EVERYBODY WANTS A CHEAPY
For all of you thalwarts who keep emailing me wanting to know who won the highly coveted Cheapy Award,here is some of the text for the 1st Annual Cheapy handed out at the Berlinale Film Festival at the Gossip Studio. More information on the winners will be forthcoming.

The Jack Smith Life as Art CHEAPy Underground Uber Alles Award.
This Award acknowledges the necessity of being exotic, creative, and bewitching in daily life whether engaging in the banal or the exceptional. For CHEAP
Evelyn Evi Russler
is a model of inventive, artistic living.

We cite just one example that of course can't even begin to address the multi-faceted charms of this budding filmmaker and cultural savant, but we hope it will elucidate one aspect of her life-affirmative presence and her inspirational savvy.

One night when the deliciously inebriated Evi
was riding home from a CHEAP event with the helmet-less DJ Nancy on her motorcycle, she was stopped by the cops and arrested. Taken to prison and strip searched, Evi nevertheless managed, with cunning charm, to hide and retain the contraband.

Ladies and Gentleman, the Jack Smith Life as Art CHEAPy Underground Uber Alles Award goes to Evelyn Evi Russler

***

The Thelma Ritter Firecracker CHEAPy Underground über Alles Award for interminable devotion to the preservation, presentation, and fornication of gilded images. This CHEAPy recognizes that in a subterreanean world of fishhooks and crustaceans, careerists and clapitalists, the determination to keep going and stay filmically afloat requires something like superhuman strength and an overstimulated sense of humor.

For CHEAP
Jerry Tartaglia
is a flaming example of dedicated film restoration and presentation.
Together with the Plaster Foundation (that is, Penny Arcade and J. Hoberman)—to whom this CHEAPy is also extended—Jerry Tartaglia saved the filmic legacy of Jack Smith from the scum of Atlantis and the normativity of family and fiends. Filmmaker, teacher, man about town, Jerry Tartaglia has selflessly set aside his own ecce-homerotic film fantasias in order to heed the siren’s call from beyond the grave to splice, dice, and thrice the pricelesss oeuvre of Assyrian splendor, known as the filmic performances of Jack Smith. By offering himself up on the Judas Cradle of celluloid subservience, Jerry Tartaglia has offered the five worlds the secret key to lofty living.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Thelma Ritter Firecracker CHEAPy Underground über Alles Award goes to Jerry Tartaglia.