Twenty Third & Seventh

george michael is in trouble again. couldn't happen to a more deserving ponce! After all the shit he has given Boy George for being 'too gay' over the years I'd be happy to see his career destroyed.  There is, IMO, absolutely no excuse for public sex of this kind in this day and age.  As Boy so wisely observed-- 'can't he use a computer'?

why do banks take 48 hours to process a payment TO a credit card while they can deduct money instantaneously?

can anybody explain the difference between an incursion and an invasion? if a tank rolled into my neighborhood i think the semantics would become secondary.

we hear reports that visitor rooms at the Chelsea have gone up in price.  a correspondent writes:

they have now gone from $250.00 to $275.00  Man oh man.  They are pricing out all the people
who made that hotel what it was!  Pretty soon the only people staying there will be rich boring tourists or Britney Spears.

and we're inclined to agree.  Negotiate like a New Yorker is my advice, it worked in knocking the price down for us.  Just be prepared for a stark room!

Liza Minnelli playing a whacked-out masturbation therapist is a freaky thought

I am My Own Wife is headed my way in the original production.  This review from the .au press has a major spoiler- be careful.

Still depressed at the idea that CBGBs will be gone forever.  An example of what happens when one becomes a parody of one's self.

Second Life is an overwhelmingly expansive and conceptually dense virtual world allegedly taking the world by storm.  It's worth a look.  I suspect that I'm a bit too old to grasp the paradigm.

Of the 147 million Americans on the Internet, 12 million have blogs.

Don't Waste Time Here

Our buddy Ed Hamilton's weekly piece in the Huffington post looks at what happens as Manhattan becomes too expensive for real people, go have a look.

Cowboys and Indians and to Hell With Art [extract]

I believe that, as creative people, we at the Chelsea Hotel offer, not just cultural products, but an alternative mode of living in, and of conceptualizing the world. This has nothing to do with any sort of political orientation on the part of our residents -- who run the gamut from right to left -- but in fact everything to do with an apolitical orientation in which difference is tolerated and respected. As the goal of art and literature is the understanding of self and others, so the creative person cultivates a life of self-reflection and empathy. In the Living with Legends blog, I often joke that this hotel is filled with nuts, and in fact we are all crazy by the standards of the larger society. But that doesn't rule out the fact that perhaps we have something valuable to say to that society.

Aghast! Cultural critique from the arts sector

Link: Sydney Opera House > Blowback.

Now I'm really confused.  Every indication would be that this is some form of artistic rebellion against the current order. 

But surely not in Sydney?  Sydney-siders only get upset if there is insufficient froth on their cafe latte. 

Blowback
26 - 29 April
Presenter: The Studio at Sydney Opera House
Venue: The Studio

not yet it’s difficult

Using the body and video as double agents, not yet it’s difficult investigates the dark and violent world of a future Australia subject to a new imperial master.

BLOWBACK tracks the story of cultural activists who hack into Australia’s joint communications facility. In the hope it will incite a popular uprising, the group encrypts images from a banned Australian soap-opera onto the facility’s operating system.

Inspired by George Bush’s Project For The New American Century, not yet it’s difficult crosses technology with flesh, acting with noise, comedy with commotion and critique with innuendo to create a clear and present danger for a future Australia.

Written and directed by not yet it’s difficult artistic director David Pledger and made in collaboration with the company, BLOWBACK is agitprop tele-theatre, part science fiction, part documentary and part absurdist metaphor.

[n.b. joint communications facility is a euphemism for American satellite receiving site at Pine Gap, so very in the middle of nowhere that just to get there requires desert survival skills.  'Civilians' are not allowed within a 120km exclusion zone.  Nobody knows exactly what goes on there but we do know that the US satellite network would be 'blind' to large parts of the planet for several hours a day without it.]

Free Symbia!

cd review from: thestranger.com

I've been merciless enough to reprint the entire review here, it is too easily lost at the original site.

