Rerun: Self-Portrait Day: My Brush With Fame, starring ... Math, The Dreadful Flying Glove, _Black_Acrylic, Max Vernon, Mark Pariselli, Mark Gluth, Alan, Davey Houle, Tigersare, Dan Callahan, L@rstonovich, NB, Bollo, Put The Lotion In The Basket, Frank Jaffe, Stephen, Alyssa Nolan, Statictick, Paul Buccholz, JW Veldhoen, Joel Westendorf, Chris, Daniel Portland, Kevin Killian, Misanthrope, Trees, Bernard Welt, Oscar B, Pisycaca, Dorna, Changeling, Christopher/Mark, Steevee, Steven Trull, Killer Luka, Chris Goode, David Ehrenstein, Creative Massacre, Chris (British), Paul Curran, Sean Cassidy (orig. 03/27/10)

___
Math





11 june 2008
i'm at this bar next to envoy gallery with alex rose, who i met the day before, and whose 'deathrow workshop' at envoy has changed what i think about everything forever etc. i'm really really drunk, which i hardly ever do. i wear a bright orange polo shirt and dance alone to some smiths song. seated later, alex is on my left and there's this buff dude to my right. he smells like cum and shows me these insane, beautiful, oversaturated pictures of torsos, messes, and money. all i can think to say is 'jesus. you're major'. he pulls on my hair and i lean away smirking. i show him my sketchbook. he wants to know if i'm a boy or a girl. he wants to know if i like boys or girls. to both answers he says 'you can tell.' he tells me i must get a lot of attention from gay men. alex and i exchange something. the night progresses to kitchen, a rooftop, a basement, a street, and an ex-factory in east bushwick. alex and this dude aren't involved in most of it but inevitably inform much of it. by the end it's turning to 14 june. at 00:22 on 14 june i google this person. he is slava mogutin.










_________
Davey Houle

Here are my two cents:
In the early 90's, I was at a live sex show on 42nd Street in NYC. In the row behind me, Allan Ginsberg was masturbating.





______
Tigersare

First photo is me a few years back during my Jesse McCartney obsession, backstage at a meet'n'greet before one of his concerts (I'd also interviewed him face to face the year before for the newspaper I write for). He had his arm around me! Jesse has gone to seed a bit these days, but haven't we all...





Second photo is me in 1995 with Lou Barlow (Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr etc). Sebadoh came to my home town of Perth in Western Australia and played on my 21st birthday. My friend's band supported and we hung out a bit after! Have always liked this photo even though it's shot from underneath which is never the most flattering angle. Just last weekend, I saw Lou wandering around at a rock festival that Dinosaur Jr were playing, and felt none of that 90s idol worship, just a mild and very detached nostalgia.






__________
Dan Callahan




"During a melancholy summer, I was finishing a halfhearted college degree by interning at a talent agency on 57th street and 7th avenue in Manhattan. There wasn't much to do. I would take nearly two-hour lunches in Central Park and read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, then go behind a tree somewhere to cry. It was that kind of summer.

One day, mid-summer, feeling more alone than usual, I got into the elevator at work and pressed the ground floor button; it was time for lunch and more Greene. The doors opened a floor below mine. A blond woman, a silver-haired man and a woman with big dark eyes got on with me. In a few seconds, I realized that the blond woman was Candice Bergen, the silver-haired man was Mike Nichols, and the dark-eyed woman, who was wearing an eccentric, floppy hat, was Elaine May.

I tensed up, happily. Bergen was standing next to me, Nichols and May were in front of me. I turned to Bergen and quietly said that I loved the long close-up of her laughing in Carnal Knowledge. Bergen smiled at me, in that tight way of hers. I said that her laughter in that scene looked really natural. Nichols turned around; his face lit up as he looked at me. "You know, there's a very funny story about that." Bergen piped in: "The stuff Nicholson said to get me to laugh like that! The stories that were told!" Nichols looked at Bergen and said, "That was a fun day, wasn't it?" May stared back at us under her hat, poker-faced. The doors opened and they all got off at a lower floor.

It was a perfect little encounter, in its way. If only Bergen had got on, I wouldn't have said anything. And if it had been Nichols and May only, I would have been scared to death, and silent. But Nichols and Bergen together inspired me to mention something specific, and that seems to have brought them a bit of pleasure in remembrance. It worked, as these things seldom do. And it definitely made my day."



__________
L@rstonovich

famous two for one.

first cat i met in portland (still a best bud) has a dad who was pals with ravi shankar (and george harrison, but i never got to meet him. buddy's dad and george produced a shankar box set together.)

we travelled to eureka, ca. to see ravi perform at humboldt state. buddy's dad played the traditional drone instrument on stage, one string. he had snuck outside before the show and smoked a doobie. ravi wasn't to high on instant highs. there he was (buddy's dad) on stage, the only white guy, stoned and plucking that string.
it being humboldt we were in the right mindset for raga as well.

afterwards we stayed at the bed and breakfast with india's legendary musician and his entourage. i felt guilty about my leather jacket. the conversation I remember around the buffet table involved ravi educating the folks on the fat content of avocados. don't get me wrong, i love and respect the raga master but there was much hollywood style shmooze surrounding the whole deal that left me with a bad taste.




cue a month or two later.

