits), so I went into the more bookish field of film theory instead. As a homosexual virgin in my early twenties, I attempted to penetrate the gay scene, but found it alienating - superficial and conformist. By this time, homosexuals had strayed from their early roots of distinct individual style and flamboyance - which exerted itself as an invisible influence on fashion, art, and culture - towards a more uniform aesthetic, clone-like and vaguely fascist. (It’s no accident that the clone look would, by the nineties, evolve literally, particularly in Europe, to a neo-Nazi skinhead bootboy look.) Politically, the gay movement was already moving in a more assimilationist direction; the desire to be accepted and treated like everyone else was predicated on a more conservative approach, which also meant distancing itself from its more extreme and radical elements. Whereas the original agenda of gay activism had been based on notions of sexual liberation, anti-authoritarian behaviour, and the expression of difference, by the mid-eighties the order of the day was conformity, fitting in, and fixing identity as non-threatening in order for it to become palatable to the masses. This could be partly attributed to the advent of the AIDS, which reduced the gay movement to a narrow set of political imperatives in service of a “health crisis”. (That this crisis could be directly attributed to extreme sexual promiscuity and the misuse of antibiotics to treat venereal diseases, as well as rampant recreational drug use, was never fully acknowledged by gay activists, who instead concentrated on those elements which exacerbated the disease, such as the corruption of the medical establishment and the unwillingness of pharmaceutical companies to facilitate potential cures.) This derailing of the gay movement resulted in the disastrous neglect of aesthetics and style, which had always been the great strengths of homosexual culture. AIDS also reduced the gay political agenda to doctrinaire sloganeering and politically correct rhetoric which resulted in an anti-intellectual, anti-dialectical ontology, also catastrophic considering that ambivalence and paradox had heretofore been one of our most effective strategies. Add to this that, as Fran Leibowitz has pointed out, AIDS killed all the cool people, and it was clear that the gay movement was a sinking ship that us rat finks had to abandon fast. At this historic moment there was also a stratification of the sexes in the gay scene, and as my closest friends had always been female, I was loathe to betray them. As Don Knotts redux, a weak and flimsy daffodil, and with my unique style, it was virtually all but impossible for me to get laid in the gay scene anyway, so why stick around. But what was the alternative? Bored with academia, I started to hang out in the punk scene, which seemed to be characterized by individual style, radical politics, and anarchic behaviour - the very tenets of homosexual radicalism that had been lost. Punk not only looked fresh and cool, but politically it was also attempting to rethink how to organize society, to decentralize power and to fight corporitization. The early roots of punk were also based on sexual revolution: experimentation with sexual ambivalence, bi- and homosexuality, androgyny, and even gender dysphoria. I started to sport mohawks and accumulate tattoos. I fell in with a group of girls who were already producing music and fanzines and working in super 8, a cheap and technically simple film format that even a sissy could figure out. We began to show homosexually-themed, experimental movies in punk clubs and alternative spaces. But imagine our surprise when I started to get jeered at and beaten up by skinheads and mohawks alike for being a fag. It appears there was a minor complication. By the mid-eighties, punk had stratified into a variety of “-cores”, splinter groups with varying agendas. It had always been part of the strategy of punk, in order to evade co-option by the mainstream, to avoid articulating its agenda directly, and to refuse to fix itself on the conventional political spectrum. A flirtation with extreme and disturbing religious or political imagery - Hare Krishna, the bloody cross, the swastika - was designed to be provocative and ambivalent to the point where sometimes personal affiliation to such signifiers became murky. It was the music and style which unified punks, not a reductive, cohesive politic. The advent of hardcore, with its fast, aggressive music and austere, stoic style - shaved heads, army boots - ushered in a new machismo, with male bodies flailing in the sweaty mosh pit. Any overt homosexuality was sublimated or repressed. Straight edge, an off-shoot of hardcore, even promoted a monkish adherence to self-discipline and self-denial - no drugs, no alcohol, even celibacy. All of this, coupled with the fact that disco fags had become annoying and lame, created a new era of homophobia in punkdom. So here was poor LaBruce, stuck in exile between two subcultures, unwelcome in both. What was a boy, and several disgruntled girls, to do? Why not start our own little movement? With J.D.s, the original queer punk fanzine, we decided to use the punk format - an inexpensive, photocopied, DIY publication which eschewed copyright and high production values - to push our rebellious homosexual agenda. (J.D.s stood for, among other things, Juvenile Delinquents.) And what better way to piss off homophobic punks and skinheads, to ridicule their supposed radicalism, than to get them drunk, take off their clothes, take pictures of their hot, naked bodies, publish them in a fanzine, and distribute it internationally? By embracing pornography, both through stealing from conventional gay porn and by creating our own punk variation, we were paying homage to our queer predecessors, when homosexual was criminal, an underground movement which encompassed all kinds of non-conformist behaviour. The shock value also didn’t hurt in drawing attention to our little crusade. As part of our punk training, we had learned from the Situationists the power of the spectacle, of propping up fictions to fight the entrenched ideologies controlling us. Thus we not only created a fanzine but also a movement in full swing, an army of queer boys and girls fed up with the confining roles we were dully expected to fulfill. Another spectacle we created was Bruce LaBruce, my alter ego, a hard-fucking, hard-drinking, out of control punk rock fag who seduces unsuspecting straight and straight edge boys, and leads them into a life of debauchery and vice. I started to appear in the fanzines and our super 8 home movies, drunk and getting my nipples pierced with a safety pin by my hustler boyfriend, stripping or having my clothes ripped off, or slamming in the pit with my camera, footage that would later be intercut with hardcore gay pornography. But underneath the punk bravado, Don Knotts still secretly lurked. In the late eighties, a German producer named Jurgen Bruning caught my short movies at an alternative screening, and I approached him to finance a modest, super 8 feature length movie. The result was “No Skin Off My Ass”, a loose remake of Robert Altman’s “That Cold Day in the Park” about an effeminate hairdresser who picks up a mute skinhead in the park, takes him home, bathes him and locks him in the guest bedroom, and eventually seduces him. I had already begun to use pornography in the fanzines, so I decided it was time to extend the strategy to celluloid. As I had never had any contact with the porno world proper, it was all trial and mostly error. Despite my somewhat ironic reputation as a porn pin-up - an irony, as with Abner Peacock, which people often chose not to read - I was shy and naive about the mechanics of pornography. I got my boyfriend at the time to shave his head to play the skinhead, and for our sex scenes in the bathtub I would have one of my girlfriends shoot us giving each other blow jobs while asking her to keep her eyes closed or look the other way. For the final seduction scene, I put the camera on a tripod and put it on running lock so that my boyfriend and I could be alone in the room together and be able to get hards-on, a significant trope for the whole enterprise which I then incorporated into the narrative. In order to foreground the voyeurism of the audience and turn the whole spectacle back on them, I used an arsenal of distanciation techniques - voice-over narration, a laugh track, an exaggeration of the sound of the camera motor, romantic Hollywood music, grainy black and white film, etc. - but paradoxically the accumulative effect was to make the sex scenes far more intimate, an effect also produced by the creative porn films of the seventies. The spectacle had become almost too engaging. Here’s where the Don Knotts syndrome kicked in. Bruce LaBruce was a persona propped up as a sexual spectacle, but it was in some ways a sham, a hoax. As in “The Shakiest Gun in the West” and “The Love God?”, it was also partly engineered by inventive women behind the scenes who developed a strong attachment to the fictional construct. Sit-com complications invariably ensued, not the least of which was myself trying to live up to said spectacle. The movie, originally intended to play in punk venues and alternative art galleries, got picked up on the film festival circuit and started to be screened internationally. Suddenly the sex life of my boyfriend and myself naively committed to celluloid was been splashed all over the world, which inevitably raised doubts about my agenda and questions of profiteering and self-aggrandizement. My response was to throw myself into the persona with gusto. I traveled with the movie for a year, showing up drunk or drugged at engagements, being surly and aggressive in interviews, acting out the ambivalent role of the pierced and tattooed sissy porn star. I quickly realized that once you committed yourself to having sex on film (particularly celluloid, the big screen, the epic scale), especially back in the early nineties, well before the explosion of pornographic imagery in the mainstream, you were regarded differently, as a kind of sexual property. People take liberties with you, touch you inappropriately, treat you as disposable or worthy of contempt even while adoring you, however whimsically. My next movie, Super 8 1/2, shot on 16mm, was a fictionalized cautionary bio-pic about a washed-up porno star named Bruce, an attempt to shoot down the spectacle I had helped to create. Within the fiction, the trademark of the porn star I played was his off-beat aesthetic and his unique camera style which tended to disrupt the illusion of pure pornography, once again drawing attention to the audience’s voyeurism, particularly with his tendency to look directly into the camera. The line between fiction and reality became murky not only for the viewer but for myself, as a Jekyll and Hyde persona emerged, or more accurately, Lewis and Martin: the nebishy sissy versus the Love God, a duality brilliantly articulated in “The Nutty Professor” in which Jerry Lewis plays both nerdy professor Julius Kelp and smooth heart-throb Buddy Love, a thinly veiled depiction of his former partner, Dean Martin. In Super 8 1/2, the fading porn star is propped up by a diabolical dyke underground film-maker named Googie/Liza LaMonica (see “The Love God!”), who is making a documentary about him which he thinks will constitute his comeback, but she is only exploiting him for her own gain. The movie was made in the style of seventies porno, influenced by such film-makers as Jack Deveau, Peter de Rome, Wakefield Poole, Peter Berlin, and Fred Halsted, who worked in 16mm, used advanced narrative techniques, incorporated humour, character development, female characters, and concentrated on aesthetics. Super 8 1/2 ended up becoming another cult item, this time showing at more non-gay, international film festivals, culminating in a screening at Sundance. Considering it was a film containing innumerable blow-jobs and ass-fucking scenes, it was a quite startling turn of events. The relationship with my boyfriend, which began to crack with “No Skin Off My Ass”, finally ended with his appearance in Super 8 1/2, a narrative trajectory which I quickly incorporated in both on- and off-screen spectacles. For my next movie, I decided I better get the hell out of town. “Hustler White” was shot in 16mm colour and documented, in fictionalized form, the dwindling male prostitution scene on Santa Monica Boulevard in LA. A loose remake of “Sunset Boulevard” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, with a little “Death in Venice” thrown in, it starred former porn pin-up and high fashion model Tony Ward, then well known for his recent high-profile relationship with Madonna. Although “Hustler White” was originally intended to exist in both soft- and hardcore versions, budget and time restrictions prevented us from shooting any hardcore scenes, although we did use several real porn stars in the movie. Through these contacts, and owing to my reputation, I did finally make my first forays into the adult video world, visiting porn sets and hanging out with porn icons. “Hustler White” was widely regarded as pornographic owing to its extreme scenes of fetishism - bondage, s & m, mutilation, and, for you amputee lovers, stump-fucking - and because Tony Ward jerks off in the opening scene. The movie was distributed even more widely than my previous two films, screened at Sundance and Cannes, and in some countries was even blown up to 35mm and sold to television. But at its heart, it was still just another Don Knotts movie, in which my character, a bitchy foreign writer researching hustlers in LA, falls madly in love with the ultimate rent boy. As a critic in Cahiers Du Cinema pointed out, in a world imbued with extreme fetishes and sexual violence, the last taboo is tenderness. At this point in my brilliant career, I was expected in some circles to make the jump to more mainstream film-making, but I quickly realized that there may be a glass ceiling for gay pornographers. For this was the reputation I had garnered despite my avant-garde products, which I perceived as being more in line with the experimental movies of such gay sixties directors as Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Kenneth Anger. But as that style of avant-garde film-making seemed to no longer exist, I decided instead to make my first legitimate porn film. For this momentous occasion, I returned in the late nineties to the theme of my first feature from the early nineties: the gay fetishization of neo-Nazi skinheads. I had come full circle, but the world had changed drastically in the mean time. Pornography had become mainstream, audiences were jaded, and I had more respect for the power of spectacle. A darker, less whimsical pornographic product was in order. “Skin Flick” was produced by Berlin’s Cazzo Film, a porn production company co-founded by Jurgen Bruning, who had produced all of my previous features. (That he himself directs movies for the company under the name Jurgen Anger, the name of my character in “Hustler White”, only reinforces the circuity of it all.) The movie is about a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads who breaks into the home of a bourgeois, mixed raced gay couple and sexually terrorizes them. The group rape of the black character by white power skinheads is an inversion of a scene in “Hustler White” in which a white twink hustler is gang-banged by some black power activist/hustlers. As in all my movies, the intersection of race and class with homosexual identity is interpreted in terms of pornographic iconography. Shot in London on super 8 and digital video, this time I was able to make both softcore and hardcore versions, videotape allowing us to shoot longer and more cheaply. Although “Skin Flick” uses, with two notable exceptions, a complete cast of experienced porn actors, and works well within the conventions of pornography, it also operates as an anti-porn. Modern pornography, since the advent of video, is an extremely conventional medium. Narrative formulae must be adhered to, character A has to fuck character B X number of times and for a certain duration, the sex must be captured from specific angles, etc. But referring back to seventies porn and avant-garde film practice, I attempted to disrupt the formula as much as possible. The movie is very narrative and character heavy, and contains a strong female character (Cameltoe) involved in numerous humorous scenes. (I wanted her to have unsimulated sex with one of the skinheads, but the producers vetoed the idea; the notion of heterosexual sex in a gay movie was too radical) The switching back and forth from grainy black and white super 8 to slick colour video disrupts the stream-lined, univocal effect of video porn, whose fascistic slickness flattens out meaning and sacrifices aesthetics to endless, mundane repetitive action. Voice-over text in the form of political poetry composed and delivered by one of the players is used over sex scenes in attempt to engage the brain and the dick simultaneously. In the rape scene, the fact that the black character refuses to give into pleasure, as the conventions of porno would dictate, but resists and even reeks revenge, is also intended to confound the sexual identification of the audience. Further disrupting identification is the fact that the bourgeois gay couple is critiqued as mercilessly as the clearly corrupt skinhead characters are fetishized. Ultimately, the film attempts to explore the latent homosexuality evinced by neo-fascist organizations while simultaneously evoking the peculiar tendency of homosexuals to fetishize and worship figures of power and authority such as neo-Nazis. Denounced by some as racist (“Sick Gang-Bang Fantasy” screamed the front page of the Voice, a left wing black London tabloid, while protesters picketed outside the screening at the Institute of Contemporary Art), it was perceived by others as an attempt to redefine and expand the limits of pornography (“An epic of the form”, opined Flash Art International, calling me “a pornographic Brecht”). The softcore version was screened at innumerable international festivals, straight and gay, while the hardcore version was nominated for nine gay adult video awards in America. In Toronto, the morality squad attended the screening of the softcore version, presented by Pleasure Dome, but deigned not to press charges. So although I’ve entered the real world of pornography, albeit through the back door, I still try to see it as an opportunity to exploit a large, undifferentiated mass of representation viewed by millions for my own idealistic, or at least ideological, purposes. Since “Skin Flick” I have shot spreads for a number of porn publications, including Honcho, Mandate, Inches, and Playguy, and as of this writing plan on making more porn movies. I’m still the reluctant pornographer, but in this era of rampant assimilationism and gay conservatism, I see pornography as the last refuge of homosexual radicalism. But underneath the glamour of it all (if you call having to wipe off the dribbling asses of porn stars while they fuck glamorous), I’m still Don Knotts at heart. |
