DIE WAECHTER DES HERZENS

My wonderful and lovesssexy student assistant Christoph Bovermann cooked a scrumptious gourmand dinner the other night at his spacious flat near the city center.  Christoph and his equally ueber sexxxy boyfriend JP who is a student director in Zurich are the cutest, most sweetest couple I have met in ages. With young people like Christoph and JP there is finally hope for the future.

The evening was majickal as we dined on a spacious patio while a summer thunderstorm transformed the sky into radiant  phospheracals. Here is the formal menu of Christoph’s dinner party, and in the words of Tilda Swinton it was“transporting!”

Campari-Orange/Tonic-Citrus /Peach-Zucchini-Salad with Buffalo-Mozzarella-Dressing/Hugo (Prosecco, elderflower syrup, sparkling water, mint)/Tonic-Citrus
Girolles with Radicchio-Apricot-Salad/Casserole of Oven-Baked Potato Slices with Braised Onions and a Haselnut-Crust/ desert: Rote Inge (raspberries, raspberry liquor, meringue, cream)

The gorgeous dinner guests included a few of my fabulous student artists: Ms. Judith Altmeyer who is a major Woody Allen fan and admirer of the chanson singer from the 1960s France Gall, Miss Lea who has been masterful in handling all technical needs for the seminar, vivacious sex god Christopher Weickenmieir, who has an asstrovar to build a dream on, and a handsome Columbian beau and Christoph Bovermann’s  super model flatmate Lisa Marie.
Everyone has been really lovely to me and Love Camel at Giessen, the staff  in the Secretaire office Julie Pownall who is an English Rose from Manchester,  French siren Sylvie Guillou & Anna Artysiewicz, plus the technical support people that I have met. No one from the administration took me out for a fancy welcoming dinner like I’ve received at other Universities, but perhaps they were all on holiday as I did come in the middle of summer.  I had a huge turnout at my opening artist talk including the personable Bojana Kunst who is a professor of Choreography and Performance I’ve met before through Janez Jansa aka Davide Grassi of the Aksioma Institute of Contemporary Art in Ljubiana, Slovenia and it was a delight to meet my fellow guest professor the enchanting Miho Takayasu from Osaka, Japan who has been teaching the Geissen students Kagura a specific type of Shinto theatrical dance -    that I wasn’t familiar with. Last night I went to Ms. Takayasu’s class presentation and it was sublime.  So playful and full of life, the students were so committed and focused.  I especially lusted over one super sexy, humpy dork of a lanky young man with slight musculature, glasses and bony long hands and feet.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him and the way he moved while dancing and the intense expressions on his face.  Last Sunday I went to see the MA performance of Kathrin Ebmeier who is one of my students who is certainly destined for art stardom.  She has a quality like the golden era Hollywood starina Louise Rainer. Her piece was called Ich Habe Heute Leider Foto fuer Dich and mixed fashion, architecture, installation, neuralscience, rockstardom, photography and material film.  The performance was so warm and giving and featured a photomanuscript that was lovingly  created by Kathrin’s collaborateur Heike Kandalowski.  I was wrapped up in the original indie rock music by Golddiggers(Laura Eggert and Arne Koehler and of course I have to mention the stylish costumes and functioning jewelry/armor by  Ernese Bodalay that reminded me of some of the work of Travis Banton from Paramount Pictures in the early 1930s.
