Twenty Third & Seventh

The '70s -- America's low point

This is telling. Lots of our preferred boldface names, most with Hotel Chelsea connections, are being used to illustrate an alleged 'moral lowpoint' in American culture.  The date that is zeroed in on is 1973. And here's me thinking that 72 would be one of the more exciting years to time travel to. 

One reads the book before leaping to conclusions, of course, but I see problems with this argument already.  It clearly operates on the false distinction between high and low culture.  It would take some convincing before I accepted that Edie Sedgwick and Richard Nixon can both be cited as moral low points without making several arbitary judgments along the way. I'm even more interested how the two are connected. Same year, same continent is only co-incidence.  Connecting them would seem to be a difficult path at best.

Link: The '70s -- America's low point.

According to Andreas Killen's new book, "1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America," the decade has had an outsize impact on American culture. Killen, an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York, locates the unlikely year of 1973, which he refers to as a low point in American history, as a watershed year. Arguing that a number of current cultural trends had their loci in the early 1970s, and especially in 1973, Killen explores some of the bizarre and sometimes overlooked events of the era: skyjackings, POWs, conspiracy theorists, cults, the early forerunners of reality TV and Andy Warhol's obsession with celebrities. Using Nixon's paranoia and the growing Watergate scandal as a thread throughout the year, Killen writes an entertaining, if not entirely convincing, cultural study.

The book works well in its primary goal of tracking cultural trends, and ends in 1976 with the Patty Hearst affair and trial -- the ultimate amalgamation of celebrity, POWs, conspiracies, cults and reality TV. However, those expecting a full-out historical analysis of the early '70s will not find it here. Killen is heavily focused on the arts and personalities. For example, there are extended discussions on movies of the period, Warhol's superstar Edie Sedgwick and the glam rock band the New York Dolls, but the OPEC oil embargo and its devastating effect on the economy are barely mentioned.

LiZa watch: LiZa says Cher would win contest to determine No. 1 gay icon

Link: Liza Minnelli says Cher would win contest to determine No. 1 gay icon.

The lady is too humble by far.  'Gay icon', as disputeable a notion as it may be, has a very clear hierarchy.  Nobody sits higher than JudyG.  LiZa is Judy's daughter with the added bonus of being more camp [Sonntag definition] than her mother ever managed.

Liza was born into icondom, and, unlike the Luft spawn, she has embraced it with vigour.  Streisand can't be compared, her icondom is self-made. 

Streisand lacks the compelling back story to be a real icon, she is a recent arrival in the world of celebrity where LiZa was born into nobility.  If Streisand wants enduring icon status she'd better get a drug / mental health problem and die dramatically pretty soon.  Sucking up to Presidents doesn't help even if she does chirp for the lesser of two evils.

I'm at a loss as to why Cher is here?  Because she wears bad wigs?  Repackaging yourself because only fags are stupid enough to buy tickets to your concerts does not make one an icon.  It merely confirms a skilful marketing manouver.

I'd suggest Bette Midler might be a better third place holder here.  Midler, at very least, can claim close ties to the revolutionary NY fags of the 60s / 70s and to have lived within very queer fringe communities.  When you get around to reading Jackie Curtis: Superstar in A Housedress, you'll even find out where she got the inspiration for Delores Delago, the toast of Chicago. 

Bette Midler channels Delores Delago?  Did Delores wash ashore at the Chelsea piers?  She has certainly been seen in the neigbourhood.

NEW YORK (AP) - In a contest among Liza Minnelli, Cher and Barbra Streisand to determine who's the No. 1 gay icon, Cher would win - or so Minnelli says.

"I think probably Barbra and maybe even Cher and myself in school felt like outcasts because we didn't have standard looks," Minnelli told Newsweek for its issue on newsstands Monday.

"Maybe what a gay icon is, is a person who is rooted for - in other words, cheered on - by people who feel different," the 60-year-old Minnelli said as her 1972 concert Liza With a Z aired on Showtime and comes out this week on DVD.

But being a gay icon doesn't necessarily mean "gaydar" comes with the turf. She says she didn't find out until two weeks after she married her first husband, Peter Allen, that he was gay.

"Honey, I was 17 when I met him," Minnelli told Newsweek. "But I was the last one to see him before he died because we stayed friends, and that was tough."

She may be a legend, but Minnelli said she mingles with all the classes.

"One of my best friends is a taxi driver; another is a maintenance man," she said. "I go everywhere. People are wonderful. They say hi and I say hi, and we keep going. That's New York."

Bohemia is Dead? On the PoMo-ing of Sydney.

Five star reading from the locals this morning. Elizabeth Farrelly is a writer who does a lot around the built environment and development issues.  This slightlyy melancholic piece in which she tries to force memories of a realer Sydney from our denial addled brains is recommended for anyone living where fringe communities are under pressure. This was a more interesting city until the yuppie plague began. 

Love song to the gritty city

From wharves to warehouses, there is much to admire in our dirty old town, writes Elizabeth Farrelly.