| Munich: The Porno |
| Sunday 26th 2006f February 2006 22:54 |
| Has anyone caught Munich? It’s actually some of the best porn I’ve seen in quite some time. Eric Bana is superhot, and spends a good part of the movie in various states of undress. From one of the opening sequences, in which he lounges naked with his wife, his butt exposed, after pointedly impregnating her, to the closing, mind-blowing climax of the movie, during which he climaxes, I found myself often avec hard-on. It reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry makes out with a chick during Schindler’s List, except that I was basically making out with myself. Steven Spielberg directed both Schindler’s List and Munich. Coincidence? I think not. Eric Bana’s buff body, his treasure trail, and his ample package, highlighted by the tight seventies-style costumes of the movie, make him the sexiest cinematic counter-terrorist (or terrorist, I couldn’t quite figure out which it was) ever. Of course I did have a few problems with the movie, like the clunky moral relativism, the manipulative tear-jerking (Eric Bana, the ultimate and literal stud, whose metaphorical sperm figures so prominently in the movie, crying on the phone when he hears his baby say da da for the first time), and worst of all, the typical Spielbergian trick of using textbook cinematic technique to transform atrocities into pure Hollywood entertainment. In other words, terrorism (or counterterrorism) has never been so sexy and suspenseful. During the scene in which the female German terrorist quotes Marcuse in a romantic candlelit room, my friend Daniel whispered to me that it looked like a scene out of my movie The Raspberry Reich, but that’s not where the similarity ended. The finale of the movie, in which Eric Bana fucking his wife is intercut with a depiction of the final, horrific murders of the Palestinian terrorists and the innocent Israeli athletes at the Munich airport, is probably the most inappropriate sex scene ever committed to celluloid. If it had been in a Bruce LaBruce movie, i.e., a porno about terrorism like The Raspberry Reich, it would have been wildly ironic and interesting and provocative. But in a Steven Spielberg movie? Awkward! Eric Bana’s rough trade orgasm corresponding with a bloody and violent orgasmic climax was quite a hoot, but I’m not sure it was quite the point the movie wanted to make. On the other hand, I did find it enormously entertaining. My friend Daniel also pointed out the fact that the real morally repugnant, slimy and insufferable villains of the movie were neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis, but the French, who play both sides of the fence and are only interested in haute cuisine, fancy kitchens, expensive cars, and country estates. Let’s hope the movie doesn’t incite another boycott of French Fries. But for me, the worst sin of the movie was its blatant and rotten misogyny. Aside from the fact that Munich reduces the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and by extension all terrorist and counterterrorist actions, to tit-for-tat, macho posturing (which may indeed be the case), the movie reduces women to two familiar types: babymakers or whores. (If you don’t count the old battleaxes, including Golda Meir, who are presented as intransigent, moral absolutists who don’t want to hear the details.) Eric Bana is relentlessly, adamantly heterosexual in the movie (one of the reasons he’s such a turn-on for the gays), and also, of course, resolutely monogamous and faithful to his wife. When he warns one of his cohorts to beware of the “honeypot”, the Dutch siren at the bar who attempts to lure him to his death, you can see it coming. But do the filmmakers have to have Bana smelling her pussy – er, perfume - in the hallway of the hotel, before he finds his friend’s dead naked body, the victim of the voluptuous Mata Hari? (Bana’s fidelity and monogamy saves him from such a cruel fate.) What follows is one of the all-time top five misogynistic scenes in the history of cinema. Bana and two of his colleagues track down the Dutch slut and shoot her at close range with small caliber air rifles so that they can watch her die slowly. Evil slut to the end, she tries to offer her body to them, saying it would be a waste to kill her. After being shot she staggers to the kitchen counter and grasps her pussycat before slowly dying, naked, before our eyes in the most grotesque way imaginable. Obviously this scene is meant to illustrate the idea that the counterterrorist have lost their moral compass, but it’s done in such a lurid, misogynistic manner that the movie becomes complicit with that moral lapse. Only a fag (the movie was co-written by Tony Kushner) could devise such a misogynistic, sexphobic scene. Yuck! Otherwise, the movie was pretty entertaining. I’d give it a B-. |
| Spanish Fly |
| Tuesday 24th 2006f January 2006 19:18 |
November 10/05. I better start becoming more successful or less, because being flown economy is starting to kill me. (If I were more successful I could demand business class; if I were less successful I wouldn’t have to worry about being flown at all.) This is my sixth trip to Europe this year (my excursion to Berlin at the end of December will make it seven), plus Argentina, Hong Kong, New York (2x) and Los Angeles (2x). Flying is such a chore and a bore since 9/11 - security makes everything slower, and airplanes are more packed owing to the budgetary constraints placed on airlines. On my way to Madrid via London, almost every seat in economy is filled, and the guy stuffed into the seat beside me is so overweight that he partially eclipses my reading light. I settle in to watch Must Love Dogs, which, considering I’m on my way to China after Madrid, is appropriate, if taken in the sense of Must Love To Eat Dogs. (Must Love Dogs: It’s a cookbook!) November 11/05. It’s my mother’s birthday. She’s a Scorpio, as are both my boyfriend and his mother. It seems I’m surrounded by deadly stingers. My hosts, Lucas and Gerardo, the lovers who run the Madrid Cinegai Film Festival, meet me at the airport with their adorable wire-haired Schnauzer, Theo, in tow. They take me directly to my hotel, a boutique affair with theme rooms ranging from African Tikki to Arabian Opium Den. It’s deliciously racist. I’m put up in The Laboratory - a lurid cross between an autopsy room and a gay S&M dungeon, replete with concrete floor, unfinished ceiling, and garish fluorescent lighting. The next day I will ask to be switched to the Opium Den, which is much cosier. After an international disco nap, I submit, against my better judgment, to photo shoots and interviews for Il Mundo, the second largest Spanish daily, and Zero, the biggest Spanish gay mag. I look saggy and laggy after only four hours sleep, and when the female photog from Il Mundo shows me the digital shots she’s taken, I’m mortified. I ask her politely not to use the ones from a particular angle that make me look like I have five or seven chins. Afterwards, Lucas and Gerardo pick me up and take me to a charming Alutian restaurant down the street that features delicious homemade food, including splendid, tender octopus. In the evening they take me, by request, to Madrid’s premier hustler bar, a relatively large, two-levelled bar/disco that features delectable Brazilian rent boys by the score. They all seem to be very friendly and well-engineered, with huge biceps and pectorals hovering below broad, handsome faces. “Mine is very big,” one of them informs me, through translation (virtually none of the Brazilian ones speak English). “22 cm!” I discover that the price is 40 Euros for a quickie in the bar toilet, or 100 if you take them back to your hotel. I make a mental post-it. I meet a swarthy, handsome young Portuguese man named Michael, who speaks six languages and fills me in on the various comings and goings of the bar, acting as an ad hoc translator. I can’t quite tell whether or not he’s a hustler himself as he seems more like a regular patron, but believe me, I will soon find out in spades. November 12/05. That bitch photographer from Il Mundo used the absolutely worst photograph she took of me, I discover when I check out the front of the culture section. I want to kill her and make it look like an ETA hit. I fear the shoot for Zero, in which I was obliged to pose in a blood-splattered Jacuzzi with a tired, leather-clad porn star and a gun – an attempted homage to my oeuvre – won’t be much better. Oh well. I should stop being so vain at my age anyway. At the theatre in the evening before my first screening I’m interviewed for Peruvian television, and although I’m already a little drunk by dinner, I manage to speak coherently about the lawsuit that was launched against us recently by the estate of Korda, the photographer of the most famous Che Guevera image, for its use in The Raspberry Reich. The suit was just recently resolved in a court in France, so I’m now free to speak about it in detail. (I will soon be publishing a piece about the whole sordid saga in Blackbook magazine.) I’m introduced before the screenings of No Skin Off My Ass and Skin Flick by Lucia Etxebarria, a famous Spanish writer who lives in Madrid and who recently won a huge literary prize which has made her quite famous. I’ve never met her before – she contacted me on the internet – so I’m not quite prepared for the way she seems to chastise and hector the largely gay audience, although I’m sure they deserve it. Someone translates a bit of what she’s saying for me, something about always blindly following the same tired icons even when they become reactionary and anti-gay. Well, you can’t argue with that. Apparently Lucia is loathed and loved in equal measure. With her long black hair and flashing dark eyes, she’s an imposing figure. After the screening she takes me to the bar she owns, called L’Aventurra, and introduces me to the father of her child, who is not only a Canadian, but who also grew up on a farm not fifty miles from the one I was raised on. Lucia confides that she no longer has sex with him, and in fact considers herself asexual. She loathes romantic love, blaming it for most of the ills of modern culture. Her new book is about hypocrisy, her favourite theme. When the bar closes at 4am it’s raining gatos and perros, so Lucia’s boyfriend waits on the street with me under his umbrella until an elusive cab appears. I direct the driver to Black and White, where I find myself standing, amidst the Brazilian call boys, back to back with none other than Michael, the cute Portuguese guy from the previous night. Long story short, we get very well acquainted very quickly and buy some incredible coke together, which we end up doing half of in the john where the hustlers openly dole out blow jobs like Pez dispensers. (Open note to New Yorkers: your coke is like Drano – toxic and cut with bad shit – you might want to take a cue from Madrid, where the coke is pure and clean and makes you feel euphoric, not like some jumped up Jay McInnery.) Black and White closes, so Michael takes me to a nearby all night disco where we do the rest of the coke and he tells me all about himself and his mother. As it turns out, he’s a high class escort, an accountant by trade who is rebelling against his father in Lisbon by hustling in Madrid. He may be gay for pay, but he tells me he likes to fuck and get fucked, suck and get sucked, and kiss, just like a marine. I invite him back to my opium den, where we finish off my complimentary wine and finally kiss under the euphoric spell of the coke and grape. The kiss seems to last for hours, long and deep and for some reason one of the most pleasurable I’ve ever experienced. Of course he can’t get very hard, and confesses to being more of a bottom, but somehow it doesn’t matter: he’s incredibly cute, with a killer smile and nice big balls, washboard abs and hairy legs. I’m not sure why I didn’t notice before how beautiful he is. We make out for a couple of hours, talking in between clinches, until I finally send him out, at 11am, with 20 Euros for a couple of croissants, but he never comes back. I forgot he was a hustler. At least he didn’t charge me anything. I fall asleep and awake at 6pm. November 14/05. The spooky Brazilian girl with the buggy eyes and the strange, robotic posh English accent picks me up at my hotel and takes me, along with her best friend, to the Museum of Ham, a typical, more working class restaurant with its walls covered in a barrage of ham hocks. More octopus and more vino ensues. My hostess is a little edgy, but she stops hyperventilating long enough for me to ask her about the huge demonstration for education reform I witnessed the other day. She informs me that all those benign looking families in the square had actually been bussed in by the extreme right wing party. Fascism, apparently, lingers in Spain. We’re late now for the closing ceremony of the festival, and become even more late when the two girls in charge of me spend fifteen minutes arguing over which route to the theatre is the shortest. When we finally arrive two hours later, the ceremony is just about to begin. Surprisingly, the ceremony is short and painless. Afterwards I meet a fellow named Cesar, who photographs all the Almodovar stars. He has another book which he gives me as a gift that is all photographs of cocks. He’s Mexican, and very simpatico. I also meet a filmmaker who’s made a documentary about Renaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls. He informs me that the screening of The Raspberry Reich at last year’s festival drew over a thousand people, a tenth of the attendance of the entire fest. He informs me I’m a bit of a star here. I blush. November 15/05. In the afternoon, Abraham, the hot owner of my hotel, walks me under his umbrella to a nearby Spa off Gran Via where we are greeted by a serene Spanish gentleman with a Kung Fu aspect in a black oriental pants suit. Abraham is treating me to a free spa treatment – Jacuzzi, sauna, and oxygen therapy replete with Buddhas and new age music. The pure oxygen, inserted directly up your nose, is amazing, sending me shooting off into space. Afterwards, back at the hotel, Cesar comes over and takes some photos of me, then takes me under his umbrella to a nearby sauna, the one where many of the Black and White Brazilian hustlers congregate during the day. We sit at the bar in towels and chat over whiskey and cokes (and whatever he’s having). He introduces me to a towering hulk of a Brazilian, who shows me the tool of his trade – one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. Later that evening Lucia takes me to see a famous Flamenco guitar player. When we enter the lobby of the theatre, the press goes wild for Lucia, while I am reduced to the dreaded position of unidentified companion. The flamenco goes on forever, but I somehow gut it out. Afterwards we drive to the final film festival party at Planet Hollywood, of all places. Lucia and her friend attend briefly. I have to say that for someone who claims to be asexual, Lucia certainly makes quite the b-line for the only straight and black man there, who also happens to be the cameraman of the director of the Arenas documentary, who asks if he can interview me. I oblige, and take the opportunity to spill my guts some more about the Che Guevera lawsuit. The afterparty after the closing party is once again at Black and White, where we stay until the wee hours. The next day I find a sore on my dick, which makes me feel like Warren Oates in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. It turns out to be just a bite mark from the Portuguese escort, however. Tender mercies. Next: Hong Kong. |
