Stardate 08152003
I fled Los Angeles. Or as I’ve been telling people, I abandoned my life in L.A. and ran away to San Francisco. It is not absolutely true, I’m only running away for three weeks. Nobody is going to miss me. Movies will still get made, celebrities will still show up at events, rock will still roll and the world will spin merrily on its axis completely oblivious to whether I am there to witness it or not.
I actually ran away LAST week and then I was back in L.A. for one single day and I got invited to go back to San Francisco to take a spiritual retreat. “Spiritual” sounds like “vow of silence” or “week of meditation and yoga” but it’s not a working retreat in that I’m not here to finish any kind of creative project, and it’s not exactly a vacation in that I’m not just lazing out by the pool, but I am spending my time recharging my spirit, figuring out what I’m doing with my life and why I’m doing it, working through whatever may be holding me back from grabbing the brass ring and then searching for what I need to move on. Maybe it’s more like a shamanic journey without all the Native American trappings or people with weird sounding names. And nobody is really “leading” it, I’m just “on” it.
So LAST week when I was in San Francisco, I went to a benefit art show for Youth Speaks, a non-profit written and spoken arts organization dedicated to helping young people through programs led by experienced poets and writers. Youth Speaks is the fiscal sponsor of 826 Valencia, the youth writing lab operated by McSweeney’s Press (MAMMOTH TREASURY OF THRILLING TALES edited by Michael Chabon). The art show was at Club 6 in San Francisco at 66 6th Street. Pretty clever, eh? 66 6th Street is at 6th and Mission, otherwise known as “Crack Alley.”
During the Dot.Com Boom ™ when San Francisco was being overhauled by speculative developers, Crack Alley itself was being refurbished for the tech-elite. Seedy dive bars once frequented by the denizens of the rows of transient hotels along Crack Alley who crowded the sidewalks begging for spare change were gutted and transformed into uber-hip “concept” bars. The new residents of San Francisco couldn’t find enough cool places to see, be seen and most importantly, spend all those venture capital dollars.
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The transient hotels were not replaced by high-priced lofts, thus completing the gentrification process, but there were a few attempts by developers to lure the young, hip and flush with cash Dot Commers into the area by buying lofts and throwing seemingly underground, word of mouth parties. If you don’t know any better you’d think you were just being pioneering, rather than socially engineered. So now I have two good reasons for not going down to Crack Alley. Because A) It’s Crack Alley and B) It’s got trendy bars where trendy bars aren’t supposed to be.
I admit to being more than a little prejudiced against the new-school Dot Commers. They were just following economic opportunity (one that doesn’t exist anymore) and doing the best they could, being a stranger in a city now filled with strangers. They were drifting aimless, begging to be corralled, given activity, shown where the watering holes were. But there was something distinctly non-San Francisco about the way they went about it. It was more like Los Angeles phoniness meets Midwestern “aw shucks-ness” wrapped up in that teenage insecurity that makes people try desperately to conform to the status quo. Nobody wants to be left out, uninvited, or be the outsider.
Conformity has never been one of San Francisco’s priorities.
And that cultural divide has only slowly started to melt away amidst the half-built lofts and paper millionaire dreams of a generation with few job options. And about half of those people who moved here between 1998-2000 have moved back to wherever they came from.
The whole thing just all around sucks for everybody.
SCREENING PARTY
Dennis Hensley, who has unintentionally been a regular on the Thom Fowler show lately, staged a live reading of his book SCREENING PARTY with Jennifer Tilly reading as Dr. Beverly Beaverman, the jaded former New Yorker and Freudian analyst. The week before, Kathy Griffin read as Dr. Beaverman and Julie Brown (the comedian, not the “wubba wubba” girl) is supposed to be reading the following week. [Okay, this is hopelessly parenthetical, but who starts out in life hoping to some day become “the wubba wubba girl.” Those fifteen minutes can sometimes cost your whole life.]
Ah. Fame. It’s like a big bubbly champagne bathtub filled with sharks.
The reading took place at the Renberg Theatre at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center on Friday, August 8 and the next one will be August 15 and then I think there is one more on the 22nd. SCREENING PARTY is about the screening parties Hensley had where he invited five of his friends to watch films like PRETTY WOMAN and JAWS and make snarky remarks for BRITISH PREMIERE magazine. It never occurred to me that PRETTY WOMAN is a movie about a whore who gets to go shopping on Rodeo Drive. I once watched San Francisco film critic Jan Wahl ask Garry Marshall if he thought PRETTY WOMAN glorified prostitution. He just said, “Penny likes to make movies that are about how things are, I make movies about how things should be.” In other words, Garry Marshall likes to make fantasy movies. Like a whore who bags a millionaire.