On my first night in Giessen the Camel and I attended an X-Wohne style group of solo shows called X-Soli: Solo als Gemeinschaftswerk where I got to get a taste of how the school operates.  Of course I’ve misplaced my notes from that evening but the highlights:  a foam installation sound and movement piece by one of my pretty students Emmilou Rossling who later took Camel & I to the Giessen Flea Market across the River where I bought some hot items sold by happy go lucky students Dominic Meder and Maria Vogt and where I was able to flirt with sexy tall blondine Felix who is the father of the most beautiful newborn child I have ever seen.  Felix will be one of the DJ's during the party after our final class presentation on August 7^th. It was also very sweet of Felix to volunteer his flat to Love Camel while he and his girlfriend and their baby were on holiday so that I could have the crampt quarters in the guest house all to myself.  I must have been crazy thinking Camel and I could be stuck together for over three weeks in one small room. At the X-Soli presentation i also enjoyed a mock lecture on The Loch Ness Monster, An animated diarama of the Applied Theatre Sciences Dept,a movement piece in the dark, and another quasi installation/movement performance featuring a tennis ball aparatus, and a monologue where the artist arrived out on the lawn of the campus making a splashy entrance with a taxi.
One of the things I’ve noticed in Giessen is that the boys here don’t smoke, drink and druggen as much as they do in Berlin so they are fresher and cleaner and there are a lot of fitness centers in the town and since there isn’t much else to do the men obsess on staying fit and hunky---yowza.  I even saw a drunken crusty boy in a square who had broad shoulders and was super muscular and handsome running around shirtless oiling his chest and big phat titties.  I also saw a gentle giant of a boy waiting for a bus who had a bubble butt of warmed over death and huge Fred Flintstone feet bursting out of his ugly Tiva mandles. Oddly enough he was wearing mom jeans.  After hanging out with the students at the Flea Market Camel took me to a bad(swim) park where we oogled a bunch of sporty link boys who were showing off their bodies doing gymnastic routines.  I was in eye candy heaven that day for almost two hours.  We had an awful luncheon at this American style diner called Chevy’s where I ordered the worse Veggy Burger on the planet and Camel’s baked potatoe was drowned in a lake of sour cream.  Word to the owner’s of Chevy. You can’t be a diner and not serve milk shakes.  The restaurants in the town are a bit limiting.  We ate at one place for bruncheon called the News Cafe that was ok but very bland in atmosphere though they had one cute little blondine boi waiter who took a shine to us as we were newcomers.  We’ve eaten several times at the only restaurant near the visiting artist guest house-- a Greek establishment called Aspendos that is serviceable, though my students all think the place is creepy.  Camel and I had a fun time at Christoph Bovermann’s birthday party in a cute little park around the corner from his flat.  Christoph is a vegetarian so the food at his shindig was  of course scrumptdelecti.
On my second day of teaching I divided the class into smaller kunst kollektivs. There are a lot of famous kunst kollectives that came out of Giessen like Rimini Protocol, She She Pop, Gob Squad, And & Company and the writer Rene Polesche. The students gave each other titles within the groups and these names of their units:  Megafuckers LTD, House of Brittany, Hot Blacks (which features a very beautiful and super talented young black German girl named Joanna Tishkau), Jurrassex and La Croquette.  I’ve been having the students work on exercises with names like  Mother May I . . . Yes You May, The Performative Moment, Kierkegaard Fear & Trembling, Conjuring Voice, Extemperaneous Contemporary Invitation to the Dance,What’s Your Damage? And my perennial favourite of Kunst Stalking.  My Giessen students took on the challenge of  Art Stalking and gave presentations in ways that no other class has ever done utilizing a lot of different performative methodologies. Teaching here at Giessen is so wonderful that I don’t have to worry about the insomnia that usually plagues me in Berlin.  I have been getting a healthy 8 hours sleep and I think I also look younger and more refreshed for a woman who is pushing 800.