| Madonna Is Counterrevolutionary |
| Tuesday 13th 2005f December 2005 10:09 |
| All right, Earthlings, I am preparing to write extensively here about my recent trips to Madrid and Hong Kong, but first I have to get something off my hollow, concave little chest. What is up with the recent swell of ground support for Madonna? Do people love her because she's a survivor, because she has longevity? Is that it? Well so does Augusto Pinochet, whom I understand she will be playing next year in a Broadway musical with lyrics and music by Bernie Taupin and Elton John. Why do Earth people get off so much on nouveau riche poseurs who act like British landed gentry but who slum in South Central LA in music videos which rip off famous fashion photographers who have already been slumming in the same neighbourhoods? Why do the denizens of the Earth go gaga over uber-rich bitches who live extravagantly wealthy lifestyles but insist on propping up as a smoke screen the mystical teachings of an orthodox religion whose very principles would seem to condemn every perversion upon which she's built her fortune? And what about that pink unitard and feathered hair? Was that look the straw that broke Camille Paglia's back? (see her recent take-down of Madonna on Salon.com.) Well, just to add to the debate, I will now post two little articles I wrote a couple of years back for the National Post here in Canada, one critquing the Material Girl, the other positing Mae West as the kind of sex goddess she should be aspiring to if she wants to maintain her status in the pantheon. Enjoy. 1) After a noticeable dip in popularity since the events of Black Tuesday, the worship of celebrity seems to have made a remarkable comeback as people clamour for more glamour to take their minds off the imminent destruction of civilization. It’s unfortunate, then, that two recent Madonna biographies - or, more accurately, hagiographies, considering their fawning, laudatory tone - manage to shed little new light on the very superstar who most thoroughly represents the apotheosis of celebrity in the last half of the twentieth century. The evident limitations of the authors aside, there are two plausible explanations for this paucity of insight: firstly, that the media has already covered the excruciating minutiae of Madonna’s life and career to such an extent that there is little left to reveal; and secondly, to borrow Gertrude Stein’s bleak assessment of Los Angeles, that with regard to this subject, there isn’t any there there. This may pinpoint the reason why academics - which these biographers decidedly ain’t - seem to get so much mileage out of the Material Girl: since everything about her is on the surface, she acts as an empty signifier upon which they can project their various intellectual agendas. The maddening thing about these Maddy bios is that rather than prop up her mythology, which seems to be their sycophantic intent, they merely serve as a bland, demystifying postscript to an already diminishing mythos. Both books regretfully inform us that Madonna didn’t really arrive for the first time in New York with thirty-five dollars in her pocket and eat out of garbage cans, that she wasn’t inordinately promiscuous in her rise to the top and didn’t pick up hapless Puerto Ricans to have sex with in the back of her limousine, etc. Andrew Morton in particular, who has already given us the skinny on heavyweights such as Lady Diana and Monica Lewinsky, presents us with a prosaic, plodding account of an incontestably charismatic and difficult star, a biography that, if one can trust the dust jacket, only a heterosexual British stuffed shirt straining for knighthood could have written. At least J. Randy Taraborelli, who, if he isn’t a homosexual, does a pretty good imitation of one (he previously gave us “Call Her Miss Ross”, the uber-camp bio of a former Supreme), portrays Madonna as a petulant and aggressive, gum-smacking brat who goes through people like Kleenex. But we already knew that. If these narratives are to be believed, it only stands to reason that a character whose career has been as controlled and calculated as Madonna’s should end up with biographies which read more like business manuals than belles lettres. After some minor struggles at the beginning of her quest to become the world’s most famous performer, including a stint with a sadistic Svengali of a gay dance teacher who evidently initiated her Eliza Dolittle trajectory, she quickly and rather easily landed management and record contracts which led to a corporate build-up very much consistent with today’s production line of prefabricated musical stars. This Velcro vixen, the poster child for wild and irresponsible behaviour, was in fact workmanlike and cautious in her career choices, demonstrating what Morton describes as a “calibrated spontaneity”. Perhaps the fact that Madonna only ever flirted with the extremes of sex, drugs, and rocknroll - the very alchemical make-up of music legend - and represented them purely cosmetically in her work accounts for the lack of true depth or mystery in her persona: she has never courted the dark side. The closest our heroine comes to being truly subversive is when she exploits the tension between the reality of a family who would bestow upon her such a hyper-Catholic name - Madonna, the mother of Christ - and her yearning, hyper-sexual persona which developed in rebellion against such a repressed upbringing. Draped in crucifixes, one of which hung down to her crotch, she once famously remarked that “even God wants to get into my pants”, a statement that today is glaringly at odds with her newfound, professed spiritualism, as seemingly contrived as her old theatrical debaucheries. At the height of her infamy, she danced provocatively in front of burning crosses in her “Like a Prayer” video and kissed a black man on a church altar, truly scandalizing a nation and sending her corporate sponsors, notably Pepsi, fleeing. But according to her biographers, none of these blasphemous gestures ever seemed to amount to anything more than a desperate Oedipal inversion, a longing for attention from a distant, disapproving father who would have preferred that his daughter become a lawyer. In both bios the “approval of the father” theme, which so nauseatingly permeates modern pop culture, is, predictably, driven home in spades, her current marriage and motherhood serving to reinforce these ultimately reactionary, traditionalist impulses. How dreary. But don’t get me wrong. I like Madonna. Compared to her bastard spawn - the Britneys and the Christinas - she’s an Einstein. At what I consider her best - the “SEX” book and concurrent “Erotica” album in the early nineties - she pushed boundaries of popular female sexual representation and fantasy to previously unexplored limits with a sly intelligence that has rarely been surpassed. But her real genius lies in the way that she has somehow balanced a healthy pornographic imagination with what has emerged as her greatest strength: a highly developed, almost orthodox feminist impulse, the simple formula that women can be sexy and cerebral at the same time. Mae West had it, Monroe and Mansfield had it, and Madonna admirably carries on the tradition. Transcending what Mick Jagger termed the “central dumbness” of her early songs and videos, her work lately, particularly her videos for “Music” and “What It’s Like to be a Girl”, function as simple feminist critiques of patriarchy and its concomitant sexual exploitation of women, a message in stark opposition to the damaged masochism of our poor lost Mousketeer, Britney Spears. Then again, it’s not inconceivable that Madonna’s championing of feminist issues is as convenient and staged as her exploitation of religious and racial ones. She’s always had a knack for appropriating alternative trends which have already almost played themselves out (as, arguably, feminism has), retooling them for popular consumption. In that sense she’s a cultural vampire, sucking the life out of revolutionary forms of expression by transforming them into pure capital. The most blatant example of such legerdemain was her appropriation of “vogueing”, an indigenous black gay dance form that emerged from the ghettos of New York in the eighties, which she popularized in the chart-topping song and video “Vogue”. Ironically, the phenomenon of vogueing, although largely practiced by a fiercely criminal and gender-bending underground sect, was at its heart conformist, longing as it did for the bourgeois traits and trappings of the rich and famous. That the already rich and famous Madonna exploited this poignant longing to make herself even more so made her project doubly reactionary. Will history be kind to Madonna? It has to be said that so far she’s failed to live up to the legends that she has most famously imitated, namely, Marilyn Monroe and Evita Peron. (That Madonna has yet to demonstrate any real acting ability is only reinforced by her recent adoption in real life of an English accent, which gives the impression at times that she cannot even portray herself convincingly.) If you extend the Monroe comparison, it’s easy to see that Dennis Rodman is no Joe DiMaggio, and that her brief fling with JFK, Jr. hardly stands up to Monroe’s undoing at the hands of his far more famous and powerful father. As healthy and pulled-together as a motivational speaker, Madonna will never reach the pantheon of tortured, tragic legends, icons whose pain and slow self-destruction we can all somehow deeply identify with. As revealed by a carefully planned interview on BBC radio, Madonna’a latest incarnation as a devoted, slightly subservient wife and mother seems almost like a betrayal of the feminism latent in her recent work, with her arch pronouncements that she will occasionally cover her nipples and tone down her sexuality to appease her new husband, the British film-maker Guy Ritchie, a member of the landed gentry who likes to posture as an east end London lad. You get the queasy feeling that she would be grabbing her crotch through a sequined burqa if she thought it would move merchandise. Ultimately, Madonna’s achievement is one of hyper-capitalistic opportunism, which may earn her a permanent place in the Fortune 500 in the sky, but possibly not in the everlasting firmament of entertainment goddesses. 2) As the fog slowly begins to clear, one of the curious things emerging about the twentieth century is how much more sophisticated and intelligent popular entertainment was in the first half of the century than in the last, how crass and dumbed down movies and music became despite, or perhaps owing to, various technological advances. Of course there were certain areas of enlightenment after WW2 - sixties avant-gardism, seventies iconoclasticism - but the fact that we are now saddled with a Hollywood at its absolute nadir populated by a variety of vacuous, reconstituted stars is mostly a measure of a century which somehow finally became mired in shallow ideals and juvenility, an empty epoch dictated by the whims of generations x, y and z. Even a cursory glance at Mae West, the greatest of the pre-WW2 sex goddesses, makes this point abundantly clear. Subversive, paradoxical, and heroic in her time, West is now seen as either a feminist icon or a high priestess of camp, but the texture and complexity of her star persona encompasses so much more than meets the bedazzled eye. And a new biography, “Mae West: An Icon in Black and White” by Jill Watts, is more than willing to tackle the representational hall of mirrors with which West confounds us. You know you’ve hit on a good biography when, as in Watts’ book, the major controversies of the subject’s life are confronted head on in the opening paragraph - in this case, the lingering questions about Mae West’s race and gender. Owing to what the author refers to as the star’s “syncretic style” - the borrowing of influences from such varied sources as vaudeville, burlesque, melodrama, minstrelsy, and African-American culture - West’s layering of personae led Vanity Fair, in 1932, to refer to her as “the greatest female impersonator of all time.” Some even speculated that the diva, who remained childless, really was a man, a rumour that was squelched only by an autopsy after her death in 1980. But even more persistent, and impossible to disprove, was the rumour that she may have been of mixed race, her paternal grandfather possibly having been a light-skinned black man who passed for white. Considering West’s symbiotic relationship with black culture throughout her career, the implications are staggering. As a woman who early in her career not only borrowed from African-inspired dance forms such as the cooch and the shimmy, but who also performed in blackface, the ambiguity of her origins, whether real or imagined, is central to her mythos. It also goes a long way toward explaining the empathy she had throughout her life for black performers as well as those of other disenfranchised ethnic minorities, and her propensity to have affairs with black athletes and entertainers. Not content merely to pay lip service to blacks (so to speak), West not only fought to include African-American performers such Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong in her movies, but also insisted on forming close personal relationships with them despite the racist tenor of the times. In one of many remarkable passages in the book, Watts relates how in the thirties, when the management of the Ravenswood, the Hollywood apartment building in which West lived most of her life, objected to her “entertaining” the black middleweight boxing champion William “Gorilla” Jones, she didn’t bother to protest: she purchased the building. (Such was Mae West’s success that by 1936, after a string of Broadway and Hollywood hits, the only American who made more money than the buxom faux-blond was uber-publisher William Randolph Hearst.) Her philanthropy aside, West was often criticized for exploiting black culture and promulgating racist stereotypes. Her use of black maids as foils both on and off stage/camera may have exhibited a certain aspect of sisterhood - there’s no doubt that she related the African-American struggle against slavery to her own battles as a woman attempting to exert control of her destiny under the patriarchal dynasties of Hollywood and America - but the fact remained that said maids still conformed to outrageous and outmoded racial stereotypes. Furthermore, although it may very well have challenged what Watt’s refers to as “racial fixedness”, her appropriation of black culture in her art still arguably amounted to exploitation. But the uncanny way in which West absorbed various ethnic and gender identities, which could almost be described as shamanistic in its effect, tended to transcend these simplistic ideological critiques. West was a shapeshifter, a trickster, a figure which Watt’s describes as someone who is “... often disguised [and] transmits sacred intentions, mediating between the secular and spiritual realms.” The earthy star may have promoted the racist notion of African primitivism - embodying the instinctual, emotional, and sexual - over European American frigidity, but the depth and intensity of her strategy made her less a mere pretender to the throne of the Queen of Sheba, her ultimate idol, and more a pure avatar of the sexual/spiritual force. It should come as no surprise that West was deeply involved in spiritualism, not only attracting her very own Guru, Sri Deva Ram Sukul, but also, reputedly, bedding him. Watt’s biography of Mae West delves deeply into the meaning of the star’s essence, placing it soundly in both historical and sociological contexts. She presents an astonishingly complex portrait of a performer who through the black practice of “signifying”, characterized as “...a subversive rhetorical device that uses multiple and conflicting messages to obscure rebellious meanings”, managed to represent sex as both serious and frivolous, to become both a star and a parody of a star. (West, a product and champion of the working class, always rejected and ridiculed the Hollywood establishment and its elitist celebrities.) Hounded by the censorship of the Hays Office and the repressive “Production Code” throughout her career, she was forced to become even more paradoxical, transforming her epigrammatical speech and double entendres into virtual Zen koans. Two of my favourites: “Caught between two evils, I generally like to pick the one I haven’t tried before”, and “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” Referencing the shimmy, the dance she made famous, Mae West once billed herself, in the twenties, as “Shimadonna”. Although I’m loathe to be too hard on - as opposed to “for” - Madonna, the greatest sexual icon of the last part of the twentieth century, a comparison with West does nothing to advance the case for the Material Girl. Although amazingly similar in many respects - their determined rise from modest roots to superstardom; their co-option of black culture (so thoroughly that black culture started imitating them back!); their sexual transgressiveness (both had works called “SEX”) coeval with spiritual underpinnings - it is West, in her detachment and consistency, who remains the true sex goddess to which none shall compare, infinitely more substantial and ethereal than any of her modern counterparts. Post Script: Full Disclosure: My Cuban boyfriend adores Madonna, and in fact claims that it was her (granted, brilliant) performance on the Oscars in 1991 that inspired him to escape the repressive, homophobic Castro regime. Thank you, at least, for that, Madonna. |