I'd like to gain insight into my Patty Hearst obsession. I'm not concerned about it, just curious.  The SLA certainly don't appeal as 'revolutionaries' any more than that repugnant moral black hole called Valerie Solanis.  An imbecile with a semi-literate 'manifesto' [or should it have been a womynafesto, Val?] is not inherently revolutionary. Like a lot of dubious fascinations I share this one with John Waters so it must be OK.

I put the SLA with the Manson family, Altamont, the Grateful Dead, pubic lice, Jonestown and macrame candle-holders as the predictable outcome of the self-indulgent ways of the west coast hippies. 

The question that I have never resolved is this. If Stockholm Syndrome is real, how can one demonstrate that all social arrangements are not the result of the same instinct?  Collaborating with your captor to survive sounds a lot like contemporary capitalism to me.

Symbionese Liberation Album

(Disgruntled)

The title Symbionese Liberation Album reflects Third Sight's mind state. According to MC Jihad's liner notes, he and DJ/producers Dufunk and ex-Invisibl Skratch Pikl D-Styles are bound by symbiosis and intraband chemistry. "My family attended one of the food giveaway programs that the SLA demanded as ransom for Patty Hearst," writes the Bay Area–based Jihad of his experiences with the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army, whose violent tactics inspired this album. It's also a nod to the raw, aggressive music Third Sight makes.

Forming in the early '90s, Third Sight issued a handful of recordings—including 1998's Golden Shower Hour. They then slowly collected material for a second album while dealing with their respective careers and lives. The resulting Symbionese Liberation Album sounds as if it arrived through a time warp from 1995. The production quality is strictly bedroom level, which will be anathema to electronic gear geeks and manna to fans of dusty, golden-age hiphop.

Symbionese Liberation Album is hard and dark, with lumbering, bass-heavy beats laced with D-Styles's ear-lacerating scratches. Dealing with social and cultural affairs via dense metaphors conveyed in a stream-of-consciousness flow, Jihad's a cut above the average battle rapper. On "Tonto" he rhymes, "Your flow is like Jim Crow/My rhyme is like busing/Segregationists crushing my male gender/But they're tender like a young pig suckling/My sound is underground, Dig Dug tunneling/Deep like Aquaman, fish summoning." MOSI REEVES

Mail from Our Readers

My unprovoked and increasingly spiteful attack on Sienna Wowow-Sedgwick has attracted comment:

from our in box

I can get on a rampage about people "playing" artists or creative people--the ones who suffered in life or went astray somehow. And these spoiled Hollywood people come waltzing in, and it's a game. It's like "playing weird" and then going back to your "safe european home."

They posture and it pisses me off.Like if someone tells me how much they love Van Gogh, I always want to say "yeah? sure you do...you won't even go down to [insert edgy street] street but you "love" a painter who sliced off his ear, lived in a mental hospital, drank paint thinner and shot himself in the stomach?...but you won't go down and visit the LIVING artists who are around here? geeze..that pisses me off.

I love Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, someone who died from heroin overdose in 2002--and people who criticize him for 'letting' heroin ruin his life. yeah, that's easy for someone to say when they don't FEEL anything ...uh, I better get of my soap box for the moment.

I MISS THE CHELSEA!!

So this is Liberation?

It's Mardi Gras time in Sydney. Pardon me if I pass out from the overwhelming excitement.

The story of how an act of political defiance turned into another crass marketing opportunity is still something that causes me some personal discomfort.  That, I suppose, is the cost of caring.

In a rare gesture of immodesty, I shall quote myself from a long email written a few weeks ago.  I'm confident the original recipient won't mind.

First of all, though, this is what it has come to.  The night where 'the gay and lesbian community' inc puts on a show about 'our' 'identity' and this is what we get....

Drug warning overshadows Mardi Gras. TONIGHT'S Sydney Mardi Gras revellers have been warned of the dangers of illicit drugs, following an alarming spike in GHB poisonings.

NSW Health Minister John Hatzistergos says one Sydney hospital registered a 53 per cent increase in patients with GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) poisoning during February compared with the previous two years

I feel an immense ambivalence reading that.  It doesn't surprise me.  It does concern me.  As fucked up as the 80s were, we weren't taking GhB and falling over at random.  That would not have been fabulous.  Standards existed and plummeting into a semi-coma was considered bad manners.