We know this, really. We know that cleaned-up sani-town is dull even for tourists, certainly dull for locals; that The Rocks and the Cross, Darling Harbour and Walsh Bay were all more interesting back when they were real, working places. And that in our ruthless overcleansing we have lost some subtle but irreplaceable flavour, something essentially ours that, just maybe, we could have kept.

All this sucks the blood from a town. And yet, even as we regret it, we go on doing it. Urban cleansing is full steam ahead in the Cross, where not only the hookers and the hooked are disappearing from the expensively repaved streets, but also the underfed artists and emigre bohemians, who made Australia's most densely packed urban quarter what it was.

When a city's artist, or bohemian, or Aboriginal communities get moved on, they don't simply reassemble somewhere else, in suburban Ashfield or Botany. Deprived of the special inner-city conditions that sustained them (such as density, access or value) they simply cease to exist. The individuals may survive but the communities, and the richness they offer a city, die.

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

SAGging under the weight of nostalgia.

My time in New York really fucked some sections of my brain up.  I'm sure that people like me aren't meant to see and do the kinds of things that I ultimately saw and did.

I just caught a little of the RedCarpet segment of the SAG Awards.  In comparison to the Tonys it is so very painfully tacky.  The stars are bigger names, and I can't imagine that I would ever be allowed to walk that Red Carpet.  Further to the point, I wouldn't bother dressing to walk their carpet unless I happened to be in the neighborhood.  The flight to LA is way too exhausting for that kind of a pay-off.  The 'stars', names or not, could never equal the thrill of walking the same carpet as Barbara Cook and Chita Rivera.

It isn't without reason that I haven't been further into LA than the airport.  The place not only terrifies me,  I simply can't imagine what I would do there.  Once I'd checked into Chateau Marmont, all the time resenting how much further the money would go at Hotel Chelsea, I would be lost.  I would like to find Roy Rogers park to do the cliche leaving the men's toilet block shot and the High School that is Rydell High in Grease and any number of schools in any number of movies, televisuals and videos.

I think that all that 'Walk of Fame' stuff would induce vomiting.  I could well reach fatal levels of boredom on the Paramount tour which would be a case of riding a ride I have seen in movies, that simulates movies. I think I'd know when to expect Jaws to surface...  I'd love to see the Paramount gates in real life but, in my heart, I know they can't possibly live up to the image of Norma Desmond arriving for her meeting with Mr De Mille.  PoMo hype is all I would expect to find.  A very pale imitation of what those gates meant when Sunset Boulevard was shot is all that can remain now that post-modernity has had it's brutish way with us.

Being a person who chooses not to drive sort of eliminates LA anyway, a revelation in itself. 

Arriving for an awards ceremony in full daylight looks tacky.  It's the sort of thing that happens in a Sydney Summer.  All the trashy people look even trashier wearing full evening wear at mid-afternoon.  Despite the amount of lavish frocks and over-paid stylists set loose on this mob they look like an alien race has descended. 

It isn't real.  We need more realness. 

Please?

Oprah's Backdown.

As loath as I am to admit it, Oprah often surprises me in her public exercise of conscience and her immense influence.  I'm very pleased to see that she has finally taken a firm position against A Million Little Pieces.  From where I see it, it was the only ethical thing she could do. 

Herewith some commentary on the Million Little Pieces and JT Leroy affairs edited from a personal email.  Some of my concerns are of less or no import now that Oprah has spoken for truth.

Americans laugh at me but I think she'd make a great Vice President when Hillary takes over the Whitehouse.

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The JT Leroy thing is mildly interesting.  There's nothing especially clever if there's some larger point about the authenticity of authorship or such going on, that's old news.  I read Sara and put it down unimpressed, even a little repulsed at the way it seemed to roll in the shit of the character's degradation.  From the text, I did sense something was up but I was miles off track.  To me it read like a PoMo-ed John Rechy, except it was insubstantial and terribly pretentious.  At the same time it lacked the sexually charged Times Sq neon-sleaze of City of Night. 

That's my Shavian, but I do like things said directly and all the hopping about over racoon penis bones worried me.  As did the glorification of a pretty ugly scene- that should have been where I tuned in.  But--  I just accepted that Courtney had met him, Shirley Manson talked about him with me...  in some sense JT Leroy is real.  How the fuck they got away with it baffles me. Wigs!  It's all in the wigs.

The interesting thing to me is how fervently people wanted to believe in JT.  We all love a victim, don't we? :-)   The Million Pieces thing concerns me more.  The willingness to accept a blur between fact and fiction is too dangerous to countenance. We live surrounded by so many lies that we can't afford to open the floodgates betwwen the fiction and non-fiction shelves.  It's not like he's just embellished a bit as Oprah wants us to buy, the Smoking Gun articles show it to be way beyond a bit of metaphor and poetic license.  It's equally worrying that the defense seems to second-foot on a story about how the book inspires people and gives them hope.  They'll be *really* inspired people when they realise that the happy ending is just as fictional as the content.  According to the book, one can just walk away from crack addiction. Three weeks at a nice rehab and it's all over, thankyou Martha Stewart.  In the real world it just isn't like that.

It's bizarre to think Isherwood had to hide memoirs as fiction and now one has to disguise fiction as truth.  Doubleplusungood times three....