| Index RIP |
| Thursday 08th 2005f December 2005 12:53 |
| People of the World: Just got back from Madrid and Hong Kong, and it was good. I was going to write about my trippy trip in my new column in Index magazine, but alas, after ten years, New York's Index, which filled the vacuum left by the slow, sad decline of Interview, has gone belly up. (Funny how many magazines fold just when I'm about to publish something in them...) I look back at the Index years with more fondness than jaundice, but I would be reMiss Thing if I didn't proclaim that the first five years of the magazine's existence, under the tutelage of original editor Bob Nichas, were the best in show. I recall with Jane Fonda-ness the arch Mr. Nichas sending me, the cub reporter, off on horribly dangerous assignments, like visiting the set of John Waters' Cecil B. Demented in Baltimore (if you think getting yelled at by Melanie Griffith is fun, you're entirely wrong), or the set of the never-to-be-released Gus Van Sant movie, Easter, based on the Harmony Korine omnibus script, in Bumfuck, Kentucky, where I did crack with the latter in a Days Inn and still didn't see God. Anyhow, as a tribute to those halcyon days, for which, incidentally, I was once bestowed, by Mr. Nichas, the Index Magazine Lifetime Achievment Award, I now present, on my blog, several examples of those heady days of investigative journalism, in a time long before embedded journalism entirely ruined the credibility of the fifth estate. Part One If the symptoms of epilepsy include experiencing graphic sexual images, hallucinations, mood swings, and seizures - and they do - then being subjected to the work of John Waters may be the closest that some of us will ever come to understanding the disease. Now you must understand that many film-makers might foolishly construe such an introductory statement as a peach put-down, but in the walleyed world of Mr. Waters - dubbed variously by critics in the past as Cecil B. Demented and The Prince of Puke, and currently the self-proclaimed Elder Statesman of Filth - an apparent insult can feel like nothing less than a kiss. In fact, if it were discovered tomorrow that John Waters movies, along with certain Japanese animation and Mary Hart's voice, induce epileptic fits, the Filth Elder would no doubt consider it to be one of his most glowing reviews. Quite a few reels back I had the honour of chatting with Mr. Waters, one of my great cinematic and homosexual role models, at a grisly afterparty in New York for my crypto-camp porno movie. He informed me that he would soon be shooting his next feature in - where else? - Baltimore, in the Land of Mary, his home town and the location of every one of his fourteen previous films. Hedy Lamarr with excitement, I asked the elegant auteur if I might pay a visit to his set under the auspices of Index, whose cover he once graciously graced. (As he has generously given me props in several interviews over the past couple of years, I figured it was high time for a little mutual log-rolling.) Thus was I invited to the set of "Cecil B. Demented", the movie itself named for the man behind the camera. For me it's a pilgrimage of sorts to Waters' Dreamland, the perverted eastern inversion of Tinseltown, which as a film student gave me such profound inspiration by proving that eating dog shit can play between the coasts. Thanks to a late night and a sadistic travel agent, I find myself fast asleep in a cab on the way to Penn Station at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. to catch the Amtrak to Baltimore. You see I had been up until all hours the night before watching "Multiple Maniacs", my all-time favourite Waters movie, for motivation. Later J.W. will tell me that in effect "Cecil B. Demented" is his big budget "Multiple Maniacs", a tidbit of information that warms my cold heart. Made in 1970 when Waters was a mere twenty-four years of age, that feature length, black and white masterpiece not only showcased the complete cast of Dreamlanders - Divine, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary, Edith Massey, Cookie Mueller, Susan Lowe, Pat Moran, production designer Vincent Peranio, etc. - but it also introduced all the elements that would later become the trademarks of his filthy oeuvre: cannibalism ("Look, Mink, look! He's just meat now!"), bizarre sexual fetishism (bicycle seats!), Catholic sacrilege (kept up to date in one of the best bits in "Pecker", the Virgin Mary ventriloquist act), nymphomania, serial murder, incest, lesbian terrorism (reaching it's apotheosis in "Desperate Living" and also, as we shall see, revived in "Demented"), child abuse, public sex, homosexual criminality, cop-killing, the list goes on. "Dogma" (the movie) my ass: the scene in which Mink Stole fucks Divine from behind with a rosary in a Catholic church, which the film-makers have obviously sneaked into without permission, makes Kevin Smith look like a choirboy. And if that scene weren't blasphemous enough, Waters throws in a young man actually shooting up heroin by the altar for bad measure, a stroke as shocking today as it was the day it was filmed. And as if that weren't enough (a phrase often used by necessity when describing a Waters film), these scenarios are intercut with a beautifully rendered recreation of the crucifixion of Christ second only in cinematic splendour to Passolini's in "The Gospel According to St. Mathew" (the mighty Edith Massey, cast as the Mother of Christ, is every bit as moving as Passolini's mother in the same role.) While most films of the era were lamenting the death of the counter-culture, Waters was busy ushering in a new vision of the future, his reign of filth. Thirty years later, I finally arrive in Baltimore (better late than never) and grab a cab to the Senator Theater, the very site of all the Waters world premieres, which also happens to be the location of the current shoot for the next four days. Like a Japanese tourist I snap pictures of the names of his various movies - "Female Trouble", "Hairspray", "Cry-Baby" - carved into the cement out front, and then of the marquee, which announces the title of the film within the film, "Some Kind of Happiness", starring Honey Whitlock, a role being essayed by Melanie Griffith. The casting of Miss Griffith is pure Waters, who has a penchant for recuperating stars by allowing them to parody themselves before others less charitable get the chance - I'm thinking of Liz Renay, Traci Lords, Kathleen Turner - sexpots all whom the director encourages to luxuriate in their own bad girl personae. (In the "Demented" script, Honey Whitlock's very first role is identified as that of an ingenue turned vixen in the movie "Good For Nothing".) Fresh off a couple of ballsy performances for Woody Allen and Larry Clark, Melanie Griffith should be primed for Waters. Skipping over stout cables, I enter the theater and ask a young gentleman in a baseball cap if he could kindly direct me to the unit publicist. What archery! - it's the publicist himself, who proceeds to fill me in on the order of things. After giving me a brief low-down on the shoot thus far, he gingerly presents me with two rules vis-ŕ-vis access to Miss Griffith: 1) Do not under any circumstances take her picture without asking her permission first, and 2) Do not ask her permission. Catch-22'd already and we haven't even had lunch yet. Of course his prohibitions have the opposite effect on me - as the day progresses, my hands, like those of Dr. Orlac, begin to take on a life of their own, clutching my camera, pulling me inexorably toward the inaccessible star. But more on this later. While awaiting my audience with the busy director, the publicist introduces me to several members of the "Demented" team. The first is Jack Noseworthy, whom you may have seen already as the "Deliverance"-style inbred hick in "Breakdown", as a successful cannibal in "Alive", or in this year's teen Dr. Orlac remake, "Idle Hands". He informs me that he is playing Rodney, a member of the quasi-terrorist film cartel, the Sprockets, who kidnap a movie star, Griffith/Whitlock, and force her to act in the magnum opus of their director/leader, Cecil B. Demented, played by Stephen Dorff. Mr. Noseworthy clocks my Canadian accent right away ; he knows it well, he confides, because his parents are "Goofie Newfies", the pejorative term for people from the Canadian province of Newfoundland whom we tell jokes about like the rest of the world does about the Polish. As I snap pictures of the handsome lad in a smart suit, he expresses regret that he's not wearing his other costume, which he describes as a black studded latex condom. I secretly express regret, too, as the fellow is sexy as all hell. Speaking of costumes, the publicist segues me over to the man responsible for the make-up and costume design of the movie, Van Smith, who has been with Waters since "Flamingos". When I ask him what his inspiration has been for "Demented", he says that like all his creations for J.W., he takes his cue from the fashion world, merely riffing on the trends he sees on the runways. Mr. Smith speaks with the characteristic modesty of most Waters alumni; his creations - like the fishtail gown, shaved-back hairline, and swooping brows of Divine in "Pink Flamingos" - are original works of imagination which easily rival Parisian couture. For "Demented" he says he has taken inspiration from the likes of artist Julian Schnabel for Miss Griffith's gowns, and has fashioned a suit from a straightjacket for the titular character. And with that he bustles away to attend to his business. I retreat to the Men's Lounge of the theater, an anteroom to the toilets, to scribble some notes to the accompaniment of the various farting and other extraneous bathroom noises of the crew. The comfortable room, replete with fireplace, settee and matching chairs, harkens back to a time when the movies were a slightly more luxe and glamorous form of entertainment, emphasizing detail and showmanship, a tradition which John Waters strives to uphold. In a later conversation, he tells me that he prefers all his movies to be of a standard length (90 mins.), and to run at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, with a special midnight screening on weekends. Like William Castle before him, he has experimented with gimmicks, such as "Odorama" (in "Polyester"), and like Hitchcock, he is one of the few directors who has managed to become a recognizable star and public personality in his own right without the conceit of starring in his own films. I ponder his ability to continue to make films in an increasingly craven, bottom-line business. Suddenly in pops the man himself, J.W., looking haggardly dashing in a black suit and signature ascot. "So did you bring me the hardcore version?" he asks right off the bat, referring to my recent porno. I confess that I haven't, but promise to mail it to him when I get back to Toronto. I dutifully grill him on some of the more quotidian details of the shoot. Although he asks me not to reveal the exact budget, I can tell you that it's more than "Pecker" but less than "Serial Mom", although with the action-packed script, including a car chase, he is having to go full steam ahead to get more bang for the buck. It's day 13 of a 6 to 7 week shoot; later I will hear him on his cell phone arguing furiously for a couple of extra days. The movie had almost been greenlit before "Pecker" by another company, but was sent into the vague hell of turnaround over casting; it is now being backed by the French company CanalPlus with distribution already set up with Artisan in America. He also tells me that he has been granted a shockingly meager three weeks of pre-production, which is hardly enough time to organize a good wank, let alone a feature film. But J.W. is used to the exigencies of low-budget film-making, and has nonetheless insisted on a full week of rehearsals, "like every movie since Edith", he adds wistfully. I ask J.W. how things are going with Miss Griffith, and he assures me, a little suspiciously, like everyone else on the set I raise the subject with, that everything is going smoothly and that she is a "real trooper". Despite assurances to the contrary, I get the impression that everyone is slightly on tenterhooks working with the archkook, but before I can press the point, the wanton Mr. Waters is wanted on set, so we head to the auditorium where this afternoon's shoot is to transpire. In this scene, Miss Griffith is to accept a humanitarian award from rich matron Mink Stole on behalf of a brat in a wheel chair who might qualify as one of Jerry's Orphans. Just as she accepts the applause of the audience, a disguised Dorff pulls off his black wig to reveal a bleached mop, produces a pistol, and declares loudly, "I am Cecil B. Demented, and this is a fucking kidnapping!" As Rodney throws a Molotov cocktail at the audience, Dorff drags Griffith, gun to her head, through the scattering extras and toward the exit. As he rehearses the actors I try to snap, surreptitiously and from a safe distance, a few measly shots, but the publicist admonishes me: "Bruce, those cameras are making me really nervous. If she sees them she's going to come running over and ask who you are." Although the cast and crew has apparently been briefed about my presence - I'm the only journalist allowed on the set thus far - I don't want to rile the tempestuous star, so I comply - for now. Meanwhile, J.W. and the crew, plus a couple of official looking gents from the fire department, are testing the pyrotechnical display that has been rigged to blow up a couple of potted plants and ignite a fire in front of the audience. As Little William, the boy in the wheel chair, is to be seated on stage near the conflagration, whose intensity is controlled by the amount of gas allowed to enter a system of pipes, Waters himself bravely crouches down beside the boy to test how close he can be positioned without getting singed, kind of like how I used to have sex in my movies to reassure the other actors it wouldn't ruin their careers if they did the same. "We don't want to pull a "Twilight Zone"", quips the director. "Lower, lower!" he mugs, referring to the unfortunate impromptu beheading by helicopter blade of Vic Morrow, father of Jennifer Jason Leigh, and two Vietnamese child actors on the set of that long-forgotten potboiler. As rehearsals continue, I am introduced to another member of the Sprockets cult, one Harriet Dodge, who plays Dinah, the lesbian terrorist of the group. Harriet, of San Francisco's infamous Bearded Lady Cafe, is indeed a bearded lady, and a handsome one at that. An aspiring film-maker, Harriet is on hiatus from a production of her own to play a role not unlike herself: the hirsute guerrilla film feminist. "Women in Film!" she cries in the middle