when i moved to portland pavement was at the top of my list. favorite band at the time. then every show i went i started seeing malkmus who had just moved here too. i was drunk at satyricon and said "are you who i think you are?" he said "yeah" he bummed a smoke, i gave it to him, it was my last and i felt like a slut. later at a trans am show i was leaving with another friend and next thing i know it's me, my friend kirk, his girl, and malk. i was wasted. we went to some russian disco that was open after hours, blurry. i stole a bottle of wine. i wanted some weight with malk so i said "hey i can get you a ticket to the ravi shankar show." he seemed impressed. we exchanged numbers. turned out he was gonna be on tour. months go by and suddenly i get a message on my answering machine "hey this is stephen, i need to record vocals for some b-sides, do you still have that set up in your basement?"

what??? how did he know i had a rad 4-track rig? what? boner inducing, life-changing shit! but wait. can't be real. "hey stephen this is larry, you left a message, but uh, this is larry kirk's friend...." stephen pauses... "oh ravi's buddy! yeah i meant to call larry c. from jackpot studios, how's it going?" every time i saw him he mentioned ravi, and i liked that, it was more of a "yeah i totally remember you" as opposed to a "yeah ravi, you dick." i never saw him much after that, i have a weird band allegiance thing and have a hard time when front dudes go solo and i never saw the jicks. so that's that. if i do see him, i'll say "ravi's friend" and i'm sure we'll have a laugh.



_
NB


You detestable little shit.



___
Bollo




I met Prinzhorn Dance School back in the summer of 07. I went to see them play, then got to hang out with them backstage after, chatting and drinking their beer. Both Tobin and Suzi very really lovely. Their drummer was their roadie and played so hard he bust a few sets of drum sticks. I got given the top of one, Suzi dubbed it the ‘Tip of the Horn’. They found me a bit hungover the next day in a guitar shop. They live footage above is from the show I was at. Two months later I met James Murphy in the same venue and hung out with him backstage. He played an amazing disco set. About 5 people liked it. He wouldn’t play any LCD Soundsystem stuff. A lot of people didn’t like that. He played “I want more” by Can. 3 people danced.






________________
Put The Lotion In The Basket


Sometimes I Just Love Too Much.







He won by a mile, all of Europe loved him, I loved him for Christ Sake.
I loved him more when he came over to me at the winners backstage party, his twinkling eyes and smile even brighter and wider than before.
We chatted.
He complemented me on my Westwood dress, my Asprey pearls, and my cock which he could see was interested in him as it was causing a stir in my dress line.
We drank champagne.
Ate caviar.
Snorted coke off a most attractive blond dancers thigh.
We laughed.
Then he held my hand and said 'lets get away from this, I just wanna be with you tonight'.
My heart melted.
I imagined a life of bliss with him, meeting his Mother, her loving me, me and his Mother knitting things together as Mr Norway went off to entertain the Crown Heads of Europe.
Where did it all go wrong?
I guess I just love too much.
I just have too much love to give.
My love just overwhelms me.
Somehow I gotta get out of Russia without being arrested.
There's lotions that need to be put in baskets tomorrow and a small white dog that needs feeding tonight.

Poor Alexander, so talented, so dead.





So that’s it, me and someone famous, anyone want to meet up for cocktails later I still have a delicious Dior somewhere at the back of my wardrobe?
    and Oh Lastly- Kier- I am so sorry for this tale, I know you were a big fan back then.



________
Frank Jaffe








_____
Stephen

While living in Los Angeles for 6 months I had the pleasure to live on the same street as one of my favorite actors, James Duval. I grew up in the LA area so I never really considered myself a sucka for famous people until one night I came home really drunk, ended up in James Duval's apartment - they were wrapping up a movie and I ended up doing blow with the director. I didn't know I was in James Duval's apartment and I left with the director to my apartment to do more blow. Time toppled all over itself and the next thing I knew there were a lot of people in my apartment, one of which was James Duval. I was flabbergasted. He was sitting on my bed. My favorite scenes of my favorite Gregg Araki movies flashed through my head. I walked up to him and caressed his face and told him he is a wonderful person then made my way back to the drugs. In the morning I felt like a fucking sentimental idiot.







_________
Alyssa Nolan

Living in Boston for three years has given me a lot of opportunities to meet celebrities, but none so famous that I'd expect the majority of people who read this blog to know who they are. No amusing stories either. Still, just getting the opportunity to chat with a celebrity for five minutes can be kind of exciting on its own, and it has a very surreal quality to it, especially if they're nothing in real life like they are on the screen. That's how it was when my brother and I met the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia after seeing their The Nightman Cometh show in Boston. They were funny, like I expected, but also really cool and down-to-earth, nothing like their clueless and arrogant TV personas. Included in the pictures are Kaitlin Olson, Rob McElhenney, and Glenn Howerton (the other guy in the middle picture is my brother Andrew).






______
Statictick







The Obvious: For some time in the late 80s and early 90s I favored wearing a vintage (50s) orange / pink hat that was given to me by my late friend DJ. DJ and I had a lot in common. She was my boyfriend's age, but liked several of the sorts of music that I liked. Patti Smith was always a favorite of mine. Someone left a copy of Horses in my grab when I was around eight years old. I sat in front of my grandparents' hi-fi and played it over and over. (I play it over and over to this day.) DJ showed me some photos she'd taken of Patti (including the ones above).

DJ lived in St. Clair Shores, a suburb to the northeast of Detroit. So did Patti, in those years she was considered "retired." For a short time, I lived in a neighboring suburb, Roseville. Roseville and St. Clair Shores shared libraries. DJ said that she'd run into Patti at the library, and at a few eateries that sprinkle that part of the river.