The quips in SCREENING PARTY about this movie are hilarious. Dr. Beaverman says, “All men want a whore, but they only want one that’s been on the job a couple weeks.” I’ve never actually watched PRETTY WOMAN but I remember when it came out on video. I was working at a mall bookstore and we had this enormous cardboard cut-out of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere right at the entrance. That was like, 1991. I had slightly less interest in mainstream movies then than I do now, which is negligible. But Gigaplex Popcorn Flicks are starting to mutate. There is a wider variety of crap to choose from. Nothing super spectacular but at least it’s not the same 3 movies over and over again.
I am so sick of movies. I only want to help make them now. I don’t want to watch them anymore.
I’m tired of “celebrities” and “Hollywood” and all the fawning and glorification and self-importance. I don’t think they move the culture in significant ways. I don’t think there is really much worth in the red carpet parades, the incessant photo-ops, the endorsements, and the magazine covers. What does that really give people? I’m all for making movies and music and putting on shows and entertainment. I’m all about theatre and spectacle and performance. But does anyone really buy Pepsi because Britney Spears hawks it, or shop at the Gap because of Madonna? I think there is something fundamentally wrong with drinking Pepsi because some celebrity does. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with drinking caramel-colored sugar water anyway, but who makes their purchasing decisions based on what their favorite celebrities buys? Did Britney Spears say to herself, “Pepsi is a beverage I believe in.” and then sign the contract? Or did she just hear KA-CHING! William Burroughs ended up selling Nike Shoes, though. I’m still not sure if that was genius or desperation.
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The real worth for a celebrity to get an endorsement deal is not the cash-money paid up front, but Britney Spears™ gets her own free advertising. When you are the product, you need advertising, I guess you can think of entertainment reportage as free advertising for studios and celebrities. The public images are supposed to sell tickets to concerts and movies. If I were a TV talk show, I wouldn’t mention a single event, performer or product unless you paid me to advertise. There is a college entertainment paper called Campus Circle and the cover stories are essentially paid advertising. The story placement is paid for by the artist’s representation. In radio they call it “payola” and it’s illegal although there are hundreds of ways around that law.
Often, the stories about celebrities become the show itself. It’s this part of what I do that fascinates me the most, the show of the show. A red carpet walk is a job for an actor. It seems like it’s the glorious reward for all their hard work getting in the public eye and building up a body of work but it’s just another part of the never-ending work involved in promoting your movies and making yourself a valuable commodity. When you show up on the red carpet, you are not there to be a star, you are there to be the entertainment.
So my favorite part of working a red carpet as a photographer is knowing that everyone on both sides of the velvet rope is working together to create a show. It’s all entertainment. Them, me, you, this.
Even the Oscar telecast is less about honoring Hollywood’s most talented and more about making a high-ratings television show. I’m surprised anyone outside of the entertainment business even cares about the awards shows seeing as how they have little relevance to most people’s lives. Oh yeah, the “stars.” Man, we are so damn celebrity obsessed. I just don’t get it. I’ve been wandering around this business the past few years trying to figure it out. I still haven’t.
Except I was upset that I didn’t get to take a photo of Parker Posey at the premier of FREAKY FRIDAY and I didn’t get to meet Flea from THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS at the premier of STEP INTO LIQUID because I was slaving away on the set of THE HELIX … LOADED, working 60 hours for a mere 100 dollars that they still haven’t paid me (or returned my phone calls). So that’s when I think, “Okay, I kinda get it. These people are exciting BECAUSE they are famous, not because of what they are famous for.”
And it amazes me that everyone has a passionate opinion about celebrities that have nothing to do with their lives. For example, EVERYONE has an opinion about Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. Why are these people thinking that much about what Jennifer Lopez does with her life? Private life as public story is some compelling theme I’m working on that will probably become a book some day.
And my self-appointed job is to translate that excitement to you, the reader, a task at which I am sure I invariably fail. “Oh look, another pointless media personality.”