What went on at the party after the parade was always bacchanalian by any standards.  Perhaps what has changed now is that people go in order to take drugs and flip out.  That's all wrong in my scheme of things. 

A party is about seeing people, looking fabulous, feeling fabulous and letting go of worries for a few hours.  What I see today is a hardcore of people who go on pharmaceutical odysseys of astounding ambition.  There is nothing that exists beyond them and their particular groove.  Some of this is the unspeakable vanity and arrogance of Sydney homosexuals.  With meth so in favour and all the disassociatives they chuck in, they seem like zombie people.  At least a freak on a speed rave is entertaining for a while.

I predicted a moral backlash at the height of the 80s excess, even as I squandered everything including reason in the quest for that elusive moment of transcendence on the dancefloor.   The pursuit of fabulousness was an end in itself.  Andy Warhol drew the template and then died when we needed his guidance most.  Everything went of the leash.  Way, way, off the leash.

For me, life as an endless party had to stop.  Others were stopped by the sheer gravity of too much partying.  It was when heroin made it's predictable debut that the death became too much for me.  Like in most post-hippie counter-cultural circles, the arrival of heroin in mine signaled the end. 

History would show that we had inherited the Studio 54 mentality from our elders, it was a way of life very literally dying off around me.  The wisdom of retrospect allows me to see that to keep dancing and keep behaving self-destructively WAS a strategy of defiance.  We were on a sinking ship, but at least we were having a damn good time listening to the orchestra as she sank.

I wish that I could claim absolute indifference to what is happening tonight.  I can't.  I have shed blood, sweat and tears in the name of Mardi Gras.  I watched a community of people who believed in something build an organisation that we then lost to careerists and the slow creep of commercialisation.

I will inevitably stop at some time tonight and cry for the passed.   The brave, the lost, the doomed, the true heroes and even a few ordinary people who I loved too much to lose so young.  All of them were too fabulous for this grey world, God lifted the velvet rope to the VIP room for them.   

Here's to the fabulous people!  Now, more than ever, the world needs freaks, perverts and weirdoes.

I'll see you all next year at the Hallowe'en Parade.

immodest self quoting

Contemporary Will & Grace queers take so much for granted that they don't even have to understand how much of that freedom they owe to people like Jackie & Holly and the Chelsea queens who history show to have been the real Stonewall rock-hurlers. [I've often wondered if a part of the Christopher St  thing is how 'close' it is to HC on the subway? That route must have been a major connection between the Chelsea and the Village.]

My most personal experience of this po-mo poisoned generation is the whole Rocky Horror thing.  I was, at age 14,  in the first Australian cinema cast.  We only had mail contact with the 8th St crew in NY [yes, we were probably the second in the world!] and evolved a completely different way of 'doing' Rocky. 

At that time, the archaic laws in this state allowed the police to harass us beyond reason.  We endured 3 mass arrests and all this crazy shit about not having less than three gender appropriate garments on at any one time.

They would shut down the film to search all 870 people, we sold out every week in those days,  and it was awful and scary but it was a part of being alive and being... dare I use, 'progressive'? We were too young to articulate it but there was action from a core of belief in something. 

The last time that I went to 'anniversary show' where the old wood regathers to nostalge I was repulsed.  Two nasty little twinks sat and very purposefully let me hear them deconstruct how overweight I am [I'm clinically underweight!], what I was wearing,  the whole scene.

After the screening, once I'd been IDed as a VIP, the very same children oozed false charm at me and tried tried to persuade me to take them to the grown-ups after-party.  I've no doubt at all that one or the other of them would have gone down for a laminate. That in itself doesn't matter.  It's quietly knowing that the little shits owe so very much of it to people who have known courage that they could only ever equate with their last waxing that tires me.

And then, I saw that one can now buy mass-produced Rocky Horror 'Halloween costumes'. How much more corporatised and sanitised could things gets?

The same years were the early years of the unworthily famous Mardi Gras- when we were still illegal and it was still a gesture of defiance.   It never occurred to me not to participate and, when the TV cameras pick you from the crowd, Monday morning at an Anglican School for Boys can be pretty tough. 