I didn't really hunt Patti down, but I did see her at the library and at some restaurants with her kids, who were obnoxious and petulant and funny. I don't know exactly when the moment occurred, but suddenly she recognized me because I was always wearing that fucking hat. She'd do a little wave at me at the library. I never had a conversation with her, but it felt oddly intimate.







When she finally put out a couple of books and did signings and eased her way back into recording and performing, I attended everything she did wearing that silly orange hat. I have this habit of writing my name in the top right corner of the first page of books. I don't know why. I think she got my name from that, because when I went to a book signing in Ann Arbor around 1992, hat in place while walking up to her, she said, "May I help, you Nicholas?" and everyone around started laughing. Woolgathering remains my favorite book of hers.

Ever since then, whenever she graces Detroit with a performance, I try to fit that thing on my head.


*





The One That Got Away: For my 25th birthday, I got to go see Nirvana with Dynomoose. The concert date was a few days after, but the ticket was the birthday present I bought for myself. The buying of it involved a car full of screaming cheerleaders smashing into the back of my truck while I stopped to let an elderly lady pass by on the sidewalk on my way into the record store. I loved it when their parents showed up to tell the crying driver that she was the one getting the ticket.

Nirvana played a suitably wasted shack in the middle of the usually unused Michigan State Fairgrounds at the Southeast corner of 8 Mile and Woodward. An old friend of mine who was living with me at the time worked at a Kinko's copy joint. The store he worked at somehow ended up with the contract to do the backstage passes for the Nirvana show. He cranked out a couple for me and Dynomoose. We'd become "Medical Staff." Indeed.

After talking this over with the Moose, we've agreed that telling more of this story would be inappropriate. Suffice to say, I don't think my feet touched the ground once Nirvana started with Radio Friendly Unit Shifter until maybe three days later. It was hard to wake Moose up.



__________
Paul Buccholz

One morning in February 2007, hazy before brewing coffee and ingesting carbohydrates, I checked my text-based webmail account and discovered an e-mail in my inbox from the Hungarian novelist Lászlo Krasznahorkai. The following few seconds, in which I clicked the blue subject heading to open the message, I felt my own view transposed into the vivid clastrophobic space of a Krasznahorkai narrative, I noticed the low ceiling and the unstable wooden floor of the brittle second-floor apartment, I noticed everything that one of this author's frenzied narrators would themselves notice. It was a time, I suppose, before I had fully accepted a belief in the banality of the figure of the writer, back when I still felt that something of the best writers must transfer directly from the fingers onto the keyboard and could somehow make its way then into the room you are reading in. The contents of the e-mail were small, polite, a cordial turn-down of an invitation to give a reading at the school where I was working… but the terse yet sincere diction of his greeting, the carry-over of his best works' morbid rhetoric, helped to melt for a second the computer, decompose and transpose it into the space of K's perverted 19th century realism and his no-future lost travel narratives, his miniature sketches of concrete objects floating in void landscapes. It is the same computer I am writing on now, apparently, the one that I will junk and forget within the next two years. Please, somebody, send an e-mail like that again. Note the photo, which is not current and which does not feature me, but is cluttered. Please read this writer's cluttered and wonderful works.






_________
JW Veldhoen





I'm afraid of this.
    What?
    When I turned to the left, I thought of a ghost story for next year.
    Saying hi there. Wormholes and wormwood and worms, looking in your rectum like some stray dog, a benefactor of the kiss of time. A whale of a whale.

Tennis anyone? Who popped the scholar?/Dammit Janet!

ɟnɔʞıuƃ
******//*********ИuʞʞLЭFuʞʞ3R*********\\******
TØUCH MY SKIИ
PSE
GRЭЭKKK
$300

PAM ENTERS
They talk about Max, Jamie Brokentoe looks hapless, then furious, his terminology for expressions being what it is, he alternates from scowl to frown and back. This is your city, the ad says. Google mapping his housing, taking screenshots. 29 countries. He hates that. He hates it everywhere.

A woman asked me to take her order for a book of art photos, slav asses. She told me her name was Mrs. Shit. Her email:
    Mrs.Shit@___.___. I met her son Mr. Hole some weeks earlier. His titanium Amex reading clearly. I saw him kissing a black professor from Parsons whom I liked at Dante's, so I hated him, naturally.

I wish I was writing fiction.
    When did she leave? Yesterday?
----


____________
Joel Westendorf




I'm guessing it was around 2000-2001... I was out @ the club Spaceland with a friend, and we ran into some other friends, and those friends had a friend who had brought along Vincent Kartheiser. We all drank and half-watched the band that was playing. I knew who Vincent was because my roomate Dennis was totally "fascinated" by him @ the time so I'd seen some of his movies. In person I found him to be brash and juvenille, but hey.. he was like.. 22. So, whatever. I can see how some people might've been charmed by his antics. Anyway, as the night was winding down and people were leaving, we gathered on the sidewalk, wrapping up conversations and saying goodnight. Vincent was loudly talking to anyone and everyone, asking aloud "Who's gonna gimme a blowjob so I can go ta sleep?" a few times, and in different ways. People couldn't tell if he was serious or not. I wasn't interested in helping him out, so I said goodnight to everyone and went and got my car from the lot next to the building. I took an immediate right and stopped in front of the club to roll down the passenger side window and tell my friend something I'd forgotten. My friend came over and Vincent followed. He poked his head beside hers as I told her whatever it was that I'd forgotten, and then we said goodnight. She pulled back from the window and Vincent put his head further IN to the window, and then both hands and arms, and then his whole torso. He said "Goodnight, Joel", lightly grabbed my face with both his hands, kissed me on the lips and then withdrew from the window to bounce back to his pals. I was like - Huh? Weird. and I drove off chuckling about how jealous Dennis was going to be when I told him. The End.