ISIS OASIS
I only feel this way because I only like writing about, in my non-fiction, whatever is around me at the time and right now I’m on vacation at ISIS OASIS in Sonoma County, Northern California. ISIS OASIS is an actual temple to the Goddess Isis and a retreat center all rolled up into one. It’s also a wild cat sanctuary and exotic bird aviary. We showed up Sunday just in time for the Temple of Isis’ Sunday service. We did a ritual invoking the Goddess Seshat, who is the Goddess of writing and architecture. There was a writing retreat ending that day and me and another writer friend of mine were the only guests that day so I guess Loreon Vigne, who is the proprietor of Isis Oasis and a Priestess of Isis, thought Seshat would be appropriate for church. I’m out here with my friend Francesca De Grandis. Francesca is an author and humorist who is supposed to be taking a vacation but instead is working on her new book and I’ve been having so much fun listening to her read her notes and watch her try out all the different spells and rituals that might end up in the book.
I am learning to sew and I brought a sewing machine along on this “vacation” and I made for Francesca a little mojo bag out of this sheer pink fabric embroidered with red daiseys and the red daiseys have tiny pink seed beads in their centers. It’s byooteefull.
Since Francesca is a witch AND a humorist, hanging out with her can be fun. She went for a walk and found a squashed jack rabbit in the road that had its feet and ears still intact and she convinced to me to cut them off and preserve them. I could only find a serrated kitchen knife that wasn’t that sharp, seeing as how I didn’t have “hunting and skinning” on my to do list. I walked back to where the carcass lay, a bloody pulp pressed into the pavement with just the ears and the feet sticking out and pulled it to the side of the road where I proceeded to hack and saw until the extremities came loose. A good pair of poultry shears would have done the job much quicker and luckily the leg bones were completely crushed. I have never slaughtered an animal. This one was already dead, but there is something much less savory about cutting up a whole animal - fur, bones, blood and all - than buying a choice cut at the grocery store.
I brought the rabbit parts back to our cabin, the “Nesu” house, which means “Royalty.” Those years in 4-H came in handy right about then. I washed the blood off, trimmed off the meat and rubbed salt onto any exposed flesh to cure and disinfect and then hung them up to dry in the attic.
And then Francesca tells me she wants to get stung by a bee. She’s planning on raising bees and the first thing you are supposed to do is get stung by a bee to see if you are allergic to bee venom. So we pinpointed the location of the nearest hospital, just in case, and went bee hunting and didn’t find a single one. I suggested that we just find a bee farm. Francesca didn’t know that a bee dies after it stings and she was a little upset about that. So she made a wee prayer for a sacrificial bee who would help her figure out if she was allergic to bee venom. So far no bee has appeared. Lots of wasps, though.
While we were searching for bees we wandered on to the next door neighbor’s property. The yard was filled with giant piles of things, like a pile of cardboard boxes, a pile of old computers, a pile of car parts. The porch was stuffed with junk and while we were walking around a ragged old man with long white hair and a turquoise bead bracelet comes out asking us what we were doing. We explained and he showed us where the property line was. As we were walking away, he kept making jokes like “BEE well,” and “I hope you find what you BEE lookin’ for.”
Fuckin’ hippies.
BURNING MAN
I did manage to get a ticket to Burning Man. Thank you Doug Arthur for your generous support of my seemingly slack-ass gypsy bohemian lifestyle. Our camp, YOU ARE THAT PIG, is finishing up the details on our miniature golf course. We have been having a hell of a time trying to find putters and a search of the thrift stores in the San Francisco area got us exactly 2. We debated getting drivers. The consensus was that if you put a driver into someone’s hand, they are going to drive the ball, rather than putt and concussions will abound. Francesca told me about this Salvation Army complex near Isis Oasis and we went over there and they had a whole shitload of cast-off golf equipment and I found 13 putters for which I only had to pay five dollars because I told the guy pricing the stuff that it was for an “art project” and nobody ever was going to buy old, rusted golf clubs.
I haven’t told the others yet but I’m sure they will be pleased to know that we now have putters. We have also decided that the 600 gallons of water we will need to bring for our camp will be better shipped in 30 gallon barrels instead of 55 gallon barrels. Yes, that is a lot of water. I’m still working on my shaving strategy. I’ll have to filter the gray water through panty hose to catch the hairs and then dump the water into our evaporation pond.
There aren’t too many places where I get to be queer, pagan, freakish, cosmic and costumey without any judgmental stares or lots of explaining taking place on my part. If I were like some of my friends, I would stay in that little freakazoid bubble world rather than venture out into the ten lane cultural highway that is Hollywood. I’m surprised I haven’t become road kill like my little jack rabbit friend, having my hands and ears cut off and dried and displayed as a novelty item. “Look what wandered out into the road.”
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