TO SELL THE TRUTH

For some reason I have been plagued with thoughts about the punk rock documentary film Another State of Mind from 1982 that chronicles the ill-fated summer tour through Canada and the US by the hardcore punk bands Youth Brigade and Social Distortion. I had a little history with the sexxxy Stern Bros of Youth Brigade, The Better Youth Organization, the punk rock venue in the San Fernando Valley Godzilla’s, Skinhead Manor and a host of other long ago and faraway vestubilas.  Sean Stern the leader of Youth Brigade had a crush on me. I still play Youth Brigade's underground hit song “Sink With California” whenever I DJ. I even experienced a thwarted romance with Mike Ness the leader of Orange County’s Social Distortion whose song “Mommy’s Little Monster” became quite a punk anthem in its day. Mike had such charm, and was quite the juicy little flirtatious pud of a boy. I will always remember sharing a sweet nektary kiss with him at the infamous 666 New Year’s Eve bash of this art space at Wilshire Blvd & Vermont in the mid 1980s. The DJ was KXLU 88.9 's Stella of Stray Pop. That same evening everyone was fornicating on the dance floor, and even one of my Afro Sisters Pop That Cherry Jefferson was making it with a member of the band Fishbone and I thought that I was going to wind up in coital heaven with Mr. Ness, but I got majorly cock blocked by the black drag queen Sean DeLear who literally stole Mike Ness’s penis right out of my mouth.  Derek O'Brian who was the drummer of Social Distortion later drummed for Extra Fancy the hard rocking band led by openly gay punk singer Brian Grillo who before Extra Fancy was in the band Lock-Up who were signed to Geffen Records for one album.  Lock-Up also featured Tom Morello before he became famous in the band Rage Against the Machine.

In the docu Another State of Mind was a black punk rock kid named Marlon Whitmore who was about my age at that time. He was very cute with dark cocoa skin but with light colored greenish/hazel eyes that were hypnotic. I wonder what ever happened to Marlon. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I would see him around the UCLA campus. I was working full time at the UCLA Placement and Career Planning Center and I think he was going to grad school. Marlon had matured from this skinny gangly black kid into a major mufa hunk.

Was in the city center of Giessen the other day with The Love Camel who I’m afraid has graduated to the title of the Hate Camel. I hope I don’t wind up brutally murdering the Camel in his sleep, I love him dearly but he is very set in his ways being that he is middle aged like I am, and we are both more then a bit insane and eccentric. Also we are sharing very tight quarters while I am teaching a summer seminar called Framing the Freakazoid at the Institute of Applied Theatre Sciences at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. I brought The Hate Camel with me as my special celebrity guest as his encyclopediac knowledge of genre film and music I feel will be a valuable resource to my students who are working on their MA’s in Applied Theatre Studies, Choreography and Performance. I should have just had Camel come on the last week of teaching the way I did at the University of Manchester back in 2005. Deep down I am a loner like my late mother Mary Magdelene Duplantier. Let me stop complaining---my life is chintz and charmed compaired to what is happening in Gaza with the poor Palestinians. There is a TV in my visiting artist guest house and from what I can tell watching the international news the world is on the brink of World War III, so my woes are petty in comparison.

Just finished the first week of teaching and things went very well, but I am exhausted. I had 42 students sign up for my seminar which is a record if I do say so myself. When I was at the Goethe Universitaet in January I had 35 students and at Lund University’s Art Institute in Malmo, Sweden 25.  All of my students here in Giessen are working artists already and are very talented, focused, sensitive and highly creative. I’m blessed to have such a wonderful group of very young and attractive artists to work with. Whenever I teach I learn more from the students then what I am able to impart. Its such a necessary and vital generational exchange that keeps me feeling fresh, vital and current. Every five or six years my style of performance art goes in and out of vogue, so its lovely to always be rediscovered so to speak by international youthquakers. My student assistant at Giessen is a handsome, tall man named Christoph Bovermann who is quite the leader with his colleagues and pure perfection in general. Christoph organized for Camel and I to have bikes to use while we are at the University. The campus is a bit far out from the town in what performance artist Antonio Baehr (who taught here last year) refers to as an enchanted forest.

Because of my anxiety, and the summer heat my gout has been bothering me a bit. I haven’t had a full on gout attack thank god or I wouldn’t be able to walk, but my knee, calf and ankle are a bit swollen and I am in some discomfort, so I apologize for being lax dear readers.