of the kidnapping, sporting an "I Heart Satan" T-shirt. As I photograph her posing with a larger-than-life cardboard cut-out prop of Melanie Griffith/Honey Whitlock - I figure it'll probably be the closest I'll ever get to the real deal - she tells me about how traumatic it was for her to wear a dress for her initial scenes in the movie, so much so that she broke down in tears. But like so many others before her, she is more than willing to suffer for John Waters' art. The shooting begins in earnest with the dialogue before the kidnapping. Miss Griffith, looking surprisingly delicate in her fur coat, delivers her lines quietly yet convincingly for each of the seven or eight takes, which seems to be about the average, the two best of which are printed. Between set-ups I manage to squeeze in a brief chat with Stephen Dorff, the boyish star who played the girlish Candy Darling in "I Shot Andy Warhol". He seems to be having a good time, and also gamely poses with his co-star's cut-out. It's back to work as the crew is ready to shoot the pivotal scene in which Honey Whitlock is taken hostage. As Dorff yells out his line, the Molotov cocktail is launched, the fire flares, and the extras in the audience scatter. J.W. peers at the video assist monitor through his dark framed glasses and assesses the take. "This time I want more," he advises the extras. "More reaction. Think "Poseidon Adventure."" Then, before the next take, he yells, "Full Chekoslovakian". When I ask him about this later, he says it has to do with the framing in the camera viewfinder. In order to eliminate altogether the possibility of an accidentally visible boom microphone - it's not uncommon for a theater to improperly conform the screen to the proper aspect ratio, revealing material at the top of the frame which is not intended to be shown - he shoots at the European ratio of 1:66 as opposed to the American 1:85. Who'd have thought the Prince of Puke would be so meticulous? Before the crew breaks for lunch, J.W. sits down with an EPK crew (Electronic Press Kit, for those of you in the don't know) to pontificate on a few matters, and I'm invited to sit in, which is fine because it means less work for me. He answers various questions about how "Cecil B. Demented" fits into his oeuvre, like how it's typical of him to depict someone who is hijacked from one kind of show business into another (like Patty Hearst), or to deal with a tight-knit cult of outsiders who view the world as mere extras in their movie. You know, auteur type stuff. He says he is allowed to lampoon Hollywood so severely with this picture because the funding is coming from Europe, but he's not completely anti-Hollywood. He has no desire to go back to his salad days, is happy to have a trailer and not have to go out and kill something fresh for lunch. He does, however, wax nostalgic about how cheap it was back in the day to just go out and find a civilian pig for Divine to have sex with, as in "Mondo Trash". Today, he astutely points out, he would have to pay the pig a fortune, not to mention the pig wrangler. He pooh poohs the notion that the Sprockets gang in "Demented", with their revolutionary, anti-Hollywood film slogans ("She's a bankable bitch/We don't need no pitch") is a reference to the followers of Dogme 95, although the fact the his little cult members must abstain from sex until their film is finished does seem to parallel the Dogme's "Vow of Chastity". When asked if he is ever concerned about pushing the envelope too far, J.W. confesses that he's never worried about being fired. "Who are they going to bring in to replace me? Bruce LaBruce? Maybe he's the only one that could." It's a good thing that I am not now nor have I ever been an Eve Harrington, otherwise that would have been my cue. I fantasize a Thelma Ritter-like assistant whispering in Mr. Waters' ear: "It's almost like he's studying you." Next on the agenda is a flu shot for J.W., something which most of the crew is submitting to today. As he poses for my camera with the nurse and the needle, he recounts his initial meeting with Miss Griffith, whom he first met when they both appeared in one of her break-out movies, Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild". "She came to the door wearing leather pants and a skull T-shirt, no make-up," he recalls. Just plain folks. At lunch (usually at around 6 p.m. on a film set) I have the opportunity to talk to the first generation triumvirate - Mink Stole, Van Smith, and Vincent Peranio, the latter who also worked as the set designer for the Baltimore-based TV show "Homicide" for seven years, but who, if he never did anything else, could always proudly claim he was the one who created "Lobstora" for "Multiple Maniacs". Mink, with her lively eyes and naughty nature ("I like a little blue in my collar," she announces coquettishly when a hot grip walks by), thrives on the familial chaos of a film set, which may have something to do with the fact that she is the fifth of ten children. She reminisces about the time during the shooting of "Pink Flamingos" when she agreed to allow Van and Vincent to set her hyper-processed hair on fire, which one of them would then douse with a pail of water after they got the shot. Thankfully, clearer heads prevailed. After lunch I have the pleasure of talking with Brook Yeaton, son of Dreamlander Pat Moran, who is a producer on "Demented". Brook, who played Mink Stole's son in "Desperate Living", the little naked boy caught playing doctor with his sister, has been on John Waters sets so long that as a kid he remembers thinking that making movies is what every family did on their summer vacation. He also thought everyone in the world was gay. It is said that the scenes in "Female Trouble" in which Edith Massey encourages young Gator to go homo are based on the Morans. Divine was his godfather, and it was Brook's dog, Nazzy, whose shit she ate at the end of "Pink Flamingos". But it doesn't end there. Having been taken under the wing of Vincent Peranio and worked his way up to property master on "Cry-Baby", Brook was the lucky man who then fell in love with and married Traci Lords, whom he met on that picture. Brook speaks reverentially of Waters, the only director for whom to this day he will work over-time without compensation and dumpster-dive to find props. His love and respect for Divine is palpable as he recounts having to suffer the taunts and insults of intolerant boors with her on the streets of Baltimore, which she attributed to their own insecurities. His fondest memory of Divine? Walking into her hotel room at the Belvedere Hotel to find her smoking joints with the maid. It's evening, and the crew gears up to shoot the exterior scenes in which Honey Whitlock arrives at the Senator Theater in a limousine before she is starnapped. A throng of extras with flashing cameras bereft of film line each side of the velvet ropes. I stand off to one side with my meager point-and-shoot, inexorably drawn to the red carpet. Only ten feet away, I snap a few shots of Stephen Dorff, who recognizes me from before so does not object, then of Ricki Lake, who either doesn't notice or care, whichever applies. Finally Melanie Griffith emerges from the limo, and caught up in the faux movie premier moment, I take a shot of her. I could have gotten away with one, but something makes me snap another. She wheels around and stares me down, sensing the film in my camera with an intuition known only to celebrities. "Please don't take my picture without asking me first," she says wearily, icily. Feeling as dazed as her namesake, Melanie Daniels, at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's production of "The Birds" (Tippi Hedren is her mother), I stammer, "I-I'm a friend of John's , I..." "Oh, so that makes it okay?" she counters, finishing me off with a rhetorical question. I was going to say "I loved you in "Night Moves"", but I guess that would have been inappropriate. Terrified, I turn on my heel and high-tail it to the Men's Lounge, where I hide out for the rest of the shoot trying to avoid her. I actually start feeling kind of bad about taking her picture, which is why I guess I could never be a true paparazzi. But I was only playing a paparazzi, wasn't I? I start thinking crazy thoughts, like maybe her husband will come to the set and she'll get him to beat me up. Maybe I should be hiding in the Women's Lounge. I seek out the publicist and tell him I have enough material for my story. I escape with my life. Later, having a drink on my ownie at the Atlantis Tavern, the very establishment which showcases tea-bagging male strippers on the bar in "Pecker", I reflect on the events of the day. Still feeling a little guilty, I recount the whole story to the naked boy laid out before me on the bar like dinner as he strokes his hard dick, and ask him if I should have taken her picture. "Well, it's not like she was sitting on the toilet or anything," he offers. "And at least you can say you got yelled at by Melanie Griffith." Leave it to a stripper to put things in perspective for you. Note: I just read in the National Enquirer that a scant two days after my visit to the set, Miss Griffith fainted and collapsed on the set of "Cecil B. Demented". Gee, I hope I didn't have anything to do with it. Part Deux 3 a.m. A hotel in Baltimore. I just crawled into bed a half an hour ago after having been glamorously yelled at earlier by Melanie Griffith on the set of John Waters’ new movie. I have to be up to catch a plane to Peducah in less than two hours. How I hate having to get up before daybreak! As a farm kid I had to rise before the sun each winter to catch the bus to school. It felt like living on the dark side of the moon. My cell phone rings. Who could be calling at this ungodly hour? Why, it’s none other than Harmony Korine, the most loved and loathed film-maker of his generation, who never calls me. What gives? He informs me that he’s in Kentucky, that he was actually trying to call another friend with a similar area code in California, a junkie whose girlfriend has had a couple of fingers drop off owing to a bad reaction to the methadone. I knew there had to be a simple explanation. Listen Harm, while I’ve got you on the horn, did you know that I will be seeing you in about eight hours in Mayfield as I am flying there to visit the set of Gus Van Sant’s movie based on your short story “Easter”, which is where you are right now? He says no one told him I was coming, so his call is indeed a bizarre case of what I used to refer to as synchronicity before The Police went and ruined a perfectly good word. We chat for a while about this and that, including how the last time I saw him I almost got fag-bashed at the party for his latest movie, “julien donkey-boy”, at the Toronto International Film Festival (long story). Harm says he only heard about it after the fact, but that he would have kicked the guy’s ass for me had he known. Nice to know. At that same festival the programmers asked him to present one of his favourite movies along with his own. He chose the Pamela and Tommy Lee video, but they were too lame to show that classic, so he had to settle on his second choice, Fassbinder’s masterpiece “Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?”. Some people might ask the same question about Harmony. Why do I always seem to be seated on the wrong side of the airplane when the pilot announces that there is some spectacular landmark or natural wonder to observe out the window? As I strain unsuccessfully to see the flooding of St. Louis or something, I can’t help but think that it’s a good metaphor for the frustration I feel as a film-maker visiting other director’s movie sets. Sure, you can learn a lot, but you’d rather be on the other side of the plane. As I compose a mental memo to stop doing these assignments, the stewardess comes on the intercom to say she hopes the people on the left are enjoying the view, and to those on the right, you might want to ask the folks on the left how gorgeous it is. Stew humour. Miss, do you mind if I open a window? You know you’re travelling to a backwater when on each leg of your journey the planes keep getting smaller and smaller. Which jets crash more frequently, I wonder, big or little? The one I’m on now is definitely the smallest I’ve ever encountered, a twenty-seater with propellers that lists and jerks as we careen down the runway. Before take-off the pilot came back and made me and another sap move to the other side of the aisle to balance the load lest we start flying sideways. The Peducah airport looks like a Greyhound bus station. One airstrip, and you have to walk glamorously from the plane to the terminal, ducking under the props. It’s surprising considering the amount of traffic it gets as the central point between Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Peducah is known as the Atomic city for its Nuclear Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which makes me nostalgic for my own experiences as a teenager working summers at the nuclear power plant not five miles away from our farm. I’d almost forgotten that my mother worked as a waitress and maid at a truckstop called the Atom Inn, whose counterpart must exist somewhere in this neck of the woods. As usual, no one is there to greet me at the airport like they’re supposed to be, but fortunately I’ve scribbled down the number of the “Easter” production office in my Filofax. I’m instructed to take a cab to Mayfield, which is about twenty-five miles away. ( US plus tip.) Coming from a rural area myself, I know enough to sit in the front seat of the cab with the driver unless you want to be considered a citified dipstick. My celebrity-at-the-airport look - baseball cap and dark glasses- ironically helps me segue into the local atmosphere. The driver, who has the thickest Southern accent I’ve ever heard outside of the movies, also wears sunglasses and a baseball cap, his over long greasy gray hair. More authentically, he has a salt-and-pepper beard and a beer gut. As he talks to me he brazenly chain smokes in direct contradiction to his own no smoking sign. His granddaddy, he tells me, was a moonshiner in these parts, and for a while he used to run moonshine for him as Mayfield County is completely dry. (Gus and the crew, I later discover, purposefully neglect to mention this choice bit of information to visitors and crew alike lest they think twice about their commitments.) Moonshine, of course, is fomented corn whiskey which, he explains, can be as smooth as silk or can blind or even kill you, and is still readily available if you know where to look. When I ask him why the county is still dry, he explains, “Son, you are smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt.” In Peducah, he continues, which is wet, there is a bar and a church on most every corner - you can find every kind of bar for whatever ails you: country, redneck, rock’n’roll, black, gay.... Suddenly I’m assailed by visions of Mathew Sheppard. I mean, I like rough trade as much as the next guy, but that was a bit much. He must have forgotten the safe word. The driver informs me that he’s going to take a short-cut, and suddenly the roads start getting narrower as brightly coloured autumn leaves close in on either side. I joke about when the pavement is going to end, but it may be no joke. Then again, I grew up on a gravel road, so I’m actually feeling strangely at home. The country side is surprisingly similar to the landscape of my childhood: mixed bush of deciduous and coniferous trees, flat land interrupted by occasional low rolling hills, geometric fields of corn, soy bean, and tobacco. I recognize the universal design of the tobacco kilns, the square, bright rust buildings with white trim. Even the hunting here is the same - coons, ducks, geese, deer. Ceptin’ up my way, there ain’t no possums. Suddenly the driver swerves slightly to avoid hitting a rabbit. “This ain’t nothin’,” he reassures me. “The Land Between Two Lakes, down Nashville way, that’s the road kill capital of the country.” I flashback to my childhood, my father driving us home one night from one of his baseball games. He deliberately jerks the wheel sideways to hit a raccoon, which we hear going under the car with a few muffled bumps, us kids lurching sideways in the back seat, jarred out of our sleep. Dad gets out of the car and throws the carcass into the trunk; he’ll skin it later if the fur isn’t too damaged. You’d hardly know we’ve arrived in Mayfield, population 2000 (Peducah is more like twenty thousand), as this part of town is so spread out and sprawling as to be almost incoherent. I’m staying at the Days Inn, Room 111, “right next door to Harmony, honey” chirps the chesty desk clerk with the bleached blond hair, frosted pink lipstick, and deep tan, apparently the favoured look for indigenous