___
Chris




It was somewhere between the summers of 1978-82. I was bicycle messenger in NYC. Which means I was all over Manhattan on any given day, often in elevators either crowded or alone with someone. One day I happened to be in an elevator with David Mccallum, the sexy one from Man from U.N.C.L.E., the "great" TV show of my youth. Sometimes I used to start up conversations by saying, "would you like to switch jobs?" So nervous, I thought I'd try it out again. His response went something like, " how dare you ask me...I've been out of work for years." True or not. That shut me up.

Those summers as a messenger were when I got to know NYC in more detail. The two other "famous" people I saw on the street several times were Tiny Tim and Andy Warhol. Then there was club 57 after work.



____________
Daniel Portland



_________
Kevin Killian





Here I am surrounded by two legendary ladies, Dodie Bellamy on my right and Valerie Harper on my left. Very eighties! Very LA! We were staying at the Hotel Bonaventure, then itself an iconic place by virtue of having been written up by Fredric Jameson and by Baudrillard. It was ground zero in the society of the spectacle. We were meeting Valerie Harper (once Rhoda on the Mary Tyler Moore show) because I had won a contest involving murder mysteries and soap operas. It was back when I was a devoted fan of the NBC soap Santa Barbara. The event we were at was the only one I've ever been to that was covered by "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," and in the months that followed I got a few phone calls for disbelieving relatives asking if they had indeed seen me for a split second on Lifestyles.



_________
Misanthrope

I’d never heard really heard of Matt Marcure (otherwise known as Panda? throughout the blogosphere – who knew, right?). Even from the countless photos of him I’d downloaded from the net during hours, days, weeks, and years of stalk- um, perusing the internet; from the thousands of daily visits to his blogs and to his myspace and facebook pages; from the hundreds of thousands of hours of listening to his music; from the millions of hours looking at the posters I’d made from his online pics and hung on my walls; even from all of this, I had noidea who this guy was.

I mean, really, how was I supposed to know I was in the presence of the world wide web’s, nay, the world’s!, biggest, most talented, revolutionary, hottest celebrity when I accidentally stumbled upon him in his backyard:





Or when I inadvertently ran into him while he was at an awards ceremony in Hawaii:





Or when I mistakenly bumped into him as he put into effect his plans for world Panda? domination:





Seriously, how was I to know?

Well, now that I have an inkling of how big a star this dude is, when I get out of prison, I’ll be sure to run into him again. In the meantime, I’ll just share with you the few pics I have smugg- um, have left of my chance encounters with this mysterious fella about whom, I swear, I knew absolutely nothing…



___
Trees


During an encore performance of "Fuck the Pain Away," I fed Peaches grapes on stage and she frenched me and spit beer on my face.






__________
Bernard Welt

Teeny-weeny Brush with Greatness (inspired by Dennis' March 13 post)

I think I've already told all my stories about meeting famous people here: Gore Vidal smiled at me, Roseanne hugged me, Patricia Clarkson flirted with me, and hugely, when I was 15, I shook hands with Sammy Davis Jr.
    This is a really tiny one, but like many a subpar American film comedy, it does feature a sudden and unexpected celebrity guest appearance:

Last year we saw Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, on Broadway, with a friend who knew someone in the cast, so we went backstage to see him. Christine Ebersole said hi, Angela Lansbury herself offered our pal in the cast a ride but he said he was going out with us and she sort of said, suit yourself, and gave us an over-the-shoulder ta-ta wave.
    Rupert Everett was in the play, too, and we'd been remarking how his face was now an absolutely featureless plane surface, with not a line in it--eerie, we said, in something of the manner of Jocelyn Wildenstein. Backstage, he kind of coasted by us, oozing charm, followed by about 5 middle-ages women. And the first among them was Jocelyn Wildenstein. From which we more or less assumed that there's some kind of weird club for people who actually think that their horrifying experiments in plastic surgery look good.








_____
Oscar B





Now, I don't want to look like I'm obsessed, but the truth is that the last celebrity I met was indeed Michael Jackson.

It happened three years ago. I was living and London, and one day I read on a newspaper that he was in town. The article included the name of the hotel he was staying in.

I decided not to go at first, he was part of my past after all, and it felt too melancholic and kind of pathetic to do so.

But I went anyway.

After a few hours waiting outside, and I didn't even know for sure what I was waiting for, me and a bunch of other mad people decided to go in the hotel and sit at the bar. We had to order a £ 20 cup of coffee just to be able to stay there.

At some point, everything went silent. The businessmen in the lounge stopped talking, the waiters stopped serving, an elderly, rich looking lady sitting on a sofa with a dog on her lap suddenly stood up. The dog fell with a cry.

Some disembodied voice whispered: "HE is coming!"

People, me included, moved to the center of the room and formed a living corridor that crossed the hall, curved and ended where the door was.

Finally, I spotted a tall, skinny figure wearing a red shirt and a fedora hat walking towards me.

He was wearing sunglasses, but no mask. His face looked kind of bored and tense.