Nothing stopped us pushing anyway. 

There is nothing left to the parade now except a stream of cliches pouring along the road.  This year was the final blow for any sense of political significance at all when they finally sold everything to corporate sponsors. MG long since lost any personal appeal and is always accompanied by a numbing sense of totally not belonging to whatever has formed from the monster we set free.  I suspect I don't have to quote Lou Reed Halloween Parade to you but I will just because it says something I can't reach.

Our history has done so well at forgetting that it was the ultra-marginal Stonewall queens who fought back- the trannies, the speed-junkies and proto-punks. Walking Christopher St late at night and realising suddenly that there were no cobblestones where I was walking chilled me.  It all came crashing home how much it meant.  I walked back to the Chelsea and so many other people who must have taken that walk played in my head. I'm sure I sang Walk on the Wildside with my own lyrical variations for others like Brigid and Andrea and Taylor- the real freaks.

Renee Ricard was loitering around the lobby as ever and... it was too symbolic.  I wanted some profound way to say thankyou but instead I added to my mystique by tearing up at him and making up a dumb story about bad news from home and rushing off.  Maybe it's better not to say that stuff anyway.

Halloween Parade fron Lou Reed's NY album.

Theres a down town fairy singing out "proud mary"
As she cruises christopher street
And some southern queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the badlands meet

This halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you

Theres a greta garbo and an alfred hitchcock
And some black jamaican stud
Theres five cinderellas and some leather drags
I almost fell into my mug

Theres a crawford, davis and a tacky cary grant
And some homeboys lookin for trouble down here from the bronx

But there aint no hairy and no virgin mary
You won't hear those voices again
And johnny rio and rotten rita
Youll never see those faces again

This halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you

Theres the born again losers and the lavender boozers
And some crack team from washington heights
The boys from avenue b and the girls from avenue d
A tinkerbell in tights

This celebration somehow get me down
Especially when I see youre not around

Theres no peter pedantic saying things romantic
In latin, greek or spic
Theres no three bananas or brandy alexander
Dishing all their tricks

Its a different feeling that I have today
Especially when I know you?ve gone away

There's a girl from soho with a teeshirt saying "i blow"
Shes with the "jive five 2 plus 3"
And the girls for pay dates are giving cut rates
Or else doing it for free

The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my door
And I dont want to hear it anymore

No consolations please for feelin funky
I got to get my head above my knees
But it makes me mad and mad makes me sad
And then I start to freeze

In the back of my mind I was afraid it might be true
In the back of my mind I was afraid that they meant you

The halloween parade
At the halloween parade
At the halloween parade
See you next year, at the halloween parade

Don't Ask, Don't Pose for Pornos

This in intriguing, perfect titilation material. 

AP are reporting on a busted gay-porn ring that used models from the Fort Bragg Base.  I suspect that these men may have misunderstood the famous 'don't ask, don't tell' rule.  Being seen sucking on a juicy big dick on the interwebs could be considered telling. 

I can see the spin-off telemovie now, Conduct Unbecuming.

But really, who would ever have thought that a porn site advertising 'real US military' actually featured real US military?  Perhaps I'm a cynical X-er, I would have expected to find a few siliconified, depilated, LA 'out of work actors' poking their members out of army fatigues and feigning butch.

An experiment in typing 'gay military' into google images led to this kind of outcome.  Lots of out of work actors with prominent tanlines waving their reproductive organs about.  Have a look where the 'models wanted' link leads.  These people do not appear to be army to me...   [n.b. XXX site. DEFINITELY not work-safe. Especially if you work for the military.]

Right now, hundreds of thousands of queens will be trolling about the interwebs looking for this site in some kind of naive hope that the military haven't entirely vanished it.  I'm going to wait awhile until someone publishes the collected pictures at another, altogether different, site.  That's the magic of the interwebs.

From AP:

ARMY CHARGES 7 WITH HAVING SEX ON GAY PORN SITE
by: Estes Thompson, The Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The Army has recommended that seven 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers be discharged following allegations they engaged in sex acts shown on a gay pornographic Web site.

