BY NOOK OR BY BABY DIAPER KROOK
Spent a glorious day with my beautiful Baby Diaper Joel Gibb of the art and music collective The Hidden Cameras at his Neu Kolln compound off of Richardsplatz which is a rustic little area just within The Ring’s NeuKolln station.Some parts of this area seem like London, and other parts the suburban countryside. There isn’t a lot of trendy café’s or bars, but the trendy gay Rize Gallery is located in this strip. There is one café that we went to on Karl Marx Str called Cafe Ricks that also contains a theatre and is quiete lovely. The gay waiter was sweet and friendly, not the usual for staff at a Berlin eatery who are more often then not gruff and unwelcoming—which is the typical Berlin style.
Mr. Gibb’s flat is on the top floor on a cute street.He has amazing light that filters freely through the apartment and nice cross ventilation and a small, but wonderful balcony with gorgeous views. For the last three days the weather has gotten progressively warmer and the sky a turquoise blue that is so rare here where it is grey and sullen for most of the year.But when Berlina gets this kind of sky its purely magical, and its days like this that bring more American’s here to live.I took a lot of photos of Mr Gibb with the camera that my pretty NYU grad student Leon Hilton bought me.Joel is one of the most photogenic men on the planet.It is impossible for him to take a bad picture, and his masculine ardour always shines through in such winning combinations that he is ideal to photograph.Others have noticed this quality as well and he has been snapped up as the spokesmodel for a company in Canada, and also a modeling agency has signed him.At the age of 33 he is at a place where male models start making some moula with catalogue work.Joel is premature grey and that gives his quirky handsomeness a distinguished edge.Joel has an unusual face, on the surface it shouldn't read as classically handsome, but somehow the oddly shaped nose and deep set eyes with his thin face give matinee idol male beauty in the vein of a young Robert Taylor or silent film star Richard Arlen who co-starred with Louise Brooks in the 1928 William Wellman hobo film Beggars of Life.Joel definitely resembles Arlen, but is taller and with his piercing but warm crystaline blue eyes he turns heads wherever he goes.Spending a day in his company is truelly a marvel to behold as he lights up every room he enters with manly charm and boyish bravado.We listened to a lot of music trying to figure out a DJ set when we tag team at Search & Destroy on June 18th at Shwutz Mehringdamn.Ms. Bruce “Judy”LaBruce will also be in town and will clamp down behind the wheels of steel in her usual crack cocaine style.
Later in the evening Joel & I went to his muscular boyfriend Enrico Dallman’s flat at Hermannplatz for a vegan din din, where we’re joined by two of Enrico’s sweet and friendly pals.Enrico is a great cook and his apartment is warm and spacious just like Joel’s.Everyone I know has a much bigger flat then mine, and I get really jealous over this point.
Met with Senol Senturk at Milch und Zucker a little café on Oranienstr in Kreuzberg to talk about the X-Schule project. Senol is all game for it which is nice, it will be lovely collaborating with him.Susanne Sachsse of CHEAP is also involved in this project and she is collaborating with Nazli, who use to be roommates with k-Johnny Blue in KreuzKolln.
Actor Dennis Hopper died recently. I remember seeing him at many an art event in Los Angeles. He and his wife came to the Platinum Oasis endurance art fest I curated at the fist fuck motel The Coral Sands on Hollywood Blvd back in 2001. I will never forget the sight of him and Larry Clark trying to catch a peak at my Topping From the Bottom installation, but of course the Q was just too long. During the witching hour I did notice that the wife was no where in sight, and Dennis and Larry were eagerly taking part in the Sexual Repulsive boy porno baiting room of artist Greg Lenzman aka: Greg Cloud.I guess Mr. Hopper was reliving his salad days of the 1950s sexing with the likes of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Roddy McDowell and Dean Stockwell.
Sorry to report on the death of actress Rue McClanahan who starred on the TV shows Maude and Golden Girls.Now with Rue’s death Miss Betty White is the last surviving GG, something she ironically predicted in a humorous death wish.
I fondly remember seeing Ms. McClanahan playing a floozy in a small film from the early 1970s that also starred Candy Darling and Gary Sandy the queen from the horrible 70s TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinatti playing a faded hustler.The film was set in a bar in a Manhattan tavern that reminds me of the Kneipe style watering holes so prevelent with drunken crusties here in Berlin.
I hate going anywhere in Berlin on Fridays and Saturdays as the drunken people throwing up all over the city is very irritating plus the binge drinking of teenagers and young gaggles of sex touristas.
TEENIESCHWARM MIT BISS
Received an emug from Amir Baradan the handsome, patrician Iranian academic I met back in 2007 with Dr. Jose Munoz when we were invited to lecture at McGill University in Montreal, the Harvard of Canada.At the time Mr. B was a young scholar, but I could tell he craved more attention then academia provides, and since he comes from an aristocratic family I was sure it would be only time before he would turn to an art career to satisfy those yearnings, well I was right.He sent my assistant an emug and it seems like he has made somewhat of a splash moving to New York stealing Marina Abramovics thunder during her celebrated MoMa performance. Imagine if I did my VDasVB performance as VB was staging one of her spectacles.Let me clarify.In the latest Abramovic performance she sits in a room wearing a nice designer dress and invites one audience member at a time to sit in silence opposite her, well Mr. B. isnt exactly sitting there in silence.He marches in wearing an almost duplicate dress that she is wearing,but his is in bright red.He isn’t in drag though, so the designer dress he sports looks more like one of those gowns that Turkish whirling dervishes wear.But it’s a pretty bold move,and I am just describing just one of his interventions on Marina.His first intervention she finds a bit amusing.You can see his documentation on You Tube.After breaking the rule of actually talking to her during her performance I am surprised that he was allowed to come back again.Where were her screeners?When I did an action with the public at the Yerba Buena Museum in San Francisco I had the people checked out way in advance before they were ushered in for an audience with la diva.