I felt sorry to be standing there looking at him as if he were some kind of rare animal. I started thinking of when I was thirteen or so and I was convinced that between me and him there was some special connection that nobody else could understand. They were mad thoughts, but they felt good.

That wasn't the real Michael Jackson of course, it was like a projection of myself on him. And standing there in front of him ten years later, it was really odd to have to accept that I was looking at the person who had embodied feelings that seemed so strong as a young teenager. It might seem stupid, but I think that deep inside I really was expecting something to happen.

I remembered I was carrying one of my notebooks in my back pack. I quickly took it out to give it to him, who was at this point literally being swallowed by a sea of screaming fans.

He saw the notebook at the end of my stretched arm, and took it.

Then, the crowd took over and I couldn't see him anymore.



______
Pisycaca





1.AV Festival, Málaga, Spain, 2003
Stephen Malkmus, there, in front of me and no one seemed to notice him. Being Pavement my favorite band and SM the embodiment of cool, I was all shaky but I got to say hi to him and the picture done.





2. Apolo, Barcelona, Spain 2008
Xiu Xiu has probably been the most important band for me in the last decade. Once I got to interview Jamie Stewart for a music website and he was adorable. A few years later I saw him before playing his gig and ask for a picture. Didn't manage to say much more.





3. Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona, Spain, 2009
When I first started listening to Deerhunter, my world changed a little bit, as it had happened with Pavement and Xiu Xiu before. Getting to meet Bradford Cox last year and hanging out with him at the festival was one of the best things of 2009 (meeting you, Dennis, was on the top of the list too of course!).”



_____
Dorna

This is a picture of me, or at least of me as Rita Verlaine, my Second Life avatar. I’m relaxing on a boat that belongs to Guillaume-en-Egypte, my celebrity of choice for the purposes of this exercise.

The boat is in the Ouvroir. The picture of the orange cat is a portrait of Guillaume created by Chris Marker. Guillaume is a constant presence in Chris’ work and in fact Chris channels him. Ouvroir is the name of the territory Chris has constructed on Second Life. Here, as your avatar floats, flies, walks, runs or hovers, you travel through three-dimensional space that is densely crafted with treasures and surprises aplenty. As you advance, you uncover this world’s topography—a group of islands set in shimmering blue waters. The proprietor offers his visitors thrilling glimpses of the things he has cherished. Constraints of time and place do not apply here, nor does the distinction between interiority and exterior reality. All holds are off. The notion of identity itself gets muddy as you explore this space and discover scraps of its maker’s past and present. Unsurprisingly film references abound. At times, if like me, you are inept at flying, you might fall in the water. But then you’ll simply float down to the bottom. You may discover a wreck down there, or a strange submarine that you might ill-advisedly enter, only to find yourself trapped.

When I came across Guillaume-en-Egypte’s boat, the large sprawled black cat offered an option to hang out and relax. I lay leaning against him and listened to water lapping and bird sounds. There’s also a whale somewhere nearby who floats around and you can hear the splash of his giant spray every so often. Earlier, before I had found the boat, not understanding how exactly these virtual spaces work, I’d managed to lose my hair as well as my polka dot dress that had somehow ended up turning into this long-john outfit. Chris is so meticulous and everything in this space is so mesmerizing that today, looking at this image, I have to fight a rising feeling of shame and inadequacy at my casual adoption of one of the generic avatar appearances on offer by Second Life. Chris is never generic. Just the other night, I came across an avatar that may have been him, an elephant-headed sphinx sitting on a director’s chair. I asked if I could take a picture with him, and he said, “No, not now. Maybe later.”

Endnote: I sent the entry to Chris and asked if it was ok with him if I submitted it for the celebrity and I photo blog post day. He wrote back, "No problem,” he wrote back, “but a few precisions: the cat on the armchair is not my habitual recreation of Guillaume in 2-d, it’s a portrait of the real Guillaume by my friend Remo Forlani, who died just a few months ago. And the character with the elephant head is one of the numerous avatar-robots belonging to Max Moswitzer, who is the conceiver and architect of the Ouvroir. It would be good to name them both."






_________
Changeling






____________
Christopher/Mark

George Harris III, AKA Hibiscus, (1949-1982) and M.L. Hollywood, 1966




ML and Nicky Haslam two days ago on March 12th 2010 Miami Beach Florida.



"Time Passes" - (Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse)



_____
Steevee

THE O WORD

“I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand.” -- Joy Division

“Did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” -- Pink Floyd

________

After receiving a mailbox full of rejection notices for this story, which was written in January, I've decided to put it up on this site. (No, I don't have any screenplays in the works.) Before you read this, there are 2 things I should point out:

1) I'm not the narrator of this story, even if his voice sounds like mine. Let's just say that this story is personal without being autobiographical and that I'm not pathologically obsessed with any movie stars - or anyone else, for that matter.

2) All the film titles in the opening paragraph, QUEERATIONAL & VIDEO CONFESSIONAL are products of my imagination. Thomas Bernhard really exist(ed), as do Slavoj Zizek, IMAGINARY LIGHT and Cannibal Ox.