Three soldiers face courts-martial on charges of sodomy, pandering and engaging in sex acts for money. Four others received nonjudicial punishments, according to a statement released by the military Friday.

The charges do not mention the name of the site, but the division had previously been investigating allegations that soldiers appeared on a gay pornography Web site. A spokesman for the division said the charges were a result of that investigation.

The military-themed Web site did not make any direct reference to the division or Fort Bragg, a sprawling post about 70 miles south of Raleigh.

"As far as we're concerned, it's isolated to the unit, and our investigation determined that these seven individuals were the only ones" involved, said 82nd Airborne spokesman Maj. Thomas Earnhardt.

The charges indicate the soldiers' behavior is "a much more serious matter than just their sexual orientation," said Steve Ralls, a spokesman for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a legal group that helps gays and lesbians in the military.

"I'm not going to make excuses for service members who are taking part in sexual conduct for money," said Ralls. "It would be absolutely criminal regardless of whether they were heterosexual or gay."

Earnhardt said the three soldiers charged under military law had been appointed military attorneys, but he said the lawyers would be unavailable for comment on Friday.

The three soldiers who face courts-martial are: Spc. Richard T. Ashley, Pfc. Wesley K. Mitten and Pvt. Kagen B. Mullen. The Army did not release their ages or hometowns, but said all seven paratroopers were members of the 2nd Battalion of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

An arraignment was scheduled for March 7.

The other four soldiers who received nonjudicial penalties were not identified. Their punishments included reduction to the rank of private, 45 days of restriction to the unit area, 45 days of extra duty and forfeiture of a month's pay.

The registered owner of the Web site's domain name lists an address in Fayetteville, the city that adjoins Fort Bragg. A phone number listed for the registered owner was not in service Friday, and e-mails to the owner have been regularly returned as undeliverable.

The 15,000 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne are among the Army's most elite soldiers, having volunteered to serve in a unit that trains to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours.

The military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy states that "homosexual orientation alone is not a bar to service, but homosexual conduct is incompatible with military service." Service members who violate the policy are removed from the military.

Abort the Loonie Right!

This is indicative of just how stupid Australian politics is getting.  Gasp in wonder as conservatives confuse RU486 with Muslims and announce that 'Australians' are aborting 'themselves' out of exsitence?

Ms Vale has caused a furore by tying debate over the abortion drug RU486 with   published comments by an imam saying Australia would be a Muslim state in 50 years. She said Australians were aborting themselves out of existence and at the current rate of 100,000 a year "that's five million potential Australians we won't have here."

I bet she'd cry if hit with a complicated idea like a Muslim Australian wanting to take RU486 in full hijab.

Jackie Curtis found in Carrie's Box! Superstar in a Housedress. The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis

on: Superstar in a Housedress. The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis by Craig
Highberger.

The first of my 'Jackie Curtis pack' arrived in Australia earlier this week. Some complications mean that we have only recently been able to access said package but, wow, the wait was worth it.

Upon opening the book, we were immediately drawn into what is most certainly one of the most significant contributions to the literature examining the world of Warhol and the very many talented people who surrounded him yet published.  At least a couple of hours passed as I did an academic 'block-read' of the book, the new material to be had is catnip for obsessives!

At first glance, the book appears to echo the infamous Stein: Edie book, where witnesses are interviewed and sewn into an 'in their own words' history.

An inspection of the text rapidly challenges that perception.  The Stein book
was a nasty hatchet-job.  JC Superstar [as the book will henceforth be known] is anything but nasty.  It is warm, thoughtful and intricately structured. The dark cloud of exploitation that hovers over some works has been blown away to allow us to see our subject in full light.  Highberger has been associated with the Warhol gang since 1972 and has clearly earned a truckload of trust and goodwill. Highberger isn't beyond implicating himself in the goings-on, the surest sign of good intent.

This is not to say that the book lacks substance, this is no Hallmark Channel portrait of Curtis, at several points the book can be quite gut-wrenchingly real about the uglier parts of life on the edge.  The gutter glamour aesthetic that so propelled the great triumvirate of Curtis, Woodlawn & Darling inevitably reflects in the book where we share some incredible highs and equally unbearable lows.