females. Later I discover that tanning beds are ubiquitous in this town, whose population is half black and below the poverty line. Draw your own sociological conclusions. After stashing my luggage, I head for the production office, also modestly situated at the Days Inn. The first person I run into is one of the actors, an albino gentleman with a shock of white hair and a bushy white moustache who hails from Kitchener, Ontario. I happen to know Kitchener, having done hard time one summer as a child in that small Teutonic Canadian city at the home of a quasi-abusive alcoholic uncle who worked at a meat packing plant and his Stepford wife who later ended up in the local snake pit. It’s a conservative town, and indeed the albino gentleman and his similarly pink-eyed and white-haired wife, who now joins us, are the epitome of normalcy, he working as a parking official for the municipality of Kitchener, she a federal government employee, with two kids, eight and ten. Gus Van Sant found them through a casting call on the internet and met with them while he was attending the Toronto Film Festival to see Korine’s latest movie. It all has a strange logic to it, considering Harmony’s script concerns a very conventional albino couple who live in an all-black community; that they are also staid Canadians merely adds to their alien yet normal identity. The production office is a small, bustling affair with phones ringing off the hook and faxes flooding the floor. A production assistant, a sweet black woman named Amelia, is swatting a fly with a flyswatter. I’m greeted by Robin of Miltie Productions who along with her partner Scott Macaulay, also editor of “Filmmaker” Magazine, are producing “Easter”. She treats me like the kind of visiting dignitary that I am (as with “julien”, I’m the only ‘journalist’ allowed on the set) - that is with a mixture of respect and admiration on the one hand and an off-hand, get-out-of-my-way-I’m-busy brusqueness on the other. As her vicious Chihuahua Trixie snarls and snaps at me, in bops Anthony Dodd Mantle, the Dogme 95 d.p. whom I met on the set of “julien”. With his ginger hair, a little longer now, and freckled, mappy face, he looks as dashing as ever, fresh off a gig in England shooting an infra-red Blur video. He gives me a big smile and a hug as Harmony enters the room, who does the same, but we are interrupted by a concerned Robin who whispers hoarsely, her hand over the receiver, that the Mayor of Mayfield is on the phone. Apparently earlier in the day Harmony had told him to kiss his ass, and now he has to apologize profusely in order not to jeopardize the shoot, explaining that he thought it had been someone else on the line. Everyone in the office starts cracking up, though, because as it turns out it isn’t the Mayor at all: the whole episode has been a practical joke organized by Robin. “Cocksucker,” exclaims Harmony, slamming down the phone, a good, old-fashioned Lenny Bruce word that so few people dare to use these days. As a practical joker of the first order - he once had me absolutely convinced that Ellen Degeneres had been dispensed with by a sniper (not that I cared) - Harmful takes his medicine good-naturedly. All right, the fun’s over, it’s back to work as Robin chain smokes while talking into two telephones simultaneously and Scott on another phone clears the rights for the use of Rick James’ album “Cold-Blooded” as a prop. I wander into the adjacent room and there’s Gus, employing his usual cloak of invisibility. We mumble our hellos and hug stiffly like always. I haven’t seen him and Harmony together since my hotel room in Park City after the Sundance premier of “Kids”. It’s inspiring to see Gus, an Academy Award-losing, A-list director, making a tiny art movie with a budget of only several hundred thousand dollars in the pure spirit of experimentalism, directly challenging the autocratic Hollywood sensibility. It’s textbook Gus. I retire to my motel room for a nap before snagging a ride to the set from a driver named Wallace, a cheerful black man who has clearly been around the block a few million times. Wallace tells me he used to live in DC where the ratio of women to men was 12:1, so he made out like a bandit for years. He marvels at the phenomenon of crack whores lining the streets not two blocks from the White House, describing precisely that cusp between black disenfranchised and white affluent that is the pure alchemical constitution of the American psyche. You see it even in Mayfield where, I will soon discover, crack cocaine has already gained a solid footing, solid as a rock. At the location Harmony tells me we have a few hours to kill before the shooting of the next scene, so we decide to tool around town a little bit in his big black rented utility vehicle. We’re accompanied by his friend Brian, a laid back, banjo-playing young man whom he grew up with in Nashville. With his baseball cap, long straggly hair and Southern twang, he could definitely pass as a local. After visiting the drive-thru bank, we hook up with another black driver who has generously consented to provide us with some of the new version of moonshine that seems to be so readily available in this town. On some deserted back street a deal is struck. We then stop for lunch at the Midtown Diner, where everything on the menu is deep fried - steak, mushrooms, pickles - and Harmony tells us an autobiographical story of Dostoyevskian proportions which I’m forbade to repeat. On both days that I visit the set, the location is the home of Curly, a black man of some stature in the community who used to be the chef at the local country club at which Gus Van Sant, Sr. is a member. The Van Sants currently reside in Mayfield, where Gus spent his summers as a child. When he decided to shoot “Easter” on his old stomping grounds, the senior Van Sant acted as the de facto location manager and introduced him to Curly, who generously consented to allow the production to use his home as that of the albino couple. With its over-the-top African decor - a statuary of various jungle animals, murals and wall-hangings of giant felines, leopard-print rugs and throws - it would seem the logical home for a pair of bourgeois albinos, particularly when you’re dealing with script by one H. Korine. By pure chance I’ve arrived on the day that the crew will be shooting the climactic scene in which the female albino sets herself on fire on the front lawn. (I won’t give away what precipitates this strange turn of events.) As Drew and Manny, the pyrotechnical experts who have been imported from Jersey, prepare the stunt woman in pink bathrobe and white wig, doubling for the albino wife, for her fiery ordeal, local black children hover around the perimeter of the set along with the local fire chief and a few of his employees and an ambulance and its attendants. Just before the scene is about to be shot I snag Gus and Harmony for a little impromptu photo shoot in front of a minute clapboard church which threateningly lists the ten commandments on its front porch. With the sun quickly setting, I barely manage to fire off a couple of rolls before Gus is called back to the set. It would be difficult to imagine a more democratic, less uptight set than the one I witness. Like “julien”, the movie is being shot on digital beta with a multiplicity of cameras of all shapes and sizes. At various points almost everyone, including the P.A.’s, the production manager, and the line producer, Dany Wolf, are enlisted to operate a camera. Harmony is covering the scene himself from the top of the house; everyone holds their collective breath as he clambers up the ladder with a camera and totters precariously on the roof. After the fireproofing of the stunt lady is complete, the cameras roll and she is set on fire, bright orange against the twilight sky. After the days shoot a bunch of us - Anthony, Gus, Scott, Dany, Brian - end up in Harmony’s motel room. As an ancient Richard Burton movie, “Green are the Rushes”, plays improbably on the TV in the background, Harmful entertains us with Cinema of Cruelty stories, in particular a charming tale of a club bouncer whom he provoked placing his leg against a curb and stomping on it as the magician David Blaine recorded it on video from across the street. He informs us that as a kid at school he used to stand crying in the washroom examining the welts on his ass from the severe strappings administered by his teachers. Ever since then he doesn’t feel physical pain, at least not until the next day. The conversation turns to the cinematic project at hand. “Easter” is to be part of a three-part omnibus movie called “Jokes”, each short story penned by Harmony, who will also direct one of the segments. The third installment, “Herpes”, is to be directed by either Claire Denis, to get the woman’s point of view, or Werner Herzog, to get the grumpy meglomaniacal German auteur point of view. Herzog, so good in “julien”, is one of Harmful’s chief mentors. After everyone else retires for the evening, Harmful and Brian and I try out some of that new moonshine we had acquired earlier. As neither of them have tried it before, I have to instruct them on the technique, something I picked up in my travels. It’s a good thing, too, because the previous evening, Harmony had attempted to apply it in the tradition of the suppository school pioneered by such luminaries as Jacqueline Susann (Nembutal division) and Lenny Bruce (Dilaudid division). (If I’m forced to get any more obtuse, I’ll be speaking in Pig Latin.) When we run out of moonshine, Harmony and Brian head off to Nashville, and I go to bed. The next day’s shoot is once again at Curly’s house, but as most of the action takes place indoors, I find myself exiled to the neighbours garage with Curly himself and some of his friends, seated on folded chairs next to the craft service table. We just got back from dinner at the Midtown, where I sat with Gus and Anthony as they discussed the upcoming scenes, including a delicate one in which the albino couple watches a gay porno called “Black Deja Vu”. Gus comes up with one of his trademark profundities on the subject of cinematic technique: “I always like to get the hard stuff over with first.” Students of cinema take note. A band of unruly black children came into the diner and surrounded the two men who seemed to be in charge, declaring resolutely, “We wanna be in your play.” In point of fact, many locals have already been incorporated into the movie. Curly bends my ear for a while about his fascinating life so far, including stories about the thirteen years he spent in Chicago where he frequented seamy, Mafia-run transvestite bars such as the Black Cat. Curly is known to still don drag occasionally at the weekly speakeasy cum dance club he runs to pay his bills and, presumably, to cover the payments on his widescreen TV and satellite dish. His best friend, a short black queen with eyebrows plucked to oblivion, throws in his two cents worth every now and then as various nephews and nieces of Curly and other black youths come and go. Clearly, Curly is the neighbourhood matriarch. The lone whity in the mix, a sullen young man who, with his scruffy beard and hunting cap, looks but exactly like Robert De Niro in “The Deer Hunter”, sits menacingly by himself in the corner. As it happens, that very movie is playing when he and I sneak into the house to watch television and drink some of Curly’s Busch, which he assures me he will replace on Friday when he gets his paycheque from the local sawmill. The twenty-three year old with the cargo pants and Nike shirt tells me in his thick Southern accent about his former life as a carnie, climbing up to service the Ferris wheel, and his stint in jail at sixteen for being a “mean-ass, trouble-making motherfucker.” When I compliment him on the LOVE and HATE tattoos which grace his knuckles, just like Robert Mitchum’s in “Cape Fear”, he shows me another on his leg which reads LSD. Apparently as a teenager he had carved his girlfriend’s initials, SD, into his thigh with a knife. Later, after he’d dumped her and started experimenting with hallucinogens, he added an L in front of it and had it tattooed. When I ask him if there was a freak show at the carnivals he worked for, he recounts stories of bearded ladies, midgets, and people with six fingers and toes. He confesses that he himself was born with six fingers, and shows me the scars on each hand where the extra digits were removed. He also tells me about his misadventures at the Hilltop, the redneck bar up behind the Bottom where Curly goes on his weekly liquor run eighteen miles toward Peducah. After getting into a fight over a girl with a guy who was “five feet tall and five feet wide”, he hit him over the head with a beer bottle so that the blood would get into his eyes, then wailed on him with his fists and a chair. How did he meet Curly? He had been living in an apartment building across from the Midtown Diner, but the sewage had been backed up for months and he couldn’t stand the stench anymore. He would spend hours in the diner to escape the smell, and one day struck up a conversation with Curly. The rest is history. It’s a good thing I’m leaving tomorrow, because I for one am getting extremely turned on, and I wouldn’t want to infringe on Curly’s territory. Trade doesn’t get any rougher than this. Resisting temptation, I bid everyone on the set adieu and head back to the motel. The next day I head back toward civilization, if that’s what you want to call the new crypto-fascist regime that is New York. I wonder if there’s any six-fingered hustlers in Gotham? |
| FUTHERMUCKERS |
| Saturday 29th 2005f October 2005 11:22 |
| Okay kids, listen up. Sorry for the temporary suspension of this website. No, it wasn't because I didn't pay the bill. If only it were that simple. For some strange reason the futhermuckers at my former server suddenly decided that they didn't want to host my site, claiming something about there being too much traffic and that it was hogging all the limelight. My long-suffering webmaster investigated this claim and found it to be bogus. True, this site does get a healthy amount of traffic, but not an unreasonable motherload that would justify their hate. So it seems like it boils down once again to a matter of (dis)content, or moral disapprobation, if you will. It reminds me of the time that Paypal insisted that I remove their logo from my dirty, filthy site because it wasn't somehow commensurate with their squeaky clean image. Yeah, Squeaky Fromme, maybe. (Sorry Lynette, I didn’t mean to insult you.) Anyway, my poor webmaster was forced to move all his clients to a new, more genteel and open-minded server, and we’re back in business. So otherwise, what’s new? Not a lot. I’m in my usual haze, wondering how the hell the world got into such a fix. I try to be positive; lord knows I try to be positive. My new boyfriend, Eulogio, the Santeria priest, helps to keep my spirits high. He’s such a pure soul, so even-tempered and loving. He takes on the burdens of so many people, and soothes their souls. It’s quite humbling for me, an inveterate egotist and simpering solipsist, to watch someone devote their life to the benefit of others. Anyway, I recently got back from New York, which is now something akin to a wax museum representation of the old New York that I was once so in love with. You see, it doesn’t smell anymore, except of money. Too sad-making. Oh, I had fun the first few days, as I always do. But it’s sort of like running into an old boyfriend and obliviously fucking his brains out for a while until you realize that he’s dead and you’ve been having it off with a corpse. Which can still be fun, but it’s kind of one-sided. Index magazine flew me down to interview and photograph Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello and Everything Is Illuminated fame, which I did, and which was fun because he’s a cool cat. I went to his party at the Bulgaria bar on lower BroadWAY, and it had a good crazy energy. The next day I went to the Nick Lowe opening at John Connelly Presents, the rad gallery at which I had my last NYC show, and it was cool. Then Tony, a journalist friend of mine, treated me to a Broadway play starring Jill Clayburgh. The play sucked, but it was kind of mind-blowing to see Ms. Clayburgh from the second row, particularly since I’m such a huge fan of her tour de force performance in Bertolucci’s Luna as the incestuous Mom. I just pretended I was watching her in that movie again instead of in a stinker on Broadway. Later, after skipping out on a creepy Chelsea party, I ended up doing too much bad Kate Moss at the Bowery apartment of some graffiti-writing vandal friends of mine, which pretty much put the kibosh on the rest of my trip as I developed a killer Kate Moss nasal infection. I did manage to take in A History of Violence on it’s opening day at my favourite Manhattan theatre on 12th street and 2nd ave, a cavernous, ornate old show palace, and I do believe that Mr. Cronenberg has crafted a masterpiece. (I also had the grave misfortune of seeing Flightplan, one of the worst movies every made, which has seriously made me consider covering up my Jodie Foster tattoo, or at least transforming it into a diabolical re-imagining of the original.) Since New York I’ve been hanging on the phone with the Muslim, cavorting in bed with the Cuban, and watching Alain Delon movies. I have an installation this coming weekend, opening Thursday November 3rd, at the Drake Hotel here in Toronto as part of TAAFI, the Toronto Alternative Art Fair Inc. It’s called Women in Revolt. And then I’m off in November to Madrid and Hong Kong, where I am having retrospectives at the fag film festivals of both cities. I’m excited to finally visit Hong Kong, where I have visited in my imagination so many times through the movies of Wong Kar-Wai, John Woo, Johnny To, and others. I wonder if there will be any Chanel Bird Flu masks available? Oh, by the way, the new photos below are from a fashion story I did recently for the fresh Dutch magazine called Blend... |