________

I’ve been obsessed with Todd Bates as long as I can remember having any sexual feelings, ever since I saw DREAMS OF A VIRGIN. We were both 12 years old at the time. He’s the first man I recall ever being attracted to, and his "films" - mostly the kind of teen sex comedies that now show up on Comedy Central at 3 AM - accompanied me through my adolescent years. Even then, I was aware how bad they were, but that didn’t prevent them from inspiring wet dreams and hours of masturbation. In college, about 7 years after I saw DREAMS OF A VIRGIN, his rare appearance in an art film, STRANGE COMFORT, finally convinced me that I was gay after years of denial. (A vaguely bi-curious friend told me that Todd’s performance in STRANGE COMFORT made him question his sexuality.) As the years rolled by and Todd blossomed into a star and relatively talented actor, his films stuck with me like fetishes. I got my first full-time job around the time one of his characters did. My first real relationship too, although his lasted longer and looked infinitely more glamorous. I remained a geek with a massive hard-on and/or schoolgirl crush for him. He became an icon of American manhood. Titillating rumors abounded about Todd. I followed them intently; like Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe.

I’m an artist - or rather, I work at a record store while attending grad school part-time. My latest project was pretty easy to put together. Coming up with a title took longer. After admiring the collages I’d put up at the store and receiving a year’s worth of discounts in gratitude, Vanessa, the director of a small, student-run art gallery, suggested that I work on a new exhibition. She shared my affection for Todd, albeit not to the same extreme. Accidentally, she kickstarted my ideas by asking “Did you know that Todd and Thomas Bernhard were born on the same day?” The two had nothing in common: Todd wanted everyone to like him (and everyone did, more or less); Thomas wrote nihilistic novels about spiritual emptiness and included a clause in his will preventing his work from being published or performed in his homeland posthumously. A perfect match for a new project! The man whose purpose in life was to be looked at and the one whose purpose was to see uncomfortably clearly! So I thought at the time.

I often worried that my obsessions bordered on the pathological. To be honest, 90% of my sex life seemed to happen in my mind, even when I was with another man. My ideal seemed to be a Todd lookalike. While there were plenty of suitable men, most of them were annoying Chelsea queens who wouldn’t give a second look to anyone who disliked Cher, didn’t take Ecstasy and didn’t spend 2 and 1/2 hours a day at the gym. (That exact figure came from one particularly irritating date.) The art project was a way to test whether or not I was crazy. I also wanted to see whether anything productive could come out of all that wasted hand cream and Kleenex. By putting all this out into the world, would anyone else respond? Would they think it was pathetic? All too ordinary? Buried in the back of my mind, another thought lurked: I wondered if there was the slightest chance Todd would respond.

I decided that Bernhard represented darkness, Todd light. Taking photos of Todd from magazines like GQ, VOGUE and INTERVIEW, I wrote his name in glitter on them, faked his autograph and attached smaller photos and shreds of used Kleenex to them with paper clips. For the Bernhard collage, I tore out pages from his books and covered them with excremental smears of chocolate, images of Germany and Austria from travel magazines, and photos of concentration camp victims. My original title was IMAGINARY LIGHT, taken from an avant-garde film composed entirely of time-lapse footage of shifting light patterns in a house and its backyard. (I thought of the light from a TV or movie screen as “imaginary”.) However, Vanessa suggested TWO DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD as a better choice.

Opening night was OK, I suppose. Not very many people turned up: most of my friends, my teachers and the kind of people who turn up at every art opening in town for the free wine and cheese. Although I could probably give you Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of the meaning of TWO DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, I wasn’t sure what it meant to me, except as an expression of two things: an overactive fantasy life and a nagging, vague feeling of identification with Bernhard’s misanthropy. Could the two be reconciled? Was this even a worthwhile goal? I had no idea, and making an exhibit out of it - hell, making a mess out of it, as long as it expressed *something* - was the best way I could think of to figure it all out.

I didn’t bother making an artist’s statement for the show. Instead, I made another collage out of quotes about Todd, including a few from sleazy tabloids printing rumors about his sexuality. He had sued one for running an interview with a former porn star who claimed to be his boyfriend: a funny move, I thought, since it wound up giving the rag plenty of free publicity. Since I wanted to get reactions from my audience, I included my phone number and E-mail address in the collage.

Then, David, an acquaintance whom I had met at the record store during the brief heyday of queercore, called me up with another hot rumor. He told me “you’re not going to believe this, but Dennis is dating Todd’s psychiatrist!” I was excited, but I had trouble even remembering who he was talking about. I replied “Is that the same Dennis who use to call himself Viva Rine and put out the zine QUEERATIONAL?” David said yes. Even better, he confirmed that Todd had coughed up thoughts on the couch that lived up to my fantasies. He felt terrible that the pressures of stardom included having to stay in the closet and yearned for a long-term relationship. Instead, he jerked off to an ever-expanding collection of porn mags and videos. (Ah, fame is a bitch!) When he got too lonely, he called an escort service but refrained from doing so too often, as he was afraid of getting busted.

Of course, I had no idea whether to believe this story. Besides being a major breach of psychiatric ethics, it played too close to my gut hopes: not so much in that Todd was really gay and depressed about being in the closet, but that he was really gay and as lonely as I was. In my schoolboy fantasies, together we would discover that we were soulmates, he would come out of the closet to take me on his arm to premieres...or we would at least have some hot sex while he remained in the closet to keep those lucrative acting gigs coming so I could quit the record store and work full-time on my art. Had someone given me his phone number that night, I would’ve felt no hesitation in calling him, stalking or not.

TWO DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD did not shake the world, or even *my* world. No one bought my collages, offered insight or shared their love for Todd with me. No one called or even E-mailed, unless hornyteens@blowme.com got my address from the show. I was still left wondering if I was one step away from becoming a stalker.