Mr. B was finally 86’d.I guess Marina doesn’t appreciate art whore showboating,of course you can’t really blame her.She has paid her performance art dues.Mr. B is a young, handsome dilletante with deep pockets.But getting kicked out of the museum didn’t stop him.He then decides to do a mock up of La Abramovics set up outside the glass windows of the museum itself staging a counter performance. The unmitigated gall. You have to give him credit for New York moxie---his motto: if the Museum of Modern Art won’t give me my own show I will infiltrate the show that is currently up and running, and do it one better by upstaging the well known artist while self promoting myself in the process.It’s the natural accension of Kareoke and reality TV.
Billy Miller of STH Magazine on this last trip to New York actually took me to an upscale gallery on the upper east side that is owned by this rich Russian woman who fancies herself a visual artist and has created her own huge vanity art gallery to showcase her awful paintings.She even pays critics to write reviews of her work, and the gallery has a staff dressed all in black wearing Madonna headset microphones, but of course there are never any actual customers in the gallery.This woman must be extremely loaded to keep floating a vanity gallery for so long in this economy.
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Gave a performative lecture at the art school UDK.The lecture series is curated by lovely young Tatiana Kononenko & Cornelia two wonderful new art talents.Tatiana who is Russian is the girlfriend of Julian of the Chocolate Grinder Kollective.The lecture hall was packed to the rafters.I didn’t know I was such a big draw at a Berlin art school.Also on hand to see the Doll was little Alex of Macadonia, one of the beautiful Lewis Clan members Sarah Lewis,Cecile the X-Schulen curator at the HAU, Uli Ziemons and Djane Olga Damnitz.After the lecture a huge group hung out in the garden ruins with the Vagimule doll drinking sekt until the wee hours.I had a fab time. One of the boys hanging out with us,with a lip piercing and a bubble butt you could build a dream on, and thick John Wayne is big leggy thighs and calves had me going with his Tom of Finland uber manlische looks, also sleighing me was this 24 year old Swiss beauty who was tall with gorgeous complexion and pillow lips to die for.Both of these boys made me want to drink their milk.
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I hate actors of the Mickey Rooney school of mugging.Jim Carrey I’ve felt has kept the Rooney mantle going very strong throughtout his years as an A-list comedy king.Few people know that I have a history with Mr. Carrey, that comes via the mid 80s when he was going out with my good friend Kelly Stallings.Ms. Stallings was one of those fashionable punk rock girls I use to hang out with who came from a very good family, attended a private girl school and was a Judy Garland doppleganger way before the actress Ann Hathaway.Mr. Carrey wasn’t famous in the slightest in those days.He was just a struggling young actor and comic plying his trade at comedy emporiums in Hollywood.I was with Kelly when she met Jim Carrey at one of the punky/queer dance clubs prevalent in the scene at that time.Places like Fake Club, The Garage(which was actually a funk club that existed in a parking garage on Hope Street in Downtown LA), Rhythm Lounge, Dirt Box and Nairobi Room.Mr. Carrey was sweet and gawky.Back then celebrities weren’t prized or favoured at Hollywood clubs.I remember a pre Brat Pack Judd Nelson trying to ingratiate himself with the cool queers who were the stars of the scene.Having a great personal style and original look was more important then fame and fortune.My have things changed for the worse.
I wonder what happened to Kelly Stallings? The only reason i bring up Jim Carrey is that I just discovered a screener copy of a film he stars in called I Love You Phillip Morris.I guess the movie was sent to me almost a year ago, but it somehow got missplaced and while cleaning up after coming back from New York I just found it and watched the flick and love it!It also stars Ewan MacGregor as the title character a gay man that Mr. Carrey is enamored with while in prison, and the film is based on the true life story of a gay conman from Texas.Carrey still does some mugging in the film, but in all his performance is quite contained, and he lets himself be photographed so unflatteringly.
Mr. Carrey has aged considereably since I met him, but lets face it the mid 80s is over 25 years ago.Even Ewan MacGregor doesn’t look so good in this Phillip Morris movie, and he’s considereably younger then Jim Carrey.I’ve had a crush on Mr. MacGregor since seeing him in the film Shallow Grave.Surprisingly there was no nude scene featuring Mr. MacGregors rather plump organ.I guess the filmmakers thought that would be a bit much.But there is one really sexy scene where Carrey is plowing a trick mercilessly and that bottom yells, “Cum in my arse, cum in my arse!” Some of these tepid gay indie films that play the fag film circuit could learn something from this mainstream flicker.
Just learned that Douglas Crimp the genius love sexy scholar worked for Jim Carrey advicing him on his art purchases.
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O the Bundespresident, or shall I say the ex-Bundespresident of Germany has resigned afer some comments he made about economics being a factor in fighting the Afganistan war.Of course he was telling the gospel truth,but the ruling class of Germany aren’t ready to hear these kinds of truths.
I remember meeting the Bundespresident at Schloss Bellview in the Tiergarten.I was dressed as Witwe Bolte for a command performance for German dignataries and their children of the CHEAP production of Max und Moritz.There is a picture of me and Mr. Horst Kurhler chatting together, and I must say the Bundespresident was quite charming and gracious.Poor Mrs. Angie Merkel will have a difficult time replacing him, and with that awful, fugly homosexual Guido Westewelle by her side, she isn’t smelling too damn fresh lately.