| Saturday 29th 2005f October 2005 11:21 |
 |
| Saturday 29th 2005f October 2005 11:20 |
 |
| Friday 28th 2005f October 2005 11:43 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:56 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:54 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:19 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:19 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:19 |
 |
| Peres Projects Show: Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:02 |
| Here is a series of photographs of my latest gallery show at Peres Projects in Los Angeles. |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 21:01 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 20:54 |
 |
| Monday 19th 2005f September 2005 20:52 |
 |
| Sunday 21st 2005f August 2005 16:19 |
 |
| Heterosexuality is the Opiate of the Masses |
| Sunday 21st 2005f August 2005 16:08 |
| Yes, Heterosexuality is the Opiate of the Masses was the name of the solo show I recently had at Peres Projects, the gallery that represents me in Los Angeles. I flew down to LA for ten days to mount the show with the help of my gallerist, Javier Peres, and his crack gallery team. (They don't do crack, but they crack at what they do.) I stayed at my usual luxurious Silverlake digs, the apartment of my dear friend the surfer/film editor Billy Rich. Unfortunately, on the very day that I arrived, Billy was called away to Atlanta to work on a hip hop rollerskating movie, so I didn't even get a chance to see him. But it did mean that I had his apartment all to myself, and as you know, sometimes there's nothing more fun than staying at a friend's place when they're not there. I settled into my usual routine - getting up at around ten AM, sauntering to the corner Sikh-owned convenience story to buy a cold bottle of Poland Springs Water, a can of Coca Cola Classic, sun tan lotion, cigarettes, codeine tablets, a bucket of ice, a glass, a bottle of brandy, my newspapers: the New York Post, the LA Times, the Paris Trib, the Rome Daily, American Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Express. (Oops, I may have gotten my list mixed up with Elizabeth Taylor's in Boom!) Then I go to the Cafe Tropical on the corner of Sunset and Silver Lake Boulevards (which happens to be crammed full of photos of Che Guevera - he haunts me wherever I go) for some strong Latin coffee and an egg, ham, and cheese croissant. I carry them home and consume them in front of Springer and the news, and then I make my daily phone calls. This time I'm trying to dig up a porn model for my opening on Saturday night, but it isn't easy because as you may or may not know, I have a bad reputation in the porn industry. The last time I tried to dig up a porn model for a photo shoot in this town, I ended up getting chewed out on the phone by one of the top porn agents in the business. How was I to know that he didn't want his client spattered in fake blood with a rifle pointed at his head in a sleazy motel room as part of an avant-garde performance called Platinum Oasis? I mean, I paid the model, and he seemed to enjoy himself. Why are porn people so dull? As Joanne Whorley would say, "Bo-o-o-o-oring". I think porn these days could stand to be a little more avant-garde, don't you? Because as it stands, it's kind of embarrassing. At any rate, I call all the unusual suspects - from legendary porn photographer Greg Lenzman (who's out of town on assignment on the Russian River) to the brilliant Michael Schmidt of Squeezebox fame, but it's friggin' difficult to find a porn star who's willing to dress up like an Iraqi Mujahid and get tied to a chair and spattered in blood while naked with a hard-on. In this day and age. Finally my pal Deadlee, the hot thug rapper, hooks me up with Shyboy, the kid who's supposed to star in LA Gangbangers (which no one seems to want to give me the money to make, by the way), and I think I'm made in the shade. But at the last minute, Shyboy says he can't get out of his shift at Macdonalds in the Valley and if he doesn't show up he'll get fired. Far be it from me to deprive the youth of America of their minimum wage! So it's a last minute scramble to find another model. Deadlee and a friend of his have generously agreed to dress up as Middle Eastern terrorists and mill about at the opening carrying fake Kalashnikovs, and one of Javier's game gallery assistants also magnanimously consents to do the same. Finally we enlist Deadlee's friend to play the role of the Mujahid who gets sexually tortured a la Abu Grahib. Actually, what I'm referencing is a popular reality TV show on al-Iraqiya, the state-run, Arabic language television station that spreads American propaganda as a counterpoint to al Jazeera. The show is called Terror in the Hands of Justice, and it features a hit parade of Iraqi insurgents (Mujahadeen) who are forced to confess to the nation all manner of dirty deed (even if they didn't do anything), including, lately, that they are homosexual and that they regularly conduct gay orgies in mosques. As a result of this show, I gather that the word "Mujahid", or Holy Warrior, has become street slang in Baghdad for "homosexual". Funny how the theme of homosexuality always seems to worm its way into the most extreme seditious and revolutionary scenarios. Anyway, long story short, at the opening my armed terrorists are milling about with the general public under a huge twenty foot high blow-up we've made of the famous photograph of the terrorist in the ski mask on the balcony from the 1972 Munich Olympics (soon to be made into a major Hollywood motion picture, I kid you not, by Steven Spielberg), and it's a little disturbing that no one seems to be particularly disturbed. I guess terrorism has kind of become de rigueur, like the little black dress. The walls are sprinkled with frame enlargements of the revolutionary slogans from my movie The Raspberry Reich, including one large wall painted red containing the tryptych: The Arrogance of the Strong/Will Be Met by the Violence/Of the Weak. I love that phrase. Later, we all head down to the low-celinged basement for my performance, wherein I explain the schtick about the Mujahadeen becoming synonymous with homosexuality - neatly reinforcing my theme of homosexual intifada in The Raspberry Reich - and then proceed to direct two of my Mujahadeen to begin to (play) torture and strip the third Mujahid and spatter him with fake blood as I snap pictures for posterity. After the photo shoot, I invite members of the public to sit in the white chair and have Kalashnikov's pointed at their heads and a machete thrust under their chins and to be splattered with fake blood if they wish (a surprising number do wish) while I take two polaroids, one which they get to keep and one which goes up on the wall as part of the show (autographed, of course). It's a delightful, cathartic exercise, and those who chose to skip the major Basquiat opening that night in favour of my squalid little enterprise were not disappointed. For the rest of the run of the show we left the white, blood-spattered chair in front of the blow-ups of the RAF logo (altered to RRF to stand for Raspberry Reich Faction) and the bloody Kalashnikovs and it really did look like Abu Grahib before the maids arrived. Hey, what can I say, it's all in the name of art. Actually, if you must know, I got a good review in the LA Weekly and a Critic's Pick in Artforum, which I now quote at length: "Americans have long needed to exorcise their 9/11 trauma in PlayStation terms, and Bruce LaBruce has found the solution for about .95 in "Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses." Hardline Ś90s-lefty critics who have wagged a disapproving finger at Spielberg's transformation of the Age of Terror into a theme-park ride in War of the Worlds might be discomfited to note that queer-cinema provocateur LaBruce is doing . . . hmmm . . . exactly the same thing. Twenty stills from his 2004 "agit-porn" film The Raspberry Reich are on view at Peres Projects, while in the basement a chair sits idly in a low-ceilinged room, covered with five gallons of "blood." Atop the mess a Kalashnikov rifle sinisterly rests. On opening night, lucky guests got to sit in the chair, gore-bespattered, as black-masked terrorists aimed guns at their head, then took a nifty snapshot for posterity. It's like going to Universal CityWalk to play at being Daniel Pearl. With those Polaroids glued to Peres Projects' wall, BLB nails the superfluity of twenty-four-hour-cable-news imagery, the scenester decadence of "the art world," and the headless giddiness of what we now only ironically call "reality." The amazing part is that sitting in that chair, covered in sticky cherry-flavored glop, is wildly, profanely exhilarating." Matthew Wilde. I'm sure he meant that as a compliment. So afterwards, bloody but unbowed, we all headed to a local Chinatown restaurant for some chow, and everyone was staring at us because we looked like we'd just emerged victorious from some bloody bar room brawl. As for the rest of my trip, the next day my crazy friend D-J took me to the beach on the freeway on his scooter, at times reaching speeds of 90 mph, which seemed kind of suicidal to me, but I don't drive so I can't complain when I'm in LA. I'm at the mercy of other people's suicidal tendencies. Oh, here's a couple of self-portraits of me in the aforementioned polaroid scenario, just so you get the picture. Adios until next time, bananas. |
| Cry For Me, Argentina |
| Tuesday 09th 2005f August 2005 14:52 |
Man, I hate the format of this blog. You know it isn’t easy to get what you want these days. But I do understand that if you try sometimes, you might get what you need. I’ll have to wait until my webmaster returns from vacation to change it. But just on the off chance that someone is reading this despite the fucked up, bass ackwards format, I’ll give you a brief rundown about what’s going on in my sordid little life and career and then try to dredge up some memories of things in the not-too-distant past, even though everything has kind of run together in my brain like broken yokes in a frying pan. Well let’s see, it’s become an unexpectedly unexpected summer, suddenly. For those of you who used to follow my overly autobiographical columns in Exclaim magazine (honestly, I wasn’t making anything up), I am still tight with the Muslim (aka my unheterosexual Muslim love object – or, if you insist on a more pedestrian term – boyfriend), but I have also taken myself a lover, as I mentioned previously. He’s a handsome black Cuban fellow who not only used to be in a dance troupe that performed for Presidents and Kings around the globe and has more recently become a salsa instructor and choreographer, but who also happens to be a Santeria priest. I’ve already had a ritual performed for me (not by him but by a friend of his – he can’t do my readings because we are involved sexually), partly to help me deal with the million dollar lawsuit that has been launched against my last movie (I can’t really talk about that yet because it’s still in the courts), and partly to allow me to clear away the obstacles that are preventing me from fulfilling my destiny, my summer project. Actually, I can’t really talk about the Cuban that much yet because I forgot to ask him if he minds if I write publicly about all of this. Suffice to say that I’m discovering you can be in love with more than one person at a time. It’s all very Kinsey, a movie that recently inspired me to re-evaluate my still-bourgeois-after-all-these-years sexuality. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but fortunately it’s a little different with old human beings. Okay, let me tell you a bit about my trip to Argentina several months back. Fortunately I jotted down a few notes about it while I was there, otherwise I would have forgotten about it completely by now (not that it wasn’t memorable). I was flown down to the Mar Del Plata Film Festival with my movie The Raspberry Reich, which has been going strong on the festival circuit for a year and a half now, for some strange reason. (I must have hit a chord.) Here’s what I wrote. 03/12/05. Mar Del Plata used to be known as the Cannes festival of the southern hemisphere before Argentina’s economic collapse four years ago knocked it off its pedestal a little bit. But it’s still a big, old-fashioned festival with lots of pomp and a certain amount of circumstance. The screening of the Raspberry Reich last night was fantastic. I seem to have some strange cultish following here in Argentina because even Mauro, the programmer of Heterodoxia, the section of the festival I’m in, commented to me about it. He said it’s partly due to the popularity of the retrospective they did of my work at the Buenos Aeries Independent Film Festival that I attended four years ago, and partly due to my punk sensibility, an attitude that is still very popular here. The screening was in a former porn theatre, an old, completely wooden building with the theatre in the basement - a cramped fire-trap that holds up to 200 people. The screening was sold out, with people seated on the floor in the front and in the aisles. I gave an unprepared introduction to the movie (translated by an intense woman named Inez) and then watched the first half of the movie to gauge the response of the audience. It only occurred to me then how the blown up image of Che Guevera I used in a porno context, with a guy jerking off on it, would play differently in a place like Argentina. The masturbation with the Che backdrop might seem to be somewhat more of a desecration here, but apparently the audience got the point – that the famous image of Che is already being jerked off on all over the world, worshipped like a golden calf, its original political significance long since depleted, squandered. The audience was behind the movie – only a few older folks, resigned to their social and sexual misery, took umbrage and turned tail. Of course with the lawsuit pending, watching the movie takes on a whole new significance for me. Aside from my usual odd detachment, it now seems as though it’s been legitimized in some crazy way, that its significance has finally been grasped, if only in a negative context. It’s hard to sift through the layers of irony – the fact that it takes a million dollar lawsuit for me to feel validated as an artist for making an anti-capitalist movie; the fact that the estate of Korda, the photographer of the famous Che Guevera image, has sued me for making a work of art that critiques modern culture for violating the original spirit of the photograph; the fact that a quasi-impoverished film-maker who actually is anti-capitalist is being accused of the capitalist exploitation of an image that has already become, itself, a symbol of inappropriate capitalist excess and distortion. [Oops. I guess I sort of let the cat out of the old bag there. Oh well, don’t tell anybody.] 