Flipping channels one night, I caught the beginnings of a public access show. Over the years, Manhattan public access had steadily gone downhill. Still, delights like a stripper/ comedian/ singer with no talent at any of her trades and Nation of Islam rejects who hated Louis Farrakhan even more than the White Devil were more entertaining than any network offering, so I continued perusing it. I came across a show called VIDEO CONFESSIONAL. There were plenty of religious programs on the air: one channel even aired a Mass each morning. The title intrigued me enough to keep my hand off the remote. All of a sudden, it reminded me of Dennis’ story: given Catholic doctrine, the concept of a video confessional seemed as oxymoronic as psychiatric gossip. Yet the latter existed, so why not the former?

The show consisted of homemade videotapes - and at the end, about 5 minutes worth of voice-mail messages - made by viewers confessing their “sins”. Each definition of sin was individual. Some were psychopath wanna-bes - I hoped - owning up to impossible crime sprees. Some were women relating depressing stories of one- or two-night stands. Others were teenagers jokingly bragging about stealing candy bars or smoking pot. For the first ten minutes, I watched the show out of morbid fascination, as if it were a DIY version of tabloid TV. Then my protective shield of irony melted away, and I was moved by the tales of bad sex and fantastic murders. Hell, I wanted in. TWO DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD hadn’t done much to make me feel better about my sanity. Maybe my own “confession” would help, especially if I left some contact information along with it.

Setting a video camera on my kitchen table, I sat in a chair about 5 feet away and did my best not to look *too* nervous. I still don’t know if I succeeded. I had jotted down a few ideas for my confession but couldn’t read them from where I sat. I started talking. I began, “I don’t know if I should talk to a psychiatrist or priest. I don’t think the way I feel is a sin, exactly, but I’m not sure what it really is. I do know that it’s led to a lot of misdirected energy and maybe prevented me from connecting with people outside my fantasies.”

I reprised the story of my ongoing obsession with Todd. Then I went further: “I wonder what he’d think if he had the chance to see all this. Would I look like a stalker? I think so. Would I be a stalker? I’d like to think not. After all, he’s the one promoting himself as a sex symbol. If he’s Mr. 100% Straight, why does he take his shirt off so often? Does he think that only women appreciate those abs? After all this talking, I’m still not sure I’ve really confessed anything beyond an ordinary fantasy life. But I’m genuinely curious what it’s like to be him. If we ever met, would he be my soulmate? Would we have yet another in a long series of unsatisfying one night stands? A friendship, maybe? Call me at {number omitted} if you’d like to share your thoughts.”

I knew that I was taking a risk by giving out my phone number to all of Manhattan, so I had leased a voice-mail number just for this purpose after mailing the tape to the PO box for VIDEO CONFESSIONAL. The response was not encouraging. Several kids yelled “fuck you, faggot” or demonstrated their rap skills; a few called solely to plug their own shows. After a second, failed try at connecting with the outside world, I felt as though my heart was sending signals to a broken modem.

A few days later, David called me with some refreshing news. Dennis’ boyfriend had seen VIDEO CONFESSIONAL and wanted to talk to me. He had taken a big risk by taping the show and lending it to Todd (as much to check out Todd’s attitudes towards his gay fans as for any other reason, I suspect.) Todd turned out to be fascinated by it, and wanted to get in touch with me. One day when I checked my voice-mail, I was startled to get a call from him. His message was refreshingly blunt: “You’re lonely. I’m lonely too. Why don’t we meet somewhere and see what happens?” It ended with his number.

Listening to the message, I suddenly felt like the room was spinning. I didn’t have a panic attack, but I felt like I was having the upbeat equivalent of one: an overload of excitement. Trying to make my voice sound relatively normal, grasping onto my kitchen table to stop the dizziness and praying that he would be home, I called him. (Maybe, like me, he only gave out a voice-mail number.) Our bizarre conversation ran around in circles for at least half an hour. The words “um,” “like” and “y’know” dominated it. I was reluctant to talk about TWO DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD for fear of making myself sound even weirder. (Besides, I doubted that he’d even heard of Thomas Bernhard.) We talked vaguely about politics, trying very hard not to offend each other. Frankly, I’ve rarely felt more self-absorbed. Even so, I felt an odd twinge of vicarious intimacy - yet another oxymoron - talking to him. His image had accompanied my life, so I felt like I knew him through the media. To him, I was a mystery, but I was delighted that he cared enough to investigate further. I must not have been the kind of fan he dealt with a dozen times a day: that counted for *something*.

After going back and forth, we agreed to meet the next day for dinner at Moni, a trendy Japanese restaurant. Under ordinary circumstances, I couldn’t afford anything more than a $10 plate of sushi, but Todd chivalrously said that he would foot the bill. I showed up around 8:00. He was fashionably late, dressed in a blazer with a pair of blue khakis that almost matched and Nike sneakers: the kind of “casual” look that exuded money. I wore a Cannibal Ox T-shirt that I got for free at work and ratty black jeans. My sneakers came from Nike via Goodwill. The atmosphere at Moni was familiar from downtown Manhattan restaurants: in order to get the waiter’s attention, your eyes practically had to shoot laser beams at him. I stared at him for a few minutes, but once he noticed my companion, he came over immediately.