The people who have chosen to speak with Highberger attest to his tenacity as a researcher.  Simply tracking down the broad range of interviewees suggests a very interesting personal phone book indeed! What quickly becomes apparent is the level of trust operating as the interviewees appear to tell their stories.  Participants include Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro, Lily Tomlin, Paul  Morrisey, Penny Arcade, Harvey Fierstein, my mate Michael Mustgo, Leee Black Childers, Sylvia Miles, John Vaccaro, Taylor Mead and so very many more names of significance.  Also present in the text are less prominent names who knew Jackie well including relatives and collaborators.

At the very core of the book is Curtis himself.  Highberger has included Curtis quotes and extracts from Jackie's writings that focus the work and bring a poignant immediacy to the book.  In my mind's eye, the book could so easily 'take place' in the Chelsea lobby.  I can picture the assorted contributors gathered in the early hours to drink Starbucks with a shot of Scotch atop and fondly remember Curtis.  [In the bitchiest way possible, of course!] The structure of the book and the content of the interviews create such a sense of immediacy that I have left the book from my first zoom through feeling almost as if I know Curtis personally.  I certainly know a lot more about one of the less written about characters from that remarkable time.

JC Superstar has pushed it's way to the head of my terrifyingly crowded 'to be read' shelf.  Having taken only a taste I'm counting the hours to having the freedom to lock myself in my room, unplug the phone, close the blinds and think that I'm Jackie Curtis for a day...

Jackie in His Barbra Wig, Maxs Kansas City, 1973.
photographed by Craig Highberger

Other things:

I am aware that a few of you are well ahead of me on all this and already know the book, film and CD backwards, I beg the indulgence of your patience.

Superstar in a Housedress originated as a documentary on film. That documentary is included as a bonus in current issues of the subsequent book JC Superstar.  The book, in turn, acts to supplement the material that couldn't be accommodated in the film. All commentary here relates to the book, I've yet to reach the DVD.

Over the next couple of weeks I will endeavour to publish an extracted morsel from the book every so often.  Don't imagine that this excuses you from ordering a copy, we don't do spoilers at 23rd and 7th.

Also included in the package was the CD transfer of a recording session Curtis did in 1968, Who Are You?.  The CD is another fascinating artefact in itself.  commentary will follow. Ordering details are available HERE.  Only a small number of copies are available.

Please, nobody even suggest that I post MP3s from Who Are You. My ethical
position on this is contradictory but firm. I'll rip off EMI but I am not willing to deprive the rightful parties, in this case one imagines Jackie's estate, of their royalties from this small, independently issued recording.

In response to earlier questions, I absolutely never endorse something at this blog unless I do so from utter conviction.  I have never received free goods in exchange for editorial or any other inducement that could be perceived as compromising the integrity of my commentary. 

This should not be taken to mean that gifts and cash are unwelcome.

USE THE SIDEBAR LINKS TO SECURE COPIES OF THE BOOK & DVD PAIRING, THE JACKIE CURTIS MINI-ALBUM AND LIMITED JC SUPERSTAR POSTERS SIGNED BY HOLLY AND THE AUTHOR, CRAIG HIGHBERGER

Dead Art

British artist Damien Hirst will curate an exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery in November comprising works of art taken from his private collection.

Legendary actor Richard Burton, who died in 1984, is to be resurrected in digital format for the stage version of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds

Celebrity Big Brother stars Pete Burns and Preston saw their new singles enter the UK top five following their stint on the C4 reality TV show.  A re-release of the 1980s Dead or Alive track, You Spin Me Round, by Burns entered the chart at number five.

Former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell made her first trip to the Sundance Film Festival to debut the documentary All Aboard! Rosie’s Family Cruise. The film, which was commissioned by HBO (a division of Time's parent company, Time Warner) and will air on the cable channel April 6, profiles gay families aboard a 2004 cruise from New York City to the Caribbean that was organized by O’Donnell and her partner Kelli O'Donnell. Rosie farted at TIME about the challenges of gay parenting.