03/13/05. I just saw Les Revenants at the festival, an intellectual French zombie movie. In it, the dead return, but they aren’t decomposed or cannibalistic. They look much like everyone else except they walk a little slower, have a lower body temperature, and don’t sweat. They can’t really come up with any new thoughts or memories – they only think of memories from when they used to be alive – old worries. Most of them are aged and retired, but the main zombie character is a mechanical engineer in his thirties who had died in a car accident after a fight with his wife. We gradually discover that they can’t reason or come up with new ideas, so the engineer is demoted to a menial, mechanical job. The zombies, then, are proletarian. The scene in which the main zombie finally has sex with his wife is extraordinary. I was repulsed at first, but then I started getting turned on by a subtle necrophilia. The zombies also have a tendency to get up and go to work in the middle of the night, which I found even more disturbing. They don’t blink, and have to be constantly mobile. The zombies reminded me of the Muslim (he always claims he’s dead), who called last week to inform me of his return from his indefinite stay in Africa. He was supposed to return the evening before I left for Argentina, but e-mailed to say he postponed his return for a month – something to do with one of his eleven brothers being a million dollars in debt, going bankrupt, and having to flee the country lest his creditors murder him. It sounds like the Muslim is trying to convince his father to consolidate the family fortune and distribute it equally. Who knows what’s really going on in his baroque family: incest, rape, exorcism, gambling, concubinage, money laundering…to name only a few. They’re the fundamentalist Islamic Knot’s Landing. My emotions are guarded about the Muslim’s return. How many times can he leave indefinitely and leave me in the lurch? Two and counting. If I weren’t so deeply in love with him, it would be a different story. When he finally called me last week and I could hear his voice clear and clean for the first time in three months, I could literally smell him over the phone. It was incorporeal. I’m not sure what it will be like when he returns. All I know is I miss his face and smile and laugh and warmth and colour. That deep red-brown skin of his, even ravaged by eczema, is so beautiful. What a strange specimen he is: eczema- and asthma-plagued; left-handed and big-footed; depressive and morose, yet joyful…03/14/05. So apparently The Raspberry Reich is a big fat, big-titted hit here (to quote Bob Duvall in Network), one of the most popular feature films of the festival (out of 280 or so.) Another irony: that a movie that sends up the cult of Che should be most popular in the country that spawned him. The screening at 22:00 last night was even more jammed full than the first one in the same venue – the aisles were so packed I could barely wade through. I joked at the beginning that it was a good thing I didn’t have a pyrotechnical display like Great White because the place is a firetrap, but I was only half kidding. It’s a wood building with no fire exits, and I noticed people blithely smoking as they entered the lobby. When I was introduced this time a big cheer went up, something that has never really happened to me before, not to that extreme, and a second screening had to be added at midnight due to audience demand. The cold that I have been postponing for weeks has caught up with me, giving me a headache and post-nasal drip. I just can’t party like I used to. I’m afraid the days of Guns N’ Roses may finally be over. I don’t seem to have the taste for liquor I used to have. It’s probably partly from dating a Muslim for four years who doesn’t drink. I guess that’s a good thing. After seeing Les Revenants yesterday I went for a walk on the beach here – row upon row of cabanas as far as the eye can see, but facing each other, not out to the sea – (apparently half of Buenos Aeries summers here), and I couldn’t help but notice that everyone seemed like the walking dead. It was eerie. Ty Power talks about it in The Razor’s Edge – something about the dead not knowing they’re dead. (Of course he was talking about Gene Tierney.) I used to feel like there was something dead inside me that I couldn’t expel, some kind of inert, dead presence, some thick black goo: a dead, atrophied, vestigial twin or something like that. Well, it’s gone, I’ve noticed lately. I think love cleared it out. But enough about me. I was talking politics earlier with the woman who runs the film market here, the one who looks like Jacqueline Bisset, and some elderly, very famous Argentine actor. They were talking, somewhat censoriously, about the leftist alliance between Kirchner, the present President of Argentina, and Lulu of Brazil and Chavez of Venezuela, all of them anti-American. Anti-Americanism is refreshingly strong here, despite the fact that there are still many Peronists: when a montage of images of the past twenty years of the Mar Del Plata film festival showed on opening night and Peron appeared in the clips, some members of the audience cheered. In some ways I’m surprised at the dearth of political discussions I’ve encountered at the festival. I have gathered that the economic collapse, the devaluation of the currency and the run on the banks, was a huge blow, and the recovery has been arduous. So much for privatization and globalization in the guise of economic development… The other night at a screening of a local movie called The New Bourgeoisie, in which a man gets sodomized with a coke bottle, alleged right wing homophobes in the audience started to throw coke bottles at the screen and a fight broke out between them and the left wing punks. The cops arrived to quell the riot. I’m sitting in a great seafood restaurant, alone. You can’t order a glass of wine here, only a bottle, so I’m drunk with a cold and I have to do an interview in a few moments with three intense girls from the Buenos Aeries film school. On the beach today I couldn’t help but notice that the bodies are generally untoned here. The cult of the worked out body and of the gym obviously hasn’t hit Argentina. Bodies are loosey-goosey, and their owners display them nonetheless with complete unselfconsciousness. The teenage boys, however, are really turning me on…I’m not sure I could live in a Latin American country, however, owing to the pastels… |
| Sunday 07th 2005f August 2005 16:13 |
 |
| Sunday 07th 2005f August 2005 16:08 |
 |
| Sunday 07th 2005f August 2005 16:06 |
 |
| Sunday 07th 2005f August 2005 15:53 |
 |
| Monday 25th 2005f July 2005 17:07 |
 |
| The Whole Enchilada |
| Saturday 23rd 2005f July 2005 15:01 |
| Here's the whole sequence, in case you care... |
| Thursday 21st 2005f July 2005 16:03 |
 |
| Now Where Was I? |
| Thursday 07th 2005f July 2005 00:29 |
| Oh yeah, Paris. As it happens, the offices of Tetu magazine happen to be on rue Campagne-Premiere, the very street on which Jean Seberg lives in a residential hotel in Breathless. The hotel still exists so we tried to rent a room there to do part of the shoot, but malheureusement it was fully booked. We had to settle for a truly disgusting room in a flea bag hotel near the Gare De L'est which I had to miraculously transform into a simulacrum of Seberg's charming room with only a few props and a prayer. I find a Battle of Algiers poster and a blow-up of Angela Davis usually work best under such circumstances. For the two models we used professional porn actors from a company called Citebeur which is run by a nice fellow named Stephane with whom I'd like to collaborate on a porn movie sometime because he has an incredibly hot stable of Arab boys. I used a white porn model to play Belmondo and a Moroccan porn model to play Seberg. They were both very sweet and cooperative and had no problem deep kissing each other even though at least one of them was straight. That's the advantage of using porn models: they're very open-minded. We drove around Paris in this big rental truck with the camera equipment and the clothes and make-up artist and everything and it was all very glamorous. At the end of the day we did the homage to the finale of Breathless which was also shot on rue Campagne-Premiere, the scene in which Belmondo is betrayed by Seberg and gets shot in the back while running down the street. It was exciting to be shooting it on the authentic location, disrupting traffic and having the model run around with a fake gun, and the photos turned out rather well if I do say so myself. Anyway, long story short, I spent the rest of my trip hanging out with my friends Christopher Chemin and Romain Vallois and I came down with a cold but went out anyway and I remember someone on the masthead of Tetu who shall remain nameless treating a bunch of us to an amazing dinner at a Turkish restaurant and then driving us very drunk at high speeds across Paris and I thought I was going to die like Lady Di died but I didn't much care because if you're going to die it might as well be in a speeding car in Paris when it drizzles. |
| Greece is the Word |
| Friday 01st 2005f July 2005 21:17 |
| Oh boy, it's been so long since I've posted an entry here, y'all probably think I ended it all months ago. As one snide and unhelpful reader put it, "It's like a grave in here." Thanks a lot. Flowers would have sufficed. Please, let me try to explain. First of all, my blog system was invaded by some spam so heavy that my webmaster had to find me a whole new system. My webmaster, incidentally, is Rory Them Finest, who is not only a fine web designer but also one of Toronto's busiest Deejays. Lately it's been difficult for us to find the time to sit down together, what with both of us travelling the world and getting laid a lot, especially him. I personally have been to Europe five times since Xmas, plus New York, Los Angeles, and Argentina, so to find any extra time to work on the website is well nigh impossible. So please, dear reader, do not be too harsh with me, and I will promise to try not to be so neglectful. So what have I been doing on all these international excursions, you ask? My swish cheese memory retains very little information at this stage of the game, but I'll try to dredge up some sludge for you. The first European jaunt involved Croatia, which I already told you about. I guess the next one after that must have been Paris when it drizzles, because I remember it starting to rain on me while i was walking under the Eiffel Tower sometime in late February. Tetu magazine, which is published by Pierre Berge, the long time lover and business genius behind Yves Saint Laurent, flew me over to essay a little fashion shoot for them. I decided to make an homage to Godard's A Bout de Souffle, or Breathless, as it is pithily known in English, except that instead of having a dashing young man (Jean Paul Belmondo) and a beautiful waif of a girl (Jean Seberg), I would shoot a white boy and an Arab boy. The Arab boy would be selling a Middle Eastern newspaper on the Champs Elysees instead of the New York Herald Tribune, but it would end up pretty much the same, like everything else: in death. I worked with the stylist Romain Vallois, whom I 'd done my previous Tetu shoot with, and it was all very very. They put me up in a four star hotel right by the Louvre, and I was wined and dined in proper French fashion. It was men's fashion week, so I ran into various friends, like Mel Ottenberg, the costume designer/stylist for Asia Argento's brilliant "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things", and the editors of Butt magazine, Gert and Jop. I went to a couple of shows, including Hedi Slimane's, which is always diverting in a kind of wham bam thank you m'am kind of way. Okay I have to go now because my new Cuban lover just dropped over and I haven't seen him since I got back from Athens. What do I mean by a lover? I mean a lover, what do you mean by a lover? I'll finish this story next time. But in the mean time I will post one of the images from the Tetu story that ended up being called "Breastless". I only told them that title as a joke, but they used it anyway. |
| Croatia Rocks |
| Sunday 10th 2005f April 2005 23:18 |
| agreb, Croatia, where I was honoured with a retrospective of my quaint little pornographic moving pictures. It was a fund-raising event of sorts for the queer festival there, the next one of which will be only the third annual. Zagreb is a beautiful old city that largely avoided the NATO bombings of the nineties. Other parts of the country bordering on Serbian and Bosnia were hit harder, but Zagreb was only bombed twice. You still get the impression, however, that the country is in the process of emerging from the fog of war. The people are very warm and open, as opposed to, say, the Poles I encountered in Warsaw three or four years ago, who seemed to me much more guarded and depressed, as if still living behind the Iron Curtain. I tried to learn as much about the war as I could, and I do understand it a great deal more than I ever did from hearing about it from western media sources, but it's still pretty complicated. Tito, the former "dictator" of the former Yugoslavia, wasn't, apparently, so bad as dictators go. There's even a smidge of nostalgia for the man, who counted amongst his friends the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. Zagreb is predominantly Catholic, with very small contingents of Protestants, and virtually no Muslims (there is one Mosque, near the airport, presumably for fast getaways.) But one thing all the religions can always agree about, they hate fags. There used to be a lot more hostility toward the pink team, and the queer Zagreb group, spearheaded by a couple of very smart and ambitious lads named Zvonomir and Giordon, has made remarkable progress in a short period of time. What's so interesting and great about what they're doing is that they're not trying to import typical western manifestations of the gay experience (like tired leathery gay bars or circuit parties or bad international house DJs, etc.), but are more interested in exploring alternative artistic expression and intellectual discourse around issues of gender and homosexuality, including radical approaches to the gay experience, and a lot of auto-criticism. A revolutionary approach for the gays in this day and age. The amount of press I got while I was there was phenomenal, and for the most part the interviews were intelligent, thorough, and philosophically oriented - a very serious and intellectually curious press. I was on an amazing hour long radio show and on a mainstream television station, and interviewed by the most politically forward papers and magazines. I was warned that one of the journalists was slightly homophobic, but she and i got on beautifully. She reminded me of Asia Argento. I think she liked my ideas about homophobia being an understandable and natural, genetically-based impulse. She also seemed to like my favourite Camille Paglia quote, that not everyone has the stomach for a daily struggle against nature. When I was asked at the end of my television interview what message I had for the Croatian people, I said: You must learn to give up your bourgeois fixation on monogamy and fidelity! (a Gudrun quote from The Raspberry Reich.) On the radio show they asked me how I developed my fixation on skinheads, and I replied that I once had a boyfriend who turned into a neo-Nazi and that when he beat me up for ridiculing him about it I guess I liked it. Although attitudes about homosexuality have opened up a lot in Zagreb, there were still several police cars and at least five policeman stationed outside the theatre during all of my screenings in case any crazy skinheads or other homophobes decided to enact some gender cleansing. My hosts told me it was progress: last year their events were guarded by a full SWAT team. There is only one gay bar in Zagreb, and like most cities with small gay communities, the bar has a nice, closet-y ambience and a secretive, subversive atmosphere. It also had a nice mixture of different sexes, ages, and body types, although, alas, not of races; the only black or brown people I saw in Zagreb were at the airport, leaving. There was a party for me at the bar, which is in a fire-trap of a basement, and which has a barricaded door which you have to be buzzed through. There were some very hot guys there, several of whom chatted me up extensively, but none of whom I could make any time with. There doesn't seem to be much promiscuity in Zagreb. The gays are very chaste by western standards. I went with one of my hosts and a former Franciscan priest who said he got more action during his seven year tenure as a monk at the monastery than he ever has amongst civilians. There were some unusually tall guys at the party. Apparently they grow them that way on the coast of the Mediterranean. Anyway, I would recommend Croatia, and the coast is supposed to be spectacular in the summer. I've always wanted to visit Dubrovnik, partly because of its reference in Rosemary's Baby. The food and drink is incredibly cheap. At my hotel I had two glasses of wine, a soup, an appetizer, a main course, and a capuccino all for about the equivalent of 15 Euros. Beers are about a Euro a piece. While dining at a popular traditional Croatian restaurant, the recently disgraced minister of foreign affairs and a large party came in and had a whale of a time. I guess political scandals are a dime a dozen in the former Yugoslavia. |