I got the first word in:
    “Um...I’m really glad to meet you.”
    “Yeah, I got the impression you were waiting a long time for this.”
    “So is this...sort of your version of that thing where celebrities go visit kids with leukemia and spend the day with them?”
    At this point, I realized that I was scratching my nose compulsively. Somewhere, I remembered that cops consider this a sign that a suspect is lying. I made a mental note to stop scratching, although I’m not sure if I did.
    “Is your self-esteem that low?”
    “Yeah.”
    “No, I thought you were cute.”
    The hustler stories suddenly popped back into my mind, but I forced them down.

Not sure how to pick up my end of the conversation - after all, he knew that I found him attractive and there wouldn’t be much point in my saying “I think you’re a hottie” - I decided to describe TWO DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD.
    “Well, I did this art show, combining photos of you on one wall, with collages of pages from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s books on the other one.”


_________
Sean Cassidy

I went to the University of Virginia's 2nd annual Arts Assembly and film festival to see John Waters give his inspirational standup titled "This Filthy World". After his talk I nervously got in line for a meet and greet with my old Crackpot paperback and my digital camera. When it was my turn I nervously mumbled that I was a big fan. He couldn't hear me at first so I had to repeat myself. I then crouched down awkwardly to be at his sitting level for my picture. He said it would probably be blurry but that it would be arty. The picture came out clear, I got an autograph, and I was shaking with nerves as I walked away. John Waters loves libraries and encourages people to read. In part of his show he said something along the lines of 'if a 10 year old boy knows who Dennis Cooper is he should be allowed to check out the book'. Maybe someday I can join his imaginary freakshow as the man with no tattooes.







*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. 'Tons of headway': I like the sound of that 'tons'. That would be a very cool Xmas present indeed! ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom! Really good to see you! Very cool news about THoD sequel! Wow. And you're already editing. You're so productive, man, that's great! Wow, another Xmas present (see: my comment to _B_A), and this one already unwrapped! Thank you! Everyone, masterful writer and d.l. Dom Lyne has ... well, here he is: 'Also as a little christmas present, I've released my first novel The Mushroom Diaries as a free ebook available here on Smashwords.' Go get your gifts, you lucky ones! Thank you again, D! Have a great Xmas if I don't get to interact with you beforehand. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Nice to see the mutual Schwartzman fandom. I haven't seen 'Listen Up Philip' yet but it intrigues me, story-wise, in theory. ** Keaton, Wow, that was a lightning flash of a overseas trip. Cool that it all went so well. The Bellmers in the Sade show were great, yeah. Man, you did a lot of Paris in your short stint. Yeah, next time we'll figure out a meeting further in advance, and hopefully I won't be editing semi-24/7. Fix your ears, and welcome home! ** Tosh Berman, Cool! ** Sypha, Glad that the post and your experiences crossed paths. I'm of the opinion that Tarantino is an extremely good writer, so, in that case, yes, I would be very interested to read a novel by him as well. Certainly can't blame you for taking a break from 'Les Miserables'. I've taken a break before I even read it, ha ha. ** Kier, Hi. Oh, Kaykay, okay, I'll keep that one revving in my storage bank. You doing the Xmas market today! Awesome! And I actually know of gløgg, I don't know why, and I've never drank it. Yes, I saw your email with the LH Day in my mailbox this morning! That's so exciting! I'm going to open it and set to building it during whatever non-editing time I have today. Thank you so much! No, I haven't gotten the witch zine yet. I'll peel my eyes into an even more peeled state. My day started with editing. We began Scene 2, which takes place in a club at a strange gig, and it looks really good, and we're even going to try to finish it this weekend so we can send it along to the producers, but I'm not sure if we'll be able get it finished by then. So, we did that, and then we took a long, crowded metro trip over to pick up the Buche that we were going to take out to CDG to feast on during the stopover by Kiddiepunk and Oscar B. On our way, Kp texted us. I don't know if you saw in the news yesterday that the air control system for almost the entirety of the UK went out for a while, but he and OB were sitting on their about-to-depart plane when that happened, and he let us know that he didn't know or if they were going to make it to Paris. So Zac and I ended up wandering around in the 15th arr. to kill time, had coffee, ate olive bread and pain chocolate, and then we picked up the Buche, which was big and very heavy. Soon after that, Kp and OB's plane was miraculously cleared for take-off, so we taxied with the Buche in heavy rain and 'the worst traffic of the year' to CDG and eventually met up with them in their room in the Sheraton Hotel, which is this kind of cool, ship-shaped hotel that's right inside the airport. We ate Buche, yum, and we showed them Scene 1, which thankfully they loved, and we went over editing details in it and in Scene 3 with Michael, and we just hung out until about 11 pm and then taxied back to Paris. It was all big fun. Back to editing room today and tomorrow for me. And you? What did the weekend do for and with you? ** Statictick, Hey! Wow, funny you come back on a day when you're in the post itself. Great to see you, duh! Yeah, I'm very glad you're recovering as much as one can after Dusty's passing. That's so sad. Very cool about the vid. Yeah, I mean, if and when on the post, anytime, most gratefully on my end. Cool about the cool and cool sounding new roommate. Love to you too! I hope I'll get you again very, very soon! ** Steevee, Curious what you'll think of the Dumont. ** Right. There's an oldie up there featuring many of the d.l.s who were hanging out here back in those days, some of whom are still here in high standing. Maybe it'll be fun to read that thing. In any case, it's your entertainment until further notice, 'further' being Monday. Have excellent weekends, one and all. See you on Monday.