Thursday, January 08, 2015

HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE



Was taken for a nice luncheon to Maxway Café at Winterfeldt Platz by the personable visiting art dealer from Chicago G.Craig Smith.  Mr. Smith has been following my retarded lady career since the early 1990s when we first met at a reading I did at the People Like Us bookshoppe.
The great fearless leader of kollektiv CHEAP Ms. Susanne Sachsse had one of her delightful dinner parties for the visiting literary scholars Sianne Ngai and Mark McGurl of Stanford University.  We were joined by my young proteges Acme Singt, Christophe DeRohan Chabot and film historian Marcuse Siegelstein who actually did the cooking following La Sachsse’s secret recipe.  The food was heavenly as is always the case at the famous East Berlin salon of Susi Su.  Mr. McGurl and Ms. Ngai are enchanting and very vivacious.  Ms. Ngai will be giving the talk “Theory of the Gimmick” on Monday January 12 7:30pm at the ICI Foundation.  She is a Harvard educated English professor and has published the books Ugly Feelings, Out Aesthetic Catagories-Zany, Cute & Interesting as well as essays with such fab titles as “The Cuteness of the Avant Garde” and “Merely Interesting”.  I can’t wait to hear what she has to say at her lecturina and I’m bringing a cadre of my interns and young former students.  During dinner Ms. Ngai  recommended two books by D.A.Miller  A Place for Us on Hollywood Musicals and Jane Austen and the Secret of Style.
I took Scandinavian Muzlim jihadist Daniel Hendrickson for his birthday breakfast to a relatively new café on the canal in NeuKoeln called California Breakfast Slam at Instrasse 47.  Loved the décor of the joint and the food was American style without being too chi chi.  I had mushroom scrambled eggs that were very fluffy the way I like em with homefries and Daniel had gravy & biscuits. Our waitress was a lovely young  Spanish woman.
On Silvester I watched several serials that were sent to me on DVD including Transparent which includes a small role by my delightful multi media artist daughter  ZacKary Drucker.  Love ZacKery but I didn’t care for the main characters in this program which involves three grown children of an elderly man who comes out as a transgendered woman.  The acting of Gaby Hoffman(the daughter of Warhol legend Viva) is superb.  I’ve known lil Miss Gaby since she was a young girl.  But all of the other leads just come across as too sour Apple Annie in that American TV fashion that tries to be edgy and winds up falling flat.  Was also sent an Australian TV show called Please Like Me with a lead in the form of the ungainly Josh Thomas who is quite unlikeable on many fronts besides being fugly.  In one of the episodes he calls himself “a 50 year old looking baby” and I couldn’t agree more.  Because Mr. Thomas is the writer and star of this series he chooses only the best looking young lads to play his love interests.  Nice work if you can get it . . .   I much prefer watching the episodes sent to me of two defunct series The Tomorrow People and Star Crossed that don’t try to be anything other then mindless escapism.